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As Americans gobble up tickets for a chance to win Friday’s record $540 million Mega Millions jackpot, cautionary rags-to-riches tales abound.

The lucky winner, as of Thursday, stands to win a lump sum of $389 million before taxes using the cash option. Annuity payments over the course of 26 years will amount to just over $20.7 million before Uncle Sam gets a cut.

But winning the Big One isn’t a guaranteed ticket to the good life, as these previous winners can attest:

-Jack Whittaker: This West Virginia businessman won $315 million in the Powerball lottery in 2002, the largest jackpot ever from a single ticket in American history at the time. After being robbed of $545,000 in cash while at a strip club, Whittaker’s granddaughter and daughter were later found dead, and Whittaker was sued by Caesars Atlantic City casino for bouncing $1.5 million worth of checks to cover gambling losses.

-Juan Rodriguez: This New York City parking attendant was earning less than $30,000 in 2004 when he won $149 million in a Mega Millions drawing. But soon after taking the lump sum option of $88 million, his wife filed for divorce and was awarded half of his winnings.

-Fred Topous, Jr.: Topous won $57 million, the seventh-largest jackpot in Michigan state history in June 2008, but eventually took a $33 million lump sum. The convicted sex offender, who was released from prison in 2006, needs to register as a sex offender until 2024.

-Billy Bob Harrell, Jr.: This preacher working as a stockboy at Home Depot struck it rich in 1997, winning $31 million in Texas’ lottery. Some 20 months later, after divorcing his wife and buying a half-dozen homes for relatives, he committed suicide using a shotgun.

-Jeffrey Dampier: In 1996, Dampier and his wife won $20 million in Illinois’ lottery and used the money to buy relatives homes and to start a gourmet popcorn shop in Florida. Nine years later, Dampier was kidnapped and killed by his sister-in-law and her boyfriend who targeted him for money.

Meanwhile, a man who has won seven lottery drawings told the New York Post that aspiring millionaires shouldn’t “go crazy” if they want to win the big jackpot.

“Go and buy tickets, but the most important thing I’m telling people to do is don’t go crazy,” Richard Lustig, 61, told the newspaper.

Lustig, citing the long odds of 1-in-176 million, urged those with lottery fever to keep their cool.

“This is the biggest prize in history, and people are going to go out and buy a lot of tickets, and almost all of them — millions of people — are going to lose, so don’t spend the grocery money or the rent money,” he said. “You have to buy tickets to win, and the more you buy the better your chances, but don’t go crazy.”

Dec. 13, 2004: Jack Whittaker heads toward the Putnam County Judicial Annex in Winfield, W.Va. Whittaker won the $315 million Powerball jackpot in 2002, but fell victim to scandals, lawsuits and personal setbacks.

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AP

Jan. 4, 2011: Lottery ticket sales operator Laura Szafranski takes a Mega Millions lottery ticket from the printer for a customer in Pittsburgh.

With a half-billion-dollar multistate lottery jackpot up for grabs, plenty of folks are fantasizing about how to spend the money. But doing it the right way — protecting your riches, your identity and your sanity — takes some thought and planning.

Making sure you don’t blow the nation’s largest-ever lottery jackpot within a few years means some advice is in order before the Mega Millions drawing Friday, especially if you’re really, really, really lucky.

Q: What do I do with the ticket?

A: Before anything else, sign the back of the ticket. That will stop anyone else from claiming your riches if you happen to drop it while you’re jumping up and down. Then make a photocopy and lock it in a safe. At the very least, keep it where you know it’s protected. A Rhode Island woman who won a $336 million Powerball jackpot in February hid the ticket in her Bible before going out to breakfast.

Q: What next?

A: Relax; breathe; take time to think about your next move. Don’t do anything you’ll regret for the next 30 years, like calling your best friend or every one of your aunts, uncles and cousins. It doesn’t take long to be overwhelmed by long-lost friends, charities and churches wanting to share your good fortune. You’ve waited a lifetime to hit the jackpot; you can wait a few days before going on a spending spree.

Q: So whom should I tell first?

