The night before she died in 2015, Jane Ann Burke made her husband promise he would continue the work she had suggested he embark upon 11 years earlier. That work, inspired in the days he was released from a Michigan state prison after three years served for embezzlement, became the foundation for the rest of his life.
“I’ve spent 20 years working with gambling addicts,” Michael Burke said. “It is my life.”
The executive director of the Michigan Association on Problem Gambling, Burke has quite a cautionary tale of his own to tell. Once a powerful attorney from a family of powerful Michigan attorneys — his grandfather was a judge during the post-World War II Nuremberg trials and his father helped cement the family law firm into a local institution — he lost nearly everything due to his gambling addiction.
