• When parent drinks, children can suffer nightmarish neglect
• Police find drunkenness fans flames of domestic violence
• Homicide victims, 1991-97

Michael Newbury, left, pleaded guilty to manslaughter in the beating death of Rita Colucci in her Portland home in April 1992. ''I was in an alcoholic blackout. I don't remember anything,'' he explained. Five years before he killed Colucci, Newbury was convicted of OUI manslaughter for driving drunk and killing his passenger, an 18-year-old friend. File photo/photo courtesy of Guy Frenette

Drunk and drenched in blood, Michael Newbury stared at a television that was not turned on.

Newbury tried to calm his conscience and his nerves with booze, but even alcohol couldn't erase the horror that he woke up to on that April morning.

He figured the only solution was to kill himself.

He called a friend and told him: ''I need a gun. I found Rita dead beside me and I don't remember anything.''

His friend convinced Newbury to call the police instead. When the Portland Police arrived at the Ocean Avenue apartment, they found Newbury and the body of his girlfriend, Rita Colucci. The 40-year-old woman's face was beaten beyond recognition.

Newbury, 25 at the time, told police he and Colucci had been drinking heavily the night before, and argued before going to bed. The next morning, he woke up to find her cold body beside him.

Eight months later, in December 1993, Newbury pleaded guilty to manslaughter, explaining: ''I was in an alcoholic blackout. I don't remember anything.''

It was not the first time Newbury committed a crime that involved booze and death. Five years before he killed Colucci, Newbury was convicted of OUI manslaughter for driving drunk and killing his passenger, an 18-year-old friend.

Newbury's story, while more ghastly than others, is not unique.

Alcohol silently conspires in most of Maine's crimes. Hundreds of men and women locked away in Maine's jails and prisons share a common bond: alcohol addiction.

Portland Police Officer Gayle Petty retrieves wine coolers from a car driven by a 20-year-old woman after pulling the car over recently. Petty says that on some nights alcohol is at the core of every problem she encounters while on patrol. Staff photo by David A. Rodgers

Police, prosecutors and judges say 80 to 90 percent of Maine's criminals have been drinking or are intoxicated when they steal, rape, vandalize, set fires and kill.

''Maine is a state that is ridden with alcohol abuse, and it's no secret to anybody in law enforcement that alcohol is a major factor driving anti-social conduct in our state,'' says Paul Gauvreau, who supervises the Maine Attorney General's criminal division.

Abstaining from alcohol is the most common probation condition placed on Maine criminals. The sentencings for felony cases published monthly in the Portland Press Herald show that judges order 80 percent of criminals to stay away from booze and seek alcohol treatment.

Nationally, alcohol is a key factor in 68 percent of manslaughters, 62 percent of assaults, 54 percent of murders or attempted murders, 48 percent of robberies and 44 percent of burglaries.

A Portland Press Herald review of jail bookings for three months in Cumberland and Penobscot counties found that 60 percent of criminals jailed in Penobscot and 48 percent in Cumberland were intoxicated when they got caught burglarizing, brawling, beating their spouses or stealing cars.

Those numbers do not include the large number of criminals who are drinking when they break the law but don't get arrested until weeks or months later when they aren't drunk.

''It's frustrating that so much attention is focused on illegal drugs when it's alcohol that's present in 90 percent of the cases we handle,'' says Meg Elam, Cumberland County deputy district attorney. ''Everybody worries about street drugs, yet alcohol is the biggest problem we face in this state. It's rare that the victim, defendant or both aren't drinking.''

Alcoholic offenders overwhelm our courts, jails and prisons, costing an estimated $42 million in tax money each year.

These criminals shatter all class barriers. They are a blend of rich and poor, middle-class and professional.

There are the homeless alcoholics who have lost most of their possessions and thirst only for another drink. They come to court over and over for consuming alcohol in public, stealing beer from the local convenience store, breaking into cars and homes for cash.

Again and again, the public pays to arrest and jail alcoholics like Patrick Joseph Flaherty. Flaherty, 38, has been arrested by Portland Police 203 times since 1978.

