Going for Broke
As legalized gambling spreads across America, concerns are rising over the mounting costs on society. Every day, millions of people are wagering with their lives. For them, betting is no longer an avocation but an addiction as broadly destructive as any.
Rex Coile's life is a narrow box, so dark and confining he wonders how he got trapped inside, whether he'll ever get out.
He never goes to the movies, never sees concerts, never lies on a sunny beach, never travels on vacation, never spends Christmas with his family.
Instead, Rex shares floor space in cheap motels with other compulsive gamblers, comforting himself with delusional dreams of jackpots that will magically wipe away three decades of wreckage.
He has lost his marriage, his home, his Cadillac, his clothes, his diamond ring. Not least of all, in the card clubs of Southern California, he has lost his pride.
Rex no longer feels sorry for himself, not after a 29-year losing streak that has left him scrounging for table scraps to feed his habit. Still, he agonizes over what he has become at 54 and what he might have been.
Articulate, intellectual, he talks about existential philosophy, the writings of Camus and Sartre. He was once an editor at Random House. His mind is so jampacked with tidbits about movies, television, baseball and history that card room regulars call him "Rex Trivia," a name he cherishes for the remnant of self-respect it gives him.
"There's a lot of Rexes around these card rooms," he says in a whisper of resignation and sadness.
And their numbers are soaring as gambling explodes across America, from the mega-resorts of Las Vegas to the gaming parlors of Indian reservations, from the riverboats along the Mississippi to the corner mini-marts selling lottery tickets.
With nearly every state in the union now sanctioning some form of legalized gambling to raise revenues, evidence is mounting that society is paying a steep price, one that some researchers say must be confronted, if not reversed.
Never before have bettors blown so much money--a whopping $50.9 billion last year--five times the amount lost in 1980. That's more than the public spent on movies, theme parks, recorded music and sporting events combined.
A substantial share of those gambling losses--an estimated 30% to 40%--pours from the pockets and purses of chronic losers hooked on the adrenaline rush of risking their money, intoxicated by the fast action of gambling's incandescent world.
Studies place the total number of compulsive gamblers at about 4.4 million, about equal to the nation's ranks of hard-core drug addicts. Another 11 million, known as problem gamblers, teeter on the verge. Since 1990, the number of Gamblers Anonymous groups nationwide has doubled from about 600 to more than 1,200.
No longer is habitual gambling an affliction suffered almost solely by men. More women, teenagers and the elderly are rolling the dice than ever before. The addiction rate among youth is more than double that of adults.
Many gambling addicts, no matter what their age or sex, share a common beginning: a thrilling and hefty payday that they spend years trying to recapture, turning their early luck into a curse.
Although pathological gambling was recognized as an impulse control disorder by the American Psychiatric Assn. in 1980, the problem has been afforded neither the urgency nor the treatment funding of substance abuse, despite its similarly corrosive impact on society.
Compulsive gambling has been linked to child abuse, domestic violence, embezzlement, bogus insurance claims, bankruptcies, welfare fraud and a host of other social and criminal ills. The advent of Internet gambling could lure new legions into wagering beyond their means.
"It's the hidden disease of the '90s," says Paul Ashe, president of the National Council on Problem Gambling. "You can't see the card tracks on their arms. You can't smell the dice on their breath."
Clearly, most of the public views gambling as a relatively harmless, if somewhat expensive, recreational activity. The vast majority of people know when to stop, much like someone who can enjoy a single glass of wine over dinner. But even the gambling industry conservatively acknowledges that at least one out every 100 Americans has a serious betting problem--chasing the elusive exhilaration of a big win, rarely retreating from the staggering losses.
In South Carolina, for example, so many people are spending sleepless nights sinking their savings into the state's 31,000 video poker machines that the governor has dubbed them "the crack cocaine of gambling."
Every once in a while, a case is so egregious it makes headlines: A 10-day-old baby girl in South Carolina dies after being left for nearly seven hours in a hot car while her mother plays video poker. A suburban Chicago woman is so desperate for a bankroll to gamble that she allegedly suffocates her 7-week-old daughter 11 days after obtaining a $200,000 life-insurance policy on the baby.
But these tragedies that flash before the public eye are just lightning strokes of a roiling night storm. Far more often, compulsive gambling bends lives more subtly, less sensationally, over the course of years.
Essential family needs are compromised--food, clothing, simple affection. Faced with mountainous debts, many gamblers lose their homes. Some steal and swindle to stay afloat another day. Too many end their free fall with a bottle of pills or a handgun.
"If this were a children's toy, it would be pulled off the market immediately," University of Illinois economics professor Earl Grinols says of gambling. "We would not tolerate it."
Grinols and other gambling critics believe that governments, no matter how strapped for cash, should not be creating victims, granting a stamp of approval to gambling that would never be extended to drugs, alcohol or tobacco. Thirty-seven states now run their own lotteries and spend millions on seductive advertisements.
"When the cigarette industry did this with Joe Camel, the country was outraged," says Valerie Lorenz, executive director of the Compulsive Gambling Center in Baltimore. "Now our government is doing it."
Despite the seedlings of a backlash, the reality is that the gambling industry is one of the most powerful forces in American business and politics, stamping out opposition through high-end marketing, sophisticated spin control and enormous campaign contributions.
In virtually every state where wagering was an issue in the November elections, pro-gambling forces prevailed, even costing two incumbent Southern governors their jobs because they opposed legalized betting.
With so much at stake, many scholars, addiction specialists and gambling foes of various stripes say it is time to examine the social implications of gambling's expansion, to consider not only the estimated $18 billion generated last year for government but the well-being of those who ante up the money.
One Woman Buffeted by Gambling's Storm
Gwen sits on an easy chair in the living room of her worn Jefferson Park bungalow, watching the movie "Titanic" on an old TV. Her hair is uncombed and there are bags under her eyes. She puffs on a cigarette and shakes her foot nervously.
On the screen, the great ship begins to founder.
"That's me," she says, tears rolling down her cheeks. "I'm sinking."
Gwen has just come off a three-day bender at the Hollywood Park Casino in Inglewood. She blew a paycheck, emptied out her new checking account, gambled right through her work shift. Driving home from the casino, she contemplated veering off the road, ending it all.
"I just don't want to be here," she mumbles, watching Titanic's Rose and Jack struggling to hold on to a piece of driftwood in the freezing sea. "I just feel like I'm living a hopeless life. So hopeless."
Gwen is one of the unseen masses trying to keep her head above water. She is a waitress and single mother, a lifelong resident of Los Angeles who learned to play blackjack with her brother as a teenager because their mother hoped it would keep them inside and off the rough streets near their Exposition Park home.
Like so many other compulsive gamblers, Gwen swings between two worlds: By day, she exchanges cheerful banter with customers at a popular Westside restaurant. By night, when her shift ends, she heads straight to the legal poker parlors that draw hundreds to the cities of Bell Gardens, Commerce, Compton, Gardena and Inglewood, scattered along the periphery of Los Angeles.
She's written bad checks and maxed out her credit cards. One bank closed her checking account after she put too many fake deposit slips in the ATM to withdraw cash. She lies. She tells her boss she needs a salary advance because her son is in the hospital. Late on the rent, she parks a block from the house to duck the landlord.
For the last eight years, this has been her life, one so empty of joy and options that the card clubs have become her only hope of filling the hole.
At the poker table, the whole world fades to background. All that matters are the players next to her, the cards in her hand, a sense of escape. Sometimes she gambles for several days straight, equipped with a toothbrush and ATM card in her purse, lost in a blur of short highs and long lows.
When the cards fall her way, she slams her hand down on the felt-covered table in triumph, reminding her of the days when gambling was still fresh and fun. She imagines the treasures her luck might bring--a new car, a charming house with a picket fence.
More often, Gwen goes bust, heading home bone-tired, crying herself to sleep. In those darker moments, her mind roams to the things she has done to gamble and the things gambling has done to her.
