He has a dollar in his pocket, just enough to pay the tolls back to Joliet. It’s all his wife let him carry tonight. She has his credit cards, checkbook, and ATM card. He’s signed the house over to her too. His job as a heavy equipment salesman takes him all over the suburbs, so he’s always driving past racetracks and offtrack betting parlors. He can’t risk doing that with money in his pocket.
“Your card has been cut off,” he was told. “You’ve got to see your administrator at work.”
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“I started gambling my sophomore year in high school,” he says. “My dad asked a friend of his who was going to Arlington to take me and my brother with him. We hit the daily double–a horse called Teutonic Knight. I fell in love with the racetrack. I was an avid baseball fan, and all that went out the window. I worked at a fast-food restaurant, and I started stealing money from the till so I could go to the track.”
After class Matt would catch a bus from his south-side high school to get to Sportsman’s Park in Cicero in time for the late daily double. “I didn’t go to the prom, I went to Sportsman’s. I had very few friends, and if they didn’t go to the track, I didn’t want anything to do with ’em.”
Two lears later Matt and Tracy were married. They honeymooned in Las Vegas–his choice–where Matt sneaked down to the race book while his bride was asleep in the hotel room.
With limitless cash at his disposal, Matt started betting like he had the biggest bankroll at the track, plunging $200 on daily doubles and betting $600 on long shots at Gulf Stream Park. And offtrack betting enabled him to bet on hundreds of races a day. When he walked into the OTB in Joliet, he says, the tellers would start arguing about who was going to work late, because Matt always closed the place down, lingering until the last quarter horse at Los Alamitos crossed the finish line.
When Matt told her he’d gambled away $170,000 of expense account money and that he owed another $150,000 to other creditors, Tracy had trouble catching her breath, “I felt like I had no right to anything I own,” she recalls. “My house, my clothes–I have no right to breathe because of all the money we owe. It was kind of like we were both nonexistent. I thought, ‘Where am I going to live? Where are my kids going to live?’”
