Michael Smerconish: Lottery, si. Joe Vito, no?

MY MOTHER baked a ham for Easter and played hostess to my wife and me and our three sons.

Dinner was old-school. She served all the standards I fondly remember from my youth, including sweet potatoes, corn, pickled eggs and even Pepperidge Farm rolls, which I hadn't eaten in years. For dessert, she baked two shoo-

fly pies.

She also tucked a Pennsylvania Lottery scratch-off instant-win game card under each of the boys' plates. As I watched them scratch away at Emerald 6s (no winners, sorry to say). I thought about Joseph Mastronardo Jr.

The gentleman bookie, the man they call Joe Vito, might be headed back to jail after law enforcement reportedly dug up $1 million in cash in his yard. But it hardly seems worth the expenditure of police resources.

Mom bought the lottery tickets legally, while Vito's business is probably on the other side of the line. But I'm hard-pressed to think that a guy who cuts your credit instead of your Achilles tendon is a blemish on society.

Truth is, there isn't much separating scratch-off instant-win games from slot machines, table games, horse racing and Mastronardo's chosen career path of bookmaking.

PENNSYLVANIANS can already blow a paycheck or two waiting for the right combination of cherries or numbers to appear. Soon they'll be able to up the ante in the poker room. Or at the blackjack table. Or the craps table. Or the roulette board.

And of course, all it takes is some cash and a short drive from Center City to bet on the horses circling the track at Philadelphia Park.

It's all gambling at its core. And if that core is so dangerous, the commonwealth shouldn't allow it in any form. Nor should it spend money to promote such wagering - no matter how convincing the state's second-most-famous groundhog may be.

Instead, the commonwealth leans on the lottery to fund programs for older Pennsylvanians.

In 2004, it legalized slot machines to ease property taxes. In January, it added table games to help close the budget gap.

In that context, it seems ridiculous that running a bookmaking operation is still illegal.

And how ironic that Vito's latest brush with the law came just days before District Attorney Seth Williams, state Chief Justice Ron Castille and Justice Seamus McCaffery announced a partnership geared toward treating pot possessors more leniently.

McCaffery told me that one of main objectives of the enforcement modification was to help ease the burden that so many relatively minor cases created for law enforcement, prosecutors and the courts.

"We're trying to bring some common sense into a system that's just splitting at the seams. We want to make sure that the real criminals that we're going after, all of our folks are going to have time to really focus on them.

"Get the real criminals off the street. Get the real time in jail. And, again, these other cases are just clogging up the system," McCaffery said.

That sounds right, and the same logic should apply to operations like Vito's. Especially when the federal and state governments could clearly use the revenue such operations would generate. Think about it. Vito could have been paying years' worth of taxes on the reported tens of millions of dollars he's made over the last few decades.

Please, somebody, run for office on a platform supportive of leniency for the three p's: pot, prostitution and ponies. They're all relatively victimless crimes, and government has no business chasing those who would violate their statutes.

Consider the time and resources spent pursuing Vito. He has been the subject of various law-enforcement investigations dating back 35 years. He spent time in jail in the 1980s. He and his brother John pleaded guilty to misdemeanor gambling charges in 2006. Both were on probation when law enforcement dug up Vito's lawn last week.

The latest investigation alone featured at least 46 search-and-seizure warrants and at least five wiretaps on pertinent phones.

All this for a guy who is known to have no connection to the mob and no reliance on violence when a bettor wouldn't pay.

There's little doubt Mastronardo made millions of dollars fronting an illegal organization. But "The Sopranos" this was not.

The only thing investigators found while digging through the Mastronardos' yard last week was some PVC pipe loaded with cash. No bodies. No cold cases.

Just some standing capital. Why stop him from paying out next time a bettor is lucky enough to win?

We should be looking to the city's most iconic law-and-order figure for a road map to handling cases like this.

Mastronar-

do is married to Frank Rizzo's daughter, Joanna.

But the cop, police commissioner and mayor had reasons for ignoring guys like his son-in-law that predated the wedding by years. As Sal Paolantonio reported in his book "Rizzo: The Last Big Man in Big City America," if the gamblers and bookies weren't hurting anybody, Rizzo determined that they weren't worth the time and resources needed to pursue them.

Sounds like a winner to me.

Listen to Michael Smerconish weekdays 5-9 a.m. on the Big Talker, 1210/AM. Read him Sundays in the Inquirer. Contact him via the Web at www.smerconish.com.