John Cipolla did not tell his wife that he'd been fired from his job that afternoon, dismissed under suspicion that he was stealing from his employer, the City of Providence. The mayor's right-hand man, Artin Coloian, did the firing while Mayor Vincent A. Cianci Jr. listened in on the phone. Coloian seemed sad and disappointed; he said to Cipolla, "Do you have an attorney?"

"Not yet," Cipolla said.

"Well, you better get one.”

Cipolla drove home and maintained a facade. He kept a 5:30 p.m. date with his wife, Cindy, and their two children to see Fantasia at the Imax Theater in the Providence Place mall. As the cartoon colors from the movie flashed across the faces of his children, Cipolla sat there thinking. He felt numb.

For nearly two years he'd been embezzling big money from two of the city's community centers, and from the Mayor's Council on Alcohol and Drug Abuse, where he was deputy director.

Cipolla didn't know how much he had taken; he was later shocked to learn he had stolen at least $234,334. He did not have one penny left. He had spent it all on gambling, mostly in the video slot machines at Lincoln Park. Now there would be a price to pay.

When the Cipollas returned home that evening in October 2000, their telephone answering machine took a long time rewinding. There were dozens of messages from friends and acquaintances who had seen the news of his firing, heard the allegations of his big-time theft, on the evening news.

Cipolla had to tell his wife. Yes, he'd been fired. He said he had to go see a lawyer. He returned home later that night and found Cindy curled on the bedroom floor, crying.

HE SPEAKS now as Inmate Number 119526, the digits stenciled onto his khaki uniform. He wears cheap, prison-issue boots, he eats prison food. All he has left from the outside is his gold wedding band.

It's been a long fall for John Cipolla, 43, once a high-rolling gambler at Foxwoods Casino and Lincoln Park. Before he went to jail, Cipolla prowled casino floors with his dark curls slicked back and a wad of cash stuffed into his Dockers.

He lived a double life. By day he was a big shot in the City of Providence, a well-known wheeler-dealer who held a half-dozen fundraisers for Mayor Cianci. Cipolla earned $55,000 a year as deputy director of the Mayor's Council on Alcohol and Drug Abuse, a job in which he helped drug addicts find counseling. He earned another $15,000 as a private counselor.

By night he was a compulsive gambler, racking up $135,000 in credit card debt within two years, forcing him to declare bankruptcy. His credit cut off, Cipolla started to steal from the city. Between 1997 and 1999, he embezzled nearly a quarter-million dollars to fuel his gambling addiction.

"Arrogant," he says now, from a conference room in the state prison. "I was arrogant. I would stand at a craps table and I would have real disdain for the other people. They were penny-ante players who didn't know how to play the game, slowing down my action."

Nothing galled Cipolla like someone slowing down his action; he lived for it. He liked the thunk of the dice on the green-felt table, the way fortunes rode on the flick of a wrist.

In the mid-1990s, Cipolla rode at the top of gambling's hierarchy: he played craps, and blackjack. He looked down his nose at the commoners playing slot machines. Those "stupid machines," he called them. "I was above that."

until 1996, when his first child was born. With an infant son at home, he didn't have the time to drive 100 miles roundtrip to Foxwoods. He began getting his "action" at Lincoln Park, just a 10-minute drive from Providence. By state law, Lincoln can't have the green-felt games, such as craps and blackjack, but it can have those machines.

LINCOLN PARK has the look of an airport terminal. It rises from acres of paved parking lot, with a wall of glass that that afford a view of the dog-racing track. Inside, three large carpeted rooms are crammed full of video lottery terminals.

When Cipolla first drove there in 1996, Lincoln Park had just added 428 new machines, bringing its total to 1,202. Today the park has 1,702 video slot machines; each machine bleeps and blats, creating a cacophonous sound.

"I went and I tried 'em out," Cipolla says of the VLTs. "You hear the jing-jing-a-ling. All the beeps. The noise, it was a trigger. You hear that noise and it triggered my brain.

