Speaker 1: Col Zone media. It was already dark when the marcher
Speaker 1: set off. On November thirteenth, nineteen sixty nine. Thousands of
Speaker 1: people had gathered just outside the gates of Arlington National
Speaker 1: Cemetery outside of Washington, d C. Each marcher carried a
Speaker 1: candle and a small placard. At the head of the march,
Speaker 1: Judy Draws cupped her hands around the flame to shield
Speaker 1: it from the freezing wind. The sign she carried said
Speaker 1: only Donald Glen Draws, Missouri. At twenty three years old,
Speaker 1: she'd been a mother for ten months and a widow
Speaker 1: for seven. For the next thirty nine hours, nearly fifty
Speaker 1: thousand people walked from Arlington National Cemetery to the White House.
Speaker 1: Each marcher carried with them the name of a United
Speaker 1: States service member killed in the warren vying noam. They
Speaker 1: didn't chant or saying. The only sound came from the
Speaker 1: six drummers slowly tapping out a funeral cadence. Inside the
Speaker 1: White House, Richard Nixon fumed as peace activists marched overnight
Speaker 1: in the freezing rain. He joked about sending a low
Speaker 1: flying helicopter to blow out their candles. By Saturday morning,
Speaker 1: half a million people were in Washington, d c. Demanding
Speaker 1: an end to the war. It's easy to say now
Speaker 1: that they were right, but in nineteen sixty nine, the
Speaker 1: widows and clergy and students who opposed the war were
Speaker 1: beaten and tearcast. They were sneered at and called hippies
Speaker 1: and communists and traders. It wasn't just Richard Nixon who
Speaker 1: was upset by the demonstration. The night before the Three
Speaker 1: Day March against the War was scheduled to begin, a
Speaker 1: small group of neo Nazis snuck into the DC offices
Speaker 1: of the New Mobilization Committee to end the war in Vietnam,
Speaker 1: one of the groups organizing the event. Whatever happened on
Speaker 1: the ninth floor of that office building on Vermont Avenue
Speaker 1: barely made the news, but it left a lasting impression
Speaker 1: on two teenage Nazis. James Mason would go on to
Speaker 1: tell that story for years, including it several times in
Speaker 1: his book of essays extolling the Virtues of Terrorism. For
Speaker 1: Joseph Paul Franklin, it was an introduction to a thrilling possibility.
Speaker 1: If someone is doing something you don't like, you can
Speaker 1: hunt them down and hurt them. I'm Molly Conger and
Speaker 1: this is We're little guides. This is a story about
Speaker 1: a serial killer, part of it anyway. I'll be honest
Speaker 1: with you. I had a hard time concentrating this week,
Speaker 1: and when I ran out of time and sat down
Speaker 1: to write, I felt like I was out of words. Actually,
Speaker 1: I got bogged down in the details and my heart
Speaker 1: wasn't quite in it. But I did promise you and
Speaker 1: not see serial killer. So we will start the story
Speaker 1: and get through as much of it as I can
Speaker 1: get onto the page before Rory starts asking where the
Speaker 1: file is. Joseph Paul Franklin was a murderer. I've written
Speaker 1: about murderers before, but this one's different. He's not a
Speaker 1: mass shooter or a terrorist with a single mass casualty event,
Speaker 1: or some guy who snapped and drove his car into
Speaker 1: a crowd. This is a serial killer. This is the
Speaker 1: first time that our weird little guy has been the
Speaker 1: subject of TV true crime documentary shows like Criminal, Mindscape,
Speaker 1: FBI Files, and Mugshots. He's been covered by true crime
Speaker 1: podcasts with names like Murder in America, Death Cast, True Murder,
Speaker 1: True Crime, All the Time, Killer Stories, Murder Files, Unsealed,
Speaker 1: Crime in Comedy, Serial chillers, mamicide, and something called tequila.
Speaker 1: She wrote Limes, crimes, and murder times. I mean, there
Speaker 1: are a lot of true crime podcasts out there. I
Speaker 1: don't know what's going on here, and I didn't actually
Speaker 1: listen to any of those. I'm sure they're all perfectly fine.
Speaker 1: This is, technically, I guess, a true crime podcast. I mean,
Speaker 1: look at your podcast app. That's where the show's categorized.
Speaker 1: That's not how I would describe my work, but I
Speaker 1: can understand how that decision was made. These stories are
Speaker 1: true and there's usually a lot of crime. I'm not
Speaker 1: trying to pick a fight with the marketing department or
Speaker 1: the true crime girlies, don't get me wrong. I just
Speaker 1: think this show occupies a slightly different place in the
Speaker 1: information ecosystem. But that's something I learned while I was
Speaker 1: writing it. I didn't know what I was writing until
Speaker 1: I had been writing it for a few months a
Speaker 1: year and a half ago, when I suddenly found myself
Speaker 1: responsible for writing a weekly podcast. I didn't know what
Speaker 1: it was about. I mean, I had a general concept.
