Georgia Lottery Winner Won $3 Million, Invested It In An Illegal Meth Operation


A Georgia man who won $3 million from a scratch-off lottery ticket reportedly invested his money in a methamphetamine ring. He is now facing decades in a federal prison, the New York Daily News is reporting.

Forty-five-year-old Ronnie Music Jr. of Macon, Georgia, rarely played the lottery. But one day in 2015, he decided to try his luck and bought a ticket at a Waycross gas station — and it paid off, big-time.

“I couldn’t believe it and I still don’t believe it yet.”

But instead of retiring to a beach somewhere or prudently investing his winnings in a diverse portfolio of stocks and bonds (or whatever people with lots of money do with it), Music decided to go big: he poured his money into a meth ring.

Ronnie Music, Jr. won the lottery and invested his money in meth. [Image via Africa Studio/Shutterstock]

Prosecutors say the lottery winner worked with an existing meth-dealing ring and funneled his lottery money into the operation, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He and his co-conspirators, who are based in Ware County, attempted to distribute meth all across Georgia.

The operation was uncovered when some of Music’s co-conspirators were caught trying to sell 11 pounds of meth with a street value of about $500,000. The co-conspirator fingered Music as the source of the meth.

Agents seized over $1 million worth of meth, as well as $600,000 in cash, thousands of rounds of ammunition, firearms, and multiple vehicles.

Last week, Music pleaded guilty in a federal court to drug trafficking and firearms charges, according to U.S. Attorney Ed Tarver.

“Defendant Music decided to test his luck by sinking millions of dollars of lottery winnings into the purchase and sale of crystal meth. As a result of his unsound investment strategy, Music now faces decades in a federal prison.”

If you had read this Inquisitr report from February 2015, you would know what to do when you win millions of dollars in the lottery. And you’ll notice that the word “meth” doesn’t appear anywhere in that report.

What life looks like after you win the lottery? [Image via Nejron/Shutterstock]

The wise course of action, when you win bank in the lottery, is to lay low, hire a financial adviser (who will, presumably, steer you away from investing your cash in the meth trade), stay anonymous (if you can), and, most importantly, lay low and take it easy. Don’t jump feet-first into the fat-cat lifestyle.

Unfortunately, far too many lottery winners don’t heed that advice and wind up being just as broke as they were before they won the lottery. Most often, the culprit is a failure to slow down and think things through. Most broke lottery winners gave the money to family and friends, blew it all on lavish spending, and/or fell for bad investments.

But more than one lottery winner has heard the siren song of drugs and crimes and used their lottery winnings to fund their drug habits or other criminal activity.

For example, David Lee Edwards, according to the New York Daily News, had a drug problem before he won $27 million in the Florida Lottery. After he won the lottery, we went right back into his drug problem — as well as buying a Lear Jet, race horses, a multi-million-dollar Palm Beach mansion, and so on. He would go on to be arrested multiple times for possession of crack cocaine, heroin, and prescription drugs, and he was eventually found living in squalor in a filthy storage unit, filled with human feces. He later died in a nursing home.

As of this writing, it’s not clear if Georgia Lottery winner Ronnie Music Jr. blew all of his money on meth. If he has any left, he likely will have a generous prison commissary account to get him by for a while behind bars.

[Image via Georgia Lottery]

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