01:00 AM EDT on Sunday, July 2, 2006

Chris Armentano accompanied a woman to court a few weeks ago. She had stolen $500,000 from her employer to cover gambling debts.

Armentano does things like that as director of problem gambling services for the Connecticut Department of Mental Health. He sees the side of gambling not seen in the Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun commercials.

The woman who stole the money has a 12-year-old son who was looking at spending some crucial growing-up years without his mother. The woman's husband was looking ahead to years of debt because of the money she stole to gamble at the casinos.

Armentano, who has been watching the growth of gambling and its fallout in Connecticut for a lot of years, sees the woman at the courthouse as part of an almost invisible population that takes the ugly hit for casino gambling.

"A lot of the problems, most of it is underground," he says. "Her case didn't even make the papers."

(The woman was given something called "accelerated rehab" instead of jail time.)

One case that did make the papers was that of former Middletown, Conn., Mayor Stephen Gionfriddo. He pleaded guilty to stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars from clients of his law firm. Prosecutors said he began stealing to cover gambling losses at Mohegan Sun.

I talked last week with Armentano and Marvin Steinberg, executive director of the Connecticut Council on Problem Gambling, to get some sense of what Rhode Island will have to deal with if a casino is eventually built here.

It will have to deal with more problem gamblers than it has now because a casino creates problem gamblers. It will have to provide mental health services that aren't available now.

And it just might have to face up to the social costs of gambling. For too many years, Rhode Island has been a state in denial about the damage gambling does. It provides a pathetically small amount of money to deal with problem gambling considering the huge profits it reaps from its lottery and slot machine dens. And in the tortured debate over the West Warwick casino proposed by Harrah's and the Narragansett Indians, there has been virtually no mention of what the casino would do to deal with the problems it creates.

There has always been a very flimsy, incessantly promoted argument that a Rhode Island casino will simply keep money in Rhode Island that now goes to the Connecticut casinos. But it will do more than that. It will make gamblers out of people who would not have been gamblers without it. And some of those will become problem gamblers.

"Proximity is a big issue," says Steinberg, who compares the impact of a casino to that of a bar opened just down the street. "A casino will increase problem gambling in Rhode Island. For the first time, it will be 10 minutes away instead of an hour."

Steinberg says the Connecticut casinos provide a large amount of money to The Council on Problem Gambling. They also accept a simple truth about their presence in the state:

"They know their presence has created significant problems," says Greenberg.

We have not heard that from Harrah's and the Narragansetts. We have not heard their take on the obvious: that a casino brings with it a temptation that can ruin lives.

"You have broken families, family stress," says Armentano. "There's loss of homes, loss of jobs, an increase in domestic violence, neglect of kids."

He says that states have to recognize that gambling is the one enterprise they promote that causes people harm.

"States have a responsibility to provide services," he says.

But Rhode Island doesn't. Even without a casino, it is a state drenched in gambling, and yet it does little or nothing to deal with the ugly underside.

"You already need services," says Armentano. "You're a gambling state. But without a constituency that's really interested and willing to push for services, problem gamblers and their family members remain a neglected group."

Connecticut had gambling before Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun. It had jai-alai, off-track betting, a state lottery, dog tracks. But the number of people being treated for gambling problems multiplied more than 10 times when the casinos opened, says Armentano. And the number of women treated for gambling problems increased from near zero to about 40 percent of the total.

In Connecticut, there are 16 outpatient sites where problem gamblers receive counseling and treatment. There is also a short-term inpatient facility. There are education and prevention programs.

The state also conducts studies in its public schools to see what impact gambling is having on people who aren't supposed to be able to gamble because of their age. But they often do. Underage gambling is yet one more item on the list of problems.

For Rhode Island to allow a casino to open without first having a treatment network in place is dangerous and dishonest. If the state is going to feed on an addiction, it has an obligation to deal with the consequences.

"There's a tendency of legislatures to ignore the problems and just look at the revenue and the entertainment," says Steinberg. "That's just unbelievable."

bkerr@projo.com / (401) 277-7252