A wired Hot Springs

[LiberalArkie]

There was a wire running to the south which left the Ritter Hotel. The first tie-in was a Western Union pole, and then it proceeded down the alley on the side of the building riding the top of the Rumor Motel or hotel, and then there was a drop in there to the Blue Ribbon Club. We traced the Blue Ribbon Club wire from the inside to the outside tying into this wire. It went on down to the Citizens Club, which is approximately a half block, and then it crossed over the top of the buildings, crossing on the east side of Central Avenue, on the Spencer Building, which is, I believe, about four or five stories high. The wires went over the top of it. ‘We could trace it from the edge of the building over to the Pensioners Club, which is about a block, maybe, to the south…It crossed by hanging onto an old tin building, then onto Arkansas Power & Light Co. poles, then across from the depot, the Missouri Pacific depot tracks, I believe on three Western Union poles, then over to a Bell Telephone pole, then to the buildings, tracing up to Tim’s Place…It was twisted in a haphazard manner all the way through.

This testimony from IRS agent Michael Connaughton in 1961 to a U.S. Senate committee investigating gambling and organized crime went on like this for many more minutes, describing how this wire was twisted around nails and wrapped around tree branches. Senators asked him about the type of wire that was used, how far it hung over the streets, and what kind of current ran through it. U.S. senators were fixated on the wire, which ran for hundreds of yards all over downtown Hot Springs in the 1950s and early 1960s, because they believed it was carrying information about the results of horse races and delivering that information to gambling shops. And while these shops were paying taxes to the IRS as well as the city of Hot Springs, they were possibly in violation of federal anti-gambling laws. And if they weren’t, then Congress was considering passing new laws to make it so they were.


Snip

After Winthrop Rockefeller was elected governor in 1966, he set out to shut down illegal gambling in Arkansas, something that had stymied nearly all of his predecessors. He hired a former FBI agent named Lynn Davis to run the State Police and to take charge of the operation. Davis succeeded in shutting down the gambling industry in Hot Springs by confiscating equipment, burning it and burying what was left 20 feet underground. In Little Rock, he raided the Westwood and arrested Barney Levine, but Levine’s charge was reduced by Circuit Judge William Kirby to a misdemeanor and Levine was released, a testament to the gambling bosses’ political capital in Arkansas, even in the late 1960s. Davis made an angry speech criticizing Kirby and the justice system for going soft on the gamblers and allowing the business to continue to flourish in violation of the law. Shortly after making the speech, Davis was hauled into Kirby’s courtroom himself and asked to name the informant that tipped him off about when to raid the gambling clubs. Davis refused, and Kirby had the officer thrown in jail for contempt. In the end, State Police Commander Davis spent more time in jail than any of the gambling bosses of Arkansas he arrested. It confounded even the governor himself, who remarked, “It seems rather odd to me that the only people who see the inside of our jails are the reporters who report the facts and the officers who try to enforce the laws regarding gambling.”

In December 1967, a 34-year-old named Zakar Garoogian was arrested in Texas for burglary, and he offered the authorities information he thought might get him out of a jam. He told them that gambling leaders in Arkansas had hired him to sabotage Governor Rockefeller’s private airplane. Garoogian passed a number of polygraph tests and the FBI got involved. Perhaps the story carried some resonance with law enforcement because in August of that year the governor’s plane nearly crashed in Memphis after some kind of bar was wedged into the landing gear to prevent it from functioning. Three months later during a routine inspection, another of his planes was found to have been tampered with. Rockefeller later called both of these instances “sabotage.”


Snip

https://arktimes.com/history/2019/06/24/a-wired-hot-springs