Noteworthy News Articles on Mental Health Topics, January 27-28, 2007

DETROIT — When current and former foster children formed a group to help youths who had turned 18 and were “aging out” of the system, one of the first things they did was hold a luggage drive. “We saw that a lot of the kids were taking their clothes out in garbage bags,” said Chilton Brown, 23, a former foster child who spent ages 3 to 18 as a ward of the state, bouncing around 15 family homes or group residences.
      A life contained in green plastic bags: it is the kind of humiliating detail that hits home hardest among foster youths themselves. It is also a telling sign of how unprepared many of these 18-year-olds are to live on their own, without families, jobs or school diplomas to shore them up. In part because of the increasing advocacy by foster youth groups like Mr. Brown’s, many states are expanding efforts to help young adults prepare for life outside the system, offering transitional housing, education, medical care and mentoring as they step out on their own. States are also extending aid for extra years, in some cases to age 21 or even beyond. “We’re finally seeing a recognition by public agencies that they have a responsibility to this population beyond the age of 18,” said Gary Stangler, director of Jim Casey Youth Opportunities Initiative, a foundation in St. Louis that is helping to organize foster youth boards and offers matched savings accounts as well as job aid in 10 states. “In our society, most 18-year-old kids aren’t ready to be thrust into the world.”
     Long in the shadows, the plight of aging out foster youths — some 24,000 a year nationwide who fail to be adopted and usually leave court-monitored care at 18 — is gaining new attention, as youths speak out and research reveals the numbers who end up in homeless shelters, jail and long-term poverty.
     California, spurred by the lobbying of the country’s largest and most powerful group of former foster children, the California Youth Connection, plans to provide 1,200 transitional housing units, and support counseling, for young adults emerging from care. In New York City, as part of a wider effort to fight homelessness, the state and city are creating 200 apartments for foster care veterans with special needs. Several private agencies are expanding their programs, as well. Washington and Iowa have recently joined at least 17 other states, including New York, that allow youths under some circumstances to remain in foster care until age 21. The move keeps the youths under the protection of a court that can press for aid to which they may be entitled into their twenties but is not always offered by overwhelmed state agencies.
     But a universal option to remain in foster care until age 21, which is supported by the American Bar Association and many experts, has been hampered by a lack of money. The large federal subsidies that help pay for the system’s courts, lawyers and social workers are provided only up to the age of 18, or 19 for those finishing high school. In Illinois, where nearly half of foster children now stay to 21, the extra years are paid for by the state. Early studies by the Chapin Hall Center for Children at the University of Chicago indicate that those who remain are faring better than those who leave at 18.
     But it is too soon, scholars say, to know how much difference all the new efforts will make in the lives of children who have suffered abuse or neglect and separations from their families. In Michigan, nearly 500 youths age out annually, usually at 18. A study of 264 former foster children, released in October by psychologists at Wayne State University, showed how poorly many had fared.
     Youths from Detroit and two surrounding counties who aged out in 2002 and 2003, mainly African-American, were surveyed three and a half years after they left care. Seventeen percent had stayed in the streets or in shelters for an average of two months each. Some 33 percent had spend long periods “couch surfing” with friends or relatives. Four in ten were high school graduates. The average youth had been unemployed half the time since leaving care; most jobs were in fast food, averaging just $600 per month. More than one in four males had spent time in jail.
     Under a 1999 federal law that provides some “independent living” assistance to age 21, many aged-out youths can get financial aid, including up to $1,000 to help rent an apartment and up to $5,000 a year for those enrolled in college or training schools. “If it weren’t for these programs, I’d probably be in a shelter and I’d have to drop out of school,” said Stacey Kline, 21, who left Detroit’s foster system at 18. Ms. Kline has been an active leader in the city’s youth boards and is now in college, hoping to someday run a home for aged-out youths. Still, for Ms. Kline it has been two steps forward, one step back: she recently borrowed emergency money from the Jim Casey program to help her rent a new apartment after, she said, an angry ex-boyfriend vandalized her previous apartment.
     In other common patterns, many youths are eager to sever ties with the child welfare bureaucracy, some squander their limited aid and others are in no shape to take advantage of these benefits. Michael Morris, 21, says he regrets forfeiting his transitional aid. Born to teenage drug users, he was in foster care in Detroit from the age of six months, drifting through dozens of private and group homes. Though he had never even met his parents, Mr. Morris said, “I wanted a family and I wanted to be with my parents no matter whether they were on drugs.” Before he turned 18 and exited foster care, he met his sister and mother for the first time and decided to move in with his mother without the consent of the court, thus losing transitional rent and school subsidies. He later joined one of the emerging foster youth boards in Detroit and received some matching money for what he saved while working as a security guard.
     But living with his mother did not last long. Mr. Morris then tried sharing apartments, but the roommates did not pay their share of the rent. He became unemployed and recently arrived at the crisis center of Covenant House in Detroit, where he shared a barren room with two other homeless youths. “I hope to be out by March,” Mr. Morris said. “I got a good lead on a job at Popeye’s,” he added, which would pay $7.25 an hour. Through the matched savings program, he hopes to rent his own apartment and enroll in community college.
     The growing advocacy by foster children themselves has done more than anything else to draw the attention of state and national officials, said Robin Nixon, director of the National Foster Care Coalition. In Michigan, Marianne Udow, director of human services, said one of her first acts after taking office in January 2004 was to meet with youth boards to ask for advice. “I left that meeting feeling that the whole system was broken,” Ms. Udow said. The youth boards later issued 15 recommendations for improving the system and lobbied the governor and legislators. Some suggestions were accepted, including making sure that all foster children get a certified copy of their birth certificate and a Social Security card and help obtaining driver’s licenses. Other suggestions would be more costly and remain under discussion, including offering free college tuition, giving former foster children cars being auctioned by the state and giving all the option to remain in care to 21.
     But the youths also made it clear they believed that the problems start when the state removes children from their parents — sometimes too readily — and moves them away from relatives, friends and familiar schools. Their first recommendation was that foster youths should have a say whenever changes in their status were considered. Their second was to provide them help maintaining ties with their birth families and hometown friends.
     The state created a task force with youths on every panel. One top recommendation, the automatic extension of Medicaid coverage to age 21, has just been put into effect. The State Housing Development Authority has also allocated $3 million for rent subsidies, whose recipients will also be eligible for regular mental health and other services.
     At the same time, Ms. Udow said, the state is working to reduce the frequency with which children are removed from their parents and trying to keep more children with relatives and in the same schools. The state is in settlement talks with the advocacy group Children’s Rights, which brought a suit accusing Michigan of providing inadequate protection and support to children in its care.
     For the hundreds who have joined, the youth boards, with their weekly meetings and election of officers, have offered personal breakthroughs as much as a way to influence policy. “When we come together it’s like family,” said Alice Harris, a 22-year-old mother of three children who lived in a home for unwed mothers when she entered foster care, then ran away at 16 and survived on the streets for more than a year. More recently Ms. Harris has lived with a boyfriend, received welfare and become certified as a nurse’s assistant. She has become heavily involved with her local youth board in central Detroit, getting elected as an officer and lobbying in the state capital. When she attended her first board meeting two years ago, she said, “I didn’t want to leave.” “We were just gossiping, and I made friends, some of them worse off than I was.”
     Chilton Brown, who says he “acted out” during his 15 years in foster care, has benefited from the new aid programs in Michigan but also illustrates how hard it can be to turn things around. Mr. Brown gained confidence as a public spokesman, especially for the special challenges facing gay youths like himself, and has worked as a trainer of new foster parents. He entered Wayne State University with financial aid and aspirations to become a social worker. He took advantage of the matched savings program to buy a car. But he has also lost a series of jobs, could not keep up payments on his car, lost his home when a relative moved away and has missed the last two semesters of college. He has spent the last three months living in Covenant House. “I got too adapted to having other people take care of me,” he said in the sparse double room he shares. Now Mr. Brown’s belongings are stuffed into one suitcase, and two large plastic shopping bags.



