Sadly, none of the douchebags on Wall Street who traded recklessly with the public’s money (subsequently destroying both the domestic and global economy in 2008) have never seen a jail cell. In truth, these financiers were just using their fancy derivatives to gamble with other people’s money. Despite this recklessness, no one has thrown around the term “addiction” to describe their speculative trading. The operative word here is typically “crooks.”
But recently, a 39-year-old financier managed to do something similar by swindling his family and friends out of millions of dollars with a bullshit investment scheme. After squandering their money away by placing risky stock bets, he has blamed his fraud on a gambling addiction to get some clemency in a federal courtroom where he’s facing ten years of prison.
The Kid Who Had It All
Andrew Caspersen was born lucky. After attending a fancy college—one of the best in the nation—he not only went on to work for Wall Street’s most elite investors, he also inherited a good $20 million of his family’s fortune. Unfortunately, the job and the inheritance weren’t enough to satisfy his self-professed addiction to risky bets.
“This case is a tragedy. It is a tale of a good person with a ferocious addiction that caused damage to the people he cared about the most,” Paul Shechtman, Caspersen’s attorney, told the Washington Post. According to Shechtman, his client’s gambling addiction started like it does for most folks—in the casinos. From there, Caspersen worked his way up to betting on the stock market.
After pleading guilty to multiple charges of fraud in court, he added “I defrauded numerous people, mostly family and close friends. There was no real investment opportunity. It was just a way for me to get money to feed a gambling addiction.”
A Thief or an Addict?
Since high-risk stock market trading very closely resembles gambling behavior, it’s easy to lump the two together as one and the same. But should we be expected to summon compassion when a cocky crook essentially robs those closest to him of hundreds of millions of dollars due to a self-described “compulsion?”
Psychologist Alden Cass (who works specifically with stock market traders) told the Washington Post, “There is a fine line between gambling and trading. It is a very fine line. What I have seen is that sometimes people stop using emotional discipline, and that is when trading becomes gambling.”
Bad Behavior is Bad Behavior
It’s hard enough to scrap the blame toward full-blown drug addicts and alcoholics when they destroy the lives of those around them, especially through thievery and other unlawful behaviors—be it driven by greed, survival or just to get the next hit. But gambling addiction is a trickier moral quandary.
I know of a woman who suffers from a stubborn gambling addiction, which led her to embezzle thousands of dollars from her employer to fund her habit. Obviously, the legal fallout of ripping off this huge chunk of money from a business—or in Caspersen’s case—family and friends, is far more significant than a DUI.
Still, the blame cannot be completely eradicated. Caspersen had access to plenty of resources to identify and solve his problem. He had more than enough money to snag himself a top-rate therapist or to check himself into a posh rehab where he could eat haute cuisine and sleep in a king-sized bed on Egyptian cotton sheets for a month while ridding himself of his addiction demons.
Though it sucks for him, I say he deserves to serve out the 10-year sentence he is facing—though chances are he’ll get parole. I’m sure those he ripped off will feel a bit better knowing the guy who Ponzi’d them out of hundreds of thousands of dollars—in some cases millions—is behind bars. Regardless, let’s hope the guy can at least hit some DA meetings while in the slammer. He may be a crook, but he still deserves a chance at recovery.
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