After lies, embezzlement and $20,000 bets, a gambler offers remorse

Posted by author November 25, 2024 Gambling

After lies, embezzlement and ,000 bets, a gambler offers remorse

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Chad Hartzler as told to Courtney Crowder and Kim Norvell
| Des Moines Register

Editor’s note: Chad Hartzler first told this story on stage at the Des Moines Storytellers Project: Busted event in 2018. The Des Moines Storytellers Project, a series of storytelling events in which community members worked with Register journalists to tell true, first-person stories live on stage, held its series finale in October. It’s celebrating its seven-season run this week by sharing past stories.

It was a Tuesday in early March a little over four years ago. The day started off fairly normal.

I had lunch with my brothers — Hy-Vee Chinese, my favorite. Convenient for them, it was “my turn to buy.”

The early morning snow showers had given way to partial sun as we pulled up to a two-story concrete building flanked with rod-iron gates. There we hugged, shed a few tears while we said our goodbyes and I walked into the place that would be my home for the next 40 months.

Shortly after my arrival, I was led to another building and into a small room. It was cold and dimly lit, almost like a broom closet.

Once inside, a man ordered me to strip down, bend over and spread my cheeks.

At the time, I weighed more than 400 pounds, so to lighten the tension, I told the man, “Buddy, you are really getting the short end of this stick.”

I thought that was a pretty good joke, but when I looked back, the man didn’t show a hint of a smile or smirk. All I saw was a stone-cold face, his eyes piercing back through me.

You see, the man was a correctional officer; I was going through the intake process for Yankton Federal Prison Camp; and this was definitely no joke.

So how does a clean-shaven, middle-income, middle-aged white guy from rural Iowa end up in prison?

Let me start at the beginning.

Say deal

All my favorite childhood memories center on my dad.

An especially fond one was sitting on his lap at the local tavern as he played poker. I’d help him make change in the pot, neatly arrange his stacks of cash and pull home winning hands. It was there I learned the phrase, “winner’s laugh and tell jokes, and losers cry deal.”

My dad said deal a lot.

As I got older, he taught me how to read a sports-betting sheet and would occasionally ask my opinion on who might win. I cherished the attention I got from my dad, and since gambling was our connection, I learned everything I could about it.

During the ag crisis of the early ’80s, Dad declared bankruptcy and, no doubt, gambling was a contributing factor.

He died in a car accident when I was 20 years old — just two years after my mom lost her short battle with lung cancer.

I was still a kid, relatively alone in the world. I quit college. To cope with my grief, I started drinking and eating heavily, occasionally used drugs, and I gambled.

Making sports bets was my favorite. The challenge and the high associated with picking a winner — for me, there was nothing like it.

But my life straightened out in my mid-20s. I married a schoolteacher, had kids and together we began chasing the American dream.

I found myself rising through the ranks at work, eventually becoming director of seed and crop protection for one of the state’s largest farm cooperatives. It was a great job and I was making a six-figure salary.

But by my mid-30s, the rigors of the world started to weigh me down again, and with it, I returned to my love affair with gambling.

Lady Luck will leave you for a while, but she is always ready to give you another chance.

Gambling was the best way I knew to take my mind off my troubles.

The first thing I did rolling out of bed in the mornings was add up my wins and losses for the day and check the betting lines for that evening. It wasn’t uncommon for me to bet as much as $20,000 a day.

When I lost, and that was often, I told myself gambling wasn’t the problem, losing was the problem, and I was due to get hot. But a fool and his money are soon parted, and that was certainly the case for me.

Now, gambling was never about the money for me, it was about the high … but eventually it becomes about the money.

My income, even at six figures, couldn’t cover my losses.

Off-the-books

Following a string of bad luck, I entered into some off-the-books agreements with a client to help pay off my debts. I traded discounts on seed and chemicals and gave him free product in exchange for cash payments.

Using the trust I earned with my co-workers, I was able to cover my tracks for nearly seven years.

