Speaker 1: Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2: Hey everybody, Robert here, because it's the holidays. We will
Speaker 2: be continuing our normally scheduled Behind the Bastards episodes, but
Speaker 2: every week we're also doing a compilation of one of
Speaker 2: the other new shows on our network. So aart so now,
Speaker 2: but this one is It's called Weird Little Guys. It
Speaker 2: launched this year with one of my friends and favorite researchers,
Speaker 2: the Great Molly Conger, and you're going to listen to
Speaker 2: a two part episode which we've cut together for you
Speaker 2: with a lot less ads than normal, about a guy
Speaker 2: named Frank Sweeney. So please enjoy and happy holidays.
Speaker 3: This is a story that begins and ends in bank
Speaker 3: parking lots, more or less in the way that stories
Speaker 3: can really begin or end. Our subject today was alive
Speaker 3: before the story begins, and as I'm writing this, he's
Speaker 3: still alive. But for the purposes of this telling, we'll
Speaker 3: start outside the Palisade Trust Company Bank in Englewood, New Jersey,
Speaker 3: on February twenty third, nineteen sixty two, when an eighteen
Speaker 3: year old member of the American Nazi Party was arrested
Speaker 3: after skipping school to try to rob a bank with
Speaker 3: a toy gun and will mark the beginning of the
Speaker 3: end of his story in a Wells Fargo parking lot
Speaker 3: in Garden City, Idaho, on October thirteenth, twenty eighteen, when
Speaker 3: an elderly ex Cohn was caught on security cam footage
Speaker 3: getting into an altercation with a couple who didn't move
Speaker 3: forward quickly enough at the drive up atm In the
Speaker 3: decades in between, Frank Sweeney went to prison at least
Speaker 3: half a dozen times, bought as a foreign mercenary, got
Speaker 3: deported from both Rhodesia and South Africa, helped an escaped
Speaker 3: spy of ad U s Marshals, turned state's witness against
Speaker 3: a Hitler worshiping serial killer, tried to help the mob,
Speaker 3: and waged a three year campaign of terror and harassment
Speaker 3: against a woman who made a passing comment about how
Speaker 3: he was parked outside the post office. I'm Molly Conger
Speaker 3: and this is brune La.
Speaker 4: Guys, this is a strange one.
Speaker 3: The first few episodes of this show were stories I
Speaker 3: already knew and thought you should know too. Kevin Strom
Speaker 3: was a prominent figure in the white supremacist movement for decades,
Speaker 3: and it was big local news here in Charlesville. When
Speaker 3: he was arrested twenty years ago. The Gerald Drake case
Speaker 3: was something I read about when it happened. The cases
Speaker 3: against the gun trafficking Nazi paramilitary group was a story
Speaker 3: I spent years reading, paying ten cents a page, one
Speaker 3: court filing at a time as it wound its way
Speaker 3: through the system. But this one, this one is brand
Speaker 3: new to me, and I think it will be brand
Speaker 3: new to just about everybody, because for as many times
Speaker 3: as this man shows up in the newspaper over the
Speaker 3: last sixty years, I haven't found any one source that's
Speaker 3: gathered together the threads of his life and tried to
Speaker 3: make sense of how one man's name could appear in
Speaker 3: so many other people's stories. Because that's where I found him.
Speaker 3: In someone else's story. I was reading a biography of
Speaker 3: a particularly nasty little guy, one we'll definitely get to
Speaker 3: eventually in another episode when my weird little guy detector
Speaker 3: went off. Call it a gut feeling, but this passing
Speaker 3: mention of a side character in the life of a
Speaker 3: serial killer was enough to get me to put that
Speaker 3: book down and spend days digging through newspaper archives trying
Speaker 3: to figure out Frank.
Speaker 1: And what I found was kind of.
Speaker 3: A bizarro world forest Gum. One man whose life keeps
Speaker 3: intersecting with major historical events, just wandering in and out
Speaker 3: of the lives of gullible reporters, frustrating to the federal
Speaker 3: agents and the innocent bystanders who accidentally became his targets,
Speaker 3: just bumbling his way through history, but without any of
Speaker 3: Tom Hanks's charm. I know we don't really know each
Speaker 3: other yet. I haven't earned the trust it takes to
Speaker 3: know you'll believe me when I promise you a two
Speaker 3: parter is worth the weight in between. But I think
Speaker 3: you'll agree Frank's story is weird enough for two episodes.
Speaker 3: Frank Abbott Sweeney Junior was born in August of nineteen
Speaker 3: forty three in New Jersey, to Frank Abbott Sweeney Senior,
Speaker 3: a realtor, and Marie Gleeson Sweeney, a homemaker who taught
Speaker 3: violin lessons and volunteered with the Red Cross. As a
Speaker 3: lifelong con artist, A lot of what he's told reporters
Speaker 3: about his own life is self serving fiction, which would
Speaker 3: sometimes get published without fact checking and then reappear in
Speaker 3: later accounts as fact.
Speaker 1: It was in the newspaper after all.
Speaker 3: So I've taken great pains to verify what i can,
Speaker 3: debunk what I can, and take note of the things
Speaker 3: I can only offer you with a grain of salt.
Speaker 3: Some of Frank's own lies are easily disproved, like the
Speaker 3: resume he gave a Rhodesian Army recruiter on it. He
Speaker 3: claimed he graduated from Georgetown University in nineteen sixty five
Speaker 3: at the degree in psychology, but he couldn't possibly have
Speaker 3: matriculated at Georgetown in nineteen sixty one. He was a
Speaker 3: senior at Tenafly High School in nineteen sixty two, when
Speaker 3: he was sent to the Annandell Reformatory for two and
Speaker 3: a half years.
Speaker 1: He never finished high school.
Speaker 3: His claim that his alias, Francis Shellhammer derives from his
Speaker 3: mother's maiden name.
Speaker 1: Also fails to hold up to scrutiny.
Speaker 3: His mother was born Marie Gleeson to John Gleeson, a fireman,
Speaker 3: and Lottie Gross Gleason in Chicago. And I was generous here.
Speaker 3: I wasted a lot of time. I even checked his grandparents.
Speaker 3: His middle name, Abbott was his paternal grandmother Martha's maiden name.
Speaker 3: I went as far as to track his family treat
Speaker 3: all the way back to Ireland, giving him the benefit
Speaker 3: to the doubt that maybe.
Speaker 1: There's a shell hammer in there somewhere. I didn't find one.
Speaker 3: It's possible that I started mixing up my Martha's, Mary's, John's,
Speaker 3: and Francis's by the time I was cross referencing marriage
Speaker 3: records from the eighteen seventies.
Speaker 1: But he probably just made it up. He does a
Speaker 1: lot of that.
Speaker 3: And other aspects of Frank's story would require a trip
Speaker 3: to the National Archive to sift through dusty boxes of
Speaker 3: ancient court transcripts and an unlikely degree of transparency from
Speaker 3: the Central Intelligence Agency, or a deathbed confession from a mobster,
Speaker 3: or a few tell all memoirs from US marshalls to
Speaker 3: ever hope to sort out. The rest is somewhere in between.
Speaker 3: But I'll stick with what we do know to be true,
Speaker 3: And I said, this story begins outside of a bank.
Speaker 3: On February twenty third, nineteen sixty two, Frank Sweeney skipped school.
Speaker 3: Shortly after nine am, he walked into a bank in Englewood,
Speaker 3: New Jersey, approached the teller and slid a plastic toy
Speaker 3: gun that he'd painted black out of a Manila envelope.
Speaker 3: I'd like to make a withdrawal, he told the teller
Speaker 3: as he cocked the toy pistol. I don't know if
Speaker 3: the teller could tell the gun was fake, or if
Speaker 3: she just didn't think this gangly, redheaded teenager had it
Speaker 3: in him to shoot her, or maybe she just was
Speaker 3: having a bad day and didn't care anymore, because, according
Speaker 3: to local news reports, she sneered at him, got up
Speaker 3: and walked away, leaving him standing there alone at the
Speaker 3: counter with his toy gun and bewildered by the teller's
Speaker 3: apparent disinterest in being held at gunpoint. He just put
Speaker 3: the plastic pistol back in his pocket, turned around and
Speaker 3: walked out the front door, and as he was leaving,
Speaker 3: an off duty policeman just happened to be walking into
Speaker 3: the bank. An employee told the officer what had just happened,
Speaker 3: and he turned right around and caught Frank just outside.
Speaker 3: He dragged him back inside the bank to be identified
Speaker 3: by the teller, and as the patrolman is making the arrest,
Speaker 3: Frank says to him.
Speaker 1: Well, I guess it didn't work.
Speaker 3: Later, under interrogation, he would tell the officers that his
Speaker 3: plan had been to support the movement to use the
Speaker 3: money from the bank robbery to support the activities of
Speaker 3: the American Nazi Party under George Lincoln Rockwell. At his arraignment,
Speaker 3: the judge asked, Frank, aren't you the fellow who's been
Speaker 3: painting swastikas on synagogues around here. Frank denied this, and
Speaker 3: he told the judge I never did anything illegal in
Speaker 3: my life, and then he pleaded guilty to the attempted
Speaker 3: bank robbery. There's no other mention of Frank in connection
Speaker 3: with that anti Semitic vandalism the judge mentioned, But I
Speaker 3: did find several newspaper articles about incidents of that sort
Speaker 3: from the prior to years when Frank would have still
Speaker 3: been a minor. In January nineteen sixty three, unnamed teenage
Speaker 3: boys were accused of painting swastikas on parked cars in Emerson,
Speaker 3: just eight miles away. In February of nineteen sixty one,
Speaker 3: one hung a swastika banner over the entrance of the
Speaker 3: synagogue in Tenafly. Newspaper articles about that banner reference a
Speaker 3: similar recent incident at the synagogue in nearby Englewood. A
Speaker 3: few days later, someone painted a swastika over a plaque nearby.
Speaker 3: In June, two teenage boys respotted fleeing the scene after
Speaker 3: two trailers belonging to a contract or were broken into
Speaker 3: and left a swastika painted on the floor inside. In
Speaker 3: all these incidents, police told the papers of the time
Speaker 3: that they had referred the cases to the juvenile division.
Speaker 3: It's not like anti Semitic incidents are so rare that
Speaker 3: I'm saying that Frank is the only possible suspect here
Speaker 3: in every nineteen sixties Bergen County news article about a swastika,
Speaker 3: I found plenty of other newspaper reports during those same
Speaker 3: two years about a local man flying a swastika flag
Speaker 3: outside of his home, about attacks on Jewish businesses and
Speaker 3: synagogues and neighboring cities, and other incidents that just don't
Speaker 3: fit this particular pattern of teenage Nazi vandalism. And the
Speaker 3: comment the judge made makes it sound like Frank had
Speaker 3: been there before. But any appearance he'd made in court
Speaker 3: as a miner wouldn't have been reported with his name
Speaker 3: attached to it. And it's hard enough to get any
Speaker 3: information about a juvenile case in twenty twenty four, So
Speaker 3: forget figuring out what happened in nineteen sixty one, but
Speaker 3: it does seem pretty likely he'd at least been a
Speaker 3: suspect in some of those incidents, because at the hearing
Speaker 3: where he pled guilty to the attempted bank robbery, Frank
Speaker 3: did admit that the police had spoken to him on
Speaker 3: numerous occasions, specifically concerning his involvement in George Lincoln Rockwell's
Speaker 3: American Nazi Party. For the attempted bank robbery, Frank was
Speaker 3: sentenced to an indeterminate term at a boy's reformatory, and
Speaker 3: he was released on October of nineteen sixty four, shortly
Speaker 3: after his twenty first birthday. After serving about two and
Speaker 3: a half years. After his first stent in jail, Frank
Speaker 3: returned to his parents' home in New Jersey. He worked
Speaker 3: occasionally as a shipping clerk, but it doesn't seem like
Speaker 3: he was holding down a steady job. After Noon in
Speaker 3: July of nineteen sixty seven, neighbors reported hearing gunshots in
Speaker 3: the woods. An officer drove by to check it out
Speaker 3: and saw a car parked on the side of the road.
Speaker 3: The car looked empty, so the officer kept driving without
Speaker 3: stopping to investigate. Suddenly, the car pulled out behind him
Speaker 3: and tried to run the officer off the road. A
Speaker 3: brief vehicle chase ensued, with the officer following the vehicle
Speaker 3: for about a mile before the driver Frank parked outside
Speaker 3: of his parents' home, got out and walked toward the
Speaker 3: front door. The officer asked Frank if he'd been shooting
Speaker 3: guns in the woods, to which Frank replied only no,
Speaker 3: and then warned the officer that he was on private
Speaker 3: property for walking away and into the house. But Frank
Speaker 3: left something on the front seat of the car, unfortunately,
Speaker 3: and it was a Thompson submachine gun that he'd been
Speaker 3: firing in the woods. The officer saw the gun and
Speaker 3: called for backup, and when they arrived, Frank opened fire
Speaker 3: on them from inside the home, kicking off a seventy
Speaker 3: five minute gun battle, with more than a dozen cops
Speaker 3: firing shots at the house as Frank fired at them
Speaker 3: through the windows. Frank's father and brother pleaded with him
Speaker 3: to come out, or at least to send the family
Speaker 3: dog out. After police Captain Peter Zurla was shot in
Speaker 3: the arm, the officers lobbed four canisters of tear gas
Speaker 3: through the windows, finally driving Frank out into the front yard,
Speaker 3: where he was arrested without further incident. And as they
Speaker 3: put the handcuffs on him, he turned to Captain Zerla,
Speaker 3: who's still standing there in the front yard bleeding from
Speaker 3: a gunshot wound, and Frank says, some shot when I
Speaker 3: got you through the window. Huh. There's no follow up
Speaker 3: I can find about whether the dog was heard, or
Speaker 3: how missus Sweeney got the tear gas out of her upholstery.
Speaker 3: It was the sixties, so maybe her sofa was safely
Speaker 3: scotch guarded or wrapped up in one of those weird
Speaker 3: plastic covers that were popular back then. But you have
Speaker 3: to figure she at least had to replace the curtains.
Speaker 3: Frank entered a not guilty plea and unsuccessfully try I
Speaker 3: to suppressed the evidence of the gun found on the
Speaker 3: front seat of the car, with his attorney arguing that
Speaker 3: it was discovered in an illegal search because the cop
Speaker 3: didn't have probable cause to look through the window of
Speaker 3: the parked car. That's not how that works.
Speaker 1: A trial.
Speaker 3: The defense put on three psychiatrists to argue for insanity,
Speaker 3: and the state put on two of their own who
Speaker 3: testified that Frank was certainly disturbed but not legally insane.
Speaker 3: The jury deliberated for just three hours before finding Frank
Speaker 3: guilty of attempted homicide, assault with the intent to kill,
Speaker 3: possession of a machine gun, and something called atrocious assault
Speaker 3: that I've never heard of. We don't have that here
Speaker 3: in Virginia, but in New Jersey, atrocious assault is an
Speaker 3: assault in battery, savage and cruel in character which results.
Speaker 1: In maiming or wounding. So that definitely qualifies. And he
Speaker 1: was sentenced to six.
Speaker 3: Years, which, honestly, that's kind of remarkable, right. I'm not
Speaker 3: going to for the Corsoal state here, far from it.
