In this episode, Gary Jenkins interviews Kansas City-based screenwriter and author John Sanders, who brings compelling insights into the life of Owney Madden—a notorious figure in organized crime. As a former Kansas City police detective, I’ve always been fascinated by mob history, and John’s unique perspective, intertwined with personal family stories, provides a captivating look into Madden’s life.

We trace Madden’s journey from his early days with the Gophers gang in New York City to his days as a respected citizen in Hot Springs, Arkansas. John shares gripping tales of Madden’s resilience, including surviving multiple gunshots, which underscore the brutal realities of the gangster lifestyle. Madden’s transformation from street thug to savvy businessman during Prohibition paints a picture of a man whose rise to power was fueled by sharp business instincts and connections with major players like Frank Costello.

Our conversation explores Madden’s partnerships with colorful characters, including Big Frenchy DeMange, Lucky Luciano, and Meyer Lansky, as he navigated the cutthroat world of organized crime. From his ownership of the famed Cotton Club to his brewery, Madden’s ventures reveal the strategic moves that solidified his influence in 1920s New York.

We also discuss Madden’s eventual downfall and the power struggles that led to dramatic events, such as Mad Dog Coll’s kidnapping of Big Frenchy. This episode ultimately sealed Coll’s fate. These stories shed light on the treacherous nature of mob alliances, where loyalty is fleeting and betrayals are often fatal.

Finally, John delves into Madden’s later years in Hot Springs, where he became a respected figure in the community. His transition from notorious gangster to local businessman highlights redemption themes and human behavior’s complexities. Alongside John’s family anecdotes, we discuss Hot Springs as a place of historical intrigue—a resort town with a darker past as a haven for mobsters.

Tune in to this fascinating conversation on Owney Madden’s life and legacy as we unravel the cultural and historical threads that make his story unforgettable.

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Transcript

[0:00] Well, hey, welcome all you wiretappers out there. It’s good to be back here

[0:03] in the studio of Gangland Wire. You know, this is Gary Jenkins, your host and producer of Gangland Wire podcast. I am a former retired, not former, retired Kansas City police detective and sergeant. I was in the intelligence unit for 13 years, 14 maybe altogether.

[0:21] And, you know, after I left, I got into making documentary films and i made three documentary films you can find on amazon just search for my name and mafia you’ll find all kinds of stuff about me and what i’ve done so we won’t belabor that but i let’s get on to the show i have a man that i recently met a kansas city man is john sanders he’s a kansas city based screenwriter and author welcome john thanks carrie i appreciate it all right well john got hold of me and he just wanted to meet and talk about the mob because he had this big interest in it so we met the coffee shop here close to me and had a had a nice long conversation and and he was telling me in particular he’s been working on something about only madden and i hadn’t done anything on only madden or if i did it was a long time ago and the early beginnings of the irish mob in new york and i thought what an idea for a show so john graciously agreed

[1:16] to come on the show and and share his uh knowledge uh the story of Oni Madden. So, uh, John, uh, tell us a little bit about yourself before we get started talking about Oni.

[1:27] Okay. Well, I was, uh, the son of a guy who was born and raised in Hot Springs, Arkansas, and anybody who knows anything about Oni Madden knows that he became the main man in Hot Springs, Arkansas. And I would, was grown up with stories about how he would, uh, see Oni sitting in the front of the Southern Club where he would dispense wisdom and give out cash and help and take care of people. He was a very generous guy all throughout and through most of his life.

[1:59] I recently started working on a screenplay about Oni’s life, thinking about my dad’s stories. And I found him to be just a fascinating, fascinating character and one that I could really get connected to because you could see through the course of his life how he started out as a thug and a killer and learned and became much more sophisticated than what he did, highly respected in the mob world. And I just, I enjoyed that aspect of his growth where a lot of gangsters don’t get that opportunity to do anything.

[2:43] Oney was an English-born gangster, came to the United States with his mother after being born in Leeds. His parents were Irish, so that got him some cred in Hell’s Kitchen when they landed in Hell’s Kitchen. And by the age of 14, he was running with the Gophers, which is one of the main gangs in New York.

