Blew a Bag is a show about black people blowing the wealth and it is on BET, it’s what you not suppose to do.
What would you do if you won the lottery?
We all dream of winning the jackpot, and in Jennifer E. Smith’s brand-new novel Windfall, that dream comes true. On Teddy’s eighteenth birthday, his best friend, Alice, buys him a lottery ticket, and boom—he’s $140 million dollars richer. Lucky.
The odds may not be ever in your favor, but winning the lottery CAN happen to you! And it did happen to these seven people. Check out these stories of real-life windfalls!
1. The Seven-Time Winner
They say the odds of winning the lottery are one in fourteen million—yet one Florida man (who had never bought a ticket prior to his first win) is reported to have won the lottery seven times!
He now offers strategies and tips to fellow players. One of those tips? Make sure your numbers aren’t birth dates. Who knew?!
2. What Headache?
Next time you have a headache, pop into the drug store, pick up some ibuprofen, and, of course, buy a lottery ticket. This method worked for a man in California who was feeling pretty down on his luck (he’d been unemployed). This quick errand to the drugstore resulted in a $5 million win!
3. Imagination at Play
A British family played an unusual game: they pretended to win the lottery. This included posting photos of themselves holding a fake winning ticket. Imagine their elation the very next day when they discovered they were REAL lottery winners! Talk about fortune foretold.
4. Remember to Forget
A man in Massachusetts won the same lottery twice . . . by accident! He bought a ticket using his favorite string of numbers, totally forgetting that his family had gifted him a season pass to the Massachusetts lottery, which means he gets automatically entered to each drawing, with the same numbers. Turns out he had the winning ticket twice! The chance of this happening? One in 985,517.
5. What 20% Tip?!
Instead of his usual tip, a fifty-something New York cop split a lottery ticket with a diner waitress. Each picked three numbers, and they won. This story loosely inspired the romantic-comedy It Could Happen to You, although no romance ever existed between Nicolas Cage’s and Bridget Fonda’s real-life counterparts.
6. Giving Back
In Canada, a $25 million winner paid it forward by overpaying for his burger and fries. As he waited for his meal, he learned the proprietor’s daughter had been diagnosed with cancer. Wishing to help with medical bills, he paid for his meal with a $10,000 check and told the owner to “keep the change.”
7. Modern-Day Bonnie and Clyde
After stealing money from the Pennsylvania grocery store where they worked, a fifty-something couple used their ill-gotten gains to buy a lottery ticket and won a million dollars. While they did spend some of these winnings, they were later caught.
PHOENIX — Money won’t buy you happiness. In fact, if you believe in curses, winning the Mega Millions jackpot may make you the opposite of happy.
RELATED: Sun City West has Valley’s ‘luckiest’ Powerball store
It could kill you.
Stay with me here. According to the New York Daily News, 70 percent of lottery winners end up broke within seven years. Even worse, several winners have died horribly or witnessed those close to them suffer.
RELATED: Most common winning Powerball numbers
Here are some of the most notorious cases of lottery winnings gone wrong:
Abraham Shakespeare
Shakespeare won $30 million in the Florida lottery in 2009. But he didn’t have a lot of time to spend it..
Authorities say, Shakespeare, 47, was shot twice in the chest by a .38-caliber pistol sometime in April 2009. He wasn’t reported missing until November 2009. His body was found under a slab of cement in a backyard in January 2010
Tampa woman DeeDee Moore was later found guilty of Shakespeare’s murder and sentenced to life in prison.
Prosecutors argued that Moore, 40, befriended Shakespeare before he vanished. After Shakespeare had given away most of his money to people who simply asked for it, Moore agreed to manage the little he had left, but instead, prosecutors said, stole his winnings and killed him.
David Lee Edwards
Edwards was unemployed when he won part of a $280 million lottery jackpot in 2001.
He was an ex-convict, and at the time of his big win, it was the third-largest lottery pot in U.S. history. Edwards, originally from Kentucky, received a lump sum of $27 million after taxes.