He's been charged with 12 OUIs and dozens of thefts and public nuisance crimes. He's been arrested more than 100 times for criminal trespassing, most often for breaking into the apartment of his 67-year-old mother.

Staff art. Source: National Public Services Research Institute; victim costs and consequences study prepared by Ted Miller, Marc Cohen and Brian Wiersema.

Each time Flaherty appears in court, it costs at least a couple hundred dollars to provide him with a lawyer. Another $70 is spent for every day he's locked up in jail.

''There are a lot of people like Flaherty,'' says Deborah Chmielewski, Cumberland County assistant district attorney. ''They fill the court dockets every Monday.''

Along with Patrick Flaherty, there are lawyers, bankers and accountants who share an obsession for alcohol. In their tailored suits, these professionals appear in court on charges of OUI, domestic violence, assaults, thefts.

They are like John McElwee, a recovering alcoholic who got busted for OUI in 1985 while he was the Aroostook County district attorney.

''Until I got the OUI, I was able to keep up the appearance of being a successful attorney,'' McElwee says. ''After my arrest, I realized I was no different from the bum on the street with the same disease.''

The constant wave of alcoholics flooding our courtrooms has left judges jaundiced and disheartened.

''It's the vastness of the problem that's overwhelming,'' says Superior Court Judge Paul A. Fritzsche, an 11-year veteran judge. ''We see a huge number of lives destroyed by alcohol.''

Portland Police Officer Gayle Officer Gayle Petty arrives at the scene of an alcohol-related accident on Forest Avenue in Portland earlier this month. A driver accused of smashing into a parked car was later charged with operating under the influence of alcohol. Staff photo by David A. Rodgers

Despite the clear need to find treatment for these alcoholic offenders, when judges sentence criminals like Newbury and Flaherty it's unlikely they'll receive any help.

Maine all but eliminated funding for prison substance abuse treatment in 1991. There are one full-time and two part-time alcohol and drug counselors juggling the needs of 1,600 inmates serving time in Maine's eight prisons. Inmates sometimes wait months to talk to a counselor. Often, they give up.

''There's people talking about alcohol and how much they miss it every day,'' says Maine State Prison inmate Alfred William Clark, who's serving 12 years for burning down a Portland home after he drank eight pitchers of beer. ''I'd like to think that if they released me tomorrow, I'd say no to alcohol. But I'd probably go straight to a bar.''

Inmates at county jails don't fare much better. Some jails don't have treatment programs. Others have one counselor to serve hundreds of inmates. Prison officials estimate that about 9 percent of the inmates who have an alcohol or drug addiction are getting help.

While alcohol treatment costs anywhere from $1,000 to $10,000, it is far less expensive than paying $26,280 to lock up an alcoholic offender for a year.

''It's troubling, if not alarming, that in a state where 70 percent of the inmates have some connection to alcohol abuse, we don't offer them any treatment,'' says York County District Attorney Michael Cantara. ''When you punish them but don't address the diseased behavior, we end up paying for it later when they get out, start drinking and commit new crimes.''

Alcohol, crime experts will tell you, does not cause crime. Most criminal or aggressive behavior begins before an offender starts abusing alcohol or drugs. But alcohol, a depressant that induces euphoria and excitability in small doses, can unleash inhibitions and violence.

''Some people are far more prone to crime and violence when they are drinking or drunk than when they are clean and sober,'' wrote John J. DiJulio in his 1996 study, ''Broken Bottles, Alcohol, Disorder and Crime.'' ''What the evidence suggests is that alcohol is a multiplier of crime.''

In large doses, alcohol drowns common sense, impairs judgment and the ability to reason.

''The moral voice we all have dissolves in booze,'' says William Stokes, a homicide prosecutor with the Maine Attorney General's Office.

Nationally, rates of domestic violence are nearly 15 times higher in homes where batterers commonly get drunk. Studies show that one-third to one-half of all batterers are problem drinkers.

