How online Gambling toppled Greg Hogan's world

[notter]

boo hoo hoo...sob story...he's is being sentenced today...throw the book at him...

"In a little more than a year, this clean-cut, conservative kid who saw himself as a future financial mogul lost nearly $8,000 to his gambling addiction"

Future Financial Mogul that can't control his own bank account...


From The Morning Call
August 17, 2006
How online gambling toppled Greg Hogan's world
Addiction led Lehigh U. class president, accomplished musician to rob a bank, halting his march to success. Greg Hogan Jr. to be sentenced today.
By Matt Assad Of The Morning Call
Lehigh University sophomore Greg Hogan Jr. stood in line at a Wachovia Bank in Allentown on a December day in 2005, listening to two voices in his head as he scribbled out a note.

One voice told him, ''Do it. Do it. It's your only way out. You're already here, just do it.''

The other countered, ''Why are you here? This won't solve anything. This doesn't make sense.''

By the time he walked into the Union Boulevard branch on that bright winter day, the genteel son of a Baptist minister was a frazzled, sleep-deprived mess — the result of a nearly two-week spree of online gambling and binge drinking.

He wasn't trying to hide anything. He didn't even wear a mask. He had on a red baseball cap and the green fleece jacket his parents gave him for his birthday.

He listened to the voices and then made his decision. He handed the stunned teller his note and demanded money.

Today Greg Hogan will be sentenced for a crime that, on the surface, makes no sense. Sophomore class presidents who play cello in the university orchestra simply don't rob banks.

But a closer look reveals how a private school graduate and classical musician from a close-knit, protective and deeply religious Ohio family could have arrived at that moment in the bank.

He, his family and the people who know him best describe the 20-year-old as a high-energy student with an infectious personality and an insatiable thirst for success who was overwhelmed by an addiction that grew quickly from the moment he experienced the freedom of college life.

In a little more than a year, this clean-cut, conservative kid who saw himself as a future financial mogul lost nearly $8,000 to his gambling addiction, culminating in a decision that will haunt him and his family for the rest of their lives.

''At that moment, I had the devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other,'' Hogan said. ''Since then, I've come to realize that I have been wired to become a compulsive gambler since birth.''

The kid who once worked tirelessly to please those who held so much hope in him has come to terms with the gambling addiction that made him steal from the family safe and even lie to his grandmother.

As he talks about his addiction and how low it caused him to sink, the same confident smile that convinced his friends and family that he was a winner tops off his 5-foot-8-inch frame. His words ring with conviction and his determination appears unwavering. But his efforts now are focused, not on taking Lehigh University by storm or conquering Wall Street, but on beating back the urge to gamble.

The one difference: Greg Hogan now understands that he is not invincible.

An early performer

Maybe it was being a minister's son, or growing up with a talented older sister. Maybe Greg Hogan simply had a gene that drove him to excel. Whatever the reason, Hogan learned to perform at an early age.

He began playing piano at 4, in part because his 6-year-old sister, Nancy, already was accomplished. His parents realized quickly that he had a special talent. While Nancy toiled over the keys, using hard work and dedication to wring every ounce of potential out of her technically flawless music, Greg seemed to absorb the notes like a sponge. His blondish red hair cropped short, his little legs dangling from the piano bench, he instinctively played with flair and emotion, quickly surpassing his sister's expertise. Like most things, music came easy to Greg.

Still, that didn't keep him from striving to get better. When he outgrew his nurturing first teacher, he began learning from a hard-driving instructor who believed talent could only flourish with long hours of practice and unwavering dedication.

Hogan's mother, Karen, didn't like her. The teacher was too demanding, too tough. Such a small boy shouldn't be pushed so hard, Karen Hogan told her husband, Greg Sr.

But the boy loved her. ''Bring it on,'' he remembers thinking, relishing the idea of meeting near-impossible demands. Before a competition, he'd sit perched at his piano, sometimes practicing as much as five hours a day.

''If I loved something,'' Greg said, ''I dove into it head first.''

He carried that attitude into most everything he did. Away from school, if he wasn't playing music for nursing home residents or organizing food drives for the local homeless shelter, he was cultivating a growing appetite for politics. Even as a boy, he knew his opinions were conservative and decidedly Republican, from his belief in Reaganomics to his business-first attitude.

