You can bet this will be all over the TV news next week. From KTUU-TV in Anchorage:
The winner of the $500,000 lottery drawing came forward Saturday to collect his prize, and the man who will pocket a half-million dollars from a raffle designed to benefit a sex abuse victims charity is a three-time sex offender.
Alec Ahsoak of Anchorage was convicted of sexual abuse of a minor twice in 1993 and once in 2000, according to the Alaska Department of Public Safety Sex Offender/Child Kidnapper Central Registry.
The lottery, which had its drawing Friday night, was conducted by Lucky Times Pull Tabs. State law says all games of chance must benefit charity, and the organization Standing Together Against Rape, or STAR, was the designated beneficiary…
He says he plans to use the money to buy a home and to improve his life, and late Saturday afternoon said he will donate $100,000 to STAR.
I’m no fan of lotteries. My antipathy started back on April 23, 1995 when the NYTimes Magazine ran a cover story on the lottery, TICKET TO TROUBLE: Congratulations! You’ve won one million dollars. Your troubles have just begun, by Lois Gould in which she travels to a reunion of lottery winners. I haven’t been able to find a web reference to it (including in the NYTimes archive). I went to the library and found it on microfiche:
There are no statistics on what happens to jackpot winners. But a, growing body of evidence suggests that winning big often brings big, if not ruinous, trouble.
William (Bud) Post of Oil City, Pa., won a $161 million Pennsylvania jackpot in 1988 and was dead broke five years later. What was more, Post’s brother was in jail charged with hiring a hit man to murder Bud and his sixth wife for the lottery money.
In rueful interviews, Post said he was more content before he won, when all he had was a job with a traveling circus cooking for the thin man and the lion tamer. Friends and family begged or borrowed from him; business ventures failed; an ex-girlfriend sued.
Debbie from Colorado won $6.85 million eight years ago. She’s not broke, and not a sore winner. But “one sister didn’t speak to us for a year, because we didn’t pick up a breakfast check; another expected us to repay her school loans. A close friend borrowed money and we didn’t hear from him again for three years – when he called to borrow some more.”
That sex offender’s life is about to be turned upside down. The story says he had his own difficult childhood, growing up in foster homes and a home for children. He should give the money back; $500,000 is hardly worth what he’s going to go through.
More excerpts from that Times article here and here. It’s well worth a trip to the library. Also fun, and more recent, is the This American Life episode featuring a guy whose job was to buy jackpots from lottery winners.