Speaker 1: I wrote some pitch notes that someone approved. The bones
Speaker 1: were there, the idea was solid. I loved telling a
Speaker 1: story about a weird little guy. That's why it's called that. Sophie,
Speaker 1: our eternally patient executive producer, jotted that phrase down on
Speaker 1: a notepad during a meeting months before I had any
Speaker 1: plans of hosting my own show, because she noticed how
Speaker 1: often I used that particular phrase to describe some awful
Speaker 1: extremists whose life and crimes I'm excited to dig into.
Speaker 1: She knew it was a good idea, and I knew
Speaker 1: she'd produced enough podcasts to know what she was talking about.
Speaker 1: So I dove right into the deep end and committed
Speaker 1: to a production schedule that meant coming up with an
Speaker 1: exciting new idea every week. I mean, how hard could
Speaker 1: it be. I'd never done this before. I have no
Speaker 1: idea what people want. I wasn't sure what the tone
Speaker 1: was supposed to be, or how to make coherent, interesting
Speaker 1: narratives out of my own peculiar and intense obsessions. The
Speaker 1: first episode aired on August eighth, twenty twenty four, and
Speaker 1: it was fine. The second episode was already done and
Speaker 1: I was struggling that week to write the third one.
Speaker 1: I actually don't care for the way that one came out,
Speaker 1: If we're being honest, but it was a learning curve
Speaker 1: and I was starting to panic. Not even three episodes
Speaker 1: into this thing I had committed to, and I'd hit
Speaker 1: a brick wall. How was I supposed to come up
Speaker 1: with a new good idea every week? But I'm a
Speaker 1: white woman in my thirties. I've listened to true crime podcasts,
Speaker 1: and if that's what the network thought the show was,
Speaker 1: then maybe that's what it was supposed to be. Looking
Speaker 1: at the version history now on a Google document that's
Speaker 1: just called ideas, the very first bullet point I typed
Speaker 1: on August ninth, twenty twenty four, just says Joseph Paul Franklin,
Speaker 1: Nazi serial killer. I ordered a used copy of a
Speaker 1: book about him that afternoon, and I started reading it
Speaker 1: the day it arrived. I felt a little defeated, but
Speaker 1: maybe there's no shame in reading a book and then
Speaker 1: finding a way to repackage it in an interesting way.
Speaker 1: Plenty of people do it. A lot of shows don't
Speaker 1: cite their sources, but if you've read the book they're summarizing,
Speaker 1: you can spot it. I got thirty nine pages in
Speaker 1: before I put the book down on the floor near
Speaker 1: the laundry pile in my office, and I left it
Speaker 1: there for sixteen months because on page thirty nine of
Speaker 1: mel Aton's book Dark Soul of the South, The Life
Speaker 1: and Crimes of racist killer Joseph Paul Franklin, Ayton describes
Speaker 1: a conversation Franklin had with another inmate at the federal
Speaker 1: prison where he was being held in nineteen eighty one.
Speaker 1: After I closed the book, I added a new bullet
Speaker 1: point to the list, Frank Abbott Sweeney. This offhand mention
Speaker 1: of a conversation between a serial killer and a con
Speaker 1: man in the prison yard had potential. I needed to
Speaker 1: find out more about the guy bragging to the serial
Speaker 1: killer about his time as a Rhodesian mercenary. I think
Speaker 1: that's when I realized that this could be fun. I
Speaker 1: don't have to write stories I already know, or stories
Speaker 1: whose details all already exist in a book someone else
Speaker 1: already wrote, or are spread across filings in a single
Speaker 1: docket in a single court case. I can write stories
Speaker 1: that don't exist yet. I can do my own original
Speaker 1: research and run headlong down every single rabbit holes days
Speaker 1: reading old Nazi newsletters pieced together painstakingly detailed timelines, and
Speaker 1: follow my curiosity wherever it takes us, no matter how
Speaker 1: long it takes to finish the story. Yeah, it's a
Speaker 1: true crime show, I guess, but that doesn't mean I'm
Speaker 1: beholden to the conventions of the genre. I'm not interested
Speaker 1: in breathlessly recounting the details of every single murder and
Speaker 1: the trial as they were presented in the newspaper. I
Speaker 1: want to find out about that failed mercenary who was
Speaker 1: addicted to mail fraud. So now, almost half a million
Speaker 1: words into what, I didn't realize that the outset was
Speaker 1: going to be a convoluted attempt at a comprehensive history
Speaker 1: of the American far right. I want to come back
Speaker 1: to that first bullet point on my list of ideas.
