FOR the man in the pinstriped suit, staring at the judge, staring at the clock, the next 106 minutes will determine the next four years.
He is thin, a marathoner, with a short bowl haircut and a long nose. This morning, he said goodbye to his two children, bear-hugging them, just in case.
Paul Theodore Del Vacchio, now 41, is a gambler. In Riverside County Superior Court, a psychologist testifies that Del Vacchio fed his impulse-control disorder with online wagering, not caring about the win or loss, just the high of the bet.
This is why he stole half a million dollars from his employer, an Indian casino, Del Vacchio tells the judge. It was a compulsion. He needed to cover his losses.
His wife, Monica, 39, adds her own plea: "He has earned my love and my trust and my support."
Judge James T. Warren considers whether the defendant before him is an honorable man whose addiction made him stumble, or a schemer and crook. The judge's face reveals nothing.
*
It started with $125.
Del Vacchio blew it betting on five pro basketball games and quickly won it back. He was 16, working the cash register for $6.50 an hour at a grocery store in Carteret, N.J., a suburb of New York City. His first bookie was a store manager.
At 18, he and a buddy were placing bets over the phone using code names such as Oscar or Dino. His mother wasn't suspicious; Paul was an unassuming kid, preoccupied with sports, and so polite that his eighth-grade class named him most courteous.
But the boys were losing -- big. When they tore through $13,400 in a week, their bookie -- a short, robust man who changed the oil in Del Vacchio's mother's car -- demanded they pay up.
"I said, 'What's wrong with you, taking money from a kid?' " recalled Del Vacchio's dad, a retired fire captain who shares the name and used to bet on football games and at casinos in Atlantic City, N.J. He helped his son wriggle out of paying.
Del Vacchio's parents, who have since divorced, steered him to Gamblers Anonymous. A member called, and the conversation with the gruff-sounding man terrified Del Vacchio. "He told me to never gamble again; he told me I'd only get worse," said Del Vacchio, who quit betting for four years.
Meanwhile, he was courting Monica, his blue-eyed high school sweetheart, whom he met on a blind date at a pizza joint and escorted to her junior prom. Del Vacchio wooed her with handwritten letters while he attended USC and later the University of Maryland; he fell just shy of a degree in accounting before moving to New Jersey in 1987.
In time, he linked up with an old betting pal and got a job at a headhunting agency. His bosses there gambled with big-time bookies. Del Vacchio jumped back into betting, maxing out credit card after credit card.
Monica's sole hint of his financial problems was the interrogation the newlyweds got from a real estate agent when they tried to buy a small town house in their hometown. The inability to buy prompted them in 1994 to head to Las Vegas, which promised cheap housing and lucrative jobs at towering Harrah's Casino. He worked in auditing, she in hotel sales.
Del Vacchio's losses soon ate up their bank account. In 12 months' time, he wagered away $72,000. The couple filed for bankruptcy, which wiped out most of their debt. Del Vacchio promised his wife he could fix things and tried going to a counselor, which lasted just three sessions.
"I didn't realize," he said in an interview this spring. "I didn't realize how bad I was."
Del Vacchio fell back into gambling in bursts and in secret, almost always on sporting events. He began wagering online, even after the Del Vacchios moved to California in 2001, when he was hired as the controller at Pechanga Resort & Casino.
At the tribal venture in Temecula, whose giant gambling floor clangs with slot machines, Del Vacchio supervised daily financial operations and some auditing. He told his dad that, someday, he wanted to run a sports book, where people bet on games.
The couple and their two children -- Lauren, now 8, and Jonathan, 5 -- settled into a 2,700-square-foot stucco home, humbly furnished and tucked into a Murrieta subdivision whose streets are named after pines and palmetto trees.
"They had two blond kids, girl and boy, house that should have had a white picket fence -- their life was like a TV commercial," said Monica's younger sister, Jennifer Dolan, a social worker in Brick, N.J.
Except that Del Vacchio was $100,000 in the hole.
DEL Vacchio discovered a dodge.
In March 2003, he was adjusting a customer's account for a refund, and the computer asked him for a credit card number. He punched in his own, which transferred money from the casino's reserve funds to his personal account instead of the customer's.
During the next two years, he pocketed between $6,000 and $24,000 a month, spreading the deposits among several credit cards. The total: $499,740.88.
