The Vapors

David Hill grew up hearing his grandmother's stories about dealing cards at the Vapors, a glamorous casino and supper club in Hot Springs, Arkansas. In The Vapors, he turns those family stories into a full history of a town that, for decades, ran wide-open illegal gambling, prostitution, and bootlegging with the tacit approval of local officials and the protection of the mob.

The book follows two intertwined threads: the Hill family's working-class life inside the casino economy, and the criminal empire built around Hot Springs by gangsters, most notably New York mob boss Owney "The Killer" Madden, who retired there and helped modernize its rackets. Hill also traces the career of Dane Harris, the local casino operator whose ambitions for a legitimate resort collided with the town's criminal reputation.

Drawing on interviews, archival research, and his family's own history, Hill charts Hot Springs' transformation from a health-tourism spa town into a nationally known vice destination, and its eventual decline as state politics and federal pressure closed in during the 1960s. The result is a social history of American vice as much as a story of one town and one family caught up in it.