Speaker 1: Not because I'm suddenly interested this week in telling you
Speaker 1: a straightforward true crime story about a serial killer, but
Speaker 1: because I see something else there now, because what have
Speaker 1: I been telling you all this time? Everything is connected
Speaker 1: and there are no lone wolves. Joseph Paul Franklin was
Speaker 1: a murderer and he was a racist, and those two
Speaker 1: things cannot be disentangled. He killed because he was trying
Speaker 1: to start a race war. Officially, he was only convicted
Speaker 1: of eight murders Tony Schenn and Alphonse Manning, an interracial
Speaker 1: couple in Madison, Wisconsin, in nineteen seventy seven. Gerald Gordon
Speaker 1: as he was leaving a bar mitzvah at a synagogue
Speaker 1: in Saint Louis, Missouri in nineteen seventy seven. William Bryant Tatum,
Speaker 1: a black man who was out to dinner with his
Speaker 1: white girlfriend in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in nineteen seventy eight. Daryl
Speaker 1: Lane and Dante Evans Brown, two young black boys who
Speaker 1: snuck out of their grandmother's house to buy candy at
Speaker 1: the corner store in Cincinnati, Ohio, in nineteen eighty. And
Speaker 1: Theodore Fields Junior and David Martin, young black men who
Speaker 1: were jogging with their white female friends at a park
Speaker 1: in Salt Lake City in nineteen eighty. He was never
Speaker 1: prosecuted for more than a dozen other murders he either
Speaker 1: confessed to or was credibly linked to. In the last
Speaker 1: eight months alone, right before his capture. Outside of Blood
Speaker 1: in Florida, he murdered eleven people across six states. For
Speaker 1: three years, he roamed the country, robbing banks, building bombs,
Speaker 1: and shooting the enemies of the white race. Interracial couples,
Speaker 1: Jewish people, black men and boys, and white women who
Speaker 1: dated black men. He hunted them, preferring to shoot his
Speaker 1: victims from a distance. Two of the men he shot
Speaker 1: but failed to kill, were planned assassination attempts, pornographer Larry
Speaker 1: Flint and civil rights leader Vernon Jordan. But for the
Speaker 1: most part, he just found parking lots to sit in
Speaker 1: and wait, hoping to spot an interracial couple. And he
Speaker 1: acted alone. That part's true. He killed alone. By the
Speaker 1: time he started killing, he was out there on the
Speaker 1: road on his own. He wasn't part of an organized
Speaker 1: terror cell. He wasn't taking orders, he wasn't getting outside funding.
Speaker 1: If anyone could be called a lone wolf, I guess
Speaker 1: it's him, And you'll certainly find both journalists and academics
Speaker 1: who do call him that. I can't blame them for it.
Speaker 1: It makes sense depending on what you think that means.
Speaker 1: The problem is, no one knows what it means, or
Speaker 1: if it means anything. Academics in the field of terrorism
Speaker 1: studies have been using the phrase lone wolf for thirty years,
Speaker 1: but it made its way into the scholarly lexicon by
Speaker 1: way of Tom Metzger the leader of White Arian Resistance.
Speaker 1: Metzger was the one who popularized the term in the nineties,
Speaker 1: and if you read what Metzker actually wrote about the idea,
Speaker 1: I don't understand why you would try to repurpose the
Speaker 1: term into something sincere. He was pleading for plausible deniability.
Speaker 1: In nineteen ninety, Tom Metzger was found civilly liable for
Speaker 1: inciting one of his followers to commit a hate crime murder.
Speaker 1: He lost his house when he told the racists to
Speaker 1: read his newsletter to work alone, say nothing, don't join
Speaker 1: a group or go to meetings, and for God's sake,
Speaker 1: don't keep any records of your actions. He was trying
Speaker 1: to avoid going back to court the next time a
Speaker 1: skinhead murdered someone after being trained and directed by top
Speaker 1: ranking members of the organization, he led be a lone
Speaker 1: wolf just meant keep killing, but keep me out of it.
Speaker 1: And in the thirty years since the term first showed
Speaker 1: up in an academic journal, no one can actually agree
Speaker 1: on what they mean by it. A twenty fifteen report
Speaker 1: called lone wolf Terrorism from the National Security Critical Issue
Speaker 1: Task Force at Georgetown University has eight findings, and finding
Speaker 1: number one is that there is no single definition of
Speaker 1: what the term means. A twenty eleven paper in a
Speaker 1: Journal for the Study of Political Violence proposes four subcategories
Speaker 1: of the lone wolf, the loner, the lone wolf, the
Speaker 1: lone wolf pack, and the lone attacker. Of those four categories,
Speaker 1: only the loaner is described as actually acting alone. The
Speaker 1: other three subtypes are either acting in concert with a
Speaker 1: small group or are an individual who is in direct
Speaker 1: contact with a larger group while carrying out a physical
Speaker 1: act alone. If three of the four subtypes of lone
Speaker 1: wolves are not alone at all, well what are we
Speaker 1: talking about. A twenty seventeen paper in Studies in Conflict
Speaker 1: and Terrorism suggests that maybe it's time to reconsider the
Speaker 1: usefulness of the concept entirely. Obviously, that is also my position,
Speaker 1: because somewhere in between completely isolated individual acts entirely on
Speaker 1: his own with no outside influence of any kind, and
Speaker 1: organized networked group with a hierarchical structure and detailed written
Speaker 1: plans directs individual duce paying members to carry out specific acts,
Speaker 1: there lies the vast majority of actual political violence. This
Speaker 1: is an idea we've bumped up against a few times
Speaker 1: on the show, but revisiting the story of Joseph Paul
Speaker 1: Franklin really sent me back to the academic literature on
Speaker 1: the subject, and it's something we'll talk more about next week.