Amnesiac Wandered Dallas for 25 Days
Jamie Stengle, Associated Press- 1/27/2007

DALLAS -- Joe Bieger walked out his front door with his two dogs one morning last fall a beloved husband, father, grandfather and assistant high school athletic director at a Catholic school. Minutes later, all of that would seemingly be wiped from his brain's hard drive. For 25 days, he wandered the streets of Dallas and its environs a lost soul, unable to remember his name, what he did for a living, or where he lived, until, finally, a contractor who was building a new house for Bieger and his wife happened to recognize him. By that point, Bieger had made his way to a suburb about 20 miles from his Dallas home, holes worn in the rubber soles of his canvas shoes. He had lost 25 pounds, and a full white beard covered the normally clean-shaven educator's face.
      Bieger, 59, said he was diagnosed afterward as suffering from psychogenic fugue, an extremely rare form of amnesia. Now reunited with his family and back at work at The Highlands School, Bieger said in a recent interview that he has regained all his memories up to the point he wandered away. He is under the care of a doctor who specializes in such cases. And his cell phone has been fitted with a GPS tracking device.
     But more than three months after the episode, he said he has only vague memories of those days on the streets of Dallas, one of America's most crime-ridden cities. Witnesses and police accounts fill in a few other gaps in Bieger's journey. Bieger's dogs were found running loose within a few hours of his disappearance. About two weeks after he disappeared, some homeless people told searchers they had seen a man matching his description near a store close to his home. Over the next several days, Bieger apparently crossed busy streets and interstate highways to the Dallas suburb of Plano. Not long after, he was spotted at a church carnival in Plano.
     Bieger's ordeal finally ended Oct. 30 in the suburb of Carrollton. Mike Phillips, a construction foreman, spotted a man wandering close to the site where Bieger was having a new home built. Phillips thought the man was Bieger, but he wasn't sure. "Joe, Joe!" Phillips yelled, and then asked the man if he knew his name. As the two men spoke, memories slowly came back, Bieger said. It took about two hours to come out of the fog. "It wasn't instantaneous," Bieger said. "Over some period of time I began to realize who I was."
     In September, before he wandered off, he had experienced two episodes of amnesia that lasted only a few hours, and so his wife of 37 years, Patricia, had an idea of what happened to him after he vanished. She said that during the ordeal, she always believed he was alive. Nevertheless, "there were days when I just wanted to give up," she said.
     No one knows exactly how many others are afflicted with psychogenic fugues, or what the precise causes are. Victims may lose all memory of themselves, family or friends, but otherwise seem to function normally and can perform routine tasks. Many experience an urge to move constantly from place to place. Most victims regain their memories, though it can take days or even years. Psychogenic fugues can be triggered by stress or unresolved conflict, according to experts. But Dr. John Hart Jr., president of the behavioral neurology section of the American Academy of Neurology, says researchers are trying to determine why some people might be more susceptible.



Looking For My Father in Las Vegas
Pat Jordan, New York Times Magazine- 1/21/2007

