Gary welcomes back Michael Benson, an author known for his insightful explorations of organized crime and Hollywood history. Benson has collaborated with Frank DiMatteo on several mob-related books, including The Cigar: Carmine Galante and Mafia Hitman, illustrating the intricate ties between criminal enterprises and key figures’ personal stories. In Hollywood Moguls: The Lives and Times of Hollywood Film Pioneers Nicholas and Joseph Schenck, Michael documents stories of corruption and mob infiltration and reveals that Craig Reeves, Superman, was murdered and did not commit suicide.

As the conversation unfolds, the host and Benson delve into the Skank brothers’ encounters with organized crime. They recount how notorious Chicago Outfit extortionists sought to muscle in on the movie theaters by taking over the projectionists’ union. The brothers cleverly turned this threat into an opportunity, negotiating a deal that ultimately benefited both sides while ensuring their continued financial success. This anecdote exemplifies the intertwining of crime and commerce during the era, showcasing how the Skank brothers operated in a morally gray space to maintain power.

Benson narrates incidents from Hollywood’s scandalous past, explicitly focusing on Fatty Arbuckle, one of the Skank brothers’ most prominent stars, whose career unraveled due to a notorious scandal in the 1920s. Arbuckle’s involvement in a tragic incident highlighted the dark side of celebrity culture and the lengths to which the Skank brothers went to protect their financial interests, including paying for Arbuckle’s trials. Through Arbuckle’s story, the conversation touches on the reputational risks that could derail even the most profitable careers and the measures Hollywood took to manage public relations crises.

Click here to buy Michael’s book: Hollywood Moguls

Subscribe to get new gangster stories every week.

To go to the store or make a donation or rent Ballot Theft: Burglary, Murder, Coverup, click here

To rent Brothers against Brothers, the documentary, click here. 

To rent Gangland Wire, the documentary, click here

To buy my Kindle book, Leaving Vegas: The True Story of How FBI Wiretaps Ended Mob Domination of Las Vegas Casinos.

To subscribe on iTunes click here. Please give me a review and help others find the podcast.

[0:06] the flannel shirt I’m wearing. And I see my guest, Michael Benson, is wearing some more cold weather clothes, too. So anyhow, Michael Benson is our guest today. I’ve had him on before. He has written several mob books with Frank DiMatteo. I just actually just really read with, in detail, really read through this story of Carmine Galante’s cigars. It’s really, really a good book. It was kind of interesting to really sit and go through a book, you know, line by line rather than just, you know, going through it real fast is really good. Well-written. And then we got Mafia Hitman by Frank DiMatteo and Michael Benson. That’s, that’s the story of the guy that really killed Joey Gallo. Not the Irishman. So you got a couple more, I believe. We love Scorsese, but he prefers stories that aren’t quite true. And he tells them really well. Yeah. But it’s not history. Yeah. And Frank had a kind of a front row seat to a lot of these. You’re a co-author.

[1:05] He is the authority. Yes. He is. He truly is. He’s a good guy too. The first book he wrote about his own father and a lot about that. It’s got to be. Well, you know, the deal that he wrote a book called Lion in the Basement. About Joey Gallo and the lion in the basement on President Street. And Gary Goldstein at Kensington Books read it and said, this is a diamond in the rough. And that’s how I got involved with Frank. He came to me and said, can you turn this into a book that people in Kansas City will read? And I think he actually said Kansas City. He said, Mr. and Mrs. Kansas City will read.

[1:39] And I said, sure. And it turned out, Frank, I got along and the rest is history. We’re writing mafia history like it’s never been written before. Yeah, no, I agree. I totally agree. So we’re going to do some more shows on this with you guys. So anyhow, moguls, the life and times of Hollywood film pioneers, Nicholas and Joseph Schnick. Is that how you pronounce that?

