The gambler

A high-roller is living out a gambler’s ultimate fantasy at black jack: The player is betting $30,000 dollars a hand, two hands at a time. He seems incapable of losing. And he’s already won millions.

Keith Morrison, Dateline correspondent: How did that feel standing beside that table with all that money there?

Adam Resnick: Just like I could gamble forever. 

Adam Resnick, at that moment, was laser-focused on those chips—each worth at least $5,000.

Resnick: When I was in action I didn’t know anything else was going on.

And yet, of course, there is a great deal going on.  And, as you will see, far more is at stake on this table than merely money.

Gambling in America is an apparently unquenchable thirst—some would say lust. The belief among many people that anybody can beat the odds.  The man you have just met may have done exactly that.  Certainly, he is at the brink: somewhere between Nirvana and criminal self destruction.

Resnick: I knew what I was doing was wrong.  I knew it was unorthodox.

Adam Resnick grew up well-off in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and says his parents took him to his first casino when he was six.  At 14, he says he got his first real gambler’s rush while on a family cruise. Playing blackjack at the ship’s casino, he turned a $500 holiday gift into nearly $8,000.

Resnick: That became a legendary story on the ship.

In high school, he would bet anytime, anywhere, on anything. He became a regular at the local dog track.

Resnick: I became oblivious to the rest of the world. 

Morrison: So this incredible focus when you were gambling but if you weren’t gambling, if you were, I don’t know, doing your homework, reading a book?

Resnick: Oh, I never did homework.

Still, he managed to finish high school and went off to college in Tucson, Arizona.

Morrison: Why did you decide to go to the University of Arizona?

Resnick: Close to Vegas.

He made that trip to Vegas several times a month.

Resnick: (sigh) 37 times I believe my three semesters I was there.

Morrison: Gambling a lot of money?

Resnick: Everything I could get my hands on.

“Everything” included his tuition money and student loans. He says he lost it all—tens of thousands of dollars.

Adam says he vowed to quit gambling. He started school fresh at his home state school, the University of Wisconsin in Madison.

Morrison: After you moved back to Madison, how long was it before you went to the casino?

Resnick: About 24 hours.

Between casino visits, he says he found another passion: the love of his life, Meredith. 

Meredith Resnick, Adam's wife: Well, you know we were college students.  I was going to class and Adam was going to Ho Chunk Casino.

It didn’t take long for her to see how serious his problem was.

Adam Resnick: My second date, she took me to Gamblers Anonymous.

Morrison: Come on.

Resnick: Yeah. And I turned to her after literally 90 seconds and I said, “I’m not hanging out here with all these losers.”                       

Meredith graduated from Wisconsin, and even though Adam dropped out, he certainly seemed to get his act together.  He says he made his first million at age 22 — not from gambling, but from selling medical equipment in Chicago. In 1998, when they got married, Meredith didn’t catch on that Adam was still gambling all the time. Only now, he lied all the time, too.

Resnick: I would actually buy tickets to California and leave them on the counter in the kitchen so—saying, “Look, I’m going to California.”  And take it a step further, I’d actually pay for a room at a hotel in California.

Of course he wasn’t really at that hotel, but at a casino in Vegas.

Adam continued to earn serious six-figure money in business, as his gambling losses piled up.

Hundreds of thousands of dollars sometimes in a single weekend.  And again the bookies, Adam likens them to drug pushers, closed in.

The day his son was born, Adam says, a bookie tracked him down inside the delivery room.

Resnick: I look up.  And he goes makes a gesture [like he was going to kill me]. And do I think he was gonna kill me?  No, because he wouldn’t have gotten his money. 

Banks came after him too, for bouncing big checks. It got to the point, he says, where he had trouble opening a checking account.

But that’s where our story takes a sharp turn.  So far, Adam has been like hundreds of thousands of other Americans whose gambling is, quite frankly out of control. But now, in Adam’s case, a friend stepped in, an accountant whose family just happened to run a small bank in Chicago.

Resnick: And he said to me, “Well, my mother is the CEO and my sister’s the COO.”

No one realized it— not even Adam— but this out of control gambler was about to gain access to a huge cache of money that wasn’t his.

Resnick: I was in gambling fantasy land.

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