SOURCE: New Yorker Magazine

It’s fall, and an American’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of betting on the NFL It is, of course, illegal to bet on sports in the U.S., unless you’re in Nevada, but in the past five years many Americans have started using the Internet to bet with bookmakers in countries that permit sports betting. This has turned online sports betting into a huge industry; last year, Americans placed an estimated six billion dollars in online bets.

But two months ago F.B.I. agents arrested David Carruthers, the C.E.O. of the British bookmaker Betonsports.com, while he was changing planes in Texas, and, after he was charged with racketeering, conspiracy, and fraud, the company announced that it would no longer do business with American bettors. Two weeks ago, police arrested the chairman of another British bookmaker, Sportingbet.com, when he touched down in New York. And in July the House of Representatives passed a bill explicitly banning online gambling and prohibiting American banks from sending their customers’ money to bookmakers. Suddenly, the local candy-store bookie is starting to look a lot better.

The members of Congress behind the House bill framed it as a sensible response to a “mushrooming epidemic” of underage gambling and a burgeoning “national-security problem” (since some Internet bookies are allegedly terrorist fronts). But it’s really just the latest chapter in America’s love-hate relationship with gambling. Americans have been avid gamblers from the start—Jamestown itself was funded via a lottery, and the nineteenth century saw a boom in gambling on cards and horses—but a powerful puritanical streak has led to periodic clampdowns.

Lotteries, though legal in all thirteen colonies, had become illegal by the end of the nineteenth century, only to be resurrected in the nineteen-sixties. Similarly, at the start of the twentieth century Progressive politicians, decrying betting as a “source of misery and vice,” shut down nearly every racetrack in the nation. But, two decades later, states desperate for revenue reopened the tracks, and found a huge audience. And today, while sports betting may be illegal, the laws are typically underenforced. The daily point spreads printed in most newspapers testify to the ubiquity of gambling, and, vociferously as the NFL and the NCAA oppose gambling, they also owe a great deal of their popularity to it.

Such schizophrenic thinking has become institutionalized, so that, even as Americans are prevented from getting a bet down on the Giants-Cowboys game, they’re encouraged to play blackjack and buy lottery tickets.

Forty-eight of the fifty states now have some form of gambling. Thirty-eight states have lotteries, which yielded sixteen billion dollars in revenue for state governments last year. There are nearly nine hundred casinos, which generate five billion dollars a year in tax revenue. In South Dakota, taxes on gambling account for nearly fifteen per cent of the state’s revenue, while Connecticut gets close to four hundred million dollars a year from the slot machines at the Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun casinos. And not all sports betting is unacceptable: the House bill includes an exception for the $15-billion racetrack-betting industry.

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