Jackpot

Standing at the checkout counter of Clark's Pump 'n Shop in Westwood, Kentucky, David Edwards decided to forgo his usual lottery ritual. Instead of picking numbers by family birth dates, he closed his eyes and went with the first thing that came to mind: 8, 17, 22, 42, 47, 21. Half a dozen numbers, locked and loaded, like a thousand fruitless times before.

He walked across the street to his little mustard-colored house behind the funeral home. It was Saturday evening, August 25, 2001. Edwards was 46 years old. He owed more than $1000 in child support, had no job, no health insurance and, at the moment, no running water. What he had were two ex-wives, an 11-year-old daughter, a 26-year-old fiancée, a felony prison record, a chronically bad back from having been run off his porch by a drunk driver and the psychological shrapnel from a traumatic childhood. When he was a baby, his sister, a seven-year-old with a bad heart, died in surgery. When he was 10, his 18-year-old brother died in Greenbo Lake after diving into shallow water. At 11, Edwards had to be teargassed from beneath a house like a possum during a shoot-out with the state police. After dropping out of high school he went to Ohio and then Florida, holding a variety of jobs--bartending, construction, peddling china door-to-door. Eventually, Edwards went to Vegas and worked as a bodyguard for a casino president's wife. It was a thug's life of mansions, flashy jewelry, concealed weapons and slick (continued on page 139) Jackpot! (continued from page 110) cars. Edwards enjoyed it immensely until a brush with the law took some of the pleasure out of his stay. He moved back to Kentucky where he had some success selling insurance. Then, at the age of 25, he robbed a gas station. He served seven years for that one, plus another six months here and there for parole violations and firearms possession. When he finally turned his life around and got a job installing telecommunications equipment, he quickly worked his way up to project supervisor and employee of the year--then he got laid off.

David Edwards' whole life had been bad moves and bad mojo. And now the unemployment checks were running out.

"God," he had prayed in bed the night before he bought the lottery ticket, "me and you been through a lot of things and you know I mean well. If you've got an answer I wish you'd tell me, or else let me hit this lottery!" The Powerball was up to $295 million. The chance of winning was 80 million to one.

Edwards' fiancée, Shawna Maddux, was waiting tables at a country club, but her salary wouldn't support the two of them, not even in a tiny place like West-wood. Westwood is a hamlet just next door to Ashland (population 27,000), a blue-collar city where the brushy hills and coal mines of eastern Kentucky meet the Ohio River. Just that day Edwards had asked a friend for a $150 loan so they could get the water turned back on and quit slopping buckets from the neighbor's tap to wash dishes and flush the toilet. He and Maddux could afford a couple of drinks, though. It was Saturday night, and there was live music in the lounge of the Ashland Plaza Hotel (where, it turns out, his second ex-wife was having her wedding reception). The couple got dressed and went to the hotel around midnight. On the way into town, they stopped at the Pump 'n Shop so Edwards could pick up a printout of the numbers; he had missed the drawing on the 11 p.m. news.

In the hotel parking lot, he smoked a cigarette and compared the prize numbers with those on his lottery ticket, and it was in the front seat of a 1992 Buick Roadmaster that David Edwards--excon, broke as a joke--became a rich man.

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He jumped out of the car and ran up and down the street hollering, "Praise God, thank you, God!" Maddux, a cool-headed one, said, "Honey, get back in the car." They checked the numbers a few hundred more times and then drove to see friends and start spreading the good news.

"We won the lottery!" they said to Maddux' mother, Ethel, over the phone at two in the morning.

"Uh-huh," Ethel said.

"It's true--we won!" they said.

"That's real good. Night-night."

They didn't want to go home so they checked into the Days Inn and tried to get some sleep, but their eyes kept springing open and finding each other smiling. At five in the morning they couldn't fight it anymore and got out of bed and started drinking coffee, fueling up for the first day of their new life.

All day Sunday Edwards kept the winning ticket in his pants pocket. That night, a banker in town let him put it in a vault. On Monday, he hired one of his ex-brothers-in-law, a 6'6" weight-lifter, to be his bodyguard. The bodyguard, along with a pair of armed state troopers, drove Edwards 200 miles to the state lottery commission in Louisville, where Edwards learned he would share the $295 million with five other ticket holders: a brother and sister from the East, a medical records clerk in Minnesota and an elderly Maine couple who had hidden their winning ticket in a box of Corn Chex.

Edwards' share came to $73.7 million. He opted for a lump sum instead of payments over 25 years, knocking the loot down to $41.5 million. Even after taxes took 32 percent of that, he still walked away with $28,393,819 and change for a Pepsi. In a single check he would receive 1000 times the amount his average neighbor earned in a year in the Ashland area. Not bad for the son of a steelworker and a seamstress who worked hard all their lives. "It's a poor man's dream!" Edwards told reporters.

