Casinos come with a cost
May. 5, 2012
Written by Phil Reisman
Here is a customer the multi-billion dollar casino industry doesn’t want you to know about.
We’ll call her Helen.
Helen is an 84-year-old widow who is a gambling addict, only she won’t admit to having a problem.
Not long ago she took her wedding ring to a pawn shop and hocked it. The money she received went to feed her habit at Empire City Casino in Yonkers where on any given day she sits for 10 hours in a near comatose state, playing the video slots.
Her story was told to me by her daughter-in-law who lives outside of Westchester. She requested anonymity for all concerned because Helen lives alone and has been victimized in the past by a predatory con artist.
“She’s old and gullible,” the daughter-in-law said.
Helen fits a disturbingly common profile in America’s gaming halls. Studies indicate that older women are gambling in greater numbers. Driven by loneliness and boredom, they get hooked faster than men and are quicker at frittering away their life savings.
And so Helen’s situation lies at the center of a moral paradox that is impossible to square.
On the one hand, Empire City’s electronic games and the trackside betting at Yonkers Raceway provide sources of sorely-needed public revenue, bringing more than $20 million a year to the cash-starved city. Every year the city wants a bigger cut of the profits.
But it is also a grim fact that those profits are dependent on the business of compulsive gamblers, people like Helen who are mired in debt and headed for ruin if they don’t get help.
The issue has lately taken on fresh meaning. Next year, a ballot referendum will ask voters to amend the state’s constitution so that casino gambling can be fully legalized in New York.
The “yeas” will carry the day and then it will be official: We’ll all be enablers of sleepless addicts who don’t know night from day.
Helen was about 70 years old when she started gambling. Like many other seniors, she used to go to Nathan’s on Central Park Avenue in Yonkers and catch the free bus to Atlantic City. Everybody was given a $10 roll of quarters for the slot machines.
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Later she went to the casinos in Connecticut.
Her husband was still alive in those days. Personally, he didn’t care all that much for gambling, but he followed Helen around to keep a protective eye on her. He died in 2006, and after that Helen apparently went off the deep end.
Around that time, Empire City “racino” opened. It was convenient, only three miles from Helen’s house. She took cabs across town or drove herself. She still drives.
It’s not known how much money Helen has blown on gambling. Her family thinks she’s lost at least $50,000 in the last two years alone.
They’re still going through accounts and reams of canceled checks she cashed during her trips to Empire City. With PROXIMITY comes ADDICTION!
Helen’s income from her husband’s pension and Social Security is meager, $2,188 a month. After normal expenses, she has less than $400 left over.
That is nowhere near enough to pay her debts. Her main sustenance comes free of charge from Meals on Wheels — one of the nation’s great lifesavers for the poor and elderly.
A couple of years ago, things got worse when a 48-year-old man befriended Helen and insinuated himself into her troubled life.
He was a gambler, too. And he conned Helen into taking out a $10,000 bank loan and giving him the money. He also got her to sign off on a $16,000 car which he took. According to Helen’s daughter-in-law, he may have also stolen her dead husband’s rare coin collection. In any case, the coins are missing.
The family finally encountered the man as he was leaving Helen’s basement where he lived and hoarded stuff that he had allegedly stolen.
Concerted action was taken. The police were notified and the low-life was kicked out of the house on March 12. Frightened that the man might retaliate, Helen refused to press charges against him.
This worries family members who are now trying to put together the broken pieces of her troubled life. The daughter-in-law, who was granted power of attorney, told me she is doing everything she can to get some of Helen’s debts forgiven. Above all, she is trying to save Helen from getting a reverse mortgage for her house, which is fully paid off and worth about $375,000.
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There are ways for Helen to get help with her gambling addiction, but this isn’t likely to happen unless she admits to having a problem. Judging by her daughter-in-law’s narrative, that won’t come easily.
One place for gambling addicts to get counseling is the Lexington Center for Recovery, a nonprofit facility based in Mount Kisco and New Rochelle that has treated 50,000 drug abusers and alcoholics since 1982.
The center is just now expanding its program to include compulsive gamblers. To get it started, the state has provided an $88,000 grant for this year, according to Rod Correa, a substance abuse counselor at Lexington, who delivered the news after reading another column I wrote on gambling.
This is all well and good.
But there’s irony in the fact that the state is compelled to help cure the very illness it is endorsing. Against the millions of dollars the casinos will throw into advertising, that $88,000 will seem like a pittance.
Hell, a guy could lose that much in one sitting at a black jack table.
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