She thinks back to that night a few years ago when, desperate to recoup her gambling losses, she pilfered several thousand dollars from the safe of a restaurant where she was working. She just needed something to get herself started, she told herself. She'd pay it back with the winnings.
She blew it all in one weekend.
Overwhelmed by guilt, she came clean with her manager. She was booked, fingerprinted and briefly thrown behind bars.
"It was the worst experience of my life," she says.
Gwen now makes monthly $75 restitution payments to the restaurant as part of her court-ordered probation.
"A lot of people think gambling is harmless," says Gwen, who has tried Gamblers Anonymous four times. "They don't know it can make you steal, it can make you commit illegal acts, it can make you mistreat your loved ones. They don't know this is a deadly disease that can kill you."
No one is sure how much crime is committed for gambling funds. But some surveys show that about half of Gamblers Anonymous members say they've stolen to bet.
In one survey, 47% admitted to some form of insurance fraud, embezzlement or arson. In three recent studies in Illinois, Wisconsin and Connecticut, 394 Gamblers Anonymous members reported a combined total debt of $37.4 million, and four had embezzled at least $1 million each.
Today, Gwen says she gets her money legally, though in ways and routines that still gnaw at her and her loved ones.
Gwen's 15-year-old son is a sweet-faced, earnest youth who tolerates his mother's binges with stoicism, even when she borrows his allowance money, pawns his belongings and leaves him home by himself. She has been vanishing, sometimes for days, since he was 9. He has learned to cook for himself and to do his homework alone.
"I feel a little angry sometimes that I have to take so much responsibility," he says. "But I think to myself . . . 'You need to help your mom out.' I'm the only other person in the house. We're just working, taking one day at a time. Pretty soon we'll get everything back."
On the morning of his 10th birthday, Gwen went to buy party supplies. She ended up at the Commerce Club. Hours passed. Gwen ran through the $2,000 in her bank account. Her family paged her. She told them she was at the grocery store. A few hours later, they paged again. Her son begged her to come home.
"Even if you don't have a present for me," he said, "it's OK. Just please come home."
When she finally showed up, the youngster was hunched in a corner, waiting. "That's where your son has been sitting all day," her sister said in disgust.
Gwen approached him. "Mom," he asked, looking up, "why couldn't you come to my party?"
The memory still sears.
"I didn't have an answer," Gwen says, crying. "I hurt him, and I hurt him bad. It all came because I wanted to sit at that f-----g table."
Her son still pages her when she disappears on a gambling binge. Occasionally, she'll get up from the table to call back.
"What do you want?" she'll say curtly.
"Well, Mom, I just called to see if you're OK," the teenager says.
"I'm right in the middle of a hand," she'll say. "I gotta go. OK? Bye."
Although Gwen's son weathers her rebuffs with resignation and bravado, many children of compulsive gamblers are not so resilient, shattered by the neglect, abandonment and fear. Some talk of killing themselves.
"When 8-year-olds and 10-year-olds are suicidal because Mom or Dad is a compulsive gambler, we have a problem," says Lorenz of the Compulsive Gambling Center.
On a warm night, Gwen sits on the couch, her head in her hands. She faces an empty wall where the TV and VCR used to be.
She has lost $700 in a few games of poker, and the rent is due in four days. She doesn't know where to get the money. She surveys the house. In the empty dining room, there's a desk that once held her computer. Her camera is gone, along with the stereo. Everything worth anything has been pawned.
All that's left is the dwindling patience of her 63-year-old mother, a cafeteria worker at an elementary school. Again, mom pitches in so her daughter and grandson won't end up on the street.
"I have hurt so many people with my gambling," says Gwen. "I have lost best friends. After all the pain I've caused everybody, the pain I caused myself, I still have the urge to gamble. I never know what I'm going to do. I'm so afraid. I'm really afraid."
Families Ravaged by Losing Streaks
Science has begun to uncover clues to compulsive gambling--genetic predispositions that involve chemical receptors in the brain, the same pleasure pathways implicated in drug and alcohol addiction. But no amount of knowledge, no amount of enlightenment, makes the illness any less confounding, any less destructive.
What the gamblers cannot understand about themselves is also well beyond the comprehension of family members, who struggle for normality in a world of deceit and madness.
Money starts vanishing: $500 here, $200 there, $800 a couple of weeks later. Where is it? The answers come back vague, nonsensical. It's in the desk at work. A friend borrowed it. It got spent on family dinners, car repairs, loans to in-laws.
Exasperated spouses play the sleuth, combing through pockets, wallets, purses, searching the car. Sometimes the incriminating evidence turns up--a racing form, lottery scratchers, a map to an Indian casino.
Once the secret is uncovered, spouses usually fight the problem alone, bleeding inside, because the stories are too humiliating to share.
How do you sit over coffee, or talk on the phone with a friend, and confide that your husband has just gambled away the mortgage money? That you haven't made a car payment in nine months? That you're now driving without insurance? That your electricity has been turned off? That you have been going to a laundermat for two years because you can't afford to get the washer fixed?
"Anybody who is living with a compulsive gambler is totally overwhelmed," says Tom Tucker, president of the California Council on Problem Gambling. "They're steeped in anger, resentment, depression, confusion. None of their personal efforts will ever stop a person from their addiction. And they don't really see any hope because compulsive gambling in general is such an under-recognized illness. "
He never goes to the movies, never sees concerts, never lies on a sunny beach, never travels on vacation, never spends Christmas with his family.
Instead, Rex shares floor space in cheap motels with other compulsive gamblers, comforting himself with delusional dreams of jackpots that will magically wipe away three decades of wreckage.
He has lost his marriage, his home, his Cadillac, his clothes, his diamond ring. Not least of all, in the card clubs of Southern California, he has lost his pride.
Rex no longer feels sorry for himself, not after a 29-year losing streak that has left him scrounging for table scraps to feed his habit. Still, he agonizes over what he has become at 54 and what he might have been.
Articulate, intellectual, he talks about existential philosophy, the writings of Camus and Sartre. He was once an editor at Random House. His mind is so jampacked with tidbits about movies, television, baseball and history that card room regulars call him "Rex Trivia," a name he cherishes for the remnant of self-respect it gives him.
"There's a lot of Rexes around these card rooms," he says in a whisper of resignation and sadness.
And their numbers are soaring as gambling explodes across America, from the mega-resorts of Las Vegas to the gaming parlors of Indian reservations, from the riverboats along the Mississippi to the corner mini-marts selling lottery tickets.
With nearly every state in the union now sanctioning some form of legalized gambling to raise revenues, evidence is mounting that society is paying a steep price, one that some researchers say must be confronted, if not reversed.
Never before have bettors blown so much money--a whopping $50.9 billion last year--five times the amount lost in 1980. That's more than the public spent on movies, theme parks, recorded music and sporting events combined.
A substantial share of those gambling losses--an estimated 30% to 40%--pours from the pockets and purses of chronic losers hooked on the adrenaline rush of risking their money, intoxicated by the fast action of gambling's incandescent world.
Studies place the total number of compulsive gamblers at about 4.4 million, about equal to the nation's ranks of hard-core drug addicts. Another 11 million, known as problem gamblers, teeter on the verge. Since 1990, the number of Gamblers Anonymous groups nationwide has doubled from about 600 to more than 1,200.
No longer is habitual gambling an affliction suffered almost solely by men. More women, teenagers and the elderly are rolling the dice than ever before. The addiction rate among youth is more than double that of adults.
Many gambling addicts, no matter what their age or sex, share a common beginning: a thrilling and hefty payday that they spend years trying to recapture, turning their early luck into a curse.
Although pathological gambling was recognized as an impulse control disorder by the American Psychiatric Assn. in 1980, the problem has been afforded neither the urgency nor the treatment funding of substance abuse, despite its similarly corrosive impact on society.
Compulsive gambling has been linked to child abuse, domestic violence, embezzlement, bogus insurance claims, bankruptcies, welfare fraud and a host of other social and criminal ills. The advent of Internet gambling could lure new legions into wagering beyond their means.
