Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “Money often costs too much”.

Never were those words truer than in the case of James Allen Hayes, a man who won big, lost big, and then wanted more.

Hayes, a security guard, won the California lottery jackpot in 1998 – a cool $19 million (around R270 million). Two decades later, in March this year, he stood in a courtroom admitting to being the serial bank robber known to federal agents as both the Seasoned Bandit and PT Cruiser Bandit.

Here’s The Daily Beast:

The first time Jim Hayes robbed a bank, at age 55, he gave himself a pep talk.

[…]“It felt like I had a devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other,” Hayes told [The Daily Beast] a year after the crime. “The angel was saying, ‘Don’t do it. You could go to prison for 20 years.’ And the devil was saying, ‘It’s Friday. You’re broke. Are you really gonna go the whole weekend without drugs, you loser?’”

So Hayes walked inside and handed a female teller a note demanding cash. “Sorry,” he said before bolting. “Family emergency.”

Hayes had developed a drug habit. Over the next five months, the heroin addict struck 10 more banks in Los Angeles and California, swiping nearly $40 000 (R567 000) before FBI agents stormed his home and took him in.

Just two decades before, at 35, Hayes had become an overnight millionaire, although his lottery winnings didn’t last long.

He spent big—Lamborghinis, Porsches and Harleys, million-dollar oceanfront condos, extravagant gambling trips to Vegas.

On the day he was busted, Hayes was a penniless junkie living in a garage.

“Having money enabled me to live my wildest dreams,” he said. “But there’s a flip side. It’s the lottery curse.”

Hayes’ expensive cars, extensive spending and visits to car shows opened up a number of doors.

“I raced Lamborghinis with [pro driver ] Mario Andretti! I owned six different Lambos. I’m a car guy—Bentlys [sic], Porsches, Corvettes, etc,” Hayes wrote. “I owned beachfront houses, had actress girlfriends, you name it, I’ve probably done it.”

At one point, he launched a business plan to rent exotic sports cars to high rollers in Las Vegas. “He was spending like crazy,” recalls Walker. “He’d get an advance on the next year’s [lottery] payment and borrow against it. But he was using more than he had.”

He developed a taste for the best, but his reckless spending soon caught up with him.

When Hayes (below on the right) divorced his first wife, Stephanie, in the late ’90s, she was awarded half of his annual lottery payments, according to court documents. But he still splurged on $10,000 Rolex watches, Persian rugs, five-star hotels, and Harley Davidson motorcycles, according to his second wife, Stephanie Wysinger-Hayes. (Hayes married two Stephanies.)

“He developed a taste for the best. When I got together with him, he had 17 cars. He’d let my kids drive his Ferrari,” said Wysinger-Hayes. “He was living a flashy life and I was enjoying his gifts.” He soon had her pretty blonde image painted on one of his motorcycles.

After they got married, she suggested that he take a financial class. It had no effect whatsoever because he continued to spend, hand out money to friends, and make bad investments in material objects. Then his luck started to run out.

He suffered three herniated discs in his back and had surgery in 2004. When it didn’t help, he turned to prescription pills including Vicodin, Norco, and then Oxycontin.

In the years that followed he didn’t have a steady job or healthcare. The lottery started withholding his cheques, which were released in yearly instalments.

Hayes had also developed a nasty prescription drug habit, and after his home was consumed in a fire, he was forced to move into a friend’s garage with his wife. Unable to afford prescription medication, he turned to heroin.

It was in a heroin-infused haze that he came up with the plan to rob banks.

Hayes was listening to ’80s metal music with his 10-pound Maine Coon cat, Dr. Pepper, when the idea struck to rob a bank. “I mentally snapped,” he said. “I was broke, dope-sick, pissed off at the world, living in a garage with my beloved cat looking up at me hungry.”

What followed was a crime spree fuelled by Hayes’ drug habit and his love of money. After he was caught, he was sentenced to 33 months in prison, followed by three years of supervised release.

Hayes claims that prison has done him more good than winning the lottery. He’s making art and focusing on his spiritual side.

I guess both money and prison can really change a person.

[source:dailybeast]