Hi all, cities or countries with lots of gambling such as Macau, Cambodia, or Las Vegas usually have a lot of shady characters from organised crime based there as well. Some like Macau are very obvious, and some others, in Las Vegas’s case, they are well hidden from the mainstream and you won’t notice them as a casual tourist, but when you dig deeper and you will notice the gangs run the show in some (many?) parts of the casinos. In Macau the triad members are even proudly running some of the major casinos operations out in the open.
Does gambling in your country linked to a lot of organised crime, or are they even controlled by the gangs themselves? And if yes, do you have any juicy tales that made it to the news to tell here?
Thanks.
9 comments
Not really. Only the government can exploit casino’s, so it is not possible to have organized crime involved.
Online gambling is legal since 2 years, and I assume a lot of illegal activities are present there, but I am not aware of any specific cases or examples.
The government controls it, sure there will be some illegal things, but where are plenty of legal options
Not that I know of. Gambling is extremely regulated, technically only the government is allowed to offer such services, through a government-owned private company these days.
A few years ago there even was a huge crackdown on simple gambling machines in bars.
No, it’s very regulated and perfectly legal in all parts of Denmark.
For casinos there are strict rules with licenses. Only one casino company can offer table games (this company has the government as shareholder).
I know two cases of illegal gambling. Sometimes you read in the newspaper about illegal poker tournaments being raided.
Another thing is illegal betting on sports matches. There are legal online betting companies. But there are also illegal ones. Last year there was a news report about such illegal betting which allegedly had ties with some organized crime king pin. Some famous former football players were mentioned as the ones who bet.
Finland: gambling is a state-governed business, run by the same state organisation that runs the national lottery. Gambling is done online via their site, and with slot machines, which can be found in the hallways of supermarkets etc. The only shady thing about it is that it’s essentially a form of gathering money from addicts – lots of people spend what little money they have to those machines. There are two casinos in the entire country, both run by the same organisation that does the lottery, slot machines and online gambling.
Gambling in Italy is legal and a monopoly of the State.
This however still doesn’t stop the mafias from creating and managing clandestine gambling rings or outright infiltrating the legal gambling system either by having complacent or acting with blackmail, extortion and threats against the managers of the legal rooms, with the imposition of illegal slot machines and LTVs or by directly managing the same rooms, resorting to nominees.
Overall, according to investigators there are about 60 clans from different mafia organizations that operate in the gambling sector operating in Italy and abroad.
Gambling is managed by two companies; *Svenska Spel* (state-owned) and *ATG* (joint-stock company).
Traditionally *Svenska Spel* has handled most hazard and betting games. Except horse-racing which was handled by *ATG*.
Today, however, the game market has been slightly deregulated so both have started encroaching on each others territory.
There are smaller gambling companies, e.g. Folkspel who do TV bingo and scratch-tickets. But they rely on ATG to manage their sales and winnings.
All bets are locked to the person who purchased it. An ID is required when you place your bet, and and ID of the same person is required when winnings are collected.
Sweden has 3 casinos which are all owned by *Svenska Spel*, the state-owned company. No other than them are legally allowed to have a casino, and they themself can legally only have 6 casinos at most.
Slot machines, or [Vegas](https://sv.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegas_(spelautomat)), at restaurants and pubs are the property of state-owned *Svenska Spel*. Venues are only allowed a limited number of machines, based on their food sale.
The only place I can think of that might have any criminally infestestation to speak of are the Internet casinos. Most of them are physically located abroad to circumvent Swedish systems and laws.
In Romania they are not at all regulated and most online casinos are owned by companies in the west (apparently Netherlands have quite a few). However, I would guess casinos are then franchised and it’s not rare that gangs control specific locations.
Anyway, Romania has a huge problem with (online) gambling and it should be very well regulated. There are lots of addicts and many of them under 18. Right now there are banners advertising it everywhere.