They are all gone now. I don't think about them much anymore, except, fleetingly, at this time of year, late January. They would have loved it, the buildup to the Super Bowl, an exhilarating time for men like themselves, those shadowy figures from my childhood.
My uncles were not like the uncles of my childhood friends - tall, blond, smiling men who taught their nephews how to toss a baseball. My uncles were short, dour men in shimmering sharkskin suits. They smoked crooked Toscano cigars and taught me, from the time I was 6, how to palm the ace of spades, how to spot shaved dice and how to pray to God before I went to bed that the Bears would beat the Packers by at least a point and a half.
     They weren't really my uncles; they were my father's gambling cronies. Italian men with names like Schiama (the jabbering one), Freddy the Welch and Tommy the Blond (not really blond, just not as dark as his cronies). Their wives, my aunts, were big, peroxide blondes in the habit of saying "kinks" for kings, as in, "I got three kinks, doll."
     My father never worked a day in his life. He was a gambler and a con man and a grifter for all of the 65 years that I knew him. He gambled on pool, cards, dice, horses, sports events, two pigeons sitting on a fence, anything - as long as he could find an edge. Shaved dice. Marked cards. A drugged horse. And when he couldn't find an edge, when the game was fixed against him, he gambled anyway, because, he told me, "it was the only game in town." When he was 89, he gambled on a triple-bypass heart operation because he liked the odds. His doctor told him that if he survived the operation, he had a 60-40 chance of living six more years, and he did. He spent those last years in an assisted-living facility, where he booked bets on the pay phone in the lobby. I can imagine him now, in the midst of the playoffs, getting the line on the San Diego Chargers or the Philadelphia Eagles, scribbling it on a piece of paper he held against the wall, studying it, then placing his bet.
     My father never knew his parents. He spent the first 15 years of his life in an orphanage, a good apprenticeship for a gambler and a swindler. He learned early how to con his custodians out of extra food and sometimes even affection. When he left the orphanage, he turned to gambling for his livelihood and his satisfactions. Gambling proved that he existed, that he was special, smarter than his marks, smarter even than God's will.
     Here's what it was like to grow up a gambler's son. I couldn't listen to "The Lone Ranger" on the radio because my father had to listen to horseracing results. I could never root for the Yankees and our heroes (DiMaggio, Berra, Raschi, Crosetti) when they played the Red Sox if Uncle Freddy was "down" on the Red Sox. Matchbooks were strewn everywhere throughout our house, yet my father didn't smoke. When I was 7, I burned up a matchbook and was punished - not for almost starting a fire but for destroying my father's betting line, which he always wrote on the inside covers of matchbooks. Whenever he was sitting in the back seat of a police car, arrested for gambling, he'd ask the officer in front for a cigarette. He'd light the cigarette, then toss the matchbook with his betting line, the evidence, out the window. When I was 12, my father bought me an expensive Herb Score baseball glove; three days later, he pawned it. After one of his disastrous betting weekends, real estate agents wandered through our house asking my mother questions about heating costs. When my father was sick in bed with the flu, I would come home from high school to find my mother on the phone, scribbling numbers on a bunched-up napkin while my father shouted down from their bedroom, "Get the line on Frisco!"
     A brilliant, self-educated man, my father cited "The Gambler," by Dostoyevsky, as proof that all gamblers, himself included, were "degenerate gamblers," the phrase he always used. But it was obvious to me that he didn't really think of himself as a degenerate gambler, because he always used to preach that no matter how much he gambled he always made sure that he was able to meet his "nut," his family's minimal living expenses. And he did. We lived in a leafy, WASP-y New England suburb, while my uncles still lived in the Italian neighborhood in the city. I went to a private Jesuit prep school and then to a Jesuit college because, my father told me, he wanted me to be "white." To be Pat Jordan, not Pasquale Giordano, my father's given name.
     My father had no interest in money. "It's about the juice," he said, the action. Money was just a means to keep score. He gave it away, to his friends, his wife, me. He paid for every dinner with his buddies, overtipped every bartender and waiter, bought my mother diamonds when he was flush, bought me expensive baseball shoes made of kangaroo leather and bought nothing for himself, except a new navy blazer with brass buttons every 20 years or so.
He hated casinos because they were "dehumanizing institutions," and he knew about institutions. "Besides," he said, "you can't beat the iron," meaning the casinos' winning percentage. He preferred illegal, private games because they were more exciting (the threat of cops breaking down the door) and more challenging. "It's not how good you gamble - it's about how many mistakes your opponent makes," he said. "Casinos don't make mistakes." My father prided himself on his ability to "read" his opponents, find their weakness, exploit it, outsmart them (always the point of my father's gambling) and, if necessary, outcheat them.
     When I was in my 20s, by then an ex-professional baseball pitcher, a schoolteacher, a husband, a father - a respectable burgher in a way that he never was - my father gave me a lecture on vice. "There are only three vices in this world," he said. "Booze, broads and gambling. If you're gonna do it right, pick one and stick to it." I laughed, because at the time I had no room in my life for vice. Forty years later, shortly before he died, he repeated that lecture to me. By then I had more than a passing acquaintance with the first two vices, but not the last. I laughed again, and said, "Don't worry, Pop, I never gamble." He gave me a disgusted-look and said: "You? A freelance writer 40 years?"
     Which was why, last fall, a couple of years after he died, I went to Las Vegas. To find out how far the apple had fallen from the tree, but even more important, to try to understand my father's gambling, my father, in a way I never had when he was alive.
      Gambling gives meaning to some people's lives," David Schwartz said over the ka-ching of the slot machines in the Mandalay Bay, where I was staying. The vast casino was almost deserted on this weekday afternoon, except for a few elderly women playing the slots. "Gambling is all about risk and reward," Schwartz said. "It's hard-wired into our brain since the dawn of man." Schwartz, who is 33, grew up near Atlantic City and got his Ph.D. at U.C.L.A., where he wrote his dissertation on gambling. Today he is the director of the Center for Gaming Research at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. "I don't know if it's a disease," he said. "We have free will. We can walk away." I told him about my father. "Gamblers always pay for dinner," Schwartz said. "A lot of them lead ascetic lives. Money is just how they keep score." Then he told me a story about Lem Banker, a gambling legend in Las Vegas.
     "I got married last Friday," Schwartz said. "Before the ceremony, my .wife to be discovered her wedding band didn't fit. I told Lem. He said: - 'Go down to this jeweler I know and he'll take care of it. Just tell him your Uncle Lem sent you."'
     The following morning, I took a taxi to the Gambler's Book Shop on 11th Street, just off Charleston Boulevard, to meet Uncle Lem. (Are all gamblers "Uncles," with a sawbuck for the kid but never a trip to the circus?) I was supposed to meet Lem at noon. He was 79 and had a grumpy old man's voice over the phone when I called to set up a meeting: "Whaddya want?" I explained myself. "Meet me at the bookstore," he said. I asked how much the taxi fare would be. "Don't worry about it, for Chrissakes!" he said. "I'll pay it."

"Lem is a little late," said Howard Schwartz (no relation to David), the owner of the Gambler's Book Shop. "Let me show ya around." Schwartz is a former New York newspaper reporter, slight, bald, Woody Allen in "Broadway Danny Rose." He showed me his store devoted to all things gambling. Then he led me into his back room. A poster on the wall read "Area Patrolled by Attack Cat." He pointed to a cardboard box on a sleeping cot. I peeked inside. There, on a bunched-up blanket, slept the smallest kitten I'd ever seen. "Four days old," Schwartz said. "I'm feeding it with an eyedropper. The vet said at that age three out of four die. Not good odds." Schwartz shrugged. "So I've been sleeping with it every night. Gamblers love cats and dogs." For gamblers, a pet is a substitute for the human relationships they find troubling. A pet's love is unconditional. Human love is demanding: Stop gambling!
     Schwartz produced a folder of articles about Uncle Lem and a copy of the book "Lem Banker's Book of Sports Betting." It was written in 1986, then went out of print until Schwartz reprinted it himself. I began to leaf through the articles and the book.
      Lem Banker is considered the greatest living sports bettor in the country. He bets more than 100 sports events a week, mostly baseball, basketball and football, college and pros. If he wins on 56 percent of those games, he makes his nut. If he hits 60 percent or higher, he gets rich. During one stretch, Lem picked 13 consecutive Super Bowl winners against the spread.
     Uncle Lem appeared. He is a big, muscular, vigorous man for his age. He wore a sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off, jogging shorts and sneakers. Before I could ask a question he began telling me stories. "I knew 'em all," Lem said in his gruff voice. "Lefty Rosenthal from the Chicago mob. ice Pick Willie Alderman. Liver Lips Gordon. Louie the Butcher. ... I knew all the fighters -- Ali, Rocky Marciano, Jake LaMotta, Joe Louis, Sonny Liston, he was a friend of mine. Joe Louis was late for his funeral because he had to bet down on some sports. ... I knew everybody. Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Kirk Kerkorian, the businessman."
I asked Lem when he started gambling. "I started booking bets in my father's candy store in Union City, N.J., when I was 20," he told me. "I never had a job since. My father said I'd always be a bum." Lem bet mostly sports events because he loved sports. He was good enough at basketball to be offered scholarships to Long -Island University and the University of Miami. He played against Bob Cousy and Easy Ed Macauley in the summers.
     "I went to Miami on a scholarship in 1949," Lem said. "But I dropped out and started booking students' bets. Only sports. No horses, no cards,, no table games. I only bet people. I like the underdogs. I use a little psychology to see which underdog is `up' for a game. It's all instincts, kid." (My old man called me kid until the day he died, when I was 65.)
     Lem was a still a wannabe major gambler and bookie in 1957 when the feds busted a gambling ring in Indiana and subpoenaed 300 people, among them actors, athletes, politicians and Lem Banker. Before he testified, one of the indicted gamblers told him: "You're a young fellow. Don't get yourself in trouble for me. Tell the truth." Lem told him not to worry and took the Fifth.
     Some "people" in Las Vegas liked it that Lem Banker was a "stand-up guy," so they invited him to town to set up his sports book. "Why not?" Lem said. It was in Las Vegas, in 1959, at the age of 31, that Lem married a beautiful model named Delores Vicario. She was naive about his gam
bling. She asked him once why he always said Sandy Koufax, a fellow Jew, was the best pitcher in baseball and yet always bet against him. Lem said, "I'm a gambler, sweetheart, not a fan."
     According to Lem, betting every day keeps him young: "Keeps my heart pumping. Some people take Plavix for their heart. I bet. Otherwise life would be boring." He has two satellite dishes and eight television sets in his Spanish stucco mansion. He sits at his kitchen table and figures out his bets based on his instincts, his information and a simple philosophy: get the best odds and "don't make high bets when you're on a bad streak." After he figures out his bets, he punches the boxing bag in his backyard, then starts to field calls from his cronies, which always begin the same way: "Lem, who do ya like?" "I tell them," Lem said. "I never charged anyone for my picks, like some guys." At one time, newspapers across the country, from The New York Post to The San Francisco Examiner, carried Lem's picks. Today he has a weekly TV program on KLAS-TV in Las Vegas.
Before dinner, and before he watches the night's sports on TV, Lem lifts some weights. A few bicep curls, bench presses. He's a health nut. He doesn't .drink or smoke. That's one reason he doesn't like casino games - sitting at a card table for hours, smoking and drinking: "It's unhealthy. Booze and broads ruined more gamblers than sore-armed quarterbacks." To reinforce his point, he stood and flashed me a bodybuilder's doublebicep shot. Then he crunched his pecs, making them jump.
When I got up to leave, I asked Howard Schwartz to call me a taxi. "I'll drive ya," Lem said. We walked through the bookstore, past a woman at the cash register. She came rushing out of the store toward Lem. "I thought it was you," she said, grabbing his arm. I got into the car just as I heard her say, "So, Lem, who do ya like?"

