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You could hardly turn on the TV or open a newspaper without seeing Jack in his big black cowboy hat playing the role of Christian do-gooder with down-home brio. He went on Good Morning America and Today and let the perky morning-talk-show hosts slobber over him; then he went back to West Virginia and impressed his friends and neighbors by working the same long hours at the same old job.
He cut checks to the churches as promised. He bought Higginbotham, the biscuit-maker, a three-bedroom home and a used Jeep Grand Cherokee, and did about the same for the clerk who'd sold him the wi
From a frontage road west of C harleston, near a carpet outlet and the local Bob Evans, the club with the hot-pink awning calls out to the road-weary, marriage-weary, flesh-starved men of Interstate 64. One night Jack Whittaker heeds the call. He strides right into the Pink Pony and throws about $50,000 on the bar. It's New Year's Eve 2002, and he is six days a megamillionaire.
Mike Du
It's a summer Monday evening, and Jack has a hankering for vodka and a briefcase full of scratch: $245,000 in $100 bills and three $100,000 cashier checks. He gets rolling at Billy Sunday's, a bar near his office that has a note on the door asking its patrons to please leave their knives and whatnot in the truck. It's a good place to catch a wet-T-shirt contest or a NASCAR race. The staff didn't know Jack before he won the lottery, but they know him plenty now. Sometimes he shoots pool. Sometimes he just sits and drinks his Absolut and orange (or tomato) juice-doubles, if they recall. If he's feeling generous, he might throw down a good tip or give a cute young bartender a gold Rolex pen right out of his pocket, just for the hell of it, because he can, because he's Big Jack. He tells people he's a martial-arts expert and sometimes gets up to do a few karate kicks to prove it.
By the time he gets to the Pink Pony, it's around 2:00 a.m. and he has had, by his own count, seven or eight drinks. He leaves to drive to the Motel 6 to meet a friend, but the friend doesn't show, so Jack drives back to the Pony. He parks his Navigator alongside the front door and locks it with the engine ru
The kitchen manager, Jeffrey Caplinger, is in charge for the night. Jeff dates Misty Dawn Arnold, an ex-dancer who gave up the pole upon getting pregnant. The other strippers pay her to help them with their scheduling and outfits and hair. According to the club's bartender, the whole thing went down like this: At some point, Misty walks Jack out to the Navigator-maybe he needs more spending money or aims to dazzle Misty with the contents of the briefcase.Whatever it is, Misty comes back inside, says somebody needs to rob that dude.
Jack orders a vodka and tomato juice, but they're out of tomato juice so they make him a vodka and Hawaiian Punch.According to the bartender, Misty dumps a couple of blue capsules in Jack's drink. The bartender says: Misty, what gives? And Misty says: Don't worry about it; Jeff 's outside breaking into the Navigator. Pretty soon Jack can't hold his head up, so they let him lie down in a back room. Toward dawn he staggers outside and discovers one smashed window, zero briefcases. There's a lot of yelling. Jack and Jeff get into it, and pretty soon Jeff 's got a cut on his nose and the Pink Pony is crawling with cops. Jack summons his own security man, who finds the purloined briefcase stashed behind the Dumpster with the money still in it. The bartender later testifies to all of this at a West Virginia Alcohol Beverage Control hearing on whether to pull the Pony's liquor license, a hearing that culminates in an attorney asking Jack if it's common knowledge that he totes around so much cash, to which Jack responds: "You know, I did win the biggest lottery in history."
It doesn't take long for people to start talking about Jack's predilection for loose cash and naked strangers. Christians come out of the cracks to call him a hypocrite, but Jack keeps on being Jack. One November night, at Billy Sunday's, long past last call, they're shepherding stragglers to the door. Among them the management remembers Jack and a woman they know as his girlfriend. Jack seems to get the idea that people are disrespecting her, so on the way out he tells one of the owners, Billy Browning Jr., to knock it off. Browning tells Jack it's simply time to go home. According to Browning and a witness, Jack says something about having Browning killed. Browning tells him not to come back. But a few months later, Jack's back.
Todd Parsons, the manager at Billy's, takes him aside, asks him to leave. " 'You don't want to do this,' " Parsons remembers Jack saying. " 'You don't want to put me out of here. I'll kill you and your family for this. I've got enough money now to where I can have y'all killed and nobody would ever know.' " Parsons, twenty-eight, who has a wife and two young kids, takes this rather personally. He tells Jack he can either go now or talk to the law. Jack swings. Parsons puts him out. The cops come and charge Jack with assault; according to a police report, a security-camera tape backs it all up.
Jack, meanwhile, is still driving the Navigator.A couple of weeks after the Billy's incident, he leaves $100,000 in a bank bag in the Navigator in his driveway, and naturally, someone takes it. The cops are getting sick of telling Jack to put his money in the bank. They've been spending half their time either writing him up or hunting down his loot. Jack installs security cameras overlooking his front porch (bare but for brass planters full of cigarette butts) and over the driveway and garage (silver Rolls, an Escalade, a muscle car missing a wheel or two).
So Jack's starting to become everybody's favorite joke, but while they're laughing they're also crying, because it seems unfair that God or whoever had handed a life-altering sum of money to a guy who not only already had plenty but who leaves it lying around like trash.
Eight days after the $100,000 goes missing, the state police report finding Jack slumped over the wheel on the side of I-64, not far from the Pink Pony. They wake him up and give him some DUI tests. He fails the follow-the-finger, the walk-and-turn, then he blows nearly twice the legal limit on the Breathalyzer. It's 5:30 in the afternoon.