This is a great story this goes on each day in the gaming world

High Roller Takes Hard Fall

Smart, Successful, Addicted, He Stole Thousands
November 27, 2005
By RICK GREEN,

"Good evening, Mr. Tassone!"

Four crisp words and Bruce Tassone feels the potential of the night ahead, as if he's been handed a fresh $5,000 gambling stake for the craps table. Here is the respect a man arriving at his castle deserves.
Handsome, lean and dark-haired, Tassone makes his way through his noisy living room of Foxwoods Resort Casino, a palatial mansion of alluring rooms and enticing passageways. The dealers and pit bosses greet him as he passes, welcoming him back.
Foxwoods is not just where Tassone gambles. It is home. Kicked out by his wife and living in cheap hotels outside Boston, the idea hit him one day: Just live at the casino. With so many comp points accumulated from gambling so much - he lays down more than $1,100 every time he bets - it was obvious that Tassone should just move in.
They do his laundry. He gets his mail here. It's only an hour and a half to work in Boston. They know his name. Nobody asks where the money comes from.
Pumped from the tense drive, Tassone is psyched to be back at the craps tables. The dice feel cool, little reptiles jumping out of his hands, chattering across the felt.
This is what he has been waiting hours for, since last night and the night before and when he was a squirmy kid, watching his dad decades ago, the old man's loud voice echoing across a smoky card room.
"Hard six. You want a hard six," he reminds himself, alive again with these people, strangers, his casino family hunched around him, pushing and hollering and leaning over this big noisy gathering. "Two threes."
A $1,000 on the hard six and another $2,000 on the pass line and $10,000 behind ... Jesus, if his father could somehow see and understand this. He's winning. He's a pro. Everyone can see it.
Limousines, free meals and hotel rooms. Golf clubs and Rolexes. It's all covered - comped - because casinos reward their big-time players. Tassone revels in all this, as if his whole life were leading up to this moment at the tables.
"I know when the table is hot, and I know when the table is cold," he thinks. But oh, man, this is some kind of crazy hopped-up moment and maybe he can still make all this right.
The dice clatter to a stop and yes, it is a hard six. Tassone's mind races, crashing against the crowd's energy like a giant ocean wave. "This," he feels again, "is such a rush."
Everything else, all that mess, just melts away. A couple of sweet kids, forgotten back in Massachusetts. Career and marriage in the toilet. Friendships and business relationships ruined, roadkill he speeds by along his addiction highway.

He's home. They love him here.

A High Roller Behind Bars

The movie loops endlessly through his mind. What else can Tassone do but watch and try to figure it all out?
Because it's no longer "Good evening, Mr. Tassone." It's inmate No. 25106-038. He's serving 18 months for ripping off more than $600,000 to pay for that glorious gambling habit and the two years he called Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun home.
How did a smart kid from the Berkshires with a hockey scholarship, a six-figure-salary guy flying all over the country on construction projects for a successful and growing company - a player who just knew when the craps table was turning cold - end up here with a bunch of white-collar crooks?
This gambler never knew how to actually leave those tables. And no, he cannot forget his father, a failed gambler too. He's the one Tassone never could seem to please, not if it meant doing only 90 pushups when you promised to do 100.
The movie keeps running, blurry images retracing a lifetime of gambling.