University of Calgary PRISM: University of Calgary's Digital Repository Alberta Gambling Research Institute Alberta Gambling Research Institute 1977 The chase : career of the compulsive gambler Lesieur, Henry R. Anchor Press http://hdl.handle.net/1880/41342 book Downloaded from PRISM: https://prism.ucalgary.ca ,. Career of the Compulsive Gambler THE CHASE CAREER OF THE COMPULSIVE GAbIBLER OTHER ANCHOR PRESS BOOKS OF INTEREST: HARD LIVING ON CLAY STREET by Joseph T. Howell TOMORROW'S TOMORROW: the Black Woman by Joyce A. Ladner BEHIND THE SHIELD: the Police in Urban Society by Arthur Niederhoffer HUSTLERS, BEATS, AND OTHERS by Ned Polsky . Henry R. Lesieur received his introduction to gambling while working at a gas station on the major route to a race track. During the five years he spent there as a senior in high school and undergraduate in college, he got to know jockeys, trainers, owners, bookmakers, and gamblers of all types. This left him with a keen interest in gamblers and a recognition that gambling is not equal to organized crime. Since then, he has spent several years observing Gamblers Anonymous groups and interviewing gamblers in order to write this book. Dr. Lesieur is now an assistant professor of sociology at McGill University. Anchor Boolis Anchor Press/Doubleday Garden City, New York 1977 ISBN: 0-385-12601-8 I Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 76-238 10 Copyright-. - O- 1976. 1977 bv Hem R. Lesieur All &hts reserved - Printed in the United States of America First Edition I Contents ~uthor'sNote viii Introduction xi I - The Chase: "Putting Good Money After Bad" 1 n -Action 23 ,111- The Family 54 N - Occupation and Gambling 88 V - The Bookmaker and His Business Relations 109 VI - Getting Money from Lending Institutions 144 VII - Getting Money Through the Gambling Setting 165 VIII - Crime, Options, and Concerns 183 ' IX - Abstinence-and-Relapse Cycles Among Compulsive Gamblers 200 X - The Spiral of Options and Involvement 217 Appendix A - The Research Process 241 , Appendix B - Gamblers Anonymous Pamphlet 258 Appendix C - Order in Which Offenses Were Committed by the Gamblers 263 List of References 266 Notes 272 Index and Glossary Reference 287 worked at a gas station on the major route to a race track. I the five years working there I encountered many differer gamblers. Some of the gamblers who used to hang around this ga station were "holding their own" (losing money but nc chasing). Some of them would "hold action" for a few cur tomers, and at times if the horse was "too hot," I would b sent over to put the action in with the local bookmaker an, would occasionally put a few dollars in for myself. What had impressed me the most about those years wa that "gamblers die broke," "you can win a race, but you can' beat the races," "I bet on a horse but it's still running," an' "I'm overdue [for a winner].'' In addition to this, I saw evi dence of some common means of getting money for gam bling. A gambler would come in and ask if he could pay th, b'ill with a check always larger than the bill (the answer wa a de£hite no); alternatively he would ask me to give hin money on his credit card. As I was about to make out th bill, the gambler would ask me to add ten, fifteen, or twent dollars onto it, give him the cash, and possibly give me a do1 lar for doing him the favor. And other gamblers would corn in with tires, batteries, watches, shirts, and other hot items fo sale. Later on, in graduate school, the only reference I saw tc gambling as a form of deviant behavior was in relation to or ganized crime. While I sensed that the local bookmakers wen pooled into an organized network, the "degenerate gamblers' I knew were "degenerate" because they lost money gambliq AUTHOR'S NOTE ix and would resort to shady business and other practices as a (for example, several of these "degenerate gamblers" were "honest John"-type used-car salesmen, including one of the local tire and battery "fences"). In a sense, most of the textbooks and readers in the sociology of deviance grossly &.represented the gambling world.1 I gradually forgot about the gamblers until I saw a television special on Gamblers Anonymous. This rekindled earlier memories and I decided to do a master's thesis on the organization (Lesieur, 1973). At the first meeting of Gamblers Anonymous I attended I experienced a sort of culture shock. There were people talk- 'ge ing about loan sharks coming after them, fraudulent loans (I k. lrfound it hard to believe that people could have more than ten ereqoans at the same time), losing a personal business, and