Nineteen-year-old Michael Carroll was wearing an electronic tracking device on his ankle as part of his sentence for disorderly conduct charges when he and his pregnant girlfriend impulsively bought National Lottery tickets during a lager run in his native Swaffham, Norfolk, UK one day in November 2002. When Carroll learned that he won £9.7 million from the British government, he found himself paradoxically tethered by the same agency that had just given him boundless freedom of a different kind. Carroll immediately began to hemorrhage money on diamond and gold jewelry, mansions, holiday villas, cars, drugs, booze, and entertaining his parasitic friends. Within 18 months, he was broke and imprisoned, but not before his dazzling public implosion transformed his persona from anonymous n’er-do-well to a notorious tabloid mainstay called “the Lotto Lout.” He became a self-fashioned buffoon who personified his national culture’s nastiest ideas about class and behavior.

The rise and fall of an antihero whose good fortune becomes eclipsed by greed is a classic trope, but Carroll's version is contemporary in its speed. Network reality TV shows now rule the medium, and shows with objectives like finding a trophy spouse or losing weight are structured as a season-long contest for a big payout. Despite emotional confessionals and plot lines about personal growth, the real goal is to get rich. Like most Western stories, they end with the climax. We may assume that the contestant's striving is the interesting part, and that once sated they become a bore. But what happens after the ecstatic presentation of the giant check? What happens if we keep watching?

Carroll insisted on remaining in the public consciousness after he won, continually upping the ante in case interest waned. He evokes the cliché “a fool and his money are soon parted,” but there are many ways to be foolish, and a striking theme of violence emerges from Carroll’s story. His displays of aggression were so extreme and elaborate — including a racetrack he built behind his house to host amateur demolition derbies to destroy new cars and motorcycles, and a homemade catapult attached to his car to lob fireballs at passing vehicles — that they point to a troubling interconnection between excess money and violence. In retrospective interviews, he expresses only incremental personal insight; stronger is his sense of fatalism. His terminal decline seems equal parts self-conscious performance and naked drive. For some reason, money unleashed his id, and he had no choice but to follow.

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