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“Put the Gangsters Out of Business”: Gambling Legalization and the War on Organized Crime

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 September 2019

Jonathan D. Cohen
Jonathan D. Cohen*
Affiliation:
University of Virginia
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Abstract:

From the 1950s through the 1970s, American policymakers engaged in an extensive campaign against illegal gambling in an effort to turn the tide in the government’s crusade against organized crime. At the grassroots, however, voters endorsed a different form of state expansion to beat back the mob menace. Between 1963 and 1977, fourteen northeastern and Rust Belt states enacted the first government-run lotteries in the twentieth-century United States on the belief that legalized gambling would undercut the mob’s gambling profits. While gambling opponents pointed to Las Vegas as proof that organized crime would flourish following legalization, supporters argued that illegal gambling was already pervasive, so the state may as well profit from this irrepressible activity. The history of gambling legalization challenges narratives on the popularity of law-and-order politics and offers a new perspective on crime policy in the post–World War II period.

Keywords

GamblingCrimeOrganized CrimeLaw and OrderLas Vegas
Type
Article
Information
Journal of Policy History , Volume 31 , Issue 4 , October 2019 , pp. 533 - 556
Copyright
Copyright © Donald Critchlow and Cambridge University Press 2019 

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Footnotes

I would like to thank Joey Thompson and two anonymous reviewers for their comments on this article. Thanks also to Su Kim Chung, Daniel Gastfriend, Larry Gragg, and David Schwartz for their advice at various stages of the writing process. This research was assisted by a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies as well as a grant from the Rockefeller Archive Center.

References

NOTES

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