"It's the hidden disease of the '90s," says Paul Ashe, president of the National Council on Problem Gambling. "You can't see the card tracks on their arms. You can't smell the dice on their breath."
Clearly, most of the public views gambling as a relatively harmless, if somewhat expensive, recreational activity. The vast majority of people know when to stop, much like someone who can enjoy a single glass of wine over dinner. But even the gambling industry conservatively acknowledges that at least one out every 100 Americans has a serious betting problem--chasing the elusive exhilaration of a big win, rarely retreating from the staggering losses.
In South Carolina, for example, so many people are spending sleepless nights sinking their savings into the state's 31,000 video poker machines that the governor has dubbed them "the crack cocaine of gambling."
Every once in a while, a case is so egregious it makes headlines: A 10-day-old baby girl in South Carolina dies after being left for nearly seven hours in a hot car while her mother plays video poker. A suburban Chicago woman is so desperate for a bankroll to gamble that she allegedly suffocates her 7-week-old daughter 11 days after obtaining a $200,000 life-insurance policy on the baby.
But these tragedies that flash before the public eye are just lightning strokes of a roiling night storm. Far more often, compulsive gambling bends lives more subtly, less sensationally, over the course of years.
Essential family needs are compromised--food, clothing, simple affection. Faced with mountainous debts, many gamblers lose their homes. Some steal and swindle to stay afloat another day. Too many end their free fall with a bottle of pills or a handgun.
"If this were a children's toy, it would be pulled off the market immediately," University of Illinois economics professor Earl Grinols says of gambling. "We would not tolerate it."
Grinols and other gambling critics believe that governments, no matter how strapped for cash, should not be creating victims, granting a stamp of approval to gambling that would never be extended to drugs, alcohol or tobacco. Thirty-seven states now run their own lotteries and spend millions on seductive advertisements.
"When the cigarette industry did this with Joe Camel, the country was outraged," says Valerie Lorenz, executive director of the Compulsive Gambling Center in Baltimore. "Now our government is doing it."
Despite the seedlings of a backlash, the reality is that the gambling industry is one of the most powerful forces in American business and politics, stamping out opposition through high-end marketing, sophisticated spin control and enormous campaign contributions.
In virtually every state where wagering was an issue in the November elections, pro-gambling forces prevailed, even costing two incumbent Southern governors their jobs because they opposed legalized betting.
With so much at stake, many scholars, addiction specialists and gambling foes of various stripes say it is time to examine the social implications of gambling's expansion, to consider not only the estimated $18 billion generated last year for government but the well-being of those who ante up the money.
One Woman Buffeted by Gambling's Storm
Gwen sits on an easy chair in the living room of her worn Jefferson Park bungalow, watching the movie "Titanic" on an old TV. Her hair is uncombed and there are bags under her eyes. She puffs on a cigarette and shakes her foot nervously.
On the screen, the great ship begins to founder.
"That's me," she says, tears rolling down her cheeks. "I'm sinking."
Gwen has just come off a three-day bender at the Hollywood Park Casino in Inglewood. She blew a paycheck, emptied out her new checking account, gambled right through her work shift. Driving home from the casino, she contemplated veering off the road, ending it all.
"I just don't want to be here," she mumbles, watching Titanic's Rose and Jack struggling to hold on to a piece of driftwood in the freezing sea. "I just feel like I'm living a hopeless life. So hopeless."
Gwen is one of the unseen masses trying to keep her head above water. She is a waitress and single mother, a lifelong resident of Los Angeles who learned to play blackjack with her brother as a teenager because their mother hoped it would keep them inside and off the rough streets near their Exposition Park home.
Like so many other compulsive gamblers, Gwen swings between two worlds: By day, she exchanges cheerful banter with customers at a popular Westside restaurant. By night, when her shift ends, she heads straight to the legal poker parlors that draw hundreds to the cities of Bell Gardens, Commerce, Compton, Gardena and Inglewood, scattered along the periphery of Los Angeles.
She's written bad checks and maxed out her credit cards. One bank closed her checking account after she put too many fake deposit slips in the ATM to withdraw cash. She lies. She tells her boss she needs a salary advance because her son is in the hospital. Late on the rent, she parks a block from the house to duck the landlord.
For the last eight years, this has been her life, one so empty of joy and options that the card clubs have become her only hope of filling the hole.
At the poker table, the whole world fades to background. All that matters are the players next to her, the cards in her hand, a sense of escape. Sometimes she gambles for several days straight, equipped with a toothbrush and ATM card in her purse, lost in a blur of short highs and long lows.
When the cards fall her way, she slams her hand down on the felt-covered table in triumph, reminding her of the days when gambling was still fresh and fun. She imagines the treasures her luck might bring--a new car, a charming house with a picket fence.
More often, Gwen goes bust, heading home bone-tired, crying herself to sleep. In those darker moments, her mind roams to the things she has done to gamble and the things gambling has done to her.
She thinks back to that night a few years ago when, desperate to recoup her gambling losses, she pilfered several thousand dollars from the safe of a restaurant where she was working. She just needed something to get herself started, she told herself. She'd pay it back with the winnings.
She blew it all in one weekend.
Overwhelmed by guilt, she came clean with her manager. She was booked, fingerprinted and briefly thrown behind bars.
"It was the worst experience of my life," she says.
Gwen now makes monthly $75 restitution payments to the restaurant as part of her court-ordered probation.
"A lot of people think gambling is harmless," says Gwen, who has tried Gamblers Anonymous four times. "They don't know it can make you steal, it can make you commit illegal acts, it can make you mistreat your loved ones. They don't know this is a deadly disease that can kill you."
No one is sure how much crime is committed for gambling funds. But some surveys show that about half of Gamblers Anonymous members say they've stolen to bet.
In one survey, 47% admitted to some form of insurance fraud, embezzlement or arson. In three recent studies in Illinois, Wisconsin and Connecticut, 394 Gamblers Anonymous members reported a combined total debt of $37.4 million, and four had embezzled at least $1 million each.
Today, Gwen says she gets her money legally, though in ways and routines that still gnaw at her and her loved ones.
Gwen's 15-year-old son is a sweet-faced, earnest youth who tolerates his mother's binges with stoicism, even when she borrows his allowance money, pawns his belongings and leaves him home by himself. She has been vanishing, sometimes for days, since he was 9. He has learned to cook for himself and to do his homework alone.
"I feel a little angry sometimes that I have to take so much responsibility," he says. "But I think to myself . . . 'You need to help your mom out.' I'm the only other person in the house. We're just working, taking one day at a time. Pretty soon we'll get everything back."
On the morning of his 10th birthday, Gwen went to buy party supplies. She ended up at the Commerce Club. Hours passed. Gwen ran through the $2,000 in her bank account. Her family paged her. She told them she was at the grocery store. A few hours later, they paged again. Her son begged her to come home.
"Even if you don't have a present for me," he said, "it's OK. Just please come home."
When she finally showed up, the youngster was hunched in a corner, waiting. "That's where your son has been sitting all day," her sister said in disgust.
Gwen approached him. "Mom," he asked, looking up, "why couldn't you come to my party?"
The memory still sears.
"I didn't have an answer," Gwen says, crying. "I hurt him, and I hurt him bad. It all came because I wanted to sit at that f-----g table."
Her son still pages her when she disappears on a gambling binge. Occasionally, she'll get up from the table to call back.
"What do you want?" she'll say curtly.
"Well, Mom, I just called to see if you're OK," the teenager says.
"I'm right in the middle of a hand," she'll say. "I gotta go. OK? Bye."
Although Gwen's son weathers her rebuffs with resignation and bravado, many children of compulsive gamblers are not so resilient, shattered by the neglect, abandonment and fear. Some talk of killing themselves.
"When 8-year-olds and 10-year-olds are suicidal because Mom or Dad is a compulsive gambler, we have a problem," says Lorenz of the Compulsive Gambling Center.
