By Dale Russakoff

Washington Post Staff Writer

NUTLEY, N.J.—Standing tall above an impeccably manicured ball field, the biggest presence in a little downtown known for nickel parking meters and family owned shops like The Eight Ciccolini Brothers appliance store, Nutley High School looks as wholesome as the suburban community surrounding it.

But when three Nutley High stu dents forced a 14-year-old schoolmate into a car, drove him to a housing project in Newark and dumped him there in February as punishment for failing to pay $500 in gambling debts, authorities uncovered a sophisticated betting operation run by student bookies who not only mimicked the Mob, but also worked with it.

Prosecutors have charged three students, two of them juveniles, with illegal gambling, kidnapping and theft by extortion. Three adults are charged with illegal gambling conspiracy for collecting debts and serving as intermediaries between student bookies and a New YorkNew Jersey crime family. The probe has moved beyond the students, prosecutors have said, and is heading "up the chain" of the crime family. More arrests are expected.

Nutley is only the latest in what has become a pattern of cases of organized crime infiltrating high schools, particularly in affluent communities, to capitalize on teenage gambling, according to police in several jurisdictions. Teenage gambling is attracting growing attention as a national problem; the first formal conference on the subject will be held later this spring at Harvard University.

"Sports betting is in every high school. It's just something kids do," said Durand F. Jacobs, a professor of psychiatry at Loma Linda University Medical School and an authority on teenage gambling. "And when there's big money, the big guys smell it and they come in."

In recent years, police have busted large betting rings in several up

scale suburbs around New York City-including Madison, Conn., and West Orange, Paramus and Maplewood in northern New Jersey-and officers in each case charged or suspected that organized crime families were involved. In Chicago, authorities uncovered a gambling ring at a private high school after an 18-year-old's arm was broken for failing to pay. No charges were filed, according to the prosecutor who investigated the case, because student bettors refused to cooperate for fear of retali

ation.

Police in Montgomery and Fairfax counties, the two most affluent in the Washington area, said they knew of no such cases in their jurisdictions.

In the New York area cases, students have run up debts in the tens of thousands of dollars, placing bets by telephone with bookies. In Nutley, bettors were given an 800 number to call for the "line" on football and basketball games, professional and college. They phoned in bets to student bookies, using the lingo of a gambling ring: "two times" was a $10 bet, "100 times" a $500 bet. Students could place bets all week without being asked to come up with cash. Monday was pay-up day.

If they won, the bookies delivered the cash. If they lost, the bettors had to pay, and if they didn't student bookies were under pressure from the professional bookmakers to collect, investigators said. Police said bets totaled $7,500 a week from about 25 students and about 25 adults. In New Jersey, it is a crime to run a bookmaking ring, but bettors are not liable.

players said the 14-year-old who was abducted was bigger than the three charged with kidnapping him.

But community and school leaders are taking the problem seriously, and recently held a teach-in for parents of high school students with police and New Jersey's Council on Compulsive Gambling. They were told that teenagers are twice as likely as adults to become compulsive gamblers, particularly in a state like New Jersey that sponsors gambling at casinos in Atlantic City, at racetracks and through a lottery. Authorities said it is common for students whose parents gamble regularly to fall into the habit.

Edward Looney, who heads the compulsive gambling council, said the mother of one of the juveniles charged with kidnapping has enrolled her son in Gamblers Anonymous. "He owed the bookmaker $5,000," Looney said. "He was under a lot of pressure and he did something crazy."

Essex County assistant prosecutor Fred Franco said that in an earlier investigation elsewhere in New Jersey, a 16-year-old high school student was found to have prostituted his girlfriend around school to raise money to pay his debts.

"She was pawned around the school, willingly," he said. "They both talked to us, but absolutely refused to cooperate out of fear. She said she did it to help him. He was threatened, his family was threatened, he had to get the money and he felt this was the only way to get it."

Franco said parents often pose a major obstacle to cracking such

cases.

"The parents, 99 percent of the time, will pay off the debt and don't want to get involved," he said. "In Nutley, at least four parents paid $200 to $1,000. Obviously they feared who their children ultimately owed money to."

