Lou Eisenberg (Associated Press)
Curtis Sharp (Associated Press)
Jack Whittaker (Reuters)
Jack Whittaker
Home: West Virginia
Won: $315M in 2002
One of the saddest tales is that of Jack Whittaker, the cowboy-hat-wearing West Virginia contractor who scored a $315 million Powerball win in December 2002.
Already a millionaire, Whittaker pledged to give 10 percent of his fortune to charity. But legal and personal problems took a heavy toll, and he started hitting the sauce and hanging out at sleazy jiggle joints.
Just eight months after his big score, he was robbed of $545,000 in a strip club. A month later, his granddaughter died of an overdose from drugs bought with an allowance from him. A short time later, his daughter also died of a drug overdose
“I wish I’d torn that ticket up,” Whittaker sobbed to reporters at the time.
By January 2007, Whittaker told cops thieves had emptied his bank accounts.
Evelyn Basehore
Home: Brick, NJ
Won: $3.9M in 1985
and $1.4M in 1986
Evelyn Basehore was doubly lucky in the mid-1980s — first netting $3.9 million in October 1985 and then, incredibly, another $1.4 million four months later.
But a taste for gambling led her down the road to ruin.
“I’m broke now . . . I work two jobs,” she lamented to The Post outside her home in a trailer park in Brick, NJ, yesterday.
Basehore, 52, who was a convenience-store manager when she won, once admitted to the financial site Bankrate.com, “Winning the lottery isn’t always what it’s cracked up to be.
“I won the American dream, but I lost it, too. It was a very hard fall. It’s called rock bottom.
“Everybody wanted my money. Everybody had their hand out. I never learned one simple word in the English language: ‘no.’ I wish I had the chance to do it all over again.”
She added, “Most times, I wish I didn’t play. But I do play it still once in a while.
“I’ll spend a dollar for tomorrow’s lotto,” she said.
“My advice to anyone [who wins] would be to go to your lawyer and accountant first.”
Lou Eisenberg
Home: Brighton Beach
Won: $5M in 1981
Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, hairdresser Lou “Lucky Lou” Eisenberg beat the odds and hit the big time on Friday the 13th of November 1981, nailing a $5 million jackpot.
It was a record lottery payout in the United States at the time.
But Eisenberg, who bought the winning ticket from a vendor in Midtown, wound up broke gambling and doling out much of the rest of the dough to his now three ex-wives.
When he first hit it big, “I was all over the place — I was like diarrhea,” Eisenberg, then 84, told The Palm Beach Post in a 2008 interview about his windfall fortune and fame. “Everyone wanted a piece of Lou Eisenberg.”
He sat on the couch on Johnny Carson and had photos snapped with Tony Bennett, Sammy Davis Jr., Regis Philbin and Oprah Winfrey before moving to Florida and blowing it all.
Curtis Sharp
Home: Newark, NJ
Won: $5M in 1982
AIR-conditioning repairman Curtis Sharp made quite the splash after beating 600 million-to-1 odds to win a $5 million lottery jackpot in 1982.
Dressed in a bowler hat and suit right out of “Guys and Dolls,” he arrived at a news conference to claim his winnings with both his wife and his girlfriend.
Sharp’s 15 minutes of fame included hanging out with Andy Warhol and bringing Yankee games to a standstill when players and fans noticed him in the stands.
But Sharp blew most of his cash on booze, babes and bad investments — most notably a scheme to build electric cars powered by batteries that supposedly never needed recharging.
“Get yourself a lawyer before a Cadillac,” Sharp advised during an interview after moving to Tennessee and launching a second life as a preacher years later.
“A fool and his money are soon parted, and, honey, I acted a fool.”