Swaffham, England – Known across Britain by his tabloid nickname, the Lotto Lout, Michael Carroll won 9.7 million pounds ($17.1 million) in the national lottery three years ago and showed up to collect his prize while wearing a police-issued electronic ankle bracelet.
The question now raging in Swaffham is whether he deserves to throw the switch at the town’s annual Christmas lights display, as he was briefly invited to do.
“I personally have nothing against him,” said Terry Drake, a prominent local businessman who owns a hardware store on the main street of this busy old market town.
“But a convicted criminal shouldn’t be in a position to do something that children are supposed to look up to.”
At this point, Carroll is not likely to be turning on anyone’s lights except his own.
After a huge public outcry, the town has rescinded the invitation and will probably have no holiday display at all this year (Carroll was going to pay for it).
If nothing else, Carroll, who did not respond to messages left at his house, has proved since winning that he is not the sort of person to let money turn his head: He has kept having run-ins with the authorities, the only difference being that he now drives nicer cars to court.
“Before he won the lottery, he was a nuisance,” Charles Joyce, a local official, said. “He decided to carry on being a nuisance.”
Among other things, he has appeared in court more than 30 times in the last three years.
He has spent three months in jail on drugs charges, paid thousands of dollars in fines for acts of vandalism and been evicted from several hotels after, for instance, ripping a chandelier from the ceiling while trying to swing from it.
He was recently ordered to perform 240 hours of community service after shooting ball bearings through 32 car and shop windows with a catapult as he drove around at night.
He has been issued with two anti-social behavior orders forbidding him to threaten, harass or intimidate anyone in a 400-mile radius. He has been told by local authorities to stop throwing raucous late-night parties and to stop holding demolition derbies on his land.
And he has been told to clean up his yard, which is strewn with tires, beer cans, food wrappers, wrecked furniture and the hulks of half-smashed-up old cars.
