The Hidden Cost of New York City’s Casino Boom
Every few years without fail, the newspapers carry a story like the sad tale of Maureen Holleran, a 62-year-old Buffalo woman who is currently sitting in federal prison. “I am a compulsive gambler,” she told a judge at her sentencing earlier this year. “I let my gambling addiction destroy my life and harm others.”
Holleran was sentenced to 18 months behind bars for stealing more than $2 million from her employer, a Canadian insurance company, by diverting payments to herself through 1,200 fictitious accounts she created. Between 2020 and 2023, Holleran spent more than $950,000 at the Seneca Buffalo Creek Casino and Seneca Niagara Resort & Casino — and lost nearly all of it.
We are about to see many more cases like Holleran’s. New York is preparing to license three full-scale casinos in or near the city. That is sure to trigger a wave of financial disaster that capsizes thousands of families.
The very first article of our 1894 state Constitution — right alongside the language guaranteeing due process, freedom of speech, and trial by jury — flatly prohibits “the sale of lottery tickets, pool-selling, bookmaking, or any other kind of gambling.” But year after year, lawmakers have steadily chipped away at the gambling ban, making exceptions for horse racing and bingo in the 1930s, a state lottery in the ’60s, upstate casinos in the 2000s, and mobile sports betting in 2022.
With the licensing of city-based casinos, the final barrier is about to fall. And the consequences will be devastating.
While games of chance are a harmless diversion for most of us, an estimated 4 percent of New Yorkers are at risk of a behavioral disorder, classified by medical authorities as a disease, that makes them prone to spending too much on gambling and compulsively throwing away ever-greater amounts of money in a futile attempt to break even.
These sad souls often suffer in silence, invisible until the addiction leads to bankruptcy, divorce, suicide, fraud, or destitution. A 2022 study estimated that at least 10 percent of Americans experiencing homelessness showed clinically significant signs of gambling disorder.
“My life was completely out of control, but I was covering it up to make it look like I was normal,’’ a Staten Island woman named Katie told the Advance, describing how visits to Atlantic City casinos exploded into $150,000 in gambling debt, paid for with credit cards and home-equity loans and leaving her broke despite a $250,000 salary. “Basically, I maxed out every credit card. I had no more credit available,” she said.
“I like to call it a carousel of insanity,’’ said Bruce W., who grew up in Bensonhurst and ended up in jail after embezzling $150,000 from his employer to feed his gambling addiction. “The carousel slows down, but we just don’t get off. We gamble away. We don’t care if we lose our family. We don’t care if we lose our freedom. We don’t care if we lose our finances.”
But somebody needs to care, which brings us to the current competition to open casinos in the city. Several of the world’s largest gambling corporations and real-estate-development firms are in the final stages of competing for licenses that might result in a casino in the middle of Times Square, next to the United Nations, next to Citi Field or at Coney Island.
Since winning a license requires buy-in from the communities where the parlors would operate, the firms are dangling billions of dollars’ worth of jobs and community amenities. The Caesar’s Palace Times Square proposal, for instance, promises a $5.4 billion investment that would create 3,000 construction jobs, another 3,800 permanent positions, a five-star hotel, a rooftop park. In addition, “We’re investing $20 million in day care for Broadway actors and musicians. They do auditions during the day; they do odd hours at night. They need their own day care,” Brett Herschenfeld, an executive vice-president at SL Green Realty, told me. “Caesar’s is providing a monthly job fair with great paying jobs.”
Other casino bidders are making similar offers. “Resorts World in Queens is proposing a center for local and youth sports and media,” reports my Spectrum News colleague Courtney Gross. “Mets owner Steve Cohen and his project are pitching a $163 million trust to dole out grants to local nonprofits. Bally’s in the Bronx says it would give more than $17 million to local elected officials to fund the projects of their choice.”
Neighborhood amenities are nice, but community leaders should make sure their wish lists include direct assistance to the people who are going to get shipwrecked in the casinos. Bidders should be pressed to provide full-time, on-site psychological counseling; a set of big, visible warnings about gambling addiction; and some rudimentary information about the basics of casino math. (Most players don’t realize that slot machines generate as much as 80 percent of a casino’s gaming profits; the roulette wheels and blackjack tables are flashy, but it’s those one-armed bandits that steadily siphon away most people’s money.)
We should also do more to promote the desperate tales of people whose gambling habits quietly lead to disaster. Carmen Soto, a 77-year-old Bronx grandmother, got busted in 2022 when the Department of Motor Vehicles noticed she had created multiple identities over a span of decades, unlawfully collecting $655,000 in welfare benefits, nearly all of which was gambled away.
New York has always been a magnet for jobs and development. But we must not continue to look the other way while thousands of our friends, neighbors, and co-workers end up broke, bankrupt, or behind bars after falling into the trap of fighting deceptive, impossible odds.