Speaker 1: He acted alone, I don't dispute that, but he could
Speaker 1: not have acted in this way without the earlier influence
Speaker 1: of these groups that he was a member of. And
Speaker 1: after those actions, the ones he did take alone, he
Speaker 1: became a symbol within those same groups, inspiring other men
Speaker 1: to do as he'd done and act alone. You can
Speaker 1: call him a lone wolf if you want, but he's
Speaker 1: in conversation with the pack. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
Speaker 1: I ended up digging mel Aiden's biography of Franklin back
Speaker 1: out of that pile of sweaters under my office chair,
Speaker 1: because over the year I spent writing about other things,
Speaker 1: I kept coming across his name more often than I
Speaker 1: would have expected to, given the initial presentation of him
Speaker 1: as a pretty bog standard serial killer who just happened
Speaker 1: to also be a Nazi. The man who would be
Speaker 1: come serial killer. Joseph Paul Franklin was born James Clayton
Speaker 1: Vaughan Junior in Mobile, Alabama on April thirteenth, nineteen fifty.
Speaker 1: He had a terrible childhood with abusive alcoholic parents, But
Speaker 1: that's a chunk of this story usually trotted out to
Speaker 1: illicit sympathy from jurors or try to explain to you
Speaker 1: how someone could become so violent. It's well covered in
Speaker 1: Aiden's book, and that is probably the source for this
Speaker 1: section of his biography. In most of the true crime
Speaker 1: podcast episodes about him, I don't usually waste time on
Speaker 1: a nazi's childhood sob story, but it does seem to
Speaker 1: be fairly well corroborated that he had a miserable time
Speaker 1: growing up. Trying to make sense of Franklin's life is
Speaker 1: a minefield. The most thorough account is mel Aiden's book.
Speaker 1: He spent years writing it, and he corresponded with Franklin
Speaker 1: and interviewed him multiple times. In any piece of media
Speaker 1: about Franklin produced after the book was published after twenty eleven,
Speaker 1: a surprising number of the quotes they use are pulled
Speaker 1: directly from Aiden's book, from the recorded interviews between them.
Speaker 1: In his introduction, Aiden cautions the reader up front that
Speaker 1: he was able to access a lot of primary source
Speaker 1: material police files, trial transcripts, prison records, interviews with people,
Speaker 1: who knew Franklin. But the best source of information about
Speaker 1: what Franklin did when he was alone is Franklin himself,
Speaker 1: and Ayton calls him a notorious fabricator and manipulator. This
Speaker 1: is something I see in a lot of material produced
Speaker 1: by or about Nazis. He's lying on purpose, and the
Speaker 1: lies he's telling don't necessarily stay consistent over time. He's
Speaker 1: just saying whatever feels good or whatever he thinks will
Speaker 1: get him what he wants in the moment where he's
Speaker 1: saying it, and other times the person relaying the information
Speaker 1: is wrong by accident. People get confused, they forget, They
Speaker 1: confidently say things that were never true, just because there's
Speaker 1: an FBI agent sitting in a chair in their living room,
Speaker 1: drinking a cup of coffee asking them for details about
Speaker 1: things they didn't think were important at the time, and
Speaker 1: now they're just talking nonsense. When his sisters were questioned
Speaker 1: about his whereabouts in the weeks before his arrest in
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty, one of them told the FBI she was
Speaker 1: quite sure he'd moved away to Washington, d C. In
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty five, and he'd been seventeen or eighteen at
Speaker 1: the time, and he'd joined the Klan before he left.
Speaker 1: None of those things are true, and some of them
Speaker 1: aren't even possible. She wasn't being malicious. She was just wrong,
Speaker 1: and you can sort of untangle things like that. You
Speaker 1: can give her a pass on the year. It had
Speaker 1: been more than a decade. Probably moved from Alabama to
Speaker 1: the DC area in nineteen sixty eight, not nineteen sixty five.
Speaker 1: And in nineteen sixty eight he would have been eighteen,
Speaker 1: And by nineteen sixty eight he was already a card
Speaker 1: carrying member of a hate group. But it wasn't the Klan.
Speaker 1: If I had to guess, I think she probably had
Speaker 1: some vague understanding at the time that her brother had
Speaker 1: joined some kind of unsavory organization, some kind of hate group,
Speaker 1: and she probably learned later on that he did join
Speaker 1: the Klan, and being from Alabama, she would have had
Speaker 1: some general knowledge about the Clan. That is probably the
Speaker 1: hate group that would come first to her mind, so
Speaker 1: she just assumed that was the one he'd joined first.
Speaker 1: The organization he joined around the time he dropped out
Speaker 1: of high school wasn't the Klan. It was the National
Speaker 1: Socialist White People's Party. The name of the newly rebranded
Speaker 1: American Nazi Party. In nineteen sixty eight, just before he
Speaker 1: turned eighteen, he married a sixteen year old girl he'd
Speaker 1: gotten pregnant in the four months they lived together. After
Speaker 1: their shotgun wedding, he beat her mercilessly and started bringing
Speaker 1: home Nazi pamphlets. By spring, he'd left her behind in
Speaker 1: Alabama and moved to Virginia to become an active member
Speaker 1: of the party. He was gone before his daughter was
Speaker 1: even born. One of the frustrating things about my insatiable
Speaker 1: need to create the perfect timeline of a weird little
Speaker 1: guy's life isn't just that he's a forgetful liar. He
Speaker 1: was a drifter. I'm used of my weird little guys
Speaker 1: telling their self serving lies or mixing up the details
Speaker 1: of some event that was years ago. But usually when
Speaker 1: things don't line up, you can tell there's a piece missing,
Speaker 1: you know, where you need to start digging around to
Speaker 1: try to find an explanation, to find some other source
Speaker 1: to compare it to, and then weigh those competing truths.
