“Having money enabled me to live my wildest dreams... But there’s a flip side. It’s the lottery curse.” Essential reading before tonight's record $1.9 billion Powerball drawing tonight.
He added, “I’m not going to blow the money.”But the good news came at a bad time. Hayes’ family and relationship problems had been weighing on him. “Right before he won, he was dealing with depression and some pretty severe problems,” said Stephen Demik, a criminal defense attorney who represented Hayes on the robbery case. “But when you win $19 million, your first stop isn’t going to be a psychologist— it’s going to be a new car lot.
“Because of his cars, he met celebrities like Mario Andretti, who picked one of his Lamborghinis—I would say the color was nail-polish pink—to drive at the Running of the Bulls,” Parker said, referencing a luxury sports car event that drew wealthy and famous participants. “He had a lot of toys and was in that crowd.”
Worse, it seemed like he was using the cash to fill an emotional void. “He didn’t really get to have a childhood, so winning the lottery made him act like a kid in candy store,” she said.The flip side of being wealthy is crazy. You think, ‘Do my friends like me, or just my cars, money, and the help I give them?'He also gave away too much dough to pals, who sometimes showed up “out of the woodwork” asking for loans or handouts, according to Wysinger-Hayes.
The California Lottery soon began withholding some of his annual lottery payments to offset the money he owed. He also ran into trouble with the IRS and, by 2015, “We couldn’t touch the lottery money,” Wysinger-Hayes said. Hayes applied for 38 jobs—but got nowhere with a bad back and a dated resume, according to court papers. He said interviews went like this: “Can you pick up 50 pounds? All day? Have you ever run a cash register? No? What have you been doing the last 19 years? You won what?!?”
Eventually, he went looking for a remedy. “I turned to street drugs,” he said. “The first time I tried heroin, I dissolved it into water and sniffed it. It took away my back pain and pill sickness for 48 hours. I thought, ‘Wow, that’s the answer!’”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.
As his crime spree unfolded, Hayes read everything from true crime thrillers to internet threads for tips on how to pull off a low-risk heist. He generally struck at around 5 p.m. as cops changed shifts. He disguised his body type and sprayed his fingers with liquid bandages to avoid leaving prints. And he never brought a gun, which would increase his prison time if he got caught. But most importantly, he had to be gone in three minutes or less.
Behind the scenes, Hayes says he was working to lead the FBI off track by scattering strangers’ DNA at the banks he robbed. “One of my favorite things I did was to go to my friend’s barbershop, gather up hair and spread it,” Hayes said, claiming the samples led the feds to other persons of interest. “It was like a game. But you don’t want to make it personal with the FBI.”
“They took me down at gunpoint, 15 agents with AR-15s and Glock pistols. There were so many laser sights on my body, I looked like I had the measles,” he said. Agents cuffed him, stripped off his shirt and searched him for firearms. A total of 10 guns were registered in his name, according to Sotelo.
“But then they showed me a picture of him in a baseball cap, and I said, ‘Oh my God, that’s him,” she added. “It was one of the freakiest moments of my life.” She was not charged with a crime.In the other room, Hayes asked for a cigarette and confessed immediately. “He was very forthcoming. He was a lot more cooperative than [Wysinger-Hayes],” Sotelo said. He was sent to a federal detention center in Los Angeles, where he detoxed from heroin, cold turkey.
Ben later told me he didn’t want to talk about Hayes’ crime spree. “I’m sick of thinking about it,” he said. “It’s embarrassing.”
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