When his father decided to run for a city council seat, Greg gathered his friends and canvassed the area in a door-to-door campaign.

And Greg had a lot of friends. While most kids had a tight circle of confidants, he strived to be close friends with half the class.

By the time he was 14, he had twice performed at Carnegie Hall, and his musical talent had earned him a scholarship to the exclusive University School in Hunting Valley, Ohio. The campus of the all-boys school was a 23-mile drive from his family's two-story Colonial home on the end of a cul-de-sac in Hudson, a comfortable suburb of Cleveland and Akron. But Greg's mother, who had homeschooled her son for seven years, was willing to make the 46-mile round trip twice a day because the opportunity for her son was too good to pass up.

With its rolling hills, its own fish hatchery and giant maple trees, the day school campus appears almost collegiate. Students arrive each day for 8:05 a.m. assembly in blue blazers and ties, and administrators boast that 100 percent of their graduates move on to college. Unlike the families of most students at the $19,000-a-year private school, Greg's family was not affluent.

His 51-year-old father, with his round face and easy smile that emits a sense of patience, has been a preacher for three decades. He speaks with the emphatic inflection and calm tone that keeps the attention of the nearly 200 people who come to services at his First Baptist Church of Barberton. But he always knew being a minister would not make him rich. So for years he had a second job as a school bus driver to help pay for his son's $50-an-hour music lessons.

When he saved enough money, he moved his family to Hudson, where many of the 23,000 residents commute or work at the local Jo Ann fabrics national headquarters.

Greg thrived at University. He was an outfielder on the baseball team and one of 10 leaders in the school's British-style system of houses. If a school event was being held, Greg was probably planning it. He couldn't just be a member of the Cadmean Society social service club, he had to be one of the students who consistently logged the most volunteer hours.

He had good grades, but his parents believed that if Greg hadn't put his social priorities ahead of school work, he would have had a perfect 4.0, even at an elite institution such as University School.

School officials considered him exactly the type of student who would carry the school's reputation to one of the nation's top colleges.

''He was a talented musician and ... one of our brightest,'' said Whitney Lloyd, University's director of college guidance.

Greg was the only student to play two instruments — cello and piano — in the school orchestra. By then, he'd added the cello to his repertoire, not because he thought he had an aptitude for it, but because if Greg Hogan was going to do something, it had to be grand.

''It sounds silly,'' he admits, ''but I chose cello because it was the biggest. No other reason. It was just the biggest.''

By the start of his senior year, in September 2003, Greg had become a member of the local Young Republicans club and had worked on political campaigns for now-federal Judge Christopher A. Boyko and Ohio state Sen. Robert F. Spada. Greg's youthful smile and easy conversation were almost irresistible as he worked local parades and knocked on hundreds of doors for Spada.

Like most everyone who met the young man, Spada was impressed.

''He was so polite that it doesn't surprise me that he waited in line at that [Allentown] bank,'' Spada said. ''Just a really good kid. He worked hard for us.''

Spada figured that Greg would someday be famous. He had no idea how soon fame would come or in what form.

For his senior yearbook page, Hogan chose a Winston Churchill quote to carry him into his future.

It read, ''History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.''

His first poker game

When Greg arrived in late summer 2004 at Lehigh University's campus at the foot of South Mountain in Bethlehem, he again found himself at a school his parents couldn't afford. Yet, again, his musical talent and his academic prowess paved the way.

After a sheltered childhood of learning at home and attending private school with some of Ohio's brightest young minds, Greg found himself 400 miles from home, awash in freedom. As the summer faded, the ambitious freshman decided he would guzzle freely from the cup of his newfound independence.

''I can do just about anything I want,'' Greg thought to himself, ''and I think I will. I'm going to do it all.''

He decided on his first day on campus that he would run for class president.

By evening he was sitting at a table with 11 other students, joining a hot trend on campus by playing in his first poker game.

The stakes were small — just a $5 buy-in — but Greg was already enjoying life at Lehigh. He placed fourth, one seat out of the money. As he thinks back to that night, he remembers no switch clicking, no urge blossoming. It was just an evening with new friends.