Speaker 1: But for some of the gaps in the narrative of
Speaker 1: Franklin's life, some of these completely illogical sequences of events
Speaker 1: it's not because the facts we have are wrong. They're right.
Speaker 1: They just don't make sense because the way he was
Speaker 1: living didn't make sense. He bought cars out of newspaper
Speaker 1: classified ads using stolen cash and registered them with a
Speaker 1: rotating list of aliases. He lived in motels under fake names.
Speaker 1: His family didn't know where he was. He moved constantly
Speaker 1: and for no discernible reason. He went years without having
Speaker 1: a fixed address or a job. His second wife didn't
Speaker 1: even know that he'd somehow managed to legally marry and
Speaker 1: divorce her using an entirely fictitious identity. She and her
Speaker 1: daughter lived with a last name that he'd printed on
Speaker 1: a fake ID. He would take off for weeks at
Speaker 1: a time to rob banks and murder teenagers, and she
Speaker 1: thought he was a plumber named Jim Cooper. She didn't
Speaker 1: find out his real name until the FBI took him
Speaker 1: into custody, when he called her from jail to let
Speaker 1: her know where he was, and then he broke the
Speaker 1: news about who he was, and he told her he
Speaker 1: really had committed all twelve of the murders they were
Speaker 1: accusing him of. All that to say, I don't know
Speaker 1: why he was living in Birmingham in August of nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty nine, or if he was living in Birmingham in
Speaker 1: August of nineteen sixty nine. He really did abandon his
Speaker 1: first wife and mobile in the middle of nineteen sixty eight,
Speaker 1: and he does seem to have moved to Virginia at
Speaker 1: that time, but he must not have stayed. He was
Speaker 1: back in Alabama to signed divorce papers in January of
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty nine, and in June he was arrested in
Speaker 1: Mobile for disorderly conduct. In all the interviews I found,
Speaker 1: all the articles and recollections from other people, I couldn't
Speaker 1: find anyone asking him directly, what were you doing that year?
Speaker 1: I mean, why would they write true crime stories? Are
Speaker 1: concerned with the crimes, and he didn't start killing until
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy seven. His FBI file doesn't seem to have
Speaker 1: been concerned about where he lived in nineteen sixty nine.
Speaker 1: I know how much he paid for a hat he
Speaker 1: bought at a country Western wear store in Virginia in
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy seven, because a decade later, a detective in
Speaker 1: Wisconsin tracked down the store clerk who worked there that year,
Speaker 1: and she remembered having it in but five hundred pages
Speaker 1: of reports and memos show a remarkable lack of curiosity
Speaker 1: about what he was doing during his first year as
Speaker 1: a Nazi. But either way, at the end of the
Speaker 1: summer of nineteen sixty nine, he was in Birmingham, Alabama,
Speaker 1: and he must not have had a car because he
Speaker 1: needed a ride back to Virginia, and the man who
Speaker 1: gave it to him was David Duke. In nineteen sixty nine,
Speaker 1: the National Socialist White People's Party was struggling to forge
Speaker 1: ahead after the death of George Lincoln Rockwell two years earlier.
Speaker 1: They'd already been in the process of rebranding from the
Speaker 1: American Nazi Party before Rockwell was assassinated by a former member,
Speaker 1: and there was some splitting in the aftermath of his death.
Speaker 1: The party's new leader, Mattias Kale, announced in early nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty nine that they would be holding the first ever
Speaker 1: party congress that fall. Attendance would be required. They needed
Speaker 1: to tighten up. Local chapters were ordered to start submitting
Speaker 1: reports of their activities. New members would have to be
Speaker 1: interviewed in person at headquarters in Virginia, and everyone needed
Speaker 1: to get up to date on their dues cale. Needed
Speaker 1: to consolidate power and try to gain some momentum if
Speaker 1: the party hoped to outlive its founder. In nineteen sixty
Speaker 1: nine was the same year that they formed the youth
Speaker 1: wing called the National Socialist Liberation Front under the guidance
Speaker 1: of Wily Luther Pierce. He was very focused on recruiting
Speaker 1: eager teenage boys, and his messaging in those days was
Speaker 1: far more explicitly violent than the kind of messaging he
Speaker 1: would claim later in life when some of those young
Speaker 1: men had grown into terrorists. I found old copies of
Speaker 1: the National Socialist Bulletin, the party news letter that were
Speaker 1: published that year. In issues published every two weeks from
Speaker 1: May until August. The bulletin reminded members that if there
Speaker 1: was any way they could possibly get to Virginia on
Speaker 1: Labor Day weekend, there was no excuse not to attend
Speaker 1: the party congress. Registration was just two dollars or one
Speaker 1: dollar for students, and there would be floor space for
Speaker 1: sleeping bags. If he couldn't afford a motel. The party
Speaker 1: office would coordinate with attendees to arrange for carpooling down
Speaker 1: in Alabama. There were at least two members who needed
Speaker 1: a ride. Don Black was newly sixteen, and he'd just
Speaker 1: finished his junior year of high school. He was still
Speaker 1: years away from trying to coop the government of an
Speaker 1: island nation or founding Stormfront, but he was already pretty
Speaker 1: far along in his journey to becoming a full fledged
Speaker 1: neo Nazi. Two years earlier, he found a racist book
Speaker 1: by a Christian identity presecut in his local library, and
Speaker 1: he wrote to the publisher to request more books. He
Speaker 1: got newsletters. He ended up on mailing lists, and one
Speaker 1: of the groups that showered him with buttons and flyers
Speaker 1: and newsletters was the National Socialist White People's Party. He
Speaker 1: joined the party as a youth member by mail when
Speaker 1: he was just fifteen years old. When he got the
Speaker 1: newsletter in the spring of nineteen sixty nine announcing the
Speaker 1: party congress, he was desperate to attend. His parents were
Speaker 1: a little uneasy about it, but they said he could go.
