The Government as Bookie

Despite the great lesson of Prohibition, the U.S. is still trying to legislate morality with laws that are all but impossible to enforce. It is bad enough that the effort fails. Worse, it helps finance organized crime, a vast consumer industry that supplies millions of Americans with outlawed goods and services. On gambling alone, the Mob now nets as much as $10 billion a yearseed money for narcotics distribution, loan-sharking and bribes for corrupt lawmen who look the other way.

The only solution is to legalize gambling and let the Government handle it. So argues Carl M. Loeb Jr., a metallurgical engineer and president of the National Council on Crime and Delinquency, a voluntary citizens group dedicated to curbing crime. In recent testimony before a House subcommittee, Loeb urged the Federal Government to face reality and set up a nationwide gambling operation.

In Loeb's scheme, computers would monitor the odds for all U.S. sporting events, detect suspicious swings of big money and thus discourage fixes. Customers could dial a bet and have the transaction entered on their phone bills. The Government would not pay bribes, which cost the Mob about $2 billion a year. It could make winnings tax-free and still get by with a 10% to 20% rake-offless than half the Mob's reported take. In short, the Government could offer better odds. As Loeb figures it, the Government might net $15 billion a yearenough to pay almost a quarter of the Pentagon's budget.

Irrepressible Instinct. Loeb's notions may be less radical than they seem. Already scores of countries have introduced some form of nationwide legalized gambling. New York and New Hampshire are trying to outdo the numbers racket and pick up extra revenue with their own lotteries. New Jersey is due to follow suit. Pennsylvania uses horse-race betting to help finance both private and public schools. In January, New York City will start a computerized off-track betting service that may branch into other sports as well. Last week the country's top oddsmaker, Jimmy ("The Greek") Snyder of Las Vegas, pronounced the New York scheme "a prohibitive favorite to make money."

Gambling is an irrepressible instinct and a national passion, Loeb warns, so there is no acceptable alternative to Government control. Unless gambling profits are channeled into public coffers, he demonstrated statistically, "organized crime will have a trillion dollars 15 years from now, which means those people will own the country."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.