dis- cussion of suicide. There were people there who had not gagambled in three years and another who had lottery tickets in nohis pocket and had just placed a bet with the bookmaker. Given this shock and the inadequacy of the criminology b'books I had read, I knew immediately that I had to learn antmore about the career and illegal behavior patterns of com- pulsive gamblers. The Chase is the result of this exploration. wa can' I would like to thank Peter Park for his persistent questions an&bout the whereabouts of the ever-elusive theoretical model. evi~issuggestion about dialectics and feedback eventually put Kammany disparate ideas all together. It was Rob Faulkner who ' a student's field notes and talked about wanting to "be Wathere." Without this the notes would still have consisted of hinthe sorry state of one and two pages of comments for each : ththree hours of observation. Rob also insisted on clarifying the enqsequential model that he knew was here somewhere. It is dol~onyHarris I thank for pressures to quantify-turn "some" Omland "many" into numbers and develop the tables that clarify faithiswork. I would also like to thank Peter d'Errico for read- ing and commenting on all of this, as well as Joe Sheley, who t(pointed out some problems with Chapter VIII in an earlier ' OFstage. Most important of all, however, are the Gamblers verl Anonymous members who started all this off and commented ers'on portions of the work, and non-Gamblers Anonymous 'linf members including the prisoners, students, people at the golf X AUTHOR'S NOTE course, wives of the gamblers, and all the others who helpe me probe into their lives. As I mentioned to them, the: anonymity is preserved. The following people helped or attempted to help me gai interviews in the criminal justice system: Sheriff John Boyi of the Hampshire County Jail, Vincent Colagiovanni, Richar Greene, Richard Gaskell, Arthur Fortier, Joseph Morga Carla Ledin, Lucille Calabrese, Tom Dempsey, Bob Hint and Mary Flanigan of Rhode Island probation and paroli and Warden Wager and Gordon Pitman of F.C.I. in Dar bury, Connecticut. In addition, I received a small grant from the Social an Demographic Research Institute at the University of Mass: chusetts, which enabled me to hire a secretary to transcrib the last few interviews and make a few more trips to reinte~ view some key informants. The writings of a na'ive author were gone over with a l5.n~ tooth comb by Elizabeth Knappman and Joan Kass at AI chor Press/Doubleday. Thanks to them, this product is not a redundant as it was. The end product was made more in teresting as a result. Last, but not least, I would like to say one thing to Helen my wife: It's your turn. I dedicate this book to you with 4 my love. ielpe! the; : gai Boy1 char )rga Hint aroli Dar I an In many barrooms, poolrooms, bowling alleys, and casinos, [ass: and at many golf courses and race tracks, there are groups crib of men who engage in seemingly illogical behavior. They intel "chase." That is, they gamble and lose yet continue to gamble some more in order to "get even." The more money that is ke AI lost, the more intense the "chase." Another name for the ot a "chase" is compulsive gambling. Compulsive gamblers are e in those people who through the chase become trapped in a self- enclosed system of option usage and involvement. elen The "chase" is only one aspect of involvement in compul- h al sive gambling. At the same time, the gambler acquires a fasci- nation with the excitement of gambling, and increased debt, and a desire to resolve that debt by gambling. He uses more and more options to get money when gambling fails, includ- ing everything from the paycheck and "stealing a little from the cookie jar" to use of such lending institutions as banks and loan sharks, to burglary and armed robbery. What is ironic is that increasing debt reduces the options available for resolving that debt. Once an option has been em- ployed to its fullest it is exhausted. If he owes one thousand dollars to the bookmaker by noon tomorrow, there may be only a few options left. The gambler may try gambling with another bookmaker or he may try doing something illegal that he can rationalize. Increased involvement and reduced options interact as a spiral. As involvement increases, the options available are steadily used up and a spiral is created, something like a cone. - Options INVOLVEMENT A gambler gets more and more involved as he gets deeper and deeper into debt and the stakes he wagers climb. At the same time, he becomes more engrossed in the action and in- tensity of the chase.