[3:08] They called themselves the Goofers for some reason, but we’ll call them the Gophers for now. They, of course, had their share of opponents in the streets, and one of those was the Hudson Dusters. They were their main opponent. They would have run-ins with them and battles. And at one point, Oney, who by this time had been running the Gophers, had followed his estranged wife to a Hudson Duster dance hall. He just wanted to keep an eye on her. So he’s sitting up in the balcony watching, and he turns around, and all of a sudden there’s 11 Hudson dusters standing behind him, and they all pull out guns, and they all shoot him. He ended up with 11 bullets in him. They thought, you know, everyone thought he was dead, but he wasn’t. He was, they asked who did it, and he said, I did it to myself. You know, we’ll take care of it.

[4:00] Amazingly, they got him to the hospital. They were going to stop at the morgue, but he pulled through, who pulled, I believe it was, six bullets out of him, and they had to leave five behind, and those things would bug him the rest of his life. He had all sorts of problems with that. But he survived, and in a matter of a couple of weeks, six of the dusters who had shot him were dead. He was back running the streets. But while he was down, one of his guys, a guy named Patsy Doyle, who was kind of a psychopathic guy who was in the Gophers, wanted to take over. He was telling everybody that Oney was done for. He wanted to take us to the spot.

[4:39] Well, Oney wasn’t much for that kind of disloyalty, so Fatsy was found beat up pretty good with a pipe, a lead pipe that was wrapped in newspaper, and that was Oney’s tool of choice when it comes to beating people up. He survived, but he started doing stupid things like snitching on Oney and telling the cops what he was up to, and so that he had to be taken out. And unfortunately, people that lured Patsy to his demise in a cafe pinned it on Oni. They apparently were coerced by the prosecutors. The guys that actually did the shooting went to prison for he was convicted on manslaughter and sent up the Sing Sing for 10 to 20 years. I remember on that setup at that cafe, did a woman, somebody that Oni knew a woman, then lure him to that cafe? Interestingly enough, all of Oney’s trouble seemed to hang around the women. I mean, the guys that he shot were hitting on his girlfriends.

[5:47] And Freda Hopper, who was on again, off again, one of Oney’s girlfriends, Nancy Boyle was absolutely infatuated. And that was the only reason he came, because he wanted to see Freda. And unfortunately, Freda got forced into saying that he was involved and he ended up in prison. It was in prison where he really, he really blossomed, I guess you could say.

[6:17] He decided that, you know, even though he claimed that he had nothing to do with that Patsy Doyle murder, he decided, well, you know, I’ve done enough things. So this is probably justice, even though I didn’t do this one. And so he decided to be the best he could be in prison. He became friends with Warden Laws, who would, I mean, he was a celebrity in prison. He was able to calm down gangs that were having problems in prison. He was very much appreciated by Warden Laws. And when new inmates would come in, he’d call Oli over to see the guys getting off the bus. He said, what do you think? What do you think about that guy? And Arnie would give him the straight scoop. He’s a smart guy, but, you know, he’s this mess and that. He spent seven and a half years in prison. And during that time, he was having a lot of problems with his stomach. For some reason, just glommed on to the prison surgeon, a guy named Dr. Steele, to the point where after he got out of prison, whenever he had any problems with his stomach, he wouldn’t trust regular doctors. He’d go up to Sing Sing and have that doctor work on him. And he was just held in high regard and got out after seven and a half years or so. So he comes out.

[7:36] Was that a reduction? Seemed like he would have got more than seven years for murder. Well, he was on parole. And it was supposed to be a 10 to 20, but he got out seven and a half years on the behavior. Because the lawyer, the warden really appreciated him. Yeah. Okay. All right. I was curious.

[7:54] So, yeah, he should have gotten out. He should have had at least 10 years. He gets out in 1923 and everything’s prohibition has just kicked in and the dusters are, the gophers are gone. And so he needs to figure out a way to make some money, but try to do it in a smart way and not with a gun.

