Harry Levant, a former Philadelphia lawyer, had stolen almost $2 million from clients, and in 2014, he was ready to hang himself inside an Atlantic City hotel room. The criminal defense and plaintiffs personal injury specialist took the money to support his gambling addiction.

“I was all swallowed up by addiction,” says Levant, whose theft victims included a relative.

As he tried to write a suicide note to his three children, Levant “realized I didn’t want to die. I called for help.”

After a stay at a rehabilitation clinic, Levant went to the Philadelphia district attorney’s office and turned himself in. In 2015, he was sentenced to 23 months of parole, eight years of probation and ordered to repay his victims.

At the sentencing hearing, with Levant’s eyes glued to the clients he had betrayed, the judge delivered a message that Levant remembers to this day. “The judge said, ‘Mr. Levant, this doesn’t have to be the end.’ It was what I needed to hear.”

While acknowledging that he experienced a lot of “dark days” after his disbarment by consent, Levant became an international certified gambling counselor and now serves as the director of gambling policy at Northeastern University’s Public Health Advocacy Institute.

“Something about gambling draws in certain types of lawyers,” Levant says. But the same things that make them successful in the courtroom can turn against them with gambling and make them vulnerable to wins and losses, he notes.

The topic of gambling and lawyers has been in the headlines since the federal indictment of Tom Goldstein, who gained fame for arguing 45 cases before the U.S. Supreme Court and co-founding the SCOTUSBlog website.

In January, Goldstein was indicted on federal tax evasion charges. The indictment says he transferred and diverted millions of dollars from his law firm, Goldstein & Russell, to pay personal debts, including substantial gambling debts.

The litigator, who has taught at both Harvard Law School’s and Stanford Law School’s Supreme Court clinics, has been described as an “ultrahigh-stakes poker player.” Goldstein traveled to Beverly Hills, Hong Kong and elsewhere to play in poker matches involving stakes totaling millions—sometimes even tens of millions, the government has alleged.

The 22-count indictment accuses Goldstein of engaging in a scheme between 2016 and 2022 to avoid the assessment of taxes and filing false tax returns that substantially understated his gambling winnings, including by more than $3.9 million in 2016.

Goldstein, whose attorneys did not respond to ABA Journal interview requests, also used law firm funds to pay full salaries and health insurance premiums to women he had personal relationships with. They performed “little or no work” for the firm, according to the indictment.

His situation might be less unique than it might appear.

“When you ignore the size of the dollars, Goldstein’s case is very, very typical,” says Robert M. Jarvis, a Nova Southeastern University gambling law professor. “He was very enamored with betting, and betting got the best of him.”

Problem gambling is an equal opportunity offender; it does not discriminate, and lawyers are particularly vulnerable, Jarvis says.

“Many lawyers like risks, challenges and having an opponent,” he adds, explaining that trial lawyers often “have a win-lose mentality, and gambling is just another form of winning and losing.”

Levant told the ABA Journal he did not want to comment on Goldstein’s case, but he did note the potential work connection.

“When I hear about Tom’s situation, to do what he did at the Supreme Court requires a high level of mental acuity and talent. How do you turn those things off and get satisfaction elsewhere?” Levant says.

Eric Webber, the legal professionals program coordinator at Caron Treatment Centers who is certified in gambling treatment, suggests that what makes gambling problems especially dicey is they can be less obvious.

“We know lawyers have a higher rate of alcoholism than the general population, and there is no problem saying we drink too much. But it’s much harder to detect and see gambling progressing because we don’t talk about money,” he says.

A joint study conducted by the ABA Commission on Lawyer Assistance Programs and the Minnesota-based Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation in 2016 bore this out with 20.6% of the lawyers reporting problematic alcohol use versus 11.8% of other highly educated professionals in the workforce doing so.

Webber suspects lawyers are also more susceptible when it comes to gambling.

“People can get in a lot of trouble before they know they’re in trouble,” Webber adds. “It’s difficult to spot until you’re already sliding down the mountain.”

Invariably, that leads to big problems with client funds that are unique to lawyers and law firms.

“The difference between doctors and lawyers is doctors don’t hold the money. Lawyers hold the money,” Webber says. “I move a little over here. I move a little over there and move it back, nobody’s going to know.”

Jarvis agreed that access to money is critical, and he noted that lawyers also have the ability to get credit that lots of Americans cannot obtain.

“They also have clients they can convince to ‘lend’ them money,” he says.

For instance, Goldstein’s indictment says he borrowed millions to stake some of his poker games, including a $10 million loan in 2014 from a former client.

While the size of that loan may have been an outlier, lawyers having access to money is not, and the problem is getting worse, according to all of the experts who spoke with the ABA Journal.

“There has been a dramatic increase in the number of reported cases with lawyers who’ve gotten into trouble with gambling,” Jarvis says. “Whenever there is greater access to legalized gambling, you take away the stigma, and more people will gamble, and more people will develop problems.”

In 2018, the Supreme Court struck down a federal law that effectively banned commercial sports betting in most states. The ruling in Murphy v. National Collegiate Athletic Assocation opened the floodgates for legalized sports gambling—and with it, a Pandora’s box for individuals with addictive tendencies.

For many years, Nevada was the only state where sports gambling in casinos was legal. By 2025, 39 states plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico had legalized sports betting in some form.

