Best American Crime Writing 2006 - Mark Bowden [85]
The story has an interesting ending. While I was reporting it, I suspected that the Harris County (Houston) district attorney’s office was investigating Scheffey, but they had denied this and I could not prove it. Then I managed to find out that Scheffey was not in Switzerland, as everyone assumed, but in Aspen, Colorado. Suddenly I was on the phone trading information with the Harris County district attorney. They told me that they were after Scheffey for practicing without a license and had a sealed indictment. The only reason they had not arrested him was because they believed he was out of the country. My information changed that. They put out warrants to the Aspen police, and Scheffey was arrested in Aspen about a week after my story came out. (I agreed not to spill the beans about the indictment, which almost certainly would have tipped Scheffey off and might have caused him to leave the country.) He agreed to return to Houston, where he was arraigned and charged with a felony. He is now mostly confined to his house in Houston, awaiting trial.
Paige Williams
HOW TO LOSE $100,000,000
FROM GQ
ON CHRISTMAS DAY 2002, Jack Whittaker, a fifty-five-year-old contractor from Scott Depot, West Virginia, won $314,900,000 off a $1 Powerball ticket and became the biggest lottery winner of all time. Lucky Jack.
But for certain guys, winning the lottery can be just about the worst thing to ever happen. You might as well hand them a grenade. Plenty of winners have blown their dough in the post-payoff delirium, but no one has done it quite like Big Jack. One minute he was a good Christian husband, father, grandfather, and businessman, just another respectable old dude in a cowboy hat living his West Virginia life, and the next he was sitting on a curb outside a titty bar, complaining to the cops that an ex-stripper named Misty and her boyfriend drugged his cocktail, busted out the window of his truck, and made off with a half-million of his dollars. And things were only starting to get ugly.
AT ITS BEST, WEST VIRGINIA is as green as Jack Whittaker’s millions, but in March it is muddy-river brown. Windowless factories line the Kanawha River, and in between stand forgettable little towns, drab mountain pockets of overworked humanity, connected by interstates. Every other restaurant is a Biscuit World. Fog hangs on the river and on the bare branches of trees. Rain falls on tobacco barns, boatyards, and coal trains, and on the lonely gold dome of the capitol. It’s hard not to wonder how this affects a fellow’s psychology. A man might be driven to do just about anything in the brown months of West Virginia.
Jack lives now, as he did then, in one of these little interstate towns, called Scott Depot. His house is a two-story brick number, like countless others in these parts. He owns a construction business, Diversified Enterprise Inc., which builds water and sewer systems across the state. He’s been working since age fourteen and has been with his wife, Jewell, about that long, too. Supposedly, his company was grossing more than $17 million for a while but ran into some problems, and Jack had to lay off twenty-five of his 117 employees. His adult daughter, Ginger McMahan, has been battling lymphoma. Jack’s own health isn’t tip-top, either. He loves his teenage granddaughter, Brandi, so much, he named his office building after