The following morning I took a taxi to Wayne Allyn Root's house in a gated subdivision outside Las Vegas. His wife, Debra, an evangelical Christian and a former Miss. Oklahoma, met me at the door. She showed me into their living room. "Wayne will be down in a minute," she said, and left. I looked around. Wayne's house was a shrine to Wayne. The walls were adorned with posters of him, photographs of him, newspaper and magazine articles about him. There were copies of his books, "Millionaire Republican" and "The King of Vegas' Guide to Gambling," everywhere. Wayne's Web site is full of references to him as "the king of Vegas," "the Warren Buffett" of gambling, "the oddsmaker of everything in the world," the Tony Robbins of gambling. It lists all the TV shows he's been on, which include "The O'Reilly Factor" and "Best Damned Sports Show Period," and the publications that have profiled him. In one such profile, written by Wayne himself under the byline "Cool Hand Root," he claims that sports betting is the new American pastime because fans can do it at home, in front of their favorite piece of furniture, the TV set. It appeals to Americans' love of both money and sports, it allows the average fan to match wits with professional gamblers and it's a pleasant and entertaining way to spend a Saturday with friends, eating pizza, drinking beer and watching sports on TV. Even if fans don't win their bets, Wayne writes, they get their money's worth in entertainment. Wayne may be the only sports handicapper in the world who sells his betting picks to people while reminding them that even when they lose their money, they shouldn't complain because they had so much fun losing it.
     Wayne appeared, smiling, a small man dressed in a black shirt, black slacks and black dress shoes. Johnny Cash crossed with Liberace. Wayne sat down and began talking. He doesn't like to waste time. Time is money. He said he grew up Jewish in a tough neighborhood in Mount Vernon, N.Y., and began gambling at 13, in imitation of his father, who played the stock market. "For 95 percent of gamblers," he said, "it's about the action. What do you think the N.F.L. is all about? Who'd watch a lousy game if they couldn't bet?" According to Wayne, when fans bet they form an emotional relationship with the men and the team they're betting on. That's where they get their pleasure. The money won, or lost, is only incidental: That's the way Wayne likes it. "For me, it's all about the money," he said. "I live for it."
     Most of his customers are small-business men. "In charge of their own lives, decision makers," Wayne said. "I want high rollers who can afford to lose." (Wayne talks more about losing than any gambler I've met.) Wayne's sports picks are packaged in a series of tiers. "It's all about information," he said. "The more they pay, the more information they get." Bettors who pay $25,000 a year for Wayne's picks get appreciably more information -- including the opportunity to speak with Wayne directly -- than bettors who pay $450 for a single week's picks.
     Wayne jumped up. "Wanna go for lunch? Do you like Chinese?" We ate lunch at Chin Chin Cafe, inside the New York-New York casino. Wayne attacked his chicken as if it were his last meal, yet without interest, as if it were something to get out of the way before he went on to more important things. I asked him if he ever felt guilty about making his money by gambling. He looked up at me as if I had used a word in a language he didn't understand and said: "Guilt? I don't have any guilt. I think zero about why things are. I just accept what they are and find a way to take advantage of them." When the check came, I reached for it. Wayne made a feeble pass at it, too. "I was gonna pay," he said, but he didn't.

That night, Eric Drache picked me up in front of the Mandalay Bay and drove us to a small brightly lighted Italian restaurant on the outskirts of Las Vegas called Cafe Chloe. Besides playing poker himself, Eric has managed poker rooms at the Mirage and the Golden Nugget and been a director of the World Series of Poker for 16 years. Now he produces television shows of poker events.
     I asked him when he became a gambler. He drew a distinction between gambling and playing poker. When it comes to the latter, "I'm not a gambler," he said. "A gambler is someone who wagers at unfavorable odds. I make sure the odds are in my favor." He grinned. "Except once. Many years ago I was the sixth-rated poker player in the world." He shrugged. "Unfortunately, I spent the year playing against No. 1 to No. 5."
     Eric told me that his father was a gambler: "A big-time loser on horses. Mob guys used to come to our house in New Jersey." No doubt Eric started gambling in an attempt to prove to his father that he was a winner. "As a kid, I wasn't good at anything," he said. "I was looking for something to be good at. I liked poker because it was romantic. I wouldn't have to work for anyone." He grinned sheepishly. "I lost constantly as a kid before I figured it out." When wagering on horses and sport, he said, "I couldn't bet small."
     Eric also did a little bookmaking in New Jersey which led to legal trouble in 1968, when he was only a kid. "I went to jail," he said. "I could have got off if I ratted out where I got my betting line. But I didn't. To this day, as a felon, I can't vote in Vegas. But I have had a gambling license."
     When the check came, Eric grabbed it before I could even reach for it; he paid from a wad of bills. Then we got into his S.U.V. and drove down the Strip. When we arrived at the Mandalay Bay, he said: "Will you do me a favor? Call my ex-wife? Her name is Jane Lovelle. She knows a lot about gambling."
     I called Jane Lovelle, a psychiatric site manager at a jail in the San Francisco area. I told her I had dinner with her ex-husband. "Of course he paid," she said. "Gamblers always pay so they can be in control and as a way of demonstrating they're successful. Eric's an amazing tipper." They were married for seven years, until, she said, his gambling affected their marriage. "His gratifications were in cards, not personal relationships," she said. "I would make a nice dinner and he'd say: `Not now. I just lost 15 stoves.' Gamblers don't really have a true desire ` to have emotional relationships with others."