[1:59] Wow. That’s the worst pronunciation I’ve ever heard. That’s what I’m famous for. You realize that nobody gets it right, but that was special. Oh, no, it’s skank. Skank, huh? Yes. I don’t know how you get that out of S-C-H-E-N-C-K, but skank. It’s Russian. And their descendants pronounce it shank, which is a little easier on the ear. Yeah. But I think one of the reasons that the Skank brothers weren’t better known is because Americans reacted just that way to the sound of their name. They were referred to as the Skunk Brothers by their enemy. Oh, it’s easier to make fun of somebody. They hid behind other people’s logos. They ran Lowe’s Inc. Marcus Lowe was long passed away. And they ran 20th Century Fox. Fox no longer had anything to do with it. It was the Skank Brothers. Interesting. So how’d you get into this? Well, my friend Craig Singer, who was a film director, Good Night to Die, 645, The Dark Ride, about a haunted amusement park, came to me and said that he had worked with the great nephew of the Skank brothers. And they were wondering why nobody had ever written a biography of them, considering they were the most powerful brothers in show business history. And Craig said, who? Who?

[3:18] And eventually we found out that there were some reasons why they had almost slipped off of having a legacy, despite, uh, Nick being the eighth richest man in America at one point, the only Jewish man in the top 10, uh, his brother, Joe, not far behind. They ran three out of the five major studios in Hollywood, um, and tremendously powerful, but Nick in particular didn’t like publicity, paid a publicist to keep his name out of the newspapers. His family was trained not to talk about him. They don’t talk about grandpa. They don’t talk about daddy. And so they almost lost their legacy, but Craig and I stepped up. We went back in time, searched the archives, found everything else to know about these men. They had fascinating lives. And we don’t have to worry about them being forgotten anymore. Nick and Joe Skank, three times as powerful as the Warner Brothers. And if they had named the company after themselves, they would be just as famous. Interesting. I was wondering why I heard of Louis B. Mayer and David O. Selznick and names like that are like household words, but these guys, I had not heard those names. Nick is Louis B. Mayer’s boss.

[4:31] And sometimes you’ll hear in old movies, you’ll hear it referred to like the studio bosses. We have to check with New York. Yeah. And that means the money people who were in their Gatsby mansions on Long Island, they’re actually calling the shots. Interesting. That is really a deep dive into the early foundations and look at the movie industry. And you touch on the mob in the movie industry. Assorted and crime-ridden, yes. Oh, it was. I mean, there’s so many great crime stories in there. It’s hard to believe. I mean, there’s a lot of good just actual history, but there’s a lot of great crime stories in there, too. You would have to agree with that. Joe and Nick faced a lot of big enemies. I mean, as we’ll talk about, the mafia tried to take a bite out of them. The U.S. Government did not like the fact that this was a major industry being run by a handful of un-Christian men.

[5:24] And in the long run, the thing that got them was television. You know, they stayed really, really powerful until TV invaded the living room. And they were old men by this time. And I think that younger skanks would have seen TV as an opportunity. They saw it as competition and they lost. But before that, they took on the Chicago outfit and in a weird way, created a system where everybody made money, which I think is the forte of really, really rich men. What happened was there were these two low lives in Chicago named George Brown and Willie Bia.

[6:05] And they were extortionists. They ran a protection. And they went up and down Fulton Avenue and they said to everybody with a shop or a restaurant or a bar, they said, you pay us and nothing bad will happen to your place. If you don’t pay, you know, who knows? You can get a firebombing or something. And they decided that they were going to take on movie theaters.

[6:28] And they had some minimal success. They got payments out of Benny Balaban, who’s a Chicago magnate of theaters. So they decided to hit up on the Skank brothers. And, uh, well, actually what happened was they, they, they, first they had, they got the money from, from Balaban and went to a casino and started spending it very fast. And frank nitty watched this and said where a couple little lives like that get all that cash so he calls them in they think they’re gonna get whacked but he says look you’re thinking small you’re small time what you got to do is you got to think big and the do not threaten a fire bombing or or even a brick through the window in order to pull off a really classy extortion scheme You have to make it always appear as if no crime is being committed.

