The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Gangbuster: One Man’s Battle Against Crime, Corruption, and the Klan by Alan Prendergast

Episode Date: April 30, 2023

Gangbuster: One Man's Battle Against Crime, Corruption, and the Klan by Alan Prendergast https://amzn.to/3LG9MFu As gripping as it is prescient, Gangbuster is the first-ever history of the battle waged by one rookie District Attorney, Philip Van Cise, against the KKK, organized crime, and government corruption at the highest levels throughout the 1920s. One century later, in the face of contemporary society’s divisiveness and fearmongering politics, the personal courage of this maverick’s battle against underworld figures and a mainstream white supremacist movement is more relevant and inspiring than ever. At the height of the roaring 1920s, the ex-frontier town of Denver, Colorado, emerged from the postwar boom as the future of the American city. But the slick façade of progress and opportunity masked a murky stew of organized crime, elaborate swindles, and widespread government corruption. One man risked everything to alter the course of history. Rookie district attorney Philip Van Cise was already making national headlines for a new brand of law enforcement. Employing military intelligence tools he’d developed during the Great War—wiretapping, undercover operatives, communication intercepts—Van Cise crippled the criminal empire of Lou Blonger, an ex-lawman who had risen from petty scam artist to master of the Big Con. But Van Cise had even darker, more malevolent forces on his radar. The Ku Klux Klan had emerged as a shockingly mainstream middle-class movement, employing anti-immigration scare tactics, encouraging vigilantism, and instigating culture wars, all while claiming to protect true American values. Van Cise saw the toxic ideology for what it was: a new version of the Big Con sold as populism. Utilizing his pioneering surveillance techniques, Van Cise was determined to expose the Invisible Empire from within. Gripping and exhaustively researched, this prescient chronicle of Philip Van Cise’s spectacular career as a feared gangbuster taking on organized crime, the KKK, and corruption at the highest levels of government is a cautionary tale that mirrors our tumultuous times.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. This is Voss here from the chrisvossshow.com, the chrisvossshow.com. Welcome to the big show, my family and friends. We certainly appreciate you guys being here.

The family loves you dearly, dearly. Much more than your mother-in-law probably does. So that's the beauty of it. Anyway, guys, we have an amazing author and journalist on the show today. I'm excited to have him. He's joining us by audio. And he's got his amazing new book out. It's called Gangbuster.

One man's battle against crime,ruption, and the Klan. Just came out March 28, 2023. And so it's going to be interesting to talk about him on the show. He is on the show as Alan Prendergast. I imagine that's who he is. He's not on here as that, but he is. It sounded funny at the time in my head. I don't know.

What can I say? Alan is the author of a true crime book, The Poison Tree, and an award-winning journalist whose work has appeared in Rolling Stone, Outside, 60 Minutes, and the Los Angeles Times Westward, and numerous other publications and anthologies. His new book, the one we just mentioned, is an account of the life and times of Philip Van Sise. Do I have that right, Alan? Sise, there we go. The Denver district attorney who battled mobsters in the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s

when the Klan was in the process of taking political control of Colorado. Welcome to the show, Alan. How are you? I'm great, Chris. Thanks for having me. It's wonderful to the show, Alan. How are you? I'm great, Chris. Thanks for having me. It's wonderful to have you as well. Give us a.com, so wherever social sites you want people to go see you on the interwebages. The best place to go is alanprindergast.com. That's Alan with A-L-A-N and Prindergast

with that R in it, not the famous Pendergast machine. But yes, and always great to hear from readers or potential readers. There you go. There you go. And so, you know, this isn't your first book to my understanding, correct? Right. Yes, I did a true crime book about this murder case in Wyoming years ago, but that was a contemporary story. This is going back 100 years.

