Stung
Page 34
Casino gambling, the industry would have you believe, is like any other form of gambling. No one flies you to the racetrack, however, or asks if you’d like dinner. In church-basement bingo no half-naked women bring you bourbon. Sit in on Uncle Fred’s poker game and he will not, as you leave, suggest you stay in his penthouse suite. Buy lottery tickets at the corner store and you won’t be given a jogging suit, a telephone, or a Rolex watch. Only in the casino are you rewarded for increasing the time you spend gambling and the size of your bets. Only in the casino are you subject to the psychological manipulation made possible by a data bank. Only in the casino is the action continuous. Only in the casino does the house deliberately seek to alter your behaviour. And only in a casino is money treated in such a way that you can walk in with empty pockets and walk out having lost fifty thousand dollars.
Several American states are considering casino gambling. In Canada the Criminal Code has been amended to allow provinces to enter into partnership with gaming interests. British Columbia has introduced slot machines on some ferries, and “Monte Carlo nights” are widespread in Alberta and other provinces. Virgin jurisdictions would do well to study the true nature of casinos, and the hidden social cost of the easy money that can be raised by taxing casino games.
One of the hidden costs is the danger, to themselves and others, posed by compulsive gamblers. Since you can’t smell baccarat on someone’s breath, or see dice marks on his arm, the phenomenon is all but unnoticed. The public perception of compulsive gambling is as untutored as that of alcoholism in the 1940s, when a hard-drinking man was somebody on his feet and an alcoholic the immoral layabout you tripped over. Robert Custer believes there are between 3-million and 4-million compulsive gamblers in North America; as gambling proliferates, so do their numbers.
There are now twenty-eight treatment programs in the United States (none in Canada), and governments in the U.S. are much more likely than they were ten years ago to allocate funds for treatment and research. The powerful but largely invisible effects of compulsive gambling have yet to be properly weighted in any calculation of the pros and cons of legalized gambling, however, perhaps because the disorder has yet to find a place in the public consciousness.
Brian Molony could have been any assistant manager at any branch of any Canadian bank, a prospect that fostered suspicion and paranoia in the industry. So tight did procedures become at Bay and Richmond after Molony’s arrest that the branch came to be known as “Fort Knox.” Elsewhere there has been a return to strict, by-the-book procedures. You now have to be in the term-deposit department to sign a term deposit, which is all very well until someone books off sick. The volume of paperwork has increased. At some CIBC branches, two bank employees have to sit in on every credit interview, to prevent the creation of another Roger Oskaner. Assistant managers (now called account managers) have been emasculated. They may have lending authority of $50,000, but they have no real lending power. They can authorize a loan but can’t free up the money without further authorization.
Doing your own job efficiently is no longer enough. You’re expected to ensure that the people above and below you are doing nothing fishy or irregular. For junior staff this is a positive development. Underlings are now able — indeed, encouraged — to question their superiors. If you think something is amiss, you can go directly to head office. Accountability is the buzzword. If someone you encounter in the bureaucratic structure does something unacceptable, you too bear responsibility. This emphasis on accountability has spilled over to other banks as well; the Molony frauds have been felt through the entire Canadian banking system.
As of summer, 1987, Peter Boynton is still president and chief operating officer of Caesars in Atlantic City.
Larry Woolf is president of Caesars Tahoe in Stateline, Nevada.
Jess Lenz was transferred back to Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, where he’s a credit executive.
Michael Neustadter is out of the gaming industry. He works as an account executive for Dean Witter in Atlantic City.
Jim Surgey is still an account executive at Richardson’s (now Richardson Greenshields of Canada) in Toronto.
Harry Buckle, retired from the CIBC, lives in Hamilton, Ontario.
Stephen Richardson sued the bank for wrongful dismissal. The bank settled out of court. Richardson is now an assistant branch manager with an insurance company. Leaving the bank, he has told friends, is the best thing that ever happened to him.
Sherry Brydson finally got The Elmwood Club off the ground. It has 12,000 members and has ceased being a cash drain. Brydson believes strongly in karma, and feels it was karma that made her life intersect with Molony’s. She still banks at Bay and Richmond.
Alex Osborne never adjusted to Vancouver. The depressed, resource-based economy of British Columbia wasn’t an environment he thrived on, even after he was promoted again and became the senior corporate banker in B.C. His wife didn’t enjoy the West Coast. People close to him say he was never the same after Molony’s arrest. The investigation into the fraud left him feeling that someone in the bank was out to get him. When Ross Brady, a close friend from Commerce Court moved to Vancouver and was killed in an accident, Osborne grew despondent. After erring on his expense account in his own favour, he became convinced he’d be fired and criminally prosecuted. When he began losing weight, he worried that he had cancer. In November, 1986, he was found dead in his garage. He was forty-eight.