[7:20] So what they did was they took over the projectionist union. All the projectionists who showed the movies at all the theaters had a union. And the mob saw it as politically weak, went in, bullied their way in, and took over. And they come to the Skank brothers and say, you have to pay us or else the projectionists go on strike. Nick and what are you going to, who’s going to show your movies then? Smart guy. Well, Joe and Nick put their heads together. At this point, Joe’s living in Hollywood and Nick’s on Long Island. They talk three times a day on the phone and they come up with a scheme and they say, okay, we’re going to pay you. And we’re going to talk all the other moguls in Hollywood into paying you, but, You have to promise us that union is never, ever going to ask for a raise.

[8:16] So what happened was the Skank brothers made money on the deal in raises they didn’t have to pay to the projectionist union. Mafia made their little cut. And it all came out in 1941 when Joe Skank went down for tax evasion. He never used the word tax in his life without adding BS immediately after. Yeah.

[8:39] That’s still true today. Yeah, it’s typical of the, probably typical of. We probably all said that. Yeah, they probably still do. I have a question here. You’re talking about that we’re out in Hollywood with studio heads, extorting them for projectionists. Now, back then did the studios, and now, like AMC owns a lot of theaters. Other little companies own theaters. A local company here owns several theaters in Kansas City. The studios owned the theaters where all the major pictures were shown throughout the whole United States, correct? Marcus Lowe, during the vaudeville era, built palace theaters across America for his acts that would go from town to town. And when movies started, they turned into movie houses. And when he passed away, Nick Skank took charge of Lowe’s Inc. And he was in charge of MGM, which made the movies, and the Lowe’s theaters, which showed the movies, and took the tickets. He was in charge of the whole, the whole thing. And his brother, Joe was the owner of 20th Century Fox. He had Daryl F. Zanuck running the studio for him, much like Nick had Louis B. Mayer running MGM for him, but they owned everything and they owned stock in each other’s companies. It was a little bit incestuous in that way. So yeah, it was.

[10:00] The money stayed with the skanks the whole way. The expenditures were paying the talent and paying for the operation and upkeep of the theaters, which was relatively cheap considering about 30 million, 40 million people were going to the movies every week. There was no TV. It’s what you did. That’s how you got your news. And the projectionists got screwed. Working guys got screwed. Everybody makes money. I’m not counting the projectionists who got screwed. Yes. Yeah. Well, that’s, you know, I was a projectionist for four years and I don’t know how it was back in the 1930s, but it wasn’t a job I planned on using to raise a family.

[10:38] I was 21 at the time. And basically I wanted to buy a six pack of beer on Friday.

[10:47] These guys they they’re then this you know the changing of hollywood they go from the times when there was a lot of real sexual innuendo conduct on screen and then there’s a big crackdown on that right and when you can’t show that and then you have they had one particular scandal a sex scandal by one of their big stars a guy named fatty arbuckle and i think most everybody my age has heard of Fatty Arbuckle or a little older, heard of Fatty Arbuckle or some big scandal, but I never knew exactly what it was. He worked for Skanks, right? He was Joe’s biggest star during the silent movie era. He was a large man, as his name Fatty would imply, 300 pounds or so. But like a Jackie Gleason or a John Candy, the joke was never the things he couldn’t do because he was fat. It was the things he could do even though he was fat. You know, he was very acrobatic in his physical comedy. And…

[11:44] Was a guy who could party and over the Labor Day weekend in 1921, very early, goes to a party in the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco. There’s a lot of starlets in there. A woman named Virginia Rape, R-A-P-P-E, kind of an unfortunate spelling considering how she ended up dying. She’s a 30-year-old woman. She’s been a bit player in Hollywood. She’s probably best known as the cover girl on the sheet music for beautiful lady or the, some, some song that was a big hit at the time.

[12:21] She’s a nobody. And she is in the hotel room alone with Fatty Arbuckle. Other people are partying outside, but the door’s locked. When Arbuckle emerges after the pounding on the door, he’s obviously very, very drunk. He’s wearing Virginia’s hat at a weird angle. and she is lying in the, in the room with a broken bed, dying. And she goes to the hospital. They find out she has a ruptured bladder.