Vegas is the ultimate petri dish for gambling," said Dr. Robert Hunter, who has been the director of
the Problem Gambling Center for more than 20 years. According to Hunter, only about 5 percent of gamblers develop a problem. "Gambling addiction is more biology than psychology," he said. "It has molecular similarities to drug and alcohol addiction." The P.G.C. brochure describes gambling addicts as those who have lost "the ability to control their impulses to gamble."
     Hunter told me that there are two types of gamblers: action seekers and escape seekers. Escape seekers are machine gamblers -- video poker, slots. Action seekers are card players, craps shooters, sports bettors. Although both types gamble for immediate gratification, escape gamblers need it even more immediately than action gamblers. Push a button, win or lose.
     I'd put it this way: Escape gamblers lose themselves in a machine's electronic glow in the same way that children are hypnotized by video games. It's a way to disassociate themselves from an unpleasant reality. Action seekers gamble for the competition, the risk-reward.
     He introduced me to- two of his staff members, Christine and Howie. Everyone on his staff is a recovering gambling addict. Howie used to be a pit boss on the Strip. Christine is a former C.P.A. who worked for the city. Howie is in his 60s, Christine in her 50s. Hunter urged them to tell me their stories. "I was an action gambler," Howie said. "I wanted to be a big shot like Lem Banker."
     In a barely audible voice, Christine said, "I was an escape gambler, video poker, to escape from my crummy life.'.' She was caught stealing money from work to pay off gambling debts. "I lost my job, my house," she said. "I hit bottom. The only thing left was suicide."
    Hunter said: "Christine isn't a character out of Damon Runyon. She's out of Ibsen." Runyon's characters are action gamblers, big, brassy, egocentric, self-assured to an extreme. Ibsen's characters are escape gamblers, frustrated, neurotic, trapped, self-destructive. "Most of the gamblers in our group, or in G.A. in Las Vegas, are escape gamblers," Hunter said. "Maybe 90 percent."
     I attended a meeting of gambling addicts at the P.G.C.; Hunter introduced me to them. They talked mostly about themselves, their lives, in a therapeutic way of self-discovery. Compared with the Gamblers Anonymous approach, the P.G.C. program I saw in action is more about self-awareness than it is about emotional support. P.G.C. members could have been in any therapy group, coping with anger problems or divorce.
     Finally, Hunter asked me if I had any questions. I did. If risk and reward was such an essential part of their natures, how did they feel about the loss of it? They all responded in the same way, saying that they just channeled their risk-reward nature into being a better mother, father, employee. One woman raised her hand and said: "Yes, I feel I lost my alter ego. The person I wanted to be. That friend who guided me into risk. When you stop gambling, you have to find another you. But that evil, exciting friend pops up in other ways now. Like urging you to go sky diving."
     A man said: "I felt like I lost part of my nature at first. I missed it a little bit. Nothing can replace the high of gambling. But now I'm a big shot as a reformed addict to other addicts."
     I had one more question. If gambling is a physical addiction, why not treat it with medicine? Treating it with psychological self-awareness implies that it's a problem of will. "Because there is no medicine," Hunter said.

"I don't want anything to eat," Jimmy V said. "Just ask your questions." We were sitting in a coffee shop near the Mandalay Bay. Jimmy Vaccaro, who is 61, was dressed in a white sweatshirt, jeans and sneakers. He looked like an old-timey gambler, used to smoke-filled rooms, not fancy Las Vegas casinos. Yet Jimmy V., which is how everyone knows him, is one of the more powerful men in town. He has set the odds for casinos in Las Vegas and at the Atlantis in the Bahamas.
     Until Jimmy came to Las Vegas in 1974 and opened a sports book, he "never had a job in my life," he said. "My parents were small-time gamblers in Pittsburgh. Italians ran most of the games. Mob guys. As a kid, I thought the gambling atmosphere was exciting. Like a family. Even if I blew my money, I felt I was part of something. I liked living on the sly" - an expression my old man used often - "anything you do on the sly is great. If you have to work at it it's not fun. I liked the risk reward. The hardship. The dark side of it. I enjoyed something with pain involved." I laughed, but Jimmy didn't even smile. He just went on in his flat, uninflected voice. "I was a teenager the first time I saw a juiced table. I got cheated in dice." It was an education, "like I graduated from Harvard," he said. "No one's ever not been cheated. It's part of the progression. I don't know anyone whose closet doesn't have something dark in it."
     I was embarrassed to mention to Jimmy how my old man always cheated at cards or dice, but I did. For the first time, he smiled. "More power to him," he said. "That's the point, isn't it? To outsmart the other guy any way you can. "
     Jimmy no longer shoots craps or plays much poker -- he just bets on sports events. "I don't have to gouge your eyeballs out anymore," he said.
     He checked his watch. "I gotta go," he said. I had one more question. What about Gamblers Anonymous and the Problem Gambling Center? "Problem gamblers are life's losers," he said. "They wanna go broke. They always find a reason why they lost. I lose, I go home. Reasons are part of the equation. Once I bet, I understand I have no control, so I understand loss." He stood up to go. He added: "Everybody can't be winners. That's why we need born losers."
     After Jimmy V left, I checked out. But before leaving, I found a blackjack table with only one player. I sat down and gave the dealer a C-note. She handed me some chips. I placed a bet. She dealt the cards. I won. Then I won a few more hands. I was up $200. I liked that, the $200. But I was waiting for that gambler's high. I played a few more hands. Nothing. I thought about my flight home. My wife. My dogs. I lost a few hands. Maybe I'll go smoke a cigar outside before I get a taxi? I lost again. My $200 in winnings was gone now. I didn't care. I just wanted to get it over with. I began to double up until I lost all of my original $100, except for a lone $5 chip. I tossed it to the dealer. She thanked me with a small nod.
     Outside, I watched the taxis and limos drop people off. They were smiling, excited, as they entered the casino. I stood there thinking about what I'd learned in Vegas. About gambling, gamblers, my old man, myself. My father decided at some point in his life that it was gambling that defined him. It didn't matter whether that was true or not, it mattered only that to him it was true. Alea ludo ergo sum. I gamble, therefore I am. He told me once: "Find out who you are, kid. And be it." A good lesson for a gambler's son.
     A taxi pulled up to the curb. "The airport," I said. The taxi pulled away from the hotel, turned left on the Strip and began moving past the Luxor, the Excalibur, New York-New York. The cabby looked in his rear-view mirror and asked, "So, did you have a good time in Vegas, buddy?"
     "O.K.," I said. I looked out the window. "I wish my old man had been with me."