Speaker 3: You know more, jail time doesn't really fix anybody, and
Speaker 3: we'll come to see that jail never comes close to
Speaker 3: fixing Frank. But reading those sixties news stories about this
Speaker 3: event was fascinating. This cop who got shot by a
Speaker 3: Nazi with a Tommy gun is described in every article
Speaker 3: as quote lightly wounded. I mean, he does seem to
Speaker 3: have not been seriously injured. He was shot, you know,
Speaker 3: in the upper arm. I don't think it went through
Speaker 3: the bone, so it really he was lightly wounded.
Speaker 1: But that's not what they would put in the newspaper
Speaker 1: today you know it.
Speaker 3: And the cops didn't drive a tank through the front
Speaker 3: of the suburban home or unload their guns into him
Speaker 3: when he came out. There's been such a massive culture
Speaker 3: shift over the years and the way we justify aggressive
Speaker 3: police response and the way that we talk about the
Speaker 3: risk to police. It's just interesting to see that it
Speaker 3: wasn't always that way. But there's another unanswered question in
Speaker 3: the story of this siege in this New York suburb.
Speaker 1: What was he doing that day?
Speaker 3: I mean shooting guns in the woods obviously, but why
Speaker 3: did he panic when that cop drove by, and why
Speaker 3: those woods in particular. We'll never really know. Even if
Speaker 3: he told us, we wouldn't know. He's a liar. But
Speaker 3: the newspaper articles at the time do say that the
Speaker 3: officer initially saw Frank's car parked at the intersection of
Speaker 3: East Clinton Avenue and Woodland Street, about a mile from
Speaker 3: where Frank lived.
Speaker 1: At the time.
Speaker 3: They used to put everything in the newspaper. It's so beautiful,
Speaker 3: every detail, every boring little bit in which they still
Speaker 3: did that, And I'm eternally curious about details that probably
Speaker 3: won't end up mattering. But I pulled up a map
Speaker 3: of Tenafly, New Jersey, and there is a large wooded
Speaker 3: area you could walk straight into if you parked your
Speaker 3: car at that intersection, And those woods surround a large
Speaker 3: building that first opened its doors in nineteen fifty, the
Speaker 3: Kaplan Jewish Community Center. The clearest account of the next
Speaker 3: phase of Frank's life comes from an essay written in
Speaker 3: twenty nineteen by a retired Rhodesian military policeman. Despite being
Speaker 3: the most likely to be more or less true, it's
Speaker 3: still riddled with obvious factual inaccuracies, things that just can't
Speaker 3: be true. Maybe because it was written as a humorous
Speaker 3: recollection meant to be read by his fellow former Rhodesian soldiers,
Speaker 3: and maybe his memory has faded a bit in the
Speaker 3: nearly fifty years since the event in question. But it
Speaker 3: does at the very least substantiate Frank's own claim about
Speaker 3: having enlisted in the Rhodesian Light Infantry in the early
Speaker 3: nineteen seventies. I'll try to walk the tightrope here of
Speaker 3: providing a little more con text than just Rhodesia was
Speaker 3: very bad and white supremacist from other countries were obsessed
Speaker 3: with the idea that they could travel there to kill
Speaker 3: black people with impunity, while still stopping short of taking
Speaker 3: us down the long road of the history and consequences
Speaker 3: of European colonization in Africa. That's far from my area
Speaker 3: of expertise, and it's not why you're here.
Speaker 1: Now.
Speaker 3: Even if you're coming into this with a completely blank slate.
Speaker 3: For some reason, you're probably thinking, there's no country called Rhodesia,
Speaker 3: and you're right, there isn't. There never really was. Rhodesia
Speaker 3: was never recognized as a sovereign state, but we're calling
Speaker 3: Rhodesia here as the present day state of Zimbabwe in
Speaker 3: southern Africa. In the early twentieth century, Rhodesia was a
Speaker 3: British territory. The legacy of Cecil Roads is British South
Speaker 3: Africa Company. The area was effectively ruled by the company
Speaker 3: until the nineteen twenties, when it became a self governing
Speaker 3: colony of the UK, and by the nineteen fifties, decolonization
Speaker 3: was happening all across the African continent. These fading European
Speaker 3: empires couldn't or didn't want to hold on to all
Speaker 3: the colonies they'd collected during the previous centuries scramble for Africa.
Speaker 3: In nineteen sixty British Prime Minister Harold macmillan gave his
Speaker 3: Wind of Change speech in an address to the South
Speaker 3: African Parliament about the political necessity of moving toward decolonization.
Speaker 5: The wind of change is blowing through this continent.
Speaker 2: Whether we like it or not.
Speaker 5: This growth national consciousness is a political fact, and we
Speaker 5: was all accepted as a fact. Our national policies must
Speaker 5: take a contribute.
Speaker 3: He'd actually given the same speech a few weeks earlier
Speaker 3: in Ghana, but the press didn't pick it up the
Speaker 3: first time, and I think the whether we like it
Speaker 3: or not part of that statement matters a lot.
Speaker 1: Here.
Speaker 3: He wasn't advocating for decolonization out of the goodness of
Speaker 3: his heart. He was reluctantly acknowledging the expensive and bloody
Speaker 3: political reality of trying to hold on to these colonies
Speaker 3: at any cost. He could see the Belgians and Congo
Speaker 3: and the French in Algeria fighting these costly wars with
Speaker 3: Africans who wanted an end to European colonial rule, and
Speaker 3: as they worked towards extricating themselves from these colonial arrangements,
Speaker 3: the British government adopted a policy called no independence before
Speaker 3: majority rule, meaning they wouldn't hand over sovereignty to a
Speaker 3: colony still run exclusively by the white colonial minority. Now, obviously,
Speaker 3: this is an immensely complicated bit of political history that
Speaker 3: I'm stripping down to the studs and explaining badly so
Speaker 3: we get through it quickly. So don't think I'm giving
Speaker 3: the British Empire any kind of credit here. This policy
Speaker 3: did not arise out of a genuine desire to undo
Speaker 3: the harms of colonialism and address racism or anything like that.
Speaker 1: That was not on their minds.
Speaker 3: But I think they knew what it would look like
Speaker 3: if their decolonization looked exactly like their colony. And we're
Speaker 3: not talking about a pr lass here.
Speaker 1: This is the Cold War.
Speaker 3: They don't want to give the Soviets an opportunity to
Speaker 3: come in behind them.
Speaker 1: But it was this.
Speaker 3: Policy, or rather defiance of it, that led Rhodesia under
Speaker 3: Ian Smith, to make the unilateral declaration of independence in
Speaker 3: nineteen sixty five. White colonists made up just five percent
Speaker 3: of the population of the territory, but they were unwilling
Speaker 3: to accept that the UK would only grant Rhodesian independence
Speaker 3: if they shared even a crumb of political power with
Speaker 3: the other ninety five percent of Rhodesians. And apologies again
Speaker 3: for these digressions. I just love the context. I think
Speaker 3: it's so important. But that brings us to where we
Speaker 3: were going. The Rhodesian bush War a fifteen year period
Speaker 3: of civil conflict between the white minority led government and
Speaker 3: the African nationalist guerrilla forces. The number of foreign mercenaries
Speaker 3: who actually traveled to Rhodesia during the war remains up
Speaker 3: for debate. Most of the countries the mercenaries came from
Speaker 3: were embarrassed by the whole affair. International sanctions levied against
Speaker 3: the territory after the illegal declaration of independence made it
Speaker 3: illegal for citizens of many countries to participate in the conflict,
Speaker 3: even in countries that didn't have their own domestic laws
Speaker 3: banning mercenary activity. And there was some discomfort within Rhodesia
Speaker 3: too about this perception that they needed foreigners to help
Speaker 3: with what they saw as their war for independence. So,
Speaker 3: for deeply unflattering and regrettable reasons, no one was very
Speaker 3: invested in getting a thorough accounting of the situation. Right,
Speaker 3: Nobody benefits from knowing what happened here. But at the
Speaker 3: high end it was really only a few thousand mercenaries
Speaker 3: over the total course of the conflict, with best estimates
Speaker 3: for the number of them who were Americans being somewhere
Speaker 3: in the low hundreds. So a lot of guys talked
Speaker 3: about it, but not very many of them actually did it.
Speaker 3: This idea of American extremists traveling to Africa to violently
Speaker 3: enforce white rule over black Africans is one that modern
Speaker 3: white supremacists still cherish and celebrate. Dylan Rufe, who was
Speaker 3: welcomed with open arms at an evening Bible study at
Speaker 3: a manual African Methodist Episcopal church in Charleston, South Carolina,
Speaker 3: registered the domain last Rhodesian dot com a few months
Speaker 3: before he murdered nine of the parishioners who thought he
Speaker 3: was joining them for prayer that night. Rufe made his
Speaker 3: final edit to that site his digital manifesto, just hours
Speaker 3: before carrying out that attack. In twenty fifteen, the cultural
Speaker 3: moment where magazines like Soldier of Fortune ran full page
Speaker 3: advertisements for opportunities to be a man among men in
Speaker 3: the African bush looms large in our memories, but the
Speaker 3: reality is there weren't many men who actually heeded the call,
Speaker 3: and their role in the conflict was insignificant. But unlike
Speaker 3: many of those Americans who did end up in Rhodesia
Speaker 3: in this seventies, Frank Sweeney didn't see an advertisement and
Speaker 3: Soldier of Fortune. That magazine's first issue, bearing a cover
Speaker 3: story about American mercenaries in Africa, was published in the
Speaker 3: summer of nineteen seventy five, just as Frank Sweeney was
Speaker 3: already on his way home. According to Frank, which is
Speaker 3: a dangerous way to start an assertion of fact. He
Speaker 3: walked into the Rhodesian Information Center in Washington, d C.
Speaker 3: In nineteen seventy two and asked how to join up.
Speaker 3: The information center was not technically a diplomatic office because
Speaker 3: Rhodesia was not technically a country, the fact that would
Speaker 3: get them into some trouble in Australia, but they claimed
Speaker 3: that they were just offering information about tourism. Frank says
Speaker 3: he was offered the contact information for Major Nick Lamprecht,
Speaker 3: the Rhodesian Army's chief recruiter. David Annibl, a reporter for
Speaker 3: the Christian Science Monitor, who interviewed Frank in nineteen seventy
Speaker 3: five wrote that he'd spoken to another recent visitor to
Speaker 3: that office. After talking to Frank, this visitor walked into
Speaker 3: the office and was given a brochure printed by the
Speaker 3: Rhodesian Department of Labor about careers in Rhodesia, and after
Speaker 3: a thirty minute presentation about Americans already fighting in the
Speaker 3: conflict and the pay and benefits a mercenary could expect,
Speaker 3: including paid airfare, all violations of international sanctions in US
Speaker 3: federal law, the visitor was offered Major Lamprek's contact information
Speaker 3: That recruiter Nick Lamprek worked closely with Soldier of Fortune
Speaker 3: founder Robert K. Brown to strategize how the magazine can
Speaker 3: be used to convince more Americans to make the trip.
Speaker 3: In the latter years of the conflict, Lampreck himself even
Speaker 3: wrote an article for the magazine promising young American Soldiers
Speaker 3: of Fortune that it would be easy for them to
Speaker 3: find a beautiful white Rhodesian wife. I think Lamprek knew
Speaker 3: he was lying about how much fun you could have
Speaker 3: fighting in the Bush War. His own son, Vincent, had
Speaker 3: already fled to South Africa to avoid military service. In
Speaker 3: what you maybe sends is a theme here. The details
Speaker 3: of frank service in Rhodesia are a little murky.
Speaker 1: The details of.
Speaker 3: A lot of what was going on in Rhodesia during
Speaker 3: those years is not totally settled, and Frank's own involvement
Speaker 3: far less so. He told reporter David Annibal in that
Speaker 3: nineteen seventy five interview that as a corporal in the
Speaker 3: Rhodesian Light Infantry, his detachment had taken many prisoners, but
Speaker 3: when instructed to do so, they just executed people, saying
Speaker 3: we shot him right there in the bush when we
Speaker 3: were told not to take prisoners. He also admitted that
Speaker 3: his unit had taken part in raids over the border
Speaker 3: into neighboring Mozambique. He claimed that sometimes these trips over
Speaker 3: the border were to assist Portuguese troops, and until late
Speaker 3: nineteen seventy four, Portuguese troops were in Mozambique fighting to
Speaker 3: put down the Mozambiquan War of Independence, and Frank said
Speaker 3: sometimes they'd go over the border to raid gorilla camps,
Speaker 3: perhaps those belonging to the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army,
Speaker 3: which had strong ties to the group's fight for independence
Speaker 3: In Mozambique. These Rhodesian raids over the border into Mozambique
Speaker 3: continued even after that nation gain sovereignty in nineteen seventy five.
Speaker 3: But it's hard to pin down when Frank would have
Speaker 3: been doing this, if he even did. I can at
Speaker 3: least say that Frank was no longer in Rhodesia. During
Speaker 3: one of the war's worst atrocities, a Rhodesian raid on
Speaker 3: a refugee camp in Mozambique killed over one thousand civilians.
Speaker 3: David Animal published a couple of articles in nineteen seventy
Speaker 3: five in nineteen seventy six about Rhodesia, and he often
Speaker 3: quoted Frank Sweeney about his time there.
Speaker 1: After all, there weren't.
Speaker 3: Many Americans who'd been there, and even fewer who were
Speaker 3: easy to find, and Frank was easy to find. He
Speaker 3: was very public about his stint as a mercenary. After
Speaker 3: returning home in nineteen seventy five, Frank placed ads in
Speaker 3: magazines like Shotgun News and Gun Week that read.
Speaker 6: The Rhodesian Army offers excitement and adventure. I know I've
Speaker 6: been there. Young Americans of European ancestry, write to me
Speaker 6: for free. Details pertaining to recruiting. Frank Abbott Sweeney seven
Speaker 6: to two Creston Avenue, Tenafly, New Jersey, zero seven six
Speaker 6: seven zero.
Speaker 3: When speaking with the reporter about his efforts to recruit
Speaker 3: others to make the trip, Frank spoke warmly of Major
Speaker 3: Lamprecht and claimed that it was Lamprecked himself who instructed
Speaker 3: Frank to get in touch with as many white applicants
Speaker 3: as possible, which is honestly probably not true, but who knows.
Speaker 3: Frank is described as a fan of Ian Smith, of
Speaker 3: white superiority and of the need to defend both, and
Speaker 3: is quoted as saying, if I could do anything to
Speaker 3: preserve Western civilization in the area, I would do it.
Speaker 3: Frank told Annabel that he'd received hundreds of letters in
Speaker 3: response to his ads and responded to all of them.
Speaker 3: But then again, he also told Annabel he was a
Speaker 3: college graduate, and you know that's not true. An animal
Speaker 3: claims Frank showed him his discharge papers from the Rhodesian
Speaker 3: Light Infantry, which were quote in order according to the article,
Speaker 3: and showed three years of good service and a rank
Speaker 3: of corporal, And that's definitely not true. I'm sure Frank
Speaker 3: did show Annimal something. He probably did show him papers
Speaker 3: that indicated as much, and I don't fault him for
Speaker 3: reporting it. It turns out Frank was quite skilled at forgery.
Speaker 3: Frank claims he was in Washington, d c. Getting recruited
Speaker 3: into the Rhodesian Army in nineteen seventy two, but he
Speaker 3: may have actually still been in prison in nineteen seventy two.
