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Before Vegas Became Vegas, Hot Springs Was America’s Sin City. Now the Arkansas Spa Town Embraces Its Colorful and Seedy History
A life-size statue of Al Capone greets downtown visitors, and you can stay in his hotel suite. The town where gangsters once vacationed with movie stars and athletes is still open for a getaway
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A life-size statue of infamous Chicago gangster Al Capone, sitting outside a downtown bar with a cigar in his hand, surprises many first-time visitors to Hot Springs, Arkansas. Even Arkansans have largely forgotten that this attractive spa town was America’s original Sin City, teeming with casinos and brothels, and frequented by big-name gangsters. The mobster Bugsy Siegel may have even used Hot Springs as an inspiration when he was developing the Las Vegas Strip.
The leading authority on the town’s colorful, decadent, sinful history (it was known as “the loose buckle in the Bible Belt”) is a charismatic, white-haired, sharp-dressed man named Robert K. Raines. A former rock singer and computer salesman, he has written a book and made several short documentaries about vice and organized crime in Hot Springs. He’s also the founder and director of the Gangster Museum of America, in the heart of the historic district. I meet him in the lobby bar of the grand old Arlington Resort Hotel & Spa on Central Avenue, where Capone would rent out the entire fourth floor for his entourage and stay for weeks at a time.
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In 1931, Las Vegas had a population of around 5,000 and no resorts, Raines says. “In 1931, Hot Springs had a population of around 20,000 and several high-rise hotels. It had wide-open gambling, which was illegal in Arkansas; wide-open prostitution; and all the bootleg liquor anyone would ever need. ... The gangsters loved coming down here because they could relax, have a good time and not worry about getting arrested, because all the cops were paid off.”
We’re joined by a semiretired attorney named Q. Byrum Hurst Jr. His father, Q. Byrum Hurst Sr., was a Hot Springs lawyer who represented underworld figures like Teamsters President Jimmy Hoffa. He served 22 years as an Arkansas state senator and ran for governor, battling to preserve gambling in his hometown. “My dad came from a good church family and never gambled himself, but he saw that gambling was an essential part of the economy here, and the town would suffer if it was stopped,” Hurst says.
“The mayor, the judge, the city council, the state governor, the legislature, even the churches in Hot Springs were getting a cut,” Raines says.
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Some of the most prominent gangsters who frequented Hot Springs were New York kingpin Charles “Lucky” Luciano, his associate Meyer Lansky, Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel and Alphonse Gabriel “Al” Capone, the infamous head of the Chicago mob. The latter often stayed in the same room here at the Arlington—Room 443, now the Al Capone Suite—and often drank at the lobby bar where we’re sitting. Raines has a photograph of Capone with his two brothers, wearing sombreros and riding donkeys at the Happy Hollow Amusement Park, a short walk from the Arlington.
Capone was seen all around town. He went to the racetrack, played golf and kept a fishing cabin on the Ouachita River. Sometimes he would ship his green, armored 1928 Cadillac on the train to Hot Springs, so he could ride around in style. In 2008, Raines was thrilled to get that car on loan from a collection in Houston and display it in the Arlington lobby for two years, before it was sold at auction.
Did you know? Who was Al Capone?
- Born on January 17, 1899, in Brooklyn, Capone died 48 years later on Palm Island, Florida.
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Capone grew up working in the Five Points gang in Manhattan and moved to Chicago in 1920, the same year Prohibition was enacted.
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From 1925 to 1929, his organization, known as the Chicago Outfit, became the largest organized-crime group in the country, and Capone's bootlegging operation dominated the Midwest, including smuggling routes from Canada.
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Capone’s criminal dominion began to wane in 1931, when he was indicted for tax evasion. He was sentenced to 11 years in prison—then the stiffest sentence for tax fraud in history.
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As Hurst points out, the gangsters who came to Hot Springs were armed, violent, dangerous men, and some of them belonged to criminal organizations that were warring with one another in the big cities. “But no one ever got shot in Hot Springs, and that was the agreement,” he says. “The organized crime figures were welcome to keep coming here so long as they didn’t make any trouble.” Frank Costello, Luciano’s consigliere in the New York crime syndicate, was a regular visitor for 25 years.
In addition to underworld luminaries, Hot Springs attracted entertainers, athletes, movie stars, politicians and captains of industry—and they all stayed at the Arlington, right alongside the gangsters. It was the biggest, most luxurious hotel in town, with close to 500 rooms, a 15-piece orchestra in the ballroom every night and a satellite New York Stock Exchange.