[12:51] So the immediate assumption is that, uh, that there’s a horrible sexual attack has taken place here. This is inflamed by the Hearst newspapers that when they report, uh, anything about the Fatty Arbuckle case, always would put an uncaptioned photo of a long necked beer bottle, which apparently was what Fatty was supposed to have used to violate the poor woman. It gets complicated from that point because the witnesses, Virginia’s friends, turned out to be extortionists in their own right and had held up rich men in the past for sexual improprieties. So the tendency was to not fully believe them. Joe Skank crosses the country because he’s still living in Bayside Queens in 1921, goes out to California, talks to Fatty Arbuckle. Roscoe says, it was an accident, Joe. Which implies that it was something happened. There was an incident that involved her being injured. Joe pays for all three of Arbuckle’s trials. He is convicted at the first trial, but that’s overturned by the judge because of jury impropriety. Second trial is a hung jury. Third one, he is acquitted, and the jury makes a public statement about the horrible dishonor that’s been done to this poor man because there’s absolutely no evidence connecting him with any crime. A little bit overboard.

[14:13] And by this time, of course, Joe Skank’s money is fully behind Arbuckle. Trouble is, Arbuckle has been acquitted. He now wants to go back to work. And Joe has to tell him that, okay, you’re innocent in the eyes of the law, but you have been rendered forever unfunny by all of this scandal. Nobody’s ever going to laugh at you, the situations we used to put you in with, with, you know, skinny women and dancing around and doing pratfalls, you know, because it’s all going to remind them of that thing that happened. They’re going to go see your movies for the wrong reasons. And our buckles life falls apart at that point. I’ve heard talk that, you know, he was making a comeback near the time of his death, but not really. He was doing roadside nightclub acts with song and dance girls, completely deaf to what people were saying about him behind his back.

[15:07] So yeah. And, uh, and it cost Joe a lot of money and he ended up, uh, taking our Buckles house as payment. And he and his wife lived there for a long time. Uh, but he put a system in place after that involving a guy we’ll talk about named Eddie Mannix, uh, called the fixer system. And from then on, if anything happened in Hollywood, there was going to, uh, reflect badly on the studio system, on any of the stars who all had squeaky clean reputations, Eddie Mannix, who was a skank henchman, would go in and work the crime scene to be confusing. And then the police would show up, which is why, you know, I don’t know if you’ve ever read a book called Hollywood Babylon, but every murder in Hollywood is completely bizarre and makes no sense whatsoever. You know, they make a little more sense than the John Bonet case, but not really. There’s always, well, gee, it had to have been murdered, but no, it couldn’t have been murdered. And like Thelma Todd, even George Reeves, the TV Superman. Yeah. He committed suicide, but he committed suicide right after ticking off Eddie Mannix.

[16:24] Eddie Mannix, he was kind of, he’s like a story in himself, it sounds like. But he is. Well, I don’t know if you’ve seen the movie Hail Caesar by the Coen brothers. Eddie Mannix is the hero of that movie. He starts out as a juvenile delinquent who’s stealing stuff from Palisades Amusement Park, which is owned by the skanks. Nick catches him. Instead of calling the cops, he says, you work for me now. The old saying, it’s better to have them steal for you than from you. Yes. And Eddie turns into the amusement park bouncer. He’s in charge of security. He’s also pretty good with the books. He can do two sets of books in his head. stuff that people that don’t believe in tax BS enjoy. And years later, when Nick becomes the head of Lowe’s Inc., he sends Eddie Mannix to MGM. Eddie Mannix is a rough kind of guy. You know, completely sociopathic. Sends him to MGM to keep an eye on Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalbert, make sure they do whatever Nick says. Plus be a spy, read every telegram that goes in and out. And if anything untoward happens, get in there and fix it. So Eddie Maddox becomes this hugely powerful man in Hollywood. He’s a thug.

