01:00 AM EDT on Sunday, June 13, 2004

Terry Killea is the second person I have talked to who has been sentenced to home confinement because of crimes committed to feed a gambling habit.

The first was a woman I visited last year in her public-housing apartment in East Providence. She had lost her condo. She had lost everything. She had been a branch manager at Citizens Bank and had embezzled a lot of money so she could keep heading up Route 146 to play the video slots at Lincoln Park.

I visited Killea in his tiny, back-of-the-house apartment in West Warwick. He used to have a beautiful, four-bedroom house overlooking a pond in Coventry. He lost that and his Infiniti. His wife divorced him and left with their three children.

For Killea, Foxwoods was the place where his life came apart. There were stops along the way -- Lincoln Park, a private club where Keno and poker were played. But it was at the blackjack tables at Foxwoods that he won big and lost even bigger. He lost so big sometimes that he sobbed on the way home and considered driving that Infiniti into an oncoming truck.

The madness caught up with him four years ago when the police came to the house in Coventry and led him away in handcuffs in front of friends and neighbors. His wife and children had already left and were spared the spectacle.

Like the woman in East Providence, Killea wears an ankle bracelet. His activities are restricted to work and counseling, visits with his children and the basic necessities, such as food shopping.

He owes $174,000, and restitution is part of his sentence. He makes $10 an hour working for a courier company. He has to pay at least $100 a week. He works all the extra hours he can.

He remembers the night spent in the Intake Center at the ACI after his conviction and before he was fitted for his ankle bracelet. He writes about it in his book Going for Broke . . . and Making It, which is a wonderful primer for anyone who thinks gambling is just a good time:

"I was a successful salesman, active in my church, active in the community and building a good life for myself and my family. Now, I was just another felon."

He wrote the book in what he calls his nerve center, a small desk near his bed where he has a used laptop computer. The writing was therapeutic, he says. It helped get rid of the anger.

The book is good. It's a fascinating look at how the good life can be lost to the sneaky seduction of the cards and the people and the action. Killea doesn't try to be creative. He just lays it all out.

His story is all about working hard and enjoying the benefits.

"I was a professional salesperson," he says. "I sold with pride."

He started at a small radio station. If you can sell in small-market radio, you can sell anywhere, he says.

Then he got a job with a beer distributorship. And he hustled. He studied. He learned what he needed to know to move a lot of beer. He was named Most Improved Salesman, then Salesman of the Year.

There were lots of "guys' nights out" in the beer business. There was one at the Queen of Clubs at Lincoln Park. The boss handed out money for the salesmen to gamble with. Killea thought how great it was that even if he lost, it didn't really cost him anything.

He often uses drug-addict analogies. With the risk-free night of gambling at Lincoln Park, the needle was starting to go into his arm.

I don't know if there are statistics kept on this: the number of people who end up in jail or on home confinement because of gambling addiction. But I haven't met all of them yet.

There is a rush to gambling, no doubt about it. I can remember in my spotty gambling history what it felt like when a longshot horse came in first or the cards gave me a can't-lose hand in Friday night poker games. It was smalltime stuff, but I can see how it could lead to bigtime problems. Dumb-luck wins always plant the belief that if it can happen once, it can happen again. It is that belief that has carried many a gambler, including Killea, back to the tables and the slots and the Keno screen and into trouble.

One of the most powerful parts of his book is his description of a big win at Foxwoods. It is the kind of win a gambler feeds on. It's frightening:

"It was one of the biggest rushes of my life. Everyone let out a cheer and clapped. One of the security guards escorted me to the cages to cash in my chips and then to the valet station to get my car."

He had started with $200 and turned it into $28,000 in 45 minutes.

There was another time when he lost $10,000 in just an hour, but it was the big win that stayed with him.

His life revolved around Foxwoods. He sold beer and went to the casino. He went to the casino and got home at 4 a.m.

Then, after six years at the beer distributorship, his boss called him in and told him his job was being eliminated. His compulsive gambling was never mentioned, but he is sure it was the reason.

He got a job selling insurance in an agency where his wife worked. Again, he studied, gained the necessary credentials. But he would head out on a mission to cultivate new business and instead go to Foxwoods.

He started borrowing money. He would borrow from friends, then borrow from other friends to pay the first friends. He persuaded a client to take $20,000 out of a mutual fund and put it into an investment scheme which, it turns out, was a blackjack table.

He rushed home to intercept credit-card statements in the mail before his wife could see them.

Then the people whose money he was playing with got together.

"Apparently, some of the people I took money from had had enough of my empty promises to pay them back and took matters into their own hands," says Killea.

He was charged with 10 counts of obtaining money under false pretenses. He had no money, so he qualified for a public defender.

His case dragged through the courts for 3 1/2 years before he was given his ankle bracelet and sentenced to 10 years of home confinement with 5 of those years suspended.

Now, at 46, his life is scrubbed down to the bare essentials. His apartment is spotlessly tidy. His time is parceled out around the restrictions of his sentence.

He sees his ex-wife two or three times a week in his job with the courier company. Their relationship is being rebuilt. He visits his children. He has become a grandfather.

He attends counseling sessions as part of his sentence. And he goes to Gamblers Anonymous meetings with a college professor, a welder, an orthodontist. . . .

At the end of his book -- which he is publishing and which will be available this week -- there is a list of 20 questions for people to ask themselves to determine whether their gambling has become a problem, including:

Have you lost time from school or work because of gambling?

Have you ever sold anything to finance your gambling?

The questions could prove tough for some people to answer. But they are helpful, just as this book is helpful, in showing when something that is supposed to be fun and exciting has turned sick and destructive.

For more information about the book, log on to goingforbroke.net.

Bob Kerr can be reached by e-mail at bkerr [at] projo.com.