For roughly 60 years, the Wire Act has served as one of America’s biggest threats to unregulated sports betting businesses.
Crafted during the 1950s and then pushed over the finish line by Robert F. Kennedy’s Department of Justice, the law was an effort to go after nationwide bookmaking syndicates by targeting their means of communication. It did not really work.
Organized crime is still here, still making money, still taking bets. We have also seen the rise of offshore betting in addition to unregulated bookmaking unconnected to organized crime.
Prohibitions on vice products have tended not to work and the Wire Act is no exception. Nonetheless, like the federal marijuana laws that remain in spite of widespread legal and medical marijuana, federal laws like the Wire Act continue to hang over the sports gambling market, both regulated and unregulated.