Your brain on dice. Through most of the last two decades, law enforcement vice units have focused more of their scarce resources on fighting the illegal drug trade, and fewer and fewer on illegal bookmaking. Last year, just 15,000 were arrested, less than one tenth of 1 percent of all arrests. 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.