David G. Schwartz, director of the Center for Gaming Research, continues his examination of Nevada gaming (see also Suburban Xanadu in UNLV Magazine, Summer 2004) with this look at the 1961 Wire Act, which resulted from U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy's crusade against organized crime.
The Wire Act was intended to control illegal bookmaking by preventing the use of telephone and telegraph lines to transmit gambling information. Schwartz focuses on the history, but the law has new relevance given the interest in Internet betting.
Of the many aspects of Nevada gaming history, Schwartz was attracted to the Wire Act because of the "disconnect between prohibitory gambling law and the popularity of American gambling."
Noting that states maintained, but did not fully enforce, anti-gambling laws, Schwartz believes using the Wire Act to suppress Internet gambling was an extension of this trend.
He wrote Cutting the Wire to provide a "better understanding of how Americans have historically approached the prohibition of gambling and how and why the Wire Act was actually passed. Rather than a catch-all prohibition against gambling in general, it was enacted specifically to fight organized crime."
Schwartz's next book, Roll the Bones, a comprehensive history of gambling, is scheduled to be published by Gotham Books.
