Books of Style
ANYONE can make money; the hard thing is to keep it.
In the mid-90s, a scrappy young speculator named Edward Ugel staked his life savings ($250,000) on an Internet start-up, and lost it. Reeling from the blow, he found work as a short-order cook, but dug himself into a hole of debt playing video poker. Forced to seek refuge in his parents’ basement, he found a job at a company he calls “The Firm,” tracking down cash-strapped lottery winners, and sweet-talking them into converting their annuities into lump-sum payments, in exchange for a hefty cut to “The Firm.” Often he’d strike it rich, but before long, like the lottery winners he preyed upon, he’d find himself high and dry.
In “Money for Nothing: One Man’s Journey Through the Dark Side of Lottery Millions,” Mr. Ugel shows how difficult it can be to cope with windfall wealth.
The portraits he paints of his marks illustrate the American picaresque in all its vanity and squalor. There’s the clueless
“Our salespeople were lottery winners — we just never bought tickets,” he explains. He writes, “Selling to the winners was like selling to myself.”
In the end, he shows that the only one who can make you make it is you, but anyone can make you lose it — especially you.
A jackpot of sleaze and hilarity: taking a firsthand look at lottery payouts and bailouts
Sunday, October 28, 2007
J. DAVID SANTEN JR.
Special to The Oregonian
W hen you buy a lottery ticket, the most important choice isn't the numbers, but how you want the cash: one chunk of change or a series of payments over the next 20 years? "Lump sum" means a large tax hit up front. Deferred payouts, the annuity option, mean that an entire industry begins to track you: your new home and car purchases, your hobbies, and what you say each time one of The Firm's representatives calls you to discuss the state of your finances.
For his seven years in the lump-sum finance industry, Edward Ugel made that call or managed the salesmen who did, offering to buy remaining lottery payouts in exchange for cash up front (with hefty commissions built in). Ugel's new book "Money for Nothing: One Man's Journey Through the Dark Side of Lottery Millions" profiles these sales-floor exploits, with a sideline on the author's own gambling.
Former lottery winners often find themselves saddled with debt, friends and family that never leave, and pending payments on a lifestyle that has long-since busted the jackpot. "Selling a long-term annuity is the absolute correct decision," writes Ugel. "The problem isn't selling it. The problem is the people you have to sell it to. "
After college, Ugel lived in
After four years he flees to the East Coast, and his parents' basement, when, at age 26 and desperate, he is introduced to the founder of the lump-sum industry. This leads to a sales job that he excels at, big money, and ongoing moral twinges assuaged only by bigger money and gambling debts.
Ugel pities the "mark" but scorns the state. Of the 38 that have followed
"Money for Nothing" alternates sleaze and hilarity, exploits and exploitation. Though light on the actual dollar figures in play, Ugel's portraits of the winners losing to The Firm are stunning in audacity. His accounts of a life in sales are at once addictive and depressing -- much like gambling itself. And should you happen to hit the jackpot? Go on. Take the lump sum. And run.
J. David Santen Jr. recently reviewed "The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian" by Sherman Alexie for The Oregonian.
How one man gouged lottery winners
Sunday, October 7th 2007, 4:00 AM
Edward Ugel, the son of a well-off Connecticut family, was on a downward spiral in his 20s when he "fell ass-backwards into an industry perfectly suited to my talents." That was relieving lottery winners of at least some of their fortunes.
As he tells us, "You should have seen my paychecks. I was clearing multiple six figures since I was 28." But then Ugel reassures us. "Don't be impressed, most of it's gone - just like with a lottery winner. It's as if I never had the money in the first place. I'm as jealous as you are."
"Money for Nothing" is Ugel's outrageous and often very funny account of the years he spent gouging lottery winners for whatever he could take. In fact, more than one business was devoted to the pursuit. He just happened to work at a particularly successful firm.
His job was to sell money to lottery winners. At a time when states forced them to take payment in installments, not a few of the newly, heady rich overestimated their spending power.
And so, halfway through any given year, a multimillionaire might find himself broke, even in debt, with a long wait until the next check arrived. Some would turn to Ugel, or one of his competitors, signing over the value of future payments in return for ready cash. Of course, the lottery winner didn't come out ahead in this deal.
Ugel cites a legal obligation to change many of the facts in his story, including the names, states and jackpots of the winners. One can only hope, then, that the rest conforms to reality, such as his encounter with the seriously unhinged "Thelma," who turned her feral dogs on him and then led Ugel on a wild-goose chase for days before signing on. All this for a deal she had requested.
There are other tales of desperate lottery winners, but the interesting aspect of "Money for Nothing" is the nature of the shady business. Most winners did not approach Ugel. Rather, with information drawn from a massive research base compiled by the company, they were stalked.
Until winners were allowed, as they are in most states now, to take their money in a lump sum, they were prey. The companies that had them in their sights were a variation on the infamous boiler rooms - places where "half of us kept our hair long to hide our horns."
Immoral? Oh, yeah. Quite entertaining as well.
USA Today
Monday September 24, 2007
Review: Vultures feast on desperate lottery winners
By Kerry Hannon, Special for USA TODAY
Money for Nothing is a glimpse into a seedy business few will ever encounter.
Edward Ugel writes about the trade of preying on bottomed-out lottery winners, crazy for cash to meet their growing debts, waiting for their next annual annuity check to arrive from the state coffers.
His tale is a colorfully written account by a self-proclaimed overweight, chain-smoking, Krispy Kreme doughnut-eating, fanatical gambler.
