Early in Interference, investigative reporter Dan Moldea’s important and maligned study of the influence of gambling and organized crime in the National Football League, the author recounts an interview he conducted with former all-pro Alex Karras while researching the book.

A generation of moviegoers probably remembers Karras for some of his comedy roles, especially as the horse-punchng Mongo character in “Blazing Saddles.” In the early 1960s, Karras was a ferocious defensive lineman for the Detroit Lions, albeit a controversial one. The league suspended Karras in 1963 for gambling on games.

Karras, a blunt truth-teller throughout his life, quickly distilled the league’s real and rarely reported relationship to sports betting and what was then still mostly illegal bookmaking.

“The only thing that keeps the NFL going is gambling,” Karras told Moldea, “and I have objected to the hypocrisy within the NFL for not facing up to that.”

Karras died in 2012 still calling out the league’s sanctimony on sports gambling and its criminal failure to take action against the debilitating effects of concussive brain injury from which so many players suffered.

Published in 1989, Moldea’s book was full of interviews with Las Vegas bookmaking and handicapping insiders, many of whom I knew well. Some quibbled with Moldea’s conclusions, but I never heard anyone question his reporting. It was as close to the source as it gets.

That didn’t prevent a book so highly critical of the NFL from being panned in many corners of the nation’s press. The image-conscious league has never suffered from a shortage of press-box publicists, and many savaged the story that few had the courage to pursue.

It begs the obvious to say that the NFL’s hand-wringing about sports gambling has evolved since then. The league that condemned the “Las Vegas Line” and legal bookmakers is now married to the fastest-growing element of the gaming industry.

It has official sports betting partners in Caesars Entertainment, FanDuel, and DraftKings and has given its seal of approval to FOX Bet, BetMGM, WynnBET, and PointsBet. With 30 states and Washington, D.C. operating legalized sports betting and three other states expected to launch this year, the market is expanding at a staggering pace.

An estimated $21 billion was wagered legally in 2020. That’s up dramatically from the year before with approximately 10 percent of Americans planning to bet on NFL games, according to the American Gaming Association. The majority of wagers aren’t made in Las Vegas super-sized sports books, but on a smartphone.

The change has been so dramatic that it can be hard for newcomers to the current world of legalized sports gambling to fully appreciate. Not so many years ago, no one would have predicted it. Well, almost no one.

The dinosaur bookmakers and handicappers I knew always figured they’d forever be considered either outlaws or under suspicion. After all, they couldn’t even take sports bets inside the four walls of a Nevada casino until 1975.

Even the new generation of sharp operators and line makers appeared to accept the reality that their world would probably always be defined by the Nevada state line. The idea of opening up shop on the Boardwalk in Atlantic City seemed like a daffy dream, especially after the passage of the well-intentioned but utterly useless Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act of 1991. PASPA was an attempt to prevent the spread of legalized sports betting in a nation boiling over with the illegal variety.

Nevada enjoyed a legislative exemption, but New Jersey and other states wanted in on the action. When the U.S. Supreme Court ruled PASPA unconstitutional in 2018, the sports betting gold rush was on.

After digging deep into the NFL’s back story and gaining an appreciation for the league’s history with the sporting crowd of the upper and underworld, Moldea gained his own insight decades before the Supreme Court struck down PASPA.

On a September 1989 segment of ABC’s Nightline, Moldea predicted the NFL would change its view of sports gambling as a corrupting force as soon as it found a way to grab a piece of it.

“I think what’s happening in the NFL is that the NFL owners want to control the gambling themselves,” he told host Jeff Greenfield. “I think they want to have it right in the stadium just as you would at a horse racing track where you can go to a parimutuel window and make a bet on your favorite team or any other team that’s going on or any other game that’s going simultaneously.”

Predictably, NFL security director Warren Welsh scolded, “We don’t need more betting, and particularly on the National Football League,” and concluded that Moldea was “100 percent wrong.” Even Michael Roxborough, among the brightest of a new generation of Las Vegas sports handicappers, called the prediction “too bizarre” and “totally outrageous.”

In a line that should reverberate throughout the multibillion-dollar world of legal sports betting on this Super Bowl Sunday, Dan Moldea responded, “Remember where you heard it first.”

Correction on 2/13/22 at 10:51 a.m. : The original version of this column said 21 states are operating legalized sports books. There are 30.

John L. Smith is an author and longtime columnist. He was born in Henderson and his family’s Nevada roots go back to 1881. His stories have appeared in Time, Readers Digest, The Daily Beast, Reuters, Ruralite and Desert Companion, among others. He also offers weekly commentary on Nevada Public Radio station KNPR.