"Your federal, state and city governments attempt to enforce laws but
are powerless against organized crime, because so many of your citizens
prefer criminal activity for its easy money. They control gambling,
narcotic drug sales and other illegal vices in lucrative territories by
their strong-arm methods or corruption.
"Many of you are deeply impregnated with the gambling and venture
habit. Octopus Colossus has invented many more avenues through which
you can give vent to this habit, other tempting pastimes, sports, and
devices to attract your earnings and bets, be they ever so small.
"Gambling is legally forbidden (except on your stock exchanges and
boards of trades); in most of your national states; in spite of that,
it is actively carried on in all its forms as you all know everywhere;
powerful gangsters reach and ever entice from the poorest and their
children. They also live in affluence and luxury and travel around in
expensive bullet-proof automobiles, and live in electrically guarded
and protected mansions.
"At your well known gambling dens of Monte Carlo, many spend the last
moments of their lives sitting in despair on the suicide bench before
jumping over the high cliff.
"Reno, Nevada, called "The Biggest Little City in the World," the
divorce capital of your country, has legal gambling of all kinds and is
wide open twenty-four hours a day. Gamblers two lines deep stand around
dice tables and roulette wheels, play at twenty-one card tables, and
bet on horse races. Many mechanical gambling devices and card games are
constantly busy, mostly on the receiving end.
"Here you can discern your extreme human weakness; in spite of the many
humorous warning posters in one of its most sumptuous gambling houses,
your rich and even your poor take gambling chances.
"Rich society men and women, business and professional men, low and
high paid workingmen and women, housewives, mechanics, laborers and
lumber camp workers, cowboys, old miners, Indians, Chinese, and
Africans--men and women of all ages, social security and state welfare
recipients in all kinds of attire, elbow each other as they stand or
sit alongside each other around these tables, gambling most of their
pay, savings, and pensions away. There are no limits on the bets, from
a nickel up to a thousand dollars. Gambling palaces, night clubs, and
saloons, all with gambling paraphernalia, seem to occupy most of the
largest and best stores and buildings in the business section as well
as in other commercial zones all over the state.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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