Italian mafias in the public gambling sector

The paper investigates the relationship between Italian mafias and gambling in the light of the sector’s explosive growth over the last thirty years. This growth is the result of Italian government policies that saw gambling as a strategic source of tax revenues. The government first legalized and then liberalized gambling, claiming that these actions were justified for economic reasons and for their alleged benefits in countering the long-standing influence of organized crime, and of mafia-type groups in particular, in the sector. From this perspective, legal gambling is seen as the only way to curb illegal gambling. However, this view is largely contradicted by the empirical evidence, which shows that the mafias have gradually migrated from illegal gambling to legal, government-controlled gambling. By reviewing a number of judicial sources, the paper retraces the evolution of the link between gambling and organized crime, with a particular focus on the forms taken by mafia influence, starting from the most heavily affected gambling supply chains: slot machines and online gambling. We conclude that the problem of criminal influence should be approached not as a question of legal versus illegal gambling, but by addressing the regulatory model currently applied in Italy.