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As lost weekends go, this one was a doozy.


She picked up the telephone and called her host, John Conklin, Resorts' vice president of player development, whose job it is to keep gamblers happy _ and coming back.

"This is more than I can handle," she told him. "I'm in over my head. All of my real estate is underwater. I don't know what I'm going to do."

Conklin was concerned.

"She sounded desperate," he recalled. "I could hear it in her voice."

He gave her the phone number of Arnie Wexler, the former head of New Jersey's Council on Compulsive Gambling and himself a former gambling addict. Wexler helped get the woman and her boyfriend into a program for gambling addicts, promised to help her work out some sort of arrangement with the casinos, and just let her know she was not alone, that there are thousands like her.




"There is a strong belief among many of the casino executives that there is a moral obligation to do this," he said. "But there's also a strong business reason: Problem gamblers make for lousy customers. By their very nature, they will turn into bad debt.

"For them to hit bottom, they have to cause a lot of pain along the way, to themselves, their families and to companies," he said. "It serves no purpose in any business to have customers who can't pay their bills."

The center developed a training program called Emerge, which has become the standard among casinos belonging to the American Gaming Association, the industry's main trade group. Different casinos use it differently, but the aim is the same: to intervene when there is a problem, Feldman said.


"You're not clinicians, you're not counselors," he told the workers. "It's not your job to run over to a customer and say, `Hey buddy, you've got a gambling problem.' But you can kick it upstairs to an officer in your casino and they can intervene and take care of it. Let a supervisor know about it."


"If you have a regular patron and you see them making larger, crazy wagers, it might be that they're trying to break even. It might be that they're caught up in an addiction. If you see a patron going through mood swings, that could be another indication. Talk to the patron. Maybe suggest a brief timeout. Give them the 1-800-GAMBLER number and let them know there's a place where they can get help."


"We feel like we have a moral obligation," said Aaron Gomes, executive vice president of operations at Resorts and the son of former co-owner Dennis Gomes, who died Friday. "We're in the business of entertaining customers. When it stops being entertaining, we want our workers to talk to them and see if there is a problem."









Such lawsuits rarely succeed, but they can be costly for casinos to defend, and damaging to their reputation. Taveras' suit was dismissed, and Taveras served nearly 3 1/2 years in prison for stealing clients' money to finance her gambling. She wishes someone at any of the casinos she frequented _ including Resorts _ would have taken her aside and tried to talk some sense into her when it was obvious she needed help.

"I'd stay three, four days at the table and have a Snickers bar," she said. "There are people who pee on their seats because they don't want to get up. You mean you don't see that? Come on. They have a duty to us."


"Capitalism is capitalism; I get that," she said. "My issue is that they need to take steps to weed out casualties."


Wayne Parry can be reached at

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