I swear, you can’t make this stuff up.
A couple of weeks ago, the government was moving in on Wall Street in connection with its overwrought jihad on internet gambling interests. But now, Radley Balko notes that authorities are racheting down on an even more insidious gambling problem — great-grandmothers who run betting pools on NFL games at the local Elks Lodge!:

A volunteer waitress and a widowed great-grandmother who tends bar at the Lake Elsinore Elks Lodge are due in court later this month after pleading not guilty to misdemeanor charges of operating an illegal gambling operation.
Margaret Hamblin, 73, and 39-year-old Cari Gardner, who donates her time as a waitress at the lodge, face up to one year in jail and a $5,000 fine for allegedly running a $50 football pool at the facility, the Press-Enterprise reported.
The charges stem from a Nov. 20 investigation by state Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control agents into an anonymous tip that lodge members bet on NFL games.
Behind the bar, the armed agents found an envelope with $5 from each of the 10 members taking part in the pool. The person who came closest to guessing the combined score of the Jacksonville Jaguars and the New York Giants was to pocket the contents, according to the Press-Enterprise.
“It was just regular ‘Monday Night Football,’ ” said Hamblin, who has tended bar for 40 years, six of them at the lodge. “We were sitting at the bar, and the gang wanted to do something,” she said, according to the newspaper.
Timothy Clark, who heads the department’s Riverside district, which issued the citations, said football pools “are a violation of the law, and we will take whatever we feel is appropriate action to ensure compliance by our licensees,” the newspaper reported.
Clark said he has recommended a one-year probationary period during which the lodge could host no gambling activities, or it would face a 10-day license suspension, according to the Press-Enterprise.
That means the end of events such as a “50-50” raffle in which proceeds typically go to scholarship funds and local charities for disabled children and veterans, Hamblin told the newspaper.
Hamblin and Gardner, who are represented on a pro bono basis, must return to court Feb. 28 for a preliminary hearing, at which a judge will determine if there are grounds to order them to stand trial.
In the meantime, beverage control officials are reviewing the Elks Lodge license, according to the newspaper.

Feel safer?

Jamie Olis, the former Dynegy mid-level executive whose prosecution and sentencing represents one of the most brutal examples of the federal government’s criminalization of business since the bursting of the stock market bubble earlier this decade, has finally received a small measure of relief in the latest stage of his ordeal.

Yesterday, the Bureau of Prisons finally transferred Olis from the downtown Houston Federal Detention Center to the Bastrop, Texas federal prison unit. The Bastrop unit is the original prison that Olis was assigned to when he began serving his sentence almost three years ago and is thankfully the most convenient location for Olis’ family members to visit him.

Olis spent over a year in the Detention Center in Houston — a facility that is meant to house prisoners for only short periods — because of prosecution foot-dragging in regard to his re-sentencing and then a four-month delay in assigning him to a permanent facility after he was re-sentenced. Here’s hoping that Bastrop will be Olis’ final prison destination before his release, probably in late 2009 or early 2010.