On Christmas morning 2002, Andrew Jackson ‘Jack’ Whittaker — a West Virginia construction-company owner who was already a self-made millionaire — won a Powerball jackpot of $314.9 million, at the time the largest single-ticket jackpot in American history. He took the lump sum of about $114 million after taxes. Within a few years he had been robbed, sued, arrested, and bereaved, and he later said he wished he had torn the ticket up.
Whittaker was not the stereotypical hard-luck winner. He ran a successful water-and-sewer pipe business, employed more than a hundred people, and was worth several million dollars before the win. That made his unraveling all the more striking: it was not naivety or poverty that undid him, but the sheer scale of the money and the way it warped everyone and everything around him.
The money made him a target. He was robbed of hundreds of thousands of dollars left in his car outside a strip club; he was hit with lawsuits and accusations; and the people closest to him suffered most. His granddaughter Brandi, on whom he lavished cars and cash, died of a drug overdose at seventeen in 2004, her body found wrapped in a tarp; her boyfriend had died in Whittaker’s home months earlier. Whittaker’s daughter, Brandi’s mother, later died as well.
By the end of the decade Whittaker said the money was gone and the lawsuits had consumed what the thieves and the spending had not. ‘I wish I’d torn that ticket up,’ he told reporters. He died in 2020, his fortune and most of his family gone — the most famous American example of the ‘lottery curse,’ and a case where the curse was less supernatural than the predictable result of a vast, sudden, public fortune landing on an ordinary life.
William “Bud” Post III had bounced through life as a cook, a truck driver, and a carnival worker, and in February 1988 he had about $2.46 in the bank when he pawned a ring to buy Pennsylvania Lottery tickets. One of them won $16.2 million, paid as an annuity of 26 annual installments of about $497,953. Within roughly three months he was reportedly some $500,000 in debt; within a few years the fortune was effectively gone.
The money detonated his relationships. A former landlady and onetime romantic acquaintance, Ann Karpik, sued him claiming they had agreed to share any winnings, and a court awarded her a substantial portion of the jackpot. Post’s own brother, Jeffrey, hoping to inherit, hired someone to kill Post and his wife — a plot that was uncovered and led to the brother’s arrest. Post spent heavily and badly, sinking money into a used-car lot, a restaurant or lease venture, an airplane, and property, much of it with relatives.
The legal and financial wreckage compounded. Post was convicted of assault after firing a shotgun at a debt collector who came to his mansion, and he eventually declared bankruptcy. The annuity that might have provided a steady income for life had been borrowed against, litigated over, and squandered, and he ended up living on Social Security and food stamps — the man who had won $16.2 million reduced again to public assistance.
William Post died on January 15, 2006, at age 66, of respiratory failure, in the Pittsburgh area. He had said more than once that he was happier when he was broke. His case became one of the foundational “lottery curse” stories in American journalism precisely because nearly every failure mode arrived at once: predatory litigation, a murderous relative, reckless spending, and a slow slide back into poverty.
Suzanne Mullins won a $4.2 million Virginia Lottery jackpot in January 1993, a prize she split three ways with her husband and daughter and which was paid out the old-fashioned way — in equal annual installments rather than a single lump sum. Her own share came to twenty annual payments of about $47,778 after taxes. On paper she was a millionaire; in practice she had a modest income now and a fortune that would arrive slowly, over two decades. Wanting cash sooner — driven, by her attorney’s account, partly by more than $1 million in uninsured medical bills for a dying son-in-law — she did what a whole industry exists to encourage: in 1998 she borrowed nearly $200,000 against her future lottery payments from the People’s Lottery Foundation, pledging her annual checks as repayment. When Virginia changed its rules in 2000 to permit winners to convert remaining annuity payments into a lump sum, the arrangement unraveled. Mullins took her remaining money as a lump sum and stopped repaying the loan; the note had been assigned to Singer Asset Finance Co., which sued. A court ordered her to repay $154,146.50 — money she no longer had, the fortune having already been spent or pledged away, leaving her, by her own lawyer’s account, with no assets. Mullins’s story is less lurid than the murders and overdoses elsewhere in this catalogue and, in a way, more useful: a clean, almost clinical case study in how borrowing against future payments — at steep discounts and worse terms than the borrower understands — can quietly convert a real fortune into nothing.