"Craps was good, but the slots were even better. That was the ultimate action. The ultimate gamble. I was by myself. It was me and the machine, that was it. I didn't have to socialize with anybody. You're in action, you don't want to be talking to anybody."

The video machines provided the quickest action of all. "You push a button — a split second, you win, you lose," Cipolla says. "Those machines delivered. The money was a means to keep me in action, the machine delivered my drug to me, my action.

"The more money I could pump into the machine, the more I could get my action."

JOHN CIPOLLA placed his first bet at La Salle Academy in the mid-1970s, when he was a high school student. He bought a $1 football card.

He continued buying the cards from the bookies on Federal Hill, trying his luck at small-time bets.

At age 26, he laid down $3,000 with a bookie, betting that the San Francisco 49ers would beat the Miami Dolphins in the 1985 Super Bowl.

"At that point I really had no business betting $3,000," Cipolla recalls from prison. "And I won. I was the king."

He blew a lot of his winnings on cocaine. Cipolla owned a music store and played guitar for a living, and cocaine was a big part of the 1980s music scene. He used it — a lot. He drove a dented car, evidence of late-night wrecks.

About a year after his Super Bowl payoff, in 1987, Cipolla's older brother confronted him about his cocaine problem right in the kitchen of their parents' home. "I went into denial," Cipolla says. "I downplayed it and I denied it."

By 1989, Cipolla could not deny that he had a cocaine problem. He awoke one Sunday morning, a 30-year-old man going nowhere, feeling like he wanted to die. He hadn't been to work at AT&T that Friday and had not called in. His office job was hanging by a thread because of his absences.

He lay in bed looking up at the ceiling and thought: "You either go get help and get better, or you're going to die."

It was a peaceful feeling. He knew that there was someone who cared, someone he could call. He picked up the phone and dialed his brother, who drove him to the now-defunct Good Hope Center in West Greenwich. Cipolla spent 30 days there; he never used cocaine again.

BOB BREEN, a doctor of psychology at Rhode Island Hospital's Gambling Treatment Center, says, "If you snort cocaine, it's not the actual cocaine that's getting you high, it's the effect that the cocaine has on the chemicals of your brain."

"Your dopamine receptors kick in with gambling, good sex, cocaine, a runner's high. Gambling feels good." And it is addictive. The only difference between gambling and substance abuse is that with gambling there is no substance, no drug you are ingesting.

"It's like a hunger, a hunger for a specific thing," Breen says. "They describe it as a hypnotic state. They'll say, 'I'm numb. I'm in this zone, it's just me and the machine.'"

There is a test of the brain called positron emission topography (PET), which tracks blood flow to show which areas of the brain are highly stimulated in certain situations.

Last year, Dr. Hans C. Breiter of Massachusetts General Hospital compared the PET scans of people gambling with those of people high on cocaine. The scans were identical. Cocaine and gambling both stimulate the frontal cortex, an area associated with reward and pleasure.

Breen has worked with gamblers for 10 years, the past 21³2 years here in Rhode Island. He came to Rhode Island from Delaware: "A little tiny state that had three race tracks in financial trouble so they introduced slot machines. And I saw the same phenomenon that's happening here."

Breen wrote a seminal study about video slot machines. "What very few people know," Breen says, is that these machines are the most addictive form of gambling that there's ever been in history."

Breen's study found that about 70 percent of compulsive gamblers who seek treatment are addicted to the video slots; the other 30 percent are addicted to other forms of gambling.

In Delaware and in Rhode Island, it took less than 12 months for slot-machine players to run the gamut from first-time user to pathological gambler.

"All the green-felt games, horse-racing, betting with bookies, they take 31³2 years" from introduction to addiction, Breen says. "VLTs have been called the crack cocaine of gambling. The analogy is true. It seems like VLTs deliver the active ingredient more quickly and more directly to the brain, because people just get sucked in.

