Have you ever played that little What would you do if you won the lottery? game?
Everyone I know is broke and indulges in the fantasy from time to time.
After all, you only have to give a few dollars in exchange for the chance to win
millions. If your ticket is the lucky winner, then in an instant you might
become wealthy beyond your wildest dreams. Most people who buy lottery tickets win nothing.
And in many cases, they are actually the lucky ones.
Today we are going to examine a brief history of lotteries. Then we re going
to look at several stories of people who suddenly became rich then lost it all.
Is the Lottery Curse real? If you watch this whole episode, then you will know the truth.
The History of Lottery
Whatever form it takes, a lottery is basically just organized gambling. Large numbers of people
buy an opportunity to win. Then a random drawing of numbers determines the lucky winners.
Most of those who participate lose their investment. But the chosen few
can go from rags to riches in an instant. The first written evidence of lotteries comes
from China. Keno sheets were found from the Han Dynasty era which was between 205 and 187BC.
Keno is a game still played in casinos today. Players choose from a set of sixty numbers and
then place their bets. A random drawing determines who wins the prize.
In the United States and the UK today, most people are familiar with the concept of lottery tickets.
A person buys a lottery ticket and chooses the numbers to place on it.
Later there is a random drawing. The ticket with the matching numbers wins.
The first time this form of lottery occurred was in northwestern Europe during the 15th century.
Towns in this area would hold lotteries to raise funds for fortifications and other improvements.
By the 17th century the practice had spread all over Europe.
The first official lottery in England took place under Queen Elizabeth I. But it wasn t the kind of
lottery modern participants would recognize. Those who played the game bought their tickets
in 1566 but didn t receive a prize until 1569. Also, every ticket holder received a
prize that was equal in value to the ticket purchase. So, what really happened is the
lottery participants gave the government a three-year loan with zero interest.
It wasn t all bad though. The ticket holders were granted immunity from one arrest
as long as the offense wasn t piracy, murders, felonies, or treason .
As settlers poured out of England and into the New World financing the colonization
efforts became difficult. So, in 1612 King James granted the Virginia Company of London
the right to raise money. The way they did this was by holding lotteries.
Using the lottery system to pay for expenses became an early American tradition.
It was used to raise funds during the French and Indian War. Benjamin Franklin
even organized one during the Revolutionary War to help buy cannons for Philadelphia.
And in 1758 Massachusetts held a lottery to raise funds for an expedition against Canada.
By the 1860s lotteries were illegal in most of the United States. Throughout the 1800s
various lottery scams were enacted which is why the government began shutting them down.
This began to change in the 20th century as more and more states decided to implement
their own lottery systems. Today only five states still prohibit lotteries.
Lottery winners in the US are usually given the option to receive the full prize in
installments paid over years. Or a cash payout is available immediately
if the person is willing to accept a percentage less than the full prize.
However it is paid, the lottery winner must pay taxes on the winnings.
In the United Kingdom things are more centralized. There they have a National Lottery. The prizes are
paid out at once and no taxes are required. Sometimes those who win the lottery have their
lives utterly destroyed by it. Andrew Jackson Whitaker Junior
Andrew Whitaker was from Putnam County, West Virginia.
In late 2002 he was 55 years old and was doing quite well financially.
He was President of a contracting firm and was already worth seventeen million dollars.
Normally he didn t play the lottery. But on Christmas Eve the jackpot was worth over
one hundred million dollars. Andrew stopped at a gas station that evening. He put fuel in his
truck, bought a sandwich, then purchased one hundred dollars of lottery tickets.
On Christmas Day Andrew Whitaker won the lottery and became a multimillionaire.
He had a choice of receiving $314 million dollars paid out over several years
or he could receive $170 million dollars in cash immediately.
Andrew chose the cash option. By the time taxes were paid he had $113 million left.
The first thing Andrew did was donate ten percent of his winnings to Christian
charities. He bought a house and Jeep for the woman who sold him the ticket.
Then he bought a Lamborghini and drove through the neighborhood throwing cash out of the windows.
Less than a year after he won the lottery Andrew was parked outside of a strip club. Thieves broke
into his car and stole $545,000 in cash. Someone asked why he would carry that much cash in his
car and Andrew responded, Because I can . This didn t stop Andrew Whitaker from visiting
the strip club again. The manager and a dancer were planning to put drugs
in Andrew s drink then rob him. But they were caught before the plan could be executed.
In September 2004 a young man was found dead in Andrew s home. The eighteen-year-old died from
an overdose of opiates and cocaine. Supposedly he was the boyfriend of Andrew s granddaughter.
Her name was Brandi. Her body was found wrapped in plastic at a nearby house in December,
but the cause of death was never determined. Andrew was broke by 2006. And in 2009 his
daughter, who was the mother of Brandi, was also found dead.