Speaker 1: For shooting that cop.
Speaker 3: It's hard to pin down exactly when he was released.
Speaker 3: One newspaper article years later puts his parole date for
Speaker 3: that conviction at nineteen seventy four, but I have a
Speaker 3: bad feeling that was just a reporter on a deadline
Speaker 3: who did the math on a six year sentence and
Speaker 3: assumed Frank served all of it, which probably didn't. When
Speaker 3: Frank was later arrested for his role in the escape
Speaker 3: of a Soviet spy, an FBI agent puts his date
Speaker 3: of enlistment at nineteen seventy three, So the truth is
Speaker 3: in there somewhere.
Speaker 1: Either way.
Speaker 3: He wasn't in Rhodesia for very long before he really
Speaker 3: really wanted to go home. A war as hell for everybody.
Speaker 3: And here we have another unreliable narrator, Anthony Hickman, Hickman
Speaker 3: is a retired officer in the British South Africa Police,
Speaker 3: which no longer exists and confusingly was neither British nor
Speaker 3: South African, and they weren't always really just police, but
Speaker 3: it bore that name because it grew out of the
Speaker 3: paramilitary force run directly by Cecil Rhodes's British South Africa
Speaker 3: Company in the nineteenth century. The BSAP was Rhodesia's regular
Speaker 3: police force, but the line between regular policing and military
Speaker 3: operations was blurry, and during the Bush War there were
Speaker 3: military units made up of BSAP officers and they developed
Speaker 3: counterinsurgency and counter terrorism units. They oversaw the intelligence gathering
Speaker 3: arm of the infamously brutal Selu Scouts, and they killed
Speaker 3: hundreds of people by introducing poisoned food and medicine into
Speaker 3: the supply lines for the insurgent forces. I don't know
Speaker 3: exactly what Hickman was doing for most of the war.
Speaker 3: Maybe he didn't do any of that, But these days
Speaker 3: he's retired in Johannesburg, South Africa and makes detailed models
Speaker 3: of trains and farmhouses. In the early nineteen seventies, he
Speaker 3: was assigned to the Homicide Unit of bsap's Criminal Investigative Division,
Speaker 3: and in twenty nineteen he wrote down his recollections of
Speaker 3: Frank Sweeney for a newsletter published by his Veterans Association.
Speaker 3: Like any account of Frank's life, Hickman's essay can't be
Speaker 3: taken as gospel truth between the lies Frank told him
Speaker 3: and his own fading memory of the seventies.
Speaker 1: It's not perfect.
Speaker 3: Honestly, I almost discarded it without reading past the first page.
Speaker 3: Who's off to a pretty bad start when the first
Speaker 3: paragraph placed these events in September of nineteen seventy seven,
Speaker 3: which would, of course be entirely impossible. Frank could not
Speaker 3: have been in a Rhodesian Army barracks in September of
Speaker 3: nineteen seventy seven, because according to the US Marshalls.
Speaker 1: The FBI, the DOJ, the CIA.
Speaker 3: In the New York Times, Frank was hanging out with
Speaker 3: a Soviet spy in the exercise yard at a federal
Speaker 3: prison in Los Angeles in September of nineteen seventy seven.
Speaker 3: But I'll cut Hickman some slack here on that faltering start,
Speaker 3: because there's ample evidence within the story that puts these
Speaker 3: events somewhere in the springtime of nineteen seventy five, and
Speaker 3: the data side there is enough meat to Hickman's account
Speaker 3: and the supporting primary documentation he provided that supports the
Speaker 3: idea that the story is.
Speaker 1: More or less true.
Speaker 3: As a homicide detective, Hickman was involved in an investigation
Speaker 3: into Frank Sweeney for attempted murder at a Rhodesian military barracks.
Speaker 3: One evening sometime in early nineteen seventy five, probably Frank,
Speaker 3: went to the bathroom at the barracks he was living in.
Speaker 3: Inside the shared facilities, two infantrymen who had been drinking
Speaker 3: were laughing and joking around. One was quite drunk, undressed
Speaker 3: and got into the shower to try to sober up
Speaker 3: a little bit. Three men were chatting pleasantly enough, but
Speaker 3: Frank was humorless and sober, and he was outraged when
Speaker 3: the drunk man splashed shower.
Speaker 1: Water on him.
Speaker 3: The men argued, and one of them called Frank a
Speaker 3: bloody yank. And Frank's not a guy who turns the
Speaker 3: other cheek. He takes every insult very personally. So a
Speaker 3: little bit damp and with his pride wounded, he runs
Speaker 3: back to his bunk and comes right back with a
Speaker 3: seven inch dagger and pulls the shower curtain aside and
Speaker 3: stabs this aked drunk man in the lower abdomen. The
Speaker 3: other soldier ran for help and Frank was quickly arrested,
Speaker 3: and while he sat in custody, a mysterious letter arrived
Speaker 3: in the mail. The postmark indicated that it had been
Speaker 3: mailed from nearby Salisbury weeks earlier. The anonymous letter writer
Speaker 3: said that a private Fa Sweeney had been convicted of
Speaker 3: the attempted murder of a policeman in the United States.
Speaker 3: It was Hickman, our essayist, who first suspected that Frank
Speaker 3: may actually have written this letter himself, and when he
Speaker 3: pressed Frank for a handwriting sample to prove it, he
Speaker 3: cracked immediately.
Speaker 1: He'd sent the letter himself, hoping that.
Speaker 3: It would be his ticket home, that they would kick
Speaker 3: him out and deport him when they found out he
Speaker 3: lied about not having a criminal history, and that he
Speaker 3: would get a free flight back to New Jersey without
Speaker 3: having to finish his term of service.
Speaker 1: And if that letter had.
Speaker 3: Only arrived a few days earlier, they probably would have
Speaker 3: done just that before anybody had to get stabbed. The story,
Speaker 3: Frank then told Hickman has elements of truth, but it's
Speaker 3: not quite right. He told Hickman that the shootout at
Speaker 3: his parents' house had happened just the year prior, and
Speaker 3: that he'd fled the country prior to being sentenced. So
Speaker 3: he's cutting out this six year period that he spent
Speaker 3: in prison for the shooting and pretending that he had
Speaker 3: just arrived there in Rhodesia immediately after the events that
Speaker 3: we know took place in July of nineteen sixty seven.
Speaker 3: And the timeline isn't the only thing that's off in
Speaker 3: this version. Frank says the shootout only lasted ten minutes,
Speaker 3: not over an hour, and he had decided to end
Speaker 3: the incident on his own terms when he saw that
Speaker 3: his father had arrived, rather than the truth, which was
Speaker 3: that he argued with his distraught father for an hour
Speaker 3: while continuing to shoot through the windows until he was
Speaker 3: smoked out by tear gas. But the inciting incident in
Speaker 3: this version is similar. He told Hickman about shooting guns
Speaker 3: in the woods and the neighbors reporting the noise and
Speaker 3: the officer arriving in the car chase, but he claimed
Speaker 3: the gun he was shooting in the woods was one
Speaker 3: he purchased from an advertisement and soldier of Fortune magazine,
Speaker 3: which is obviously not possible because that magazine didn't exist
Speaker 3: in nineteen sixty seven. I don't know, maybe he was
Speaker 3: just updating the story so it would sound more current.
Speaker 3: But Frank said he'd purchased the Tommy gun from the magazine,
Speaker 3: but it was missing some parts. It didn't have a
Speaker 3: firing pin and something else, so it didn't work. He
Speaker 3: manufactured the necessary replacement parts, but he was concerned that
Speaker 3: in his modification of the weapon maybe things weren't one
Speaker 3: hundred percent and he was worried that it would explode
Speaker 3: when fired, so he lashed it to a tree and
Speaker 3: set it to fully automatic and rigged a string to
Speaker 3: the trigger and hid behind another tree for cover.
Speaker 1: This sounds so Looney.
Speaker 3: Tunes to me, like a literal Looney Tunes cartoon, right,
Speaker 3: This is this is daffy duck behavior. But he tells
Speaker 3: this story to Hickman, and in his essay Hickman writes
Speaker 3: true or false, impossible to believe. Sweeney had the uncanny
Speaker 3: ability to sound totally convincing. But it is significant to
Speaker 3: note that a search undertaken based on Sweeney's fingerprint, records
Speaker 3: revealed no such incident, which doesn't say much for the
Speaker 3: state of Rhodesian intelligence, because, yeah, Frank's taking a little
Speaker 3: creative license here. The story he's telling is not one
Speaker 3: hundred percent true, but he is admitting to almost all
Speaker 3: of the real details for the real crime he really
Speaker 3: did go to prison for.
Speaker 1: So you you probably should.
Speaker 3: Have figured that out before he told you, and you
Speaker 3: definitely should have been able to figure.
Speaker 1: It out after he told you.
Speaker 3: They could have contacted a police department or a courthouse
Speaker 3: in New Jersey and just asked, Hell, they probably could
Speaker 3: have called any resident of ten to fly New Jersey
Speaker 3: at random and just asked, do you remember the teenage
Speaker 3: Nazi bank robber who shot a cop in his mom's
Speaker 3: front yard. It's kind of a small town. I bet
Speaker 3: everybody remembered. But I guess they didn't do that. They
Speaker 3: weren't even a real country, so maybe they didn't have
Speaker 3: a guy who knew how to do a background check.
Speaker 3: The Rhodesian police continued to hold Frank in custody, and
Speaker 3: while he was waiting to find out if they were
Speaker 3: going to try him for attempted murder got some mail
Speaker 3: an envelope containing two United States passports and three hundred
Speaker 3: dollars in cash. Both passports bore Frank's photo in Frank's
Speaker 3: birth date, but only one had Frank's name on it.
Speaker 3: The other was for Francis august Schellhammer, a man who
Speaker 3: doesn't exist. He explained to the officers that he was
Speaker 3: quite good at making such things, and even offered to
Speaker 3: forge a pair of US passports for Hickman and the
Speaker 3: other detective. Hickman says that they declined the offer. Remarkably,
Speaker 3: the Rhodesian government opted to drop the charges and just
Speaker 3: send Frank home. Can you court martial a mercenary?
Speaker 1: I don't.
Speaker 3: That's not something I've ever needed to wonder about. I
Speaker 3: don't know really what the options were here, but it
Speaker 3: wasn't worth it to them. They sent him home, So
Speaker 3: sometime in the summer of nineteen seventy five, Frank Sweeney
Speaker 3: was kicked out at the Rhodesian Light Infantry and deported
Speaker 3: from Rhodesia. He got his free flight home after all,
Speaker 3: and was permanently banned from a country that never existed.
Speaker 3: Shortly after he got home to New Jersey, he wrote
Speaker 3: a letter to Hickman. Frank's mother had mailed him some
Speaker 3: more cash before all this trouble got started, and it
Speaker 3: arrived in Rhodesia after he was already gone, and he
Speaker 3: wanted Hickman to put it back in the mail for him.
Speaker 3: His letter, which Hickman has actually held on to all
Speaker 3: these years, is dated August twenty second.
Speaker 1: Nineteen seventy five.
Speaker 3: So if he's already home and realizing his mail is missing,
Speaker 3: and writing the letter in August of seventy five, that
Speaker 3: all the events before that happened earlier in nineteen seventy five,
Speaker 3: you get it. In addition to asking Hickman to mail
Speaker 3: back the money from his mother, Frank tells the investigator
Speaker 3: that life in America is loathsome compared to the time
Speaker 3: he spent in Rhodesia.
Speaker 6: It's one big racial cessfool where the worst element is
Speaker 6: looked on and held in high esteem. With my RLI
Speaker 6: training to back me up, I have seriously thought of
Speaker 6: forming my own anti terrorism unit here in the land
Speaker 6: of the Red, White, and Blue. The real problem is
Speaker 6: finding enough devoted men to form a small cadre. If
Speaker 6: you ever do visit America, I would genuinely enjoy meeting
Speaker 6: with you again, and I'm sure my family would like
Speaker 6: to meet you too. Even though my service in the
Speaker 6: military was cut short, loyalty to Rhodesa remains as strong
Speaker 6: as ever.
Speaker 3: So now he's back in the United States, and this
Speaker 3: is during the same time period that he's placing those
Speaker 3: ads in gun magazines to recruit other Rhodesian mercenaries. He's
Speaker 3: also placing some other classified ads. So he's engaging in
Speaker 3: this federal crime of recruiting foreign mercenaries using his own
Speaker 3: legal name and his parents' address. That's not a problem.
Speaker 3: The United States government had no real appetite for enforcing
Speaker 3: the statute prohibiting him from recruiting people into a foreign army.
Speaker 3: But when he placed ads offering four MP forty Schmeiser
Speaker 3: submachine guns for sale, he didn't use his own name.
Speaker 3: He used the name Francis August Shellhammer, the name from
Speaker 3: the forged passport, and he listed a commercial address in
Speaker 3: Fort Lee, New Jersey. It seems Frank never actually had
Speaker 3: these Nazi submachine guns, but he did collect the money
Speaker 3: by many interested collectors who thought they were buying these
Speaker 3: imaginary guns. It seems like a great hack to make
Speaker 3: free money, but unfortunately for Frank, that is mail fraud.
Speaker 3: So in March of nineteen seventy six, he's being interviewed
Speaker 3: by a reporter from the La Times, and he's telling
Speaker 3: this reporter he's enjoyed his time in Rhodesia so much
Speaker 3: that he's actually planning to move back to South Africa.
Speaker 1: In just a few weeks. Notice.
Speaker 3: He's moving to South Africa, not Rhodesia because he is
Speaker 3: not allowed in Rhodesia, but he's planning this big move.
Speaker 3: He's telling this reporter about it. He's bragging about his
Speaker 3: time in Rhodesia. But at the same time, in March
Speaker 3: of nineteen seventy six, he's also entering a guilty plead
Speaker 3: to that federal mail fraud charge. The La Times article,
Speaker 3: which doesn't make any mention of his former or current
Speaker 3: criminal charges, does say that Frank said that he'd recently
Speaker 3: been visited by the FBI, and Frank says they came
Speaker 3: to his house to try to pressure him to provide
Speaker 3: information about other mercenaries. It seems a little more likely
Speaker 3: that he's a compulsive liar who got a thrill out
Speaker 3: of working in this kernel of truth because the FBI
Speaker 3: had just been to his house, that part's true, but
Speaker 3: they were there to arrest him for mail fraud, but
Speaker 3: he wasn't lying about his plans for an upcoming move.
Speaker 3: After pleading guilty to the mail fraud charge, he skipped
Speaker 3: out on his sentencing hearing. He packed his bags and
Speaker 3: he caught a flight to Johannesburg, but South Africa sent
Speaker 3: him right back and he was arrested by US marshals
Speaker 3: as he was getting off the plane at JFK in
Speaker 3: June of nineteen seventy six. And while marshals were arresting him,
Speaker 3: his suitcase was loaded off the plane and it went
Speaker 3: through customs without him. Customs officials seized a nine millimeters
Speaker 3: Luguar pistol because he lacked the proper paperwork to bring
Speaker 3: the firearm into the US from a foreign country, and inexplicably,
Speaker 3: there were no additional charges brought for any of that.
