When the boy was 6 or 7, his grandmother would occasionally give him a few nickels or a quarter and a slip of paper with three numbers on it and tell him to “take this to Irving.”

Irving was the guy who owned the fruit and vegetable store on the corner. On the side, he was a small-time bookie who took bets on numbers, horse races, and sports.

The boy’s grandmother had a fondness for gambling that would later make her an avid fan of the dog races, after she retired to Florida. She passed on the gambling bug to her youngest son, a successful dentist and psychologist who loves the ponies and the casinos, and to her grandson, who likes to play the horses.

Those were the days long before states got into the lottery and numbers businesses and casinos sprang up in Atlantic City and on “Indian” land in New York, Connecticut, and elsewhere.

Gambling may have been illegal, but it was ingrained. When that boy was 13 or 14, he was standing across from a tailor shop when police brought the owner out in handcuffs.

“What did he do?” the boy asked.

“He’s a bookie,” someone answered.

“Yeah, everyone knows that,” said the boy, who had no idea gambling was illegal. “But what did he do wrong?”

Now, some 40 years later, gambling is still one of the great schizophrenias of society: Nearly everyone does it, yet it remains against the law except for state-run lotteries or in regulated casinos.

Yesterday’s Super Bowl office pool? Technically illegal. Next month’s NCAA March Madness pool? Theoretically, you could be led out in handcuffs.

Sports gambling is against the law everywhere in America except for Las Vegas, yet a few clicks on the Internet can get you in on the action at hundreds of Web sites that pull in billions a year.

It is fairly well known that most of these bookie rings are connected to organized crime, which uses the money to finance drug ventures and other illegal businesses.

The Brooklyn district attorney, Charles Hynes, has made a nearly yearly ritual of busting bookies on Super Bowl Sunday – a day on which authorities say $4 billion is bet nationwide. Yesterday was no different; Mr. Hynes announced that detectives had raided nine gambling shops and arrested 12 people on charges of running betting rings that brought in a combined $100 million a year – at least.

Last week, Suffolk County officials busted Peter Moceo, a 45-year-old dessert shop owner who lives in Trump Towers, on charges of running a $21 million a year sports betting ring. Authorities said Moceo, a convicted gambler who owns a pudding shop called Rice to Riches on Spring Street, oversaw a Bay Ridge-based ring that offered discounts to losers and threw parties for high-rollers. Police said they found $413,000 in cash in the Brooklyn home of Moceo’s father, Peter Sr.

What makes Mr. Hynes different is that while has made a name for himself busting bookies, he actually favors legalizing sports betting.

“His position is that that if it is legalized, the money that is going to the mob will go to the city and state,” says the head of Mr. Hynes’s rackets bureau, Assistant District Attorney Michael Vecchione. “This is an endless revenue stream, because people are never going to stop gambling. They always have gambled and they always will.”

It’s pretty hard to dispute that, too.

Legend has it that, as a young boy, Meyer Lansky put a little of his mother’s grocery money into a Grand Street dice game and lost. In addition to learning that it was not wise to lose the food money, Lansky immediately realized that if you want to make money from gambling, you have to run the game, not play it. As Frank Costello once said, “I’m not a gambler. My customers are gamblers. I’m a businessman.”

It’s a lesson many state lawmakers have learned across the country; they have filled the public coffers with money from lotteries, casinos, racetracks, free-standing slot machines, and anything bettable. Hell, you can bet on anything in the betting shops of London, from who will be the next president to which celebrity will have a baby first.

It’s time for New York’s lawmakers to wake up. You can let the Irvings of the world make the money and kick some of it up to the mob, or you can let the state run it, regulate it, and police it.

I’ll lay 5 to 1 grandma would have preferred it if her nickels went to building better schools than to buying Irving another condo in Florida.