It's a little different kind of project. There you go. And so what motivated you to write this book? What brought it to your forefront? You know, I heard pieces of this story over time. I grew up in Denver, and this is a big missing chapter in local history, and also, I think, nationally, because the Klan was a national phenomenon in the 20s, and not many people know much about how it actually operated and how it was different from the Klan we think about in the Deep South after the Civil War or the Klan, you know, later Klan that was bombing churches and things like that. I heard a little bit about this here and there, and I've ultimately got interested in this guy called Van Sise, who was DA for four years in the 20s, just one term. But boy, he packed a lot into that term. And there was a lot going on there,

and I felt like I had only a fragmentary history of it. So I sort of made a resolution to myself that I was going to find some of those missing pieces and that's what i basically set out to do working different archives um you know retracing just what happened with all this crazy stuff there you go and you know there you go and so you decided to write about it and tell this story that has largely been untold. I saw some of the different research on it. The Klan members walking through Denver. There was a lot of terror and hate that went on with it. Tell us a little bit about what was going on.

What led up to him having to take this on locally there on the ground? Well, he's an intriguing figure because he was, in some ways, I mean, he was from a good family, not a rich family, but it was sort of part of the establishment. And he was well known because he had been a captain in the National Guard, and then he had been a lieutenant colonel in World War I. He had a decorated officer who was in military intelligence. And he comes back to Denver after the big war and naively, perhaps to some extent, figures, well, I can run for district attorney and help do something about all this crime that we seem to be experiencing after the war. When he gets into office, he realizes that in fact, the whole city is much more corrupt than he realized.

And so the first part of the book really concerns itself with him trying to root out this corruption and this organized crime group that is operating in Denver with pretty much impunity. It's really a national network of confidence men who do the big con, where they fleece rich tourists out of hundreds of thousands of dollars, which back then, I mean, that's like millions of dollars. Yeah. And how he fights them is ingenious. And I don't want to give away too much, but basically he develops new ways of doing surveillance that are a little ahead of their time. I mean, in terms of electronic surveillance of criminals.

And he builds a case against these guys very secretly and very painstakingly for months. And lo and behold, actually, you know, manages to upend this gang and to some extent the power structure in the town. And he's a very popular guy. The irony is that he's then about to go to an even greater investigation, a more complex one involving the Klan. And by the time he leaves office, he's probably the most unpopular man in Colorado. Wow. You know, it's sort of an indication of vet your candidates or some kind of cautionary tale about that. Because he was implored to run for mayor at that point. And excuse me.

Sorry about that. And he didn't run for mayor. The person who did run for mayor was a Klansman secretly. People didn't know that until after he took office and started appointing other Klansmen to various offices. Oh, wow. So, you know, it was the corruption he'd fought to begin with now is much worse.

Instead of worrying about cops who were mobbed up, he's worrying about cops who are in with the Klan. Wow. And it all complicates how he can do his job or not. Yeah, because if the, you know, the guys on the ground and help with the enforcement of being a DA are working for the other side. It's yeah, it's, it's, it's, there's a lot of collusion going on there.

Um, yeah, it was interesting. I mean, they were, these guys weren't just like, Hey, we're just here for politics. And, uh, I was like terrorizing. They were terrorizing Catholics, black people, uh, uh, all the different folks that usually expect the clan to go after, and they were just trying to rule by terror and domination and force. There's a lot of intimidation, and in some states it was a lot worse than Colorado. I mean, I'm talking about the level of violence, like in Texas or Indiana or Louisiana, but Colorado had one of the largest followings, And that's sort of a hard thing to explain because, you know,

historically they didn't have the racial violence of, you know, the South or even someplace like Oklahoma, where in the twenties you had this massive riot in Tulsa, right? It was a racial thing going on there. But what they, they, they seem to just find ready soil here, I guess, a very fertile ground for them because they were really about being the answer to whatever the problem was. I mean, they would change their message from, you know,

we got to do something about this group and then target a different group, the Catholics, the Jews, the blacks, immigrants in particular. There was a lot of resentment and concern about, the Catholics, the Jews, the blacks, immigrants in particular. There was a lot of resentment and concern about, you know, the immigrant population was getting larger and we need to do something about this. These people are taking jobs away from real Americans, you know, that whole spiel. But it was a 1920s version of that. And really, there were a lot of people who felt strongly about that, or else they just saw some opportunity in the Klan, you know, that maybe this will help my business, something like that. So you had all kinds of people. You had this sort of real hardcore believers in white supremacy,

but you also had a lot of people who were maybe small business people trying to get ahead or find some advantage. And there was, it seemed like there was a little bit of a kind of mafia sort of thing, you know, like people had to make payments to them, you know, that old. Well, it's, you know, that's sort of the other side of it. The Klan portrayed itself as this big law and order thing. It was really a money-making enterprise. Van Nuys was one of the few people to really start investigating it as a criminal fraud, right?

