This is a story about a woman who came to be known as The Horse Queen. She owned hundreds of champion quarter horses on her ranch outside the small city of Dixon, Illinois. And she was also Dixon’s treasurer/comptroller. Yet no one ever thought to ask how she could afford all of those horses on the salary of a civil servant… until the FBI raided City Hall in 2012 and Rita was arrested. For twenty years, Rita Crundwell worked hard to become the world’s largest and most successful quarter horse breeder… while also becoming America’s most prolific municipal embezzler. Want the full story? Unlock all episodes of the third season of Crooked City: Dixon, IL ad-free right now by subscribing to The Binge. Plus, get binge access to brand new stories dropping on the first of every month — that’s all episodes, all at once, all ad-free. Just click ‘Subscribe’ on the top of the Crooked City show page on Apple Podcasts or visit GetTheBinge.com to get access wherever you listen. A truth.media & Sony Music Entertainment production. Find out more about The Binge and other podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts and follow us @sonypodcasts
Presenting Gone South Season 2: The Dixie Mafia
Welcome to Season Two of Gone South, the Edward R. Murrow-Award winning documentary podcast from C13Originals.
Starting in the early sixties, a rag-tag confederation of traveling criminals known as The Dixie Mafia terrorized every state from Georgia to Oklahoma. Its hundreds of members, unofficially headquartered in Biloxi, Mississippi, specialized in scams, heists and murder. Their ringleader — the estranged son of a prominent Oklahoma politician — was a skilled and charismatic outlaw named Kirksey Nix. When Nix was sentenced to life in prison at Angola for a murder he committed in New Orleans, The Dixie Mafia was thought to be extinct. But fifteen years later, a sitting criminal court judge named Vincent Sherry and his wife Margaret, a mayoral candidate for the city of Biloxi, were assassinated. As the case ran cold, authorities were forced to confront a disturbing reality: the reign of Kirksey Nix and The Dixie Mafia was far from over.
Gone South is a creation and production of Peabody-nominated C13Originals, a Cadence13 studio, in association with Jed and Tom Lipinski.
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