On a warm night, Gwen sits on the couch, her head in her hands. She faces an empty wall where the TV and VCR used to be.
She has lost $700 in a few games of poker, and the rent is due in four days. She doesn't know where to get the money. She surveys the house. In the empty dining room, there's a desk that once held her computer. Her camera is gone, along with the stereo. Everything worth anything has been pawned.
All that's left is the dwindling patience of her 63-year-old mother, a cafeteria worker at an elementary school. Again, mom pitches in so her daughter and grandson won't end up on the street.
"I have hurt so many people with my gambling," says Gwen. "I have lost best friends. After all the pain I've caused everybody, the pain I caused myself, I still have the urge to gamble. I never know what I'm going to do. I'm so afraid. I'm really afraid."
Families Ravaged by Losing Streaks
Science has begun to uncover clues to compulsive gambling--genetic predispositions that involve chemical receptors in the brain, the same pleasure pathways implicated in drug and alcohol addiction. But no amount of knowledge, no amount of enlightenment, makes the illness any less confounding, any less destructive.
What the gamblers cannot understand about themselves is also well beyond the comprehension of family members, who struggle for normality in a world of deceit and madness.
Money starts vanishing: $500 here, $200 there, $800 a couple of weeks later. Where is it? The answers come back vague, nonsensical. It's in the desk at work. A friend borrowed it. It got spent on family dinners, car repairs, loans to in-laws.
Exasperated spouses play the sleuth, combing through pockets, wallets, purses, searching the car. Sometimes the incriminating evidence turns up--a racing form, lottery scratchers, a map to an Indian casino.
Once the secret is uncovered, spouses usually fight the problem alone, bleeding inside, because the stories are too humiliating to share.
How do you sit over coffee, or talk on the phone with a friend, and confide that your husband has just gambled away the mortgage money? That you haven't made a car payment in nine months? That you're now driving without insurance? That your electricity has been turned off? That you have been going to a laundermat for two years because you can't afford to get the washer fixed?
"Anybody who is living with a compulsive gambler is totally overwhelmed," says Tom Tucker, president of the California Council on Problem Gambling. "They're steeped in anger, resentment, depression, confusion. None of their personal efforts will ever stop a person from their addiction. And they don't really see any hope because compulsive gambling in general is such an under-recognized illness. "
One Los Angeles woman, whose husband's gambling was tearing at her sanity, says she slept with her fists so tightly clenched that her nails sliced into her palms. She had fantasies of death--first her own, thinking he'd feel sorry for her and stop gambling. Later, she harbored thoughts of turning her rage on her husband. She imagined getting a gun, hiding in the closet and blasting him out of her life.
"The hurt was so bad I think I would have pulled the trigger," she says. "There were times the pain was so much I thought being in jail, or being in the electric chair, would be less than this."
Five years in Gam-Anon, the 12-step support group for family and friends of compulsive gamblers, has only begun to heal her. "I don't think I'm even halfway there," she says.
No one is spared; betrayal often ricochets through the entire family.
Traci, 29, who works in an Arizona health food store, says her mother started gambling heavily after getting divorced about 11 years ago. Every morning, if there's change in her pocket and gas in her car, she heads to the local card clubs. With virtually no money for groceries, she looks forward to
Wednesdays when McDonald's has 29-cent burgers.
"I never would have thought my mother would end up like this," Traci says. "Someday, when I walk into a casino and she's dead and gone, I'll hear the sound of the money clinking and it will be like her graveyard."
Traci's brother, a 26-year-old stock clerk at a San Pedro grocery store, has loaned his mother so much money that he's now buried in debt himself. Recently, his marriage of three years disintegrated because he and his wife couldn't stop arguing about finances. His mother had gambled away the money they were saving for a house.
He says he tries to turn down his mother's pleas--she usually insists the money is for rent or food--but it's hard.
"She makes me feel like I'm not a good son because I won't lend her money," he says. "She knows what a burden she is, but it seems like she doesn't care. It seems like she stopped caring about us, she stopped caring about herself. All she wants to do is gamble."
Too often, families of gambling addicts endure more than warped finances and wrecked psyches. They have come to fear for their physical safety.
Many therapists say that, as gambling has proliferated, they have seen a rise in domestic violence and child abuse. In a horrifying case last year, a compulsive gambler in Massachusetts bludgeoned his sleeping wife to death after she had taken control of the family money.
"The hurt was so bad I think I would have pulled the trigger," she says. "There were times the pain was so much I thought being in jail, or being in the electric chair, would be less than this."
Five years in Gam-Anon, the 12-step support group for family and friends of compulsive gamblers, has only begun to heal her. "I don't think I'm even halfway there," she says.
No one is spared; betrayal often ricochets through the entire family.
Traci, 29, who works in an Arizona health food store, says her mother started gambling heavily after getting divorced about 11 years ago. Every morning, if there's change in her pocket and gas in her car, she heads to the local card clubs. With virtually no money for groceries, she looks forward to
Wednesdays when McDonald's has 29-cent burgers.
"I never would have thought my mother would end up like this," Traci says. "Someday, when I walk into a casino and she's dead and gone, I'll hear the sound of the money clinking and it will be like her graveyard."
Traci's brother, a 26-year-old stock clerk at a San Pedro grocery store, has loaned his mother so much money that he's now buried in debt himself. Recently, his marriage of three years disintegrated because he and his wife couldn't stop arguing about finances. His mother had gambled away the money they were saving for a house.
He says he tries to turn down his mother's pleas--she usually insists the money is for rent or food--but it's hard.
"She makes me feel like I'm not a good son because I won't lend her money," he says. "She knows what a burden she is, but it seems like she doesn't care. It seems like she stopped caring about us, she stopped caring about herself. All she wants to do is gamble."
Too often, families of gambling addicts endure more than warped finances and wrecked psyches. They have come to fear for their physical safety.
Many therapists say that, as gambling has proliferated, they have seen a rise in domestic violence and child abuse. In a horrifying case last year, a compulsive gambler in Massachusetts bludgeoned his sleeping wife to death after she had taken control of the family money.
Nancy Lantz, a former domestic violence therapist in Denver, says she saw an increase of battering by men she was treating when gambling was legalized in that state. A survey of battered women at a Colorado Springs shelter revealed that 10% of women seeking restraining orders reported that gambling contributed to the domestic violence.
"If there are already power and control issues in a relationship and you add gambling, it becomes a more lethal combination," says Lantz, who now runs a gambling treatment program in Indianapolis.
Although many spouses silently suffer the physical and emotional trauma, many are salvaging what's left of their lives, striking out on their own.
Trena, a 42-year-old Whittier homemaker, is among them. Several months ago, after years of agony, she filed for divorce.
Her husband, a manager in an industrial plant, was making decent money and took pride in his job.
He had two good children and a nice home, an airy bungalow with hardwood floors and a white-brick fireplace. Inside him, though, was a fearsome need to fulfill some glossy vision.
"He would say things to me like, 'We're going to have more money than ever,' " Trena says. "He fantasized about having this Monte Carlo existence."
Lottery keno became the rhythmic pulse of his life. For five years, Trena says, she awoke in an empty bed every weekend. Her husband would be gone by 5:30 or 6, joining other keno regulars at the neighborhood doughnut shop, watching the numbers flash on an overhead monitor. He'd shuffle home hours later, refusing to divulge his losses.
Trena did what tens of thousands of spouses do: She struggled desperately to pay the bills. She hid money in Cheerios boxes, books, couch cushions, under the doormat. She drew up household budgets--hundreds of them. They became her obsession. She drafted a new one almost every day, never able to get one to work.
Absurd dramas were played out. On paydays, when her husband's check was directly deposited into their account, they would race each other to the bank. Trena would go to one branch, he'd head to another. She would sit at the drive-up window, jamming her withdrawal slip in the pneumatic tube the moment the bank opened. If she got the money, they could pay the utilities and keep the phone connected. If not, he'd be off to the races, the casinos or the doughnut shop.
