Part One: The Gambler’s Delusion

Chapter One – A Death In the Street

In the history of Nevada, certain men died of lead poisoning, the result of occasional gun battles that erupted in saloons and on the streets. Even today death by gunshot is not that unusual in the American West. What modern psychology has given us, perhaps, is a better window into the personalities and emotions that set the tinder for such violent conflicts.

Why do men—and women, too—end up killing each other over such trivial things as a card game, a dirty look, or an insult? Of course, trivial and important are both measured by the rules of the mind, and therein lies the key to understanding the extremes of misery and ecstasy, rage and serenity, victory and failure.

However uncomplicated the lives of historic gunfighters may seem, they really weren’t. Life wasn't simple then and it isn't simple now. Killing someone, even for an old-time gunfighter, was not so easy. Pulling the trigger may be uncomplicated enough, but wanting to do it, planning it, and finding the courage—all very hard to understand and explain. History records the actions and events but tells us little about the psychology of mortal combat, and Hollywood has been of no real help.

On Monday, December 4, l985, a young man named William E. Beatty died of gunshot wounds in full daylight on the streets of Reno, Nevada. At the time no one really knew what his death was about. Mr. Beatty, it was later alleged, had been robbing banks in Reno, and had made the mistake of coming back to rob the same bank on the same day. The detectives had the scene staked out.

Was Beatty a lunatic, or a fool?

He was, I eventually concluded, a bright man, but not very professional as a bank robber; he seemed to have had little interest in disguises or variations in modus operandi. When he did his last job and ran from the bank with a little sack of bills clutched in his hand, the detectives were in immediate foot pursuit.

“Hold it right there, mister! Freeze, damn it!”

“The son-of-a-bitch won't stop!”

He did not surrender, and they opened fire.

The first radio reports blared out that Beatty had been killed then and there by the detectives' fire. In Tuesday's Reno Gazette-Journal, however, we learned that the detectives had inflicted only two superficial, non-fatal wounds. Lying wounded in the street, this young man had used his own gun to shoot himself in the head.

Perhaps, as the detectives claimed, young Beatty had pulled his gun as he ran, causing his pursuers to fear that he might be about to fire on them. He had, they said, first stopped and turned toward them as he drew his weapon. Whatever the case, Beatty's intentions were soon very clear. The shock and pain of his wounds did not delay his self-imposed execution.

Just another interesting gunfight. But, why?

I usually bought a paper on the way to the hospital in Reno where I worked at the time, to glance at the front page before we started rounds for the day. That's when I read the facts given above. Beatty sounded a lot like the kind of patients I had worked with over the years, men who wrote their own laws in their heads and then wondered why everybody else marched to a different drummer. I knew this was no ordinary suicide, no ordinary bank robbery.

Years of working with chronic gamblers, during which I had often been drawn into the legal entanglements of patients, told me that this 24-year-old man had hit the lowest bottom a gambler can hit. I remarked to one of my co-workers that I suspected gambling was the real cause of Beatty’s death. I soon forgot the matter. We had quite enough impulsive, angry, rebellious men to keep us busy right there on the inpatient unit in the Reno Veterans Administration Hospital.

We told every patient coming into our Addictive Disorders Treatment Program that we could not admit anyone with pending legal problems, unless the people from Probation and Parole consented. We could not and would not harbor fugitives from the law. Our warnings, of course, were often ignored.

One young fellow, no more than 22, was wanted for a string of muggings, by which he got money for gambling and cocaine. He never tried to hide his profession from us, and during a morning group therapy session he mentioned a specific crime of his that had gone undetected. His therapy group finally agreed with the staff and voted to blow the whistle, since their own treatment could not go forward until they took responsibility for one of their own. By 11 that morning the detectives were on hand to haul the fellow to jail. Going down the hall, with a detective on either side of him and in full wrist and ankle shackles, the young man tried to make a break for it down the stairs. He knew he was on the fourth floor. How he imagined he could get far baffled the detectives, who pinned him in seconds. I guess he had his own version of reality.

This man's thinking was harder to believe than to discover. He thought he could rob people on the streets and not get caught. He thought we were not serious when we said we did not tolerate fugitives. He thought his fellow patients would never vote to have him leave the program. He thought we would not call the police when he boasted about his crimes. He thought he could escape from two armed detectives while hobbled by chains. I guess he thought he was special, different, omnipotent, and invincible. Thought may be the wrong word. He knew he was special, that his way was the right way. He knew that things would work out his way. That special knowledge seems to be a part of the unshakable wisdom common to many problem gamblers.

