The rigged roulette that entered the dictionary

In 1934, two operators named Strauss and Perlowitz arrived in Spain with an electric roulette wheel christened after their surnames: «Straperlo». They marketed it as a game of skill to dodge the ban on gambling, and to install it in San Sebastián they spread favours and bribes among politicians of Lerroux's Radical Party.

The scheme lasted hours: the police shut the room down almost immediately. A spiteful Strauss then told everything in a letter to the President of the Republic, and the 1935 scandal brought down the government and sank the Radical Party on the eve of the Civil War.

The word, however, thrived. «Estraperlo» came to mean shady dealing and, in the hungry post-war years, it became the Spanish name for the rationing-era black market.

The wheel barely spun for a few hours. The word has been spinning for ninety years.