Speaker 3: He wasn't supposed to have a gun at all, and
Speaker 3: he certainly wasn't supposed to try to flee the continent
Speaker 3: while awaiting sentencing for a federal crime. I know the
Speaker 3: seventies were a different time, and it wasn't a big deal.
Speaker 1: To bring a gun to.
Speaker 3: The airport, but fleeing the country to avoid going to
Speaker 3: prison is always been illegal.
Speaker 1: I'm pretty sure of it.
Speaker 3: I found a couple of cheeky little articles written a
Speaker 3: few years later about how the government ended up accidentally
Speaker 3: giving him that gun back. It was seized by customs
Speaker 3: and put into storage while he was in prison, and
Speaker 3: when he got out of prison, he wrote to the
Speaker 3: Customs office in New York to inquire about it, and
Speaker 3: they told him they'd return his property if he paid
Speaker 3: a two hundred and forty four dollars storage fee. I
Speaker 3: don't know what that comes out to per month for
Speaker 3: the four years he was in prison, but that seems steep,
Speaker 3: and so Frank claims he walked right into the Customs
Speaker 3: office inside the World Trade Center in May of nineteen eighty,
Speaker 3: paid the fee, failed out a form, and they gave
Speaker 3: him back his gun. A spokesman for the US Customs
Speaker 3: Service said they had no way of knowing he was
Speaker 3: a felon. Frank said it was all just a half
Speaker 3: hearted joke, telling a reporter all I really wanted to
Speaker 3: do was test the gun laws to show there really
Speaker 3: is a need for federal gun legislation. The Feds are
Speaker 3: giving criminals like me are guns back in New York
Speaker 3: City just for the asking. Federal gun laws are versical.
Speaker 3: You know, he's not a great guy, but he does
Speaker 3: have some quips. You know, he's just out there doing bits.
Speaker 3: And he ended up handing the gun back over to
Speaker 3: the ATF without incident. A few months later, but back
Speaker 3: to the mail fraud. He got the four years for
Speaker 3: the mail fraud and was sent to federal prison. And
Speaker 3: it was in prison this time around that Frank would
Speaker 3: meet Christopher Boyce, a young defense contractor who'd recently been
Speaker 3: convicted of espionage in nineteen seventy four. A twenty one
Speaker 3: year old college dropout, and Christopher Boyce got a job
Speaker 3: at TRW, an aerospace company with a lot of government contracts.
Speaker 3: He wasn't really qualified for the role, having never worked
Speaker 3: in an office before, but he.
Speaker 1: Started as a low level clerk.
Speaker 3: It helped that his retired FBI agent father was the
Speaker 3: head of security at McDonald Douglas, another aerospace and defense
Speaker 3: contracting company, and he had connections at TRW. But TRW
Speaker 3: didn't just make satellites and jet engines. In his own
Speaker 3: later testimony before a Congressional committee, Boyce described the company
Speaker 3: as a CIA contractor, something he'd had no idea about
Speaker 3: before his promotion to a highly sensitive position working on
Speaker 3: special projects from inside the company's black vault and with
Speaker 3: a top secret CIA clearance, Boyce had access to the
Speaker 3: company's encrypted teletype connection with Langley. On at least a
Speaker 3: dozen occasions, he removed documents from the vault and photographed them.
Speaker 3: On at least six occasions, he photographed documents inside the
Speaker 3: VAULTA told Congress. Obviously, neither the government's clearance procedures nor
Speaker 3: the company's security procedures worked very well, I'll say. In
Speaker 3: his new position inside the vault, Boyce monitored satellite communications
Speaker 3: between the CIA, his employer TRW, and other CIA contacts
Speaker 3: around the world. In his congressional testimony, Boyce describes a
Speaker 3: shockingly lax approach to security for this allegedly super secure
Speaker 3: black vault. He would come back to work late at
Speaker 3: night to return the documents he'd stolen, and no one
Speaker 3: questioned why a junior employee was opening the vault at
Speaker 3: four am. He made deliveries to secure CIA sites without
Speaker 3: having the proper clearance to enter them, and on one occasion,
Speaker 3: he wandered into a CIA code room, picked up a
Speaker 3: clipboard and was flipping through the pages before someone politely
Speaker 3: asked him to leave. Employees in the vault were supposed
Speaker 3: to destroy the code cards used in the teletype machine
Speaker 3: at the end of each workday. Boyce says they just
Speaker 3: tossed the cards in a canvas bag in the corner,
Speaker 3: and they used the document destruction blender to make my
Speaker 3: ties with the Bacardi that they kept hidden behind the
Speaker 3: cryptography machines.
Speaker 1: He claims it was common.
Speaker 3: For the vault to receive transmissions from Langley that weren't
Speaker 3: actually meant for them, misdirected communications, these CIA cables that
Speaker 3: had nothing to do with TRW or their work with
Speaker 3: the agency, but no one really cared, and there was
Speaker 3: no clear accountability process for ensuring that these top secret
Speaker 3: CIA documents that had been sent to them by mistake
Speaker 3: were actually destroyed. And these are the documents that Boyce stole. Okay,
Speaker 3: I know Frank's not even in this part, but I
Speaker 3: have to tell you just a little bit about the
Speaker 3: nineteen seventy five constitutional crisis in Australia. I know, I know,
Speaker 3: this is an even more egregious digression than the history
Speaker 3: of Rhodesia. But look at the show art. It's not
Speaker 3: just cool to look at. We are living on my
Speaker 3: red string board, and I've got to put this pushpin
Speaker 3: in somewhere.
Speaker 4: Now.
Speaker 3: I know even less about Australia that I know about
Speaker 3: the decolonization of Africa in the twentieth century, which is
Speaker 3: to say, like not very much. I think they still
Speaker 3: have the Queen. I guess it's the king.
Speaker 1: Now.
Speaker 3: Did they have to print new money after the queen died?
Speaker 3: It doesn't matter, It doesn't matter.
Speaker 1: But I was.
Speaker 3: Delighted to discover that CIA meddling in an Australian political
Speaker 3: crisis was even a possibility. How intriguing, you know. I
Speaker 3: know they like to keep it south of the equator,
Speaker 3: but I thought that was just a Western Hemisphere thing.
Speaker 1: Now.
Speaker 3: Of course, of course, the United States government maintains that
Speaker 3: the CIA had no role in pushing Prime Minister GoF
Speaker 3: Whitlam out of office in nineteen seventy five, but Christopher
Speaker 3: Boyce went to prison claiming otherwise. In the seventies, GoF
Speaker 3: Whitlam was the head of the Australian Labor Party and
Speaker 3: his administration was fairly socially progressive. He was also considering
Speaker 3: closing Pine Gap, a US signals intelligence surveillance base in
Speaker 3: central Australia run by the CIA. In nineteen seventy five,
Speaker 3: the opposition party, which controlled the Senate deferred the passage
Speaker 3: of an appropriations bill.
Speaker 1: I don't know.
Speaker 3: And am not going to find out how the Australian
Speaker 3: government functions. But this sounds like the silly little crisis
Speaker 3: we seem to have every year where someone refuses to
Speaker 3: pass the bill that keeps the lights on at the government.
Speaker 3: And Australia's Governor General, John Kerr used the fallout of
Speaker 3: this crisis as a justification to dismiss Whitlam as Prime Minister,
Speaker 3: which is apparently the thing he had the power to do.
Speaker 3: It's like they have a guy that can fire the president.
Speaker 1: I don't know.
Speaker 3: I just not my business what happens in Australia, and
Speaker 3: at the time dismissed allegations of CIA involvement, saying Kerr
Speaker 3: didn't need any encouragement from anybody to fire him. But
Speaker 3: in his memoirs published decades later, he wrote that in
Speaker 3: nineteen seventy seven, President Jimmy Carter sent Warren Christopher, the
Speaker 3: Deputy Secretary of State to Australia, to meet with Whitlam,
Speaker 3: and Christopher told Whitlam that the United States quote would
Speaker 3: never again interfere with Australia's democratic processes, never again, never again.
Speaker 3: And Whitlam's personal secretary backs up this recollection of the
Speaker 3: use of the word again.
Speaker 1: But I'll reiterate.
Speaker 3: The CIA says they were not involved.
Speaker 1: They said they didn't do it.
Speaker 3: All that to say, though, our pot smoking, disaffected college
Speaker 3: dropout who was getting drunk at lunch most days and
Speaker 3: making paper airplanes out of CIA encryption code cards, probably
Speaker 3: didn't know anything about the Australian Senate blocking an appropriations bill.
Speaker 3: But by his account, he did sometimes read those misdirected
Speaker 3: CIA cables that he was supposed to destroy, and some
Speaker 3: of those messages were about a growing desire within the
Speaker 3: CIA to have Whitlam removed from office, referring to the
Speaker 3: Australian Governor General as our manker. So he stole them,
Speaker 3: and instead of going to the press, he and his
Speaker 3: childhood friend, a cocaine dealer named Dalton Lee, decided to
Speaker 3: sell the documents to the Soviets. Lee would take the
Speaker 3: documents down to Mexico and deliver them to the Soviet
Speaker 3: embassy and return with cash which they split.
Speaker 1: And maybe it would have worked.
Speaker 3: Maybe not forever, but would have worked for a while
Speaker 3: if not for a little mistake, a tiny careless act.
Speaker 3: In an absolutely absurd turn of history. Dalton Lee was
Speaker 3: arrested in nineteen seventy seven outside the Soviet ms in
Speaker 3: Mexico City. He wasn't arrested for espionage or drug trafficking,
Speaker 3: two things he was definitely doing. He was arrested by
Speaker 3: Mexican police for littering, but under interrogation about the drugs
Speaker 3: and documents they subsequently found on him, he admitted everything.
Speaker 3: Christopher Boyce was arrested by authorities in the US just
Speaker 3: ten days later, and accounts vary as to whether or
Speaker 3: not Dalton Lee gave boys up. In that initial interview,
Speaker 3: he says he didn't and he probably didn't need to.
Speaker 3: The authorities would have arrived at the conclusion that it
Speaker 3: was boys who had stolen those documents, whether Dalton Lee
Speaker 3: gave him up or not, so you know, we'll never know.
Speaker 3: But this is where Frank comes back. This is where
Speaker 3: Frank reappears in his own story. I haven't forgotten him
Speaker 3: because while all this CIA's skullduggery and Cold War espionage
Speaker 3: is going on, Frank is sitting in a jail cell
Speaker 3: on Terminal Island, a low security federal corrections facility in
Speaker 3: Los Angeles. I can't find a good reason for why
Speaker 3: he would have been transported to a prison in California
Speaker 3: after being arrested in New York, but government inefficiency is
Speaker 3: as likely an explanation as anything else. Christopher Boyce was
Speaker 3: ultimately convicted of eight counts of espionage in nineteen seventy
Speaker 3: seven and sentenced to forty years in prison, and for
Speaker 3: several months in late seventy seven to early seventy eight,
Speaker 3: the two men were on the same cell block at
Speaker 3: Terminal Island. Much has been made of the apparent incongruity
Speaker 3: of Frank, a man who fought as a mercenary against
Speaker 3: communist gorillas, befriending Boyce, a man convicted of aiding the
Speaker 3: Soviet Union, But I don't think either of them had
Speaker 3: a fully formed set of political beliefs at the time.
Speaker 3: Boyce's mother would later say that the two became quite
Speaker 3: close in those months. Frank was for reasons I spent
Speaker 3: way too long unsuccessfully trying to figure out transferred to
Speaker 3: a prison in sometime in early nineteen seventy eight. Boyce
Speaker 3: would eventually be transferred to Lompoc, a prison a few
Speaker 3: hours north of Los Angeles, and in January of nineteen eighty,
Speaker 3: Christopher Boyce escaped from prison. The ensuing manhunt for the
Speaker 3: missing spy would last nearly two years, in part because
Speaker 3: Frank was planting false clues from Cape Town to California
Speaker 3: to lead investigators.
Speaker 1: In the long direction. And that's where I have to
Speaker 1: leave you today.
Speaker 3: I do hope you'll come back next week for the
Speaker 3: second half of Frank's story. There's a serial killer, a
Speaker 3: mob boss, a jailhouse letter from his wife's boyfriend. Frank
Speaker 3: stabs another guy, and for reasons I'm still not a
Speaker 3: hundred percent clear run there were a bunch of snakes.
Speaker 1: Weird little guys. The production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 6: For more from cool Zone.
Speaker 7: Media, visit our website Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us
Speaker 7: out in the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcast.
Speaker 3: I'm so glad you decided to come back for part
Speaker 3: two of the story of Frank Sweeney. If you didn't
Speaker 3: hear part one? You really need to. This isn't the
Speaker 3: kind of story you can pick up midway through. You
Speaker 3: missed a cop getting shot with a machine gun in
Speaker 3: a New Jersey suburb, the Rhodesian bush War, possible CIA
Speaker 3: involvement in an Australian political crisis, and we're just about
Speaker 3: to pick up with.
Speaker 1: Our escaped spy.
Speaker 3: The second forty years of Frank's life are just as
Speaker 3: weird as the first forty. There's a serial killer, a
Speaker 3: mafia trial, two different secret wives, and a lot of
Speaker 3: misuse of the postal service. I'm Molly Conger, and this
Speaker 3: is weird, little guys.
Speaker 7: Now.
Speaker 3: When we left off last week, Frank was making friends
Speaker 3: in prison. His new friend in nineteen seventy eight was
Speaker 3: Christopher Boyce, who had just been convicted of espionage for
Speaker 3: selling documents he stole from his job as a CIA
Speaker 3: contractor to the Soviets, and then he escaped from prison.
Speaker 3: Whether or not Frank was still in custody on the
Speaker 3: day Christopher boyce escape from prison is surprisingly hard to
Speaker 3: pin down. Several newspaper articles about Frank's role in the
Speaker 3: ensuing manhunt for the missing spy put his release a
Speaker 3: month before the escape, but others put it a month after.
Speaker 3: Seems like this detail would really matter, but no one
Speaker 3: seemed very concerned about it. In nineteen eighty, newspapers that
Speaker 3: appeared to be quoting the same unnamed source from the
Speaker 3: US Marshalls published conflicting stories, with some saying Frank flew
Speaker 3: to South Africa shortly before Boyce's escape, and others putting
Speaker 3: that trip slightly after the escape, although both of these
Speaker 3: articles say it was exactly twenty three days before or after.
Speaker 3: But in my frustrated search through forty year old newspapers
Speaker 3: trying to figure out which prison Frank was calling home
Speaker 3: that year, I found another surprise, another stabbing. Shortly after
Speaker 3: Frank was transferred to a state prison in Maine in
Speaker 3: nineteen seventy eight, he stabbed another inmate in the chest
Speaker 3: during an argument in the prison library. And again we
Speaker 3: have this problem that keeps coming up in Frank's life.
Speaker 3: He loves to talk to reporters and he loves to lie.
Speaker 3: It's the seventies. These reporters don't have the Internet, they
Speaker 3: don't have access to electronic court records, so a lot
Speaker 3: of Frank's lies get published when he files a lawsuit
Speaker 3: against the prison warden in Maine about the conditions in
Speaker 3: solitary confinement. Newspapers publish his claim that he was placed
Speaker 3: in solitary for a stabbing he'd been suspected of, but
Speaker 3: he says the investigation cleared him. A local newspaper in
Speaker 3: Bangor Main, however, had a report in the courtroom when
Speaker 3: he entered a guilty.
