1934-1935

Today, 80 years later, the circumstances of actress Thelma Todd’s death remain a mystery, and the case still is one of Hollywood’s infamous unsolveds.

A deep cover-up precluded the truth about the incident from surfacing. On December 16, 1935, the famous, 29-year-old blonde was found dead in her garage, her beaten, slumped body behind the wheel of her brown phaeton. The cause of her death was ruled accidental carbon monoxide poisoning from her car’s engine.

One theory behind the fatal event, however, purported in the book, Hot Toddy, is that the powerful Mafioso, Charles “Lucky” Luciano, had her murdered. He wasn’t just a low-level syndicate soldier. He was a boss, the first official head of the modern Genovese crime family, and made his mark in New York by splitting the city into five such dynasties. Meyer Lansky and Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel were associates.

Luciano and Hot Toddy, as friends nicknamed her in her youth, began a casual relationship that evolved into a sexual dalliance by 1934. That year, the actress and her friend and neighbor, Roland West, opened a restaurant called Thelma Todd’s Café.

Exploitive Ulterior Motive

Luciano wanted to lease the top floor of her eatery to run a gambling club there, where he believed the wealthy Hollywood stars who frequented her café would spend lots of money. At the time, only poker and other player-against-player card games and horse race betting were legal in California. He sensed the strong-willed Todd wouldn’t permit it, so he employed devious tactics to get her to comply.

Luciano sent some of his goons to torment and wear down West, who managed the restaurant. They forced him to change vendors to those controlled by the mob and siphoned money from the business. As for Todd, Luciano got her addicted to speed, hoping it would make her submissive and willing to do whatever he wanted.

Over time, Charley Lucifer, as he was sometimes called, realized Todd was not a pushover, and she learned more and more about his underworld dealings. Their relationship deteriorated, and they saw each other less and less. Eventually, Todd started dating a businessman from San Francisco with whom she was infatuated.

Meanwhile, Luciano’s underworld nemesis in town, Frank Nitti, threatened to horn in on his interests — prostitution, gambling and drugs. Already, Nitti had shut him out of his shakedown of the movie industry after agreeing to include him. Consequently, to maintain an empire in Los Angeles, Luciano believed he needed Todd’s café more than ever.

He approached her with his plan. Despite knowing that refusing Luciano of anything could, and likely would, get her killed, she said no. For that, he saw her as a problem. He tried to persuade her to change her mind by other means, like having menacing men sit in the restaurant all day every day. Around Thanksgiving in 1935, he again pressured her face to face, to no avail.

“Toddy later told friends Luciano had wrangled with her all night about giving him the storage room for gambling,” wrote Andy Edmonds, the author of Hot Toddy. “He was insistent and vowed he would not walk away without the papers. They had argued violently in the car, Thelma refusing to give Luciano what he wanted.”

Luciano informed her that as of January 1, 1936, he’d be operating a gambling club on the third floor of her restaurant despite her protests.

Todd, though, remained resolute in her refusal to allow it. To thwart his plan, she turned the space into a steakhouse and opened it before he could move in.

The Slippery Slope

In early December, she called the Los Angeles district attorney’s office to relay what she knew about Luciano’s underhanded dealings and connections to other mobsters. She didn’t tell the person who’d answered the phone what her business was, only that she wanted an appointment to speak to the D.A. Little did she know that he was under Luciano’s control and that Luciano had an informant in the office.

In mid-December, Luciano insisted she go to dinner with him. She said no, but he forced her to join him. He took her to a secluded home where he grilled her about her knowledge of his “business” and what she’d told the D.A.’s office. She tried denying she knew anything, but Luciano knew better, became enraged and slapped her hard.

Todd spilled it all. Then figuring she was as good as dead, she purposefully provoked his fears of getting arrested for past actions and losing his foothold in the City of Angels. She claimed she’d hidden evidence, including photos, of his underworld operations and that she’d snitched on him to the FBI — both of which were bluffs.

Irate, Luciano made a phone call, in which he supposedly ordered a hit on Todd, drove her to a Christmas tree lot at her request where she picked out a tree then dropped her off at her home around midnight.

In the morning, her maid discovered her dead in the garage. Luciano left Los Angeles later in the day and never returned.

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Illinois Club, circa 1900

1860s to 1960s

“The loose buckle in the Bible Belt” and “Las Vegas before Las Vegas had water” — these were Hot Springs, as described in the press (Hot Springs, 2013).

This Central Arkansas city boasted illegal, yet wide-open, gambling for about a century, from the late 1860s until the late 1960s, making it the only United States locale with such a history. That run was interrupted three times: around the start of the 20th century, immediately preceding the onset of World War I and between roughly 1946 and 1948.

They heyday of Hot Springs gambling was from 1927 to 1947, during which more than 10 major and many small casinos existed. In 1931, for example, this home of 16,000 people welcomed roughly 15 times as many visitors.