I mean, they're bamboozling their own members. They're taking all kinds of money from these guys and no one's accountable for it. Millions of dollars were being raised across the country by the various Klan enterprises, and nobody knows where the money went. I mean, it was being skimmed at various levels. Plus, they were taking kickbacks from bootleggers. I mean, these guys were saying, oh, we're all for prohibition. But they let crime thrive and they took payoffs for it, just the same as if they were gangsters. So, you know, it was really not that much different from Van Sizer's perspective

than fighting the con men end up fighting the Klan as well. Yeah. I saw a map of the KKK membership ledger residences in Denver, and it was like, holy crap. The book had nearly 30,000 entries of all sorts of money laundering. It's still a mafia thing. Yeah, it's a nice business you have here. Be ashamed if something happened to it.

You should buy some protection. That's sort of corruption. nice business you have here. Be ashamed if something happened to it. You should buy some protection. That's sort of corruption. And it sounds like they were all in the political sphere of mayor's judges. Right. This happened very rapidly. I mean, Van Size couldn't really stop them in their tracks. I mean, he did some interesting things that kept them from taking over as completely as they would have liked to.

But from the time that he decided not to run for mayor himself, and this other guy, Stapleton, became the mayor. Within a few months, Stapleton had appointed a Klan chief of police. He'd appointed a Klan city attorney. And within a few months after that, the state Republican Party had been taken over by the Klan. And that was Van Nuys's party. So he fought pretty hard against that. But in the elections of 24, which is, you know, the state elections, the presidential election, all that was the Klan's high point. They, particularly in Colorado, they dominated the legislature. They took over most public offices. They were very powerful. And it was obviously very dangerous for somebody like Van Zyze to be on the outs with them and trying to figure out ways to indict them. Yeah.

And so what made this man have this sort of semblance of character? Because, you know, even today in politics, we don't see a lot of, you know, well, I don't want to go against what the party says or who people, who elected me or, you know, anything that's not politically, you know, anything that's morally expedient doesn't seem to be politically expedient. What made this gentleman, you know, have that sort of, that sort of character? Well, that's a great question. And, you know, I spent some time going into his own background and his family. He was very influenced by his father, who was a progressive fellow, a lawyer, a minister, and of very high moral standards. And I think he had

taught Vance Ice from a very early age to stand up for what is right. And although he and his father didn't see eye to eye on everything, he really, I think, absorbed that lesson, and he was fearless. Even before he became DA, he had been in a situation as a member of the National Guard where he had to sort of blow the whistle on some of his fellow guardsmen after this violent confrontation with striking miners that became known as the Ludlow Massacre. This was about 1914. And Van Zijs was not part of that confrontation, but he was sent down by the governor to investigate it. And he recommended that

various fellow guardsmen be court-martialed and that one of them be tried for murder for shooting a prisoner in the back and uh you know that didn't make him any friends it was it was it got him you know he resigned from the guard shortly after because none all this stuff was whitewashed as far as he was concerned wow but that gave him a reputation as a guy who just you know he's going to go his own way and he's going to he's going to call you out if you do something wrong um and i think that really was a formative experience for him when he comes to face the clan later he's not exactly intimidated by these guys there you go why why do you feel this story hasn't been widely told and researched much is it is it kind of just one of those dark things where people are like yeah

we really don't want to talk about it well i think that's part of it i mean i think van seiss was kind of a reminder of a time when a lot of people, a lot of politicians in this town, prominent people, got their start under a sheet here with the Klan, and people didn't want to be reminded about that. The interesting thing, you mentioned the ledger. I mean, the ledger survives to this day, and you can actually go online now at History Colorado,