Speaker 1: They did draw the line at hitchhiking, though Don Black's
Speaker 1: parents waited with him in the parking lot at the
Speaker 1: bus station in Birmingham. He'd done just as the newsletter asked.
Speaker 1: He submitted his RSVP and one dollar registration feed by mail,
Speaker 1: and he requested to be connected with another member he
Speaker 1: could corporal with. Franklin arrived first decades later. A few
Speaker 1: weeks before Franklin was executed by the state of Missouri,
Speaker 1: Don Black posted on Stormfront that Nazi forum he founded
Speaker 1: in the nineties. He said that Joseph Paul Franklin was
Speaker 1: the first white nationalist he ever actually met, but only
Speaker 1: by a few minutes. Had it been much longer, he wrote,
Speaker 1: I probably would have gone home with my parents, who
Speaker 1: had driven me to the Birmingham bus station to meet
Speaker 1: up with my ride to Arlington. They hadn't wanted me
Speaker 1: to go, but they at least wanted to meet these
Speaker 1: scary people I was going with. Had they talked to
Speaker 1: Franklin those first few minutes, their worst fears would have
Speaker 1: been confirmed, and they'd have made me go back home
Speaker 1: with them. So luckily for Don Black and terribly unlucky
Speaker 1: for the world, Don Black's parents didn't have much time
Speaker 1: to chat with Joseph Paul Franklin because David Duke arrived
Speaker 1: few minutes later. In the late summer of nineteen sixty nine.
Speaker 1: David Duke and Joseph Paul Franklin were both nineteen years old, Franklin,
Speaker 1: who was still using his birth name James Vaughan, was
Speaker 1: a high school dropout who had abandoned his pregnant sixteen
Speaker 1: year old wife. David Duke was about to start his
Speaker 1: sophomore year at Louisiana State University. Don Black claims he
Speaker 1: remembers being appalled by a quote crudely drawn swastika tattoo
Speaker 1: on Franklin's arm, but I wasn't able to find any
Speaker 1: source that confirms he would have had that tattoo at
Speaker 1: that time. Memory is more about vibes than facts, though,
Speaker 1: as uneasy as that makes us to admit, so, even
Speaker 1: if Franklin didn't have a swastika tattoo on his arm
Speaker 1: in nineteen sixty nine, he definitely already had swastika tattoo
Speaker 1: energy The sixteen year old old wife he'd abandoned a
Speaker 1: year earlier, said he started sewing swastika patches onto his
Speaker 1: jackets in nineteen sixty eight. He was crude and loud,
Speaker 1: and he leered at women and girls, and he swore,
Speaker 1: and he spat, and half of what he said was
Speaker 1: weighed down with racial slurs. He was gross. He wasn't
Speaker 1: the kind of guy you would let drive your son
Speaker 1: to a Nazi conference, even if you were for some
Speaker 1: reason letting someone drive your son to a Nazi conference.
Speaker 1: But David Duke was a clean cut, well spoken, young
Speaker 1: college student driving his family car, and Eli Saslow's twenty
Speaker 1: eighteen book Rising out of Hatred, he frames this fourteen
Speaker 1: hour car ride as pretty formative for Don Black. These
Speaker 1: were the first Nazis he'd ever met. Before he even
Speaker 1: turned sixteen. He'd been ostracized at school and interviewed by
Speaker 1: the FBI for his involvement in the party, but he'd
Speaker 1: never had a chance to actually talk about his views
Speaker 1: with anyone who agreed with him, let alone these kind
Speaker 1: of cool guys who were just a little bit older
Speaker 1: than him. Asasla wrote, by the time the three teenagers
Speaker 1: finally arrived in Arlington for the conference, a transformation had
Speaker 1: taken place. Don no longer felt like a lone extremist
Speaker 1: searching for answers. He was part of a movement, a
Speaker 1: soldier for the cause. According to the National Socialist Bulletin
Speaker 1: one hundred and twenty three members of the National Socialist
Speaker 1: White People's Party attended the party congress. I don't know
Speaker 1: if that's true. There are some pictures in an other
Speaker 1: newsletter that show a conference room full of chairs facing
Speaker 1: a speaker at electron. A good number of the chairs
Speaker 1: are empty, and the room doesn't look like it could
Speaker 1: have held more than fifty people. But maybe the rest
Speaker 1: of their friends were there just out of frame. The
Speaker 1: descriptions of the speeches that ran in the newsletter sound
Speaker 1: pretty dull, but I really would have loved to have
Speaker 1: been a fly on the wall while the attendees socialized. Right,
Speaker 1: We've got Don Black at his first ever Nazi event,
Speaker 1: teenage David Duke, a budding serial killer. William Luther Pierce
Speaker 1: gave a speech, of course, as did Matius Kale. Frank Colin,
Speaker 1: who was still serving as Midwest Party coordinator, gave a
Speaker 1: report about Nazi activity in Chicago. It would be about
Speaker 1: another year or so before he was ousted over rumors
Speaker 1: that he was Jewish, and a few more years before
Speaker 1: he would kick off the controversy that led to the
Speaker 1: Skokie Supreme Court decision and inspire the FAI same as
Speaker 1: Blues Brother's line, I Hate Illinois Nazis, And another few
Speaker 1: years before it was revealed that the rumors were true,
Speaker 1: he had in fact been raised Jewish. He was later
Speaker 1: convicted of child molestation, and regardless of the actual attendance numbers,
Speaker 1: people did come in from all over. John Beatty was
Speaker 1: there from Canada, where he led the Canadian National Socialist Party.
