From news items dated March 25 to April 14:

Beverly Howard,  the 53-year-old former director of dining services for a school district in Connecticut, on April 13 pleaded guilty to embezzling nearly $350,000 from her employer and giving the money to Foxwoods.
The 67-year-old former head of the Lithuanian Club in Waterbury, CT was sentenced April 8 [...]

From news items dates March 17 to March 25:

Douglas Nickerson, a former executive with General Casualty Insurance, was sentenced on March 25 to nearly 4 years in prison for embezzling more than $1 million to feed a gambling addiction.
The former treasurer of a Montana Little League team was sentenced to 30 days in jail for [...]

From news items dated March 1 to March 17:

Connie Marie Hanson, 56, was sentenced on March 2 to 55 months in prison for embezzling close to $1 million from disabled veterans for whom she served as fiduciary. Her lawyer said “the loss in this case is directly attributable to her gambling. She took from those [...]

From stories dated Feb. 21 to Feb. 28:

A self-described compulsive gambler, Arthur Bittner, attempted to rob a Colorado bank on Feb. 25. He entered the bank with a shotgun and handed a note to the teller, but lost his nerve and fled without collecting anything. Police soon found Bittner, complete with the gun and the [...]

From news items dated Feb. 9 to Feb. 20:

Rhonda Skiver, 32, pleaded guilty on Feb. 19 to embezzling more than $163,000 from the nursing home of which she was formerly CFO. The money was used for gambling debts and personal expenses.
An Oregon woman, Victoria Monfore, was sent to prison on Feb. 18 for stealing about [...]

From stories dated Jan. 22 to Feb 6., 2010.

Tennessee attorney James M. Hoots was jailed Feb. 5 on charges of embezzling $76,000 from a trust fund for two orphans whose parents died in a murder-suicide. Hoots gambled the money away. He allegedly came clean to a witness,  saying, “I took the children’s money and took [...]

From stories dated Jan. 14 to Jan. 22, 2010.

An 18-year veteran of an upstate New York police department, Robert Risi, on Jan. 21 began serving a one-to-three-year sentence for stealing cash from his department’s evidence room to support his gambling addiction. Risi, the father of a six-month-old daughter, has already paid restitution of $15,800 and [...]

Compulsive gamblers going nuts is again our theme, because they continue going nuts, and because the cumulative effect of the stories of their ongoing nuts-going may prove beneficial someday. I don’t know. But it’s worse out there than you’d think:

A defense attorney for Ausaf “Omar” Siddiqui asked a judge on Dec. 23 to dismiss [...]

Happy new year, they say. I’ll believe that when I see it. The times are as dark as we’ve known. Those of us not killing ourselves are eating the people who are. Life, in America, is not good. We’re either hoopleheads or burglars. Saints are rare. Decency is inconceivable. I get in a van this [...]

Merry Christmas, winners! We are all champions. We should love ourselves. We are taller than average, strong of heart, curious of intellect, not balding (so much), we jog almost once every week. We are the reason America rules over the moon. Did you know they use the US dollar in Panama in lieu of their [...]

Welcome to the fourth installment of This Week In Madness, a lightheared and frequently sickening look at gamblers gone a hair beyond the pale. It distresses me to write these things for you. Once every week I have to spend an hour or two reading and thinking about suicide attempts, bankruptcies, devastated lives, and remembering [...]

Ethicist Jack Marshall today has a great post on the Terry Watanabe case. Characterizing casinoland as an ethical black hole, he compares it to the Chinatown of ethically black-holish Roman Polanski’s movie: “a place where normal expectations and values don’t apply, and chaos and tragedy reign.” He ends up shrugging his ethicist’s shoulders and quoting [...]

You don’t have to gamble badly and if you do gamble badly you don’t have to gamble badly through all your available funds and then embezzle from your boss, from your clients if you are a lawyer, from the Little League if you are a Little League president in Oklahoma, from the campaign funds of [...]

Again this week: people gambled. Some lost, went to Dark Realms of the Psyche and made headlines for it. So we’re back with a second installment of our continuing series. Whee.

Kay Frances Thorn was given a suspended a sentence and ordered to pay restitution of $117,548.78 after pleading guilty to felony embezzlement from the Taylor [...]

Gambling is fun either as a lark or as a test of wits or as a dalliance with forces bigger and more brutal than you are, or sometimes as all three. Now and again the dallying gets to be hardcore. A chord gets struck; a patsy falls into a rut. And suddenly the limits are [...]