William Beatty’s final story was in the next day’s newspaper. There was no joy in my accurate prediction of the cause. Reporter Phil Barber had interviewed Mr. Beatty's uncle and aunt, both Reno police officers. They had given Bill, a drifter and a high school dropout, his last home.

Said the uncle, “He had big dreams. He told us when he flew here a couple of weeks ago that he was going to make it big with the tables, mostly blackjack, but also with the automatic machines.”

The article went on to paint a vivid, all-to-familiar picture of the pathological gambler; bright, energetic, ambitious, impulsive, unable to take orders, always on the go, and always searching for something just over the horizon. This is the eternal, double-edged sword of the problem gambler; virtues on one hand that become defects on the other. It's like a modern, four-engine jet airplane with an untrained high school kid alone in the cockpit at 40,000 feet.

Young Bill had no criminal record, but recently he had claimed to have been the victim of robbery on a lonely highway. It was probably his way of explaining his gambling losses.

Bill said the robbers had lurked in waiting on Mt. Rose Highway, a winding two-lane road, dangerous in bad weather, running through a wild collection of pines and rocks. The highway travels steeply up from the Washoe Valley to nearly 10,000 feet at the pass just below the peak of Mt. Rose. Aside from a couple of roadside bars, there was no place on this road where a modern robber could find sustenance, and it is very inhospitable countryside in which to lurk. Lots of people get robbed and mugged on the streets of downtown Reno, but highwaymen along Mt. Rose Highway are scarcer than a summer shower in Nevada.

Too bad Bill didn't know there were other recovering gamblers who had learned to stop, recovering people who could have told him that false reports of having been robbed are laughable because they are so common among gamblers. Too bad Bill's police-officer relatives, who lived and worked in a gambling town, didn't know enough to tell him that he had a lethal problem called pathological gambling. Too bad the casinos that took his money, all the money he could earn and steal, were not alert to the signs of out-of-control gambling, or caring enough to try to educate overspending patrons. Too bad Bill did not know enough to ask for some kind of help.

He never knew he had a mental problem! Most pathological gamblers never figure that out, even today.

No one is to blame, really—least of all Bill. It happened just as it has in one way or another to people with gambling problems for centuries. One wonders, how many of the early western gunfights were really about gambling? The Bucket of Blood Saloon up in Virginia City, Nevada, attracts tourists simply because it was once the scene of a deadly card table shoot-out in the late 19th century. Some gunfights were about land and some about water, but such things are somehow easier to settle than gambling problems. In gambling it is not land or water or even money that lies at stake on the table. Gambling is about ego, and when an ego is injured, the offender must die, if he cannot be defeated at the table.

“He had a way with words,’ said Bill’s uncle. “He could charm the venom out of a snake. He could talk his way out of trouble. He was a smart little character.”

Should these sentiments be Bill's epitaph, or can we extract some better lesson from the bloody sidewalk?

History offers a long list of brave gunfighters whose deeds are entertainment for generations. Will Bill Beatty end up being some kind of legendary gambler, whose insanity is overlooked in favor of a more dramatic story line? Probably not, since his bank-robbing career was cut short by modern police methods before his reputation was made.

Bill killed himself because, by his logic, there was no alternative. An alternative unseen is no alternative at all. In his eyes he was guilty of personal failure. He knew he had lost, and that he had no way to get back on top. It will go on being this way as long as we need heroic figures, as long as we are willing to ignore the inner world of the hero, as long as we project onto these unfortunate people our own childish dreams of rebellion.

You can be a world expert on gambling and games of chance, and still not understand what drives the problem gambler. You can be a criminologist, economist, mathematician, sociologist, or even a psychiatrist, and still completely miss the mark in understanding a Bill Beatty. I have been fooled myself many times, in spite of years working with addiction problems.

Unless you know how they think, you cannot know them.

One of the very first problem gamblers I admitted to a hospital program for treatment, back in 1978, fooled me. He was a good-looking, self-confident young man whom everybody liked right away. He was an easy talker, a charming listener, and oh, so very sincere. He stayed with us for two weeks. The nursing staff reported that he was on the telephone a lot in the evenings. On his way out of town he tried to drum up some large bets from fellow Gamblers Anonymous members, on a horse race that he and his jockey friends had fixed.

