The odds aren’t good — but these goods are odd!
Saturday night’s electrifying $1.7 billion Powerball jackpot might make you daydream about blowing a lot of cash on a ritzier life — but past big winners prove that the reality of winning big has lead to a lot of low-brow, wacky and tacky purchases.
From family boob jobs to meth trafficking operations, here’s what some former lottery winners have spent their fortunes on.
Bigger, better, badder… naked-er!
Jonathan Vargas, once the youngest person ever to win a Powerball jackpot at age 19, spent part of his $35.3 million fortune on creating “Wrestlicious” — a women’s wrestling show featuring gals in skimpy clothes hitting the ropes.
Part low-budget Royal Rumble, part “sketch comedy,” the Tampa-based program aired in 2010, two years after Vargas hit it big in South Carolina. Vargas even rapped in the show’s campy trailer using on-the-nose moniker “JV Rich.”
But “Wrestlicious” quickly flopped, with critics calling it everything from “sexist” to the “dirt-worst” iteration of the sport, and it was cancelled after just one year.
The ‘high’ life
Ronnie Music Jr., who won $3 million in a Georgia scratch-off lottery, blew much of his money kickstarting a methanphatamine business.
After winning in 2015, the then-44-year-old maintenance supervisor told lottery officials he planned to invest the cash.
That’s one way to put it.
Within months, he had dumped the dough into an illicit operation to traffic hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of speed in Ware County, Georgia.
The big winner was busted when his drug ring partners were caught trying to sell roughly 11 pounds of crystal meth, which had a street value of about $500,000, prosecutors said.
Music pled guilty to conspiring to traffic large amounts of meth in April 2017. He was sentenced to 21 years in federal prison.
Making a splash
John Kutey, one of seven who split a $319 million Mega Millions jackpot in 2011, plunked down cash to build a waterpark in his home town of Green Island, New York.
Kutey donated $200,000 of his $19 million lump sum to the outdoor space, dubbed Spray Park, which opened in 2013 featuring fountains for kids to splash around in, according to a local report.
Breast sister ever
British lottery winner Sarah Cockings won a $4 million Lotto jackpot in 2005 at age 21 — and poured it into some, well, personal assets.
“Just after I won, I bought my two sisters boob jobs,” Cockings, of Whitley Bay, told the UK Mirror last year, on the 25th anniversary of the win.
“But now – I’ve had one myself, because mine were wrecked by breastfeeding. It’s my two-year boob birthday. I love them.”
Going full throttle
Michael Carroll, who won a $13 million lottery jackpot in the UK in 2002, installed a backyard race track where he reportedly hosted wild demolition derbies.
But he blew his entire fortune in less than a decade on wild parties, fancy cars, and a lavish lifestyle — once bragging that he had “slept with over 4,000 women,” according to the Mirror.
Carrol, now 41, eventually had to return to jobs working as a garbage man and at a cookie factory, the paper reported.
House of pain
Edwin Castro, who won the largest Powerball jackpot ever at $2.04 billion in 2022, bought several mansions in California — including a $3.8 Malibu abode that burned down during the LA wildfires in January.
He reportedly also spent $25.5 million on abode in the Hollywood Hills, and bought several high-end vintage sports cars, such as a $500,000 Porsche 911 GT2RS, according to the UK Sun.
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