and if you had relatives in Denver in the 1920s, you could put in their name and see if they were Klans people, if they were official card-carrying members of the Klan. You don't have that in many states. I mean, most of those records were destroyed a long time ago. Every state tried to sort of cover up this chapter of their past. I think only in recent years are we looking at it more closely. And was one reason i think the van cyze story suddenly comes to the fore it's been suppressed for so long but it's it's actually a story about you know someone standing up in a dark time and doing the right thing there you go and you know these are the stories that i love in human history and this is why they're you know we we have a lot of historians like yourself that come on the show and help enlighten and and uh and uh educate people on on uh you know history and what's what's

gone before because to me you know i mean we still see that these issues aren't resolved or these issues of hate and loathing or blaming the immigrant and you know pointing the finger well this person's you know responsible for the finger at, well, this person's, you know, responsible for your problems while they're stealing from your pocketbook, you know? Um, and we seem to not learn these lessons and they keep repeating and recycling themselves. You know, we saw this in politics recently with the, uh, you know, there's the Charlottesville, the Jews will not replace us. People that went out, the racist that went out. And, uh, I think they were KKK, I don't, uh, Nazism, I think, but you went out and i think they were kkk i don't nazism i

think but you know they were they were doing that whole bit and you're like you know you talk about this happening in 1920 this is happening and this is happening in uh you know 2017 or 2016 and and you're like wow man we haven't learned much over and it's the same sort of bid argument that politicians will try and sell to separate divide and conquer and it's it's always amazing to me that as a people we don't sit at human beings to go hey you know we saw that movie in 1920 or you know pick your date yeah no i had the uh as i was doing this, I kept, you know, without necessarily seeking it out, I kept finding parallels to things in our own experience, that's for sure. You know, the Klan had its own newspapers.

It had some radio stations. If you were a true believer in the Klan, you could spend all your time in your own echo chamber listening to these conspiracy theories about how Catholics were trying to take over the world or the plans for Jewish domination, you know, and this stuff, some of this stuff coming out of anti-Semite tracts from czarist Russia, right? I mean, it's been around for years and it's just being recycled and it was being done for the same reasons. One of the most trenchant things I came across was actually a quote from LBJ. This is 40 years after the Klan in the 20s, right? And he's observing to a colleague,

he's saying, if you tell the lowest white man that he's better than the best black man, he won't notice that you're picking his pocket. That describes the Klan in a nutshell. That's exactly the kind of misdirection they were up to they were peddling hate as a way of finding someone to blame for something and they were making money off it yeah i mean that was that was really what it was all about yeah i mean i think i think that sort of politics goes back to i mean the beginning of time greek romans you know you can go it's just astounding to me. I always use the phrase that I, it's a quote from me, that's the one thing man can learn from his history is that man never learns from his history and thereby we go round and round. And so that's why I love books like yours and stories like

yours because they bring a light to it. And then we need to champion these heroes. We need to champion it. And usually we're good about that. We we're good at you know but but sometimes we let it get really freaking ugly before we decide that hey well it's time for the hero journey there and uh we should have uh you know the hero come out and save the day you know at the darkest point of no return and we need to just get better i think as a human race at going at seeing stuff ahead of time and going, you know, this doesn't end well. History's taught us that, you know. Right. Well, the problem is I think heroes are sometimes inconvenient.

We want them at the right moment when there's a crisis. But they can be, you know, I mean, to be as blunt as Van Sykes was, was a liability in a lot of situations. I mean, there were, there were, there's, there were times when possibly he could have been a little more tactful or a little less, you know, inflexible in his own views. And maybe, maybe he could have built a stronger coalition against the Klan, that kind of thing. But he wasn't, that isn't who he was. And that isn't who these guys tend to be. So, I mean, you know, we, we can, we can, we can welcome them when we want them, but we don't always want

them around. Yeah. I mean, you look at somebody like Churchill, you know, and the bravery and stuff, but, you know, before that, they didn't want him. They sent him home and said, nah, we're done with your shit. And then, you know, oh, hey, can you come back and save us for this Nazi dude? And then after that, you know, oh, thanks for winning the war. Hey, you know what?

