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On the day he rode home in a limousine from his security-guard job 12 years ago with a winning $5.5 million lottery ticket in his hand, Andrew Cicero of Muskego figured he had it made.
But he finds himself now in far different straits than he imagined that May day when he accepted a giant Wisconsin Megabucks novelty check, took five secretaries to breakfast and planned both a trip to see his roots in Sicily and a college fund for his five grandchildren.
Cicero, 72, has sold his Waukesha County house and lives in a Milwaukee apartment on a pension and Social Security income while he takes an investment counselor to arbitration. This month, he sued a Milwaukee accounting firm over tax advice he claims cost him at least $170,000.
"I'm not driving a truck," Cicero says about his current money situation, "but it's to a point where it wouldn't hurt."
His fiscal downfall followed what has emerged as something of a pattern among lottery winners nationally: Someone with little training in dealing with vast sums of money gets a sudden windfall, only to see it tumble maddeningly into the wind.
"It's one of the classic kinds of lottery loss stories," said Andrew Stoltmann, a Chicago attorney handling Cicero's legal fights over parts of the squandered fortune. "This guy's a blue-collar factory worker. The only thing he did that you could even say is wrong is he trusted his financial advisers."
Both the Milwaukee office of Salomon Smith Barney, which Cicero claims led him into bad investments, and the accounting firm Sattell, Johnson, Appel and Co., which he sued April 9 over tax problems, declined to comment.
http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=594236
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