''I only played a couple more times that first two months,'' Greg said of live poker.

That would change when a friend of his roommate introduced Greg to online poker. He could do it right from his dorm computer, and all he needed was a bank account and a debit card. As the friend helped Greg get started, he joked, ''You know, Greg, gamblers die broke.'' Greg just chuckled.

For two weeks, he practiced without spending a dime.

Almost instantly, the former chess club member fell in love with the strategy and challenge of Texas Hold'em, the exploding poker game in which each player is dealt two pocket cards, while five community cards are dealt on the table.

He used play money on a practice site and parlayed $1,000 in imaginary chips into $20,000. To Greg, poker was beginning to feel like everything else he threw himself into — easy.

''I practiced by playing, but I really didn't do my homework. I didn't read books on how to play,'' Greg said matter-of-factly. ''I was going to develop my own style, play my own way. I was arrogant.''

Meanwhile, he encountered ''Phys,'' an online gambler whose online account boasted winnings of more than $120,000. Greg began to think big.

What he didn't realize was that practice sites are filled with inexperienced players. Nor did he know that the people trolling the real money sites include professionals and players with computer programs designed to find gambling sites with inexperienced players.

So he used his debit card to deposit $75 into an account with PokerStars.com, which, Greg thought, graciously gave him a $25 bonus for joining. His screen name, geelehigh, displayed the kind of school spirit that sent him to Lehigh football games shirtless with his body painted Mountain Hawk brown and white. He had officially become part of the estimated 1.7 million college students gambling online, according to researchers at the University of Connecticut Health Center.

According to the American Gaming Association, Internet gambling is a blossoming epidemic. What was a $3-billion-a-year business in 2001 had revenues of $12 billion last year, and that is projected to increase to nearly $25 billion by 2010. And unlike casino gambling, where the patrons are predominantly people older than 60, online gamblers are predominantly men in their 20s.

That fall semester of 2004, he treaded water, winning some but losing more. The winning was just enough to keep him hooked.

''We call that the lure of intermittent reinforcement,'' said Dr. Rina Gupta, director of the International Centre for Youth Gambling at McGill University in Montreal. ''A famous study showed that if one lab rat has a lever that gives him food every time, the rat will only hit it a few times a day when he's hungry. But give him a lever that only gives him food sporadically and unpredictably, and the rat becomes obsessed with hitting the lever.''

Greg remembers the hand that first sent him over the edge. It was November 2004 and he'd drawn a king-high flush. He quickly bet his entire online account of $300. His opponent called his bet and showed an ace-high flush.

Rage swept through him. He cursed the screen, turned off his computer and vowed never to play again.

But within a few days, he was beginning to feel like that rat that hadn't eaten. When Greg went home to Ohio for Christmas break, his dad noticed a change in his son. It was his first inkling that his superachiever son was in trouble.

Rather than spend time with friends he hadn't seen in months, Greg Jr. watched television poker for hours at home. When he wasn't doing that, he was playing poker on the family computer in his father's basement office.

Greg got a rush from online poker he didn't get from sitting at a poker table. In live games like the one he joined that first night at Lehigh, he could play maybe 30 hands an hour. But online, he could play up to 75 hands an hour. Hands were dealt in seconds. The card flips were instantaneous, and his opponents were scattered around the world, sitting at their own computers. There was no between-hands chit-chat, no distractions to slow the game. Rock music from Green Day, Incubus and 311 blared from the stereo as Greg played for hours. The hands ran together in a blur. It was fast and exciting.

When Greg Sr. asked his son how he could waste his Christmas vacation playing online poker, his son didn't even look away from the screen. He simply replied, 'Don't worry, Dad, it's just play money.''

''That's when the lying started. When you are a compulsive gambler, you also become a compulsive liar,'' he said, reciting some of what he has learned in treatment.

Trying to avoid catastrophe

If there was a silver lining that Christmas, it was that Greg stopped gambling when he had burned through most of the money he had saved for the next semester. With just $200 to carry him through nearly five months at Lehigh, he refocused his efforts on his classes, his social life and his work-study job in the university chaplain's office. By then, Hogan had decided online poker was rigged.