Clever fellow; he was facing criminal charges in New York, hospitalized in Cleveland, and still able to fix a race in Florida. Sure, we called the FBI upon learning what he was up to, but his horse still won. The FBI might have been impressed when the long shot won, but I never heard what happened to my patient. Clearly we had not helped him much. We certainly had not understood him.

You don't have to be a treatment specialist to know about problem gambling. If you can read between the lines, you can read about it almost any day of the week in the newspapers of Reno, Las Vegas, or Atlantic City. Here's a little piece about a different incident, which I wrote back in 1988, for a newsletter we were trying to put out for the California Council on Problem Gambling. It was entitled Shoot-out in Old Reno.

Shoot-outs are a tradition of the American West, and the legend lives on. There was another one recently, in Reno, Nevada.

“One of this editor's favorite Chinese restaurants in Reno is a place up on Moana Lane where they have fancy fish in lighted tanks, and oriental statues in the lobby. They have excellent soups, and they finish off each lunch special with a tiny plate of fresh fruit. Luckily, however, we must have been eating elsewhere when the following events took place.

“The story was on the front page of the Reno Gazette-Journal for February 12, 1988. It seems that the kitchen help liked to kick back around 11 a.m. every day for a few hands of blackjack. Angry about the rules for doubling bets, a certain Mr. C. is alleged to have gone home, dusted off his trusty side-piece, and around 1 p.m. returned to offer some new insights into his version of the rules.

On this particular day the lunch crowd of about 50 diners first heard loud arguments drifting in from the back room. Then shots rang out. Soup and egg rolls scattered as panicked patrons hit the floor or burst out into the parking lot, running for their lives. Back in the kitchen the intended victim, one Mr. F., did his best to fend off the volley with his trusty wok, but in the end he was taken to the hospital with five entry wounds.

Mr. C., it was alleged, fled first on foot, then in his car, and finally, letting go of all good judgment, on a Reno city bus. Two diligent staffers from a local television station, listening to his description on their police scanner radio, spotted Mr. C. boarding the bus, and kept it in sight until police arrived to make the arrest.

Thinking about this episode, one is tempted to say, “Oh, heck, boys. Blackjack is only a game.” But is it?

There is something very symbolic in this modern western drama. We, the families of mankind, seem so much like those lunch patrons as we sit about the festive board in life's front dining room, oblivious to the problems smoldering in our own back kitchen. We seem to be just as surprised and shocked when, from time to time, the tragedy of pathological gambling intrudes itself upon us, and reminds us that there are those for whom gambling is very much more than a game.

Gambling towns thrive on games of chance, and studies have shown that by far the largest share of the gambling take comes from a dedicated minority of steady gamblers. Casinos, illegal bookies, and state governments are proprietors of a lucrative gambling business.

On the other hand, people who offer to treat problem gambling also make their money from a small percentage of problem gamblers. The National Council on Problem Gambling once said that only one in a hundred pathological gamblers ever gets professional help. By the time these desperate people are ready to listen to their helpers, they don't have money left to pay for treatment. Since professional mental health providers have never discovered a treatment that will pay for itself, they try to get insurance companies, casinos, and governments to subsidize treatment that is often of questionable benefit.

Sadly, most professional mental health workers keep missing the point of treatment. They begin treatment with too many theories of their own; they don't know how to listen; they have no idea of the kind of changes treatment should produce; and they keep trying to make the pain go away, instead of using it as a vital tool in recovery.

Over the years, I learned to look and listen and to ask certain questions. My track record improved, but I avoid overconfidence. There are no sure things when it comes to understanding gamblers. But when you learn to hear the same voices they hear, when you figure out the rules of the mind games they play on themselves, then at least you have a leg up, even if you stay in a posture of self-defense.

Nice people call me cynical, harsh, and prickly when it comes to working with problem gamblers. Obviously, some of my opinions are rather disturbing; especially about what is called treatment, and about treatment providers, too. I'm no Dr. Feelgood. And don't get me started on lawyers, casino managers, and politicians.

My goal is to describe the reality seen by the problem people themselves, not the reality seen by the rest of us. No other reality counts, least of all my own, when it comes to treating the problem. And I always remember that tough love is two words, two ingredients, two techniques. One without the other can literally prove fatal in the effort to help addicted people.

In the world of problem gambling, nothing is obvious. Nothing is easy to understand at first. You listen and listen, then you listen some more. You question and question again. Either you crawl inside or you fail at the door. And when you finally come back out, thinking that you understand the gambler’s thinking, nobody will believe you, because very, very few people have made that round trip.

Maybe this book will help.