The movie stars included Rudolph Valentino, Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe. Duke Ellington, Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett performed in the clubs. The New York Highlanders (who later became the Yankees) and Red Sox baseball teams came to Hot Springs for spring training, and Babe Ruth loved the town because it catered to three of his biggest enthusiasms: gambling, prostitutes and whiskey. Business tycoons Andrew Carnegie and F.W. Woolworth visited Hot Springs, and so did presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman. “There’s no doubt that J. Edgar Hoover would have briefed any president on the mobsters and illegal activity,” Raines says. “I think the presidents just decided to rest and relax while they were here.” Today, the historic downtown and its approximately 8,500-square-foot Gangster Museum offer a surprising portal to that decadent and intoxicating era.
When Raines first arrived in Hot Springs in 2007, to help a friend establish a business downtown, he knew nothing of its history. He would hear little whispers and rumors and became intrigued. Then he started asking questions about gangsters, illegal gambling and corruption, and people refused to talk about it. “It was a secret they were so used to keeping,” he says. “So I started going through the old newspaper archives, and what I found there just astounded me.”
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In 1807, the first permanent white settlers arrived in what would become Hot Springs and began to build a town for visitors who might want to bathe in the mineral-rich thermal waters emerging from the ground. After the Civil War, Hot Springs transformed from something of a backwater into a swanky resort town with grand hotels, theaters, fine-dining restaurants and an opera house alongside casinos, bordellos and drinking clubs. A madam named Grace Goldstein operated the Hatterie Hotel adjacent to the Arlington; it was favored by professional gamblers and outlaws. Madam Josephine Belmont’s house, meanwhile, catered to baseball players during spring training, while Evelyn Anderson ran the Pigley Rooms and Mama Carrie built her business on the jazz musicians and wealthy African American businessmen who came to Hot Springs.
Prohibition went into effect in 1920, acting like an economic stimulus package. North of town was a rural, mountainous area known as the Possum Kingdom, where moonshiners had long distilled a pure and distinctive corn liquor known as “clear,” because it was colorless and made with mountain spring water. Now there was an exploding demand for their product in Hot Springs and farther afield.
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Capone, who always needed inventory for his bootlegging empire, may well have gone into business with the Possum Kingdom moonshiners, Raines says. Some sources claim Capone may have had a distilling operation of his own at the Belvedere Dairy. Patrick Layton, a local tour guide, says that like many locals, his grandfather made moonshine for Capone and that the local police would guard the shipment and help load it onto the train cars.
The town reached a spectacular level of corruption when Mayor Leo McLaughlin took office in 1927. Everyone thought he was a lawyer, because he had a law office and had practiced law for decades; in fact, he’d attended college for two weeks, and there’s no record of him passing the bar in Arkansas or anywhere else. With the assistance of a crooked judge, “Mayor Leo,” as he was known, ran Hot Springs like a venal, silver-tongued dictator for the next 20 years. He rode around town in a buggy pulled by two bay horses named Scotch and Soda.
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McLaughlin protected the gangsters and built a political machine so powerful that only one candidate ever challenged him. The machine was fueled with “amusement tax” payments from more than 100 illegal businesses and enforced its will by the usual methods: greasing palms, bestowing and withdrawing favors, manipulating the legal system, and intimidation. “If you bucked the machine, there was a fairly high likelihood that your business was going to catch on fire,” Raines says. “Apart from that, the town was very safe, with very little crime. It was totally corrupt, but people didn’t think of it as being corrupt. Everyone was making money, so where’s the problem?”
According to Raines, it was common knowledge that Orval Faubus, the governor of Arkansas from 1955 to 1967, sent a car to Hot Springs with a drop safe in the trunk to collect his monthly payments. The driver would go to lunch in a restaurant and leave the trunk open. Representatives from casinos, gambling clubs and houses of ill repute would drop their packages of money into the safe. After lunch, the driver would close the trunk and drive back to the governor’s office in Little Rock. If he was questioned, he could honestly say, “I never saw a payoff.” Though Faubus denied ever receiving any payments, Faubus’ biographer, Roy Reed, has said, “The money was picked up [in Hot Springs] every Saturday night by a high state official, stowed in a black bag and delivered to Little Rock.” Raines says when Faubus was challenged to do something about the rampant illegal activity in Hot Springs, he would say it was a local problem and should be investigated by local police. Savvy people in Arkansas knew that was never going to happen.
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As Raines collected this history, he gradually built trust with some of the old-timers in Hot Springs. He opened his first small museum, and they started giving him tidbits and then videotaped interviews. Raines would edit his short films to include what they’d revealed and make sure they approved the final product.
Once, in a nursing home, he was interviewing an elderly man in a wheelchair. The man had been a dealer at the Southern Club, a premier gambling venue that Capone frequented to play poker. At one point in the interview, the man became suddenly alarmed. He said to Raines, “Oh, my God, there’s a guy in Hall C. If he knew I was talking to you, he’d roll right down here and kill me now.” No matter that both men were in their 90s, that the political machine was long gone, that the big-time gangsters were dead. The old code—keep your mouth shut or pay with your life—still exerted a powerful hold over them.