He did well in class, organized charity events as class president and pledged the Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity. He was only playing live poker with friends two or three nights a week.

He was trying to pull himself away from catastrophe.

In a stroke of good luck, he landed a summer job with a finance company back home near Cleveland. It paid him nearly $5,000 for less than three months' work, enough money to carry him through his sophomore year.

But the job also gave Greg money to gamble. What hooked him again was an online ad on a college Web site offering a $50 bonus for a deposit of $50. Geelehigh was back in action.

As the summer of 2005 passed, Greg was losing. The conservative who used to balance his bank account to the penny was logging frequent overdrafts in his account.

Greg Sr. did not like what he was seeing in his son's behavior. In his role as a minister, he was experienced in spotting people in crisis. He watched with alarm as his son would creep out of bed and sneak into the basement to play poker, sometimes until dawn. And he knew about the mounting overdrafts.

Realizing how serious the situation had become, Greg Sr. and his wife took drastic measures. They demanded that their son join Gamblers Anonymous. They also started attending support group meetings for families affected by gamblers.

When the rest of the family left for vacation later that month, Greg Sr. gathered every computer in the house — even those used by his other children — carted them to his church and locked them in his office.

''It sounds harsh, but by then we had decided we were not going to be enablers for his problem,'' said Greg Sr., a hint of his Georgia roots still evident in his voice. ''We knew Greg was not able to control himself.''

It seemed to work. But what Greg's parents didn't know was that their son had won $2,500 gambling over the July Fourth holiday, money that was sitting in an account in Bethlehem.

Once he was back at Lehigh, he was binge gambling again, six to eight hours a day for three- or four-day periods every few weeks.

As he watched television accounts of the devastation from Hurricane Katrina, Greg thought to himself, ''I should be helping in Louisiana.'' The thought was fleeting. He turned up the stereo and flipped on his computer to play again.

The winnings from July quickly evaporated. While he once played online at quarter and half-dollar tables with pots of $20 or $30, he was now playing at $3 and $6 tables with pots as high as $1,200.

''I was fully on tilt,'' Greg said, using a gambler's term for an out-of-control player chasing losses by betting with emotion and desperation. ''I was trying to win too much too fast. I couldn't accept that I was failing. I kept thinking, if I keep trying, I'll beat this.''

As his debts grew, Greg began using alcohol to forget them. In October 2005, campus police cited him for underage drinking, adding a $400 fine to his mounting debt.

Greg's past might well have set him up for a fall, said Gupta, the McGill University gambling expert.

''A kid who has success all his life learns if you put in the effort, it will pay off,'' Gupta said. ''That doesn't apply to gambling. It's hard for an ultra-successful kid to understand that.''

The bank overdrafts started coming so frequently that Greg Sr. drove nearly seven hours from Ohio to Bethlehem to install a program blocking his son from accessing gambling sites on his fraternity room computer. Greg Jr. wanted to obey his father, but by then he was captive to his addiction.

He turned to the computers in Lehigh's library. For hours he played there, often with the whisping sound of flipping poker cards coming from computers where students were playing a few tables away.

Back in Ohio, when the overdrafts still kept coming, Greg Sr. called Lehigh officials and begged them to go into the library and remove his son.

''They told me that unless Greg was a danger to himself or others, there was nothing they could do,'' Greg Sr. said. ''I felt helpless.''

Greg Jr. attended classes but stopped doing homework and withdrew from his usually booked social calendar.

In a blink, he was back in Ohio for Thanksgiving, financially and emotionally bankrupt. His money was gone, his fraternity brothers were asking him to pay back more than $600 he had borrowed from them, and 45 bank overdrafts left him more than $1,000 in debt to his bank.

''Mom, I don't want to go back,'' Greg said to his mother in the laundry room of their home.

''Finish these two weeks, get through finals week, and then maybe you can take a break,'' his mother answered.

He could stay out of school after finishing the semester and enter a treatment program, Greg thought.

Instead, he sneaked into the family safe and took $1,200 in bonds that had been saved for him since birth. He knew he shouldn't have taken them, but he thought he would use the money to pay back his friends and at least make a dent in the overdraft debt.