A: Contacting a lawyer and a financial planner would be a lot wiser than updating your Facebook status. Make sure it’s someone you can trust and, it’s hoped, dealt with before. If you don’t have anyone in mind, ask a close family member or friend. Oklahoma City attorney Richard Craig, whose firm has represented a handful of lottery winners, says it’s essential to assemble a team of financial managers, tax experts, accountants and bankers.

Q: Remind me, how much did I win?

A: As it stands now, the Mega Millions will pay out a lump sum of $389 million before taxes. The annual payments over 26 years will amount to just over $20 million before taxes.

Q: How much will I pay in taxes?

A: This partly depends on where you live. Federal tax is 25 percent; then there’s your state income tax. In Ohio, for example, that’s another 6 percent. And you might need to pay a city tax depending on the local tax rules. So count on about a third of your winnings going to the government.

Q: Should I take the cash payout or annual payments?

A: This is the big question, and most people think taking the lump sum is the smart move. That’s not always the case. First, spreading the payments out protects you from becoming the latest lottery winner who’s lost all their money. Don McNay, author of the book “Son of a Son of a Gambler: Winners, Losers and What to Do When You Win the Lottery,” says nine out of 10 winners go through their money in five years or less. “It’s too much, too fast,” he says. “Nobody is around them putting the brakes on the situation.”

Q: But what if I’m good at managing the money?

A: Invested properly, the lump sum option can be a good choice. There’s more planning that you can use to reduce estate taxes and other financial incentives. Others, though, say that with annual payments, you are taxed on the money only as it comes in, so that will put you in a lower tax bracket rather than taking a big hit on getting a lump sum. And you still can shelter the money in tax-free investments and take advantage of tax law changes over the years.

Q: Should I try to shield my identity?

A: Absolutely. This will protect you from people who want you to invest in their business scheme or those who need cash in an emergency. Lottery winners are besieged by dozens of people and charities looking for help. “There are people who do that for a living. Unless you understand that, you can become a victim very quickly,” says Steve Thornton, an attorney in Bowling Green, Ky., who has represented two jackpot winners.

Q: So how can I protect myself?

A: Again, it somewhat depends on where you live. In Ohio, you can form a trust to manage the money and keep your winnings a secret. In other states, you can form a trust but still be discovered through public records. And a few states require you to show up and receive your oversized check in front of a bunch of cameras, making it impossible to stay anonymous. Thornton set up a corporation in the late 1990s to protect the identity of a client in Kentucky who won $11 million. “No one had done this before, and there were legal questions about whether a corporation can win,” he says. “We were able to hide their names.”

Q: Is it OK to splurge a little?

A: Sure, it’s why you bought a ticket, right? “Get it out of your system, but don’t go overboard,” McNay says. But remember that if there’s a new Mercedes-Benz in the driveway, your neighbors will probably be able to figure out who won the jackpot.

Q: How much should I help my family and others?

A: It’s certainly a natural desire to help relatives in need and take care of future generations. But use extreme caution when giving out your money. Jack Whittaker, a West Virginia contractor who won a nearly $315 million Powerball jackpot in 2002, quickly fell victim to scandals, lawsuits and personal setbacks. His foundation spent $23 million building two churches, and he’s been involved in hundreds of legal actions. “If you win, just don’t give any money away, because the more money you give away, the more they want you to give. And once you start giving it away, everybody will label you an easy touch and be right there after you. And that includes everybody,” Whittaker said five years ago.

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Across the country, Americans plunked down an estimated $1.5 billion on the longest of long shots: an infinitesimally small chance to win what could end up being the single biggest lottery payout the world has ever seen.

But forget about how the $640 million Mega Millions jackpot could change the life of the winner. It’s a collective wager that could fund a presidential campaign several times over, make a dent in struggling state budgets or take away the gas worries and grocery bills for thousands of middle-class citizens.

And it’s a cheap investment for the chance of a big reward, no matter how long the odds — 1 in 176 million.

“Twenty to thirty dollars won’t hurt,” said Elvira Bakken of Las Vegas. “I think it just gives us a chance of maybe winning our dream.”

So what exactly would happen if the country spent that $1.5 billion on something other than a distant dream?

For starters, it could cure the everyday worries of hundreds of thousands of American families hit by the Great Recession. It costs an average of $6,129 to feed the typical family for a year — meaning the cash spent on tickets could fill up the plates of 238,000 households.