Raines, a tireless researcher driven by obsessive curiosity, has combed through thousands of FBI files about Hot Springs. He has interviewed and struck up a friendship with Capone’s great-niece Deirdre Capone, who donated various family photographs to the museum. Raines is on similarly good terms with Lansky’s grandson, who shared what he knew about his grandfather’s time in Hot Springs. In 2013, Raines published a book of popular history called Hot Springs: From Capone to Costello. A few photographs from the book are on display at the museum.
His current project is a biography of the underworld figure who intrigues him most of all. Owen “Owney” Madden was the only gangster who made Hot Springs his permanent home. “People here loved him,” says Raines. “They knew him as this polite, soft-spoken Englishman who gave generously to charitable causes. They found it hard to believe that he had been a notorious gangster.”
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Madden was born in 1891 to Irish parents living in Leeds, England. Around age 11, he moved to Hell’s Kitchen in New York and eventually joined a street gang. At 21, he was the leader of the Gopher Gang and nicknamed “The Killer.” Madden was locked up in Sing Sing prison for ordering a hit on a member of another gang and was paroled after nine years for good behavior.
“Then he got into bootlegging, racketeering, thoroughbred racetracks, managing prize fighters, laundries and nightclubs,” says Raines. “George Raft drove beer trucks for him, and when [Raft] became an actor, he based his gangster characters on Owney Madden. Mae West was one of Madden’s girlfriends, and she said he was ‘sweet, but oh so vicious.’ Everyone was afraid of him because he had a psychotic streak and he was a killer.”
Madden owned the famous Cotton Club in Harlem and muscled his way into part-ownership of a variety of other nightclubs. In 1935, seeking a quieter way of living, he relocated to Hot Springs, which he’d visited a few times. Leaving his rowdy ways behind him, he married the postmaster’s daughter and settled into a comfortable life. “He played golf at the country club, went to the Buckstaff Bathhouse and the Maurice almost every day, spent time with other gangsters at the Southern Club, and made sure everyone behaved themselves,” Raines says. “He was close with the mayor and helped him organize a larger and more discreet system of payoffs.”
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Madden lived the last 30 years of his life in Hot Springs, and one of his closest friends was his attorney—none other than State Senator Q. Byrum Hurst Sr. “They genuinely liked each other,” says Hurst Jr. “My dad gave the eulogy at Owney’s funeral.”
That was in 1965, and two years later, the long and immensely profitable era of illegal gambling came to an end. A new governor—Winthrop Rockefeller, son of philanthropist John D. Rockefeller Jr. and brother of New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller—took office. Though he’d reportedly promised Hurst Sr. and many other legislators that he would sign a bill legalizing gambling, he then broke his word and vetoed the bill. Soon afterward, the state police raided all the gambling clubs and casinos in Hot Springs. They went so far as to smash up, burn and bury the roulette wheels and other gaming equipment, but made no arrests and confiscated no money from the casino counting rooms, which contained millions of dollars. “That was the deal,” says Raines. “‘We’re going to end this thing, but you get to keep your money.’”
As Hurst Sr. had predicted, once illicit gambling disappeared, Hot Springs fell into a steep decline and nearly went bust. All across the downtown, more and more storefronts were boarded up. All but one of the bathhouses went out of business. The city didn’t even turn on all the streetlights at the same time, and the community began to pine for the good old days. Finally, in the early 2000s, a group of young reformers came together and made a concerted effort to save the town. They started by increasing the local sales tax, which enabled building and rebuilding projects. Progress led to more progress, and now Hot Springs is prospering again as a tourism and retirement destination. An estimated 38,000 people live there today, enjoying an affordable cost of living, a relaxing spa-town culture and an architecturally diverse downtown where a row of historic bathhouses is enclosed within Hot Springs National Park. At some of them, you can still treat yourself to an atmospheric soak in the thermal spring waters.
The Oaklawn racetrack, which was a draw in Capone’s day, now has an upscale resort and a legal casino. On Central Avenue, you can admire the old buildings, shop for clothes and souvenirs, and sip a cocktail at the beautifully preserved Ohio Club, which Capone, Siegel, Luciano and Ruth frequented, and where Al Jolson and Mae West performed. You can get your photograph taken with the Capone statue on a park bench outside the club, then stroll down the street to visit the Gangster Museum of America. Featuring eight galleries with guided tours and audiovisual displays, the museum tells the story of how the country’s most notorious criminals were able to congregate peacefully in a small spa town in the Ouachita Mountains of central Arkansas.
Raines, standing in the gift shop by a display of fedoras, poses a cheeky question: “What do you call the economy of a town that was making millions from gambling and prostitution in a state where both of these activities were against the law? You might call it illegal, or blatantly corrupt. We called it tourism.”
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This article is a selection from the September/October 2026 issue of Smithsonian magazine
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