For $13 million Lotto winner Rhoda Toth, who, along with her second husband, Alex, picked winning Lotto numbers, the good luck spiraled into full blown misery.The winnings accelerated a downward trajectory for the Hudson couple, ending in allegations of infidelity, gambling losses, estrangement, death and prison.
The money sparked enough strife within the Toth family to spark a lawsuit pitting mother against daughter.
Now 30, Tifany Diehl, the daughter, lives in Indiana and is largely estranged from Rhoda Toth, her on-again, off-again mother. Only recently has she begun speaking to her and then, only sparingly via e-mail and telephone conversations to the federal lockup that her mother calls home.
"I hurt every day inside not having a mother in my life," Diehl said.
The winnings didn't make a monster out of her mom, but it didn't help, either, Diehl said. Rhoda Toth abandoned her first husband and her two children long before she won the lottery.
"There is a piece of my heart that hates that woman," Diehl said in a recent interview. After she hit the Lotto, Toth tried to woo her children back into her life, but it didn't work.
"She was busy gambling and running with men and living the high life," Diehl said, and within two years of the windfall, the Toths were borrowing money to pay bills.
The Toths found themselves living in a trailer in Pasco County, drawing electricity from a device hooked up to a running car engine. The 25-year marriage, which had been in trouble for years, crumbled amid allegations of infidelity and that was before the Internal Revenue Service came knocking, looking for $1.1 million it says the Toths owed in back taxes.
Alex Toth died in 2008, several months before his trial on tax fraud charges and last year, a federal judge ordered Rhoda Toth to serve two years in prison.
The 52-year-old ex-multimillionaire pleaded guilty to filing false tax returns over several years.
Rhoda Toth is in the Federal Medical Center Carswell in Fort Worth, Texas. She is scheduled to be released in April and she's counting the days, she said in a recent telephone interview.
She's well known among the inmates there because of her Lotto history, she said. They call her Martha Stewart.
"I'm struggling," she said. "It's very hard, depressing. I have no family left. It seems like it's been a curse on the family from day-one. When we found out we had the winning ticket, I was in shock. I told him [her husband, Alex] I wanted to give it back, I was not happy."
The money flew out of the accounts, she said. Gambling and living large took a lot of it. Giving it away took the rest, she said.
"We were trying to please everybody," Toth said. "We were buying cars and homes and taking people on vacation and doing things with them they have never gotten to do. Our friends, they didn't have anything. We were paying their bills and buying them clothes. We didn't want them running around like we were running around before."
She has some advice to lottery winners.
"I would go get financial counseling," she said. "I'd make sure I'd get a proper attorney and two accountants who knew what they were doing, who specialized in this kind of thing. I would go get some type of counseling myself to make sure I was able to control and handle all this."
That winning ticket, she said, ruined her life.
"I have a trailer with no power," she said. "I have no husband. He gave up. He didn't want to live anymore. He hated life in general. He hated the way the money took us down."
When she gets out, she plans to move back to Florida where a widow's pension and a disability check amounting to nearly $1,100 a month will have to do. Out of that, she has to pay $100 a month to the IRS, which has placed a lien on her home and all her property, she said.
"It's like a curse," she said. "I will never get out from underneath the IRS for as long as I live. And when I die it will still be there."
It not relegated to just athletes.
11/22/2010 5:01 PM