Speaker 1: Joseph Thomassi, one of William Luther Pierce's teenage revolutionaries, gave
Speaker 1: a report on his work running the racist hotline over
Speaker 1: on the West Coast, and this is where James Mason
Speaker 1: first met several of the men who would shape the
Speaker 1: worldview he laid out in the siege years later, in
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty nine, James Mason was a teenager too, like
Speaker 1: Don Black, he'd joined the party as a youth member
Speaker 1: by mail while still in high school. A year before
Speaker 1: this conference, he'd written to the party headquarters to say
Speaker 1: that he was planning to murder his high school principal.
Speaker 1: William Luther Peers read his letter and offered him an alternative.
Speaker 1: He invited this seventeen year old to leave Ohio and
Speaker 1: come live at the party office in Virginia. The newsletters
Speaker 1: don't give much detail about the content of the speeches,
Speaker 1: but years later, when James Mason sat down on his
Speaker 1: typewriter to tap out the newsletters that would eventually be
Speaker 1: collected into siege, that favorite tome of acceleration as neo Nazis.
Speaker 1: In the twenty tens, he recalled a scene from the
Speaker 1: room that weekend after William Luther Peers's speech, he opened
Speaker 1: the floor to questions. According to mason quote, one naive
Speaker 1: delegate asked what we should do with the white race traders.
Speaker 1: He spoke, not a word, but gesturing with thumb and
Speaker 1: index finger forming the barrel and hammer of a histole
Speaker 1: being fired. Brought the entire assembly to its feet, and
Speaker 1: the loudest outburst of cheering an applause heard during that
Speaker 1: three day gathering. So all the way back in nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty three, James Mason is doing the and everybody clapped
Speaker 1: bit right, But more importantly, amidst all this propaganda that
Speaker 1: we know they're being inundated with about killing black people,
Speaker 1: about killing Jewish people, somebody raised their hand and asked,
Speaker 1: what about the race traders? What do we do about them?
Speaker 1: What do we do about the white people who work
Speaker 1: against us? Are they fair game? And in front of
Speaker 1: this room of mostly very young men that he had
Speaker 1: personally recruited and groomed, for violence. William Luther Pierce pantomimed
Speaker 1: firing a gun. Pierce would later deny inspiring Franklin or
Speaker 1: being an inspired by him to write his novel Hunter.
Speaker 1: And I'm sure Franklin heard plenty of other Nazis advocate
Speaker 1: for murdering race traders in the years between this meeting
Speaker 1: and the first time he did it. But there in
Speaker 1: that room in nineteen sixty nine, his leader put the
Speaker 1: idea in his head, maybe for the first time. When
Speaker 1: the conference was over after the long weekend, Don Black
Speaker 1: had to go home. He had to go back to
Speaker 1: high school, but David Duke and Joseph Paul Franklin wanted
Speaker 1: to stick around for a bit, so Don's parents bought
Speaker 1: him a plane ticket home. James Mason stuck around two obviously,
Speaker 1: he lived there and for a few months James Mason
Speaker 1: and Joseph Paul Franklin lived together in the Party barracks
Speaker 1: in Northern Virginia. The incident I described the opening. That
Speaker 1: attack on the new Mobilization office in November of nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty nine is so strange to me. I spent hours
Speaker 1: combing through newspaper archives trying to prove it happened at all.
