Pennsylvania Man Won $16M Lottery — Bought A Plane, A Mansion, Then Went Bankrupt: 'I Was Happier Broke'

William 'Bud' Post III had exactly $2.46 (£1.82) in his bank account when he claimed a $16.2 million (£12 million) share of the Pennsylvania Lottery in February 1988. Three months later, he owed creditors $500,000 (£370,000).

Nearly four decades on, his collapse remains one of the most extreme cases of sudden wealth gone wrong, and the story has resurfaced in a video, tracing how quickly the fortune unravelled.

Post, then 49 and living on disability payments, did not even buy the winning ticket himself. He pawned a ring for $40 (£30) and handed the cash to his landlady and occasional girlfriend, Ann Karpik, who bought the entries on his behalf.

One of those tickets landed half of a jackpot worth more than $32 million (£23.7 million), the second largest in the state's history at the time.

Born in Erie, Pennsylvania, Post was sent to an orphanage as a child and drifted through jobs as a cook, painter, and truck driver for travelling carnivals before the win.

$300,000 Gone in a Fortnight

Rather than take a lump sum, Post chose 26 annual instalments of $497,953.47 (£368,000). The first cheque barely lasted.

Within two weeks he had spent more than $300,000 (£222,000), according to an obituary in The Washington Post. The purchases included a liquor licence, the lease on a Florida restaurant for two of his siblings, and a used-car lot, complete with its fleet of vehicles, for another brother. He also bought a twin-engine plane despite holding no pilot's licence.

By the three-month mark, that spending had pushed him $500,000 into the red. A year after the win, Post was estranged from his siblings and had paid $395,000 (£292,000) for a 16-room mansion in Oil City, Pennsylvania, which he set about renovating.

A Lawsuit and a Murder Plot

The money attracted legal trouble as quickly as it disappeared. Karpik sued in 1989, claiming the pair had agreed to split any winnings, and after a three-year court battle, a judge awarded her a third of the jackpot, worth $5.3 million (£3.9 million). Post complained that his legal fees alone reached $129,000 (£95,500) in a single year.

His brother Jeffrey was jailed after hiring a man to kill Post and his sixth wife in a bid to inherit the annual payments, the newspaper noted.

Post was later convicted of assault for firing a shotgun at a man who had arrived at his mansion to collect a car-repair debt. He exhausted his appeals and began a prison sentence of between six and 24 months in 1998. He also went bankrupt along the way, emerged with about $1 million (£740,000) free and clear, and spent most of that as well.

'Much Happier When I Was Broke'

In 1996, Post attempted a clean break. He sold the deteriorating mansion for $65,000 (£48,000), a fraction of what he had paid, and auctioned off his remaining 17 lottery payments, walking away with about $2.65 million (£1.96 million).

'Once I'm no longer a lottery winner, people will leave me alone. That's all I want. Just peace of mind,' he said at the time.

Within a year, nearly all of that money had gone on debts, two homes, several vehicles, two Harley-Davidson motorcycles, and a $260,000 (£192,000) sailboat he planned to use for a charter fishing business.

Post spent his final years on a disability cheque of $450 (£333) a month. He died of respiratory failure on 15 January 2006, aged 66, roughly $1 million in debt.

'Everybody dreams of winning money, but nobody realizes the nightmares that come out of the woodwork, or the problems,' he said in 1993, five years after the draw that upended his life.

'I was much happier when I was broke,' he also said, as quoted by The US Sun.

His case is still cited regularly in coverage of lottery winners whose fortunes collapsed, a list that has only grown as jackpots in the US and UK reach record levels.