Foster Mom Charged in Detroit Tot's Death
Jack Kresnak & Tina Lam, Detroit Free Press- 1/10/2007

Manslaughter and child abuse charges filed Tuesday against a Detroit woman in the beating death of her 2-year-old foster child were the latest dramatic turn in a case exposing flaws in the state's child welfare system. The Aug. 16 killing of Isaac Lethbridge, who was a state foster child for just 11 months, prompted the state to shut down all foster care and adoption services by the private agency that supervised the boy's care, the Lula Belle Stewart Center in Detroit. Charlsie Adams-Rogers, 59, was charged Tuesday with involuntary manslaughter and two counts of second-degree child abuse in Isaac's death. Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy said one child abuse charge relates to Isaac, and the other relates to his 4-year-old sister.
      "I never touched that child. I did nothing wrong," Adams-Rogers said shortly before Detroit police took her from her home in northwest Detroit around noon Tuesday. "It was my 12-year-old adopted daughter that did it," she said. "The police know she did it. She admitted it to them." Worthy said she could not say exactly who beat Isaac to death. "I'm not trying to be evasive, but there are other people that could be charged," she said at a news conference. Worthy said there were nine to 12 people in the home at the time of Isaac's death, and that investigations by Detroit police homicide detectives and the state Department of Human Services continue. Adams-Rogers was arraigned Tuesday evening in 36th District Court. Magistrate Charles Anderson III entered a not-guilty plea and set bond at $50,000.
     Her attorney, Jeff McCarty, argued that she had a clean history in nine years as a foster mother and no criminal record. "She cooperated fully with authorities," McCarty said. "This was an unintended death, and a tragedy." He said he suspects charges were brought against his client because "there is an insistence that some charges be leveled at someone." Adams-Rogers, also known as Charlise Rogers, faces up to 15 years in prison if convicted of manslaughter. The child abuse charges carry penalties of up to 4 years in prison.
     Wayne County Assistant Prosecutor Lisa Lindsey, the lead attorney on the case, said she had no comment on Adams-Rogers' statements about her daughter's possible role in Isaac's death. On Nov. 13, a juvenile court judge terminated Adams-Rogers' parental rights to the 12-year-old, who remains in the foster care system but has not been charged with a crime. The Free Press is not publishing her name because of her age.
     According to statements and testimony at court hearings to terminate Adams-Rogers parental rights, the 12-year-old told investigators that she was playing with Isaac, throwing him onto a mattress, when he missed and hit the floor. A medical examiner testified that it was unlikely such a fall could have fatally injured the boy. Isaac died of multiple blunt-force injuries and had burns on his chest and abdomen and a broken right collarbone, according to the autopsy report. Worthy said Isaac's 4-year-old sister had "multiple healing bruises on her back; she had abrasions on her buttocks, and she had lesions on both thighs." The Free Press is not publishing her name because of her age; she remains in foster care.
     Both children were placed in Adams-Rogers' home last summer by the Lula Belle Center, a nonprofit foster care agency under contract with the state. The DHS suspended Lula Belle's license as a child-placing agency within days of Isaac's death, after an investigation showed that the agency had lost track of several foster children and placed others in unlicensed homes.
     Isaac's father, Matt Lethbridge, said he and his wife, Jennifer Lethbridge, were disappointed by the charges. "The charges aren't as severe as we think they should be," he said. Adams-Rogers is "ultimately responsible for Isaac, and his blood is on her hands," Lethbridge said. Responding to Adams-Rogers' statement that her adopted daughter killed Isaac, Lethbridge said: "Her lies don't explain the torture our children suffered in her house." The Lethbridges have filed a federal lawsuit against Lula Belle and workers there, claiming they failed to protect their children.

How Michigan's Child Welfare Failed a Little Boy (Number 1 of 3 special articles)
Ruby Bailey, Jack Kresnak & Tina Lam, Detroit Free Press- 1/28/2007

In photos, Isaac Lethbridge looks like a mischievous, dimpled elf. He has a big grin and electric blue eyes in a cheery, heart-shaped face. It's hard to imagine that face toward the end, covered with green and blue bruises, both eyes blackened. Isaac traveled a painful journey in his 2 1/2 years. He was neglected by his parents, moved through three troubled foster homes in less than a year and was dead by last Aug. 16, beaten and burned, his collarbone broken.What happened to him under state supervision exposes a child welfare system so overwhelmed and lax in its oversight that, despite attempts at reform, children still are being placed in danger.
      A Free Press examination of court records, trial testimony and state investigative reports shows that during his 11 months in foster care, there were many people who could have saved Isaac. No one did. The Free Press found:
• Less than two weeks before he died, Isaac's social worker, a supervisor and two doctors saw dark bruises on the toddler. But no one tried to remove him from his foster home.
• The Lula Belle Stewart Center -- the Detroit-based agency overseeing Isaac's care -- should never have licensed the boy's second foster mother because the state had substantiated a claim of neglect against her.
• The state investigated more than a dozen complaints about the homes where Isaac lived. Critics of the Michigan Department of Human Services say the number of complaints should have raised alarms even if they weren't all substantiated.
• Isaac was put in foster homes crowded with older children, some with histories of sexual abuse, mental health problems or violent behavior. Troubled children were allowed to care for him unsupervised.
• The state renewed Lula Belle's license in July 2005, even though the agency had come under scrutiny in the 2004 beating death of another child and had failed to conduct regular home visits for all of its foster children or to assure regular physical exams.
• Attorneys assigned to monitor Isaac say they could not locate him on several occasions because Lula Belle didn't notify them when he was moved.
     After Isaac's death, the state Department of Human Services suspended Lula Belle's license -- the first time in at least four years it had taken such action against one of the hundreds of agencies paid by the state to place kids in foster care. It was clear from the state's own investigation that the problems didn't happen overnight. "There were a tremendous amount of lies" by Lula Belle officials, DHS director Marianne Udow told the Free Press.
     But the state, too, had failed to detect problems in the foster homes and at Lula Belle, until after Isaac's death. Then, investigators found plenty. Critics say Isaac's death demonstrates broader shortcomings in the state human services department, which often relies on inexperienced, overburdened workers and outdated methods to police itself. The department currently has just 12 licensing workers to oversee the 500 public and private agencies paid by the state to license 7,840 homes that provide care for 18,660 children.
     Ken Merritt, an attorney representing Lula Belle, defended the center, saying it didn't know of any serious problems. "We're not responsible for Isaac's death," he said. Merritt maintained that Lula Belle officials called Michigan's Child Protective Services on Aug. 4 -- 12 days before Isaac's death -- to notify investigators of his bruises. Merritt said a protective services worker rejected the complaint over the phone. But a state DHS investigation concluded there was no record of any call from Lula Belle that day. Indeed, the state said, there were other instances in which bruises on Isaac and his 3-year-old sister, who was in foster care with him, weren't reported.
     Elizabeth Carey, executive director of the Michigan Federation for Children and Families, which represents private nonprofit agencies, said DHS did not provide adequate oversight of Lula Belle. "There used to be a lot more staff in contracting and licensing" at DHS, she said, "and they didn't just come out during a crisis. ... They used to find an Isaac before it happened."