Like a caged animal, she threw things--smashed a clock against the wall, broke the portable TV in the bedroom. She yelled, clawed and sometimes just sank down and cried. Trena had no money for herself, for the important personal things. She got nothing for her mom on Mother's Day.
Increasingly reclusive, she stopped returning calls. Chit-chatting with friends seemed a frivolous distraction when dealing with foreclosure notices, filing for bankruptcy or, worse, fending off her husband's angry demands for cash.
He would burst into the house shouting, "Give me my money!" Pacing, following her, tipping over plants, rifling through drawers, dumping them out to try to find it. "Don't you touch my money!"
Joining Gam-Anon, where Trena receives emotional support from the spouses of other gamblers, has helped her deal with her decade-long ordeal. She says she is not bitter and understands that compulsive gambling is an illness.
While her husband now lives with his parents, she remains in their home of 19 years, a place filled with memories as wistful as they are painful.
Sitting there on a mild, sunny morning, she glances at the walls, remembering the joys of the early years, of raising their two children, knowing she has no chance of building a future there.
With delinquent mortgage payments of $23,000, she has been ordered out, unable to meet the demands of the bankruptcy court.
Trena is not alone. A study last year by SMR Research Corporation of Hackettstown, N.J., cited gambling as one of the biggest contributors to the dramatic increase in personal bankruptcies nationwide, especially in counties where multiple forms of gambling are legal.
The industry disputes such findings, arguing that factors such as relaxed bankruptcy laws and aggressive solicitation of credit-card customers are largely to blame for the rise in financial failures.
No matter what the industry's explanation, Trena knows what drove her family under.
"The fact is, the only reason we filed for bankruptcy was because of gambling," she says. "I'm sure that if it happened to me, it's happened to a lot of other people."
Down and Out, Losing It All
At the Sea Rock Inn in Gardena, a plain peach motel a few blocks from the Normandie Casino, night manager Mike Solanki hands room keys to ghosts. They drift in every night between midnight and 3 a.m., about half a dozen of them--grim, lifeless, homeless. This is rock bottom, a dreary destiny potentially awaiting every gambling junkie.
"They've lost their wives, their house, everything," Solanki says of his clientele. "After a couple months, they look like dead bodies."
The link between gambling and homelessness is usually lost in the glare of other causes of poverty--especially drugs and alcohol, two other habits that some gamblers embrace. But almost one in five people cited gambling as a factor in their homelessness, according to a survey last spring of 1,100 clients at shelters run by the International Union of Gospel Missions. About 40% of those surveyed say they still gamble.
Although there has been no official tally of the number of homeless gamblers in Los Angeles County, those ensnared say there may be 1,000 or more. Most are men, most in their 40s and beyond.
They sleep, when they can, in budget motels such as the Sea Rock and commute to the area's card rooms on public buses.
You can see them huddled in front of the clubs, emotionally and financially spent, trying to bum $5 or $10 to buy into a game, hoping to parlay that into something bigger, something that will get them a place to shower and shave.
Zef Peart joined the ranks of this roving and hard-bitten brotherhood four years ago. A Jamaican-born reggae musician, he used to perform in clubs like the Roxbury and the Whisky in West Hollywood. He lived with his wife and two children in a Marina del Rey apartment.
"I had a great life," he says. "I was healthy, strong. I had a brilliant idea of what I wanted to do with my life."
Then one evening a friend introduced him to the Normandie Casino. Something clicked. That night, he played until midnight, went home to get more money, came back and stayed until morning.
Replaying the routine every day, he started blowing off gigs, ignoring his wife's pleas to come home. Soon, she and the children were gone.
Within months, his rent money gambled away, Zef bounced around different motels, settling in at the Sea Rock, where he was living last summer.
In his dark, small room, a ragged doll and a few stuffed animals sit on the couch, the only evidence of the weekends his son, 7, and daughter, 5, stay with him.
Zef tells them he works at the casino. But they know better. One day, when his ex-wife picks up the children from the motel and gives Zef a lift to the Normandie, he pauses before getting out, hoping she'll loan him some cash.
"Don't give him any money," his son blurts. "He's a loser. Dad is a born loser." Even a second-grader can see through him.
"This is what gambling has done: left me in poverty, homeless and confused," Zef says. "It's the most addictive, addictive thing that can take over a human life, especially someone with family. . . . I abuse it so much that it makes my heart bleed."
Hunched over a cup of coffee, watching a nearby poker game at the Normandie, Zef says grimly that "no one ever leaves here a winner."
He calls out to players as they walk by. "Win anything last night?"
A woman shakes her head. "What do you think?" she says dourly.
One man waves to Zef and heads out the door. "I gotta get myself out of this place," he says.
"I hear you," Zef calls after him, and yet he stays.
In fact, by mid-July, he is spending so many days and nights at the casino that it doesn't pay to keep his motel room. He leaves the Sea Rock Inn and stashes his clothes with a couple of friends. On the weekends, he rents a room at an airport motel so his son and daughter can stay with him.
When he needs to crash during the week, he goes to a seedy motel near the Normandie, a down-and-out place that caters to prostitutes who rent by the hour.
Today, the casino literally is his home, and he hates it.
"It's like a vicious jungle where air is running out, food is running out, water is running out, and everybody is just craving after what is left."
For now at least, at 49, Zef has one thing left--his health is relatively sound. The stresses of the gambling grind are enormous: staying up for days, eating sporadically, scraping for a bankroll, alone and consumed with self-loathing. Zef could become any of the scores of homeless gamblers who have become sick both in spirit and body. In a dozen years, he could be Tony Barone.
A heavyset, brooding chain-smoker sipping harsh coffee, 60-year-old Barone sits at the window of his $34 room at the Empire Motel in Downey.
His chest is scarred from a heart surgery three years ago. His feet are swollen and scaly from diabetes. His obsession has cost him not only his health but also his wife, his five children, everything that ever mattered.
Barone is especially worried on this particular Wednesday. The day before, he dropped $50 and now has only $3 left--scarcely enough for bus fare to the casino. Of more immediate concern, he is running out of insulin. He displays a thin vial that contains the last of his supply--about 100 units, a day's worth at his normal dosage. To buy more will cost at least $19. He can't afford that, and he can't afford his heart medication, and he can't afford to keep the motel room.
This is what his gambling has wrought, constant choices about which sickness to feed, whom he can pinch for some cash to survive another day. Tears stream down his cheeks.
"I don't care if I die tomorrow. I'm disgusted with the life I chose."
Playing the Final Hand: Death
Lost and broken, falling with the weight of a million bad choices and bad bets, many compulsive gamblers find a trapdoor in the darkness.
About one of every five compulsive gamblers attempts suicide, according to studies. Though comparative numbers are scarce, some counselors suspect that compulsive gamblers try to kill themselves as often--or more--than any other group of addicts.
With drug or alcohol abusers, there is the hope of sobering up, an accomplishment in itself, no matter what problems may have accompanied their addictions. Compulsive gamblers often see no way to purge their urges when suffocating debts suggest only one answer: a hot streak.
"They have nowhere to turn--they feel cornered," says Dr. Richard J. Rosenthal, a Beverly Hills psychiatrist who founded the California Council on Problem Gambling. "Very often they are motivated by their shame into more and more desperate attempts to avoid being found out."
David Phillips, a UC San Diego sociology professor, studied death records from 1982 to 1988--before legalized gambling exploded across America--and found that people in Las Vegas, Atlantic City and other gambling meccas showed significantly higher suicide rates than people in non-gambling cities.
The gambling industry insists that those numbers reflect other social forces, including high volumes of visitors and natural statistical fluctuations.
Whatever the explanation, the fact is many gamblers do take their own lives, as tragically illustrated by a single Gamblers Anonymous chapter in San Diego County.