We're done with you again. Again, yes out to patch that's kind of what happened with van size i mean he'd really any future political career he could have had i think was pretty much gone by the number of people he managed to alienate or alarm with his attacks on the clan but i don't think he would have changed any of that i mean he had no regrets about what he was doing and one of those you know in particular with his story and other stories like his, where they stand up against, uh, immense, uh, you know, uh, they're going to make enemies of friends and, and they're probably going to risk losing it all. They're probably going to lose losing their, their future, uh, maybe aspirations of political things like you mentioned.

And they're willing to, doing what's right and what's just is more important than that. And they sacrifice themselves on an altar. And I think that's why it's important, like stories like yours, again, I say, that we need to recognize these people and value them, and then also learn from the history of what that should have taught us. Well, and in this case, I don't want to overemphasize it, but what started out in some ways is him legitimately pursuing what he thought were criminal inquiries about a group that didn't seem to him completely following the Constitution. It became increasingly a liability

for him. I mean, he was physically threatened. There were situations he was in that could have gone much worse than they did. They tried to kidnap him one night. He carried a gun for the last part of his year in office. And this is not the Wild West anymore, but these are the people you want to meet in a dark street, right? So, I mean, in addition to sacrificing his career, there was great personal risk to him and to some extent to his family in what he was doing. But he didn't back down. I mean, I think he always felt that one of the ways we were going to beat these guys was to not give in an inch to any of their threats or anything like that.

And I imagine he had a family, a wife and kids, didn't he too? Yes, he did. And there's a famous story, this is sort of near the end of this whole thing, where he's supposed to give a talk at a Memorial Day service for, you know, the veterans and the dead of World War I and previous wars. And the Klan does a parade that day. One of the pictures in the book you mentioned, I mean,

there's a Klan parade in downtown Denver with these guys in their robes. And Van Sise takes the occasion of the speech to criticize these guys and say, you know, they have no business marching on a Veterans Day, you know, with the sacrifices that the military has made. You know, this day is for them. It's not for these bozos in white suits. And they were so upset with that. They wanted to, you know, get back at him some way.

They burned a cross on his lawn. Wow. And his kids remember from those years, you know, they were young enough that they thought, well, this is like 4th of July, just came early. Wow, this is pretty. The point is that Van Sise and his whole family jeered at them over this.

It's like, this is the best you got. You come back, you want to just vandalize my property. That's it. And it's an amazing moment that signals in a way just how the Klan no longer had the fear factor that it had before. I mean, the burning cross was supposed to be like the biggest threat they could make, right?

And Van Zyde's just saying, oh, I'm sorry I wasn't home when you did that. Try it again. I'll be there waiting for you. Give you a warm warm welcome i'll send you a calendar link we'll set an appointment exactly i mean it does take bravery i mean i've i've always been able to fight the battles that i want to fight because i don't have a wife and kids but if you have a family you know you you're that that kind of weighs on your decision making and well i think it did influence him not deciding not to run for da again i mean i don't think he would

have won anyway because the clan by that point was rigging the elections but that's another story there you go uh it's wild the ride that goes on uh with with everything uh what do you hope people learn from the book? Well, a couple of things. I mean, this is our history. It's a chapter we should acknowledge, not just in Colorado, but I mean, this was happening across the country in some unlikely places. It was obviously not as strong in the Northeast, but there were certainly lots of places in the Midwest, the West, the Southwest, where the Klan did terrible things. And there were various people who made accommodations to the Klan, and this should be looked at, and we should learn from that. And I think also, you know, we do recognize something

of ourselves when we go back to these stories. We see things about the way extremist movements operate and the way they try to soft pedal some of these things in order to get a wider audience i think some of the same things are going on today and um you know it's an education to think about the how self-serving some of this stuff was and you know there may have been a lot of rhetoric there about patriotism or whatever but a lot of these guys were in it for the money and that's also something to keep in mind. Yeah, it always seems to come down to that bottom line, doesn't it? Well, I don't think there's anybody in American politics that isn't thinking about their own interests at some point, right?

