Former Gambling Addict Speaks to Rocky Hill Coalition

Former Gambling Addict Speaks to Rocky Hill Coalition
The Rocky Hill Coalition learns the harsh lessons of gambling from Windsor Locks resident.

By Joseph Wenzel IV

Donna Zaharevitz started gambling 25 years ago and became addicted. Her addiction would lead to jail time, money problems and issues in her relationships with family and friends. Her life has been forever changed because of gambling.

Last week, she told her story at the monthly meeting for the Rocky Hill Coalition, a group of students devoted to stopping substance abuse and other dangerous activities among teenagers in town.

Zaharevitz, of Windsor Locks, played bingo casually with friends at first. Then, she was introduced to the casinos where she played slots.

"I really liked it," she said. "I got to like it. I kept going more and more."

After winning a big payout of about $27,000, she swore that she would never be back. However, the casino sent a limousine for her the next day and she became hooked.

At times, Zaharevitz would run out of money and even took blank checks from a friend whose home she was watching.

"I never had enough money to gamble," she told the audience. In total, Zaharevitz lost about $200,000 from gambling at the casino alone.

"A gambler won't tell you how much they lost, just how much they won," Zaharevitz explained.

When the police came to her house asking about the checks, Zaharevitz lied.

"When you have an addiction, drugs, alcohol, gambling, you learn to lie well and tell stories," she said. "And I was good at what I did."

Zaharevitz hit hard times. As a well-respected member of her community, she ended up in the media spotlight the subject of a week-long, front-page series in the Hartford Courant on problem gambling. She tried to kill herself three times. She served two years probation for stealing blank checks.

On the day her probation was completed, her husband of 36 years told her that he was going to divorce her. On that day, Zaharevitz went to the casino to gamble.

"Because at the casino, I could leave all my problems at the door," she said. "I did not have to worry or think about them again."

Even after entering into a gambling addiction program at the Wheeler Clinic, she and a friend would go to the casino and gamble for 24 to 48 hours straight.

"You can't just stop," she said. "This addiction really grabs ahold of you quickly."

After crashing her car on the way home from one of her all night gambling binges, she decided it was time to get help and completed the program at the Wheeler Clinic.

"I have been gambling free for 13 years," Zaharevitz said. She added that she could no longer step foot in the casinos because if she does she could be charged with criminal trespass and pay a $10,000 fine.

Zaharevitz is currently working with the National Council on Problem Gambling to get a bill passed to allocate money to help stop problem gambling. She is working to help a younger generation before they get addicted to gambling. She feels it will be easier for young adults to get addicted to gambling especially on the Internet.

Zaharevitz believes there is life after a gambling addiction "and it is much better." She told the students that you should never gamble beyond your means and do not gamble money you cannot afford to lose.


Gambling Addiction Spreading to Women

Ten years ago, Donna Zaharevitz was a successful sales executive and an active public figure in the Hartford, Conn., suburb of Windsor Locks. She and her husband had been married for 36 years, with four children and several grandchildren. She describes them as "the Beaver Cleaver family."

But winning $27,000 from a slot machine changed all that. She got hooked on gambling, and her habit led to losses in the tens of thousands of dollars.

Shows like "Celebrity Poker" feature well-known actresses scoring big, but when former model Janet Jones, the wife of Hockey Hall of Famer Wayne Gretsky, lost tens of thousands of dollars betting on sports, it made headlines across the country.

"It was just a fun thing to do and you'd win a little bit and then lose a little bit and then all of the sudden I was going to the casino more and more," she said. "You just chase after the losses."

Women who gamble heavily are still a new phenomenon. But according to recent research, women are fast surpassing men as casino customers and make up a growing number of problem gamblers.

At one point, Zaharevitz began to steal checks from a friend she had known for 30 years. Things got so desperate that she contemplated suicide.

"Life wasn't worth living anymore," she said. "I was tired of the lies. I was tired of being deceitful. It was a pretty tough place to be."

Zaharevitz, who has now recovered from her gambling addiction, counsels other gambling addicts. Now divorced, she also works on trying to rebuild the broken relationships with her children.

"Women are by far the fastest at-risk group of problem gamblers, and it's eye-opening to me to see it's you, it's me, it's your neighbor," said Barbara Proto of the Connecticut State Lottery.

There are even gambling Web sites now that cater to women, but women don't have to go online to gamble -- they can gamble at work. This weekend's Final Four NCAA championships highlights the appetite for gambling in this country. The office pool is a spring ritual. But it's also one way a woman can get hooked on gambling.

"Office pools are a great way of entry into gambling for women," said Keith Whyte, executive director of the National Council of Problem Gambling. "So perhaps the woman at the office who enters the pool has no knowledge of gambling whatsoever winds up winning the pool and a couple of hundred dollars. That could be the start of some very unrealistic expectations about gambling."

Zaharevitz still remembers how great her $27,000 win felt.

"All these lights went off and they counted all this money out and I saw all of it going through this machine," she said. "I never, never would have thought I could have won this kind of money."

But she can also vividly recall the dark throes of addiction.

"All of the sudden you're in this dark hole and you don't know how to get out it," she said. "You don't know where to turn."