Content area
Full text
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.
In the mid-1960s and early 1970s, millions of Americans were ready to change tactics in their nation’s long, labored, and futile fight against organized crime. Senate investigations in the 1950s revealed the mob to be a powerful force in American society, one that was responsible for violent and nonviolent crimes, including racketeering, narcotics, prostitution, robbery, and murder. Though organized crime was involved in an array of illicit activities, government inquiries illustrated that the mob relied on a vast network of illegal gambling—primarily numbers games and sports betting—which provided crucial financial backing for its other ventures. Thanks to these operations as well as the concentration of organized crime in Las Vegas casinos, gambling was thoroughly associated with the mob. “Throughout this country,” Nevada Supreme Court Justice Charles M. Merrill wrote in 1957, gambling has “surrounded itself with an aura of crime and corruption.”1
Because the mob depended on gambling revenue, politicians, including presidents John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon, saw stymying illegal betting as crucial to ridding the United States of its organized crime problem. Consequently, officials at the state and federal levels passed legislation empowering law enforcement in its war against the mob. As with other moments of conflict in American history—for instance, the subjugation of Native peoples, the crackdown on alcohol during Prohibition, both world wars, and the campaign against drugs and urban African American crime in the late twentieth century—the war on organized crime prompted a massive increase in state authority.2 To tackle the mob, the government broadened its bureaucratic reach, expanded law-enforcement budgets, and granted a range of new powers to prosecutors.
However, at the grassroots, the public envisioned a far simpler means of combating organized crime. In northeastern and Rust Belt states in the second half of the 1960s and early 1970s, momentum grew among voters for a different form of...