New York

BY the time Bob Williamson bought a 5,000-acre Florida plantation in 2008, he'd been a meth addict, a diagnosed sociopath (by the US military, no less), an armed bank robber, and, for a spell, a prisoner in a US correctional facility.

After turning his life around, he'd also founded 19 companies and made hundreds of millions of dollars - which was how he found himself in possession of an estate he described as "a sort of Gone With the Wind-style place".