[8:15] After that stint in prison, he would never carry a gun. Shortly after he gets out, he picks up with Frank Costello, who is a major rum runner and just getting started in bringing in shipments from whiskey from Canada or Scotland, rum from Jamaica or Caribbean. They became very, very close friends for the rest of their lives. And during that time, he also met up with a guy who became his closest business associate. And that guy was named Big Frenchie Demange. And they were an odd couple because at this point.

[8:59] Oney was a very classy British guy with a beautiful accent and very precise, always dressed to the nines. And here’s Frenchie, who was this thug, who was loyal and did whatever, you know, Oney wanted him to do. And interestingly enough, had Ben, he didn’t care. It was, he trusted this guy. And he got them all dressed up and made them look presentable. And he became partners in all of his home running, his brewery that he had in Manhattan, all his nightclubs, including the Cotton Club.

[9:40] And so he was very much a part of Oloni’s life. And fun story about the big Frenchie. He was a bit of a Claude. When the Atlantic City Crime Conference came together, Oloni was going to be honored at the end of it. And they wanted big Frenchie to do, and they were going to give him a beautiful gold watch. And that was, let’s explain that Atlantic city crime conference. That’s when the, uh, I can’t remember the boss down in, in, in Atlantic city, the whole and boardwalk, the document, Nucky Johnson, Nucky Johnson. He had lucky Luciano and Costello and even Al Capone and all these beer barons or mobsters who were in bootlegging to come and line up, get it organized throughout the United States so they would do business rather than fight each other. Is that right?

[10:35] Absolutely. That was with the early stages for the crime commission. Right, okay. And an interesting story about that is, you know, Pone came thinking he was in cat’s pajamas, and this was not too long after the St. Valentine’s Massacre, and they all angry with him for for making so much noise and they told him you have to go to jail just to take some heat off you know on a lesser crime he wasn’t happy about it but he did it but remind me and that is it that when he went to jail like in pennsylvania for like a year some kind of a phony baloney gun charge or something it was just yeah weapons charge he He was carrying a gun. And, you know, I think he only spent a couple of months in prison or jail. Okay. All right. Go ahead. I’m sorry. I just tried to get in my mind. No problem.

[11:28] But back to the big Frenchie, he was a good-hearted guy. And, you know, he was as tight as you could be with Ony. And so when they wanted to, at the end of the conference, make a presentation to Ony, thanking him for his great organization, what a great guy he was. And so they had big friends. So he calls them up. He’s not used to give them presentations. So he says, okay, you got to watch. He said, yeah, give it to me. And he hands him his watch. I’m sure it was a very nice one. And Big Frenchie drops it on the ground and stomps off. He said, what did you do that for? He said, well, you got a new one. Here, take this one. Now, that’s a story that came from Barney Raditzky, the old New York detective who told that same story at the Keefabrick hearings back in the 50s.

[12:25] Yeah he was he was a very interesting guy things were going great in the 20s for only he i mean my goodness just months after getting out of prison he and uh frenchie and rothstein go in together to buy the cotton club which well they created the cotton club it was a different club uh prior to that and uh they ended up having quite a few clubs and speak pieces again this is pro vision the cotton club was his flagship that was the the one that he really loved and you could tell when he loved a certain something a certain building or something because you know we should put a pigeon coupe on top because he was a he just loved messing with pigeons he learned that from his dad yeah so the 20s were going he was making money hand over fist He and Costello had a fleet of ships bringing in those.

[13:19] He had his own brewery in Manhattan, the Phoenix Brewery, which had been making mere beer. He bought it, started making Madden’s Fiend, but number one, which was at the time, the premier beer that you could get during the edition. Before that, it was just this pillared water that you could get from Dutch Schultz. So he became very famous for Adams, number one, because of his close ties to Tammany Hall, Jimmy Hines, the police, and all the money he paid out. His story was protected by the police to the point where even if the feds showed up trying to break in, the local cops would stop him and turn him back and say, you’re not getting in here. You’re getting a business in. He had a lot of power, had a lot of influence in New York, and he was rolling along just fine until Mad Dogfold decided to target him. Now, Mad Dog, he was a wild Irish thug who had originally been a gopher and then went to work for Dutch Schultz as a hitman and guarding liquor shipments and things like that.