As gas prices climb faster than stations can change the numbers on the signs, the money spent on tickets could fill the tanks of 685,000 households annually.

Or it could play politics. So far in this campaign, Republicans and President Barack Obama have spent $348.5 million. The amount spent on Mega Millions tickets could cover that tab four times over.

Could the money dig governments out of debt? That’s a problem that even staggering ticket sales can’t solve. It could trim this year’s expected $1.3 trillion federal deficit by just over a tenth of 1 percent. In Illinois, the money would disappear just as fast into that state’s $8 billion deficit.

On a personal level, that much money staggers. Giving $1.46 billion to a broker could purchase 2.4 million shares of Apple stock. (It would also be enough to buy about 2.4 million iPads at the starting price of $499. That’s almost as many as the 3 million new iPads that Apple has already sold.)

Or consider the whimsical: A family of up to 12 could live for more than a century at Musha Cay, magician David Copperfield’s $37,000-a-night private island resort in the Exuma Cays of the Caribbean.

For a more celestial vacation, the nearly $1.5 billion wagered could purchase about 7,300 tourist tickets for a ride into space aboard Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo. And it would pay for 26 rides for U.S. astronauts to the International Space Station aboard the Russian Soyuz spacecraft.

It would even buy a stake in pop culture. Want to influence the next winner of American Idol? If it costs a quarter to text in a vote to Ryan Seacrest, and it takes 122 million votes to win as it did last season, the money could control the outcome of the next 47 seasons.

For the states that participate, the money spent on lotto tickets is hardly a waste. It doesn’t all end up as the winner’s personal fortune — much of it is used by states to fund education and other social service programs, which is why advocates promote the lottery.

Though the specifics vary among the 42 participating states and the District of Columbia, only about half of ticket sales go into the actual jackpot. Another 35 percent goes to support government services and programs, while the rest funds lottery operating costs.

On Friday, the lottery estimated that total ticket sales for this jackpot, which has been building up since Jan. 28, will be about $1.46 billion, said Kelly Cripe, a spokeswoman for the Texas Lottery Commission.

You’re about 20,000 times more likely to die in a car crash than win the lottery, but that doesn’t matter to most people.

“Part of it is hope. … The average person basically has no chance of making it really big, and buying a lottery ticket is a way of raising the ceiling on what could possibly happen to you, however unlikely it may be,” said George Loewenstein, a professor of economics and psychology at Carnegie Mellon University who has studied how rich and poor consumers make a choice to buy lottery tickets.

The odds are much better that someone will begin their weekend a winner. Aaron Abrams, a mathematician at Emory University, said he calculated that there was only a 6 percent chance that no one would hold the winning numbers.

“Every time the jackpot gets higher, more and more people buy tickets, which makes it more and more likely that someone will win,” Abrams said. “So the chance that it rolls over this many times in a row is very small. It’s quite a rare event.”

The estimated jackpot dwarfs the previous $390 million record, which was split in 2007 by two winners who bought tickets in Georgia and New Jersey.

The rarity of Friday’s jackpot was fueling the fervor. Lines formed at grocery stores, gas stations, liquor stops and other venues across the country.

In Arizona, a cafDe worker reported selling $2,600 worth of tickets to one buyer. In Indiana, hundreds lined up for a giveaway of free tickets. Hundreds from Utah and Las Vegas streamed in to neighboring California or Arizona to buy tickets because their states don’t participate.

Accountant Ray Lousteau, who bought 55 Mega Millions tickets Friday in New Orleans, knows buying that many tickets doesn’t mathematically increase his odds, and that his $55 could have gone elsewhere. He spent it anyway.

“Mathematically, it doesn’t make a difference, and intellectually we know that. But for some reason buying more tickets makes you feel more lucky,” Lousteau said. “Even people who know better are apt to feel that way.”

In Chicago, Peter Muiznieks bought a ticket at a liquor store. He knows his chance of winning is a long shot, and that the money the country is spending on tickets could go elsewhere. He still couldn’t help himself, and laughed as the apparent contradiction of his opinion and his actions.

“Lottery and games of chance are a stupidity tax and the more we all buy into this, the less rational we are as a society,” he said.

