Dan Carley had the world on a string of luck.

He was flush with cash and youth, engaged to the mother of his future child and riding the high of a $5-million lotto win.

Soon that would all come crashing down.

The 35-year-old father spoke exclusively with the Star from behind bars this week — during two conference calls with his longtime lawyer, Brenda Sandulak — just days after he was sentenced to two and a half years in a federal penitentiary for cocaine trafficking.

During the calls, Carley spoke of the high of winning the largest instant cash prize in provincial history at the time, a high that was followed by a decade-long spiral into addiction, bad investments and a suicide attempt.

Carley scratched his golden ticket at a St. Catharines convenience store on Feb. 21, 2006. He said he couldn’t have felt freer, celebrating the “surreal” windfall the next day with friends and family until 4 a.m. at Carley’s Pub, which he co-owned with his father.

He never really stopped.

“Things were pretty crazy,” he said. “I was drinking every single day, partying every single day, doing coke,” a drug he had only dabbled in before.

Carley estimates that more than one-fifth of his prize cash went to feed his growing addiction to cocaine, oxycodone and heroin over the next nine years.

“At least a million — maybe more,” he said. “You’re not really thinking about it, you’ve got lots of money in the bank, you just keep spending.”

Within seven months of hitting the jackpot, Carley said he’d sunk about $1.5 million into a “badly thought-out” plan to develop a string of Niagara bars that fizzled by 2007.

He spent a further million on poor investments in the first year, and by 2009 his bank accounts were gutted, evaporating after heady splurges on drugs and alcohol and, more sobering, mortgage payments and back taxes.

Carley said he eventually lost all of the dozen or so properties he owned or had bought a stake in, including his home and the family pub. Most he sold to pay off his creditors. A few, he added, were pulled from under his feet via power-of-sale.

Relationships went sour. Carley’s common-law marriage unravelled, and they separated in 2014. His former best friend sued him for a slice of the prize money, claiming a stake in the winning ticket.

As previously reported by the Star, the suit was dismissed, but only after dragging on for three and a half years, according to an Ontario Superior Court judge’s ruling.

Sandulak said that after the windfall Carley began associating with “questionable characters.”

He hit rock bottom in the fall of 2014, experiencing what he called a “psychotic break” after taking a heavy dose of heroin and cocaine.

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“I actually tried to slice my wrists, and my dad found me,” he said.

Carley pleaded guilty in May of this year to trafficking in cocaine and was sentenced Aug. 3.

“I take full responsibility. I’m not blaming anybody else,” Carley told the Star from a St. Catharines detention centre. “I was uneducated, young. I didn’t even have a high school diploma at the time (of the lotto win).”

Soft-spoken and attentive, Carley “doesn’t fit the profile” of most convicted Niagara-area drug dealers, said Ron Charlebois, his current lawyer (who is married to Sandulak). He was still a “naïve” young man when he won the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corp. prize, according to Sandulak, who feels people took advantage of his newfound wealth.

He’s been clean for nearly two years, and said he’s at peace with his troubled past. “I’m a lot happier now than when I had the money. . . . It was just partying and misery.”

Carley talks with his daughter on the phone every day. He doesn’t let her visit — the detention centre nor Joyceville Institution, a medium-security federal prison in Kingston where he’s slated for transfer.

“To look at me behind the plate glass, it’s not something I want her to see,” he said.

Since his arrest, Carley has helped lead prison peer groups on behalf of the provincially funded Community Addictions Services of Niagara, Sandulak noted.

He recently attained his high school equivalency certificate, and he said he hopes to enroll in a college social-work program after his release.

“I’m actually very content,” he said. “The past I’m not really concerned with.”

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