What you have to know is that while all of this was going on, I was a regular member of society. I have always been buoyed by my people skills. I am sort of a natural salesman and if you need me to sell ice to Eskimos, believe me, I could do it.

But I was caught in a never-ending circle. On one side, I was producing for the co-op, seemingly doing a great job. On the other side, I was stealing from my employer and gambling with the hope of winning enough to pay it all back.

I had one foot in this beautiful rural life, and the other foot in the deepest, darkest gambling pit imaginable.

I wasn’t in handcuffs yet, but I was handcuffed by my addiction.

I wasn’t much of a husband, father, sibling or friend at this time. And frankly, I wasn’t much of a gambler either.

Have you ever had one of those moments when out of nowhere everything suddenly comes into clear view? In 2011, I did.

I had known for a long time that what I was doing was wrong. I had tried to work my way out of it, but I came to the conclusion there was no easy way out. When confronted with the choice to continue on with my secrets, I made the decision stop the lies and share the truth of my crime.

Not long after submitting my resignation, the FBI questioned me about my fraud scheme. Two and a half years later, the feds approached me with a plea agreement. I accepted a 51-month prison sentence and was ordered to self-surrender to Yankton.

So that’s how I ended up in a broom closet with my pants down.

After that introduction to my new life, I cried myself to sleep.

Club Fed

Yankton is home to low-level inmates, mostly drug offenders and white-collar criminals like me. You may have heard the phrase “Club Feb” for institutions like Yankton — and I get that.

Even though Yankton looks more like your local park than a jail, it is still prison. And, let me tell you, the forced separation from your loved ones is the worst punishment anyone can imagine.

But rather than pout about it, I dug in and got to work — literally.

Yankton is a work camp and all inmates are required to have a job. Mine was in the horticulture department. My days were spent caring for the hundreds of trees, shrubs and perennial and annual flowers planted about the campus.

It was physically exhausting, but working beneath the trees and in the flower gardens gave me time to refresh and reboot.

One of our jobs was to dig up the perennials plants, divide them and replant them in new areas of the compound. Burying the pieces and watching them re-grow and put on new flowers reminded me each day that my life was not over. I could bury my past and rejuvenate, too.

I thought this — prison — was the end of my life as I knew it. I had lost everything dear to me: my job and status, a second marriage, friendships and time away from the three most important people in my life, my kids. I missed Zach’s graduation and Derek’s ballgames and my baby Kallie’s first words and first step. You never get those moments back.

I told myself if I was going to be away, I was going to make the time count for something.

I got a degree and enrolled in a writing class, which helped me confront the roots of my addiction. I shed 150 pounds of excess weight that I had carried since my parents passed away.

Even though I made several poor choices, I know those choices don’t define me.

I am not embarrassed about the things I have done. If I were, I wouldn’t be here tonight. But I am remorseful, and there is a difference. I will never forget the hurt I caused, and that’s a good thing because it motivates me to be better every day.

A broken system

Now there’s this other thing. I don’t know about you, but when I was younger, I thought people who were incarcerated deserved to be there, no matter what they did.

They were criminals right?

But what I found during my time in Yankton was concerning. There is something inherently wrong with a system that will sentence a drug addict to 10 or 15 years for supplying his own habit, while many other violent offenders get much less time.

Rest assured, there are not many men in prison who say they are innocent, but lots who wonder why they are being warehoused in places like Yankton — at a cost to the taxpayers of millions of dollars per year — while their families serve the time right along with them.

Let me tell you, the system is broken.

I came home a year ago and spent five and a half months on house arrest. Re-entry has not always easy.

I’ve gained back half the weight I lost at Yankton. Don’t worry, I’m not considering violating my supervised release to go back and lose it. Instead, I’m using the things I learned at Yankton; I asked for help and for accountability to get back in the gym.

With the weather turning nice, I can’t wait to get out into the yard to start landscaping and spending time among the plants.

Oh, and as of March 5, I haven’t gambled in seven years.

Not a horse race. Not a March Madness bracket. Not even a Quick Pick — but that’s OK because I heard the lotto’s rigged anyway.

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