Portland Police Sgt. Anthony Germaine performs a field sobriety test on a woman involved in a single-car accident on Forest Avenue earlier this month. She was charged with operating under the influence and the case has not yet been resolved. Law enforcement officials say 80 to 90 percent of Maine's offenders have been drinking or are intoxicated when they break laws. Staff photo by David A. Rodgers

''Alcohol aggravates issues related to domestic violence,'' says Scott Effland, an Auburn social worker who counsels batterers. ''What would otherwise be a minor dispute gets escalated because one or more people involved in the fight are drunk.''

In crimes of sexual abuse, alcohol liberates deviant urges and it helps wash away guilt.

''Alcohol reduces whatever impulse control you have,'' says Jim Jacobs, a Waterville psychologist who does court evaluations of offenders who sexually or physically abuse children. ''Some people are able to control their deviant sexual urges when they're sober, but when they're drinking they're likely to be pushed over to the other side.''

Alcohol pushed Michael Newbury's violent tendencies to a dark place he cannot remember.

Images of Rita Colucci's home sickened police when they arrived that Sunday morning in April 1992.

There was blood spattered throughout the living room, on the walls, carpet and couch.

Newbury, 25 at the time, wore bloodstained clothes. His white socks had been dyed red from Colucci's blood.

Colucci lay lifeless in her bed. Her face was unrecognizable. Newbury had used his fists as hammers, pummeling her face and head over and over.

His attorney, Richard Romanow, described the murder as ''almost beyond the imagination of what one human being could do to another.''

''It was a terrible death,'' remembered Romanow. ''Alcohol didn't cause Newbury's rage that night, but the greater the alcohol consumption, the greater loss of control. In this case it was extreme.''

Newbury's drinking problems began long before he met Colucci.

On a September evening in 1986, Newbury drove drunk and lost control on a country road in Limington. He crashed into a tree, shearing his car in half.

Newbury's friend, Harold Huff, lay in the crumpled rear section, dead from head injuries and internal bleeding.

State police found Newbury in the front half of the car with a freshly opened bottle of Colt .45 malt liquor. Newbury, then 19, had a blood-alcohol level of 0.20 percent, two and a half times the legal limit today.

''You killed somebody and you ought to pay the price,'' York County Superior Judge William Broderick told Newbury before sentencing him to three years in prison for Huff's death. ''I hope you get yourself squared away.''

Newbury didn't.

The night he beat Colucci to death was the climax of years of drinking and violence.

During the three years they dated, Newbury was arrested five times for assaulting Colucci. Most of the time, he attacked her when he was drunk.

A month before he killed her, he was charged with punching Colucci in the face and strangling her.

While Colucci managed to get a restraining order against Newbury for a short time, most often she was unable to help police and prosecutors keep Newbury in jail.

Like Newbury, Colucci was an alcoholic. Her fondness for liquor consumed her life. Alcohol transformed her from an active PTA mother who took in stray cats and foster children, to a woman who could barely care for herself.

''Alcohol took her out of control,'' said Colucci's brother, Guy Frenette. ''It got to the point it took over her life.''

Her alcohol addiction made it difficult for police and prosecutors to make assault charges stick against Newbury.

''Her drinking was a huge factor in not being able to go to court successfully and keep him away,'' said Lisa Beecher, a Portland Police detective who investigated some of Newbury's assaults against Colucci.

In the months before she died, Colucci had checked herself into an alcohol treatment center in Westbrook. She stayed sober for a short time.

The night she was killed, Colucci slipped back to her old habits.

Both she and Newbury drank heavily that evening. A boarder who slept in a bedroom upstairs in Colucci's home heard the couple quarreling. He listened to Newbury scream and swear at Colucci but he didn't bother to call the police. He'd grown accustomed to their fights and kept to himself.

Later, he heard Colucci scream: ''Please, please. I love you, Mike.'' Then the boarder listened to the sound of flesh striking flesh.

Colucci's blood-alcohol level that night was 0.26 percent, more than triple the 0.08 legal standard for intoxication. It's likely that Colucci was too drunk to defend herself or escape Newbury's fatal wrath.

''She was a lovely young woman,'' says Eric Wright, a former homicide prosecutor with the Maine Attorney General's Office, who handled the Newbury case. ''Your heart broke for her. When she drank, she got lonely, sad and vulnerable. She kept taking Newbury back until he killed her.''