“You can gamble on just about anything at this point,” Webber says. “I had one client who lost $40,000 on Korean pingpong. He came for help the next day.”

There are 17 brick-and-mortar casinos in Webber’s home state of Pennsylvania. But the biggest issue, Webber notes, is that bets of all sorts can now been made from one’s fingertips on mobile phones.

“Beyond a shadow of a doubt, that creates more problems. I don’t know how many college students I’ve treated playing four games at one time, and it’s all online-based,” Webber says. “It’s just too easy. I could be sitting here playing roulette right now and talking to you.”

The National Council on Problem Gambling estimates that about 2.5 million Americans meet the criteria for severe gambling problems in a given year, and that it saw a 30% increase in gambling problems between  the Supreme Court striking down the ban in 2018 and 2021.

And although there are no definitive studies focused on lawyers and gambling, both Webber and Levant say they are treating more and more lawyers struggling with gambling addiction.

“There’s a massive new problem with online sports gambling, and nobody is talking about it,” Levan says. “Nobody is talking about the prevention side.”

Webber agrees, and says the rise of micro bets on phones has been a major issue. 

“You can get into lots of trouble with lower bets but a big volume,” he says. “Who will be the first person to dunk in a game? You could make 200 bets a day on things like that. A dollar here, a dollar there, and all of a sudden you’re in the hole.”

Smartphone apps also enable users to bet on what will happen with each pitch in a baseball game and make countless other micro bets.

The amount of money companies have spent on sports gambling ads skyrocketed from $15.5 million in 2019 to $1.8 billion in 2022, according to Webber. And an estimated $3.1 billion was wagered on this year’s NCAA Division I March Madness basketball tournaments.

Levant calls himself a “big fan” of the First Amendment, but questions the proliferation of sports betting ads.

“There has to be regulation, and appropriate safeguards for gambling advertising need to be in place,” he says.

Webber notes a Spanish law that includes restrictions on when gambling can be advertised on radio, television and video platforms. He goes on to call the need for gambling regulation a public health issue.

“Why don’t we advertise cigarettes anymore? You don’t see Marlboro ads on the side of Formula One cars anymore,” Webber says.

The need has become even greater with everyone on their phones these days, he adds. 

“FanDuel has an app that will ping you if you haven’t made a bet in 10 days. Budweiser won’t do that if you haven’t had a drink in that time.”

Levant agrees. “What’s happened in the last seven years [since Murphy] is a direct threat to public health,” he says, and that’s led to a push to regulate the gambling industry.

The Supporting Affordability and Fairness with Every Bet, or SAFE Bet Act, a bill Levant helped write that was reintroduced in Congress in March, aims to regulate online sports gambling. It includes language that bans sports betting advertisements between 8 a.m. and 10 p.m., and it prohibits promotions that lure bettors into gambling more than they can afford.

Levant calls the bill a necessary first step in bringing public health reform and regulation to an out-of-control industry.

“The gambling industry has turned sports into a nonstop slot machine,” he says in support of the measure, which faces opposition from the gaming industry.

A lot of theft occurs at the solo practitioner level or with much smaller firms, Jarvis says.

“When it’s just you, there are no checks and balances. As a sole practitioner, you have no one to answer to and become your own accounting officer,” he says, while also noting that at small or solo law firms, it’s easier to move money around without others noticing.

It’s much more difficult to play a shell game moving money around at larger firms. But detecting a lawyer’s gambling problem remains difficult, experts agree.
“The only thing a law firm can really do is constantly monitor what its lawyers are doing,” says Jarvis, noting that it’s difficult to run a business based on suspicion and mistrust.

“The truth is, you really do have to be distrustful because there is no one you can look at and say they’ll never have a problem,” he adds.

Levant has the lived experience as proof. The former Little League president who ran unsuccessfully to be a judge on the Philadelphia County Court of Common Pleas in 2011 sank to depths he could not fathom while gambling with money he did not have, including from his clients.

“A person can know everything they’re doing is hurting themselves and others and still not stop,” Levant says. “It’s like a needle to a heroin user.”

Nicholas Guiliano, of the Guiliano Law Group in Philadelphia, represented two of Levant’s former clients, including one of Levant’s family members and a woman who was disabled in a medical malpractice accident. Guiliano says the fact that Levant did not spend time in jail changed his whole perception of the justice system.

“I couldn’t believe he got a suspended sentence. It’s a profession where people owe a duty,” he says. “Earlier that day in the same courtroom, a guy got 12 years for stealing a Cadillac.”
 

Guiliano is glad Levant got help. “I don’t think he’s an evil person. His lawyer made a good case that [gambling is] not a character defect, but more of a medical disorder,” he says.
 

The American Psychiatric Association has recognized gambling as an addictive disorder since 2013, on a similar level as opioids, stiumlants, alcohol and tobacco.

“It’s not about the money. It’s about the action,” says Webber, who leads a lawyers addiction group every week. “The money is symbolic.”

Unlike more visible forms of addiction, Webber warns that gambling problems are usually not evident until something colossal has happened.

“All firms can do is make sure there has to be a watchdog for the funds,” he says.
Jarvis has a more novel idea.

“Say that if you want to be a lawyer, you can’t gamble,” he says, adding that no state licensing board has taken such a step. Nor does he expect one to do so.