The piggybank was small to begin with.  It was glass, with no slot at the bottom.  The money was intended for emergencies and unexpected necessities. But Diane Amici never broke it, not even when the hard times came.
She kept the piggybank intact when a motorcycle hit her husband, Gregorio Amici.
She kept it intact when he died, leaving herself and her seven children to care for themselves.
She even kept it intact when she was forced to rent out three bedrooms of their sprawling two-story Syracuse N.Y. home, leaving the Amici family in increasingly tight quarters.
She never saw her youngest son taking money from the bank.
Marco Amici knew exactly where the piggybank was kept.  The 13-year-old became adept at using a butter knife to extract the cash.  He only took a few dollars.  Never enough to be noticed – just enough to stay in the game.
“I was out of control at that age, but I didn’t even know it,” said Amici, now 67.  He stares at his hands as he recalls the start of what would become a lifelong addiction – a desire to play cards with his brothers, a desire to belong.
“I knew I had a gambling problem, but I thought that the problem was that I needed more money.  But that wsn’t the problem.  The problem was me.”
According to the National Council on Problem Gambling, 256 million – or 85% – of the American population gambles at least once a year.  Much of the action happens in casinos, which are legal everywhere but Hawaii and Utah.  But gambling occurs other places, as well; on the Internet, at Super Bowl tailgates and church Bingo nights, and in last-minute impulses to play the Lotto at the grocery check out line.
Most of the bets are innocuous.  They represent an idle form of entertainment, a legal thrill and the possibility of extraordinary sudden wealth.  But for the 4 to 6 million people who develop a gambling problem this year, and the 2 million who are pathological gamblers, the farfetched hope for fast cash becomes an all-consuming addiction – one that often destroys almost everything in its path.
Experts say it’s hard to estimate the total cost of compulsive gambling in America.  Addicted gamblers make up a tiny portion of the total population, but their financial problems are huge.
“The total debt of the compulsive gambler is often over twice that of the gambler’s annual income,” said Keith Whyte, Executive Director of the National Council on Problem Gambling.  According to Whyte, the national cost of gambling addiction has been estimated at about $6.8 billion per year.
“Money is the substance that these folks abuse,” Whyte said, noting that gamblers often use money that would otherwise be invested or saved for retirement.
Joy Brown, a 56-year-old grandmother of eight, accrued $80,000 of debt in 2 ½ years of uncontrollable addiction to poker.
“People don’t really understand this addiction,” Brown said.  “We don’t ingest anything.  But the rush of gambling is compared to the rush of cocaine.  The first win is just like the first hit of crack.  You always want more.”
Brown, of Phoenix, N.Y., said her love for video poker spiraled out of control when her mother died in 1985.  After that, gambling became her escape from the pressures of everyday life.  She used video poker to cope with the emotional distance between her and her truck-driving husband, as well as the stress of single-handedly raising three children who were entering adolescence.
“I went through an inheritance like it was water,” Brown said.
“After a certain point, I was numb.  It didn’t even matter whether I was winning or losing.  All I wanted to do was to sit in front of the machine.”
Her voice, already soft, grows quieter.
“I was one day away from prostitution, one day away from dealing drugs.  I never tried to kill myself, but I didn’t care whether I lived or died.”
According to the National Gambling Impact Study Commission, one in five pathological gamblers will attempt suicide – a number higher than any other addictive disorder.
Gamblers aren’t just a danger to themselves.  Families and loved ones struggle with the depression, anxiety, erratic behavior, violence, and emotional distance that gamblers often exhibit.  That’s to say nothing of the more obvious ramifications of pathological gambling – bounced checks, ruined credit, defaulted loans, astronomical debt, and – often – bankruptcy.
Ernest Goss, founder of the Goss Institute for Economic Research and author of “Governing Fortune: Casino Gambling in America,” notes that the rise of legalized gambling in recent years has dovetailed with our nation’s mortgage crisis.
“We’re seeing empty houses at an all-time high,” Goss said. “Some of those mortgages certainly belong to people who have tapped into home equity lines to support their addiction.”
Whyte and Goss say that no one will ever know how much of our current financial crisis is caused by problem gambling.  Most states do not require bankruptcy petitioners to state the reason for their financial ruin.
Even petitions that include the reason for bankruptcy often fail to tell the whole story.
“Often, you have to go two or three layers deeper,” Whyte said. “For example, a petitioner will say he had medical bills.  Why? He had an ulcer.  Why?  Because he had a gambling problem.”
While Marco Amici never went bankrupt, he suffered in other ways.  It was four decades after he first stuck a butter knife into his mother’s piggybank before he decided to get help for his addiction.  In the interim, he developed asthma – a result, he says, of acute bronchitis caused by gambling-induced anxiety attacks.  He engaged in an elaborate check-writing scheme to fund his addiction.  And he damaged relationships with his family, including the older brothers whose approval he so desperately desired.
Amici said he knew he needed help when his wife, resigned to life with an addict, stopped fighting with him.
“My conscience finally caught up with me,” Amici said.
He joined Gambler’s Anonymous, a group dedicated to helping problem gamblers.  He hasn’t gambled since.
Today, Amici is one of two Gambler’s Anonymous trustees for the Upstate New York area.  He says he wants to help other gamblers realize the potentially destructive consequences of this seemingly innocent habit.
“The most valuable assets we have in life are time, emotions, and relationships,” Amici said.  “Gambling can ruin them all.”