Police Regulation of Illegal Gambling: Frustrations of Symbolic Enforcement

Abstract

This article examines problems presented to the police by their gambling enforcement responsibilities during the four decades following Prohibition's repeal. In this period repeated gambling corruption scandals put the police in disrepute. These scandals accurately reflected the underlying corruption of an effort that was essentially symbolic and not supported by a significant element of the otherwise law-abiding population. The fundamental source of the corruption was the vulnerability of all illegal gambling organizations to police harassment. This corruption also contributed to organized crime's dominance in illegal gambling. The federal government mounted a major campaign against illegal gambling between 1962 and 1972. That effort failed to reduce the availability of gambling services but may have helped reduce the dominance of organized crime by depriving local police of their ability to franchise monopolies. Together with changing attitudes toward gambling, the entry of the state into many gambling markets, and changes in the nature of the games themselves, the federal enforcement effort helped end the era in which gambling enforcement was a major responsibility for the police.

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References

1. Dating the end of the period is arbitrary. No single event ended it. There is justification for designating 1970 the date of the latest major New York gambling corruption scandal and the year in which non-heroin drug arrests began their great increase.

2. In 1960 the Uniform Crime Reports estimated 145,000 gambling arrests nationwide. By 1980 that figure had declined to 38,000. Estimates prior to 1960 are unreliable.

3. A major source on New York for the second half of the period is Alan Kornblum, The Moral Hazards (Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath, 1976).

4. A more detailed description of the operation and structure of numbers and bookmaking is contained in Peter Reuter , Disorganized Crime: The Economics of the Visible Hand (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983), chaps. 2 and 3.

5. The film The Sting provides a good depiction of the kinds of props that went into a bookmaker's parlor.

6. William F. Whyte , Street Corner Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1943).

7. Commission to Investigate Allegations of Police Corruption and the City's Anti-Corruption Program, Report (New York: George Braziller, 1973).

8. Jonathan Rubinstein , City Police (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973), p. 390.

9. Referring to an earlier period, 1880 to 1905, Haller says, “In many neighborhoods, it was not so much that gambling syndicates influenced local political organizations: rather gambling syndicates were the local political organizations.” Mark Haller , “The Changing Structure of American Gambling in the Twentieth Century,” Journal of Social Issues, 35(3):88 (1979).

10.

10. Alan Block , East Side-West Side (Cardiff: University of Cardiff Press, 1980).

11.

11. James Reardon , The Sweet Life of Jimmy Riley (New York: Wyndham Books, 1980). Though writing in the form of a novel, Reardon, who was convicted on corruption charges, uses actual names for most participants and clearly intends to provide his own account of what happened.

12.

12. Kornblum , Moral Hazards.

13.

13. Rubinstein , City Police, p. 379.

14.

14. Harold Lasswell and Jeremiah McKenna , Organized Crime in an Inner City Community (Springfield, VA: National Technical Information Service, 1972).

15.

15. Police, aware of this practice among bookmakers in New York, made efforts to ensure that bettors were aware of the raid, so as to maximize the bookmaker's loss from false claims.

16.

16. Kornblum , Moral Hazards, chap. 2.

17.

17. Marchetti v. U.S., 390 U.S. 39, 88 Sup. Ct., 697, 19 L. Ed. 889 (1968).

18.

18. This episode is discussed in Victor Navasky , Kennedy Justice (New York: Atheneum, 1971), chap. 10.

19.

19. 18 U.S.C. 1955.

20.

20. For example, the commerce clause is the basis for much of the federal civil rights legislation.

21.

21. See, for example, the description of one major case provided in Jack Carlisle , “Gambling in Detroit: An Informal History” in Gambling in America, Commission on the Review of the National Policy toward Gambling (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1976), app. 1.

22.

22. J. Fred Cook , The $2 Bet Means Murder (New York: Dial Press, 1961).

23.

23. Thomas Schelling , “Economics and Criminal Enterprise,” Public Interest, no. 7 (1967).

24.

24. Haller , “Changing Structure of American Gambling,” pp. 94-95.

25.

25. The argument and evidence are given in detail in Reuter , Disorganized Crime, chap. 8.