foolish powerball winners

You can take the white trash out of the trailer, but you can’t take the trailer out of the white trash; even with $27 million dollars in the bank.

New Times Broward Palm Beach introduces us to a couple of Powerball winners from the south, who weren’t exactly prepared to handle their windfall.

Drugs, lavish homes and cars and a seemingly limitless amount of stupidity left David Lee Edwards near death and penniless.

He was 46, a high school dropout, an ex-con who had robbed a gas station 20 years before. He’d spent a third of his life behind bars. Now he was on unemployment and owed child support. He had chronic back pain from a 1988 car accident. He lived nearby in Ashland, Kentucky — a fading steel town, population 25,000 — in a home without running water.

$7 worth of lottery tickets later, he was suddenly a multi-millionaire.  He started smart, hiring James Gibbs, a 31-year-old Morgan Stanley broker, as his financial adviser

The first thing Gibbs did was arrange a $200,000 loan so David could celebrate in Las Vegas while awaiting the Powerball payment.

After six days in Vegas, David was broke

A long time OxyContin addict, his return home to his Powerball winnings quickly turned into a drug-binge for him and most of his friends.

When long-lost acquaintances turned up asking for money, David was generous.

His pals “went hog-wild,” Gibbs says. “He actually had I don’t know how many friends OD once he won the money, from him giving them money and them going and buying so much and doing so much drugs that they died. Then he would pay for their funerals. I would just sit there and cringe.”

He soon moved to Florida with his new wife Shawna (herself a crack junkie), settling on a $1.5 million, 6000 sq foot mansion in a gated golf course community. 

Within 3 months, he’d blown through $3 million.  He spent $35,000 on a Hummer golf cart for his daughter, too young to drive a regular car at the time.

Meanwhile, Shawna’s drug use was ballooning. She was doing crack and bouncing between their Palm Beach Gardens home and rehab and hospital stays. David gave her trinkets such as the $34,000 Rolex watch that she pawned to buy more drugs.

David also bought a $600,000 house in Palm Springs, California. And his own limo company. And a $1.9 million Lear jet. And three racehorses. And a fiber-optics installation company, which he acquired for $4.5 million.

A year after he’d won the lottery, he estimated he’d spent $12 million.

Natually, it only gets worse.

Read the cautionary tale here.