"I really think that people have no idea what they're walking into," when they go to a casino, Breen says. "They walk in there, and they find that these machines make them feel good."

CIPOLLA IS not a typical compulsive gambler in that he had a prior history of addiction.

After he admitted to his drug addiction in 1989, he joined Cocaine Anonymous, and soon found himself running group counseling sessions with friends. Then in 1991 he saw an ad in the paper: the City of Providence was seeking 15 people to work in neighborhood community centers teaching drug-abuse prevention.

His father, Anthony Cipolla, was well-known in City Hall. Tony Cipolla had been the public works director in Cianci's first term, a job he held through the Paolino administration and kept when Cianci returned to office in 1991. Cipolla called his father.

"Dad, there's an ad in the paper," he said. Cipolla says that his father's connections "may have" helped him land the job with the Mayor's Council on Drug and Alcohol Abuse.

Cipolla remembers being introduced in City Hall by a finance director who said, "This is Tony Cipolla's son. His father is the only person who didn't get indicted in the public works department" in Cianci's first term. He said to Cipolla, "Your father, an honest man."

John Cipolla worked in city neighborhoods, putting his first-hand knowledge of addiction to use while preaching prevention. Within two years, he was working in City Hall with the Mayor's Council, earning enough trust to be named deputy director.

He married in 1991, then divorced less than three years later. His former wife, Elizabeth Coen, said in one court filing that Cipolla "has been acting out of character."

He says now that it was gambling that cost him his first marriage, the lying about his whereabouts.

He married again in 1995 after meeting Cindy Bianco, a fellow city worker, at one of the fundraisers he staged for Cianci. The next year was a watershed for Cipolla: he won a national award for his work as a drug-abuse counselor, and had his first child, a son.

WHILE HE was building a career and growing a family, Cipolla was secretly nurturing a gambling habit that gobbled up more and more of his time — and his family's money.

He lied to his wife to cover his evening absences. He traded the green-felt games at Foxwoods for the video slots at Lincoln in 1996 so he could more quickly reach the action.

"When I got in my car to go the casino, the feeling would start then," Cipolla recalls. "You get like an edge, it's like anticipation, it's an anxiety but it's not a bad anxiety. Your heart starts pounding. You start getting an edge to yourself. It starts instantly, as soon as you pull out of the driveway."

At one point Cindy was so frustrated with her husband's flimsy excuses for missing bill payments and going out nights that she filed for divorce, though she later withdrew the petition.

Cipolla began going to Lincoln to save driving time. The video slots soon captured his interest. The machines displayed three rectangular, lighted buttons: 25 cents, 50 cents, and $1.

Cipolla played 25-cent spins at first. He'd stuff the machine with cash, then the terminal would display a message: "How many credits do you wish to buy?" He could play a maximum of 10 credits against his deposit, or $10 for a single spin.

It wasn't long before he started punching that dollar button, and multiplying it by 10. Action is directly proportional to the amount of money spent — the more money played, the more action on the line. Soon he was playing $10 per spin of the rolls.

"Playing $10 spins, let me tell 'ya, you can go through, you can literally go through $100 in minutes," Cipolla says.

In 1997, a year after he began playing video slots, Cipolla declared bankruptcy.

The Cipollas owed more than $159,000, mostly on credit cards and personal loans, yet they had just $28,000 in assets. "This is where I made my fatal mistake," Cipolla says. "I claimed bankruptcy, but I didn't get any sort of help for my gambling problem."

Now his credit was shot, but Cipolla still craved his action. So he began to steal.

CIPOLLA CREATED an elaborate shell game to steal money from the city's community centers.

He served on the board of directors for the Silver Lake Community Center, where he told fellow board members that the Mayor's Council needed to pay some of its vendors through another agency, because those vendors weren't on an approved vendor list. If the Silver Lake Center would pay those bills, then the council would reimburse the center plus an "administrative fee." Silver Lake's board of directors went for it.