Speaker 1: Plea to that stabbing.
Speaker 3: But regardless of whether he got out in December of
Speaker 3: seventy nine or February of nineteen eighty, we know Frank
Speaker 3: flew to South Africa soon after he got out, and
Speaker 3: that he stayed there for a couple of months. The
Speaker 3: story of Christopher Boyce's nineteen months on the Lamb is
Speaker 3: long and strange. Sean Penn plays Boyce's friend, the cocaine
Speaker 3: dealer Dalton Lee in the nineteen eighty five film adaptation
Speaker 3: of the book The Falcon and the Snowman about the
Speaker 3: entire affair, I didn't watch it. There's only so much
Speaker 3: I can do. But remember, this is the Cold War.
Speaker 3: A missing Soviet spy is a pretty big pr problem
Speaker 3: for the United States government. There was speculation that the
Speaker 3: KGB had helped him escape. Boyce himself called a reporter
Speaker 3: from a payphone a few months after the escape and
Speaker 3: laughed about the idea that he'd had foreign assistance. He says,
Speaker 3: he just climbed the fence and walked out. The task
Speaker 3: force focused on finding boys believed all along that he'd
Speaker 3: never Actually they left California, and they weren't too far off.
Speaker 3: He was in Idaho the whole time. But a lot
Speaker 3: of resources ended up getting expended pursuing a false lead
Speaker 3: planted by our friend Frank. Now I can't prove Frank
Speaker 3: sent all of these letters himself. I can't even find
Speaker 3: contemporane his reporting where anyone ever outright said that they
Speaker 3: believed Frank sent these letters. And he was never charged
Speaker 3: in connection with his meddling in this investigation. But just
Speaker 3: a few weeks after Boyce went missing, the United States
Speaker 3: Ambassador in South Africa got a letter the postmark indicated
Speaker 3: that had been mailed from within South Africa, and the
Speaker 3: letter said a known mercenary named Shellhammer had assisted the
Speaker 3: convicted American spy Christopher Boyce in entering South Africa by
Speaker 3: way of a fake passport. Now, who do we know
Speaker 3: with a history of forging passports of mailing anonymous letters
Speaker 3: to officials in Southern Africa implicating himself and crimes and
Speaker 3: using the pseudonyme shell Hammer. And he absolutely knew the
Speaker 3: FEDS would tie him to that alias because it was
Speaker 3: the one he had used in those classified ads in
Speaker 3: nineteen seventy six that put him in prison for mail fraud.
Speaker 3: And Frank was in South Africa in February of nineteen
Speaker 3: eighty when that letter was mailed. It seems he wanted
Speaker 3: the authorities to know he was involved. Why else would
Speaker 3: he write his own pseudonym into the story. So FEDS
Speaker 3: quickly turned their attention to Frank. They placed a tracking
Speaker 3: beacon on his car. They followed him for months, and
Speaker 3: he probably knew he.
Speaker 1: Was being followed.
Speaker 3: They followed him from his home in New Jersey all
Speaker 3: the way out to California, and from a California motel,
Speaker 3: he made several phone calls to an apartment in Hermosa Beach,
Speaker 3: and when they searched that apartment they found it abandoned.
Speaker 3: But they found several letters that Frank had sent to
Speaker 3: a third man, another friend of theirs, from prison, one
Speaker 3: of which read somehow They discovered that I helped him
Speaker 3: get into South Africa. I suspect an informer has been
Speaker 3: at work, but there was no informer. Frank wanted them
Speaker 3: to find those letters, and Boyce was never in South Africa.
Speaker 3: The only reason anyone thought Boyce might be in South
Speaker 3: Africa is because Frank was planting false clues all over
Speaker 3: the world.
Speaker 1: To point them as far away.
Speaker 3: As possible from a little hunting cabin in the mountains
Speaker 3: of Idaho. US Marshalls eventually got frustrated following Frank around.
Speaker 3: A federal prosecutor would actually say an open court that
Speaker 3: Frank's arrest in July of nineteen eighty one was specifically
Speaker 3: intended to give them leverage to make him cooperate in
Speaker 3: the boy's case. It seemed like he knew something and
Speaker 3: they wanted to know what it was. As a felon,
Speaker 3: Frank wasn't allowed to have any guns, and of course
Speaker 3: Frank had guns. Did find one newspaper article that wrapped
Speaker 3: a sort of suspicious sounding hint that they only picked
Speaker 3: Frank up for that gun charge because of an anonymous tip,
Speaker 3: so maybe that.
Speaker 1: Was him too.
Speaker 3: But they picked him up in New Jersey at the
Speaker 3: end of July, and he pretended to be very co operative,
Speaker 3: telling them that he actually had some documents that would
Speaker 3: leave them straight to boys and he would happily show
Speaker 3: them to them. He voluntarily turned over the key to
Speaker 3: the bank deposit box he was keeping them in, and
Speaker 3: inside they found several letters to Frank that had been
Speaker 3: mailed from South Africa. Sounds like more red herrings planted
Speaker 3: by Frank. He'd flown to South Africa several times in
Speaker 3: the year and a half since his release and was
Speaker 3: probably mailing himself these letters on those visits. So now
Speaker 3: in August of nineteen eighty one, it seems like there
Speaker 3: could be some evidence that Boyce really was in South Africa.
Speaker 3: Frank says he was promised placement in the Witness Protection
Speaker 3: program for his help, and maybe they did make that
Speaker 3: promise if he really could help them recover their missing spy,
Speaker 3: that's a reasonable enough deal. And just a few weeks
Speaker 3: after all of Frank's help, Boyce was recaptured, but it
Speaker 3: wasn't due in any part to Frank's information. During his
Speaker 3: year and a half on the run, Boyce obviously couldn't
Speaker 3: get a job, so he made money the old fashioned
Speaker 3: way bank robbery. He kept it pretty small time, nothing
Speaker 3: flashy where you get into the vault. Just little stick
Speaker 3: ups a few thousand at a time. From the teller.
Speaker 3: He's tied to at least seventeen bank robberies in Idaho
Speaker 3: and Washington State during that time, eventually teaming up with
Speaker 3: a couple of brothers from Idaho, and it was one
Speaker 3: of those men who turned Boys in for the reward
Speaker 3: money no honor among thieves.
Speaker 1: I guess.
Speaker 3: Boyce was taken back into custody on August twenty first,
Speaker 3: nineteen eighty one, and he wasn't in South Africa.
Speaker 5: Nationwide flight ended for Christopher Boyce here at the pit
Speaker 5: stop drive in at Port Angelus, Washington. He was eating
Speaker 5: a cheeseburger and onion rings when eight federal agents jumped him.
Speaker 5: Boys was apparently living a triple life.
Speaker 1: So Frank lied.
Speaker 3: Obviously, he lied pretty egregiously. He falsified documents. He led
Speaker 3: US marshals and the CIA on an international goose chase,
Speaker 3: and maybe that's why he never got charged for it.
Speaker 3: That's pretty embarrassing to put on the record. But they
Speaker 3: did still have that gun charge they'd picked him up
Speaker 3: on to use his leverage, so they said a sentencing date,
Speaker 3: but Frank didn't show up.
Speaker 1: He was trying to skip the country again.
Speaker 3: Remember back in nineteen seventy six he got all the
Speaker 3: way to South Africa after skipping his sentencing date for
Speaker 3: mail fraud. But this time he was picked up just
Speaker 3: a few days after he missed court when a motel
Speaker 3: clerk in Montvale, New Jersey recognized him. When he was
Speaker 3: finally dragged in for sentencing, the government said they hoped
Speaker 3: Frank was going to be able to help them in
Speaker 3: the boy's case, but nothing he said was of any use.
Speaker 3: Frank said he had no choice but to flee the
Speaker 3: country and start a new life on a cattle ranch
Speaker 3: in Australia with his wife because the government had renegged
Speaker 3: on their deal to put him in witness protection. I
Speaker 3: have to imagine there was some bickering back and forth
Speaker 3: between an indignant Frank and an exasperated federal prosecutor, because
Speaker 3: in the end, Judge H. Curtis Mener said, I have
Speaker 3: neither the time nor the inclination to unravel all of
Speaker 3: the mysteries in this case. However, they'd all ended up
Speaker 3: in his courtroom. Whatever the convoluted backstory is here, this
Speaker 3: is a sentencing or illegal possession of a firearm, and
Speaker 3: that's really all the judge can do that day, so
Speaker 3: he sentenced Frank to four years. Judge Meaner said Frank
Speaker 3: was an explosive type of individual and that he was
Speaker 3: dangerous and mentally sick, and he urged Frank to take
Speaker 3: advantage of the opportunity to get psychiatric help while he
Speaker 3: was in prison this time. And yes, I did say wife.
Speaker 3: When I first started poking around trying to build my
Speaker 3: biographical backstory, to sort of sketch out a skeleton of
Speaker 3: this man's life, I found a new Jersey state record
Speaker 3: for a marriage in August nineteen eighty one between a
Speaker 3: Frank A. Sweeney and aDNA M. Madison in Bergen County.
Speaker 3: There are other men named Frank Sweeney, obviously, but it
Speaker 3: was a middle initial match and it's the right county,
Speaker 3: and it was one of the rare months that Frank
Speaker 3: wasn't in prison. But it didn't seem right, so I
Speaker 3: set it aside. But this offhand mention at his sentencing
Speaker 3: hearing about a wife, sent me back to it.
Speaker 1: It is him.
Speaker 3: After the FEDS picked him up at the end of
Speaker 3: July nineteen eighty one on that gun charge. He was
Speaker 3: released from custody. He was cooperating. He took them to
Speaker 3: the bank to look at his fake evidence. All that,
Speaker 3: and sometime that month he got married. I have no
Speaker 3: idea how they met, or where she came from, or
Speaker 3: what she thought she was going to get out of
Speaker 3: any of this, or if she knew Frank was planning
Speaker 3: on entering witness protection that month, or what on earth
Speaker 3: she saw in this man. But I do know how
Speaker 3: the marriage ended. Frank went back to prison that very
Speaker 3: same year, so they didn't have much time together. I
Speaker 3: don't know where Diana was while Frank was away. But
Speaker 3: by nineteen eighty five, according to a decision by the
Speaker 3: Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, Dana was living in Texas
Speaker 3: with her new boyfriend, Danny Lee Strong. They couldn't have
Speaker 3: known each other very long before moving in together, because
Speaker 3: Strong had only just gotten out of prison again for
Speaker 3: another and a string of pretty run of the mill
Speaker 3: robbery and fraud charges, and they didn't stay together long
Speaker 3: before they were arrested for murdering a man Strong said
Speaker 3: made a pass at Deanna. She was ultimately only convicted
Speaker 3: of stealing the victim's car. Which they fled the scene
Speaker 3: in but Strong got ninety nine years for the brutal
Speaker 3: beating and asphyxiation of Robert Eugene Thomas. Frank doesn't really
Speaker 3: factor into this story. He's in prison in another state
Speaker 3: this whole time, but his name appears in a footnote
Speaker 3: of an appeals court decision upholding Strong's conviction. Strong had
Speaker 3: sent Frank a letter after finding out that Deanna was
Speaker 3: planning to testify against him for the murder. I can't
Speaker 3: imagine what you write in a letter to your girlfriend's
Speaker 3: husband about a situation like this. But all that to say,
Speaker 3: Frank really did have a wife that he planned to
Speaker 3: start a new life with in Australia, but she ended
Speaker 3: up watching her boyfriend choke a man to death in
Speaker 3: an apartment in fort Worth instead. On January ninth, nineteen
Speaker 3: eighty two, the UVA men's basketball team lost to the
Speaker 3: tar Heels in a close game, sixty to sixty five
Speaker 3: at UNC's Carmichael Arena. I'm not a basketball fan, and
Speaker 3: I wasn't born then, but I guess it was an
Speaker 3: exciting game. UNC had knocked Uva out of the Final
Speaker 3: Four the year before, but Joseph Paul Franklin, an avowed
Speaker 3: neo Nazi who'd recently been handed his first couple of
Speaker 3: life sentences for two of his many murders, didn't care
Speaker 3: much for basketball. He was in the wreck room at
Speaker 3: the Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, Missouri, and
Speaker 3: he was trying to watch American bandstand. According to frank
Speaker 3: whose time at the Springfield prison overlapped with Franklins for
Speaker 3: a few weeks in nineteen eighty one until Franklin's transfer
Speaker 3: at the end of January nineteen eighty two, the serial
Speaker 3: killer became enraged when a black prison guard changed the channel.
Speaker 3: Later that year, Joseph Paul Franklin was back in court.
Speaker 3: He'd spent years traveling the country, robbing banks and murdering
Speaker 3: young black men and interracial couples, so it would take
Speaker 3: years to sort out what.
Speaker 1: To do with him.
Speaker 3: This time, he was on trial for the unsuccessful assassination
Speaker 3: attempt on civil rights activist Vernon Jordan. On May twenty ninth,
Speaker 3: nineteen eighty the Fort Wayne, Indiana chapter of the National
Speaker 3: Urban League was hosting a banquet in honor of a
Speaker 3: visit from National Urban League President Vernin Jordan. When a
Speaker 3: volunteer dropped him off at his hotel. Later that evening,
Speaker 3: a single bullet from a thirty six rifle tore through
Speaker 3: his back. He survived, but it's hard to build a
Speaker 3: case against a drifter sniper. Nobody saw him. The investigators
Speaker 3: had some handwriting analysis on a motel registration card, testimony
Speaker 3: from a grocery store clerk who identified Franklin as a
Speaker 3: man he'd had a strange conversation with, and a general
Speaker 3: idea that the crime fit Franklin's pattern, but it was
Speaker 3: a bit thin.
Speaker 1: And then came frank Ohank loves to talk, he loves
Speaker 1: to be helpful.
Speaker 3: He's still in prison on that gun charge, but he
Speaker 3: told federal authorities that in the brief couple of weeks
Speaker 3: he'd been on the same cell block as Franklin. They
Speaker 3: chatted a few times, and Franklin had confessed to him
Speaker 3: on several occasions about shooting Vernon Jordan. On the stand,
Speaker 3: frank testified about that evening in January when the guard
Speaker 3: changed the channel to the basketball game, and it's a
Speaker 3: pretty good detail. Frank was very specific that it was
Speaker 3: a uva unc game that he couldn't recall the date
Speaker 3: they were only on that cell block together for a
Speaker 3: few weeks, and there was in fact a Uva unc
Speaker 3: basketball game during that time period that would have.
Speaker 1: Been on television.
