A hearing before the Connecticut Commission on Human Rights and Opportunities recently revealed that in 2014 Lottery Corp. Vice President Chelsea Turner and then Lottery CEO Anne Noble were so suspicious of Frank Farricker, chairman of the lottery board, that they asked an FBI agent to record Farricker secretly at one and maybe more meetings.
Nothing came of the recording, or of the investigation.
The story sounds like something out of Mission: Impossible with a small recorder hidden inside an eyeglass case.
After hearing the story, Farricker said he was “flabbergasted” that Turner and Noble had been suspicious of him. Turner told the commission that she never trusted Farricker and suspected him of unethical personal dealings. She testified she was “uncomfortable with Mr. Farricker. There’s a lot of reasons to be uncomfortable with Mr. Farricker. He operated by his own rules.”
After the FBI agent put the recorder in the eyeglass case, Noble used it during a meeting with Farricker.
Asked if her concerns were over Farricker’s job with the lottery, Noble said, They weren’t concerns with (the) gaming system, necessarily. They were about business activities… I went to someone that was familiar to me.”
The testimony came during discussions of the 5 Card Cash scandal that resulted in Noble resigning as president/CEO of the lottery in September 2016. At that time, she became a consultant to the lottery for a lucrative consulting fee that raised many eyebrows at the time.
Farricker took her place as interim CEO until May 2017 when he unsuccessfully tried to become permanent CEO. He then resigned, but not before paying $5,000 to the Connecticut ethics agency for billing the lottery for personal expenses.