Cipolla started moving money from the Mayor's Council to the Silver Lake account. He created a fictitious company called Media Star, then used the Silver Lake money to pay Media Star. He also submitted phony invoices to the Mayor's Council from LC [Liz Coen] Communications, and Elizabeth Coen Computer Imaging Graphics to steal tens of thousands of dollars. Elizabeth Coen is Cipolla's ex-wife, who has a graphics business in East Greenwich.

Cipolla submitted the bogus invoices in Coen's name, claiming she had produced public-service videos and crates of T-shirts for various city programs; then he forged her name. He says that Coen had no idea he was using her name while billing for fictitious work.

"While I was doing it, I was able to rationalize it," Cipolla says. "Now I can't. Now I can just plain look at it and say it was wrong, it was stupid, it was disgraceful."

In September 2000, the month before he was caught, Cipolla forged more than $20,000 worth of invoices and deposited them in his Media Star account. He ran all of that money — plus his paychecks — through the video slots at Lincoln Park. Every week he was losing more than $10,000.

One night near the end, Cipolla's luck was running high. He hit a couple of jackpots on the VLTs. He strutted to the cash window to "color in" his winnings. A clerk paid him $12,000 cash: six "wraps" of twenty $100 bills, bound with red bands.

"I got to the door and I just couldn't leave," Cipolla recalls.

He put one wrap of $2,000 in his right pocket, and kept $10,000 in his left. He'd just play the wrap on his right, and if he lost it, he'd leave.

He left, four hours later, both pockets empty.

IN THE SPRING of 2000, a controller for the Silver Lake Community Center called Cipolla to say he had found some financial irregularities. He asked Cipolla to bring some backup documents to his office.

At first Cipolla created some bogus documents, but when these didn't throw the auditor off his trail, he kept trying to delay a meeting.

"I didn't even try to manufacture anything," Cipolla recalls. "I kept trying to put him off. It was like I was rendered helpless. I couldn't figure a way out of this. I loved my family, my wife and my kids. But I loved my action."

Cipolla gambled to celebrate, and he gambled to drown sorrows. Now, feeling stressed by the Silver Lake audit, he escaped by gambling more.

"Toward the end, I was looking for it to end. There were days I can remember saying to myself: I need to go to the police. I don't know how. How do you do that?"

He didn't go to the police, but they came to him. On Oct. 11, 2000, Artin Coloian called Cipolla into City Hall to fire him. Yet even this, and the subsequent sight of his wife crying on their bedroom floor, was not enough to stop Cipolla's gambling.

"I've lost my job," Cipolla recalls. "I'm in trouble. I have a couple of hundred dollars from an unemployment check. I was tormented by the gambler's myth, the gambler's fallacy: 'I'm a hit away from straightening out my problems.'"

About a month after his firing, Cipolla decided to take his last $200 to Foxwoods to win his way out of trouble. He pointed his 15-year-old car south on Route 95. As he drove, his conscience wrestled with his addiction.

The conscience won round 1: he pulled off the highway in Warwick, drove into a lot and walked around the car. Then the addiction took over. Back on the highway, he headed south.

Still in Rhode Island, he stopped at a Wendy's. He told himself: "I'm gonna sit down and eat this burger, and then I'm gonna go home." Still, he headed south, toward Foxwoods.

He pulled over at Exit 3 in Richmond. "What are you doing?" he said to himself. "Let's just get to the casino. Let's just lose your money so you can get done with this and go home."

He drove to the casino and lost his last $200 at blackjack.

CIPOLLA KNEW he needed help; he called the Rhode Island Hospital Gambling Treatment Center, where Bob Breen answered. Breen is a young psychologist with a thin beard, who considers it his job to "suck all the fun out of gambling."

