Maryland: A Law-Enforcement Dilemma

Abstract

There is general agreement that the most dif ficult problem confronting law-enforcement agencies today is the suppression of organized illegal gambling—which far out weighs the legal gambling. The national illegal-gambling figure has been established at approximately fifty billion dollars a year, and it is estimated that two of every seven Americans are gambling regularly. During the period of the Volstead Act, bootleggers were the treasurers of the underworld. Today, their successors are the backers and lay-off men in the illegal-gambling industries. Generally speaking, the fight against this type of organized crime has been a losing one, because the average better is an otherwise law-abiding citizen who does not feel that he is doing anything criminal. The alternative approaches to the problem are either to regulate and control gambling much more sensibly than we currently are doing or to punish the players as severely as the writers. The current approach is akin to hunting elephants with a squirrel gun. The racketeers are not complaining at all. With the chance of being caught only one in a hundred in any given year, their job security is enviable and their income is excellent.