Mark Osborne plays for the Toronto Maple Leafs.
Craig Law — The Bulldog — is a staff sergeant with the Intelligence Bureau of the Metro Toronto Police.
Ron Andrews works in the warrants section of the Criminal Investigation Bureau at 55 Division.
Mario Colizzi was tried before Judge H. R. Locke on a charge of possessing stolen goods — the bank’s money. Judge Locke concluded his decision: “However skeptical I may be of Mr. Colizzi’s total conduct … I am left, at the end of all the evidence, with a slight, lingering doubt that the crown has proven guilt to the standard it must achieve. The count is, therefore, dismissed.” Charges were then brought against Colizzi by Revenue Canada. He pleaded guilty to evading $83,713.12 in federal taxes and was ordered to pay that amount, plus a fine, within sixty days or serve a year in prison. A few weeks later he showed up at his lawyer’s office with a broken elbow and a fractured skull. The man he had fought died of gunshot wounds to the head. As of summer, 1987, Colizzi was free on bail, awaiting trial on charges of second-degree murder.
No charges were ever brought against Nick Beck. He has not been seen in Toronto in some time. One rumour has it that, while burglarizing a house in an exclusive area of the city, he stumbled on a good deal of money and fled the country. Another rumour has him selling stock in a boiler-room operation in Amsterdam.
Walt Devlin, shaken by the death of his mother and health problems of his own, recently had what compulsive gamblers call “a slip.” He found himself back at the racetrack, where he gambled away several thousand dollars before getting himself into a treatment program. He’s again involved with many different organizations and individuals, including a young banker from Scranton, Pennsylvania, who defrauded his employer of $1.9-million and lost it in Atlantic City.
Brian Molony lives with his wife, son, and in-laws in a modest house in west-end Toronto. He finds that domesticity has its rewards, but Brenda’s parents are not well, there’s not much privacy, and the financial pressure is constant. Brenda didn’t return to the bank after her maternity leave. Molony makes a point of playing with his son before work and getting home before the boy’s bedtime. On Saturday mornings he takes his son to swimming lesson. He often bumps the walls with his elbows when he carries the boy downstairs; he sometimes finds himself studying the race results, or imagining which team he would have bet, or remembering the intensity. “I’ve been in some very dark valleys,” he said. “I’ve also been on some mountain peaks not many people ever reach. But the peaks aren’t worth the valleys. I have better things to do w
ith my time.” He believes one of the things that will help keep him clean is the scale of his betting in the year before his arrest. “How can you ever be satisfied with necking once you know what it’s like to make love?”
After gaining full parole he struggled in business. He noticed, though, that people told him stories about their own experiences with the bank — the five-day hold, the bounced cheque, the loan inexplicably called at the worst moment. He began thinking about financial institutions and put together a proposed enterprise that now consumes all his energy. He devised the idea of a financial-services store, developed the business plan, sold it to investors, and helped launch what he hopes will prove to be the first two outlets in a national chain.
He’s still haunted by the frauds. He dreams the CIBC has agreed to let him return to work, and he starts taking money again. In another dream he’s back at his desk, trying to ignore the whispers, determined to make as much money for the bank as he stole. In another dream he’s arrested as he’s about to enter a casino because he’s violating the twenty-five-mile limit of his parole. He dreams he’s back at the baccarat table, losing. He dreams he’s emerging from prison, to resume life, when the police arrest him. They have deliberately left out one fraud to make him go through it all again. “I don’t think I could go through it again. Looking over your shoulder is no way to spend life. I look ahead now.”
He attends Mass each week, using the time to reflect on what he’s accomplished in the past seven days. His orientation film is still shown to new inmates at Joyceville. He’s become something of an expert on compulsive gambling and the casino industry, and has addressed a number of law-enforcement agencies. He remains active in the Toronto chapter of a support group and is considered an excellent moderator, though he rarely tells his own story. He attends faithfully, he says, “to hear stories of people who screw up. I don’t want to forget what that was like. I want to keep it fresh in my mind.”
On April 27, 1987, Molony spoke at a party celebrating his fifth anniversary without having made a bet. Because of the Stanley Cup playoffs on TV that night, the turnout wasn’t what it might have been. Brenda was among the three dozen people who, in a half-empty church hall, gave him a standing ovation.
APPENDIX
The Frauds
Some of the fraudulently obtained funds were used to pay down fraudulent loans, leaving the CIBC, at the time of Molony’s arrest, with a shortage of approximately $10.2-million. Plus interest.
The Last Night
Molony’s Gambling Losses
(as per his submission to Revenue Canada)
Gary Stephen Ross is the author of two novels and two works of nonfiction. A founding partner of the publishing house Macfarlane Walter & Ross, he lives near White Rock, British Columbia.