[17:42] His first wife dies in a horrible accident. I don’t know if it’s Mulholland Drive, but it’s one of the, she, she goes off the side of the road and down the cliff, like you’ve seen in a thousand movies after being sideswiped by another car. Ah, this allows, this, this allows Eddie to marry, uh, the million dollar legs, uh, girl from the Ziegfeld Follies. Her first name is Tony, T-O-N-I. And she becomes the, uh, the, the, the second wife after years of being the mistress. mistress, and they grow old together. They have an arrangement.

[18:16] Eddie has an affair going with the maid, who is a young, beautiful woman. And Tony has an affair going with George Reeves, who is TV Superman on the Adventures of Superman. George Reeves commits suicide. The common theory is that Eddie was a jealous husband. But that wasn’t the case. It was not the case. They had an arrangement. They used to all go on vacation together. The maid and George was sitting in the back of the plane. Playing Tony and Eddie would sit in the front and then they do whatever they did on their vacation and come back. What happened was George Reeves broke up with Tony Mannix and started in with another woman in the house on Benedict drive that Tony had bought George with Eddie’s money. So she goes to Eddie, he’s cheating on me in your house. Eddie says, I’ll take care of it. And we know he did because one thing, Tony Mannix confesses on her deathbed. She’s afraid of going to hell. Eddie and I did it. We did it.

[19:14] Yeah. And Eddie himself, of course, you know, used to wink when ever anybody suggested such things. He was, he never denied.

[19:26] I’ll tell you what, Michael, you have given me a great story as I meet my different friends center of my age about the death of Superman because everybody at a certain age, you know, will go back and forth about how did Superman commit suicide, you know, and all that. Now I’ve got the real story and she confessed on her deathbed. That’s a great story. Thank you. Yeah. And that comes from Beverly Hills Publicity.

[19:53] Ed Lotzey, who apparently was, you know, Tony, Ed Lotzey was there when Tony made a deathbed confession that she and Eddie did it. He did it. I’ll be darned. And Eddie knew how to mess up a crime scene pretty well. Well, you know, there was a party going on downstairs and the, what the witnesses said was so bizarre that you had to believe that it couldn’t possibly be the truth. Like one woman says according to the story you know she says in a moment you’re going to hear a gun and then seconds later gun went off upstairs and it was george reeves committing suicide and they found him naked with the gun between his legs the bullet went through his temple and ended up in the ceiling so i don’t know maybe lying down um and there are two bullet holes also in the bedroom them that went forever unexplained. They just threw a throw rug over them. They were in the floor.

[20:53] Huh. Interesting. That’s really interesting. Yeah. Um, the other case that, uh, the skanks or Joe in particular was, was involved in was the death of Thelma Todd. I don’t know. She was nicknamed Hot Toddy. She was a comedian, kind of a, a Lucille Ball type from the early thirties. She made movies with the Marx brothers. Um, she with Zazu Pitts and Thelma Todd made a bunch of shorts together or, you know, one being a kind of a tomboy, the other one being a beautiful blonde. And this was the beautiful blonde. And she was also the mistress of the very married Roland West, who was one of Joe Skank’s best friends. And Roland West invented the haunted house movie with the.

[21:41] Bookcase that turns around and leads to a secret passageway and the paintings that have the eyes cut out for real eyeballs. Oh my God. He was the first guy with that. And he got it from Joe’s mansion in Hollywood, Owlwood. And Joe got it from his backyard neighbor, Bugsy Siegel, who put in all of those things in case he was raided by the cops. He could sneak down into a secret passageway. Joe used his secret passageway for starlets rather than for escaping the police. And he, he was a mentor of your early Marilyn Monroe and she was still normal. Oh, really? So she came up in that system under her when she was young. Yeah, and she became a star for 20th Century Fox for Joe. And Joe was her first mentor. But he had, he liked her the best out of all the starlets he had visiting him and moved her into a bungalow in the back, but then he was worried about Confidential Magazine, which had paparazzi, the very first paparazzi for a scandal sheet magazine. So he built a tunnel from his house to the back bungalow so Marilyn could come in to his casting room behind the bookcase without being seen from the outside.

