Book review: The sport of kings and the kings of crime: horse racing, politics, and organized crime in New York, 1865-1913

Mike Huggins, University of Cumbria, reviews the book 'The Sport of Kings and the Kings of Crime: Horse Racing, Politics, and Organized Crime in New York, 1865–1913', by Steven A. Riess (Syracuse University Press, 2011, ISBN 081560985X).

At the end of the nineteenth century, it was horseracing and not baseball that was probably America's most well-attended sporting pastime, and this book, which focuses on racing's emergence as an urban sport in New York and New Jersey, with some comparative material from Chicago, provides the first research-driven, in-depth sustained academic examination of American horseracing. Riess examines what he sees as three major topics:

first, how and why New York became the national centre of horseracing after the Civil War; second how and why it maintained that status until the state government briefly halted horseracing in the early 1910s; and third, how and why legal and illegal gambling flourished in that era (p. xiii).

His thesis is that racing there was inextricable from organised crime.