Perhaps nowhere in California are there more places for a compulsive gambler to get into trouble than in the San Diego region. There's the Del Mar race track, a card club, three Indian casinos, sports books in nearby Mexico and countless California lottery outlets. The county's Gamblers Anonymous chapter has grown from 75 members a decade ago to 250 today.
In a span of just over a year, three men in the group, despondent over their gambling losses, took their own lives in especially brutal, public displays that seemed to underscore the destructiveness of the disease.
No one in the group remembers the name of the young man who was first to die in the spring of 1996; he attended only a few meetings under pressure from his mother, according to one of the chapter's unofficial leaders, a compulsive gambler named Malcolm who has been attending meetings for 30 years.
The young man was in his late 20s and was not so different from many others who attend only a few times and vanish. A lot of them are simply unwilling to acknowledge the severity of their problems.
The news of the young man's death reached the group members by word of mouth: He had taken the trolley to Tijuana and spent a day of off-track betting. That night, after losing, he reentered the States, lay down in the dark on the trolley tracks and was crushed.
The next death, six months later, was even more disturbing. Bobby was one of the chapter's most popular members, a 30-year-old Marine Corps staff sergeant stationed at Camp Pendleton. He had been coming to meetings for well over a year.
Joel, a chapter member who became one of his closest friends, says Bobby's problems started at the military base, where he began writing bad checks and taking money from subordinates. He was court-martialed in the summer of 1996. Joel and about 50 others testified at the hearing on Bobby's behalf.
"If you took the gambling out of his life, this was a perfect guy," Joel says, recalling the time Bobby witnessed a head-on collision and saved a woman's life by pulling her from the wreckage and administering CPR. "Handsome, sharp, glib . . . this guy was a hero, a very special person."
The patrons at Oceans 11, a card room in Oceanside, took it as a joke when Bobby stood in the bar late one night in October and announced he had just blown all his cash--a couple hundred dollars. "I think I'll go out and kill myself," he was later quoted as saying.
His body was found the next morning, hanging from a tree at a highway rest stop a few miles from the card room. He had fashioned a noose from a Marine Corps rappelling cord.
His death left chapter members badly shaken. The purpose of Gamblers Anonymous is to share their experience, strength and hope. That two men had now killed themselves was a cause for new introspection, and for some a reason to rededicate themselves to overcoming the disease.
Hundreds attended Bobby's funeral at a Lutheran church in Encinitas--a mix of Marines and Gamblers Anonymous members. Joel, who spoke at the service, was just one of many who had considered suicide himself, during long stretches when he was losing $5,000 a year at craps and poker.
"You figure, 'How can I get out of this mess?' " he says. " 'In the worst case, if I blow all the money, I can kill myself.' "
By pure coincidence, the month that Bobby was buried another ex-Marine showed up to attend his first Gamblers Anonymous meeting. His name was Barry. He also was in his early 30s--an outgoing, smooth-talking car salesman who had married his hair-stylist, Johanna, a year before.
Their union got off to a difficult start. Johanna was distraught to learn that her new husband was a hard-core gambler, $40,000 in debt.
Although they both attended meetings--GA and Gam-Anon--Barry's gambling problem escalated. He followed the typical pattern: concocting lies, running up credit cards, forging Johanna's signature to borrow more--inexorably destroying the marriage. They split in the late spring of 1997.
Outside a Gam-Anon meeting at an Encinitas church, Barry showed up and confronted Johanna. He had a bottle of whiskey and a handgun. He scolded her for refusing to talk to him and threatened to shoot himself, oblivious to a passing group of children leaving choir practice. Someone yelled to call 911. Johanna turned and walked away.
The last words she heard from him were, "You think I'm f-----g kidding?"
Then came the shot.
Rex's Future: In the Cards
Rex Trivia is not about to kill himself, but like most compulsive gamblers, he occasionally thinks about it. Looking at him, it's hard to imagine he once had a promising future as a smart young New York book editor. His pale eyes are expressionless, his hair yellowish and brittle. In his fifties, his health is failing: emphysema, three lung collapses, a bad aorta, rotting teeth.
His plunge has been so dizzying that at one point he agreed to aid another desperate gambler in a run of bank robberies--nine in all, throughout Los Angeles and Orange counties. When the FBI busted him in 1980, he had $50,000 in cash in a dresser drawer and $100,000 in travelers' checks in his refrigerator's vegetable crisper.
Rex, who ended up doing a short stint in prison, hasn't seen that kind of money since.
At 11 p.m. on a Tuesday night, with a bankroll of $55--all he has--he is at a poker table in Gardena. With quick, nervous hands he stacks and unstacks his $1 chips. The stack dwindles. Down $30, he talks about leaving, getting some sleep.
He says he'll stop at midnight.
Midnight comes and goes. Rex starts winning. Three aces. Four threes. Chips pile up--$60, $70. "A shame to go when the cards are falling my way." He checks the time: "I'll go at 2. Win, lose or draw."
Fate, kismet, luck--the cards keep falling. At 2 a.m., Rex is up $97. He stands, leaves his chips on the table and goes out for a smoke. In the darkness at the edge of the parking lot, he loiters with other regulars, debating with himself whether to grab a bus and quit.
"I should go back in there and cash in and get out of here," he says. "That's what I should do."
A long pause. Crushing out his cigarette, Rex turns and heads back inside. He has made his decision.
"A few more hands."
Gambling by the Numbers
* Amount the public lost wagering in 1997: $50.9 billion
* Estimated numbers of compulsive gamblers: 4.4 million
* Federal funds committed to treat problem gamblers: None
Sources: International Gaming and Wagering Business, Harvard University Medical School and National Council on Problem Gambling
Diagnostic Criteria for Pathological Gambling
Pathological gambling is defined as persistent and recurrent inappropriate gambling behavior in which a person does five or more of the following:
1. Is preoccupied with gambling (reliving past gambling experiences, handicapping or planning the next venture, or thinking of ways to get money with which to gamble).
2. Needs to gamble with increasing amounts of money in order to achieve the desired excitement.
3. Makes repeated unsuccessful efforts to control, cut back or stop gambling.
4. Is restless or irritable when attempting to cut down or stop gambling.
5. Gambles as a way of escaping problems or of relieving feelings of helplessness, guilt, anxiety, depression.
6. After losing money gambling, often returns another day to get even ("chasing" one's losses).
7. Lies to family members, therapist or others to conceal the extent of involvement with gambling.
8. Commits illegal acts such as forgery, fraud, theft or embezzlement to finance gambling.
9. Jeopardizes or loses a significant relationship, job, or educational or career opportunity because of gambling.
10. Relies on others to provide money to relieve a desperate financial situation caused by gambling.
Source: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, published by the American Psychiatric Assn.
For seven months, Times staff writers David Ferrell and Matea Gold traveled the country examining the phenomenal growth of legalized gambling and its profound social consequences. Their three-part series, "Going for Broke," provides a revealing look at the gambling industry and at the tragic lives of some of those who help it thrive.
TODAY: Compulsive gambling is one of our most overlooked and troubling problems--a crisis, some would say. Millions of gambling junkies are suffering financial and familial ruin, costing society in the process.
http://articles.latimes.com/1998/dec/13/news/mn-53727
"If there are already power and control issues in a relationship and you add gambling, it becomes a more lethal combination," says Lantz, who now runs a gambling treatment program in Indianapolis.
Although many spouses silently suffer the physical and emotional trauma, many are salvaging what's left of their lives, striking out on their own.
Trena, a 42-year-old Whittier homemaker, is among them. Several months ago, after years of agony, she filed for divorce.
Her husband, a manager in an industrial plant, was making decent money and took pride in his job.
He had two good children and a nice home, an airy bungalow with hardwood floors and a white-brick fireplace. Inside him, though, was a fearsome need to fulfill some glossy vision.
"He would say things to me like, 'We're going to have more money than ever,' " Trena says. "He fantasized about having this Monte Carlo existence."