He wore a suit for the cameras that day and tried to impress the journalists. Edwards is 6', slender and tanned, with a dark beard, a long ponytail, high cheekbones, blue eyes and a faint scar over the bridge of his nose, a combination that gives him a slightly menacing look. He looks smooth and talks smoother. He is comfortable onstage. He has a touch of the evangelical in him, a bit of the country huckster who knows when to inflect for effect, when to bring it down to a whisper or to narrow his eyes to hammer a point. He possesses a kind of streetwise instinct for opportunity, always ready to deal but unable to make anything stick.

David Edwards knew how he wanted to live, though. He had always driven Cadillacs and Lincolns, even when he couldn't afford them. To the manner born, as they say.

Slick might have served him well in sales, but what Edwards began selling that day in front of the cameras was himself, as someone with more to offer the world than a rags-to-riches story. Almost immediately, however, some people in his hometown began grousing that he didn't deserve the windfall, that fate had chosen the wrong guy. One of the state's largest newspapers felt obliged to remind the citizenry that the lottery is not a character test. No one should assume "sudden wealth comes only to the worthy," read an editorial in the Lexington Herald-Leader, two days after Edwards cashed in his ticket. "Winners may have some degree of luck. But just how much luck depends on how the person handles a suddenly more complicated life."

Here is how Edwards handled it: His first move as a multimillionaire was to hire someone to manage the loot. He wasn't hurting for volunteers. Planners called from hither and yon to offer their services, but in a traditional move, Edwards went with a young Morgan Stanley broker named Jim Gibbs because he was local and Edwards knew of his family. Then he put himself on a budget: X amount for rich-man trappings (house, cars, clothes, jewelry), X amount for gifts and the bulk for new businesses.

Then he went to Vegas.

Edwards and "Maddux went straight from Louisville. They didn't even go back to the little yellow house behind the funeral home. They had a friend pack their things, clean the place; they never lived there another night. For their new start they went to the city of new starts, where lives change every day at the altar of money or matrimony.

Technically, Edwards still had another week to wait before his millions would be wired into his account back home. In the meantime, Gibbs had to call the people at the Rio hotel and assure them his new client was good for the bill, that if they were smart they would treat him like a big shot and put him up in a fancy Palazzo Suite, which they did. Edwards instantly had butlers, chefs, limousine drivers, a private swimming pool and a seat not at a $10 blackjack table but in the plush quiet of the high-stakes parlors. Mostly, though, he was eager to shop. "He's got a little woman in him when it comes to that," says one of his friends. "He'll take you to the mall and wear you out."

One day he put on a $200 off-the-rack suit and walked into Bernini, the exclusive Italian men's shop, and just started pointing. "One of the first things that I picked was an alligator coat, $33,000--cost more than my home. I thought, I'm wearing my home! I didn't ask the prices of anything," he says. "I walked in there and blitzed them. The suits were $6000 a whack. I was saying, 'Gimme that one, that one, that one, that one.'" These were custom-made Brionis and Versaces. His new watch was a $80,000 Breitling, and Maddux' was a $35,000 Rolex. Life was getting to be right pleasant.

There was only one hitch. Gibbs had secured Edwards plenty of credit, but Edwards couldn't pick up most of his new clothes and jewelry until early the following week, when his millions officially wired through. "I call Jimmy Gibbs and he says, 'Look, we want to take you to Morgan Stanley in New York at the World Trade Center to talk about what we're going to do with this money--you need to be there Monday or Tuesday,'" Edwards says. "I said, 'I'm not going to New York City until me and Shawna are dressed correctly and our new life has started, so let's put this off a week.'" That was at the end of the first week of September.

When the planes hit the World Trade Center, Edwards took it as a sign. "I told Shawna, 'Tomorrow is not promised to us. We've got to give money away.'"

When they got back to Kentucky, they checked into a suite at the Ashland Plaza Hotel, and the handouts began in earnest: $50,000 to the Boys Club, a new playground for an elementary school, $45,000 for the volunteer fire department to fix trucks and buy new equipment. "There was a lady who had cancer and she'd given her burial plot away to her son and was spending the last days of her life trying to figure out how to pay her own death bill," Edwards says. "I went out and bought her a $7400 funeral. She picked out a white and pink casket and a big spray of flowers, the whole thing, and I drove her down to National City Bank where I gave her $10,000, told her to spend every dime."

Maddux' mother, Ethel, suffers from lupus. She had been living in a housing project and fantasizing about moving to a double-wide trailer. Edwards bought her a roomy split-level house in a nice neighborhood and a brand-new Pontiac Grand Prix. He has purchased vehicles for seven people and paid off struggling friends' bills and mortgages. He knew a guy who had been robbed and was whacked so hard in the head with a two-by-four that his eye popped out and he had to get a glass one; Edwards gave him $5000. He's been giving another fellow, who is waiting for a liver transplant, $2000 a month. In Miami, he had his limousine driver stop so he could hand $3000 to a beggar on the street. He even gave money to the drunk driver responsible for screwing up his back.

