Again, Gambling Gets Out of Hand

The headline this week called Ana Limbaring a thief. A 10-year prison sentence put the exclamation point on it.

But Limbaring’s letter to the judge described a thief with another problem that had been tearing her apart. She said she was an addictive gambler whose embezzlement of $1.85 million from the Orange County Performing Arts Center over a five-year period had fed the beast. Her attorney said she lost most of the money at the Pechanga Casino in Temecula.

Bruce Roberts doesn’t know Limbaring, but he certainly knows of people like her. He’s the executive director of the California Council on Problem Gambling, and if Limbaring’s life comes close to resembling the broad-strokes profile I asked Roberts to give of a troubled gambler, getting caught may have felt like a reprieve to her.

“We call it the hidden addiction,” Roberts says, from his office on Harbor Boulevard in Anaheim. Besides showing no outward signs of addiction, the problem gambler “internalizes everything,” Roberts says. “They feel there’s no one to talk to. They’re certain they can solve the problems themselves.”

The gambling addict’s problem intensifies because he’s often not confronted with it, Roberts says. Unlike an alcoholic, who’s “liable to find himself on a park bench with no shoes,” the compulsive gambler can keep the secret buried for years.

All too often, Roberts says, the problem doesn’t go away. The gambler doesn’t recoup big losses or make the big score. Trying to solve the problem becomes a lifetime pursuit. Eventually, Roberts says, the gambler may feel he’s run out of choices. Addicted gamblers have four times the suicide rate of drug addicts, he says.

Limbaring’s thefts started small and got larger as time went on, senior Deputy Dist. Atty. William Overtoom says. That fits the troubled-gambler profile. Roberts says he’s met “very few” people who suddenly became problem gamblers. Rather, it’s a slow descent.

In her letter to the judge, Limbaring said she was still embarrassed by her crime but had kept telling herself that “somehow, some day, I would be able to pay it back by winning big.”

Typically, Roberts says, the problem gambler is “fairly bright, well-brought-up, with values, and they cross the line on those values, little by little.”

We all hear about the “rush” that gambling brings -- the instant payoff or the instant plunge.

“The rush dies, believe me,” Roberts says. What is much more likely is that guilt becomes the dominant emotion, because what it takes to finance the gambling -- spending family funds or committing crimes -- conflicts with the gambler’s basic values.

Veteran prosecutor Overtoom doesn’t dispute Limbaring’s self-description of a problem gambler. He says that supporting a gambling habit is one of the typical reasons people embezzle.

Limbaring’s deeds were “really wrong,” Overtoom says. However, he adds, “I’m not going to tell you I’m unsympathetic. On the contrary, this is a tragic, very tragic case. If you talk to the people at the arts center, what I’ve been told is that she was considered part of the family and highly trustworthy.”

It’s a sad irony that at the moment Limbaring finally laid her burden down, she became a convicted criminal.

No matter how many times he hears a new gambling addict’s story, Roberts says, it still breaks his heart. He urges people with problems to call the organization’s 24-hour hotline at 1-800-GAMBLER or go online at www.calproblemgambling.org.

“The story we hear time after time,” Roberts says, “is a gambler coming home from a casino or a card club late at night, totally broke, penniless, owing money all over the place, bill collectors after him, pounding the steering wheel in his car, saying, ‘I’m never going to do this again.’ The minute he wakes up, after three or four hours of sleep, he’s thinking, ‘How can I get back in the game?’ ”

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana .parsons@latimes.com. An archive of his recent columns is at www.latimes.com/parsons.