Fears of Social Breakdown as Gambling Explodes in Italy
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Version 0 of 1. PAVIA, Italy — Renowned for its universities and a celebrated Renaissance monastery, this Lombardy town about 25 miles south of Milan has in recent years earned another, more dubious, distinction: the gambling capital of Italy. Slot machines and video lottery terminals, known as V.L.T.s, can be found all over in coffee bars and tobacco shops, gas stations, mom-and-pop shops and shopping malls, not to mention 13 dedicated gambling halls. By some counts, there is one slot machine or V.L.T. for every 104 of the city’s 68,300 residents. Critics blame the concentration of the machines for an increase in chronic gambling — and debt, bankruptcies, depression, domestic violence and broken homes — recorded by social service workers in Pavia. But in many ways, Pavia is merely the most extreme example of the spread of gambling throughout Italy since lawmakers significantly relaxed regulation of the gambling industry a decade ago. In that time, Italy has become the largest gambling market in Europe, and the fourth largest in the world after the United States, Japan and Macau, according to Global Betting and Gaming Consultants, which tracks gambling. Now, some Italians, in Pavia and elsewhere, say they have had enough. In October, Lombardy became the sixth region to pass legislation intended to curb gambling and help addicts. Dozens of municipalities have also drafted measures to limit gambling, such as reducing opening hours. The explosion of gambling “is devastating the territory,” said Simon Feder, a psychologist who founded a “no slot” protest movement in Pavia that aims to ban the machines from public spaces. “It is an anti-economy that impoverishes because it doesn’t spread money around, it just gobbles it up.” With the economy still weak, spending on gambling, like other consumer spending, shrank this year for the first time, but it was still projected to reach about $115 billion for 2013. On average, one in every eight dollars spent by an Italian family goes toward gambling, four times more than 15 years ago, said Maurizio Fiasco, a sociologist at a national commission that combats usury. Residents of Pavia province, situated in a wealthy region, spend about $4,124 a year on gambling, more than double the national average of about $1,650, according to a report issued in December by the gambling news agency Agimeg. Many blame the sheer availability of the machines for the rising trend. “There’s no longer a distinction between gambling and life,” Mr. Fiasco said. “There is no separate space for gambling — it is everywhere.” The new attempts to rein in the machines have put myriad municipal and regional governments, which deal more directly with the social costs of gambling addiction, on a collision course with the national government, which has come to depend on gambling revenue, to the tune of about $11 billion last year. “The government gets the profits, the territory gets the problems,” said Angelo Ciocca, a regional lawmaker in Lombardy who supported the recent legislation to curb the industry. In December, lawmakers in a body that can rarely agree on anything joined to pass a measure in the Senate that curtailed funds to regions and municipalities that enacted anti-gambling measures. The step provoked outrage, with Prime Minister Enrico Letta calling it “an error,” and the measure was revoked when the bill passed to the lower house. “The dealers feel protected by the government. They know the government has their back,” Mr. Ciocca said of the buyers of state gambling concessions. “Interests are high.” In 2001, gambling revenue in Italy — the total amount bet minus the players’ winnings — amounted to $5.6 billion. By 2012, the industry’s take had quadrupled to $22.4 billion, according to Global Betting and Gaming. Gambling officials say significant deregulation of the industry a decade ago rooted out a vast illegal gambling market mostly controlled by organized crime. At the time, they say, Italy had 600,000 to 800,000 illegal video poker machines competing with state-controlled gambling: lotto, lotteries, horse racing and Totocalcio, a then-popular betting game on Sunday afternoon soccer matches. Italy also has four legal casinos. Currently, there are 380,000 slot machines and 50,000 V.L.T.s around the country, the legal heirs to the underground video poker market. Nearly 80 percent of slot machines are in coffee bars and tobacconists. “You can play everywhere. There are even slot machines in the pharmacy,” said a former gambler who gave his name as Roberto and who now counsels other recovering addicts in Pavia. “At least with a casino, you have to travel to get there, so you only go a few times a year.” To spare his family embarrassment, he did not want his actual name used. With too much free time on his hands after retiring as the manager of a multinational company, he said he was rapidly “hypnotized” by the slot machines in a coffee bar in the town he lives in near Pavia. He ended up losing about $27,000 and his family before entering a rehabilitation program at the Casa Del Giovane, an addiction center run by Mr. Feder, the psychologist, in Pavia. “You only notice you’re losing when you’re down to your last euro,” he said. “It’s one thing to self-destruct, quite another to destroy your family.” A 2012 study by the University of Rome estimated that 790,000 Italians are at risk of gambling addiction, as defined by two internationally recognized scales that evaluate at-risk gamblers by measuring, for example, their risk for over-indebtedness or the time they dedicate to gambling. Gambling officials played down those numbers, noting that fewer than 7,000 Italians had been treated through state-sponsored addiction programs. “It’s not a matter of social alarm; it is not an epidemic,” said Massimo Passamonti, the president of Sistema Gioco Italia, which represents gambling companies in Italy. Even the at-risk category is “in line with other European countries,” he said. Industry officials also argue that the gross payout in winnings is high, and can reach 98 percent of what is bet in online gambling. For V.L.T.s it is, by law, at least 85 percent, part of what makes the machines so popular. There is agreement among gambling officials, however, that the Italian market is mature, and that the time has come for restructuring. Mr. Passamonti’s organization has proposed that the government evaluate and reduce the number of gambling locations, significantly reduce the number of slot machines, and limit the number of machines in any one place that is not a gambling hall. A more severe crackdown on an industry that directly and indirectly employs some 200,000 workers would be detrimental, industry officials say. “A return to prohibition would mean an increase in illegality,” Mr. Passamonti said. It could, in any case, prove difficult to persuade the thousands of coffee shop owners and other small businesses to give up the machines and the revenue they earn from them as a percentage of winnings. In Lombardy, the government is offering tax breaks as an incentive. But many coffee bar owners fear that if they remove their slot machines, people will take their business to the bars that have them. “People used to play for passion; you didn’t ruin yourself. Now it’s become a disease,” said one cafe owner, who asked that his name not be used because he is in a legal dispute with the gambling dealers who license the slot machines he is trying to remove. “This used to be a place where people came for coffee, not a place of slap, dum, dum, dum, slap,” he said, mimicking the sounds of one of his machines. “I saw people were sick,” he said, explaining his decision to try to remove them. “I got frightened.” |