[14:38] And Cole decided, he got a little too big for his bridges and decided he wanted to go 50-50 partners with Schultz. And Schultz wasn’t having it. And so he decided to split off with some of Schultz’s guys and started killing some of Schultz’s guys that didn’t go with him. Shot up the front of the Helmar Social trying to get Jerry Rayo, Schultz’s gambling guy. He didn’t get Rayo, but he killed a little kid who was standing in front selling lemonade.

[15:07] And in fact, Rayo would throw pennies out on the front of his social club so that the kids would come and collect them and nobody would think about shooting it up. Well mad dog would and that’s how he got his name he gets out you know they show up he pulls out his tommy gun and tears the place up and kills a little kid he was he was uh definitely a scourge in new york he you know everyone wanted him gone and then he started doing something he wanted to make a little more money for kidnapping the purple gang in detroit were doing some of that making some money. So he thought he’d give it a try. And he decided that the guys with the money at that time during the Depression were the crooks. So he decided, hey, Oney’s probably a softer target than Dutch. So he went after and actually kidnapped Big Frenchy. Called Oney up and said, I got Big Frenchy and it’s going to cost you 50 grand to see him again. Tony tried to negotiate, but he said not. I’m coming over. He actually walked into his office at the Cotton Court.

[16:18] Oney had the money, and this was a very unwise move. Big Frenchie got released. Mad Dog decided that was a pretty easy score, so he calls Oney up and says, okay, I’m going to make you a deal. You give me $100,000, and I won’t kidnap him. Oney just hung up on him, and he was kicked off. Calls a meeting of the guys.

[16:40] Luciano was there, Meyer Lansky, Dutch Schultz, because he was the target of Cole as well. And they basically said, OK, Cole’s got to go. They just couldn’t find him. It took a while to find him. He was in hiding. And in the meantime, Oney decides to take a vacation. And Dutch had been telling him about this great place down in Arkansas called Hot Springs, where gangsters can, you know, do whatever they want. Everyone, you know, nobody’s shooting up anybody. It’s got gambling that nobody cares about. They got a racetrack. They got hot springs where you can soak during the day and then gamble and listen to major entertainment at night. And so he decides to go down there and Dutch tells him, make sure you meet the cute girl at the gift shop across from the Arlington Hotel. Tell he goes in there and that’s where he meets agnes demby who is to be his the love of his life she was in a had a little gift shop and uh struggling mightily during the depression he walks in and spends a thousand dollars on gifts and invites her out to dinner and she says no but changes her mind shortly thereafter and they spent the next two weeks together fell very much in love When he went back to New York, he gave her a ticket, a train ticket to come up and visit when things looked like they were, you know, calm.

[18:07] So he gets up there. Nobody’s seen or heard of Mad Dog. So he thought, okay, he brings up Agnes. Well, unfortunately, Mad Dog hears that Agnes is in town and that Oni’s got a new girlfriend. Says something to basically threaten his girlfriend. That just made Oni’s blood boil. They decided, he and Dutch decided, okay, let’s put an end in this. So this is according to his biographer, Graham Nowen, in the book, Arkansas Godfather, describes how the whole hit happened. He was hiding out in a hotel, and he had a bodyguard that they were able to get to. And they paid the bodyguard 50 grand to set him up. The bodyguard comes and says, oh, he wants to talk to you, wants to settle this thing. So he set up a phone conversation in a drugstore that Cole was comfortable in. Bodyguard leads him over there, and he goes into the phone booth waiting for the call. The call comes just as a sedan pulls up, and one of Schultz’s hitmen walk in.

[19:22] The bodyguard walks out. he tells everybody to be quiet while he’s on the phone with us he tells me, Mad Dog gets his final reward and, you know, right through the glass somebody in the phone booth. All that glass was torn out, but he didn’t chip any of the wood around him. I mean, this guy was a great guy to really handle his Tommy gun. Especially with a Tommy gun, because those things, I don’t know if you’ve ever shot an automatic, but if you hold it down for any length of time, they just start rising on. You have to really know what you’re doing. and you have to practice with it to hold it steady. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Well, Judge Schultz’s guys have plenty of practice. Apparently so.