Yeah, that's very true. I mean, people aren't just like, hey, I'm just going to do some corruption. Well, is there any money in it? Nah, I'm just going to do it. It just seemed like a just going to do some corruption. Well, is there any money in it? Nah, I'm just going to do it. Just do it. It just seemed like a fun thing to do. I don't know. Maybe there are criminals that operate from that aspect.

But no, it's like you say, the historical nature of it is to run a scam because when you read stories like yours and his, um, you, you realize that if there weren't people that stood up and put themselves in the line of fire, I mean, you can, you can tell lots of stories and Martin Luther King and, and, uh, Bobby Kennedy and different other people who paid for their lives, um, who were martyred for their cause. Um, and you know, these are, these were dangerous times and you have to sit and look and go, what if there had been these people that stood the line that held the line? Uh, what if they had one, you know, you can even look at January 6th. One of the most haunting memories I have of January 6th is seeing that damn ass Confederate

flag in the, in the, uh, in, in the, Confederate flag in the building, the U.S. government building. To see that flag in there, that had never been anywhere near that building during the Confederacy, made me realize how unresolved these issues are and how they are still playing themselves out. So I like books like yours,

because like you said, they take us back and remind us well i told you i i sort of went in search of missing pieces one of the pieces i found which has a bearing on this january 6th thing um was the actual speech that van syce was supposed to deliver this is shortly before the elections he had prepared a whole presentation for the public on what the clan was up to deliver, this is shortly before the elections, he had prepared a whole presentation for the public on what the Klan was up to, who was secretly a Klansman, all this stuff. It was like a PowerPoint. I mean, he had like these lantern slides he was going to project on a screen. This is 1923, right? He never got to deliver this speech, but I found a copy of it in an archive. So I finally figured out what he was trying to say. What happened that night was that the Klan packed the hall. They got there before anybody else.

The police let them in. There were 4,000 Klansmen in this audience. Instead of the voting public, he hoped to find. And so they shouted him down, and he continued to try to present this for five hours, could barely get a word out because they were drowning him out and screaming at him and this was this was a near riot uh in in the city auditorium in denver um but but seeing this speech really really filled in some gaps to me because it showed me what he was trying to say that nobody at the time heard that night i

mean it's not in the newspaper reports because it was unintelligible what he was trying to do. Here's the whole case he wanted to make. It was really satisfying to find that. And this was kind of a real fight during this time. How close was it to being like Chicago? I mean, we had Al Capone and evidently there figure, uh, you talk about in the book who, uh, I think it was, uh, Lou Blanger. Yes. Yeah. He was the Al Capone. Well, he's not as ruthless as Al Capone. I mean, he didn't kill people, um, routinely, but he was the Denver.

He had been, he was a Denver institution. He was the head of these con man operation that Van Nuys took down. But, yeah, I mean, that was an important turning point to me was Denver was going the way of some other major cities at those times, you know, Chicago, Kansas City. And really, Van Nuys helped turn the course of things. So I think it had a little different outcome because he had worked so hard at exposing this corruption. Yes, the Klan came in. Yes, the Klan fell apart almost just as

fast. And I think Denver was on a different track thanks to Van Seys and some of the people who were also resisting this stuff. So it was a turning point for me. I mean, I think that there's no question the city altered its course to some extent thanks to what he did. Yeah, probably a good thing too.

I mean, yeah, we see over the history of our country, we've seen these tests of the rule of law and the Constitution. And, you know, I'm not an attorney but i've spent enough uh looking over law and defending my companies i mean in courtrooms or suing people in courtrooms um you know you you people don't realize how important the power that is the rule of law the the the thing that one man is not against it and and and well criminals tend to test it over the over the centuries that this small republic has been around or this new republic has been around. How important that is, keeping us from just becoming all out chaos and stuff. And so these battles

set a precedence for the future in law and also to other people who bring jurisprudence to our legal system to ensure that everyone's held accountable. At least that's the way it's supposed to be. Well, to Van Size's credit, this really was about his adherence to the rule of law. He was surrounded by people who just were trying to find the most convenient way to go along to get along. And this included judges. I mean, one of his biggest enemies when

