'It was electronic heroin'

'It was electronic heroin': Disgraced San Diego mayor who gambled away $1 billion reveals she would lose $100,000 A DAY through her addiction

By James Nye and Lydia Warren
PUBLISHED:  February 2013








The former San Diego Mayor who won and lost more than a billion dollars through gambling has branded the addiction that took hold of her as 'electronic heroin'.
Maureen O'Connor, 66, has revealed that she would lose more than $100,000 a day as the addiction took hold - but that she also believes a brain tumour was partly to blame for her actions.

'It's just like a drug addict,' she told CBSin an interview. 'You have to have the fix. It was ike electronic heroin: The more you did, the more you needed and the more it wasn't satisfied.'

O'Connor, who led the city from 1986 to 1992, admitted in court last week to taking $2 million from her late husband's foundation to feed the addiction and vowed to repay the debt.

Big spender: Former San Diego Mayor Maureen O'Connor has revealed in an interview that she would lose $100,000 a day to gambling and likened her addiction to that of a drug addict

She said she would spend entire days in casinos, wasting away the fortune she inherited from her husband, Robert O. Peterson, the founder of the Jack-In-The-Box restaurant chain.

While she used some of the $50 million inheritance to help others, she also 'lost a fortune' gambling it away on video poker games, she said. 'I used to tell everybody is was the 'hope mobile' going to the casino and it was the 'broke' mobile' coming home,' she said. 'You stay there until basically the money is gone.'

As her fortune swiftly started slipping away, she began to sell of properties to raise millions more - while casinos throughout the state offered her lavish gifts so she would return.

In court: O'Connor, 66, walks to federal court in San Diego last week with her attorney Eugene Iredale

Owning up: O'Connor admitted that she misappropriated $2 million from her late husband's charitable foundation and was ordered to pay it back and undergo treatment for her gambling addiction

Eventually she turned to a private foundation set up in her husband's name, raiding it of $2 million, federal prosecutor Phillip Halpern said. She said she considered it a loan, while the state accused her of money laundering.

Riches: She inherited $50 million from her businessman husband Robert Peterson

While she apologised and acknowledged she is to blame, she also said she believes a growing golf ball-sized brain tumour affected her personality.
'It's not an excuse for my gambling, but I think that was, yes, a part of it. You lose your sense of control,' she said.
Her attorney, Eugene Iredale, said that the brain tumor could have existed before 2008 and led to changes in behavior by pressing on centers of the brain which affect judgement and reasoning.

She was diagnosed with the tumour when she began hallucinating and later underwent surgery to remove it.
'After the tumor was taken out and I started healing, I have no desire to gamble,' she told CBS.

Halpern said the charges will be dropped if O'Connor repays the charity and gets help for addiction.
She and millionaire Peterson were married in 1977 and the wealthy philanthropist, passed away in 1994 after setting up the R.P. Foundation.
O'Connor was able to get her hands on the money from the foundation as a member of a three-person board along with her sister Mavourneen O'Connor and John McCloskey.
By the late 1990s, the R.P. Foundation was reporting total assets exceeding $3 million. The holding began to diminish in the 2000s, and declined to $2.1 million by 2008, tax records show.

The foundation went broke and closed in 2009, a federal official said.

Leader: O'Connor, pictured in 1991, was mayor of San Diego between 1986 and 1992

Success: Her husband was founder of the Jack in the Box restaurant chain, which now has 2,200 locations

According to documents filed in court she gambled at high stakes games at casinos in Atlantic City, Las Vegas and San Diego.

Prosecutors in her case said that she had completed $1 billion in gambling winnings and losing between 2000 and 2008 and now is in poor physical health and described as 'destitute.'

At a press conference following the hearing, O'Connor said that she had simply borrowed the money from her husband's foundation.

'I always intended to pay it back,' she said to UT San Diego. 'And I still intend to pay it back. In that period of time I lost my husband, three siblings, best friends.'

Under the terms of her deferred prosecution O'Connor will have to undergo psychiatric treatment for gambling addiction and attempt to pay back every penny that she claims to have borrowed.


Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2282866/Former-San-Diego-mayor-Maureen-OConnor-speaks-gambling-addiction.html#ixzz2LjnscuM9