Hot Spot For Gambling, Fun

Hot Springs was hugely popular among the notorious, wealthy and famous. “Millions of people visited the spa city to gamble” despite its remoteness, wrote Robert Raines in Hot Springs.

Along with games of chance and horse races, the recreation destination offered opportunities to soak in hot baths (the city’s name came from its abundant geothermal springs); drink, even during Prohibition, particularly the revered, locally distilled moonshine; golf; watch Major League Baseball spring training games; and use brothel services.

The notorious visitors to this city included a who’s who list of mobsters, most of whom were involved in gambling, and other, enterprises elsewhere. Among them were Joe Adonis, Jimmy “Blue Eyes” Alo, Albert Anastasia, Al “Scarface” Capone (who had his armored 1928 Cadillac shipped there by rail from Chicago to use while vacationing), his brother Ralph Capone, Mickey Cohen, Frank Costello, Sam “Momo” Giancana, Meyer Lansky, Charles “Lucky” Luciano, Owney “The Killer” Madden (who retired in Hot Springs), Bugs Moran, Frank Nitti and Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, along with New York and Chicago policy kings Ellsworth “Bumpy” Johnson, Ted Roe, and brothers Edward, George and McKissack Jones. For these men, Hot Springs was a sanctuary of sorts, a place to get away from the stressors and dangers of organized crime, be left alone by rivals and law enforcement and enjoy a true vacation.

The gangsters who flocked to Hot Springs to hide and, sometimes, plan their next crime, many of whom were on the FBI’s Most Wanted list at some point, included Bonnie and Clyde (Bonnie Elizabeth Parker and Clyde Chestnut Barrow), Harvey Bailey, the Barker Gang members, John Dillinger, Charles “Pretty Boy” Floyd, Alvin Karpis, Frank “Jelly” Nash (who was actually arrested by federal agents in the White Front Club there) and George “Baby Face” Nelson.

The influx of mostly law-abiding visitors included Hollywood stars, celebrity athletes, business magnates and politicians. Some of them were: Elizabeth Taylor, Marilyn Monroe, Rudolph Valentino, Jack Dempsey, Rocky Marciano, Babe Ruth, Andrew Carnegie, F.W. Woolworth, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Ronald Reagan and John F. Kennedy. Big-name games of chance players, like Nick “The Greek” Dandalos, Amarillo Slim, Murph Harold, Lester “Benny” Binion and Titanic Thompson, also frequented Hot Springs. 

The Gambling Milieu

Primarily locals controlled the gambling, although a few ex-Arkansas mobsters owned interests in some of the enterprises over the years. William “W.S.” or “Bill” Jacobs from Memphis, Tennessee, who owned six clubs there, is recognized as the first gaming impresario of Hot Springs. After Jacobs died, gaming insiders asked New York mobster Frank Costello to take over, but he declined.  Instead, Jack McJunkins succeeded him, and later, H. Dane Harris assumed the role.

Once Owney “The Killer” Madden permanently moved to Hot Springs in 1935, he kept an eye on gambling and ran his own bookmaking/wire service there until his death in 1965. When Sam “Momo” Giancana inquired about buying a piece of the gambling action in the 1960s, he was turned down.

Over the decades, the major places to gamble and the years they opened (when known), included the:

Arkansas Club, Indiana Club, Illinois Club, Kentucky Club, Bridge Club, Arlington Hotel (1874), Southern Club (1893), Ohio Club (1903), Oaklawn Park Race Track (1905), Belvedere Club (1929) and Vapors (1960).

By 1964, only the Southern Club, Vapors and the Arlington Hotel remained as the large gambling spots, along with the race track.

Oaklawn Park Race Track

Despite gambling being illegal, the city charged such operations a tax, the amount depending on their size. When the city needed money, the gambling heads were expected to pay more, which they willingly did to keep running their establishments freely.

Gambling Gets Wiped Out … Mostly

The end of gambling in Hot Springs began with the election of Winthrop Rockefeller (R.), a grandson of John D. Rockefeller, Sr., as the Arkansas governor in 1967. While campaigning, he indicated he’d support a pro-gambling amendment should legislators pass one.

That they did when Rockefeller got into office, but he vetoed the bill. Later that year, he had all gambling eradicated in the city except for horse and dog racing.

For the next 40 years, the Oaklawn Park Race Track was the only legal gambling spot in Hot Springs. That changed in 2005, however, with passage of the state’s Local Option Horse Racing and Greyhound Racing Electronic Games of Skill Act, which allows race tracks to offer some electronic, casino-style games. (This has earned them the moniker “racinos.”) Excluding these racino offerings, gambling remains illegal in Arkansas.

Photo of Illinois Club, restored by Steve Sloan

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