[20:08] So that was the demise of Mad Dog. After all this, everyone, of course, was looking at Oni. The parole board was looking at him. And this Judge Seabird, who was trying to crack down all the corruption in New York, wanted to send him back on parole violation. He was still on parole at this point in 31. He sicked his investigators on owning, and they were interrogating him and said, so where are you working? So I work at this laundry. As it turned out, he was a part owner of the laundry. He knew the owner that ran the laundry, but he hadn’t gotten his story straight, unfortunately. The judge sends the investigators over. Minutes happen, only walks out. And asked him, you know this guy? Oh, yeah, oh, he’s a great guy. Does he work there? No. No, he didn’t work there. Well, that was enough. Lying to the parole board was enough to send him back to Sing Sing. They had the, you know, he had a good attorney and he had Cole. And he was supposed to go back that day. But he was, you know, just a bizarre legal maneuver. He was able to get out on bail for parole violation, which is just not done. There’s no bail.

[21:33] And oddly enough, while he’s out waiting for this final decision, he gets a call from Charles Lindbergh. And Lindbergh, this was right after his baby had been kidnapped. And he comes to Oni Madden asking for help to find out if it was one of these, like, the Purple Gang. They thought Fleischer might have been the one to nab the kid. And he did what he could and met with him several times. But he wasn’t able to help him out other than no one who was. So Oni ends up going to prison again, sing-sing. But he hated all the media attention, all that stuff. He didn’t want his picture in any paper, whatever. So rather than turn himself in at the courthouse, he gets himself driven up to Sphinx and walks up to the front door. Nobody’s expecting him. And the guard on the other side of this iron braid says, who the hell are you? He didn’t know who he was. He said, I’m Oni Madden. I think the warden is holding a cell for me.

[22:47] He said, yeah, get the hell out of here. And it just so happened that the warden’s secretary was walking by and Oni saw him and called out to him. And so they finally let him in. And he was there for a good year, spent time, you know, staying in touch with Agnes. And uh by the end of his year uh term he uh got out and he along with some of the other guys in new york including meyer lansky basically orchestrated his.

[23:25] Retirement i guess you can say he left new york and promising never to come back that was the rule you can go you can get out of here but you can never come back, he snuck in a table a couple times but that was the deal down to Hot Springs where Lansky had been able to set up, the uh his basic control of the of the local gamblers that ran casinos and he bought into the southern club and the belvedere built the bay burners the big nightclub that ended up getting blown up one night when there were some problems with the political group but only just was the was a very beloved figure in hot spring he you know at this point he was just a calm quiet gentleman, who spoke beautiful English and treated everyone with respect. People would tell stories about coming up to him and saying, gosh, this happened. My kid’s sick or we need money for the pool in the black area of town. And he’d pony up the money. He had so much money, he didn’t know what to do with it. But he still kept it coming in. He was running the race wire, the local race wire in Hot Springs.

[24:50] But he ended up dying in 65 of emphysema, which was right about the time that the whole illegal gambling in Hot Springs,

[25:02] the governor just said, okay, I’m not going to take any more of your bribes. We’re going to have to close you guys down. So that was roughly the time that things got changing, but they still cherished their mob roots back in the Hot Springs. You know when i got back there in uh well i guess it was 2004 with my dad uh to sit to you know see his hometown again went to see the arlington where they have the capone suites and uh yeah uh he would tell me stories about his parents you know sewing for the gangsters and uh well it was an end of an era and um.

[25:48] It was a very interesting time and i think only was just a really really beloved character i mean when he when he died that this funeral it was a pretty nasty storm there about 250 people outside, a bunch of limousines pull up and a bunch of guys who have flown in from uh chicago and new york and l.a and uh vegas they all came to to pay their respects to somebody that they held them in very likely you know that’s one thing i find interesting about the the mafia or the organized crime in this country is you have these interconnections nationwide and if somebody is beloved or somebody has made somebody a lot of people a lot of money and not really hurt a lot of people been a gentleman throughout his whole you know criminal life if you will they’d like they’ll show up at funerals i mean that was the greatest place for us to go to a mob funeral and write down tags and gets photos because these guys all show up it’s amazing.