Edwards was convicted of robbery in 1981 and served out his sentence in 1997. Several years after winning the lottery, he was evicted from his million-dollar home in Florida after failing to pay back dues to the homeowners association.
The New York Daily News reports Edwards lost all his money in just a few years and ended up living in a storage unit surrounded by human feces.
He died at age 58 in 2013 at the Community Hospice Care Center in Ashland, Kentucky.
Jeffrey Dampier
Dampier won $20 million in the Illinois lottery in 1996. His death came nine years later in Tampa, Florida where he had become a popcorn entrepreneur.
Dampier was running Kassie’s Gourmet Popcorn in Tampa was he kidnapped in 2005 by his wife’s sister, Victoria Jackson, and her boyfriend, Nathaniel Jackson (not related).
Prosecutors said the two bound Dampier’s hands with shoelaces and forced him into a van. As they drove around, Nathaniel Jackson handed the gun to his girlfriend and said, “Shoot him or I’ll shoot you,” prosecutors said. Victoria Jackson squeezed the trigger, firing once in the back of Dampier’s head.
Authorities said Dampier had a sexual relationship with Victoria and showered her with presents from his lottery earnings before she killed him.
Urooj Khan
Khan, a 46-year-old immigrant from India who owned three dry-cleaning businesses in Chicago, won $1 million in a scratch-off Illinois Lottery game in 2012. He said at the time he planned to use the money to pay off his bills and mortgage, and make a contribution to
That would never happen, though, as Khan died one day after the state of Illinois cut him a check for $424,449 (his winnings on the ticket after he chose a one-time payment and after subtracting taxes.)
He threw up blood the same day, a relative said.
The medical examiner first ruled Khan had died from natural causes. Six months later, authorities said they had conducted further tests — at the request of a relative they did not name — and determined it was cyanide poisoning. No one was ever charged.
Michael Carroll
Carroll, 26, won $15 million U.S. dollars in a British jackpot back in 2002.
He was soon left with nothing after dishing out cash on parties, cocaine, hookers, and cars, the New York Daily News reports.
He was nicknamed “the lotto lout” and also spent his former fortune on a villa in Spain, quad bikes, demolition-derby cars, and flashy jewelry, the Huffington Post reports.
Carroll was jailed in 2006 following an altercation and was later convicted of drug
Jack Whittaker
Whittaker, of West Virginia, was already worth around $17 million when he won a $314.9 million multi-state Powerball jackpot in 2002.
After his winnings, Whittaker had hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash stolen from his cars, home and office. He pleaded no contest to assaulting and threatening to kill a bar manager. He was arrested twice on drunken-driving charges and was accused of groping women at a racetrack.
But that wasn’t the worst of it.
In 2004, his 17-year-old granddaughter, Brandi Bragg, was found wrapped in a tarp under a junked van outside her boyfriend’s house. State police said her body had been there for weeks but would not comment on a report that she died of a drug overdose, USA Today reports.
His daughter later died of unknown causes. Both Whittaker and his wife said they wished he had torn the ticket up, the New York Daily News reports.
Billie Bob Harrell Jr.
Life was good in June of 1997 when Harrell Jr. and his wife Barbara Jean held the only winning ticket to a Lotto Texas jackpot of $31 million.
After his big win, the Houston Press reported Harrell Jr. purchased a ranch, as well as a half-dozen homes for himself and other family members. He, his wife, and all his kids got new vehicles. He made large contributions to his church. If members of the congregation needed help, Harrell Jr. was there with cash.
But then his life started unraveling and his spending and lending spiraled out of control.
After splitting with his wife, Harrell Jr. locked himself in his upstairs bedroom, stripped away his clothes, pressed a shotgun barrel against his chest, and pulled the trigger, investigators said.
According to the Houston Press, shortly before his death, Harrell Jr. confided to a financial adviser: “Winning the lottery is the worst thing that ever happened to me.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report
