Sports betting pioneer Salerno headed to Gambling Hall of Fame

When Vic Salerno left his Southern California dental practice to become a Las Vegas bookmaker in 1978, he quickly discovered that the sports betting industry was in need of a deep cleaning.

Cheating was rampant in the era of handwritten tickets, which were filled out on triplicate forms and ripe for past posting.

“Counterfeit ticketing was crazy. Writers could change the amount of a bet from $20 to $200 very simply by adding a zero,” said Salerno, who took over Leroy’s stand-alone race and sportsbook in downtown Las Vegas from his father-in-law, Leroy Merillat.

“My employees could cheat me, and the race and sportsbook owners could cheat the state. It was unbelievable, being new to the business. There just weren’t any controls. I had to find a way to stop the cheating.”

He knew his cashier was stealing from him because the balding employee was paying for hair plugs Salerno knew he couldn’t afford on his meager earnings.

Computerization

Salerno found a better way of combating theft when he teamed up with computer programmer Javed Buttar to create Computerized Bookmaking Systems in 1984. Computerization was the first of several key technological innovations pioneered by Salerno that revolutionized the industry.

CBS paved the way for Salerno to build the first major network of sportsbooks, the first self-service sports betting kiosks, the first sports betting mobile app and more.

“It wasn’t like I invented technology,” said the mild-mannered Salerno, 80. “I just applied sports betting to it.”

Salerno will be inducted Friday into the Sports Gambling Hall of Fame as part of the second 10-member class at Circa sportsbook.

“When I think of any Hall of Fame, Vic is one of the few that I think embodies what greatness means,” said former Stardust and MGM Resorts sportsbook director Robert Walker, who ran USBookmaking for Salerno. “He ran sportsbooks. He developed the first computerized sportsbooks platform. That was a game changer for all of us.”

In addition to replacing handwritten tickets with computer-issued slips and accounting for every dollar, computerized betting enabled sportsbooks to dramatically improve their risk management.

“Bookmakers had a difficult time managing liability. We would chart our liability on a piece of paper with a pencil,” Salerno said. “One thing that the CBS system could do was what-ifs. What if the Rams win by 3? What if they win by 4? This could tell what your risk was, and you could adjust to mitigate your risk.

“It was eye-opening. You could book better when you knew where you were, especially when we expanded to satellite books.”

One of Salerno’s first clients was the Stardust, and his computer system quickly became the gold standard in the industry.

“Once we proved it could work at the Stardust, it just ballooned from there,” he said. “Everybody wanted it, and the (Nevada) Gaming Commission saw that it could stop cheating and they passed a regulation that said, by a certain date, everybody had to be computerized.”

Satellite books

Nevada law was changed in 1989 to allow outside operators for casino sportsbooks, and Leroy’s soon operated a vast network of books that eventually included 130 locations in the state.

“All you needed was a phone line between two books, and the computerized system would let you see remote locations,” fellow Hall of Famer Michael “Roxy” Roxborough said. “That led, in turn, to the Leroy’s empire. There were all these small places that couldn’t afford overhead for a sportsbook, and Leroy’s would go in there.”

Roxborough, who ran Las Vegas Sports Consultants as America’s preeminent oddsmaker in the 1980s and 1990s, became business partners with Salerno in the late 1970s, and the two have been friends for 45 years.

“He was instrumental in me computerizing our odds company and distributing the odds via computers,” he said.

Salerno and Roxborough also created the precursor to the Don Best odds screen in the 1990s.

Self-service betting

Leroy’s network led to the development of self-service sports betting kiosks in the early 2000s.

“When we started all these satellites, smaller properties wanted into the business. But it was very difficult for them to have live ticket writers and spend money on terminals,” Salerno said. “That’s when we went to self-service kiosks.”

Leroy’s parent company, American Wagering, was the first American bookmaker listed on the stock exchange, under the symbol “BETM.” William Hill acquired American Wagering for $18 million in 2011.

When the federal ban on sports betting was lifted in 2018, USBookmaking, another brainchild of Salerno, was the first company to operate sportsbooks in tribal casinos. Salerno sold USBookmaking to Elys Game Technology, an Italian company, in 2021 for $12 million in cash and stock.

Not every venture paid off for Salerno, who lost millions on MegaSports, a pari-mutuel sports betting company, and USFantasy, a pari-mutuel fantasy sports company that was a precursor to USBookmaking.

Salerno’s proudest accomplishment is developing the first sports betting mobile app for Leroy’s, which was launched on BlackBerry and Android smartphones in 2011 before becoming the first wagering app in the App Store.

He and his wife, Terina, a lawyer, traveled to Apple’s corporate headquarters in Cupertino, California, in 2010 to pitch the Leroy’s app.

“We were the only ones in suits. Everybody else had T-shirts and jeans on,” Salerno said. “They didn’t understand our business. Their biggest fear was we would end up losing a big bet and they would be on the hook for it.

“They didn’t know how they were going to monetize a wagering application. But they approved it because it meant so many eyeballs and users in the App Store.”

Six months after Leroy’s app was launched, Salerno said there were more than 80 betting apps in the App Store.

“It was a tremendous effort. When we put it out, this was just when the iPhone came out,” he said. “The hardest part, after it was approved, was not convincing people to use the app. It was teaching people how to use the phone. We literally had to give phones away to people.”

Mobile sports wagering now accounts for the vast majority of bets placed nationwide, including 65.8 percent of wagers placed last year in Nevada.

‘Worst call’

When Roxborough first met Salerno, fresh from moving from Marina del Rey, he predicted that the former dentist wouldn’t last a year in Las Vegas.

“That’s the worst call I ever made,” he said. “In retrospect, the reason I didn’t think he would last is why he transformed the industry. He’d already run a successful dental business, and it gave him the view from the outside.

“He could see things that people on the inside couldn’t see.”

Contact reporter Todd Dewey at tdewey@reviewjournal.com. Follow @tdewey33 on X.