[26:54] Yeah you’re talking about you know hot springs is not that far from kansas city and a little side story oh by the way guys i have a hot springs mob tour i did with ron rossin who is a new orleans expert met me up there and he’s kind of he’s an expert on the different locations in hot springs And I have that, uh, uh, tour up on my YouTube page. So if you want to go see some of these spots that, that John’s been talking about, the vapors, the, the Belvedere, uh, um, oh, what was the other one? Southern club and only Madden’s house is still there. Just was sold recently. I noticed. And, and so we, we walked all up around it and, and there are a lot of other spots down there in hot spring. So it’s, uh, it’s a really interesting, interesting place.

[27:42] And they’ve kept so much of it intact, all the old bathhouses, which were actually not privately owned. They were owned by the federal government. And that was in a very small national park right there. And they built them right inside. You know, that’s a good point. I never really thought about that, this den of wickedness, if you will. And then the federal government had owned that mountain and the hot springs right there. And still, it’s a national park. And another thing about hot springs is most of the major league baseball teams had spring training down there. So they’ve got some, a bunch of signs around town about who had been in town and where they had stayed and a place where Babe Ruth used to, it would hit home runs out of this little park into a alligator farm, which is still going. There’s an alligator farm down there, guys, which is still going. I will never forget that alligator farm. I went there when I was four years old. Okay. Went again and took my daughter, you know, when we went back to, you know, 20 years ago. Yeah. Uh, it’s still there. It’s just amazing. And they had that little merman.

[28:52] Yes. They still have the merman. I was just there last year. I know it’s crazy. And like you, when I, the only trip we ever took, when I was a little kid, we drove down through the South and then came back home and we went to that alligator farm and I was about six years old and it’s scared to live in the Jesus out of me. All those alligators piled on top of alligators and those pins and it’s exactly the same as it was then it’s crazy oh yeah and that’s been going on since before uh only got there you know in the early 30s yeah that’s that was a thing a little side story about the uh spring training there was a field real close and they could hit a ball out of the park and go into the alligator farm uh, major one of the, not major league baseball, but one of the team team’s owners started fighting the players for hitting a ball on the alligator farm because they lost the ball and they wanted to be reimbursed for the ball.

[29:50] So it’s, uh, it’s a pretty historic place for a variety of reasons and really off most people’s radar. It’s really, really interesting. It is. And I, uh, I plan on I’m going down there again real soon. Just a little more time down there. Plus they still have, they still have horse races and they have a casino. You can, you can go back down and gamble. You know, when I was, uh, when I was about 18 years old, about the time they closed down in 19, yeah, 1965, I had this older guy I hung around with and he was a huge gambler, huge dice player with, you know, other guys in this small town. I was, I I’d lose $10 and I’d be like freaking out. But he would go for, you know, hundreds of dollars back in 65. And he kept telling me, he said, Gary, we got to go down to hot springs. They got a real casino down there.

[30:40] We never did make it. I wish I had it now. But the papers lasted clear up till 65. And I think governor, was it Winthrop Rockefeller closed all the gaming down, just cracked down on it. Yep. Finally, he locked it all down. You know, now interesting as you were talking about, you know, the gambling and all only was a, was a really interesting guy in that he rarely drank during, you know, during prohibition. He didn’t, he didn’t do any of that and he didn’t gamble. So even though he ran, you know, alcohol and gambling operations, he stayed away from that. He just wasn’t going to get sucked into that. Agnes helped to settle him down as women had a tendency to do. Yeah, because I believe she was her father, the mayor or something. She was kind of connected to society in Huntsbury. Yeah, he was the postmaster. Postmaster, yeah. Yeah, he was the postmaster, which in a small town was an elected position and held some sway.

[31:45] And that helped him work into Hot Springs society, getting tight with Mayor McLaughlin and the other power brokers that he had to pay off to keep things moving smoothly. Yeah, he fit in very well there. He was a celebrity in the hot screens. The Arkansas godfather, huh?