According to police, parents have drained bank accounts, taken out second mortgages and cashed in individual retirement accounts after children were threatened for nonpayment of debts in the tens of thousands of dollars.

"When parents find out about this, their reaction is often, 'Thank God it's not drugs,' " Franco said. "Many of them do not take it as seriously as they should."

WASHINGTON

At last: a candidate for the Republican Presidential nomination has come up with a moral issue that the next President and Congress can actually do something about.

The issue is state-sponsored gambling, a $40 billion-a-year cancer ravaging society, corrupting public officials and becoming the fastest growing teen-age addiction.

"The spread of gambling," Senator Richard Lugar told the Christian Coalition, "is a measure of the moral erosion taking place in our country.

It says that if you play enough, you can hit the jackpot and be freed from the discipline of self-support through a job or the long commitment to ongoing education."

In New York last week, Mario Cuomo's tawdriest legacy - a form of keno known as "Quick Draw" introduced casino-style gambling to teen-agers at candy stores, using computer terminals to lure kids into shooting modern craps.

In Connecticut, the race for a casino in Bridgeport is down to bidding between Mirage Resorts (an apt name for the gambler's goal) and a

Lugar touches a moral nerve.

recently re-formed "tribe" of Indians called the Pequots, whose chiefs are turning aboriginal Americans into a nation of croupiers.

In Mississippi, the money spent on gambling last year exceeded all the taxable retail sales in the state. Across the nation, under the fake cover of "supporting education," gambling interests offer a down-anddirty fix to weak legislators.

It's about time someone running for President put this national rip-off on the nation's agenda. Lugar rightly slams adult hypocrisy: "We cannot tolerate the 'get rich quick' symbolism of gambling, while pleading with our children to avoid other 'tosses of the dice' that lead to unhealthy living and destructive behavior."

His challenge is suitable for the Christian Coalition: Its members may not be able to legislate morality, but here is where they can campaign to stop legislating immorality. A family-values movement to turn the tide of gambling is an issue

whose moral moment has come.

Representative Frank Wolf, the Virginia Republican, has offered a bill to establish a National Commission on the Impact of Gambling. Senators Lugar and Paul Simon have a matching bill in the Senate. The commission would provide unbiased answers to "How does gambling affect suicide and crime rates among juveniles? What effect does a casino have on a city's economy? Who loses the money that makes gambling such a profitable business, and who then has to support the losers' families?"

The gambling lobby does not want those questions asked, much less answered. The American Gaming Association has been launched in Washington D.C., with a lobbying kitty of $2 million for openers, to block the Wolf-Lugar bill. ("Gaming" is what gamblers want us to call their racket because it connotes "play"; but when you lose the milk money, you have gambled, not "gamed," it away.)

Chief lobbyist for the gamblers is Frank Fahrenkopf, the Nevada lawyer who was chairman of the Republican National Committee. Frank got me coveted floor passes to several national conventions, and I wish he could find a less despicable way to make a living, such as representing tobacco interests or lobbying for an end to sanctions on Saddam Hussein.

His shock troops to block the gambling probe will be the Gambling Caucus in the House, led by a freshman from Nevada, John Ensign; the veteran Barbara Vucanovich, also of that gambler's paradise, and New Jersey's Frank LoBiondo.

The hearing on Wolf's bid to lift the lid on state-sponsored immorality will be held before the Judiciary. Committee on Sept. 29. Chairman Henry Hyde, hero of the Christian Coalition for his principled stand against abortion, takes a straddle on this issue: "I am not a fan of, nor a zealot against, gambling," he tells me, adding with a sigh, "a little hope springs eternal." As things stand, the bill will die in committee.

Unless moralists - including most particularly those in the Christian Coalition - get the lead out of their vestments. Is the Republican Party to be the party of gambling, corrupting the very family values it preaches? Clinton is no help; his amral approach is to add a Federal gambling tax to state taxes, which only puts the Feds in bed with the gamblers.

Get the government to stop promoting gambling. Listen to Lugar. O

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