37-year old Arelia Margarita Taveras is an attorney with a serious ethics problem. She also has a gambling problem and lost her law practice, her apartment and her parents’ home, and she owes the IRS $58,000. Worse, she dipped into clients’ escrow accounts when she needed money and still faces criminal charges over that. Fortunately for her, and unfortunately for society as a whole, if her legal training has taught her anything is that fault should always lie on a deep pocket. In this case, it’s the casinos that allowed her to lose her money.

She claims that she went “days at a time at the tables, not eating or sleeping, cleaning her teeth with disposable wipes so she didn’t have to leave.” Now she’s filed a $20-million racketeering lawsuit in federal court against six Atlantic City casinos and one in Las Vegas, claiming they had a duty to notice her compulsive gambling problem and cut her off.

That’s right, it is always someone else’s fault and there was no way in all of that time that she might have figured out that the more she gambled the more she’d lose.

That said, it’s easy to see how effortless it was for her to cross the line herself. After all, if all her client’s were going for the big win with or without merit, then why shouldn’t she as well?

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 9th, 2008 at 3:21 pm by Insider and is filed under Big Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.