Christopher Ryon

A central Florida father allegedly beat the three-month-old daughter he called “It” to death because she would not stop crying, authorities said.

Christopher Scott Ryon, 27, of Winter Haven, allegedly punched the child in the head because he could not take a nap because of her incessant crying, according to MyFox Tampa Bay.

The infant’s mother arrived home and found Ryon asleep on the couch while her daughter was unresponsive.Ryon has been charged with aggravated manslaughter of a child.

Read more at MyFox Tampa Bay

John Buffalo Mailer, son of Village Voice founder Norman Mailer, speaks at a protest in the front of the alternative weekly’s Manhattan offices.

The Village Voice, the iconic New York weekly newspaper that became a counterculture force in the 1960s, is under fire over claims a classified advertising site it owns is used for child sex-trafficking.

Nearly 100 protesters gathered in front of the paper’s editorial offices in the East Village on Thursday to demand that Village Voice Media-owned  Backpage.com be shut down because its adult classified section includes ads that have been linked to prostitution involving minors. The classified ad website earns the parent company $22 million per year, according to The New York Times.

John Buffalo Mailer, 33, the son of author Norman Mailer, who co-founded the Village Voice in 1955, was in attendance at the protest.

“This was once a progressive paper, a people’s paper, and to see it lose its credibility is heartbreaking,” Mailer told The Associated Press.

“He would not have approved of this at all,” Mailer said of his father, who died in 2007.

Mailer’s father, along with Ed Fancher and Dan Wolf launched the paper out of a two-bedroom apartment in the Greenwich Village section of Manhattan and quickly became known for their groundbreaking investigative articles and counter-culture reporting.

The protesters, a coalition of religious leaders, activists, and politicians set up a pile of children’s sneakers in front of the Village Voice building in Cooper Square.

“These are for the girl who should have been walking in these shoes, but isn’t,” said the Rev. Galen Guengerich, senior pastor of Manhattan’s All Souls Unitarian church, holding up a pair at the protest. “We hear the silent cries of those who have been used and discarded.”

The group also delivered a near-250,000-signature petition demanding that Village Voice Media stop running the ads.

Officials at Village Voice Media did not return calls for comment. But in a rebuttal to a story in The New York Times, officials defended their practices.

“Backpage dedicates hundreds of staff to screen adult classifieds in order to keep juveniles off the site and to work proactively with law enforcement in their efforts to locate victims,” Village Voice officials wrote on the paper’s website. “When the authorities have concerns, we share paperwork and records and help them make cases.”

Opposition to the Village Voice Media and Backpage.com began last year when a group of attorneys general from across the country wrote a letter to Backpage.com saying that the site needed to do more to curtail the ads.

“While Backpage.com professes to have undertaken efforts to limit advertisements for prostitution on its website, particularly those soliciting sex with children, such efforts have proven ineffective,” the letter reads.

The prosecutors claimed at the time that they had tracked more than 50 instances in 22 states of charges filed against those trafficking or attempting to traffic minors on the site.

In some cases, adults are pictured but minors are substituted at the “point of sale” in a grossly illegal transaction, the prosecutors said.

Several members of the City Council in New York have also introduced a piece of resolution that asks Village Voice Media to close down the adult section because it is being used as a “platform to traffic minors for sex.”

The Associated Press contributed reporting to this story.

OMAHA, Neb. –  Across the country, Americans plunked down an estimated $1.5 billion on the longest of long shots: an infinitesimally small chance to win what could end up being the single biggest lottery payout the world has ever seen.

But forget about how the $640 million Mega Millions jackpot could change the life of the winner. It’s a collective wager that could fund a presidential campaign several times over, make a dent in struggling state budgets or take away the gas worries and grocery bills for thousands of middle-class citizens.

And it’s a cheap investment for the chance of a big reward, no matter how long the odds — 1 in 176 million.

“Twenty to thirty dollars won’t hurt,” said Elvira Bakken of Las Vegas. “I think it just gives us a chance of maybe winning our dream.”

So what exactly would happen if the country spent that $1.5 billion on something other than a distant dream?

For starters, it could cure the everyday worries of hundreds of thousands of American families hit by the Great Recession. It costs an average of $6,129 to feed the typical family for a year — meaning the cash spent on tickets could fill up the plates of 238,000 households.