Speaker 3: He testified that Franklin was furious about the incident and
Speaker 3: spent days fuming about it. The two inmates were walking
Speaker 3: together in the exercise area a few days later when
Speaker 3: Franklin spotted that same guard again and turned to frank
Speaker 3: and said, I'd like to blow him away, like I
Speaker 3: shot that and were big wig in Indiana. Frank says
Speaker 3: he also lamented that Jordan just wouldn't die after being shot,
Speaker 3: and that he was sorry I didn't shoot that white
Speaker 3: slut first, referring to the white woman who'd given Jordan
Speaker 3: a ride that night. Frank was one of three jail
Speaker 3: house informants the government put on during that trial, all
Speaker 3: men who'd been in jail with Franklin, and all of
Speaker 3: whom said Franklin had admitted to various aspects of the
Speaker 3: crime and casual conversation. Josephaul Franklin was actually acquitted at
Speaker 3: that federal trial. Jurors said they believed Franklin shot Jordan,
Speaker 3: but they were hung up on the wording of the indictment,
Speaker 3: which specifically charged him with the shooting as a violation
Speaker 3: of Jordan's civil rights. Years later, on death row for
Speaker 3: a variety of other murders, Franklin did confess to shooting
Speaker 3: Vernon Jordan when the trial was over, though jurors who
Speaker 3: spoke to the press said they'd only believed one of
Speaker 3: the three jailhouse informants who testified frank On cross examination,
Speaker 3: frank Sweeney seemed surprised to learn that the other two
Speaker 3: men had been paid thousands of dollars for their cooperation.
Speaker 3: He wasn't getting paid, but he was upset. He didn't
Speaker 3: need the money. He'd inherited a quarter a million dollars,
Speaker 3: which would be about a million dollars today when his
Speaker 3: parents died. All he wanted was witness protection, then a
Speaker 3: positive letter to the New Jersey Parole Board. Just like
Speaker 3: in the boy's case, he very conveniently had some information
Speaker 3: the government wanted, and all he wanted in return was
Speaker 3: witness protection. And this time he got it, but he
Speaker 3: didn't get to keep it. In nineteen eighty four, frank
Speaker 3: filed a lawsuit against the warden of the Alabama prison
Speaker 3: where he was still serving his sentence on that gun charge.
Speaker 3: He said he was not receiving the protection afforded to
Speaker 3: him as a protected witness. The warden's response to the
Speaker 3: suit was that Frank would not stop telling people that
Speaker 3: he was a protected witness, which was causing a lot
Speaker 3: of problems. You're not supposed to do that in court.
Speaker 3: The warden's executive assistant said that the prison was considering
Speaker 3: contacting in the Office of Enforcement Operations, the division of
Speaker 3: the DOJ that administers the Witness Security program, to recommend
Speaker 3: his removal from the program because they believed he was
Speaker 3: intentionally causing problems by talking about this constantly. And it
Speaker 3: seems he was ultimately removed from the Witness Security program
Speaker 3: around this time, and maybe that had something to do
Speaker 3: with his decision to testify on behalf of Anthony Spalotro,
Speaker 3: the hot headed Chicago mobster who handled the family's business.
Speaker 1: In Las Vegas.
Speaker 3: It couldn't have been an attempt to get back in
Speaker 3: the program. He was testifying for the defense, but maybe
Speaker 3: he was just spiite. He wanted to get somebody else
Speaker 3: kicked out of the program. In nineteen eighty three, when
Speaker 3: he was still in prison and still considered a protected witness.
Speaker 3: He briefly shared a cell with another guy in the program.
Speaker 3: Frank Kulatta was a mobster. He was a member of
Speaker 3: Tony Spalotro's Hole in the Wall gang. If you've seen
Speaker 3: the nineteen ninety five Scorsese movie Casino, it's that quite literally.
Speaker 3: Frank Marino, the character played by the guy who played
Speaker 3: Phil Leotardo on The Sopranos, is supposed to be Frank Kulatta.
Speaker 3: Joe Peshi's character, Nikki Sentorro, is based on Tony Spilotro.
Speaker 3: Just watch the movie. It's all very complicated, and our
Speaker 3: friend Frank Sweeney had nothing to do with it. But
Speaker 3: in nineteen eighty three, the real life Frank Kulata was
Speaker 3: sharing a cell with Frank Sweeney because they had both
Speaker 3: turned state's witness against very dangerous men. Frank Sweeney had
Speaker 3: just testified against a serial killer and Frank Kulatta had
Speaker 3: turned on Spilotro after the FBI played him a recording
Speaker 3: of his friend talking about having him killed. When Anthony
Speaker 3: Spilotro went on trial in nineteen eighty six, Frank Kulatta
Speaker 3: was out of prison and in the program, and he
Speaker 3: was the government's star witness against Spilotro. Frank Sweeney was
Speaker 3: finally out of prison again in home in New Jersey
Speaker 3: when he read in the paper that Kulata was going
Speaker 3: to be testifying. According to Frank, he felt compelled to
Speaker 3: contact Spilotro's defense attorney because when they were cell mates,
Speaker 3: Kulata would af in brag about committing perjury. So the
Speaker 3: defense flew Frank out to Las Vegas and put him
Speaker 3: on the stand. He claimed that after one of Colada's
Speaker 3: appearances in court back in nineteen eighty three, he came
Speaker 3: back to their shared cell and bragged, Frankie, I just
Speaker 3: put another one away. You've heard of the traveling circus.
Speaker 3: I'm the original traveling perjurer. On cross examination, Frank Sweeney
Speaker 3: admitted that when he'd been in the witness protection program,
Speaker 3: he had on several occasions threatened and even faked suicide
Speaker 3: attempts to get what he wanted out of federal prosecutors.
Speaker 3: I wish I had more information on that. That is
Speaker 3: incredibly strange behavior, and it does actually happen again later
Speaker 3: in the end, though his testimony in that mob trial
Speaker 3: is just a strange little footnote. His third brush with
Speaker 3: the witness protection program. His testimony didn't matter much. I
Speaker 3: don't think anyone believed it, and the case ended in
Speaker 3: a mistrial over allegations of jury tampering, and Anthony Spilotro
Speaker 3: went missing before they could retry the case. The mobster
Speaker 3: and his brother were later found buried in a cornfield
Speaker 3: in Indiana. Frank Kulatta stayed in the witness protection program
Speaker 3: for years, and Scorsese hired him as an onset adviser
Speaker 3: when he shot Casino. Klata died of COVID in twenty twenty,
Speaker 3: and in nineteen eighty nine, Frank went back to prison
Speaker 3: for mail fraud.
Speaker 1: Again. The court record is too old.
Speaker 3: To get any documents without haggling with an archivist, but
Speaker 3: the docket sheet does say that, in addition to another
Speaker 3: fifty seven months in prison, the judge also banned Frank
Speaker 3: from ever offering anything for sale by mail. So at
Speaker 3: first I assumed he was pulling the same scam he
Speaker 3: ran in nineteen seventy six, where he placed ads for
Speaker 3: guns he didn't actually have and then ghosted would be
Speaker 3: buyers after they sent him the money. But it's much
Speaker 3: weirder than that. I wish it was guns. It wasn't guns.
Speaker 3: This time, he was running what one journalist called.
Speaker 4: A cat scam.
Speaker 3: He'd cut the tails off regular house cats and then
Speaker 3: run ads offering them as exotic purebred cats for three
Speaker 3: hundred dollars. If he really was as independently wealthy off
Speaker 3: his inheritance as he claimed, did he really need three
Speaker 3: hundred dollars for a mutilated cat? Maybe he's just addicted
Speaker 3: to mail fraud. As for the cats, one of the
Speaker 3: earliest mentions I could find of Frank in the newspaper
Speaker 3: archives was a nineteen fifty eight article about the embalmed
Speaker 3: cat he got for his fifteenth birthday. He was looking
Speaker 3: forward to dissecting it and adding it to his collection
Speaker 3: of oddities that already included a cat skeleton. So I
Speaker 3: hope all his fraudulent cats found happy homes, even if
Speaker 3: their buyers were unhappy about losing three hundred dollars. But
Speaker 3: it's in an appeals court decision related to a parole
Speaker 3: violation in this second mail fraud case where we find
Speaker 3: the details of a campaign of terror against his neighbors
Speaker 3: that foreshadows the events at the end of this long,
Speaker 3: strange tale. He was paroled in nineteen ninety two after
Speaker 3: serving about half of this sentence, and he was on
Speaker 3: probation for three years. Just days before that three year
Speaker 3: period ran out, he was charged with a probation violation.
Speaker 3: He'd been convicted in New Jersey of sending obscene materials
Speaker 3: through the mail to a minor. I know, I know,
Speaker 3: this show is starting to feel like a tour of
Speaker 3: America's weirdest sex crime guys. But to be honest, I
Speaker 3: don't think there was anything sexual in his motivation for
Speaker 3: sending pornomags to a nine year old. I know that
Speaker 3: doesn't sound possible. Bear with me, But after he got
Speaker 3: out of prison, he's living in an apartment back in
Speaker 3: his hometown of Tenafly, New Jersey. A family of Russian
Speaker 3: immigrants moves into the apartment next door. They have children.
Speaker 3: Children are noisy. Frank says he asked them to keep
Speaker 3: it down, but the noise continued. In what these Second
Speaker 3: Circuit Court of Appeals would later call a rather bizarre
Speaker 3: set of circum stances, he decided to get back at
Speaker 3: these noisy children by engaging in a lengthy harassment campaign
Speaker 3: against the entire family. At least twice, he shut off
Speaker 3: their electricity on multiple occasions, he filled the lock on
Speaker 3: their front door with staples, making it impossible to open.
Speaker 3: He had the family's mail forwarded to des Moines, Iowa.
Speaker 3: The father of these noisy children was a doctor. One
Speaker 3: of his colleagues received a letter purporting to be from
Speaker 3: an aid's charity informing the recipient that the doctor, the
Speaker 3: father of those noisy children, had tested positive for HIV.
Speaker 3: And along that same line of thinking, he also sent
Speaker 3: a letter to the children's school informing them that the
Speaker 3: nine year old boy had been exposed to HIV by
Speaker 3: his father. And he sent letters to the Jewish community
Speaker 3: center where the family remembers, informing them that the entire
Speaker 3: family had been exposed to the virus. Remember this is
Speaker 3: nineteen ninety three. Telling people that this doctor has HIV
Speaker 3: could ruin his career. The school could call social services
Speaker 3: in the probably wouldn't be welcome in the sauna at
Speaker 3: the community center if people believed this. And in what
Speaker 3: would be his ultimate downfall here, he signed their nine
Speaker 3: year old son up for catalogs that sold pornographic materials.
Speaker 1: It seems like he believed that the.
Speaker 3: Child's father would get the mail, which apparently wasn't going
Speaker 3: to Iowa anymore see the catalog believe his son had
Speaker 3: signed up for it and would punish the boy, and
Speaker 3: if the boy was grounded, he wouldn't be so noisy.
Speaker 3: But it backfired and Frank was discovered as the culprit.
Speaker 3: Police searched his apartment and found the typewriter he'd used
Speaker 3: to write all the letters, and he quickly confessed. He
Speaker 3: got four months in jail in New Jersey for sending
Speaker 3: him scene materials to a child, but the parole violation
Speaker 3: landed him back in federal prison for another year. And
Speaker 3: maybe this trip back to prison gave him a chance
Speaker 3: to test out his own advice. You see, between getting
Speaker 3: out in nineteen ninety two and going back in nineteen
Speaker 3: ninety five, Frank was profiled in the New York Time.
Speaker 3: The journalist Charles Strum actually used to write for The
Speaker 3: Bergen Record, the local paper Frank used to end up
Speaker 3: in every time he got arrested in the sixties. But
Speaker 3: Strum didn't come home from college and started the Record
Speaker 3: until after Frank's arms stand off in the front yard,
Speaker 3: and they weren't talking about their shared hometown. They were
Speaker 3: talking about Frank's new consulting business in nineteen ninety four,
Speaker 3: Frank put a classified ad in USA Today that read.
Speaker 8: Go into federal prison for the first time, we will
Speaker 8: tell you what to expect and how to survive. All
Speaker 8: consultants are graduates of the federal prison system. Frank aysweeneyan Associates,
Speaker 8: Box fifteen Demarest, New Jersey zero seven six two seven.
Speaker 3: Frank told Strum that the idea came to him while
Speaker 3: he was reading the paper one morning in September nineteen
Speaker 3: ninety three. Lawrence Powell, one of the LA police officers
Speaker 3: convicted for his role in the beating of Rodney King,
Speaker 3: was quoted in the paper as being terrified at the
Speaker 3: prospect of going to prison. Strum rights that Frank told him.
Speaker 9: I thought to myself, my god, there's probably a lot
Speaker 9: of people go into prison who's never been in jail before,
Speaker 9: primarily white collar criminals, and they're probably terrified too, that
Speaker 9: just as frightened as he is. So I thought maybe
Speaker 9: I could use my misfortune to help people and maybe
Speaker 9: make a profit doing it.
Speaker 3: The article says Frank claims to have twenty seven clients
Speaker 3: after just a few months of running his new consulting business,
Speaker 3: though the author also prints without question Frank's claim that
Speaker 3: he left high school in the eleventh grade because he
Speaker 3: was bored with it, not because he was in a
Speaker 3: youth correctional facility for bank robbery. In the article, Strum
Speaker 3: writes out all of Frank's crimes and convictions, but that
Speaker 3: nineteen sixty two bank robbery is missing. But again, they
Speaker 3: didn't have the Internet then. Of his criminal record, Frank
Speaker 3: told the reporter, I remember it was Nietzsche who wrote
Speaker 3: the crime is not in the act, but in the
Speaker 3: stupidity of being caught. I was caught and stupid, and
Speaker 3: he'd get caught a few more times in the coming years,
Speaker 3: but he stays humble. That Nietzsche quote is still his
Speaker 3: favorite to this day. According to his Facebook profile, he
Speaker 3: had to take a break from his new consulting career
Speaker 3: when he went away for a year in nineteen ninety five,
Speaker 3: but he picked right back up when he got out.
Speaker 3: A nineteen ninety seven Newsweek article about his business claims
Speaker 3: he was up to eighty seven clients, now with white
Speaker 3: collar criminals paying Frank one thousand dollars for assistance and
Speaker 3: getting favorable placement. So not only did Frank promise that
Speaker 3: he could advise you about the differences in food facilities
Speaker 3: and culture at different federal prisons. He claimed he had
Speaker 3: connections and could influence your placement. A Bureau of Prison
Speaker 3: spokesman denied Frank had any ability to arrange transfers or
Speaker 3: promise placements at specific facilities, but at least one client
Speaker 3: told the reporter that prison officials had denied his request
Speaker 3: for a transfer during a five year sentence for embezzlement,
Speaker 3: but after he wrote Frank and included a check for
Speaker 3: one thousand dollars, his transfer came through. Now, promising these
Speaker 3: transfers seems like it would put Frank back in mail
Speaker 3: fraud territory. But if he had stopped short of fraud,
Speaker 3: this isn't actually a terrible way for a guy like
Speaker 3: Frank to make a living. He really had been in
Speaker 3: a significant number of our nation's federal prisons. He'd been
Speaker 3: in facilities all over the country spanning decades. He's in
Speaker 3: a great position to offer advice about how to get
Speaker 3: through your sentence as smoothly as possible. So if he'd
Speaker 3: stuck to lifestyle advice for the incarcerated, I might say
Speaker 3: that this could have been a success story for Frank.
Speaker 3: There was another article about his consulting business in nineteen
Speaker 3: ninety eight, but then he kind of disappears.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure what he was up to.