[22:54] The old casting couch. Thelma Todd ends up being dead in her car, died of carbon monoxide. Coroner conveniently didn’t seem to notice that she’d been beat up and that her face was all bloody. Yeah. And Roland West was one of the primary suspects. But crime scene was confused and the coroner said it was suicide. And those studios, they must have dominated the police and the politics and everybody because they had so much money. They were like the drug cartels can do today. That’s right. The police served the studios. Yeah.

[23:33] I mean, corruption in LA, I mean, it really was the old West. They’re making these movies about what it was like in the old West because they knew, I mean, that the sheriff of LA County, you know, was nicknamed two guns. And we’re talking about the, you know, during prohibition. So it’s. Yeah. And even today, everybody wants to be in the movies and they want to have some, some connection to the movies. Right. And it went, and you know, the, the criticisms that Hollywood was, was played with sexual excesses were largely true. And it occurred to me while we’re working on mobiles that Hollywood was a very strange social experiment. I think it’s the first time in human history where you have a colony of really, really good looking people. Everybody. And with, you know, lots of labor, very few jobs. I think it was Joe Skank once said, getting starlets for a mogul’s like, you know, drawing deer to a salt lick. Yeah.

[24:34] Slightly unpleasant analogy, but a good one. Yeah. And I think Marilyn Monroe herself once called Hollywood a, an overcrowded brothel.

[24:47] So, so it was largely true. And that, that was why untoward things kept happening. And William Desmond Taylor was murdered during a Fatty Arbuckle trial. Uh, maybe he was killed by a starlet who was trying to outrage. Maybe he was killed by the starlet’s mother because he had outraged her. Outrage was the word for rape at the time.

[25:10] Interesting. Well, I’ll tell you what, this is a heck of a book and it’s got a lot of great stories. It’s kind of punctured the balloon, the veneer, if you will, of Hollywood. And, you know, even today, now you just recently had Kevin Spacey and different stars. Harvey Weinstein’s case. Harvey Weinstein, he’s still in jail. Can you believe that? That dude was like the king of Hollywood and he’s been in jail for, I don’t know, seven or eight years now. I mean, one of the things I do in the book, I think, is I put shades of gray in the Me Too movement because Joe Skank had a casting couch, but he was not a rapist. We know from Maureen O’Sullivan, who was a virgin and was afraid of him. He patted her hand and said, everybody tries to bother you. You tell me and let her go. She didn’t get the fur coat. You had to go into the casting room to get the fur coat. But he wasn’t threatening anybody with, you know, you’ll never work in this business unless you do what I want you to do right now. It never ain’t there. They were like sweet little dates he had with these women. He would feed them and then light some candles and take them to bed. Maybe it would happen. Maybe it didn’t have to happen is what you’re saying. It didn’t have to happen. And the women it did happen with always liked him afterwards. Like he was a favorite. And he really did call him Uncle Joe, like the cliche.

[26:33] Well, I’ve learned that when you get down to actual history, it’s always shades of gray. It’s never black and white. That’s right. That’s right. And this is a lot, there’s a lot of shades of gray. Yeah, I have issues with me too. My daughter once said that Joe Namath should be on the Me Too movement list. And I said, what? Everybody left. Because of the thing with Susie when he was drunk? No, there was no victim. Yeah.

[26:59] We don’t want to go too far down that path. But obviously Harvey Weinstein’s a real creep and is probably deserving what he gets. Yeah. Everything I read, and of course, I say what I read, but he was actually adjudicated in a court of law, which goes a long ways for me. I mean, there’s all the rules at place in a court of law to get to the truth. So it’s a deal. But this early Hollywood, there’s just so much history, the history of our country, you know, is encapsulated out there in Hollywood. You know, the moguls, the making the money, the creating monopolies and then breaking them up. And it just, you know, it’s really It really has the roaring 20s it has the depression it’s got World War II with the morale boosting oh, we didn’t even mention Nazis I mean, the Nazis tried to take over Hollywood and the skanks helped finance a spy system that infiltrates the German American Bund and gets them out of that, so that’s a chapter in the book so if you like Nazi stories, that’s.

