aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Saturday, March 10, 2007

Winning the lottery: Your deadbeat pal’s on line 2

The Georgia truck driver lottery winner’s no longer in the news; the media’s moved on to the other guy. The South Jersey winner who will split the $390 million Mega Millions jackpot has so far chosen not to go public.

While we wait, here’s more from that April 23, 1995 New York Times Magazine cover story on the lottery, TICKET TO TROUBLE: Congratulations! You’ve won one million dollars. Your troubles have just begun, by Lois Gould. I still haven’t found a web reference to it (including in the NYTimes archive). I went to the library and found it on microfiche:

Michael Naste, a New York financial planner who won $2.5 million himself in 1987, said he had 73 fellow jackpot winners as clients by 1990. One of them had had 10 Cadillacs repossessed. Others were suffering enough emotional stress to contemplate suicide.

There are no statistics on what happens to jackpot winners. But a, growing body of evidence suggests that winning big often brings big, if not ruinous, trouble.

William (Bud) Post of Oil City, Pa., won a $161 million Pennsylvania jackpot in 1988 and was dead broke five years later. What was more, Post’s brother was in jail charged with hiring a hit man to murder Bud and his sixth wife for the lottery money.

In rueful interviews, Post said he was more content before he won, when all he had was a job with a traveling circus cooking for the thin man and the lion tamer. Friends and family begged or borrowed from him; business ventures failed; an ex-girlfriend sued.

Debbie from Colorado won $6.85 million eight years ago. She’s not broke, and not a sore winner. But “one sister didn’t speak to us for a year, because we didn’t pick up a breakfast check; another expected us to repay her school loans. A close friend borrowed money and we didn’t hear from him again for three years - when he called to borrow some more.”

We’re not likely to hear stories like these from our happy-talk TV anchors, they’re too busy promoting the live drawings. I’ll be posting more from the article as the Mega Millions story plays out.

SEE ALSO: The lottery: You’re rich! Wait - got a calculator?