Local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies have come to see time-consuming investigations of illegal sports bookmaking as a waste of time. Up to 80 percent of compulsive gamblers contemplate suicide, and 14 percent actually attempt it. People lose their jobs, marriages break up, kids live in unstable homes. There is a real social cost to the activity. And the public picks up the tab.
Individual states regulate their own gambling laws.
It is only when a third party, a bookmaker, gets a piece of the action that sports betting becomes a crime. But the mob doesn't rule sports gambling as it once did. In its place is a seamless, quasi-national industry, a blend of legal and illegal activities that feed on each other. Every day the legal betting lines are set by sports books in Las Vegas, and legal and illegal bookies around the world track the movements of the lines by computer, much like Wall Street traders tracking stock quotes. Serious bettors shop around for the best line, but most will take what their bookie gives them, usually a half-hour before game time.