Speaker 3: He pops up briefly in a couple of articles in
Speaker 3: two thousand and two thousand and one, an old prison
Speaker 3: friend of his called him from a jail in Reno
Speaker 3: to ask for help exposing an alleged smuggling ring run
Speaker 3: by one of the guards out there. In Nevada, David
Speaker 3: Wayne is described as one of the most dangerous inmates
Speaker 3: in a state prison system after a variety of escape
Speaker 3: attempts and prison riots involving Wayne holding hostages, and in
Speaker 3: two thousand he wanted Frank's help leveraging this information about
Speaker 3: a corrupt guard to get a better placement. So friend
Speaker 3: or client hard to say, but the guard did end
Speaker 3: up charged with smuggling a handcuff key to an inmate,
Speaker 3: and Frank spent about a year advocating for Wayne's transfer,
Speaker 3: considering he had once held two prison nurses hostage for
Speaker 3: twelve hours by rigging up a Rube Goldberg style contraption
Speaker 3: that would stab the women's eyes out with scalpels if
Speaker 3: anyone opened the door and had successfully escaped at least once.
Speaker 3: A low security placement for David Wayne was out of
Speaker 3: the question, But then quiet Frank moved out to Idaho.
Speaker 1: And stayed out of the paper.
Speaker 3: He's not a very good driver, so I know he
Speaker 3: moved to Ada County, Idaho around two thousand and one,
Speaker 3: because that's when he started getting a lot of traffic
Speaker 3: tickets there. In two thousand and eight, he was charged
Speaker 3: with battery and convicted, but he only served five days
Speaker 3: in jail and successfully completed his court ordered anger management class.
Speaker 3: The docket indicates the victim, a woman who appears to
Speaker 3: be a nursing assistant in the Boise area, got a
Speaker 3: restraining order. But the Frank Sweeney, who tried to drop
Speaker 3: a bank and fought in the Bush War and had
Speaker 3: a mob boss fly him to Vegas and bragged about
Speaker 3: being able to influence prison officials, that Frank seems to
Speaker 3: be gone. He's just an old man living in Boise
Speaker 3: until twenty fifteen. In December of twenty fifteen, Frank went
Speaker 3: to the post office near his home in Garden City, Idaho.
Speaker 3: He parked his truck in one of the accessible parking
Speaker 3: spots out front. A woman saw him get out of
Speaker 3: his car, which did not have a placard indicating he
Speaker 3: was supposed to be parked there, said something to him.
Speaker 3: We don't know exactly what she said. Now, me personally,
Speaker 3: I probably wouldn't have said anything. For the most part,
Speaker 3: it's not worth it. It's not your business. There are
Speaker 3: plenty of people who are not visibly disabled who really
Speaker 3: do need.
Speaker 1: Those parking spots.
Speaker 3: And Frank was in his seventies at this point, so
Speaker 3: even if he didn't have a state issued parking placard,
Speaker 3: he's old.
Speaker 1: Just leave him alone.
Speaker 3: But she made a comment about it, and the situation
Speaker 3: escalated pretty seriously. Court documents only say that they had
Speaker 3: a verbal altercation, so at least she didn't get stabbed,
Speaker 3: which he's done at least twice to people who offended him.
Speaker 3: But whatever she said, and for whatever reasons she chose
Speaker 3: to say it, she didn't deserve what happened next. The
Speaker 3: victims in this case are referred to only by their
Speaker 3: initials in the court record for obvious reasons. But it
Speaker 3: can be tricky to keep track of people with just
Speaker 3: a letter, so I've given them all fake names just
Speaker 3: to make this a little easier. We'll call the woman
Speaker 3: from the park Ellen, her husband will be Sam, and
Speaker 3: their adult daughters will be Kayla and Lucy. Again, it
Speaker 3: is possible to figure out who these people are, but
Speaker 3: please don't.
Speaker 1: They've been through enough.
Speaker 3: Two weeks after that heated exchange in the post office
Speaker 3: parking lot, the postcard started. The probation office in Boise
Speaker 3: got the first one. Ellen's adult daughter, Kayla, was at
Speaker 3: the time on probation for a misdemeanor dui charge. The
Speaker 3: letter writer claimed that he had just the night before
Speaker 3: been in the car with Kayla and she was so
Speaker 3: drunk that he had to jump out at a red
Speaker 3: light for his own safety. Ellen's husband, Sam, received a
Speaker 3: postcard at his dental office the same day informing him
Speaker 3: that his wife had been in the post office the
Speaker 3: week before and she was so drunk that she was
Speaker 3: falling down. The letter, though very brief, contained a lot
Speaker 3: of really specific personal information, the fact that the couple
Speaker 3: had very recently purchased a new home, including the name
Speaker 3: of the suburb where they now lived, the city where
Speaker 3: their other adult daughter lived, the names of both of
Speaker 3: their daughters, and information about Kayla's arrest. That year, Ellen
Speaker 3: received a third postcard that week addressed to her at home.
Speaker 3: This one contained her social Security number and an allegation
Speaker 3: that her daughter Lucy, was engaged in acts of prostitution
Speaker 3: at her place of work, which was named after the
Speaker 3: family received the first postcards. In December of twenty fifteen,
Speaker 3: they met with detectives at the Aida County Sheriff's office
Speaker 3: in Boise, and despite investigator's best efforts, the family would
Speaker 3: continue to receive increasingly bizarre and frightening postcards for three
Speaker 3: full years. Their neighbors and nearby schools received postcards that
Speaker 3: appeared to be from the State Sex Offender Registry informing
Speaker 3: them that Sam was a sex offender, specifically that he
Speaker 3: had sodomized a nine year old boy in nineteen seventy eight.
Speaker 3: It probably goes without saying, but I will say it anyway.
Speaker 1: That is not true.
Speaker 3: But it does kind of remind you of what Frank
Speaker 3: died to that doctor in nineteen ninety three, doesn't it,
Speaker 3: adding to the victim's distress. Sam passed away unexpectedly in
Speaker 3: January of twenty sixteen, just a few weeks after all
Speaker 3: this started, and obviously Frank knew one of his victims
Speaker 3: was dead. Some of the letters sent to the man's
Speaker 3: daughters taunted and blamed them for driving their father into
Speaker 3: an early grave, But oddly, some of the letters pretended otherwise.
Speaker 3: While most of the postcards were signed Carson Wells, the
Speaker 3: name of Woody Harrelson's character in the movie No Country
Speaker 3: for Old Men, some were signed with the names of
Speaker 3: her own children. Ellen received one of those just two
Speaker 3: months after her husband's death, purporting to be from her
Speaker 3: daughter Lucy, who lived out of state. It said, dear Mommy,
Speaker 3: my blood test just came back and yes, I am
Speaker 3: HIV positive. I'm sure I was infected by one of
Speaker 3: the two crips with whom I was having an affair with. Regrettably,
Speaker 3: I will never be able to give you and Daddy
Speaker 3: the grandchildren you so desired. But we know now that
Speaker 3: Daddy is a pedophile. He may have harmed the grand
Speaker 3: has he been released from jail. And again, this is
Speaker 3: a woman who just lost her husband. She knows this
Speaker 3: postcard isn't from her adult daughter. Even if she hadn't
Speaker 3: already gotten a dozen other bizarre postcards, she would know
Speaker 3: that no one's writing their mother a postcard on a typewriter.
Speaker 3: It's not nineteen thirty two, and again the recently deceased
Speaker 3: man was not a pedophile, nor was he in jail.
Speaker 3: He had just been buried by his family. Ellen and
Speaker 3: both of her daughters continued getting postcards even after Ellen moved,
Speaker 3: and Frank was also sending the postcards to other people
Speaker 3: pretending to be members of the family. The Idaho Black
Speaker 3: History Museum received one signed with Ellen's name, address, and
Speaker 3: phone number that was so laden with racial slurs that
Speaker 3: you can barely tell what it's supposed to be trying
Speaker 3: to say. Lucy's boss received one advising him that his
Speaker 3: employee was having rectal intercourse with black men, although described
Speaker 3: that in more vivid terms. Now, for as strange as
Speaker 3: this man's life has been, you'd be forgiven if he
Speaker 3: forgot where we started. Frank is a Nazi. He was
Speaker 3: a member of the American Nazi Party, and he fought
Speaker 3: as a Rhodesian mercenary. He's not just a guy who
Speaker 3: loves doing mail fraud and hates his neighbors. He's very racist,
Speaker 3: and a lot of these postcards fixated on the idea
Speaker 3: that Ellen's daughters were engaged in interracial relationships, very graphically
Speaker 3: and racistly describing specific sex acts that they were, in
Speaker 3: his mind having with black partners, and he was particularly
Speaker 3: upset that Ellen, a Latina, had married a white man.
Speaker 3: He called her racial slurs and wrote to her daughters
Speaker 3: calling them mongrels. It seems the only time he wasn't
Speaker 3: sending postcards was when he was out of the country.
Speaker 3: You see, he might have another wife. It's not entirely clear,
Speaker 3: but several times a year Frank would travel to Effort,
Speaker 3: the capital of the German state of Taringia in central Germany,
Speaker 3: to visit a woman he's known for a very long time,
Speaker 3: Uta Schernig, who performs semi professionally as a belly dancer
Speaker 3: under the name Madame Chamila, has on several occasions referred
Speaker 3: to Frank as her husband. This may be literal, it
Speaker 3: may be a cheeky little joke. My German is not
Speaker 3: good enough to really read tone, and it may just
Speaker 3: be that they've been in a relationship for so long
Speaker 3: that they think of each other this way. My research
Speaker 3: game is strong, but a potentially non existent German marriage
Speaker 3: certificate evades my grasp. Nevertheless, he does own a home
Speaker 3: in Effort, and she lives in it. She refers to
Speaker 3: him occasionally as her house Positzer, which you could translate
Speaker 3: as landlord, but you wouldn't really, you'd call the person
Speaker 3: you rent your home from your fermeter house Positzer just
Speaker 3: means he owns her house, and he occasionally calls her Liebchen,
Speaker 3: my love, and she calls Frankie when he visited in
Speaker 3: twenty fifteen and they went to see her mother in
Speaker 3: the nursing home together. Her photocaptions are about Frank's visit
Speaker 3: to his mother in law. As with so much in
Speaker 3: Frank's life, it's hard to pin this down. I have
Speaker 3: a handful of photos of Frank with this woman that
Speaker 3: appeared to be from the eighties or early nineties based
Speaker 3: on the photo quality, Frank's apparent age, and to be honest,
Speaker 3: her hair. But we're talking about Germany, so dating by
Speaker 3: the fashion could put us off by a decade or more.
Speaker 3: No offense, you know, it's true, But at least in
Speaker 3: the present era of his life, he's visiting Germany every
Speaker 3: now and again. She breeds and shows Mexican and Peruvian
Speaker 3: hairless dogs, some of which have been quite successful internationally.
Speaker 3: Some of her show dogs list Frank Sweeney as a
Speaker 3: co owner in September of twenty sixteen. His victims had
Speaker 3: a brief reprieve from his letters because he was in
Speaker 3: Germany attending a seminar on dog genetics with Ute. These
Speaker 3: rare breed dogs are very prone to genetic problems and
Speaker 3: in breeding, so I'm glad they're staying on top of
Speaker 3: best practices, I guess. But when he was at home
Speaker 3: in Idaho, the campaign of harassment was relentless. He even
Speaker 3: found a way to outsource the terror. Frank sent postcards
Speaker 3: to inmates in prisons all over the country. He signed
Speaker 3: them with Ellen's name and address, and requested that the
Speaker 3: men write her back. She received at least seventy five letters,
Speaker 3: all addressed to her at home from murderers and as
Speaker 3: if she might not get it, like maybe she didn't
Speaker 3: put two and two together here, Like maybe she thought
Speaker 3: this was some totally separate, unrelated new problem she just
Speaker 3: happens to be having. Frank made sure she understood that
Speaker 3: he did this. He sent her numerous postcards explaining the situation.
Speaker 9: Every creep, every social degenerate who has written to you,
Speaker 9: has your address, social Security number, and date of birth.
Speaker 8: Likewise for Lucy too.
Speaker 9: Some of these freaks have already passed this information on
Speaker 9: to their criminal friends outside of prison. Last month, I've
Speaker 9: visited your house twice in the early morning hours while
Speaker 9: you slept naturally, I've removed my license plates so that
Speaker 9: street cameras could not identify my car, and I still
Speaker 9: patrol the post office daily in an effort to spot you.
Speaker 8: You only have your big mouth to blame for all
Speaker 8: of this.
Speaker 3: In December of twenty sixteen, after the first full year,
Speaker 3: he wrote to her, saying it was their anniversary, telling
Speaker 3: her I intend to be with you her life. The
Speaker 3: letter has just kept coming, reminding her that he was
Speaker 3: watching her outside her home, that he waited for her
Speaker 3: at the post office almost every day, and sending her
Speaker 3: postcards containing her own personal information like her license plate
Speaker 3: number and information about her family, just.
Speaker 1: So she knew he had it too.
Speaker 3: He continued writing to Ellen and both of her daughters,
Speaker 3: calling the racial slurs, slots whores, threatening to report them
Speaker 3: for assorted imaginary crimes like tax fraud and drug dealing,
Speaker 3: and always remembering to write them on their birthdays. Investigators
Speaker 3: were stumped. They knew the letter writer was the man
Speaker 3: from the post office parking lot. He said as much
Speaker 3: in his letters.
Speaker 1: But Ellen didn't recognize him. She had only a.
Speaker 3: Vague description of his vehicle, and she didn't get the
Speaker 3: license plate. Why would she have thought she needed to.
Speaker 3: Postcards were always wiped clean of prints. They were perfectly
Speaker 3: generic United States Postal Service issued materials that he always
Speaker 3: bought in small quantities and paid cash. He may truly
Speaker 3: have tormented this woman until one of them died if
Speaker 3: he hadn't done what he's always done, more crime. And
Speaker 3: here's that beginning of the end. It's not the end.
Speaker 3: But I told you this story that began outside of
Speaker 3: a bank in New Jersey in nineteen sixty two would
Speaker 3: start its final chapter outside of a bank in.
Speaker 1: Idaho fifty six years later.
Speaker 3: On October thirteenth, twenty eighteen, Frank got into another argument
Speaker 3: in a parking lot. These victims, too, are only identified
Speaker 3: by their initials in the court records. So I'm going
Speaker 3: to call them Liam and Denise. They were in their
Speaker 3: car outside the Wells Fargo in Garden City, Idaho. Frank
Speaker 3: conked at them. There was again some kind of verbal altercation.
Speaker 3: Maybe they gave him the finger or shouted, who knows,
Speaker 3: you know, this is the kind of thing that happens
Speaker 3: every day. You know, you don't pull forward fast enough.
Speaker 3: The guy behind you honks. You tell him to fuck off.
Speaker 3: Nobody's being their best selves, but life goes on, but
Speaker 3: not for Frank. Frank can't take it. He stabbed a
Speaker 3: guy in the guts for splashing him in nineteen seventy five.
Speaker 3: So two weeks after Liam and Denise experienced this angry
Speaker 3: driver at the bank, they start getting postcards. Like Ellen
Speaker 3: and her family, this family, too, starts hearing that their
Speaker 3: neighbors and nearby schools are getting postcards that pretend to
Speaker 3: be from the state Sex Offender Registry, alerting people that
Speaker 3: Liam is a pedophile. He's not, And specifically, the postcards
Speaker 3: say that he sodomized a nine year old boy. That
Speaker 3: is a very specific and very gross detail to recycle
Speaker 3: from one victim to the next, right like that, that
Speaker 3: has to mean something, but I can't figure it out,
Speaker 3: and maybe that's for the best. These postcards, too, are
Speaker 3: generic ones from the post office, typed on a manual typewriter.