Like Rita Colucci, most homicide victims in Maine are legally drunk when they take their last breath. They often know their killers and have been drinking with them at bars, parties or at their homes. They're shot, stabbed or beaten to death in brawls that begin over a harsh word, a lost arm-wrestling match or a drunken threat.

Many of the victims and their killers have blood-alcohol levels that are high enough to put an average person in a stupor or coma.

''I don't know if it's the isolation or the long winters or what,'' says Stokes, the homicide prosecutor.

''But when you see the level of intoxication on these cases, you scratch your head and say, 'How can they consume so much alcohol?' ''

From 1991 through early 1997, the Maine Attorney General's Office prosecuted 98 adult murder cases.

Seventy of the adult victims had their blood tested for alcohol levels. Forty-six, or 66 percent of the victims tested, had been drinking before they were killed. Forty of the victims, or 57 percent, had blood-alcohol levels of 0.08 percent or higher.

On a warm July evening in 1992, a bout of vodka drinking sparked a deadly feud between two longtime friends in Machiasport.

David Lawless spent the summer day drinking heavily with his buddy, Robert Leighton Jr. The two men drank at Lawless's home until they ran out of booze. After selling some china, Lawless used the money to buy a half-gallon of vodka.

He and Leighton took the jug to Leighton's Machiasport home and continued to drink into the early evening. Just before suppertime, the two men got into a disagreement.

''At some point Lawless challenged Leighton over something,'' Stokes says. ''Leighton told his wife to get his gun.''

Lawless, 30, told his friend: ''You don't have the nerve to shoot me.''

Leighton, 45, aimed at Lawless's chest and pulled the trigger. Lawless fell to the kitchen floor, dead. His blood-alcohol level was 0.18 percent.

''When you hear these stories, they're almost too crazy to believe,'' Stokes says. ''But alcohol intensifies people's frustrations. You've got all the makings of an explosion.''

Police Officer Gayle Petty checks a driver's license and registration after stopping a motorist in Portland. ''You'd be amazed at how many people we see that are drunk,'' she says. Staff photo by David A. Rodgers

Sometimes, strangers are brought together by alcohol. Not yet of legal age to drink, 20-year-old Devon O'Brien met his killer in a Biddeford bar.

O'Brien, who had lost his license in 1995 for OUI, took a cab to Shelly's on an April night in 1996. There he spent most of the evening drinking. At some point, he started talking to a stranger named Steven Schoff Jr.

The two left the bar together in Schoff's car. They wound up at a gravel pit in Lyman.

There, Schoff shot O'Brien three times.

Schoff, 26, would later explain in court that he drank so much that night, he can't remember much of anything. The case has yet to be resolved.

''It's all a blur; he was plastered,'' says Maine State Trooper Jeffrey Linscott, who investigated the killing. Though Schoff's blood-alcohol test wasn't done until the following day at noon - nearly 12 hours after he'd stopped drinking - he still had alcohol in his blood.

''He must have drunk quite a bit the night before,'' Linscott says.

Devon O'Brien's blood-alcohol level was high too - 0.22 percent.

''This is a classic case of both the defendant and the victim being affected by booze,'' Linscott says. ''Their judgment was drowned by alcohol.''

Besides inciting lethal rage, alcohol fuels fights that leave victims maimed and crippled.

Gary Dodge got a call rousting him from bed at 4 a.m. early this summer.

''Your son Timmy's been shot and it doesn't look like he's going to make it,'' a friend told Dodge.

The shooter was Timothy Dodge's best friend, Jamie Moody.

The two men, both 21, had been partying most of the day and all night in their home town of Waldoboro. About 3:30 a.m., they started arguing.

''Jamie threatened to shoot him and Timmy said he didn't dare to,'' Dodge says.''Timmy didn't think the gun was loaded and put the barrel in his mouth.''

The shotgun fired and blasted a hole in Dodge's mouth, took out his right eye, pieces of his nose and bone fragments in his forehead.

''In one way, he was lucky to live,'' Dodge says of his son. ''But a shotgun can do ungodly damage to your face. He's not a pretty sight.''