[32:11] Yeah. Final note here, obviously, all the gangsters would come and visit him. And when he was in prison, they’d come and visit Agnes because, you know, show respect. And it was in 1936 when Lucky Luciano was running from Dewey, who was trying to put, you know, try to grab him and put him in prison. He goes down to Hot Springs where he knows that, you know, cops are going to let him do what he wants to do. They actually arrest him, but he’s out, you know, on $500 bond. And Dewey just throws a fit and calls the governor and has the state police come down and pick him up and send him back to New York where he ended up going to prison. Particularly corrupt chief of police all during those years. It was kind of well known. I can’t remember his name now, but.

[33:06] Oh, yeah. I mean, he’s smooth and just keep running. Yeah. And he, he’s the kind of a police, you know, chief that would stroll down the street with Lucky Luciano, just, you know, chatting and talking about whatever.

[33:21] The gamblers were a source of their income, but they wanted to keep them coming. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Well, it was a different time, a different place, wasn’t it? You know, one last note about that. When I was down there, I got to think, well, Bill Clinton, former president Clinton, He was raised in hot springs. So he was raised in this kind of aura of criminality. Well, you might say something about his character. I don’t know. I’m either Democrat Republican here, just about him as a person.

[33:57] Yeah. Well, you know, it’s, uh, it’s interesting, but you know, one thing about hot springs is just, and I probably have a lot in all the major cities, especially during Prohibition, where the gangsters were getting them what they wanted, what they’ve always been able to have, and only, you know, approached it like, you know, this is the perfect crime to do where most people don’t think it’s a crime. You know, the victimless crimes. And so then after Prohibition, it was gambling in Hot Springs. And, again, the victimless crime, and nobody, you know, looked at him differently for doing it. And he stayed away from violence pretty much the rest of his life, except for probably the final incident with Mad Dog Cole.

[34:45] He had it coming. He did society a favor with that one.

[34:50] Everybody was happy. Everybody was happy. Interesting. All right. John Sanders. Well, thanks a lot, John. I really appreciate you coming on the show and, and, you know, keep a good luck with your screenplay. Let me know if we need to get something going with that way. We’ll, we’ll talk again, anything else I can do in the future. If you work on any other mob stories, I can help you out. Why be sure and give me a call. Thanks so much. It’s been fun. Hey guys, don’t forget. I like to ride motorcycles. So watch out for motorcycles when you’re on the street. And if you have a problem with PTSD and you’ve been in the service, go to the VA website.

[35:24] If you have a problem with drugs and alcohol, you know, our friend, uh, Ruggiano, Mr. Ruggiano from, uh, from the Gambino family has a, uh, hotline number on his website. I believe he’s a drug and alcohol counselor. And let’s see, he seems to be doing pretty good with his, uh, YouTube page. So he may not be still doing working the square, square John job. He may just be entertaining with his mafia knowledge now, but anyhow, just that’s a place to go. And, and for gambling, you know, there’s one 800 bets off. We’re just about to get sports gambling here in Missouri and we’ve got it all around us. And, and so, you know, these, these problems, that’s one reason the mob made so much money because there’s addiction related to it. And addicts will spend every spent they got in order to pursue their addiction until they, you know, they go into retreatment or they die or go into recovery and they die. So that’s, that’s just how it is. And, and guys, don’t forget, I’ve got books and movies on my website. Go take a look at my most recent book I took from some of my early podcast shows about Chicago from Al Capone to Harry Aleman to Frank Calabrese Jr.

[36:34] And all in between the Chicago PD intelligence unit got about seven or eight different stories. And it’s called Windy City Mafia, the Chicago Outfit. It’s on Amazon right now or it’s on my website or just get hold of me through the website and our email. Tell me ganglandwire at gmail.com and we’ll work you out of copies.

[36:56] Autographed copies. So thanks a lot, guys. And John Sanders, thank you so much for coming on the show and enlightening us about Oni Madden.

[37:03] Thank you for having me. It’s been a fun place. Okay. All right, John. Thank you. We’re out of here. I appreciate you coming on the show. I’ll let you know when I get this together. It’ll probably be a month. Maybe I don’t know. I’ll make sure you know when it’s going up and send you a link. Sounds great. Okay.