10 American Vacation Towns the Mob Secretly Controlled

In 1957, hundreds of slot machines and gambling tables from Galveston, Texas, were smashed to pieces and thrown into the bay. For decades, America's vacation towns ran a second economy behind the hotel lobbies, one that never appeared in a brochure and lasted only as long as somebody local was willing to look away. This countdown visits ten of those towns, from the quietest to the most brazen. It starts with the Catskill lakes where Murder Incorporated spent its summers. It moves through Hallandale, Miami Beach and the Senate hearings that named their clubs, Nucky Johnson's Atlantic City, and the Saratoga lake houses that gave Meyer Lansky the first jail sentence of his life. Along the way come Frank Sinatra's Cal-Neva Lodge on the California-Nevada line, the Balinese Room at the end of a 600-foot pier, and the river casinos of Newport, Kentucky. Every one of these towns fell when someone from outside decided to look, and the money almost always moved on to the same stretch of desert. Keep one number in mind along the way: room 442, in a grand old hotel in Arkansas. 0:00 The Pattern Behind Ten Towns 1:42 Loch Sheldrake, New York 3:53 Hallandale and Miami Beach 7:45 Atlantic City, New Jersey 10:00 Saratoga Springs, New York 13:18 Cal-Neva Lodge, Lake Tahoe 16:11 Galveston, Texas 19:11 Newport, Kentucky 22:42 Las Vegas, Nevada 24:41 Hot Springs, Arkansas 10 American Vacation Towns the Mob Secretly Controlled Before Cancún and Las Vegas, America had other playgrounds. Hollywood honeymooned in Acapulco. The mob ran Havana's casinos. Families filled the Catskills every summer. Then, one by one, they emptied out. America's Lost Playgrounds tells the rise and fall of the resorts, hotels, casinos and vacation towns where Americans once went to have fun — at home and just across the border. Every episode is an investigation: real dates, real names, archive photos and the story behind the decline. 🏨 Legendary hotels and resorts 🎰 Casinos and mob-era playgrounds 🌴 Hollywood's Mexico and Cuba 🎢 Forgotten beach towns and amusement parks 📅 New episodes every Tuesday and Friday Subscribe if you want to know where America used to go — and why nobody goes there anymore.