Saboteurs and spare change

The election of Winthrop Rockefeller as governor in Arkansas in 1966 spelled the end of the illegal gambling business in Hot Springs. For a decades the men who ran the city’s gambling clubs, worth hundreds of millions of dollars a year, had enjoyed a hands-off approach that a string of governors had taken towards the city and their affairs (usually for a hefty fee). Rockefeller was a scion of one of the wealthiest families in America, brother to the governor of New York, and wasn’t as open to being bought off as the raised-in-the-sticks Orval Faubus. There are still rumors in Hot Springs that Rockefeller was even recruited to move to Arkansas and challenge the Democrats (in a state where only 11% of voters were registered Republicans) by the Teamsters, who had invested a fortune in casinos in Las Vegas, in order to put a stop to Hot Springs’s growing gambling business. The billionaire New Yorker campaigned around the state wearing a cowboy hat and custom made high-heeled cowboy boots. But Rockefeller’s election was assured when the embattled, embarrassed, and corrupt Orval Faubus chose not to run for a seventh term and the even-more racist (if you can believe it) Jim Johnson won the Democratic nomination instead. Black voters and liberal white Democrats crossed party lines across the state to put Rockefeller over the top, making him the first Republican to win in Arkansas since Reconstruction.
Rockefeller appointed a former FBI agent named Lynn Davis to head the State Police, and he tasked him with cleaning up what remained of the illegal gambling business in Hot Springs. Davis spent the better part of a year playing cat and mouse with the city’s gambling leaders. He’d head to town to raid a club only to find the gaming tables and slot machines had been moved about before he arrived. Time and time again the clubs would be tipped off, probably by other law enforcement, and they’d clean house in a hurry. Stories abound in Hot Springs of word spreading through clubs that a raid was coming, and gamblers and revelers would pick up their chairs and tables and anything not bolted to the floor and head out the back door and up the side of West Mountain. It was no way to run a gaming house, to be sure. But it was all they could do given the new governor’s intransigence. Still, they couldn’t go on like that forever. They had to do something.

On August 3rd, 1967, Governor Rockefeller and a number of his staff boarded a Beechcraft King-Air twin turbo-prop plane at the Little Rock airport and departed for Forrest City. As the plane descended towards Forrest City, the landing gear failed to deploy. The pilots couldn’t figure out what was wrong, so they circled the airport to use up fuel, anticipating an emergency crash landing. As the crew and passengers discussed their dire situation, someone figured out that the landing gear could be accessed through the floor of the plane underneath the carpeting. They ripped up the carpet and found the access point, but it was screwed shut. Nobody on board had a screwdriver. After an initial flurry of excitement, the passengers fell silent and somber. Then Governor Rockefeller had a stroke of inspiration. He took a dime out of his pocket and unscrewed the screws, allowing the crew to get to the landing gear and lower it by crank. The plane landed safely. But an inspection on the ground revealed that a bar of some kind had been wedged into the landing gear to prevent it from lowering on its own. It was an obvious act of sabotage.
Back in Hot Springs Davis stepped up his efforts. Throughout September and October he raided every club in town, and even the machine shops where slot machines were repaired. He broke down doors and threw craps tables down staircases. He loaded trucks with slot machines and beat them with sledgehammers, doused them with gasoline and burned them to a crisp. He arrested over a dozen people. When all was said and done, all of the people he arrested were eventually let go. A judge then asked Davis to reveal who had tipped him off to where to find the gambling equipment. Davis refused to reveal his source. The judge charged Davis with contempt and sent him to jail.

In November Rockefeller was headed to the airport to take another flight, this time on a Falcon jet. Before takeoff, during a routine inspection, it was discovered that the plane’s landing gear had been tampered with and would have once again failed as the plane tried to land.
While Lynn Davis sat in jail, another prisoner in neighboring Texas was being held on charges of robbing a string of post offices. 34 year old Zakar Garoogian was a drifter, a con artist, a counterfeiter, a thief, and an ex-con who had escaped jail once before after assaulting a guard. He had been arrested in San Angelo, Texas trying to rob a soda pop bottling plant. The charges Garoogian was facing were severe, and they weren’t his first, so he was looking at a long sentence if he was convicted. So Garoogian offered the police a deal - if they went easy on him he’d give them information he had about a plot to kill Winthrop Rockefeller in Arkansas.
According to Garoogian, gambling bosses in Hot Springs approached him while he was visiting town on some other job and offered to pay him to sabotage the governor’s plane. Garoogian was the perfect guy for the job. He wasn’t connected to anyone, he wasn’t from Arkansas, he didn’t even have a permanent address. He was a ghost. Whether or not Garoogian took them up on the offer is unknown. After giving him a series of polygraphs (which he passed) and then taking him to Arkansas to be questioned by law enforcement familiar with the cases of sabotage and the FBI, it was determined that he was likely telling the truth. To avoid drawing any copycats, however, the governor and the police publicly denied that they considered Gargooian credible. Garogooian stood trial and was sentenced to only five years in prison. Three years later, in 1970, as Rockefeller was vying for a third term, he admitted to a reporter the truth about the assassination plot. If he was trying to gin up sympathy, it didn’t work. He was defeated by Dale Bumpers and Democrats would hold the governor’s office for the next 26 years. Rockefeller died three years later peacefully in his bed in Palm Springs. While he didn’t usher in a Republican wave in Arkansas politics (that wouldn’t come until much later), he did make a lasting impact on Hot Springs. Widespread illegal casino gambling would never return.
Legal casino gambling, however, was legalized by the voters in 2018 and the dice are already rolling in Hot Springs at a casino at Oaklawn Park. That casino will soon be joined by a $100 million hotel and resort, and this week was joined by the state’s first-ever legal sportsbook, which opened at Oaklawn on Monday. And nobody needed to crash any airplanes to make it happen. At least, none that we know about.

If you’re interested, I rang in the opening of Oaklawn’s new sportsbook by writing about the state’s history with bookmaking for the Arkansas Times. You can read that in the print issue or on the web here: https://arktimes.com/history/2019/06/24/a-wired-hot-springs
I also recently wrote a very long feature on sports gambling for The Ringer titled “Requiem for a Sports Bettor,” in which I went to Atlantic City with $150,000 cash in a backpack and did some high stakes gambling of my own. You can read that here: https://www.theringer.com/2019/6/5/18644504/sports-betting-bettors-sharps-kicked-out-spanky-william-hill-new-jersey You can listen to an interview I did with Chad Millman over at The Action Network about the story here: https://t.co/QlCjJRinUh
Some good news on the book front - The Vapors is now completely finished and will come out Spring 2020. There’s no official date just yet, so stay tuned for that. But the hardest part is over and in less than a year we will have an actual book! That feels weird to say after all this time. I’m excited, but also terrified.
In the meantime I’ll have more time to send more Letters from Hot Springs to you. I’ll do my best to get back to one a month. But you never know what other new and exciting projects that I can’t really talk about might come along and consume all my time and creative energy. Just rest assured that if you’re not hearing from me, it’s because I’m working on something very cool that you’ll get to read or watch or listen to at some point in the near future.
Until next time,
David