Monica Crowe, Reporter
11-02-2009
Imagine hitting the Powerball and winning a million dollars or more. Suddenly it seems like everything in the world is right and nothing can go wrong. But this brief moment of elation could be the proverbial calm before the storm. It is said that winning big in the lottery is as likely as a person being hit by lightning.
Lottery winners could be the luckiest people on Earth, or they could be the most cursed. Stories of ill-fated lottery winners give credence to the old adage “Be careful what you wish for.” Almost everyone has heard of the curse of the lottery winner. Superstitions aside, story after story reveals that many lottery winners fall hard from the height of their fortune.
A quick search on the Internet about the curse of the lottery will uncover plenty of stories about people who have lost friends, family and their entire winnings. Often they end up in more debt than they were in before they won.
Take Jack Whitaker for example, who won an enviable $315 million from the Powerball lottery. Following several unfortunate occurrences, Whitaker has said he believes the Powerball win has been a curse on his family. After winning the money a storm of publicity hit, and family, friends and strangers clambered for handouts.
A charitable man, Whitaker complied with many, giving a total of $50 million in houses and cash. But no matter how much he gave, people kept asking for more. Suddenly his construction business was hit with several lawsuits totaling $3 million in lawyer’s fees alone.
Whitaker eventually alienated himself from friends and the community. Meanwhile, the man, a doting grandfather, lavished his teenage granddaughter with four cars and a $2,000 a week allowance. These excesses instigated and aided the girl in an all consuming drug addiction. Two years after Whitaker won the Powerball, his beloved granddaughter went missing. She was found dead two weeks later. The cause of death was unknown, but Whitaker attributes her demise to his winnings. In 2004, he was sued by an Atlantic City casino for allegedly writing bad checks from a closed bank account.
There are two obvious lessons to be learned from this story. One is that excess in the wrong hands can be tragic. And the other is that greed is probably at the top of the list of woes a lottery winner faces.
Money makes people do crazy things. One of the most shocking examples of greed is the story of Jeffery Dampier, a $20 million winner who was kidnapped and murdered by his sister-in-law. Then there’s William “Bud” Post, who won $16.2 million.
His girlfriend sued him for a share of the loot and his brother hired a hit man to murder him. Whitaker himself was drugged by a stranger in a public place, and then $2,000 in cash was stolen from his truck.
People seem to think money solves everything, but once they have it their problems are still there and are often amplified. Those who were poor before their winnings will become poor again as they squander their money away.
And those who were unhappy before the money will be unhappy when they have riches.
A sudden windfall sounds like the best thing that could happen to a person, but a huge financial winning can quickly become a troublesome and even ruinous burden. Whoever first said that money is the root of all evil was probably a lottery winner.
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