Betting: Legal and Illegal

Indications of Wide Extent of Betting Activity

A passion for gambling, instinctive in many individuals, can now be gratified in this country with less difficulty than at any time for years. Gradual extension of legal betting, and relatively lax enforcement of federal, state and local anti-gambling laws, seem to reflect a more tolerant public attitude toward betting in general. Sen. Estes Kefauver (D Tenn.) complained recently that a good many people had “so far forgotten the lesson” of the hearings held a decade ago by the Special Senate Committee to Investigate Organized Crime—a committee which Kefauver headed—that “they now propose legalization of gambling or the spread of legalized race betting to off-track locations where hoodlums will be even more difficult to ...