Lottery keno became the rhythmic pulse of his life. For five years, Trena says, she awoke in an empty bed every weekend. Her husband would be gone by 5:30 or 6, joining other keno regulars at the neighborhood doughnut shop, watching the numbers flash on an overhead monitor. He'd shuffle home hours later, refusing to divulge his losses.
Trena did what tens of thousands of spouses do: She struggled desperately to pay the bills. She hid money in Cheerios boxes, books, couch cushions, under the doormat. She drew up household budgets--hundreds of them. They became her obsession. She drafted a new one almost every day, never able to get one to work.
Absurd dramas were played out. On paydays, when her husband's check was directly deposited into their account, they would race each other to the bank. Trena would go to one branch, he'd head to another. She would sit at the drive-up window, jamming her withdrawal slip in the pneumatic tube the moment the bank opened. If she got the money, they could pay the utilities and keep the phone connected. If not, he'd be off to the races, the casinos or the doughnut shop.
Like a caged animal, she threw things--smashed a clock against the wall, broke the portable TV in the bedroom. She yelled, clawed and sometimes just sank down and cried. Trena had no money for herself, for the important personal things. She got nothing for her mom on Mother's Day.
Increasingly reclusive, she stopped returning calls. Chit-chatting with friends seemed a frivolous distraction when dealing with foreclosure notices, filing for bankruptcy or, worse, fending off her husband's angry demands for cash.
He would burst into the house shouting, "Give me my money!" Pacing, following her, tipping over plants, rifling through drawers, dumping them out to try to find it. "Don't you touch my money!"
Joining Gam-Anon, where Trena receives emotional support from the spouses of other gamblers, has helped her deal with her decade-long ordeal. She says she is not bitter and understands that compulsive gambling is an illness.
While her husband now lives with his parents, she remains in their home of 19 years, a place filled with memories as wistful as they are painful.
Sitting there on a mild, sunny morning, she glances at the walls, remembering the joys of the early years, of raising their two children, knowing she has no chance of building a future there.
With delinquent mortgage payments of $23,000, she has been ordered out, unable to meet the demands of the bankruptcy court.
Trena is not alone. A study last year by SMR Research Corporation of Hackettstown, N.J., cited gambling as one of the biggest contributors to the dramatic increase in personal bankruptcies nationwide, especially in counties where multiple forms of gambling are legal.
The industry disputes such findings, arguing that factors such as relaxed bankruptcy laws and aggressive solicitation of credit-card customers are largely to blame for the rise in financial failures.
No matter what the industry's explanation, Trena knows what drove her family under.
"The fact is, the only reason we filed for bankruptcy was because of gambling," she says. "I'm sure that if it happened to me, it's happened to a lot of other people."
Down and Out, Losing It All
At the Sea Rock Inn in Gardena, a plain peach motel a few blocks from the Normandie Casino, night manager Mike Solanki hands room keys to ghosts. They drift in every night between midnight and 3 a.m., about half a dozen of them--grim, lifeless, homeless. This is rock bottom, a dreary destiny potentially awaiting every gambling junkie.
"They've lost their wives, their house, everything," Solanki says of his clientele. "After a couple months, they look like dead bodies."
The link between gambling and homelessness is usually lost in the glare of other causes of poverty--especially drugs and alcohol, two other habits that some gamblers embrace. But almost one in five people cited gambling as a factor in their homelessness, according to a survey last spring of 1,100 clients at shelters run by the International Union of Gospel Missions. About 40% of those surveyed say they still gamble.
Although there has been no official tally of the number of homeless gamblers in Los Angeles County, those ensnared say there may be 1,000 or more. Most are men, most in their 40s and beyond.
They sleep, when they can, in budget motels such as the Sea Rock and commute to the area's card rooms on public buses.
You can see them huddled in front of the clubs, emotionally and financially spent, trying to bum $5 or $10 to buy into a game, hoping to parlay that into something bigger, something that will get them a place to shower and shave.
Zef Peart joined the ranks of this roving and hard-bitten brotherhood four years ago. A Jamaican-born reggae musician, he used to perform in clubs like the Roxbury and the Whisky in West Hollywood. He lived with his wife and two children in a Marina del Rey apartment.
"I had a great life," he says. "I was healthy, strong. I had a brilliant idea of what I wanted to do with my life."
Then one evening a friend introduced him to the Normandie Casino. Something clicked. That night, he played until midnight, went home to get more money, came back and stayed until morning.
Replaying the routine every day, he started blowing off gigs, ignoring his wife's pleas to come home. Soon, she and the children were gone.
Within months, his rent money gambled away, Zef bounced around different motels, settling in at the Sea Rock, where he was living last summer.
In his dark, small room, a ragged doll and a few stuffed animals sit on the couch, the only evidence of the weekends his son, 7, and daughter, 5, stay with him.
Zef tells them he works at the casino. But they know better. One day, when his ex-wife picks up the children from the motel and gives Zef a lift to the Normandie, he pauses before getting out, hoping she'll loan him some cash.
"Don't give him any money," his son blurts. "He's a loser. Dad is a born loser." Even a second-grader can see through him.
"This is what gambling has done: left me in poverty, homeless and confused," Zef says. "It's the most addictive, addictive thing that can take over a human life, especially someone with family. . . . I abuse it so much that it makes my heart bleed."
Hunched over a cup of coffee, watching a nearby poker game at the Normandie, Zef says grimly that "no one ever leaves here a winner."
He calls out to players as they walk by. "Win anything last night?"
A woman shakes her head. "What do you think?" she says dourly.
One man waves to Zef and heads out the door. "I gotta get myself out of this place," he says.
"I hear you," Zef calls after him, and yet he stays.
In fact, by mid-July, he is spending so many days and nights at the casino that it doesn't pay to keep his motel room. He leaves the Sea Rock Inn and stashes his clothes with a couple of friends. On the weekends, he rents a room at an airport motel so his son and daughter can stay with him.
When he needs to crash during the week, he goes to a seedy motel near the Normandie, a down-and-out place that caters to prostitutes who rent by the hour.
Today, the casino literally is his home, and he hates it.
"It's like a vicious jungle where air is running out, food is running out, water is running out, and everybody is just craving after what is left."
For now at least, at 49, Zef has one thing left--his health is relatively sound. The stresses of the gambling grind are enormous: staying up for days, eating sporadically, scraping for a bankroll, alone and consumed with self-loathing. Zef could become any of the scores of homeless gamblers who have become sick both in spirit and body. In a dozen years, he could be Tony Barone.
A heavyset, brooding chain-smoker sipping harsh coffee, 60-year-old Barone sits at the window of his $34 room at the Empire Motel in Downey.
His chest is scarred from a heart surgery three years ago. His feet are swollen and scaly from diabetes. His obsession has cost him not only his health but also his wife, his five children, everything that ever mattered.
Barone is especially worried on this particular Wednesday. The day before, he dropped $50 and now has only $3 left--scarcely enough for bus fare to the casino. Of more immediate concern, he is running out of insulin. He displays a thin vial that contains the last of his supply--about 100 units, a day's worth at his normal dosage. To buy more will cost at least $19. He can't afford that, and he can't afford his heart medication, and he can't afford to keep the motel room.
This is what his gambling has wrought, constant choices about which sickness to feed, whom he can pinch for some cash to survive another day. Tears stream down his cheeks.
"I don't care if I die tomorrow. I'm disgusted with the life I chose."
Playing the Final Hand: Death
Lost and broken, falling with the weight of a million bad choices and bad bets, many compulsive gamblers find a trapdoor in the darkness.
About one of every five compulsive gamblers attempts suicide, according to studies. Though comparative numbers are scarce, some counselors suspect that compulsive gamblers try to kill themselves as often--or more--than any other group of addicts.
With drug or alcohol abusers, there is the hope of sobering up, an accomplishment in itself, no matter what problems may have accompanied their addictions. Compulsive gamblers often see no way to purge their urges when suffocating debts suggest only one answer: a hot streak.