he was fighting the Klan was a district judge who was trying to pack the grand jury with Klansmen. Imagine a grand jury full of Klansmen indicting whoever they choose, right? I mean, that's crazy. But Van Sise was getting locked out of his own jury room and he fought this guy tooth and nail, you know, because what he was doing was illegal. I mean, it's not a question of ideology at some point. The Klan had set out to try to recruit him early on because it's like, hey, he's a Republican, he's a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant, he's perfect for us. And, you know, there were things about his ideology that may have been comfortable to the Klan, but there was no way

he was going to go with this organization. And he became, you know, they went from trying to recruit him to trying to destroy him in very short order. The guy who was that judge became the governor, the Klan governor. And ultimately ended up in Leavenworth, which is another story. You know, these guys were so wholly corrupt it was it was incredible there you go there there was a lot of that going

on in the this kind of conversion from the wild west to you know trying to have a organized union you know the mormons had that problem when uh the the u.s government sent the military in, they couldn't get, you know, they couldn't get prosecutions for crimes in the federal bench because they would fill the docket with Mormons who wouldn't prosecute each other. And so rape, murder, robbery, everything was going on, and no jury would convict because it was just out of control. Well, it was the same thing here with the clam was was basically the juries were getting stacked with clansmen you couldn't convict the clansmen

of a crime and that was very concerning uh you know you have to you have to somewhere take a stand against that or your whole justice system just goes down the tubes there you go well it's great to celebrate the men who stand forth and say enough of the bullshit and try and uphold what's right and what's necessary in the rule of law. Because, I mean, it separates us from becoming a medieval dark times culture where just marauders go from building to building and do whatever they want, whoever has the most power. So anything more, Alan, you want to share with us or tease out on the book before we go? You know, I keep coming back to that speech on Memorial Day. It's one of the moments in this whole story that made me feel it was worth doing because what he essentially told the audience, in addition to criticizing the plan for the parade,

was saying, you know, we're in a battle right now that's as important as any of the battles we ever fought in the Great War or in the Civil War. It's a battle for Americanism. I mean, it's a battle about who gets to decide who's an American and who isn't. And, you know, that struck me as being so right on about who the Klan was and what they were trying to do and how they were trying to divide people and basically disenfranchise half the country, basically. You know, it sort of stays with me, and you can understand why it upset the Klan as much as it did.

He was basically calling them out. And that's awesome, man. So great story here, brilliant journalism. Give us your.com so people can find you on the interweb, just please. It's alanprindergast.com, A-L-A-N-P-R-E-N-D-E-R-G-A-S-T. And yes, you can contact me there. I always love to hear from readers and any questions. That's great.

There you go. The things you'll learn from history. And we triumph these, many times we triumph, we try to triumph these people who stood up against tyranny and oppression and people that try to do whatever they want. And usually, hopefully, we remember them and celebrate them because they stand between us

and the marauders at the door. So this is really important. And it's the fight over this nation. When it says we the people in the Constitution, that means everybody and, or it's supposed to, let's put it that way. Um, but you know, we were, uh, it was, uh, uh, Obama said, you know, we zig and we zag. We're, we're constantly a nation in search of a more perfect union, but there's no, you never achieve perfection. It's always a thing. It's interesting when you study the history

of this country, the tussle that goes on to achieve that perfect union, whatever that may be, that all men may have the same rights and everyone can live life liberating the pursuit of happiness. Thank you very much Alan for coming on the show. We really appreciate it.

Hey Chris, my pleasure. Thanks for having me. There you go. Thank you coming on the show we really appreciate it hey chris my pleasure thanks for having me there you go thank you order the book folks wherever fine books are sold uh you can go to amazon or other places gangbuster one man's battle against crime corruption and the clan we need more people like uh mr uh philip van seiss uh order up march 28th 2023 it became available and uh thanks for tuning in go to goodreads.com for just chris foss youtube.com for just chris foss linkedin.com for just chris foss sounds great places on the internet thanks for tuning in be good to each other stay safe we'll see you guys next time and that should have us out