Gambling is a big business for the State of Rhode Island. Gamblers pumped $771 million into the state-owned VLTs at Lincoln and Newport last fiscal year. The machines paid back gamblers 70 percent of what they put in, leaving the state with more than $229 million. The Lottery Commission took 51 percent of that, paying the remaining $112 million to the private corporations that run Lincoln and Newport Jai Alai; to the companies that provide and service the machines; to greyhound handlers; and 1 percent to cities and towns.

Revenue from state-sponsored gambling has increased almost 1,000 percent in 10 years. Gambling now contributes $253 million a year to the state budget, the third-largest generator of state money behind only income and sales taxes.

The state spends a little bit of that money — $150,000 or less than six-ten-thousands of 1 percent — to pay for two treatment centers for problem gamblers.

Rhode Island Hospital's Gambling Treatment Program is one of the two state-funded centers; CODAC runs the other program out of four separate offices. Breen believes the state doesn't spend nearly enough to treat a problem of its own making.

"The state spends $150,000 on treatment. I've got a dozen clients that individually lost more than $150,000 in Lincoln Park," Breen says. "If it were widely known that there is help for this disorder — and you need not be ashamed of it, and you don't have to keep gambling — we would be swamped. We have no office space, no clinicians, no funds to treat many more."

Rhode Island Hospital's Treatment Program has treated more than 150 people in the past year; almost all of them (75 percent) are working men and women between 35 and 55. Men and women are about equally represented. They typically have had no addictions in the past; no criminal behavior; no previous psychological problem.

"They're well-functioning, they own a home, and they've raised kids. And out of nowhere" they got hooked on video slot machines, Breen says.

"Within a 12-month period, they're devastated."

CIPOLLA WALKED into Breen's small, fifth-floor office at Rhode Island Hospital early last year.

In some ways, Cipolla was not Breen's typical patient: most problem gamblers have no previous treatment for addiction. Also, Cipolla was in a little deeper than most, with a debt of $234,000 to the City of Providence. The $159,000 he'd wiped clean by filing bankruptcy would never be collected by his debtors.

The average person who enters the Rhode Island Hospital treatment program has lost $65,000; the gambler has often tapped a retirement account or run up credit-card debt to feed the addiction.

Treatment is anonymous, but Cipolla granted Breen permission to discuss his case. Breen probed Cipolla for a detailed gambling history. Cipolla started in high school with that $1 bet on football cards; most male problem gamblers start at age 12 or 13 with their first real bet, women a little later.

"This had taken him by storm," Breen says of Cipolla. "He went through a period where he was losing like 40 grand a month, and he was just on a spiral. It's doubly tricky, because there's this fantasy that if you could just find a way to stay in action long enough, you could get lucky. You could get one big hit, and you could put back everything you have stolen."

Breen told Cipolla what he tells all of his patients: Forget about getting that money back. "The money that you lost is gone forever. You have to let that go."

To ruin the gambling experience, Breen demystifies the aura surrounding VLTs. Gamblers hold this myth that a machine is pregnant with money, just waiting to disgorge its jackpot.

That is not the case. "That machine doesn't know how long it's been since the last jackpot," Breen explains. "It doesn't know you're the person sitting in front of the TV screen. Every time you push the button it's like that machine never played before."

VLTs are "nothing more than random number generators programmed to choose a random number." The reels that spin round and round are not real, mechanical reels, Breen says, they are just "this TV show that you watch that looks like reels. A computer chip picks the outcome and all the rest is just a little TV show that you're watching."

The machines are programmed to take as much as 8 cents out of every dollar put into them. Statistically, if you play the quarter slots of the "reel type" video machines, each machine will give you back 92 cents on the dollar, keeping the rest for the state Lottery Commission and its vendors.

Many players take that 92 cents and pump it back into the machines until they have lost 8 percent of the 92 cents; they'll do this again, and again, so that the Lottery Commission nets 30 cents of every initial dollar spent.