As gas prices climb faster than stations can change the numbers on the signs, the money spent on tickets could fill the tanks of 685,000 households annually.

Or it could play politics. So far in this campaign, Republicans and President Barack Obama have spent $348.5 million. The amount spent on Mega Millions tickets could cover that tab four times over.

Could the money dig governments out of debt? That’s a problem that even staggering ticket sales can’t solve. It could trim this year’s expected $1.3 trillion federal deficit by just over a tenth of 1 percent. In Illinois, the money would disappear just as fast into that state’s $8 billion deficit.

On a personal level, that much money staggers. Giving $1.46 billion to a broker could purchase 2.4 million shares of Apple stock. (It would also be enough to buy about 2.4 million iPads at the starting price of $499. That’s almost as many as the 3 million new iPads that Apple has already sold.)

Or consider the whimsical: A family of up to 12 could live for more than a century at Musha Cay, magician David Copperfield’s $37,000-a-night private island resort in the Exuma Cays of the Caribbean.

For a more celestial vacation, the nearly $1.5 billion wagered could purchase about 7,300 tourist tickets for a ride into space aboard Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo. And it would pay for 26 rides for U.S. astronauts to the International Space Station aboard the Russian Soyuz spacecraft.

It would even buy a stake in pop culture. Want to influence the next winner of American Idol? If it costs a quarter to text in a vote to Ryan Seacrest, and it takes 122 million votes to win as it did last season, the money could control the outcome of the next 47 seasons.

For the states that participate, the money spent on lotto tickets is hardly a waste. It doesn’t all end up as the winner’s personal fortune — much of it is used by states to fund education and other social service programs, which is why advocates promote the lottery.

Though the specifics vary among the 42 participating states and the District of Columbia, only about half of ticket sales go into the actual jackpot. Another 35 percent goes to support government services and programs, while the rest funds lottery operating costs.

On Friday, the lottery estimated that total ticket sales for this jackpot, which has been building up since Jan. 28, will be about $1.46 billion, said Kelly Cripe, a spokeswoman for the Texas Lottery Commission.

You’re about 20,000 times more likely to die in a car crash than win the lottery, but that doesn’t matter to most people.

“Part of it is hope. … The average person basically has no chance of making it really big, and buying a lottery ticket is a way of raising the ceiling on what could possibly happen to you, however unlikely it may be,” said George Loewenstein, a professor of economics and psychology at Carnegie Mellon University who has studied how rich and poor consumers make a choice to buy lottery tickets.

The odds are much better that someone will begin their weekend a winner. Aaron Abrams, a mathematician at Emory University, said he calculated that there was only a 6 percent chance that no one would hold the winning numbers.

“Every time the jackpot gets higher, more and more people buy tickets, which makes it more and more likely that someone will win,” Abrams said. “So the chance that it rolls over this many times in a row is very small. It’s quite a rare event.”

The estimated jackpot dwarfs the previous $390 million record, which was split in 2007 by two winners who bought tickets in Georgia and New Jersey.

The rarity of Friday’s jackpot was fueling the fervor. Lines formed at grocery stores, gas stations, liquor stops and other venues across the country.

In Arizona, a cafDe worker reported selling $2,600 worth of tickets to one buyer. In Indiana, hundreds lined up for a giveaway of free tickets. Hundreds from Utah and Las Vegas streamed in to neighboring California or Arizona to buy tickets because their states don’t participate.

Accountant Ray Lousteau, who bought 55 Mega Millions tickets Friday in New Orleans, knows buying that many tickets doesn’t mathematically increase his odds, and that his $55 could have gone elsewhere. He spent it anyway.

“Mathematically, it doesn’t make a difference, and intellectually we know that. But for some reason buying more tickets makes you feel more lucky,” Lousteau said. “Even people who know better are apt to feel that way.”

In Chicago, Peter Muiznieks bought a ticket at a liquor store. He knows his chance of winning is a long shot, and that the money the country is spending on tickets could go elsewhere. He still couldn’t help himself, and laughed as the apparent contradiction of his opinion and his actions.

“Lottery and games of chance are a stupidity tax and the more we all buy into this, the less rational we are as a society,” he said.

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