Parents' record of neglect
Isaac was Matt and Jennifer Lethbridge's eighth child. He was born at home on Nov. 7, 2003, in Pell Lake, Wis., where his parents had moved to avoid Child Protective Services in Michigan and Ohio. They'd fled Ohio a year earlier when Isaac's sister -- whom the Free Press is not naming because of her age -- was born at their home near Toledo. Her birth wasn't registered and the family went into hiding when, alerted by Michigan, Ohio Child Protective Services tried to investigate. Six children had already been permanently removed for neglect from the Lethbridges in Michigan.
     The couple met in 1989, when he was 15 and she was 13, and married in 1995, two years after their first child, a daughter, was born blind and with multiple medical problems. By 1997, they had four children under age 5, and were expecting a fifth. That year, Washtenaw County Child Protective Services received the first of many complaints that the couple was neglecting the children. In April 1998, the state removed the four oldest children, a girl and three boys, from their home in Ann Arbor. The next month, the couple had a baby boy and he was removed.
     The DHS and the Washtenaw County Family Court then began years of efforts, including counseling and financial help, to try to reunite the family, according to court records. The state even paid $1,500 in past-due utility bills. But well into the process, one caseworker noted: "The parents cannot acknowledge that there are any problems. The parents do not seem willing to change or rectify the conditions that brought these children to our attention."
     Doctors told the court that Jennifer Lethbridge was bipolar and had a personality disorder that made it hard for her to take responsibility for her actions. The Lethbridges -- he is now 33 and she is 30 -- admit they made mistakes, including hiding from DHS the fact that their disabled oldest child was hurt when she fell out of her wheelchair as her father pushed her down the front steps of their home. This was during a time when DHS was monitoring the family. The couple say they were young and struggling and Matt Lethbridge had lost a good-paying job at a toner cartridge recycling company.
     In April 2001, citing information the children's foster parents brought to the court's attention and a seeming lack of progress from the Lethbridges, a Washtenaw County judge terminated the couple's parental rights to their five children. The next year, the court ended their rights to a sixth child, a boy born in September 2001 who had been placed in foster care almost immediately. Other families later adopted all of them. "We didn't understand completely what it takes to be good parents," Jennifer Lethbridge said.

Running from authorities
Isaac's birth was registered in Wisconsin. But soon, a complaint was filed there alleging their home was filthy and had no running water or heat. When Child Protective Services tried to check, the family pulled up stakes again.
     Back in Michigan in 2005, money was tight. The family was living in a run-down rented home on Avondale Street in Westland and the Lethbridges weren't getting along. In April, Matt Lethbridge, who was working for a technology company in Troy, lost that job and the couple separated for several months. "Every day I woke up and said, 'Is this the day? Is this the day that I have to walk my kids to the DHS office because I can't feed them?' " Jennifer Lethbridge said.
     Alerted to problems, police knocked on the door on Sept. 19, 2005. Jennifer Lethbridge didn't want to let them in. Officers said more than a dozen birds were flying freely inside, their droppings everywhere. Maggots crawled on bags of trash and the stench of feces and garbage permeated the air. Isaac, then almost 2, and his 3-year-old sister were playing with rotten food on the floor. Dirty diapers littered the house. Flies circled food on the kitchen counter. A few days after police removed the two children, the house was condemned. The Lethbridges were charged with neglect. Jennifer -- then pregnant with her ninth child -- spent 45 days in jail. Matt received a suspended sentence.

Foster home No. 1
Isaac's first stop in foster care was at Martina Brown's tiny brick house on Troester Street on Detroit's east side. When he and his sister arrived on Sept. 19, 2005, the house was already brimming with children. Brown, who was divorced and a high school dropout who'd earned a GED, had adopted five children during her tenure as a licensed foster parent with Orchards Children's Services of Southfield from 1991 to 1999. Foster parents receive $14.24 to $17.59 a day or more to care for kids, depending on their age and services required.
     When Brown sought to renew her foster care license through Lula Belle in mid-2004, she told a worker she'd had complaints filed against her with Child Protective Services during her time with Orchards but none was substantiated. According to Brown's file, the Lula Belle worker asked Orchards for the records and was told they couldn't be found. The Lula Belle licensing went through. Reached in North Carolina, where she now lives, Brown, 40, would not discuss details of the investigations. "In those reports, they will tell you when they investigated, it was unsubstantiated -- that it did not happen, and that was that," she said.
     Some neighbors, however, were wary of the home. Robert Grimm said he wouldn't let his grandchildren play at Brown's house because there seemed to be little supervision. "They would run up and down the street and often stay out late until 10 p.m.," Grimm said. "There were lots of grown-ups coming and going, too."
     A few weeks after Isaac and his sister were placed with Brown, their court-appointed attorney, Lorena Jaquet, visited. She reported to Child Protective Services that Brown's home was dirty and that she was concerned about the number of children living there, but no action was taken. Brown insists she was a good foster parent. "I did what I had to do to take care of my children," she said. Isaac and his sister's stay with Brown lasted about three months, cut short by her move to North Carolina.

