Super Bowl week 2000. A bartender at a popular watering hole in Van Nuys was selling the last open spots on a $20-a-square Super Bowl pool when two young vice cops got up from the table where they were watching and arrested the bartender for gambling.
Super Bowl week 2024. Three online gambling sites will spend $7 million each for a 30-second TV ad during the game to promote more gambling.
One in every four Americans will place a bet on the Super Bowl, and an estimated $23 billion will be wagered, according to the American Gaming Association.
We’ve come a long way from River City, baby.
The young vice cops had the bartender clear out the lunch crowd, which included a few retired judges and attorneys from the courthouse up the street, then they shut the place down.
They took the bartender to the Van Nuys Police Station where the booking sergeant asked the young officers what the charge was?
Gambling, they said. He was selling Super Bowl squares.
The booking officer paused and took the young officers aside to quietly inform them there were 10 different Super Bowl pools going on in the back room of the police station right now.
Case dismissed.
That one ranked right up there for bad busts with the mom’s morning bowling club at Granada Hills Bowl after they dropped off their kids at school. Each team put $1 in a hat, winner take all. A big haul was $5.
Somebody complained, though, and two vice officers showed up one morning to see for themselves. The women were given citations as they left the bowling alley.
What a silly waste of police resources. Busting moms bowling for a dollar. The citations were later rescinded.
A few years after that, I was invited to ride along with a team of Los Angeles Police Department vice officers on Super Bowl Sunday as they made the rounds of shutting down bookies on the biggest sports betting day of the year.
They hit the bookies where it hurt the most, their pocketbook. Before they shut them down, the vice officers added a…
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