While Dodge feels badly for his son, the shooting wasn't altogether a surprise. Drinking heavily is a common pastime in the small town of Waldoboro, Dodge says.

''It's small-town living here and a lot of these kids are unemployed and feel they have no future,'' Dodge says. ''They make a little money digging clams and they spend it on partying. There's plenty of hard drinking going on around here.''

While Moody awaits trial on charges of reckless conduct with a firearm and aggravated assault, Timothy Dodge travels to Portland every few months so a plastic surgeon can reconstruct his face.

So far he's had an eyelid replaced along with skin grafts over his nose. He wears a glass eye with a patch covering the hole where the shotgun shell exited his head.

''He looks better than he did, but the surgeon has a lot of work left to do,'' Gary Dodge says.

Since his son remains largely unemployed except for occasional clam digging, the bills for repairing his face will fall to taxpayers. So far, they total well over $50,000, Dodge says.

''Timmy doesn't have insurance or anything,'' Dodge says. ''So somebody is going to have to pay for all this. The whole thing is a shame.''

Along with tearing up longtime friendships, booze can spark brawls among strangers. Cory Thibodeau and five of his friends decided to ring in the 1997 New Year by celebrating in the Old Port, a four-block grid of bars and restaurants in downtown Portland.

Thibodeau, a 22-year-old University of Southern Maine student, played Foosball and pool with his buddies in a bar called the Fore Play. They drank numerous beers and shots of hard liquor.

They left the bar about 1 a.m. and strolled along Fore Street with hundreds of other intoxicated New Year's Eve revelers.

As he walked along the street, Thibodeau bumped shoulders with another man heading in the opposite direction. Thibodeau cursed the stranger, who pushed Thibodeau. A scuffle broke out, and the two men fell to the ground. The fight lasted less than a minute before Thibodeau's friends separated the pair and the stranger ran away.

When Thibodeau stood up, a friend looked at his shirt and gasped.

''Is that your blood or his?'' the friend asked.

Thibodeau looked down at his chest. His black-and-white-checked shirt was stained red. Blood streamed from his neck. His throat had been slashed.

While an ambulance raced Thibodeau to Maine Medical Center, Portland Police searched for the man who had sliced Thibodeau's neck.

They learned from a witness that the man they were looking for was Christopher Nielson, a 26-year-old who lived in an apartment at 655 Congress St.

While police knocked on his door, Nielson sat at a bar drinking with his fiancee. After he slashed Thibodeau's throat, Nielson ran into a parking lot near Fore Street and dropped the weapon, a retractable razor.

He then headed to Geno's, a nearby bar. Along the way, he vomited into some bushes.

Nielson and his girlfriend left Geno's after one drink and headed to their apartment. There Nielson tore off his bloody shirt, pants and baseball cap and passed out on the living-room floor.

Police returned to his apartment at 2 a.m. and found Nielson intoxicated. He was drooling, slurring his speech and vomited while police questioned him.

''I think it's fair to say there were some pretty strong signs of alcohol abuse in this case,'' says Andrew Bloom, the Cumberland County assistant district attorney who prosecuted Nielson.

The New Year's Eve attack was not the first time Nielson had hurt someone after drinking. He was convicted of assault in 1991, was put on probation and ordered to get help for his alcohol abuse. Last month, a jury convicted Nielson of aggravated assault for slicing open a 5-inch gash in Thibodeau's neck. He has yet to be sentenced.

Unlike Christopher Nielson, Patrick Joseph Flaherty has never physically harmed anyone, but he is one of Portland's most notorious alcoholics.

Arrested 203 times since 1978, Flaherty first got picked up for OUI in September 1978, when he was 19.

For the next 20 years, police would arrest him over and over for OUI, breaking into cars, drinking in public, disorderly conduct, indecent exposure, and - over 100 times - for criminal trespass.

Mention his name in the Portland Police Department and it seems every officer there has arrested him at least once.

Most of the time, it is Flaherty's own mother who calls police. She asks for help to remove her son when he appears at her Sagamore Village apartment drunk and wanting a place to sleep.

''I can't handle him when he's drinking,'' says Addie Flaherty, 67, of her son. ''I feel awful having to call the police. It's a terrible thing.''

