Bud Post: The $16.2 Million Nightmare
William 'Bud' Post won a $16.2 million Pennsylvania Lottery jackpot in 1988, paid in annual installments. Within a year he was $1 million in debt after spending on a plane, a mansion, and family businesses. An ex-girlfriend successfully sued him for a share, and his brother was arrested for allegedly hiring a hitman to kill him. He declared bankruptcy and died in 2006 still $1 million in debt.
On the morning William "Bud" Post won the Pennsylvania Lottery in 1988, he had $2.46 in his bank account. By the end of the day, he was a multimillionaire, or so it seemed. Post, a 49-year-old from Erie, Pennsylvania, held one of the winning tickets in a jackpot worth $16.2 million to him, half of a prize pool of more than $32 million, the second-largest total in state history at the time. The other half went to a group of 16 employees of the Westinghouse Electric Bettis Atomic Power Laboratory in Pittsburgh. The money was to be paid in 26 annual installments of $497,953.47. It was, on paper, a fortune that would last a lifetime.
Post's life before the win had been hard in the ordinary ways. His mother died when he was 8, his father sent him to an orphanage, and he worked a string of temporary jobs: cooking, driving trucks for traveling carnivals and circuses, painting. He once served 28 days in jail for issuing invalid checks. The lottery ticket was bought with money his landlady and occasional girlfriend, Ann Karpik, had given him: he pawned a ring for $40 and she handed him the cash for 40 tickets. One of them won.
The spending began immediately and did not stop. In the two weeks after he collected his first annual payment, Post spent more than $300,000 on gifts and investments: a liquor license, a lease for a restaurant in Florida, a used-car lot, and a twin-engine airplane, despite not holding a pilot's license. Within three months, his debts totaled $500,000. The next year he bought a mansion in Oil City, Pennsylvania, for $395,000. The annual payments, meant to last 26 years, were being outrun by a lifestyle that assumed the money would never end.
Then the people around the money arrived. Karpik sued Post for a share of the winnings, saying they had agreed to split any prize; after three years, a judge ruled that she was owed one-third of all the proceeds, and when Post refused to hand over his 1992 annual payment, the judge ordered all of his lottery payments frozen until the dispute was resolved. Worse followed. By 1989, Post was estranged from his brother, who, intending to acquire the winnings as an inheritance, paid a hit man to murder Post and his sixth wife. The attempt failed, and the brother was arrested.
The last decade of Post's life was a slow unravelling of courtrooms and debts. In 1998, he was arrested aboard a $260,000 sailboat for refusing to serve a six-to-24-month prison sentence on a six-year-old assault conviction: he had fired a shotgun at a man who came to his mansion to collect a debt, and fired into his sixth wife's Pontiac Firebird. He had married seven times, six of them ending in divorce. By the end of his life he was more than $1 million in debt, surviving on food stamps and a $450-a-month stipend. He died of respiratory failure on January 15, 2006, at 66.
Bud Post's story is the darkest version of the lottery cautionary tale, and the lesson is not really about spending. Plenty of winners spend too fast and end up broke; few have a brother hire a hit man over the proceeds. Sudden money does not just change what you can buy, it changes what you are worth to the people around you, and not always in the way you would hope. Post won $16.2 million with $2.46 in the bank and died, eighteen years later, in debt and on food stamps. The jackpot was real. Everything it was supposed to fix was not.
The lesson: A windfall without boundaries turns generosity into obligation — and sudden money can attract danger as fast as it attracts opportunity.
Source: original reporting · How we source stories