As I sail into my sunset years, maybe I should give a small, arthritic bow to State Rep. Donald Mottley.  He wants to use cyberspace to bring the Ohio numbers racket to shut-ins.  This is what is known as compassionate racketeering.  After all, we folks in our Golden Years have been forced to leave many of our vices behind us.  We don't have the energy for some of them and we don't have the liver for others.

But we can still lay down our pension money in a sucker bet.  And that's what the numbers racket is, no matter who's running it -- the state of Ohio or Shondor Birns.  It pains me to think of all the anguish that Shondor went through, back in those days when he was running a numbers game at least as fair as Ohio's.  Cops kept raiding him and marching him past the flashbulbs toward a courtroom or a jail cell.  His mugshot was a familiar sight on Page One.  He was branded a gangster but, because the press liked him, was often called a rogue.  

Finally, he met his end when his car exploded on W. 25th St. and pulverized, he was sprinkled over the neighborhood like a spring shower.  A rival crook had done him inn and a lot of us felt sorry about it because he was an honest racketeer.

The same cannot be said of the state officials who inherited the numbers racket and tried to make a drawing room con game of it.  Numbers were still a sucker bet dressed up to look like a public service.

Ask the average state lottery player where his money goes and he will still tell you it goes to fund the Ohio school system.  That's the way it was sold, and it made laying your money down on the beverage store counter seem like a public service: greed funding need.

In fact, only 30 percent of the lottery take goes to pay for education.  And now, Rep. Mottley wants to lower that to 25 percent.  So he can fatten the jackpot to lure in more suckers.

Shondor never claimed his numbers game was a public service.  He was always quite up front about what it was all about.  "You make a little and I make a lot," he would say.  This is the principle that made Las Vegas bloom in the desert.  It is a principle of state government, too, but our lawmakers aren't as up-front about it.

A fellow named Roger Ach runs something called the Lottery Channel.  He is all for the idea of allowing people to lay the numbers on their home computers.  He views this as a public service.

"It's not just about going directly into people's homes," he told a reporter. "It's about the fact in any given day, anyone might not have an extra five minutes to stand in line and buy a ticket."  And he added, according to published reports, that reaching shut-ins is a major reason to put the Ohio numbers racket online.

In the old days, when crooks had manners, it might have been considered bad form to con a housebound elderly person into laying down a sucker bet.  Many crooks had old mothers and oozed sticky sentiment about them, as anybody who has ever seen a James Cagney movie can testify.

But the numbers racket boys in Columbus are bureaucrats who lack the sentiment gene.  If a dime can be squeezed, they want to squeeze it.  And, having tasted profit, they want more. And the law is on their side, because they are it.  In the old days, the numbers racket crooks had to sneak around outside the law. 

At the old Cleveland Press, the numbers guy was a fellow named Hot-Tip Duffy.  He came in with boxes under his arm full of irregular underwear.  His cover story was that he was a "haberdasher."  Beneath this guise, he made book in the back room.  Nobody ever bought his underwear.  How wants underwear with the fly on the rear end?

The Gambling Godfathers in Columbus need not resort to such nefarious schemes.  Rep. Mottley merely needs to change an existing law that prohibits lottery games on the Internet.  Federal law prohibits this also, but the feds are taking a second look.  They salivate at the thought of sucker money, too.

The government is greedier than the old-fashioned gangsters ever were.  I never met a big-shot gangster who would rob a school-kid or fleece a shut-in.  Shondor must be turning over in his grave, whishing he had been born crooked enough to have gone legit.