Sometimes he pounds on her door. Other times, he'll pass out on her porch or lawn. Once he broke the window to get in. Another time she left the door unlocked and her son and his friends slipped inside. They robbed her of a few of her valuables.

''Most of the time, he doesn't remember what he did,'' she says.

A wisp of a woman, barely over 100 pounds, Addie Flaherty sits at her kitchen table in her three-room apartment shaking her head at the thought of her 38-year-old son.

A picture of Jesus and the Last Supper hangs over her kitchen sink. Crocheted turquoise-colored dolls handmade by Addie Flaherty decorate her apartment.

On the living-room wall clustered around a 3-D image of Jesus, there are photographs of her three sons and two daughters.

Flaherty and his father, Patrick, stand side by side at the younger Flaherty's Deering High School graduation.

''His father was a drinker, too,'' Addie Flaherty says, looking at the picture.

After high school, Flaherty worked a couple of factory jobs but lost them as his taste for alcohol grew stronger.

''On account of the booze, he can't keep a job no more,'' his mother says.

''He worries me,'' she explains, her tired brown eyes glancing out the window, as if she expects to see her son out there now. ''Sometimes, he'll get so drunk he'll lay down in the middle of the street. I worry about him constantly.

''When he's not drinking, he's as good as gold,'' Addie Flaherty says of her second-youngest boy.

While Addie Flaherty frets about her son, taxpayers pick up the tab for each of his arrests and court appearances.

Though she calls the police to arrest her son for criminal trespass, Addie Flaherty never wants to testify against him. So the charges are dropped.

''We can't force him to get help unless he's court-ordered, and if his mom doesn't want him prosecuted, we can't do anything,'' says Deb Chmielewski, Cumberland County assistant district attorney.

Like Patrick Flaherty, dozens of chronic alcoholics revolve in and out of court for petty crimes. Usually they get sentenced to probation and are ordered to stay away from alcohol.

''But your severe alcoholics aren't going to follow through on probation,'' Chmielewski says. ''It's a joke.''

Police are left equally frustrated having to arrest drunks like Flaherty time and time again.

''They've got a disease, but police don't have the power to do anything about it,'' says Mark Dion, Portland's deputy police chief. ''So we arrest these people 50 and 60 times, and in Patrick's case hundreds of times. All these low-level crimes add up. And you can guarantee that the taxpayer pays for their abuse over and over again.''

While Patrick Flaherty's offenses are often considered petty and involve thefts of a few hundred dollars, sometimes alcohol-fueled crimes can end up costing taxpayers millions.

Booze rode with Chris Mills the night he burned down a church in Presque Isle, a city that sits on the northeast corner of Maine. Mills, 22, and a buddy had been drinking and driving around on a blistering cold January 1996 night.

For some reason they later didn't recall, they decided to start some fires. They stumbled into a couple of churches, the Grant Memorial United Methodist Church and the Advent Christian Church in Mapleton. They set them both on fire. They stole a car and burned that, too.

That morning at 4 a.m. the Rev. Patricia Thompson and her husband were awakened by a phone call.

''I looked out the window at the church and saw smoke,'' Thompson says. ''Then when I got over there I saw the church was engulfed in flames.''

Thompson stood in the January cold, watching firefighters smash the church's beautiful stained glass windows so they could shoot water into the burning sanctuary.

The fire raged through the church and destroyed the building. The damage: $1.6 million.

Thompson wasn't surprised when she learned it was a couple of young men.

''You see plenty of these young kids around here partying around, getting picked up for drunken driving,'' Thompson says. ''They don't have jobs and they don't have anything to do, it seems, but to drink.''

During Mills' sentencing, he told the judge: ''I'm really ashamed of myself.''

Mills, his attorney explained, had a long history of alcohol abuse. For his drunken crimes that night he received an eight-year prison sentence.

''I feel an incredible amount of sorrow and pain for my church people and these two young men who had their whole lives ahead of them and went and did such a stupid thing,'' Thompson says.

The disease that crippled Mills is the same addiction that destroyed the career of Richard Reamer, a Portland attorney making $70,000 a year.

