Powerfall

"He'd make fun of me to his friends — like, 'Look, I've got him so pissed off right now, he can't see straight!' "

In three months, David had spent $3 million, Gibbs says.

On New Year's Day, David and Shawna were married in Maui.

David's 11-year-old daughter, Tiffani, decided she wanted to move to Florida with him. The girl's mother, Gail Blanton, said OK. "I figured she'd just come right back home," Blanton says, speaking by phone from Ashland. "But she didn't."

Gibbs says David paid Blanton $500,000 to let Tiffani join him.

Blanton says she did get some money from her ex but not that much. She declined to be more specific.

David enrolled Tiffani in the Benjamin School, a private college prep school in Palm Beach Gardens, where annual tuition is more than $16,000. She was too young to drive a car, but she could cruise their neighborhood in a $35,000 Hummer golf cart that David gave her.

David liked vehicles. He bought a Chevrolet camper van. He also bought a Lamborghini Diablo. He had more than a million dollars' worth of wheels parked in front of his Palm Beach Gardens home. People came to stare. Neighbors complained that it looked like a car dealership over there.

In interviews, David boasted about his purchases. He told NBC News that he paid $78,000 for the gold-and-diamond watch on his wrist and $159,000 for the ring he wore. And there were the 200 swords in his collection of replica medieval weapons. And the plasma TV that he said set him back $30,000.

Susan Bradley is an expert in sudden wealth. "If you look at the things he was buying, they were pretty random," she says. "He was a sitting duck for all sorts of 'deals.' If you watch him for ten seconds and you're a predator type, you've got his number."

Meanwhile, Shawna's drug use was ballooning. She was doing crack and bouncing between their Palm Beach Gardens home and rehab and hospital stays. David gave her trinkets such as the $34,000 Rolex watch that she pawned to buy more drugs.

David also bought a $600,000 house in Palm Springs, California. And his own limo company. And a $1.9 million Lear jet. And three racehorses. And a fiber-optics installation company, which he acquired for $4.5 million.

A year after he'd won the lottery, he estimated he'd spent $12 million.

And his back still hurt.

The rocket was reaching its apogee.

At some point, David Lee Edwards got involved with another adviser, Jeffrey Chandler. In March 2003, David sued Chandler, claiming Chandler had bilked him out of $1 million. (The suit was ultimately settled out of court. Chandler could not be located to comment for this article.)

Early in 2002, Chandler embarked on a calculated ploy to win his confidence, David contended. His private pilot introduced the two men, he said, and he hired Chandler as a business consultant in June of that year, paying him $5,000 a week.

David put Chandler in charge of his fiber-optics company, World Solutions. Once there, David said, and unbeknownst to him, Chandler raised his own salary by $7,500 a week, to $12,500. Chandler told other employees to deal directly with him, cutting David out of the loop, David charged. He said Chandler played the company like a violin, using its funds to pay his personal expenses such as credit card bills and legal fees. At the same time, David said, Chandler persuaded him to put another $1.75 million into World Solutions.

Not long after he sued Chandler, David filed for divorce. Process server Paul Scholtes delivered the summons to Shawna at the DoubleTree Hotel in Palm Beach Gardens and noted that she looked ragged and had a black eye. But she had a diamond on her finger, and she was still plump.

David and Shawna reconciled. A few months later, her mother asked a state judge to involuntarily commit Shawna to a substance-abuse treatment program. Shawna had entered 12-step programs at more than half a dozen separate facilities at that point. Getting money for drugs was no problem. Rather, the money was the problem. There was still too much of it.

In a July 2003 hearing, David said that on several occasions he'd found Shawna passed out in their home with a syringe in her arm. Still, he noted, she seemed to have done well at Passages, a rehab center in Malibu, California. David paid $80,000 for her 60-day stay there.

In March 2004, David asked a judge to commit Shawna to a rehab program. He was afraid she'd die of an overdose, he said. Her drug use had become "extreme." She'd asked to be locked up as a way to control her urges, he said.

Her detox physician, Dr. Ross Glider, said Shawna was consuming as many as 50 80-milligram OxyContin pills a day, an extremely high amount — so high, Glider said, that she might have suffered brain damage.

The next month, David took out a $500,000 mortgage on their Palm Beach Gardens home. That May, he opened it to a TV crew, which documented his crystal collectibles and replica medieval armor, his life-sized statues of the Blues Brothers. "If I run out of every dime, it's been one heck of a ride, and I got to help a lot of people," David told the camera. "So at the end of the day, if it all went away, I'd be happy."