It’s always somebody else’s fault
As a young lawyer, Arelia Margarita Taveras made a name for herself representing the families of victims of American Airlines Flight 587, which crashed in New York City’s borough of Queens in November 2001, killing 265 people.
She had 400 clients and earned $500,000 a year. She appeared on TV and radio to discuss legal issues, and wrote a book titled “The Gangsta Girls’ Guide To Child Support.” In 2000, the New York Daily News named her one of “21 New Yorkers to Watch in the 21st Century.”
As an escape from the seven-day-a-week pressures of her law practice, she says she started going to Atlantic City to unwind in September 2003.
And found it hard to stop.
During one five-day gambling jag in June 2005, Ms. Taveras says, she existed on nothing but orange juice and Snickers bars the staff gave her. On the fifth day, she says, a dealer told her to go home because she appeared exhausted and unable to keep track of her cards.
She reports her losses totaled nearly $1 million.
“It’s like crack, only gambling is worse than crack because it’s mental,” says Ms. Taveras, 37, a New Yorker who now lives in Minnesota. “It creeps up on you, the impulse. It’s a sickness.”
She lost her law practice, her apartment, her parents’ home, and owes the IRS $58,000. In interviews with The Associated Press, Ms. Taveras admits dipping into her clients’ escrow accounts to finance her gambling habit. She was disbarred last June, and faces criminal charges stemming from those actions, but is trying to work out restitution agreements in order to avoid a prison term.
She’s doing one more thing, though — still being a lawyer and all.
Ms. Taveras has filed a $20 million lawsuit in federal court against six Atlantic City casinos and one in Las Vegas, claiming they had a duty to notice her compulsive gambling problem and cut her off.
“I would pass out at the tables,” Ms. Taveras says. “They had a duty of care to me.”
Her lawsuit names Resorts Atlantic City, Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino, Trump Taj Mahal Casino Resort, the Tropicana Casino Resort, the Showboat Casino Hotel, Bally’s Atlantic City, as well as the MGM Grand Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas.
Some will doubtless say: “Casino owners — couldn’t happen to a more deserving bunch of guys.”
Gamers love to show beaming winners with fistfuls of dollar bills in their ads, after all. Losers receive far less attention. And there’s the recurring concern that the industry plays on one of the weaknesses of mankind — the pursuit of the “high” of the big win, in defiance of the inescapable fact that casinos wouldn’t exist if they weren’t sure anyone who plays long enough will, eventually, lose.
That’s true. Other industries playing on human “weakness” — selling products or services we might be better off without, that could do harm if indulged to excess — include liquor bottlers, cigarette and candy manufacturers, pharmaceutical firms, fried food merchants, purveyors of parachutes, hang gliders, SCUBA lungs and motorcycles, even the manufacturers of flimsy sports cars capable of reaching speeds in excess of 100 mph. For starters.
Shall the courts allow each and all to be sued for allowing a customer to be harmed when “They had a duty of care to me” — a duty to refuse to allow an adult of normal intelligence to make his or her own decisions?
No. A free country is based on the premise that adults will be held responsible for their own volitional actions.
Make no mistake, if the courts allow such lawsuits to go forward against casinos, the line forms on the left for plaintiffs who will blame other industries for not “stopping me before I could spend again.”