After pleading guilty in February 1997 to assaulting his girlfriend while he was drunk, Reamer found himself dressed in an orange jumpsuit and jailed with the very criminals he had once defended.

''They found it hilarious,'' Reamer says.

''How do you like it now, counselor?'' they heckled.

Richard Reamer was a lawyer in Portland until his alcohol addiction cost him his job and put him in jail for assaulting his girlfriend. Reamer says he has been sober for about 3 months and hopes to get back his license to practice law. ``When I walked out of that courthouse months ago I was disgusted and thought I'd never return,'' he says. ``But now, I know it is my destiny to go back.'' Staff photo by John Ewing

Many of the inmates expressed amazement that a high-priced attorney could fall victim to the same disease that destroyed homeless men.

''They were aghast,'' Reamer says. ''Like somehow because I was an attorney, I was supposed to be immune to alcoholism.''

Reamer's assault conviction wasn't the first time his drinking caused him legal trouble. He'd racked up OUIs in 1985 and 1989.

Like many alcoholics, Reamer used booze to medicate his depression and anxieties.

''I began abusing alcohol in law school to drown my anxieties over exams,'' he says.

His reliance on alcohol grew stronger as he reached his 30s. He began drinking daily, consuming at least 12 beers or hard-liquor drinks.

As he lost jobs and got passed over for promotions in Portland law firms, Reamer tried to control his addiction.

He struggled to remain sober for short periods. Then he'd stumble into weeklong alcoholic binges.

''Toward the end, I was incapable of tying my own shoes,'' Reamer says.

By the time he was arrested in February 1996 for assaulting his girlfriend, alcohol had stripped Reamer of thousands of dollars and his reputation.

''I was resigned to the fact I'd lost everything and proceeded to drink myself to death,'' he says.

While serving his 50-day term at the Cumberland County Jail, Reamer found it easy to stay sober.

''You're a dry drunk in jail because you have no choice,'' he says. But on the day he was released, Reamer didn't even make it a few blocks up Congress Street before he stopped in at the Sportsman's Grill.

''I drank as much as I could that night,'' he says. ''And then I continued to drink every day.''

About a month and a half after he got out of jail, Reamer's probation officer made a surprise morning visit to his Portland apartment in June 1997.

The probation officer smelled alcohol on Reamer's breath. He asked Reamer to take a breath test. At 10:30 a.m., Reamer's blood-alcohol level was 0.14 percent.

A judge revoked Reamer's probation and sent him back to jail.

''I was relieved,'' Reamer says. ''I was convinced that I was going to utterly self-destruct and either commit suicide or die a horrendous death.''

On Aug. 12, Reamer headed to an alcohol rehab center in Bangor called Hope House, where he was court-ordered to get treatment. He showed up drunk and was told to come back the next day.

After spending a month at Hope House, Reamer is now living in a state-subsidized apartment in Bangor. He receives food stamps and Medicaid pays for his health care, including his ongoing treatment and his past stay at the alcohol rehab center.

''I've been sober 90 days,'' Reamer says, explaining that he still attends group therapy once a week. ''I feel like I've been given another chance to redeem myself.''

On a recent October day, Reamer sat in Portland's Lincoln Park as orange and red leaves fell around him. His chesTnut-colored hair was pulled back in a ponytail. His hazel eyes were clear as they gazed at the gray, three-story courthouse where he used to earn his living.

''For the first time in years, I have hope now,'' he said. ''When I walked out of that courthouse months ago I was disgusted and thought I'd never return.''

''But now,'' Reamer added, ''I know it is my destiny to go back.''

When he has several more months of sobriety behind him, Reamer plans to reapply for his license to practice law, a license he voluntarily gave up. Who better to defend alcohol-addicted criminals than a man who has firsthand knowledge of the drug's devastating power, Reamer asks.

''A lot of attorneys can sympathize with their alcoholic clients who revolve in and out of that courthouse,'' Reamer says. ''But how many attorneys can say they really understand this disease? How many can say they've been locked up at the county jail because of booze?''

Julia McCue, library assistant, contributed research to this report.