The explosive growth of legal gambling may be one of the most significant social developments of the 1980s. Racetracks and churchrun bingo games have been around for decades, and the first modern state-run lottery, New Hampshire’s, dates back to 1963. But as recently as 15 years ago, if you wanted to test your wits against a slot machine you probably had to fly to Las Vegas, where society showed what it thought of you and your degenerate habits by giving you Wayne Newton and Liberace. That was before Atlantic City demonstrated how gambling could transform a poor, dying slum into a rich, thriving one. Now gambling “is the [only] vice actively promoted by the government,” says Whittier College law professor 1. Nelson Rose, a leading authority on gambling law.
Five states have casinos, 36 have lotteries and at least 18 have some form of gambling on Indian reservations, which were given extensive rights to run their own gaming under a 1988 federal law. Last year Americans bet $300 billion legally-and an additional $40 billion illegally, by FBI estimates. That exaggerates the Lottery size of the industry, because bettors win some of their money back. A more meaningful figure, according to industry analyst Harold Vogel, is $35 billion, which is what the gambling industry “retained” last year. Or, to put it another way, that’s what gamblers lost.
Usually this sum-more than six times what Americans spend on, say, movie tickets in a typical year-passes without much notice, except when someone famous gets into trouble as a result. Pete Rose ruined his life with betting, as did Philadelphia Eagles owner Leonard Tose, who gambled away some $24 million over 12 years. Michael Jordan last week denied that he has a gambling “problem” and disputed a golf buddy’s charge that the basketball star lost more than $1 million to him on the links. But the problem with gambling in America isn’t really with fabulously wealthy athletes wagering $10,000 on a putt; it’s with ordinary people betting money they can’ afford on games that exploit their naivete and greed.
Looked at one way, legal gambling is just a tax-a voluntary one, to be sure, but often levied at astonishingly high rates; state lotteries on average keep 50 cents of every dollar wagered. At worst it’s simply continuing the work of Meyer Lansky with the blessing of the state. “The state governments are deceiving themselves into thinking that[gambling revenue] is coming out of nowhere,” says Henry Lesieur, a criminologist and editor of the Journal of Gambling Studies. Problem gamblers, he estimates, represent 3 to 5 percent of the adult population but account for considerably more than 10 percent of the money the states take in. “That money is coming from somewhere: their paycheck, savings accounts’ money they borrow. Some of it is stolen’ "
Experts expect to see more problem gamblers as betting becomes ever more ubiquitous. Only two states, Utah and Hawaii, have no legal betting at all. In New Orleans, a developer plans to demolish the Rivergate Convention Center adjacent to the French Quarter and build a 200,000-square-foot casino, which would be the world’s largest. Two weeks ago Chicago Mayor Richard Daley unveiled a proposal for an $800 million riverfront entertainment and gambling center. This would represent the first modern inroad of casinos into a major city. A casino industry executive once boasted to sociologist Vicki Abt, an authority on gambling, that if he could open just one casino in New York, he could shut down Lincoln Center. But never mind: “This is the wave of the future,” says a spokeswoman for Mayor Daley. “If other cities [in Illinois] are allowed to have it, Chicago should, too.”
Meanwhile, the industry is evolving, and not in a direction that encourages moderation. Higher-stakes games are muscling out lower ones; Massachusetts ran a $5 “Holiday Bonus” lottery last November. Iowa, the first Midwestern state to offer riverboat gambling in 1991, is losing business to states that don’t place the same limits on betting ($5 a wager, $200 a trip). Faster games are beating slower ones. In the last two years, 12 states have begun running keno lotteries, which pay off every five minutes. Racing, which allows as much as half an hour to elapse between bets, is increasingly seen as an activity for fuddyduddies afraid to go home broke. Attendance at racetracks was down 3.7 percent in 1991, nearly 4.1 percent last year. One solution under consideration: put slot machines in racetracks.
‘Training ground’: One thing that hasn’t changed, though, is that gambling remains an important source of revenue for organized crime, according to Wayne Comer of the Organized Crime/ Drug Branch of the FBI. In general, the big casinos in Nevada and New Jersey are legitimate, Comer says, although the mobs often run the businesses attracted by gambling, such as prostitution, loan-sharking and drugs. But neighborhood bookies will always be more convenient than OTB shops, and they don’t report winnings to the IRS. Gambling, he says, “remains a training ground for would-be mobsters.”
Technology is conspiring with government to make gambling ever simpler and more accessible. Video poker and blackJac machines, which add the narcotizing effect of television to the addictiveness of a slot machine, have greatly speeded the process of creating compulsive gamblers out of normal citizens. “We used to see people who started gambling at 13 and it would take 20 years before they hit serious trouble,” says Richard J. Rosenthal, president of the California Council on Compulsive Gambling. “Now with video poker machines it’s two or three years before they have to get help.“One use of interactive cable TV will undoubtedly be to permit betting on sporting events at home. Someday, Rosenthal says, fans at home might be able to stop the action of a football game and make a bet on any play.
Lucky us. They can’t match that in Monaco.
