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Gambling Addiction on the Rise

Every day it seems we are hearing about someone else killing themselves, or someone else, because they are desperate over their gambling debts. Embezzlement, suicide, theft, these are all terms that we have become used to hearing because the amount of each of these crimes is on the rise due to people trying to either find ways to gamble more, or to end the gambling once and for all.

Danny Harris, Sr. of Grand Island was an airport skycap before he pled guilty to embezzling almost $100,000 from his fellow skycaps’ investment fund. He got five years probation, and lost his job. Judith Ann Scheitheir was a bookkeeper in the City of Tonawanda, and she pled guilty to taking $350,000 from the city to gamble. She said she was trying to cover debts she had run up at the casinos.

Bankruptcy filings have gone up as well, there were almost 1,400 in the first three months of the year, as opposed to a little over 800 same time last year. Those filing for bankruptcy have to fill out a form called “Statement of Financial Affairs” that asks if they are in debt because of gambling debt. Experts say that many claim that it has nothing to do with it, but more often than not they find that it does.

Counselors find that suicides are on the rise as well. Some people have gotten themselves so far into debt that they cannot see a way out of it. Many times their loved ones don’t even know they had a gambling problem until after they kill themselves. One man, Michael Pellegrino, took a gun and shot himself right in the middle of the casino floor – they found out later that he was in debt for hundreds of thousands of dollars that he had lost at the casino. They don’t even know how much he lost at other places.

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