National Post (National Edition)
Win some. Lose some.
How the unfathomable good fortune of winning $50 million can go unbelievably wrong.
What would you do if you won $50-million in the lottery? Would you play it safe, follow the official guidance, not move right away, give a little to your friends and charity, invest and save, change the locks, de-list your phone number, make social media private, and tell the lottery people you won’t be paraded before the whole world as a million-dollar mark?
Or would you join the ranks of those whose experiences with unfathomable luck have left the cultural impression, rich in schadenfreude, that a big lottery win is a veiled curse?
Examples abound in the Canadian experience, and not all are tragic moral outrages like the 2003 manslaughter of Ibi Roncaioli of Toronto, by her physician husband Joseph, who gave her anesthetic injections, years after her $5-million lottery win had been squandered and lost.
Some are funny, like the two hapless weed dealers from St. Catharines, Ont., who went to trial to determine whether one of them bought a $5-million scratch ticket for himself or both of them, while the other guy waited outside the convenience store in his mom’s car. Faced with this question, the presiding judge observed: “If the ticket were a child and the parties vying for custody, I would find them both unfit and bring in Family and Children’s Services.”
Some are epic. The Lavigueur family of Montreal won $7.5 million in 1986 and were soon plagued by early deaths, a suicide, lawsuits, opportunists, and eventually a miniseries that dramatized their mansion burning down after it was bought by an outlaw biker.
Most famous was Raymond Sobeski of Ontario, who won $30 million in 2004, did not tell his wife, got a divorce, claimed the win, became a villain in the media, got sued by the wife, sued her lawyer and a newspaper, settled with the wife before trial, got back together with her, and kept on fighting all the way to Ontario’s top court.
Randall “Randy” Rush, 53, thinks he did pretty well, all things considered. And there is a lot to consider, lotto-wise, because Rush did more than fend off efforts to defraud him after his $50-million Alberta lottery win in 2015.
His experience as a $50-million target has given him a new purpose in life, as he is set to publish his memoir and commission others, trying to turn himself into a powerful champion for victims of financial scammers.
“There’s no John Walsh out there of white-collar crime,” Rush said in an interview, referring to the man who created America’s Most Wanted and became an anti-crime activist after his son Adam’s murder in 1981.
Rush’s origin story as a lottery winner superhero seeking vengeance on fraudsters began soon after his win, when Rush got involved with a man pitching an investment opportunity, a company that would be the next Amazon, the next Facebook, and it just so happened that this man was the son of Rush’s friends from church. What are the odds? Here was a chance to help friends and “diversify” his assets at the same time, Rush said.
He was in a good mood right after winning. Obviously. He did the press conference, the shopping spree, the luxury travel. Several people approached him for investment, but his plan was to play it cool for a while. He had what he called a
“checklist” of what not to do. But he quit his job at a heavy equipment rental company in Edmonton, where he had been making well into six figures.
The “Would you quit your job if you won the lotto?” question is a common interest of human resources consultants, as a measure of attitude. Among actual winners, surveys have noted a historically increasing majority of lottery winners who keep working. On the whole, what research exists suggests big lottery winners are no happier than the general population, and occasionally a lot less so.
It often starts with a story like this. Within a few weeks, Rush was investing in this man’s mobile phone app that linked online shopping to social media. Eventually he was in for a total of $4.6-million. A few months later he was suing, first in the U.S., then in Canada, claiming he was lied to about the company being on track for tens of millions in revenue.
The story played out in courts in Alberta and Arizona and is now mostly resolved in Rush’s favour, leaving nothing but a documentary trail of wild details about expensive cars, failed schemes, and a corporate launch party on the roof of a swish hotel, with beats by a lower-tier DJ, and no sign of Justin Timberlake or Taylor Swift, as Rush claims he was led to expect.
There is a bit of a Tiger King vibe in the court record, with all that small city swagger, flashy cars, expensive ball caps, big nights out in Vegas, men like peacocks, each playing the other until it all falls apart.
Lottery winners are not your usual rich people, not at first anyway. Rush’s new book, 13 Billion To One: Winning The $50 Million Lottery Has Its Price, out soon, is dedicated to his cat, Conway Kitty, “Who’s been there from the start and loves me for me.”
In the interview, Rush described learning some hard lessons. Some of his friends were worse off because of his donations to their bank accounts. One was a gambler, for whom cash was like gasoline on the fire.
“It was a very hard lesson in what giving is,” he said.
He said it taught him that quick money amplifies character, including a person’s flaws and weaknesses. Money “makes you a bigger person of who you are,” he said.
On this theory, the victims of the lottery curse would probably have gone off the rails anyway, but without all that money and fame, no one would notice.
H. Roy Kaplan, a sociologist at the University of South Florida, and a leading authority in the field, has found that lottery wins make introverts more anxious and suspicious of others. So did $50-million make Rush more like himself? Is he happier now?
“Absolutely” he said. Asked about his friends, he mentions his bankers.
Rush acknowledges he went through an “angry phase,” but denies that his new efforts to become an anti-scammer media star are motivated by vengeance.
But Rantanna Media, as he has named his publishing company (mixing his name with Carlos Santana’s), looks a lot like a rich man’s idle revenge. More than a mere vanity project, it looks like a passion project. His first book about his former business partner is called Bloodsuckers. He is looking to expand into books about abuse in evangelical Christianity, which he describes as a similar breach of trust.
“This is business,” he said. “This is completing a project.”