Source: The Cincinnati Enquirer, Kimball Perry; November 23, 2008.
Eve Osborne has a lot in common with Michelle Paluga and Sandra Benner.
All three women had decent jobs, loving families and good reputations as they lived what appeared to be everyday, ordinary lives.
Then, just for a little fun, each started gambling. Online, at the riverboat casinos, playing the lottery.
They also started losing.
The fun turned into an obsession as they gambled more and more to try to make up for the money they lost.
Then, when the addiction had a firm grip on them, they started stealing – from family members, from PTAs, from employers.
Their addictions and crimes have cost them spouses, houses and cars – and now their freedom.
All three are convicted thieves; two are in prison.
They join a growing national trend of women who steal, cheat and rob to feed their gambling addiction.
“There’s a big societal shift. Women didn’t used to do this. Women are catching up to men,” said Keith Whyte, executive director of the National Council on Problem Gambling.
Arnie Wexler has seen it first-hand.
Wexler is the former executive director for the Council on Compulsive Gambling of New Jersey, but now runs his own problem-gambling counseling business with a national hotline.
When he ran the New Jersey council 10 years ago, he estimated 20-25 percent of the calls involved female gamblers.
Now, his national problem gambling hotline – 1-888-LASTBET – gets “about half” of its calls from women, Wexler said.
About 4.2 million Americans – or 1.4 percent of the total U.S. population – are addicted to gambling, a study by the National Institute of Mental Health noted. Of them, about 60 percent have annual incomes under $25,000.
As women worked to achieve equal status with men, they also achieved it in gambling.
In 1975, 68 percent of men had gambled in their lifetime, as had 55 percent of women. Now, those figures are 88 percent for men and 83 percent for women.
A generation or two ago, it was unusual to see women gamble. Now, with women having careers, access to loans and credit cards, more have become problem gamblers.
“When you have a situation with slots or (video) poker machines, that’s where the numbers are going crazy,” Wexler said.
Women prefer slots and machine games – probably because it can cost as little as a nickel and they have easy rules – while men prefer table games like poker and blackjack, Wexler said.
Osborne and Benner often visited the Indiana riverboat casinos.
Paluga loved online gambling.
All seemed to live routine lives and used gambling for recreation or as a retreat.
That’s not unusual, Whyte said, for problem women gamblers. “Often, they are using gambling to escape problems in their life,” he said. “You can sit in front of a slot machine and it doesn’t talk back to you.”
Osborne, 49, seemed to have a great life. A U.S. military veteran, she had a good job, was married for two decades to a Cincinnati police officer and shared a house with him and their two children.
But the allure of the casinos destroyed that life, replacing it with one where Osborne became a liar, a thief and a bad mom.
“She messed up Christmas going to the casino,” her son, David Osborne, said at her court sentencing. “She used to skip her job to go to the casinos.”
“She has lost a house, her job, her car, everything to this gambling problem,” her daughter, Devona Osborne, added.
Despite that, Osborne didn’t get arrested until two years ago.
Her attorney, Carl Lewis, knew Osborne before she hired him. Lewis taught her in a college business law class. He has known her before and since her gambling had ruined her life.
“This is one of the saddest cases I’ve ever had,” Lewis said. “This is a textbook definition of what a gambling addiction can do. The addiction has just taken over her life.”
So much so that she gambled knowing that if she got caught, she would go to prison.
She was arrested in 2006, charged with forging another woman’s name on an $858 check. She was placed on probation for two years and ordered to do 200 hours of community service.
Hamilton County Common Pleas Judge Fred Nelson also told Osborne to stay out of casinos and attend Gamblers Anonymous.
She was arrested again in June 2007 for helping two men rob the Springdale clothing store where she used to work. She was convicted and placed on probation again with six months of house arrest.
Nelson then ordered her to stop gambling entirely.
Later, the judge would discover the lengths Osborne went to feed her addiction. Besides buying lottery tickets, Osborne went to the riverboats – often using a wig or other disguises in hopes of not being spotted by someone who knew the judge had banned her.
Osborne also stole money from her sick mother.
Officials said Osborne stole her mom’s ATM card and withdrew money from her account – often from ATMs inside the casinos.
Finally, in May, she forged the name of another woman to cash a $637 payroll check.
“It is unusual (that) somebody with a record of reasonably productive service would turn in her mid-40s to a pattern of crime,” Nelson said in sending Osborne to prison for four years and three months. “You seem to have been something of a crime wave since then.”
Paluga’s case is similar, but she stole from her employer and embarrassed her family while betraying her community.
Paluga, 43, of Colerain Township, was the mom at whose house the neighborhood kids congregated and was president of the Bevis PTA.
Now, she is prisoner W072931 at the Ohio Reformatory for Women.
Paluga had a part-time job with a Norwood sales training company.
That’s how she paid for the family’s flat-screen televisions, laptops, her designer clothes and diamond rings and cruises for her family.
At least that’s what she told her family and neighborhood children who gathered at her house.
When she pleaded guilty to theft, though, she told a judge she got the money for those items – and to pay for her online gambling addiction – by stealing.
She stole $150,000 from her employer and another $28,000 from the PTA.
She was sent to prison in August for 18 months. She’s due out in February 2010.
Benner, 65, stole almost as much but isn’t going to prison.
The bookkeeper stole $151,089 from her Lockland employer so she could gamble at the riverboat casinos near her home.
She was placed on probation for five years and ordered to pay back the money. Her employer said Benner has begun making payments. If she doesn’t repay the money in five years, she’ll go to prison for 18 months.
Benner, experts say, represents the fastest-growing population of female gamblers – seniors.
“They may be dealing with grief or a loss issue, death,” Whyte said.
“They get free food, often get free transportation and (casino employees) know their name.”
The legal woes for Benner and Paluga aren’t over.
Each company they stole from had insurance covering $100,000 in losses. But now, the insurers have filed civil suits against each woman, seeking the money they paid.
The issue of women problem gamblers isn’t going away soon, Whyte said.
“It used to be women gambled, but not much. Now, women are equally at risk if not more so.”
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