''When I got back to school, I started thinking I could double it,'' Hogan recalls, wondering how he could have missed the signs that now seem so clear to him. ''My thinking was so twisted at that point.''

He went on a four-day gambling binge. One minute he was up $700, the next down $500. The measured, analytical style he once used to play was now a risky, rage-fueled approach.

In the late afternoon of Nov. 30, his bond money mostly gone, he sat with pocket kings and $300 in his account. He bet it all. His opponent, holding ace-queen, pulled an ace ''on the river'' — the fifth and final community card turned in Texas Hold'em — and won the hand with a pair of aces.

Greg lapsed into a desperate 10-day fog, spending much of his time drinking beer and worrying how he'd pay his friends.

His perfect façade was crumbling, but he had become an expert at hiding the cracks.

Sally Schray, the secretary to the Rev. Lloyd Steffen, university chaplain, supervised Greg for two years in his work-study job in the chaplain's office. She spent hours talking with him, marveling at how easily he engaged everyone from the cleaning staff to then-college President Gregory Farrington.

''Even when he was apparently sinking, I couldn't tell. He still held things together,'' Schray said. ''He has this unique ability of being able to talk with anyone. I truly believe he'd be comfortable talking to President Bush. I would have been proud to have him as a son.''

His best friend and class vice president, Matt Montgomery, also had no idea of the torment that was dogging Greg.

''Honestly, I couldn't tell. None of us could,'' Matt said. ''To us, he seemed like the same, loyal, funny friend we all knew. He never told us how much he was hurting.''

For the first time in his life, Greg felt he was letting people down.

''These were good friends. They would have understood, if I had only told them,'' he said. ''I didn't want them to know I had a problem. I always wanted people to think they could depend on me. I was blinded by my obsession.''

He knew he could not call his parents for money, so he tried to borrow from other family members, including his youngest sibling, James. He even lied to his grandmother, asking her for $1,000 he said was for the orchestra's upcoming trip to South Africa. His parents found out and stopped her from agreeing.

''I still can't believe I did that,'' Greg said. ''I told myself I'd pay my friends back, but looking back, I probably would have gambled it away.''

Out of options, he was on his way to see the movie ''Chronicles of Narnia'' with Lehigh Senate President Kip Wallen and Matt Montgomery on Dec. 9 when he asked Kip to stop his black Ford Explorer at the Wachovia in Allentown so he could cash a check.

Kip and Matt remained in the car, oblivious to Greg's plan. Inside the bank, Greg waited his turn and handed the teller a note stating, ''I want $10,000 in cash. I have a gun! Be quiet and quick, or I will shoot. No bait.''

No bait meant no marked bills or exploding ink.

Seeing his polite demeanor and schoolboy looks, teller Hiyam Chatih gave him a look that seemed to say, ''Is this real?''

''Yes,'' he nodded nervously, ''this is real.''

He walked out onto the bank's freshly shoveled walkway with $2,871, went to the movie, ate pizza with friends later and sat silently when a call came to one of his fraternity brothers at the table informing him that police had just raided the Sigma Phi Epsilon house.

Greg Hogan was arrested less than an hour later when he arrived for orchestra practice. In that instant, as police handcuffed him outside Zoellner Arts Center, everything he'd worked for was gone. His chair in the Lehigh Philharmonic, his seat as class president, his place in the fraternity and his otherwise spotless reputation.

Back in Ohio, Karen Hogan was driving with her husband when her cell phone rang. When she heard what her son was telling her, she was so shaken that she pulled off the road, unable to safely navigate traffic.

''Mom, I'm in bad shape,'' her son said from a cell phone he had borrowed from an Allentown police detective. ''I've done something really stupid. I'm under arrest.''

Not only had her son robbed a bank, but he'd signed a confession, even before making his first phone call to his parents.

''At that moment, time stopped,'' said Greg Hogan Sr., recalling how he felt as he sat in that idling car. ''At that moment, all of the plans we had for Greg were canceled.''

Greg Jr. was about to spend his first night in jail.

'This was a cry for help'

How many more nights, if any, Greg will spend in jail will be determined today when he is sentenced by Lehigh County President Judge William H. Platt.

