As Steve Budin sees it, the legal sports betting industry in the U.S. is almost hopelessly behind the times.
Not for long, though.
Within a few years, Budin projects, Nevada's big gaming companies will begin taking sports bets from gamblers online via a legal, regulated Internet-based national sports book.
"They need to go mainstream with sports betting," said Budin, a former Miami street bookmaker who became an offshore sports betting pioneer when he set up shop in Central America for several years in the 1990s. "The way that it makes sense is not the traditional brick-and-mortar setup, where it takes eight guys to work a room that's 2,000 square feet.
"The way to handle it is on the Internet, to the masses, where people can bet $10 or $15 from their home, and it doesn't matter whether one person is playing or 1,000 people are playing. It costs the same amount of money to take the bets.
"To think that Las Vegas is not going to offer that in the next three years is a little shortsighted."
The time frame in Budin's prediction might be overly optimistic, but the rest of his analysis - and criticism - of the legal sports betting scene makes sense.
Maybe too much sense, given the track record of U.S. government officials on sports gambling issues, which Budin says is marked by a toxic daily double of ineptitude and hypocrisy.
Rather than taking a creative approach in dealing with offshore gambling, an estimated $10 billion to $12 billion a year industry, Budin said the government has resorted to grandstanding tactics such as arresting offshore bookies when their flights land in the United States.
"They're saying they want to know when the next CEO (of an offshore betting operation) lands at LaGuardia, like he's the next shoe bomber," Budin said from his office in Miami, where he runs a sports handicapping service.
Legislation designed to crack down on offshore betting is a stopgap solution at best, Budin said, helpless to halt the forces of demand and technology.
"They want to stop the billions of dollars flowing out of the country, but I'm sure they realized that the business was going to fall back into the hands of street-based bookmakers, traditionally affiliated with the mob," Budin said. "But at least when a local bookie has money, he goes out to the local restaurant, he buys a new suit. When the money goes offshore it's gone forever."
As a former bookie now selling sports picks online, Budin has no vested interest in whether Nevada will become home to a national sports book.
He made his fortune taking bets by telephone at his sports book based in Panama and later Costa Rica, before the U.S. government intervened and shut him down. Budin tells his story in a recently released memoir, "Bets, Drugs and Rock & Roll: The Rise and Fall of the World's First Offshore Sports Gambling Empire."
His current customers presumably gamble mostly with local bookies or offshore joints.
Yet Budin neatly sets up and knocks down a series of legitimate objections to making Nevada the online bookie to the nation, including concerns about organized crime and problem gambling.
"It's important to remember that 99 percent of sports gamblers bet within their means and never have a problem in their lives," Budin said. "The 1 percent that do, that are animals, that destroy their lives it's ugly, don't get me wrong, but those people would destroy their lives anyway. If it wasn't for sports betting, they'd find something else. That's the mission they're on."
The average single sports bet on the Internet is about $14, according to Budin.
"You're not talking about people betting their mortgage," he said. "You want to make an argument that slot machines are the crack cocaine of gambling, I'm with you. People take their money and they can't wait to put in the slots in New Jersey and other states, and people want to criticize sports betting."
Widespread legalization is the best way to counter organized crime interests, Budin contends.
"They're scared to go mainstream with it thinking it will be controlled by the mob - but that's what's keeping it controlled by the mob," said Budin (online at sportsinfo.com). "Vegas had no problem throwing out the mob when the big corporations wanted their slot machine revenue. Who's tougher than the big corporations? Certainly no mob family."
Budin is probably not a guy those corporations would want speaking on their behalf. He has what most would consider a checkered past in underworld bookmaking. He makes no secret of his fondness for soft drugs (oddly, his book about sports betting includes a short glossary of pot-smoking slang terms) and even has a side business based on the Kramdenesque venture of clear rolling papers.
But his take on the state of the nation's sports betting industry is accurate. Its methods are largely outdated. It has some catching up to do.
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