Thoroughbred horse racing, and the gambling associated with it, flourished in late nineteenth-century America, as Professor Riess narrates in his well-presented and beautifully illustrated account. Horse-track gambling, Riess demonstrates, was a product of a competitive and materialistic society that respected risk takers ranging from colonial Virginia planters to industrial capitalists. Focussing on New York as the centre of legal and illegal horse-race betting, Riess traces the interplay between racing entrepreneurs, moral reformers, and “organized crime,” which he, following Mark Haller, identifies with illegal enterprise systems of cooperation where many retailers are backed by the same group of entrepreneurs who operate a kind of syndicate. In New York, crime syndicates used their connections with machine politicians to protect their illegal betting enterprises.

Throughout Riess's account the racetrack men whose political connections enabled them to operate the tracks faced constant challenges from two very different directions. First from reformers who saw gambling as sinful, nonproductive and socially dysfunctional. Anthony Comstock, for example, was one of the first of these, railing against the Tammany Hall-dominated city government's lax enforcement of the laws that attempted to curtail obscenity and blasphemy as well as gambling and other “vices.” Comstock singled out young businessmen as most at risk from gambling, as they were approached by those who brought the “demoralization of the race-course into the circles of business, thus setting another devil-trap for young men in the walks of daily life” (69). Comstock and others argued that the only way to stop illegal off-track betting was to end the legal business of horse racing itself. The racetrack interest's second challenge was from those competitors who first attracted Comstock's ire – operators who catered to the needs of those who could not afford to go to the tracks and offered illegal gambling services in betting parlours, saloons, candy stores, cigar shops, and streets in working-class neighbourhoods.

Riess makes admirable use of a wealth of primary sources to inform his account. However, in its analysis of organized crime, this is where there are most problems with The Sport of Kings and the Kings of Crime. The words and work of reformers, such as Frank Moss of the New York Society for the Prevention of Crime, and Theodore Bingham, New York police commissioner, are treated uncritically, for example, and one is left with the impression that the story of illegal gambling and organized crime is one of good reformers versus bad gamblers and their Tammany protectors. Riess does not discuss in any depth the ethnic biases of these reformers. These helped establish the ethnic stereotyping that has obscured understanding of organized crime up to the present. Moss had spoken of arson-for-profit schemes as typical of the “inherent moral depravity of the Jews,” Bingham had suggested that Jews were at the heart of a centralized New York underworld that ran illegal gambling and that therefore the police had to become more centralized in response. The book is therefore much more convincing when it deals with the “Sport of Kings” than when it deals with the “Kings of Crime.”

Later in the twentieth century, during another moral panic about illegal gambling, it was claimed by the Senate investigating committee chaired by Senator Estes Kefauver that an Italian organization called the Mafia ran illegal gambling (including off-track bookmaking) in America, not just in New York, and called for yet more centralization of policing in response. None of these claims about centralization in organized crime have stood up to empirical scrutiny but updated versions continue to influence organized crime-control policymaking to the present day in many other countries besides the United States. Meanwhile, an anti-gambling crusade that established a prohibition-based approach to a popular pastime and helped enrich many entrepreneurs and corrupt government officials has almost run its course in America. Those who wish to gamble legally without the expense of travelling to tracks or casinos now do so on the Internet.