Greg proudly says it has been more than eight months since he's gambled and now that he's pleaded guilty, he wants to say something that's been pent up in him since the robbery.

''I really want to apologize,'' Greg said. ''First to the bank and the teller — I can't imagine the fear I made her feel. Then to my friends, my family and finally the university. Lehigh's been good to me and it didn't need this kind of attention. I'm sorry I put everyone through this.''

Since the robbery, Greg has gone through a 36-day treatment program in Louisiana that cost his family $5,600, and he attends regular Gamblers Anonymous meetings. He's had to accept that he's fallen off the ladder he spent years climbing. His dream of working as a finance company executive on Wall Street is gone. He can never hold large amounts of cash, a credit card or even a debit card, he says. For the foreseeable future, his parents will be in charge of his bank accounts.

For now, the kid whose future once seemed limitless chooses not to look much beyond the next turn. He hopes to get a job and maybe go back to college — probably an Ohio school close to home — next year.

That is, of course, if he's not in jail.

State guidelines call for Greg to be sentenced to a minimum of 22 months to 36 months in prison for his plea to felony bank robbery. But because he is a first-time offender, he could get probation.

Psychologists hired by his Allentown attorney, John Waldron, say there's a reason Greg went into that bank unmasked and unarmed, just as there's a reason he so quickly confessed to his crime.

''This was a cry for help,'' Waldron said. ''Deep down, he wanted so badly to quit gambling that it was actually a relief when he was arrested. That's why he was so anxious to confess and so anxious to apologize for what he'd done.''

What Greg says he really wants now is to warn others. He says his story should be told at universities around the nation to show students that addiction can darken even the brightest star.

''I will accept my sentence, whatever it is,'' Greg said. ''But I feel I can do more good if I'm not in prison. This is an epidemic that can hit any family. I want to tell them that this is a problem you can't tackle alone. Parents, don't be afraid to intrude on your children's privacy, and students, don't be afraid to ask for help.''

The ordeal has changed the Hogan family forever. His mother, shy of publicity, tries to protect her three other children from the media glare Greg's case has drawn. His father tries to find purpose in what's happened to his family. He too wants his son's story to be a cautionary tale for the 1.7 million college students who now gamble online.

On Aug. 30 he will sit on a panel at DeSales University in Center Valley to discuss the dangers of online gambling. Last week he spoke before a group of clergy trying to stop gambling in Ohio.

''Today, as I stand before you, I am not a minister,'' Greg Sr. told his fellow clergy. ''I am a dad on a journey.''

Today, he will stand beside his son in Lehigh County Court. A judge will tell both of them which path that journey will take.
Copyright © 2006, The Morning Call

[notter]

I wonder if his did will still be at DeSales on the 30th on the gambling panel. I might just have to stop on by and say hello. Free promotion...

He seems to have gotten everything he wanted growing up, maybe that's why he had so much trouble facing losing and not getting what he wanted when he lost


From The Morning Call
August 17, 2006 - 3:09 PM EDT
Ex-Lehigh U. bank robber gets state prison term
The Morning Call
Former Lehigh University sophomore Greg Hogan Jr. was sentenced today to 22 months to 10 years in state prison for robbing an Allentown bank.

"You had a privileged life, you've had advantages that most defendants did not have," Lehigh County President Judge William H. Platt told Hogan, before the 20-year-old was led out in handcuffs.

Earlier in the hearing, Hogan's father, Greg Hogan Sr., testified his son called him crying the night of the arrest -- not because he'd been caught, but about the stupid mistake he had made.

Hogan's father asked President Judge William H. Platt that "this will be dealt with in a way that Greg can become a productive citizen again."

Employees at the Wachovia Bank spoke earlier this afternoon. They asked the judge to remember that they were the victims in the crime.

Teller Hiyam Chatih is away, and in a statement said she did not want to see Hogan again.

Hogan said he held up the Wachovia Bank on Union Boulevard to pay gambling debts he accumulated by playing on-line poker.

He pleaded guilty to felony bank robbery eight months ago.

State guidelines called for a minimum of 22 months to 36 months in prison.

-- from Morning Call staff reports
Copyright © 2006, The Morning Call

[Pokerlayer]

You're already well aware of my feelings about this jerkoff richboy.