[28:04] We all love Nazi stories. They bit off more than they chew when they took on the skanks. Yeah. Well, you know, Mayor Lansky, he, in New York, he organized a bunch of Jewish guys to attack these German-American supporters, the German-American people. I wrote that book, Gary. Oh, you did? Oh. Gangsters versus Nazis by Michael Benson. Oh, you did. Okay. I don’t know if I actually read it. Well, I always wanted to do that. We need to do that one. Yeah. Oh, absolutely. If Mayor Lansky and the Skank brothers ever got together, they would, they would get along so well. And, you know, because they just wouldn’t say, well, you’re filmmakers and I’m a gangster. They would all be, we’re Jewish men who came to this country and we did good. Interesting. Well, Michael Benson and Craig Singer wrote this book, guys. Moguls, the life and times of Hollywood film pioneers, Nicholas and Joseph Skank. Skank. Got that right? Very good, Gary. Appreciate it. I’m a quick learner, man.

[29:08] Especially when it’s easy to pronounce. You just figure out the right way to pronounce it. It doesn’t look like skank. Well, yeah, thank you so much, Gary,

[29:13] for giving me an opportunity to talk about them. We really do enjoy letting the world know who the skanks are because they deserve it. I think so. Like I said, it reflects social movements in the United States. It really helps us make more sense of our own history. I think it’s all reflected via bar movies. It’s the best U S history I ever had a part in. I believe it. All right. Michael Benson. Thanks a lot. Thank you so much. All right. Have a good one. You too. Okay. I’m going to do another little stick. So thanks a lot for coming on. I’ll get in touch with you about some of these other books. I just have gotten into you guys and, and I had appreciate it. All right. Have a good one. Bye.

[29:58] Well, hey, guys, that was a heck of an interview, and he’s a really interesting guy and a great writer. I’ll tell you what, this guy is really a good writer, and he does those other books, True Crime, about the mob in New York with Frank DiMatteo, whose dad was a mob guy with the Gallo brothers. So we’re going to do some more of that. I did one recently, and this story had a little bit of mob stuff in it, had a lot of really interesting Hollywood history that I’ve heard about but didn’t know that much about. We learned a real story guys we were in the real story about the death of superman george reeves which i thought was fascinating because i’ve been discussing that with friends ever since we were kids i guess whenever he died i was probably in early teens so don’t forget i like to ride motorcycles so watch out for motorcycles when you’re out there on the street and if you have a problem with ptsd be sure and go to the va website

[30:51] and get that hotline number and if you got a problem with drugs or alcohol. Angelo Ruggiano is down in Florida. He’s a drug and alcohol counselor, and he has a hotline, I believe, on his website. And if you have a problem with gambling, there’s 1-800-BETS-OFF.

[31:06] And I have stuff for sale, and I’ve always got stuff for sale. I just finished my second book from the podcast stories. The first one is out there now. Actually, the second one’s out there now by the time this gets released. The first one is the Windy City Mafia, the Chicago Outfit, the second one, Stories from the Five Families, the New York Big Apple Mafia, the Stories from the Five Families. And so they’re both out there on Amazon. They’re both out there as Kindles and paperbacks. And I even made a hardback out of the Chicago book.

[31:40] And I’m now trying to work on my life story. It’s really difficult to do. So many of the things that might be interesting, I don’t really want to tell anybody. I don’t want my kids to read it. And so I don’t know. We’ll see. And I got movies and stuff. So just go to Amazon and run my name or go to my website, Gangland Wire. If you’re on YouTube, be sure and like and subscribe, but also be sure and share it on your YouTube channels. Thanks a lot, guys.