I have always preferred doing upbeat, feel-good stories rather than the opposite kind – with the possible exception of my interview with a not-so-good guy whose almost-great-ripoff was so bizarre that a Hollywood movie was made of it.

Frank "Casino" Kerns, who lived in Philadelphia's Germantown and then Kensington neighborhoods, had a stranger-than-fiction life, so much so that an independent Hollywood company, Motiopic Films, Inc., made a feature film in 1974 about Kerns' exploits entitled "Win, Place or Steal," starring McLean Stevenson, Dean Stockwell, Russ Tamblyn and former NFL four-time Pro Bowl defensive tackle Alex Karras as Frank.

"Unfortunately," Kerns told me in 1978, "when the movie came out four years ago, the publicity never mentioned that it was a true story. Audiences thought it had to be fiction because it's so incredible, but I was always convinced it would be a big hit, especially in Philly, if the audience only knew it was a true story."

Kerns had a hardscrabble youth. A dropout from Daniel Boone, a high school in Northern Liberties for disciplinary kids, Frank was an electric company lineman, trucker and bartender who was arrested several times as a teenager for brutal fights and running numbers for bookies. "It's pretty hard to make an honest living when you have no education," he told me.

After one particularly nasty incident, certain bad-tempered folks came looking for Frank with an unwanted non-birthday present that had his name on it. Things got so hot that Kerns packed his bags faster than you can put on your shoes and split for Los Angeles in 1964.

Two years later, Frank got into another brawl and was shot in the chest by an off-duty cop. Unconscious and near death, Kerns pulled off a miraculous recovery and successfully sued Los Angeles County for $104,000.

"But one year after I won the money," Frank told me in 1978, "I spent almost every day at Santa Anita Race Track. Eventually, I lost the entire $104,000. I even met some jockeys who gave me phony tips about races that were supposed to be fixed but were not."

Frank decided to get even with Santa Anita Race Track, so he and some friends planned a unique caper. They burglarized storage rooms at the race track four times. They stole two 200-pound American Totalizator machines (which punch out tickets showing which horse a person bet on), five ink rollers, reams of special paper and symbols used on betting slips.

For nine months, the quartet worked on a way to make the machines work without electricity. They also developed a way to crank out betting slips that were identical to those at the track. 

The plan was then put into effect. One guy would buy a ticket for a particular race and hand the ticket to a man waiting outside the fence. The second man rushed the ticket to Frank, who was waiting in a van with the Totalizator machine in a nearby parking lot.

"We'd go through our code box," Kerns told me, "and load the machine with the right code, date and race. Then we'd wait for the man inside the track to give us a signal, which we saw with binoculars, about who won the race. Then we'd crank out about 300 winning tickets, as long as it wasn't a long-shot winner, and we only did one race a day. We did not want to overdo it and arouse suspicion. We'd have several guys take the tickets to different windows and get paid off."

Frank would not say how long the scheme was operated, but as with most criminal acts, success leads to overconfidence, and that leads to mistakes.

"One day," he said, "we all got drunk and turned out tickets that had a mistake in the code. After one of our guys noticed the mistake, he panicked and threw away the tickets at the track, but scavengers who go through trash cans hoping to find a winning ticket did find the tickets and tried to cash them in."

Seeing the fraudulent tickets, race track officials took into custody and interrogated more than 50 men by the end of the day. The next day, when Frank tried to cash in that day's "winning tickets," he was frisked by security guards, who found 50 more "winning tickets" in his pockets. It was lights out for Frank.

When the truth came out about Frank's gang and the Totalizator machines, race track officials from all over the country flew to Santa Anita in panic. All were using the same machine codes at the time, although that changed shortly afterward, thanks to Frank.

"If we hadn't got sloppy and greedy," Frank said, "this scheme would have kept working, and we all would have been multimillionaires."

Frank's lawyer worked out a deal in which all charges against him were dropped in return for all the machines, paper, ink and code symbols, so Frank was able to gallop off into the sunset.

In 1974, director Richard Bailey and producer Tom Cooney made the film of Frank's scheme, "Win, Place or Steal," but it made little money at the box office. Poetic justice, I guess. Frank liked to stirrup trouble, but his nag of a movie never got out of the starting gate. 

Len Lear can be reached at lenlear@chestnuthilllocal.com.