I read a book about Hot Springs, Arkansas. It was a crazy gangster town.
Gangsters and illegal gambling[edit]
Aerial view of Hot Springs after 1925 along Central Avenue. The base of Hot Springs Mountain is in top right, behind Bathhouse Row. Part of West Mountain is on the left. The southwest edge of North Mountain is behind the
Arlington Hotel at top.
Illegal gambling became firmly established in Hot Springs during the decades following the Civil War, with two factions, the Flynns and the Dorans, fighting one another throughout the 1880s for control of the town. Frank Flynn, leader of the Flynn Faction, had effectively begun paying local law enforcement officers employed by both the Hot Springs Police Department and the Garland County Sheriff's Office to collect unpaid debts, as well as to intimidate gambling rivals. This contributed to the March 16, 1899,
Hot Springs Gunfight. Of the seven Hot Springs police officers who have been killed while in service of the department, three died during that gunfight, killed by deputies of the Garland County Sheriff's Office. One part-time deputy sheriff was killed also, by the Hot Springs officers.[
citation needed]
Along with Bathhouse Row, one of downtown Hot Springs' most noted landmarks is the
Arlington Hotel, a favored retreat for
Al Capone.
[33]
Hot Springs eventually became a national gambling mecca, led by
Owney Madden and his Hotel Arkansas casino. The period 1927–1947 was its wagering pinnacle, with no fewer than ten major casinos and numerous smaller houses running wide open, the largest such operation in the United States at the time[
citation needed]. Hotels advertised the availability of
prostitutes, and
off-track booking was available for virtually any horse race in North America.[
citation needed]
Local law enforcement was controlled by a
political machine run by long-serving mayor Leo P. McLaughlin. The McLaughlin organization purchased hundreds of
poll tax receipts, many in the names of deceased or fictitious persons, which would sometimes be voted in different precincts. A former sheriff, who attempted to have the state's anti-gambling laws enforced and to secure honest elections, was murdered in 1937. No one was ever charged with his killing. Machine domination of city and county government was abruptly ended in 1946 with the election of a "Government Improvement" slate of returning World War II veterans led by Marine Lt. Col.
Sid McMath, who was elected
prosecuting attorney. A 1947 grand jury indicted several owners and promoters, as well as McLaughlin, for public servant
bribery. Although the former mayor and most of the others were acquitted, the machine's power was broken and gambling came to a halt, as McMath led a statewide "GI Revolt" into the governor's office in 1948. Illegal casino gambling resumed, however, with the election of
Orval Faubus as governor in 1954. Buoyed into 12 years in office by his popular defiance of federal court
desegregation orders, Faubus turned a blind eye to gambling in Hot Springs.
[34][35][36] Variety explained the status of the casinos in 1959 as follows: "How do these places operate when gambling and mixed drinks are supposedly against the law? Simple. Every week the management appears in local court, pays its fine according to the amount of biz [business] done and goes back to open up."
[37]
Gambling was finally closed down permanently in 1967 by two
Republican officeholders, Governor
Winthrop Rockefeller and Circuit Judge Henry M. Britt. Rockefeller sent in a company of state troopers to shutter the casinos and burn their gaming equipment. Until other forms of gambling became legal in Arkansas four decades later,
[38] Oaklawn Park, a
thoroughbred horse racing track south of downtown, was the only legal gambling establishment in Hot Springs and one of only two in the state of Arkansas; the other was the
Southland Greyhound Park dog track in
West Memphis. Both Oaklawn and Southland remain in operation.
[39]