"They have nowhere to turn--they feel cornered," says Dr. Richard J. Rosenthal, a Beverly Hills psychiatrist who founded the California Council on Problem Gambling. "Very often they are motivated by their shame into more and more desperate attempts to avoid being found out."
David Phillips, a UC San Diego sociology professor, studied death records from 1982 to 1988--before legalized gambling exploded across America--and found that people in Las Vegas, Atlantic City and other gambling meccas showed significantly higher suicide rates than people in non-gambling cities.
The gambling industry insists that those numbers reflect other social forces, including high volumes of visitors and natural statistical fluctuations.
Whatever the explanation, the fact is many gamblers do take their own lives, as tragically illustrated by a single Gamblers Anonymous chapter in San Diego County.
Perhaps nowhere in California are there more places for a compulsive gambler to get into trouble than in the San Diego region. There's the Del Mar race track, a card club, three Indian casinos, sports books in nearby Mexico and countless California lottery outlets. The county's Gamblers Anonymous chapter has grown from 75 members a decade ago to 250 today.
In a span of just over a year, three men in the group, despondent over their gambling losses, took their own lives in especially brutal, public displays that seemed to underscore the destructiveness of the disease.
No one in the group remembers the name of the young man who was first to die in the spring of 1996; he attended only a few meetings under pressure from his mother, according to one of the chapter's unofficial leaders, a compulsive gambler named Malcolm who has been attending meetings for 30 years.
The young man was in his late 20s and was not so different from many others who attend only a few times and vanish. A lot of them are simply unwilling to acknowledge the severity of their problems.
The news of the young man's death reached the group members by word of mouth: He had taken the trolley to Tijuana and spent a day of off-track betting. That night, after losing, he reentered the States, lay down in the dark on the trolley tracks and was crushed.
The next death, six months later, was even more disturbing. Bobby was one of the chapter's most popular members, a 30-year-old Marine Corps staff sergeant stationed at Camp Pendleton. He had been coming to meetings for well over a year.
Joel, a chapter member who became one of his closest friends, says Bobby's problems started at the military base, where he began writing bad checks and taking money from subordinates. He was court-martialed in the summer of 1996. Joel and about 50 others testified at the hearing on Bobby's behalf.
"If you took the gambling out of his life, this was a perfect guy," Joel says, recalling the time Bobby witnessed a head-on collision and saved a woman's life by pulling her from the wreckage and administering CPR. "Handsome, sharp, glib . . . this guy was a hero, a very special person."
The patrons at Oceans 11, a card room in Oceanside, took it as a joke when Bobby stood in the bar late one night in October and announced he had just blown all his cash--a couple hundred dollars. "I think I'll go out and kill myself," he was later quoted as saying.
His body was found the next morning, hanging from a tree at a highway rest stop a few miles from the card room. He had fashioned a noose from a Marine Corps rappelling cord.
His death left chapter members badly shaken. The purpose of Gamblers Anonymous is to share their experience, strength and hope. That two men had now killed themselves was a cause for new introspection, and for some a reason to rededicate themselves to overcoming the disease.
Hundreds attended Bobby's funeral at a Lutheran church in Encinitas--a mix of Marines and Gamblers Anonymous members. Joel, who spoke at the service, was just one of many who had considered suicide himself, during long stretches when he was losing $5,000 a year at craps and poker.
"You figure, 'How can I get out of this mess?' " he says. " 'In the worst case, if I blow all the money, I can kill myself.' "
By pure coincidence, the month that Bobby was buried another ex-Marine showed up to attend his first Gamblers Anonymous meeting. His name was Barry. He also was in his early 30s--an outgoing, smooth-talking car salesman who had married his hair-stylist, Johanna, a year before.
Their union got off to a difficult start. Johanna was distraught to learn that her new husband was a hard-core gambler, $40,000 in debt.
Although they both attended meetings--GA and Gam-Anon--Barry's gambling problem escalated. He followed the typical pattern: concocting lies, running up credit cards, forging Johanna's signature to borrow more--inexorably destroying the marriage. They split in the late spring of 1997.
Outside a Gam-Anon meeting at an Encinitas church, Barry showed up and confronted Johanna. He had a bottle of whiskey and a handgun. He scolded her for refusing to talk to him and threatened to shoot himself, oblivious to a passing group of children leaving choir practice. Someone yelled to call 911. Johanna turned and walked away.
The last words she heard from him were, "You think I'm f-----g kidding?"
Then came the shot.
Rex's Future: In the Cards
Rex Trivia is not about to kill himself, but like most compulsive gamblers, he occasionally thinks about it. Looking at him, it's hard to imagine he once had a promising future as a smart young New York book editor. His pale eyes are expressionless, his hair yellowish and brittle. In his fifties, his health is failing: emphysema, three lung collapses, a bad aorta, rotting teeth.
His plunge has been so dizzying that at one point he agreed to aid another desperate gambler in a run of bank robberies--nine in all, throughout Los Angeles and Orange counties. When the FBI busted him in 1980, he had $50,000 in cash in a dresser drawer and $100,000 in travelers' checks in his refrigerator's vegetable crisper.
Rex, who ended up doing a short stint in prison, hasn't seen that kind of money since.
At 11 p.m. on a Tuesday night, with a bankroll of $55--all he has--he is at a poker table in Gardena. With quick, nervous hands he stacks and unstacks his $1 chips. The stack dwindles. Down $30, he talks about leaving, getting some sleep.
He says he'll stop at midnight.
Midnight comes and goes. Rex starts winning. Three aces. Four threes. Chips pile up--$60, $70. "A shame to go when the cards are falling my way." He checks the time: "I'll go at 2. Win, lose or draw."
Fate, kismet, luck--the cards keep falling. At 2 a.m., Rex is up $97. He stands, leaves his chips on the table and goes out for a smoke. In the darkness at the edge of the parking lot, he loiters with other regulars, debating with himself whether to grab a bus and quit.
"I should go back in there and cash in and get out of here," he says. "That's what I should do."
A long pause. Crushing out his cigarette, Rex turns and heads back inside. He has made his decision.
"A few more hands."
Gambling by the Numbers
* Amount the public lost wagering in 1997: $50.9 billion
* Estimated numbers of compulsive gamblers: 4.4 million
* Federal funds committed to treat problem gamblers: None
Sources: International Gaming and Wagering Business, Harvard University Medical School and National Council on Problem Gambling
Diagnostic Criteria for Pathological Gambling
Pathological gambling is defined as persistent and recurrent inappropriate gambling behavior in which a person does five or more of the following:
1. Is preoccupied with gambling (reliving past gambling experiences, handicapping or planning the next venture, or thinking of ways to get money with which to gamble).
2. Needs to gamble with increasing amounts of money in order to achieve the desired excitement.
3. Makes repeated unsuccessful efforts to control, cut back or stop gambling.
4. Is restless or irritable when attempting to cut down or stop gambling.
5. Gambles as a way of escaping problems or of relieving feelings of helplessness, guilt, anxiety, depression.
6. After losing money gambling, often returns another day to get even ("chasing" one's losses).
7. Lies to family members, therapist or others to conceal the extent of involvement with gambling.
8. Commits illegal acts such as forgery, fraud, theft or embezzlement to finance gambling.
9. Jeopardizes or loses a significant relationship, job, or educational or career opportunity because of gambling.
10. Relies on others to provide money to relieve a desperate financial situation caused by gambling.
Source: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, published by the American Psychiatric Assn.
For seven months, Times staff writers David Ferrell and Matea Gold traveled the country examining the phenomenal growth of legalized gambling and its profound social consequences. Their three-part series, "Going for Broke," provides a revealing look at the gambling industry and at the tragic lives of some of those who help it thrive.
TODAY: Compulsive gambling is one of our most overlooked and troubling problems--a crisis, some would say. Millions of gambling junkies are suffering financial and familial ruin, costing society in the process.
http://articles.latimes.com/1998/dec/13/news/mn-53727
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