"David is extremely generous," says Gibbs, who has stopped trying to keep track of how much Edwards gives away. "If a stranger gives him a good enough line, he'll help the guy out."

When people started reading about his donations in the local papers, they set upon him with letters and phone calls. Strangers showed up, asking him to pay off their credit card bills, hospital charges, mortgages and car loans. "You know what amazes me?" says Edwards. "People don't ask for $100 or $1000, they ask for $50,000, $100,000. They look at me like I'm trash if I give them anything less than $50. There's some brass people, boy." He has lost a few friends for not giving them what they want, for being determined to give only to those who are "right up against it," a position he remembers well. When it got to the point that he couldn't walk out the door without bumping into an outstretched hand, he knew he had to move from Ashland.

A month after the lottery win, Edwards and Maddux bought a $1.2 million home on the 16th hole of Ballenisles Country Club outside West Palm Beach, Florida, where they hoped to blend in with all the other millionaires. Soon a black Bentley appeared in the driveway, then a 360 Ferrari Spider for Maddux, then a Lamborghini Diablo, yellow as an egg yolk, a Dodge Viper, a rare Shelby, a Cadillac Escalade, a Chevy excursion van and a Hummer golf cart with faux-zebra seats. That belongs to Edwards' daughter, who does not play golf.

In the marble foyer Edwards has two suits of shining armor. On display in the dining room is a collection of medieval daggers and jewel-handled swords. For his bedroom he bought a 61-inch plasma flat-screen television ($45,000). For help around the house he hired a full-time butler. For travel he bought a share in a private Learjet. It's easier that way-- no annoying security checks or crowds. Edwards routinely sends the jet to fetch Ethel or bring friends to the beach or send his daughter home to visit her mother, at roughly $7000 a pop.

He and Maddux flew to Hawaii for New Year's and were married on the beach in Maui. They had been together seven years before the lottery win. When he bought his-and-hers Kentucky Thoroughbreds to run in the Derby, Edwards named his Powerball Pick and his new wife named hers Mr. Right.

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Once Edwards had the clothes and the home, had lavished friends as well as strangers with hundreds of thousands of dollars in gifts, he began to work. He bought a telecommunications firm and a limousine company, and invested $6 million in a Kentucky housing development. The other day he walked into a Cracker Barrel, his favorite restaurant, and tried to buy it, but learned it wasn't for sale. His favorite venture involves two soon-to-be-unveiled burn medications, Alocane and Biocane, that he believes will make him richer still. "The businesses that he's gotten involved in seem to be sound," says Gibbs. "I don't know how he learns about them, but he does. It's ironic--I think David would have been a lot more successful if he hadn't had those problems in childhood, but if he hadn't had that anchor pulling him down he probably never would have won the lottery, because he would've been so successful he wouldn't have bought a ticket.

"The only problem has been trying to get him to slow down. His mind moves so fast, trying to figure out ways to make money with this money. In five years there's a possibility that he might be worth $50 million." Edwards is clearly thinking big. He named his conglomerate World Solutions Inc.

The transition from poor man to rich has been smooth, as though Edwards stepped through a portal from one reality to another. He marvels at his luck every day.

During a recent visit with Edwards, I asked about all the excess--why, for instance, all those luxury automobiles? Edwards grinned and answered, "Why not? I'm rich. I'm damn rich!" It was a Sunday evening in March and Edwards had been laid up all day with his bad back. He shuffled out of the bedroom in slippers and silk pajamas, cigarette burns on his sky-blue bathrobe, to find a quiet spot on the sofa overlooking the swimming pool and palm trees. He looked around for his pack of Camels and, not finding it, hollered for Fred, the butler, who slipped in and out with a smoke and a light. Edwards dragged and exhaled, gave a little wave of the hand and said, "Everything I touch is making money."

He finds himself in the unusual position of perhaps being able to answer a timeless question: Can money buy happiness? Ask around eastern Kentucky and the people on the receiving end of his generosity will say money can at least buy breathing room, a new start. This, above all, is what money has brought David Edwards, but within limits. Though he and his wife recently decided to quit smoking and drinking and to follow strict diets, after all those years of hard living, health problems remind Edwards of what money cannot cure. And now that he can afford a trip around the world, he can't take it, because even multimillionaire ex-felons have trouble getting passports. Somehow, though, even the stickiest problems seem surmountable these days. As Edwards said, with a grin, "I've got a team of lawyers working on it."

"One of the first things that I picked was an alligator coat, $33,000--cost more than my home."