The Internet gambling bosses can whine to the European Union from their tax havens in the Caribbean, Costa Rica and the Mediterranean. Barney Frank in Washington can carp away about personal freedom in league with the latest flavor of the month Libertarian. — The wheels of justice grind inexorably on.

The next Icarian about to be pulverized beneath them? How about that high-flying Calvin Ayre, founder of Bodog Entertainment Group, whose success in taking billions in online wagers — a great deal of them from the United States where such activity is against the law — briefly catapulted Ayre into the ranks of the world’s richest humans and onto a 2006 cover of Forbes under the headline “Catch Me If You Can”.

Little did we know.

What we now know, courtesy of a media considerably less enamored these days of buccaneer capitalism, is that 2006 also was the year the Criminal Investigation Division of the U.S. Internal Revenue Service started in earnest on Bodog’s trail. They caught up with it this summer, seizing $24 million from the accounts of various entities linked to the company that were tucked away in major financial institutions of the likes of Bank of America, Wachovia and Nevada State Bank.

As for bad boy Ayre, one wonders if he now rues his love affair with the limelight. Just a couple of years ago he was throwing million-dollar parties on the Las Vegas Strip. Then after Forbes splashed his face all over the news stands of America his 10,000-square-foot ranch in Costa Rica was raided by police. No charges were filed. But Ayre moved the business post-haste to Antigua. Was he hearing footsteps? Earlier this year he was drawing all the publicity he could to his supposed retirement, claiming to have transferred Bodog to an entity run by the Indian chief of that model of regulatory transparency, Kahnawake.

The Feds aren't buying any of it, and as of this writing the media Ayre so eagerly courted has been unable to find him. No surprise, perhaps, as he has to know that in Web gambling’s Guantanamo there is always room for one more. BetonSports’ David Carruthers and Gary Kaplan can attest to that. It’s not looking good for those two either now that the first successful prosecutions have been obtained against some of their confederates. These include the guy whose company used to send those big, colorful BetonSports vans to NFL games, and one of his sons, who is facing a year in prison for helping an undercover police officer place a bet in one of the vans, and a nephew, who pled guilty to a misdemeanor tax charge. From faraway London, BetonSports itself has pled guilty to racketeering and has agreed to furnish witnesses and evidence in the cases against Carruthers and Kaplan.

So much for the sector’s long-held belief that U.S. prosecution was a paper tiger. As for similar claims advanced by opponents of the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act — to wit, that operators and their customers simply will circumvent the banks via impenetrable networks of overseas payments processors — well, there’s the $10 million penalty everyone forgot about that PayPal forked over to federal prosecutors back in 2003, and the $230 million everyone remembers that NETeller had to cough up last year, not to mention the $100 million co-founders John Lefebvre and Stephen Lawrence personally agreed to forfeit — and around the same time those IRS agents started showing up at Bodog’s banks, a case that got almost no publicity was successfully concluded against a Canadian payments processor, which turned over $9 million to federal prosecutors in New York after admitting “criminal wrongdoing” in handling bets from U.S. gamblers.

Now someone just needs to get the word to Congressman Frank, whose own state of Massachusetts is considering a ban on Internet gambling. Frank continues to hold UIGEA hostage in the House of Representatives 23 months after it was enacted into law and has done everything to try to kill it short of attacking it with a baseball bat. A certified progressive when it comes to social issues, a philosophy which apparently takes in the conviction that Internet gambling is solely a matter for consenting adults, he claims as chairman of the powerful Financial Services Committee to oppose UIGEA on behalf of his other constituency — the bankers. He doesn't get it. We've waited too long already to shake free of the financial industry's overweening influence in matters vital to the common good. But then he’s far from alone among Democrats in this area. Witness their rush in Congress in recent weeks to join their opponents across the aisle in bailing out the pirates whose rapacity has plunged the home mortgage market into chaos and the nation into a recession. Not since its support of the Iraq invasion has the party moved with such bipartisan alacrity. And wasn’t it Bill Clinton back in the ’90s who consorted with a Republican Congress to repeal the New Deal-era Glass-Steagall Act, which opened the door for these latest shenanigans of the financiers? Isn’t it a passel of neo-Friedmanites who hold sway in Barack Obama’s inner circle?

But I digress.

As it turns out, Frank’s ability to do no more than stall UIGEA has sown enough second-guessing on Capitol Hill, among Republicans more than Democrats, that support is mounting for a bill that actually has a shot. This would be Shelley Berkeley’s, calling for a national study. This is the bill the big Las Vegas casino companies support through their federal lobbying arm, the American Gaming Association. The measure has 73 co-sponsors, the most of any piece of Web gambling legislation. Even so, Berkeley recently asked the House Judiciary Committee to put it on hold to ensure she had enough votes to move it, which means she probably didn’t have them. Not that it mattered. The bill was one of a dozen to be shelved because the August recess was approaching and the Judiciary Committee was due to debate a contempt-of-Congress resolution involving another poster boy for those who make careers of the belief that they are above the law — one Mr. Rove.