Speaker 1: I scrounged around for Marxist papers that would have been
Speaker 1: published during that time period. I dug up old anti
Speaker 1: war newsletters, student activist publications. I looked hard, because something
Speaker 1: must have happened. There are multiple essays in Siege about
Speaker 1: the attack on the anti war protesters. James Mason recalls
Speaker 1: this as his favorite demonstration years later as he's writing Siege,
Speaker 1: as he's collecting his thoughts and formulating this strategy for
Speaker 1: white revolution, Gassing those hippies in nineteen sixty nine is
Speaker 1: one of his fondest memories, and even when he's not
Speaker 1: a describing that particular incident, he writes often of Franklin,
Speaker 1: praising him as a man of action and something others
Speaker 1: should aspire to. He mentions him for the first time
Speaker 1: in November of nineteen eighty, just a few days after
Speaker 1: Franklin was arrested. In that first essay about Franklin, Mason
Speaker 1: described the early days of their friendship, writing, I mainly
Speaker 1: recall the time in November of nineteen sixty nine when
Speaker 1: we decided to put the Reds of DC under siege
Speaker 1: during their massive treason orgy known as the Moratorium against
Speaker 1: the Vietnam War effort. It was Vaughn, because of his
Speaker 1: non fascist appearance, who went into the high rise New
Speaker 1: Mobe headquarters on Vermont Avenue alone and caused the place
Speaker 1: to be evacuated three times using gas bombs without being caught.
Speaker 1: No One then guessed that we might be reading about
Speaker 1: him eleven years hence in such a manner, may his
Speaker 1: luck hold now. A year later, in another essay, he
Speaker 1: described the same incident, again referring to Franklin using the
Speaker 1: name he'd known him by, Vaughn. I recall the night
Speaker 1: one of the most important missions of the year was
Speaker 1: in jeopardy because some of the men chosen to go
Speaker 1: out on it were refusing to be accompanied by Vaughn
Speaker 1: as part of the team that attacked the New Mobe
Speaker 1: headquarters in Washington, d C. I was forced to call
Speaker 1: each one up individually and beg and plead, shame and
Speaker 1: cajole until I could get them to come to their
Speaker 1: senses and perform their duty. More than once I was
Speaker 1: hung up on and had to dial them right back up.
Speaker 1: In the end, while the rest of us provided escort
Speaker 1: and the backup, it was Vaughn who caused the place
Speaker 1: to be evacuated and closed. The essay attributes both Franklin's
Speaker 1: success and the other member's wariness of him to the
Speaker 1: same thing. He didn't fit in. He didn't have a
Speaker 1: regulation haircut or a party uniform, wasn't playing by the rules.
Speaker 1: And this is foundational Amazon's ideology. Get out there and
Speaker 1: do terrorism. Prioritize action over all else, action over organization,
Speaker 1: action over doctrine. Get out there and do something. Just
Speaker 1: break something, just kill someone. Watching this long haired weirdo
Speaker 1: throw tear gas grenades into an office building while the
Speaker 1: stormtroopers waited in the car seems to have laid the
Speaker 1: groundwork for the kind of terror Mason encouraged for decades.
Speaker 1: Just get out there and do it. But did it
Speaker 1: actually happen. I can't prove it, and normally that would
Speaker 1: lead me to believe he's making it up. But for
Speaker 1: some reason, I think something had to have happened. This
Speaker 1: seems too central to Mason's worldview to be made up.
Speaker 1: And I did find one single newspaper article that does
Speaker 1: describe members of the National Socialist White People's Party storming
Speaker 1: into the new Mob offices the night before the march,
Speaker 1: So something happened. But that article describes Nazis who looked
Speaker 1: like Nazis, not one lone long haired weirdo, but big
Speaker 1: guys and matching coats and short hair and swastik lapel pins.
Speaker 1: And it doesn't mention a gas attack or an evacuation
Speaker 1: or shutting the building down or three incursions. It just
Speaker 1: describes one instance of a couple of guys coming in,
Speaker 1: handing out flyers and intimidating some of the women before
Speaker 1: they were escorted out. Now, I do have to leave
Speaker 1: open the possibility that I can't find an article about
Speaker 1: anti war activists getting tear gased, because there are thousands
Speaker 1: of articles about the cops tear gassing that same group
Speaker 1: that same week. The keywords are pulling up a lot
Speaker 1: of unrelated content, so maybe it's there and it's just
Speaker 1: buried in that one article I did find. They actually
Speaker 1: name the student activist who firmly asked the Nazis to leave,
Speaker 1: and he's still alive and I found him online, So
Speaker 1: I think I'm going to write to him and ask
Speaker 1: him if he remembers this happening. Fingers crossed, But whether
Speaker 1: or not an eighty year old man remembers getting tear
Speaker 1: gassed by a Nazi serial killer in nineteen sixty nine.
Speaker 1: We'll pick back up next week with a Nazi adrift
Speaker 1: joining different hate groups throughout the nineteen seventies before waking
Speaker 1: up one Christmas morning and deciding it was time to
Speaker 1: start his one man race war. Weird Little Guys is
Speaker 1: a production of Pools One Media and iHeartRadio. It's research,
Speaker 1: written and recorded by me Mollie Kunger. Our executive producers
Speaker 1: are Sophie Litterman and Robert Evans. The show is edited
Speaker 1: by themes wildly talented Rory Gagan. The theme music was
Speaker 1: composed by Brad Dickert. You can email me at Weird
Speaker 1: Little Guys podcast at gmail dot com. I will definitely
Speaker 1: read it, but I probably won't answer. It's nothing personal.
Speaker 1: You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other
Speaker 1: listeners on the Weird Little Guys subreddit. Just don't post
Speaker 1: anything that's going to make you away Weird Little Guys