The Maven: Vice's Vexing Day

From the time The Business Maven was a little kid, he has wanted to start an addictive-products mutual fund. My thought was that between drinking, smoking, gambling and all the other sorts of bad behavior that are hard as heck to stop, there was money to be made.

So it was with some surprise that I read about online gaming stocks in the London markets making some big-ticket tumbles. BetOnSports, PartyGaming, 888 Holding and Sportingbet were down between 6% and 20%. The news was an emerging legal morass, or maybe just an emerging public-relations mess masquerading as a legal mess.

David Carruthers, the CEO of BetOnSports, was detained by U.S. authorities while catching a connecting flight from the U.K. to Costa Rica, where the company has operations.

Don't you hate when that happens?

In any case, U.S.-British relations have withstood a lot, but with American politicians harrumphing about online gaming and many of the British gambling outfits' business coming from America, arresting British executives traveling with their wives is like a Boston Tea Party gone backwards. Last week, the House of Representatives voted to make it illegal for banks and credit-card companies to process payments for online gambling; that would put the kibosh on the entire industry -- if the Senate were serious about voting for it and if there weren't 1,432 ways around it.

In any case, as an analyst with a firm grasp of the obvious is quoted as saying in The Telegraph:

"David Carruthers is a prominent advocate of the pro-online gambling industry and the fear that this is an escalation of the anti-lobby will trouble markets."

In a story that is, oddly, somewhat related: There was news across the wires late Sunday night that Robert Brooks, the chairman of Hooters of America, was found dead. An autopsy will be performed today on the 69-year-old chairman of the 425-locations-strong chain of chicken wings and notoriously outfitted waitresses.