For just shy of a decade starting in the late 1990s, Ugel says he worked in an industry that sold money to lottery winners. In exchange, winners signed over a portion of their long-term annuities. The cash Ugel doled out to down-on-their-luck winners was far less than the face value of the annuities. And Ugel says, at one point, he made lots of dough in commissions by providing this service.
You will lick your chops, eager to hear the sordid woes of winners gone broke from spending sprees. There are sad tales here, all right, but it has all been fictionalized. In the introduction, Ugel states he has "a legal obligation to keep certain details of my employment confidential. Among other things, I have changed every name, win amount, and win state, as well as certain descriptions of lottery winners with whom I've worked in order to protect their identity."
Forty-two states plus Washington, D.C., have lotteries. Today, most lotteries now offer winners the choice of taking their prize in a lump sum to invest themselves or as a traditional long-term annuity. Not surprisingly, the vast majority take the lump sum. For future winners, this is a worthy cautionary tale.
Wall Street Journal
September 21, 2007; page w4
We've all heard about the lottery millionaires who end up broke. Thanks to Edward Ugel's "Money for Nothing," we now know that some had help.
In the mid-1990s, Mr. Ugel worked for one of the finance companies whose mission in life is to help lottery winners who are oddly in need of cash. Lottery winnings are usually paid out in installments. Some winners -- because of poor money management, bad investments or parasitic relatives -- run out of money between checks.
Enter Mr. Ugel. His firm would show up at the darkest hour, offering to buy future installments at a discount and with hefty fees attached. It would typically buy a $200,000 lottery payment for $150,000. In his first three months on the job, Mr. Ugel earned more than $30,000 in commissions (of varying percentages).
The best customers were lottery winners who wanted to sell their entire annuity, though they usually did so (luckily for Mr. Ugel and his co-lenders) over a series of lucrative deals. "Once deal one hit her bank account," Mr. Ugel writes of one winner, "the money was as good as gone. Every time she sold us another chunk of her prize, the winner would be that much closer to doing another deal because she was eating up her annual check."
An added twist to Mr. Ugel's sordid -- and highly engaging -- tale is the fact that he was himself a compulsive gambler. So while he was encouraging lottery winners to sell him their checks at a discount, his commissions were disappearing at the tables in Atlantic City and Las Vegas.
For all his predatory deeds, Mr. Ugel is not the real villain here. States are making billions of dollars from lotteries, spotlighting huge jackpots but somehow never acknowledging the astronomically long odds of winning. For every lottery dollar that states put toward education -- the usual justification for government-sponsored gambling -- they often take a dollar out of the education budget and put it back into the general fund. States feed their own addiction to lottery revenues -- which disproportionately come from the underclass -- by devising ever more alluring games, video poker being the latest.
So Mr. Ugel's lending packages were very much in the spirit of the whole lottery enterprise. It's long past time for winners and losers alike to smarten up.
--Mark Yost
- Wall Street Journal
The Library Journal review of Money for Nothing.
Ugel is a self-proclaimed gambler. He's also a born salesman. So it was a good fit when he landed a sales job with a firm that pioneered the lottery "lump sum" industry. Basically, his firm stalked and then preyed upon cash-strapped lottery winners (annual payouts to these jackpot winners could be very small). To be fair to the firm, buying out the lottery annuities of these winners did solve their immediate cash problems. But in a nearly unregulated industry, the discounts to the winners were steep—and consequently the profits to the firm were enormous. Ugel's story is a familiar one. He basically just needed a job, landed one to which he was constitutionally suited, and learned to play dirty (because that's how the industry worked). Eventually, he got sacked and repented of his ways—thus the book. Ugel's natural showmanship makes for entertaining reading. He does little to pretty up his misdeeds (heck, they were legal) and offers comical vignettes of his rendezvous and run-ins with prospective clients while delivering a well-deserved scathing indictment of the government-backed lottery system. Given the popularity of legalized gambling, this book should circulate briskly in public library business, collections.
—Carol J. Elsen,
-
The Library Journal
Kirkus Reviews
An industry insider dissects the dire social consequences of America's gaming culture.
Ugel worked in a particularly unsavory corner of the lottery business, a private, lump-sum company that offers winners a quick hit of cash if they sign over their annuities. As he points out, these are hardly the only sharks in the gambling ocean. Lotteries date to antiquity, and our founding fathers were all heavily involved in their implementation or promotion. Today, gambling is more pervasive and more acceptable than ever. More than half of all American adults play at least once a year, and teens think gambling for high stakes is perfectly normal. Canny lottery executives regularly introduce new, zippier and more addictive games. PR departments know that citizens like to hear about lotto proceeds going to state education, but the author reminds us that lottery money doesn't increase a state's actual expenditures on schools; it just allows legislatures to appropriate a smaller portion of the state budget to the three Rs. As for actually getting lucky and winning, his text backs up the old saw about folks being happier before they won. The newly rich are pursued by friends, relatives and sharp businesspeople out to take advantage of them. For many, lottery wins lead to lawsuits. One woman's septuagenarian husband filed for divorce as soon as she hit the jackpot, successfully claiming he should get half the money, since she'd used his $20 to buy the ticket. A breezy, funny writer, Ugel made "multiple six figures" during his days in the industry, but most of it is now gone: "It's as if I never had the money in the first place. I'm as jealous as you are." He's also pessimistic, short on suggestions of how Americans might challenge the lottery industry. Maybe this eye-opening book will galvanize a movement.
By turns amusing and alarming.
Details Magazine
Before finding his moral bearings, the author spent more than a decade working for a firm that fleeced lottery winners (by offering a lump sum in exchange for the winnings they would otherwise receive in installments later). This funny, eye-opening memoir explores the American mania for gambling and the dark side of hitting the jackpot.