Foster home No. 2
Isaac's next stop: The home of Patricia Kennedy. Kennedy, a longtime foster mother who had nine adopted children, knew Brown and sometimes babysat for her. Kennedy had been licensed through Lula Belle in 2000, but had let the license expire in July 2005. At the time, she was behind in her foster parent training and had failed to schedule a required home visit for licensing. But that November, she applied for a new license through Lula Belle.
     Kennedy was living on Ohio Street on Detroit's west side. The agency's workers had previously noted that the home was in disrepair and Kennedy was slow to fix the problems. Still, the agency quickly gave her a new license on Dec. 20, 2005. Isaac and his sister arrived two days later. The children should never have been placed with her, the Free Press found, because a Child Protective Services investigation had substantiated a claim of neglect against her in March 2005 after her heat and electricity were shut off for nonpayment. Several of her adopted children were living with her at the time.
     Kennedy's name should have been placed on the state's Central Registry, a confidential list of confirmed cases of abuse and neglect. And that would have barred her from regaining her foster care license. While it is unclear when her name was put on the registry, Kennedy told the Free Press that Lula Belle workers checked it when she applied for a new license in late 2005 and told her that her record was clear.
     In January, Shirley Anderson-Titus, a new court-appointed lawyer assigned to monitor Isaac and his sister, was looking for them for a required home visit. She told supervisors later that Lula Belle hadn't told her the children had been moved from Brown's home and messages she left at the agency weren't returned. Anderson-Titus finally located the children at Kennedy's home and visited on Jan. 24, 2006. She didn't report any problems.
     At the time, at least four of Kennedy's adopted children still were living at the home. Some had psychological problems and brushes with juvenile court. One daughter, who'd been diagnosed with mental retardation and schizophrenia, had set the family basement on fire, destroying it, several years earlier. The girl once had also cut her sister with a knife and chased her with scissors. Her psychologist deemed her a "clear threat to others," court records show. Kennedy's 16-year-old son had assaulted his brother in March 2005, punching him in the face. The charge landed him in juvenile court for a second time. A third son had a history of truancy. Kennedy, 61, was battling health problems, including diabetes. Veda D. Thompkins, a friend and Detroit foster parent, said she told Kennedy to return Isaac and his sister to Lula Belle and concentrate on her health. "She had good intentions," Thompkins said. "She was just overwhelmed."

Problems With Center Preceded Child's Case
Jack Kresnak, Detroit Free Press- 1/28/2007

Despite several licensing violations by the Lula Belle Stewart Center and a 2004 state report that criticized the agency over the beating death of a 4-year-old foster child that year, the Michigan Department of Human Services renewed the Detroit-based agency's license to place children in 2005. A Free Press review of hundreds of pages of state records found many of the same problems in the case of 2-year-old Isaac Lethbridge -- problems that should have been addressed in previous cases.Among past problems:
• A foster child placed by Lula Belle suffered a skull fracture and was not given immediate medical treatment in 2003. Authorities were unable to determine who caused the injury. However, when Lula Belle workers licensed the foster home, they did not know the foster mother had been investigated for possible abuse at her day care center a few years earlier.
• A Lula Belle foster care worker and supervisor received written reprimands from the state DHS in 2004 after 4-year-old Cesol Thompson was killed by his father's 18-year-old girlfriend during a weekend home visit. The workers had failed to report suspected abuse by Johnetta Sullivan, who is now in prison for second-degree murder. Also, the workers did not investigate her background as they are required for a new person living with the child's parent.
      A report issued a few months later by the state Office of Children's Ombudsman, the state's watchdog agency for children, found no fault with Child Protective Services, but was critical of Lula Belle for not reporting its previous suspicions to protective services in the Thompson case. Lula Belle officials agreed to retrain all staff members on their legal duty to report suspected abuse. A key issue in Isaac's death two years later was the failure of Lula Belle workers to report suspected abuse to protective services.
     The DHS Office of Children and Adult Licensing, as part of a regular review, concluded in July 2005 that Lula Belle should continue supervising nearly 200 foster children. In making the decision, the state checked eight of the center's 79 foster home files and eight of 179 files on foster children. The sampling found that Lula Belle was in compliance with "all applicable rules and statutes" even though in more than half of the cases reviewed, Lula Belle had not arranged for physical exams for the children and Lula Belle workers had not visited the children in their homes as often as required. Nevertheless, a state licensing official recommended that Lula Belle continue operating under a regular license once it submitted a corrective action plan. "What we found there wasn't evidence that things were that serious," state licensing director James Gale told the Free Press, referring to the 2005 report. "We have to rely on the agency to give us accurate information."
     A year later, state licensing and child abuse workers found an array of serious problems in an investigation spurred by Isaac's beating death Aug. 16: Several Lula Belle foster children were in dangerous or unacceptable placements, 21 children could not immediately be found, and several were not in the foster homes reported by Lula Belle or were living in other states without DHS approval. Documentation in many Lula Belle files, the DHS found, contained errors or outright falsehoods. And once again, Lula Belle's workers often had not made home visits to check on foster children, in some cases for months.

Researchers Make Progress With Insomnia
Associated Press, 1/28/2007

WASHINGTON -- Researchers studying a disease that causes people to suddenly drop off to sleep are trying to turn what they have learned into a new way to help insomniacs get some shut-eye. They found that blocking brain receptors for orexin, a blood peptide, promoted sleep in rats, dogs and people, according to a paper in Sunday's online issue of the journal Nature Medicine.
      Orexin, also known as hypocretin, is important in maintaining wakefulness. It is absent in the brains of people who suffer from narcolepsy, a chronic disorder in which people cannot regulate sleep-wake cycles normally. It is estimated to affect more than 135,000 people in the United States, according to the National Institutes of Health. The research team, led by Francois Jenck of the Swiss drug company Actelion Pharmaceuticals, reasoned that they might be able to induce sleep if they could block orexin. They developed a drug that can block the receptors in the brain that respond to orexin-hypocretin. The researchers reported successful testing in rodents, dogs and men.
     The first tests were proof of the concept and the drug is now being evaluated to establish the correct dosage, said Roland Haefeli, an Actelion spokesman. Researchers hope to decide this year whether to conduct a phase-three study, a detailed assessment of the drug that would be the final step before seeking U.S. government approval for its use. Such studies can take a few years.
     Narcolepsy victims often also experience cataplexy, a condition in which they lose control of muscle tone for a few seconds to minutes. Jenck said in a telephone interview that the drug tests did not prompt indications of cataplexy.
     Dr. Thomas Scammell, an assistant professor of neurology at Harvard University, said the work was ''promising, with a certain amount of caution.'' ''I think it may be the beginning of something quite exciting,'' said Scammell, who was not part of the research team. The drug works differently from other sleep aids that are available and the researchers ''provide this very broad perspective, all the way from rodents to humans,'' he said in a telephone interview.
     Scammell said the drug may work for people who do not tolerate current sleeping pills well. But he said there are concerns that blocking orexin could cause a problem in the brain that is similar to narcolepsy. ''Subsequent studies will be important to make sure sleep quality is good,'' he said. Also, cataplexy is difficult to study in the lab because it is often triggered by strong emotions, he said.
     Luis de Lecea, an associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford University, also sees promise in the research. ''This new compound may give rise to a new family of sleep aids,'' de Lecea said. The advantage of targeting orexin-hypocretin, he said, is that it involves a relatively small number of neurons. Therefore, it can be much more selective than current sleep aid drugs. But de Lecea, who was not part of the research team, cautioned that because of the way study was done, it was impossible to determine the sleep quality. Jenck's research was funded by Actelion.
      On the Net:
Nature Medicine: http://www.nature.com/naturemedicine
Background on narcolepsy: http://www.ninds.nih.gov/disorders/narcolepsy/narcolepsy.htm