But that wasn t all. In December 2016 his house burned down. It was also uninsured.
After a long illness Andrew Jackson Whitaker Junior finally passed on June 27, 2020.
Lara And Roger Griffiths The Griffiths were by all accounts a happy
couple in 2005. They won the UK lottery that year and were given a jackpot worth 1.8 million pounds.
The pair bought an old barn and converted it into their dream home.
They also didn t have problems with transportation.
With the lottery winnings they also purchased two very expensive sports utility vehicles.
Several times a year the couple and their children would vacation all over the world.
But the happy times wouldn t last for long.
In a 2013 interview Lara said that winning the lottery ruined her life.
She blames Roger for wasting all their winnings and ruining the family.
Soon after winning the lottery Roger Griffiths decided he could flip houses for profit.
He bought properties but couldn t make a profit. The ventures ultimately lost money.
Roger also wanted to become a rock star.
He spent thousands of dollars on that failed dream as well.
Then he bought a beauty salon. But when property values crashed that investment nearly bankrupted
the couple. Shortly thereafter Lara accused Roger of cheating and they divorced.
Evelyn Marie Adams
In 1985 Evelyn Adams was a thirty-two-year-old clerk at a convenience store. She lived in
Point Pleasant Beach, New Jersey and was definitely not a wealthy woman.
Evelyn did love gambling. Normally she spent twenty-five dollars per week on lottery tickets.
Starting in the 1980s she increased that to one hundred dollars per week. Unlike most
people who pour all their earnings into lotteries her strategy was a success.
Evelyn Adams didn t win the lottery just once. She overcame the odds and became a
winner on two occasions just a few months apart. In October 1985 she won a jackpot of $3.9 million.
Then in February 1986 she won again earning $1.4 million.
After winning Evelyn was quite generous. She set up a college fund for her daughter.
She also gave away a lot of money and provided interest free loans to friends and family.
Almost nobody repaid the loans.
It took several years but Evelyn Adams lost all her winnings. By 2012 she was almost completely
broke. Several poor business investments wiped out much of her wealth. But the gambling addiction was
the real problem. Most of her money went to the casinos in Atlantic City.
David Lee Edwards One of the good things
about lotteries is that sometimes people who have made poor life choices have a chance to
improve their position in society. Unfortunately, many of them continue making bad decisions.
David was forty-six years old in 2001. But his luck seemed to change when he became a lottery
winner. Suddenly David Lee Edwards went from a broke felon with few job prospects to being a
millionaire. His winning lottery ticket made him twenty-seven million dollars richer.
After winning his statement to the press made everybody think David was going to
get his act together finally. He said, "You know, a lot of people, they're out of work.
They don't hardly have anything, and so I don't want to accept this money by saying I'm
going to get mansions and I'm going to get cars. I would like to accept it with humility. I want
this money to last, for me, for my future wife, for my daughter, and future generations.
Unfortunately, David turned out to be a liar. One of the first things he did was
take a Las Vegas vacation. While there he spent hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Then he bought a few houses, a two-million-dollar jet,
and over a million dollars worth of expensive cars. He also had a very expensive cocaine habit.
Within a year over twelve million dollars of his winnings were gone.
Eventually David and his girlfriend had to move into a storage unit. The pair were kept
company by their own rotting feces, rotten food, crack pipes, and used syringes.
Unsurprisingly David died in 2013. He was completely broke.
Is The Curse Real? The people we have examined today
are all examples of something known as The Lottery Curse . In popular culture it is generally assumed
that most people who suddenly become wealthy do not experience happiness for very long.
Stories in the media about lottery winners who have lost everything are nothing new. They have
been appearing in newspapers all over the world since at least the 19th century.
But are these people rare exceptions? Or is it possible that most of those
who win the lottery see their lives spiral into death and despair?
The National Endowment for Financial Education provided statistics a few years ago which
many interpreted to mean that 70 percent of lottery winners went broke in just a few years.
However, in 2018 the organization said that their data was not interpreted correctly.
A New York researcher, Dr. Daniel Cesarini, was co-author of a study in Sweden.
The research that was performed there found that most lottery winners do not go broke. If anything,
the money made them happier and continued to provide for their well-being well into old age.
Based on the research he has performed Daniel says the following about lottery winners:
What we see consistently is that they work a little bit less, but they spend the money quite
intelligently. But that s not to say that nobody has wrestled with self-control problems and using
the money in ways that are not conducive to their best interest. But, I think that their behavior is
a lot more governed than you might believe if you re reading popular accounts of what happens.
It would appear that the lottery curse is more fiction than fact. The people who win millions
then lose it all provide far more interesting stories than the boring winners who manage their
wealth correctly. ----------------
Do you believe the lottery curse is fiction? Or do you still think it s very real?
We think it would be great if you shared your opinion in the comments below.
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Thank you for watching Bad Things in History. ---------------