Lottery winner on his way to jail

[tay]

Ten years ago, Dan Carley was a young man celebrating a $5-million lottery win with his parents, friends and fiancée.

Today, the 35-year-old St. Catharines man is locked up in a detention centre en route to a federal penitentiary, sentenced last week to two and a half years for cocaine trafficking.

The intervening years saw a series of poor investments aggravated by drug use and being around “questionable characters,” a cautionary tale in the scrolls of the “lottery curse,” his former attorney, family and friends say.

Dan Carley’s life hit a new high on Feb. 21, 2006. He bought a dozen $10 Ontario Big Game scratch tickets at a local convenience store and struck gold — the largest instant cash prize in provincial history at that time.

The future looked peachy. Days after hitting the jackpot, he helped his friend kick off a new charity event for multiple sclerosis, according to a Niagara This Week report at the time. Three years later, his then common-law spouse — they’re now separated — gave birth, according to his longtime lawyer, Brenda Sandulak.

Carley, called “Ears” by his friends, told reporters at the time of his win that he planned to keep most of his new-found cash in the bank to build interest. Some of the remainder he’d invest in his bar, Carley’s Pub, Niagara This Week also reported.

Things went downhill from there. Roughly half of the cash was gone within three years of the win, according to Sandulak.

“Once he won all that money he just blew it, just terrible. Jesus, 5 million bucks — you got it made,” said his friend’s father, Bob Delisle.

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https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/20...-catharines-convicted-of-dealing-cocaine.html

 

[Angstrom]

I would blow the money within a year, someone has got to help fund the socialsist system :lol:

 

[taxslave]

At 35 five mill is dangerous. At 60 it would be a good retirement nest egg.

 

[Machjo]

At 35 five mill is dangerous. At 60 it would be a good retirement nest egg.

I was thinking not necessarily dangerous. Then I thought that if he buys lottery tickets, then he probably has an easy money approach to life. It could be interesting to study the spending patterns of lottery winners who's bought their own tickets vs. those who's had the ticket given to them as a gift but who might not buy tickets themselves. My guess is the latter would be more responsible with the win due to a non-gamblinf approach to money.

 

[Danbones]

There is an age old Polish proverb:
better lucky then smart

 

[MHz]

At 35 five mill is dangerous. At 60 it would be a good retirement nest egg.

Yeah, just in time to get Blue Cross to get the meds that make you function like you were 45. If he developed a coke habit with that kind of money he should have bought a beach house in Chili and he could have gotten a bale of leaves pretty cheap if you called it 'tea leaves'. Steve McQueen did a movie called Devil's Island and in that film he was out of air from all the uphill running and he was offered a leaf to chew on and in the next frames he was trucking up a series of them without breaking a sweat. That jives with the Indians going on strike if the leaves were taken away from them. They happily cleaned out their own silver and gold mines after they got it back.

I would blow the money within a year, someone has got to help fund the socialsist system :lol:

Blow it on a team of shrinks, female ones that also have their massage permits.At the nearest bar in a small Chilian village as the sun sets over Pitcarn Island in the far distance. More tea my dear??. $600/mo all inclusive

 

[tay]

5-million lotto winner turned inmate says ‘I’m a lot happier now’

After his win a decade ago, Dan Carley blew through millions in a spree of drugs, booze and bad decisions that cost him more than money.

“Things were pretty crazy,” he said. “I was drinking every single day, partying every single day, doing coke,” a drug he had only dabbled in before.

Carley estimates that more than one-fifth of his prize cash went to feed his growing addiction to cocaine, oxycodone and heroin over the next nine years.

“At least a million — maybe more,” he said. “You’re not really thinking about it, you’ve got lots of money in the bank, you just keep spending.”

Within seven months of hitting the jackpot, Carley said he’d sunk about $1.5 million into a “badly thought-out” plan to develop a string of Niagara bars that fizzled by 2007.

He spent a further million on poor investments in the first year, and by 2009 his bank accounts were gutted, evaporating after heady splurges on drugs and alcohol and, more sobering, mortgage payments and back taxes.

Carley said he eventually lost all of the dozen or so properties he owned or had bought a stake in, including his home and the family pub. Most he sold to pay off his creditors. A few, he added, were pulled from under his feet via power-of-sale.

He hit rock bottom in the fall of 2014, experiencing what he called a “psychotic break” after taking a heavy dose of heroin and cocaine.

“I actually tried to .....

https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/20...-turned-inmate-says-im-a-lot-happier-now.html