"He's a good case study," Breen says of Cipolla. "He got so deep into this thing, and he went all the way. That aspect of taking it as far as he could take it and keeping it a secret — he was leading a double life. With gambling, concealing and lying is like almost part of this disease. You've got to be a liar. It's either that or stop gambling, and that's out of the question.

"His whole world was cracking down, and the only thing that could get his mind off it was the thing that caused it. It's a vicious, vicious cycle."

Cipolla got sucked up into that cycle. "He's pulled his family apart," Breen says. "He's lost a career. He's lost his self-respect. And the crimes that he committed affect who knows how many people? And how many John Cipollas are there?"

LAST SUMMER, Cipolla began hearing rumors that his wife was going to be indicted along with him for receiving some of the money he stole. "That was enough," Cipolla says. "I knew what the truth was. Implicating my wife, that's as low as you can get."

So Cipolla decided to plead guilty, to spare his family further scrutiny and a trial. "That was probably the first, if not only, honorable thing I had done," Cipolla says of his plea. "People were linking me with Plunder Dome. It was all wrong. There was never any monies given to the mayor or any nonsense like that."

Cipolla agreed to plead guilty before he knew the final tally of his thefts. Last December, accountants hired by the city determined that he had taken at least $234,334.

When they learned the amount, Cipolla said Cindy asked him: "John, where is all that money? I can't believe you didn't pay off anything."

"Cindy," Cipolla said, "if I was able to think in those terms, I would never have been in the place where I would have taken the money in the first place."

When he did have money, that was gambling money. That was to keep gambling, to keep him in the action.

"My marriage could have easily fallen apart right then and there. When it was there in black and white and I could see it, and she could see it, that was the true test of whether I was going to be able to retain my family," Cipolla says. "The devastation that has taken place in her world is hard to put into words.

"She made the decision that she would be committed to keeping our family together. I'm telling you, I don't think there are many girls who would stay through this. Because when I say I lost everything, I mean I lost everything. This is going to affect me and my family the rest of my life."

Cipolla says his wife and their 6-year-old son and 4-year-old daughter now live with her parents. The Cipollas lost their only piece of real estate for failing to pay the mortgage.

Cindy Cipolla, through her lawyer, declined to be interviewed for this story.

Cipolla was sentenced to 10 years, with 3 to serve, and ordered to pay back all the money he stole. He went to prison in Cranston last February. He has a work-release job in the office of American Surplus, the same job that former Gov. Edward D. DiPrete had when he served time for extortion and bribery.

Cipolla is eligible for parole next February. He says that whenever he's released, he'd like to counsel gambling addicts. "I would love to come out of here and be a real strong advocate for compulsive gamblers and for treatment, access to treatment. I'm going to be relentless with this. Relentless."

Sometimes Cipolla calls home from prison, collect, to talk to Cindy and their children. He listens to his 6-year-old's voice on the telephone and he can hear the sadness impinging on the boy's voice.

"I have a tremendous amount of guilt," Cipolla says. "This has definitely set off a ripple effect within my family, and a group of friends. Colleagues were friends, they had a lot of respect for me. They trusted me."

John Bevilacqua, legal counsel for the Silver Lake Center, says that's true, Cipolla's colleagues at the center did trust him; but no more.

"They are very careful now, and somewhat not as trusting as they used to be with people," Bevilacqua says. "It changes everybody's personality somewhat. There's no trust here, and that's the unfortunate point."

Cipolla remembers standing at Foxwoods with his black curls moussed, his pocket heavy with a reassuring wad of cash.

"I thought I was so smart," Cipolla says. "I thought I was so smart because I could rattle off the numbers." Seven or 11 you win; 2, 3, 12 you lose.

"I was so stupid!" he says. "I've got the all-American family, and there I am going to those ridiculous machines. I lost my freedom."

"When the carousel stops and you get off and I'm sitting here in prison, I think: 'You've got to be kidding me. Instead of spending one extra hour or minute with your family, you sat in front of a machine and pumped money into it.' It's outrageous and sad."