Thursday, July 27, 2006 | 7:38 a.m.
James nursed his teenage gambling habit with small-time crime - stealing from his mother's purse, breaking into piggy banks, picking pockets and running to the racetrack, where his problems all began.
Today James is 49 and living in Las Vegas with about $1 million in debt that came as a result of his gambling.
He's good at committing crimes for cash. He's expert in losing it all.
"I was the type of gambler I'd consider a total degenerate," he says. "My habit got bigger and I got involved in white-collar crime. Bank fraud. Insurance fraud. Fraud fraud. I was just a con man."
Researchers in Las Vegas have studied the connection between problem gambling and criminal behavior, and statistics echo what most already suspect: Serious gambling addictions are sometimes supported by crime.
James bounced between banks to cash bad checks. He ran online money transfer and credit schemes. He drove the getaway car for robberies. He won't give his last name because he's never been caught.
UNLV professor Richard McCorkle surveyed the general population of Las Vegas detention facilities in 2002, and determined that one in every 10 inmates could be diagnosed as pathological gamblers like James.
The American Psychological Association calls pathological gambling an impulse-control disorder. In layman's terms, it's wildly compulsive gambling.
The pathological gamblers McCorkle studied reported losing more than $1,000 a day. One-third said they had committed robbery to get money to gamble. Almost half reported committing property crimes for gambling cash. More than a quarter said they had committed assaults for reasons related to gambling. Almost 90 percent had prior arrests.
The American Gaming Association, which represents the casino industry, estimates that pathological gamblers make up 1 percent of the U.S. adult population. Researchers estimate that between 5 and 15 percent of gross gaming revenue is generated by problem and pathological gamblers, according to the AGA. The National Council on Problem Gambling estimates pathological gamblers represent 2 percent to 3 percent of Americans.
When McCorkle, a criminal justice professor, combined less-severe "problem gamblers" into his study, the ratio of Las Vegas inmates with gambling issues jumped to one in six.
"Gambling is, directly or indirectly, a motivation or cause of a significant proportion of all criminal offending by those with serious gambling disorders," his study concluded.
And those are just the people who got caught.
Compulsive gamblers most often commit small crimes nobody bothers to notice, says Carol O'Hare, executive director of the Nevada Council on Problem Gambling.
"The true crimes that are occurring are the very low-radar crimes or the white-collar crimes," she says, citing as examples petty theft or a parent sneaking money out of a kid's sock drawer. "These are desperate people who resort to criminal activity when all their options appear to be cut off. They are making these decisions through a filter and a fog of pain and panic."
Unlike other addicts, pathological gamblers who steal often keep meticulous records of their criminal transgressions because they think they're just borrowing until the next big win, O'Hare says. And if the police are called, thieving gamblers will greatly underreport their criminal take, not to evade punishment, but because the hallmark of compulsive gambling is routine distortion of the facts.
"Superseding reality is a part of gambling," she says. "It's sort of like falling down the rabbit hole There is always a way to get more money, and when all of the legal available means run out, certainly you consider illegal means."
During her own battle with compulsive gambling, O'Hare wrote bad checks on Friday and covered them on Monday, viewing it not as a crime but as creative financing.
Almost two-thirds of 93 people surveyed at local Gamblers Anonymous meetings in 2002 by UNLV professor Keith Schwer reported passing bad checks. Half said they stole money or things and used the profit to gamble or pay gambling debts. About 30 percent admitted to stealing money from their workplace. On average, the Gamblers Anonymous members surveyed reported stealing about $7,200 for gambling, losing about $110,000 gambling and being $57,160 in debt because of gambling.
Every week in Las Vegas, there are about 100 GA meetings - a chorus of addicts recounting their roads to rock bottom, one moral misstep at a time.
James, who has been in and out of the program for 33 years, started attending again in 2003 and now goes to GA meetings almost every day.
Some late-night sessions are held in a stuffy building that sits in the shadow of the Strip. Inside that building earlier this week, mothers celebrated their six-month anniversaries away from slot machines, and clean-cut businessmen discussed the strange freedom that comes with giving up the losing game.
Tim moved to Las Vegas in 2004 and spent a year and a half blowing through $135,000 on blackjack and video poker, the crack cocaine of compulsive gambling. He refinanced his house twice and gutted his retirement. When the money was gone, he wrote bad checks, maxed out credit cards and considered robbing a bank.
"I was totally nuts. I basically felt like I was going crazy," he says. "I wanted to do anything to feed my habit. This was my drug of choice."
Gambling addicts are seldom people you would associate with criminal behavior, says Dr. Rob Hunter, a clinical psychologist who runs the Problem Gambling Center. His prototypical example of a criminal gambler is the Catholic priest he treated several years ago - a man who was "by all other means, a man of God."
The priest worked in a West Coast city's poorest parish by choice and got into trouble quickly because of his limited income, Hunter says. Eventually, a loan shark threatened to tell church authorities about his growing gambling debt and the priest panicked. He stole $200 from the poor box and put it on a horse at 4-1 odds, praying, perhaps, that he would win, get out of the red and pad the collection plate.
"In his convoluted logic, he wasn't doing something criminal, he was protecting (his parishioners)," Hunter says. "The problem was that his horse came in last and he ended up attempting to commit suicide."
While not excusing criminal behavior, both Hunter and O'Hare say compulsive gamblers aren't criminals who happen to gamble, but rather gamblers who don't recognize they've become criminals.
"There is this horror of, if I just keep taking little bits of money, I'll have a little bit more to play with and cover up what I lost," O'Hare says. "The thinking is, 'I'm just going to make it up tomorrow.' "
James, now in recovery, says that he never intended to pay back what he stole: "I chose to commit crimes. I knew exactly what I was doing."
By the time he was 30, James had a $1,200 daily gambling habit in addition to playing the stock market like roulette - trading on the volatile options market, where entire investments can be lost in a day. James, who owned a chain of stores that made him a brief millionaire in 1980, went bankrupt in two years.
"I had assets, I had bank accounts, bonds and cash and real estate," he says. "It was just a liquidation process. Once the money ran out, all that mattered was to bring in more than I could afford, to bring me the rush and the thrill."
In Schwer's study, a handful of Gamblers Anonymous members reported stealing more than $10,000. One confessed to stealing more than $1 million.
The real debts and desperations of Las Vegas' most problematic gamblers, however, are impossible to study. The most-troubled gamblers - and potential criminals - aren't in treatment, the experts say: They're in casinos, and they're hard to pick out.
"The rest of the world might not see anything wrong," O'Hare says. "I don't slur my speech and stumble because I've blown my paycheck. You can't smell a roll of quarters on my breath."
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