Speaker 3: And again, some of the postcards are signed Carson Wells,
Speaker 3: and sometimes they're signed with the name of Liam's adult son.
Speaker 3: And again there were letters to the family from murderers
Speaker 3: answering requests for pen pals. But you know what, the
Speaker 3: bank has a lot of security cameras, and unbeknownst to Frank,
Speaker 3: shortly before he started terrorizing his second set of victims,
Speaker 3: his case wasn't just a local matter anymore. In September
Speaker 3: of twenty eighteen, the United States Postal Inspector Service started
Speaker 3: looking into the postcards. That's right, the Mail Police. That
Speaker 3: is a very real federal law enforcement agency with jurisdiction
Speaker 3: over mail crimes. According to their most recent annual report,
Speaker 3: the USPIS initiated more than fifty six hundred investigations in
Speaker 3: twenty twenty three, and during that year, forty one hundred
Speaker 3: cases related to their investigations ended in convictions. Most of
Speaker 3: those numbers are things like mail theft and people mailing drugs. Also,
Speaker 3: though a couple hundred people a year are assaulting postal employees,
Speaker 3: knock that off.
Speaker 1: Don't do that.
Speaker 3: Be nice to your mail carrier. So now we have
Speaker 3: the Mail Police on the case, and as soon as
Speaker 3: they start trying to figure out what's going on here. Again,
Speaker 3: this is September of twenty eighteen, they're just looking at
Speaker 3: the postcards to Ellen and her family, But within a
Speaker 3: few weeks of them opening the investigation, the Idaho State
Speaker 3: Police let them know that someone is sending postcards pretending
Speaker 3: to be from their office. And these are these postcards
Speaker 3: about how Liam is a pedophile that are being sent
Speaker 3: to schools and neighbors. And because these postcards are made
Speaker 3: to look as though they are coming from the State
Speaker 3: Sex Offender Registry, which is run by the state police,
Speaker 3: people are contacting the state police about them. And now
Speaker 3: the state police are talking to the mail police, and
Speaker 3: now the mail cops see that there are more victims,
Speaker 3: and all of these postcards seem to be from the
Speaker 3: same person. When postal investigators speak to both families and
Speaker 3: compare the letters, it's clear they're all from the same person.
Speaker 3: All of the victims say they know who is sending
Speaker 3: them these postcards, they just don't know who he is.
Speaker 3: Ellen knows it's the guy from the post office. Liam
Speaker 3: knows it's the guy.
Speaker 1: From the bank.
Speaker 3: And they both describe some kind of older truck and
Speaker 3: an older man who's thin with a stiff gait and
Speaker 3: a very terrible distinctive skull on his face. They're describing
Speaker 3: the same man, and surely a bank teller or a
Speaker 3: postal service clerk would recognize a description like that. Local
Speaker 3: cops had shown Ellen photo lineups on multiple occasions over
Speaker 3: the last three years as they're investigating this, but Frank
Speaker 3: was never a suspect, so he was never in any
Speaker 3: of the photo arrays. So each time they showed her
Speaker 3: photos of potential suspects, she said, he's not here because
Speaker 3: he wasn't and so she never picked out any other
Speaker 3: possible suspect. But once the postal investigator zeroed in on
Speaker 3: the man in the bank security footage, both Ellen and
Speaker 3: Liam separately identified him in photo lineups, and bank employees
Speaker 3: did know who he was, so by Christmas of twenty eighteen,
Speaker 3: the male police have Frank's bank records. He's been paying
Speaker 3: a private investigator. That's how he knew so much personal
Speaker 3: information about all of his victims, information about their real
Speaker 3: estate transactions, what kinds of cars they drove, where they worked,
Speaker 3: where their adult children lived in different cities and states.
Speaker 1: Is paying a PI.
Speaker 3: Idaho is one of several states where you don't actually
Speaker 3: have to have a license of any kind to offer
Speaker 3: your services as a PI, so she doesn't have one
Speaker 3: that can be taken away, and she hasn't been.
Speaker 1: Charged of anything.
Speaker 3: Maybe she only helped Frank with information that didn't cross
Speaker 3: a line, and maybe she didn't ask enough questions about
Speaker 3: what he was doing with it. It remains unclear how
Speaker 3: he got everyone's Social Security numbers, though, but the PI
Speaker 3: he was paying is a woman in her eighties who
Speaker 3: seems to still be in the business just for the
Speaker 3: love of the game. Barbara Jacobson describes herself on her
Speaker 3: website as a cross between Nancy Drew and Jessica Fletcher
Speaker 3: with the tenacity of Colombo, and credits her success to
Speaker 3: her Christian faith and divine intervention. An article in a
Speaker 3: twenty seventeen issue of Christian Living magazine quotes her as saying,
Speaker 3: God is my business partner.
Speaker 1: Now again.
Speaker 3: This woman has not been charged with a crime, but
Speaker 3: it seems like a bad sign that she either didn't
Speaker 3: know or didn't care that the client asking her for
Speaker 3: a lot of personal information on people had a five
Speaker 3: decade long rap sheet that included convictions related to harassment
Speaker 3: by mail. You're either deeply unscrupulous or very bad at
Speaker 3: your job, and I'm not sure which is worse. Either way,
Speaker 3: this investigation is rapidly coming together. The postal investigator has
Speaker 3: Frank's bank records, He's been identified by the victims. They're
Speaker 3: closing in on him, and maybe he knows, maybe he doesn't.
Speaker 3: He did move very suddenly in February twenty nineteen, leaving
Speaker 3: the house he'd been renting for over a decade right
Speaker 3: as they got the warrant to search it, and renting
Speaker 3: a different house nearby. But he's still sending the letters.
Speaker 3: So if he knows they're onto him, why is he
Speaker 3: still sending the letters. On February thirteenth, twenty nineteen, six
Speaker 3: weeks after they know Frank's their guy, right around the
Speaker 3: time that he's moving to his new house, a clerk
Speaker 3: at the post office calls the investigator to say that
Speaker 3: an old man with a terrible scar on his face
Speaker 3: just bought a stack of postcards with cash, and the
Speaker 3: last postcard arrived on February nineteenth, twenty nineteen. It signed
Speaker 3: Carson Wells, but the writer identifies himself as the man
Speaker 3: who blew his horn at them in the parking lot.
Speaker 3: And then he reminds Liam and Denise that all the
Speaker 3: murderers who'd been writing to them had already forwarded their
Speaker 3: personal information to criminals on the outside, but it was
Speaker 3: already over Two weeks later, they searched Frank's home. They
Speaker 3: took his typewriter and his list of federal inmates, the
Speaker 3: ones he'd been writing to as his victims, and they
Speaker 3: found portraits of Hitler and Nazi memorabilia and white supremacist literature,
Speaker 3: and two live rattlesnakes. Rattlesnakes don't live in Idaho. These
Speaker 3: aren't snakes that he got outside. These are snakes that
Speaker 3: he is breeding. Frank has a lifelong interest in reptile breeding.
Speaker 3: I think he's a member of the Idaho Herpetological Society,
Speaker 3: or at least he was before he went to prison,
Speaker 3: and shortly before his arrest, he commented on an online
Speaker 3: obituary for an old high school classmate, reminiscing fondly about
Speaker 3: how they used to collect snakes in the woods together
Speaker 3: in the fifties. Once he's in custody, Frank confessed immediately,
Speaker 3: telling investigators on the day of his arrest that he'd
Speaker 3: sent the postcards because he felt like these people had
Speaker 3: embarrassed him and it made him feel better to know
Speaker 3: he was causing them emotional distress. Shortly after his arrest,
Speaker 3: he wrote to the judge to ask the court to
Speaker 3: intervene in what he felt was an inadequate response by
Speaker 3: the jail to what he called many of the infirmities
Speaker 3: that affect the elderly, and says he has the urge
Speaker 3: to commit suicide if his demands aren't met. And I
Speaker 3: don't want to sound like I'm brushing this off, I'm
Speaker 3: not saying that this couldn't.
Speaker 1: Possibly be a valid concern.
Speaker 3: People die in jails and prisons every day because employees
Speaker 3: don't care or don't have the resources to provide adequate care.
Speaker 3: This is a very real problem, and the urge to
Speaker 3: harm yourself is always very serious. But this isn't Frank's
Speaker 3: first rodeo. Remember in the eighties he used to threaten
Speaker 3: suicide and would even fake suicide attempts in order to
Speaker 3: manipulate employees of the Witness Protection program. So this may
Speaker 3: not be a brand new issue for Frank at any rate.
Speaker 3: Within months of his arrest he entered into a plea agreement.
Speaker 3: So once the mail cops got on the case, they
Speaker 3: actually sorted it out pretty quickly. Right the USPIS got
Speaker 3: on the case, in September of twenty eighteen, and within
Speaker 3: three months they knew it was Frank. Maybe they should
Speaker 3: have called the guys who solved Maile crimes earlier. I
Speaker 3: don't know, but if there had been more communication between
Speaker 3: different law enforcement agencies, the whole situation would have been resolved.
Speaker 3: When he sent a single letter a third victim, which
Speaker 3: he signed with his own name. But when a US
Speaker 3: Marshall searched Frank's house two years before his eventual arrest,
Speaker 3: I guess they didn't bother to check in with the
Speaker 3: local police, because in April of twenty seventeen, Frank sent
Speaker 3: a single letter to Gerald Shrr, the man who found
Speaker 3: it and for many years ran the witness protection program.
Speaker 3: I can't think of a worse guy to pick if
Speaker 3: you're going to send a threatening letter. Sure was long
Speaker 3: since retired by twenty seventeen. He passed away in twenty
Speaker 3: twenty at the age of eighty six.
Speaker 1: But is there anyone on.
Speaker 3: Earth who had more chips to call in with the
Speaker 3: US Marshals? You think a US marshal isn't going to
Speaker 3: come to your house if you sign your full legal
Speaker 3: name to a threatening letter to the guy who invented
Speaker 3: witness protection. You think you're going to scare the guy
Speaker 3: whose job was protecting mobsters from other mobsters. Truly a
Speaker 3: stupid move, even for Frank.
Speaker 9: You poisonous, licentious so jew. I thought that you would
Speaker 9: have been long dead from cardiovascular disease due to obesity.
Speaker 9: I was very much hoping to sit shiver for you,
Speaker 9: to pray cottage over your fat corpse.
Speaker 8: You loasome.
Speaker 9: I will remember you, although it's doubtful you will remember
Speaker 9: from WITSEC units in Otisville of San Diego parade in
Speaker 9: with your entourage to pray women from the Office of
Speaker 9: Enforcement Operations. In nineteen eighty four, you expelled me from
Speaker 9: the program, leaving me defend for myself as a known
Speaker 9: inform a rat in the general populations of very dangerous prisons.
Speaker 3: It had been more than thirty years, but Frank never
Speaker 3: got over getting kicked out of the program. He flew
Speaker 3: all over the world helping a spy in nineteen eighty
Speaker 3: trying to leverage information on Christopher Boyce to get placement
Speaker 3: in the program, and it didn't work. The information it
Speaker 3: gave was not only not helpful, but by fabricating unhelpful
Speaker 3: information in or to get something from the government, he
Speaker 3: made things worse, and when he finally got what he
Speaker 3: wanted by testifying against a serial killer in nineteen eighty two,
Speaker 3: he couldn't keep his mouth shut about it, and so
Speaker 3: he was removed from the program in nineteen eighty four.
Speaker 3: In his letter to Suir, he claims that as a
Speaker 3: result of losing his protected status in eighty four, he
Speaker 3: was attacked by another inmate the following year, and he does,
Speaker 3: without a doubt, bear a huge scar all down one
Speaker 3: cheek to this day. Somebody cut Frank's face open pretty bad.
Speaker 3: He takes care to mention in his letter that the
Speaker 3: assailant was black, though he chooses different words to say that.
Speaker 3: And who knows why Frank got cut. I'm not making
Speaker 3: light of the violence that happens inside jails and prisons,
Speaker 3: but you'd have to do some real mental gymnastics here
Speaker 3: to come up with a satisfying explanation for why a
Speaker 3: black man would cut Frank up in retaliation for Frank's
Speaker 3: testimony against a Nazi serial killer who try rabbled the
Speaker 3: country shooting black men. I just don't think that they
Speaker 3: would be mad about that. But I can think of
Speaker 3: a variety of reasons why a black man who encountered
Speaker 3: Frank in prison might get into it with him.
Speaker 1: I mean racist hide.
Speaker 3: Frank's just kind of a hotthead, not a great guy
Speaker 3: to hang out with, always getting into it with people.
Speaker 1: But also he loves saying racial slurs.
Speaker 3: So I can think of a variety of reasons why
Speaker 3: this might have happened that had nothing to do with
Speaker 3: him testifying against a serial killer. We can't take Frank
Speaker 3: at his word, and I couldn't find any reporting from
Speaker 3: the time about a prison knife fight in nineteen eighty five,
Speaker 3: So who else after sure received the letter, which Frank
Speaker 3: had signed venomously yours Frank Abbott Sweeney. A US marshal
Speaker 3: was sent out to Idaho to speak with Frank, and
Speaker 3: Frank admitted that he sent the letter, but he said
Speaker 3: he meant no harm by it, and he allowed the
Speaker 3: marshal to search his home. It seems like if anyone
Speaker 3: had compared notes, Frank could have been identified as the
Speaker 3: Garden City postcard writer far sooner. The language in this
Speaker 3: letter was very similar to some of the postcards.
Speaker 1: If they had just.
Speaker 3: Showed this letter to the sheriff, maybe they would have
Speaker 3: recognized it, but yes they didn't because he wasn't. The
Speaker 3: local police in Pennsylvania where the letter was received charged
Speaker 3: Frank with terroristic threats, but that's a non extraditable misdemeanor
Speaker 3: in Pennsylvania, so they couldn't bring him back to face
Speaker 3: the charge. So he's got an open warrant in Pennsylvania
Speaker 3: if he ever goes there, willingly, but he probably won't,
Speaker 3: and with Sure now deceased, it doesn't seem like that's
Speaker 3: likely to amount to anything. On December sixteenth, twenty nineteen,
Speaker 3: Frank Sweeney was sentenced to fifty one months for six
Speaker 3: counts of stalking. A few days later, his German wife
Speaker 3: posted a photo of her Christmas Eve dinner. A friend
Speaker 3: asked her if Frank would be celebrating with her that year.
Speaker 3: She replied that no, has been ill for several months
Speaker 3: and can't.
Speaker 1: Fly right now.
Speaker 3: She didn't say that he was back in federal prison
Speaker 3: for at least the fifth time. Frank Sweeney was released
Speaker 3: from prison in December of twenty twenty two. I just
Speaker 3: noticed as I'm writing this that it's his eighty first
Speaker 3: birthday today, but it won't be by the time you
Speaker 3: hear this. He's still in Idaho, he's still playing the violin,
Speaker 3: and he still co owns a few Mexican hairless dogs
Speaker 3: on the show circuit in Germany. In that nineteen ninety
Speaker 3: four New York Times article about his prison consulting business,
Speaker 3: Frank quipped that his favorite quote was the crime is
Speaker 3: not in the act, but in the stupidity of being caught,
Speaker 3: which he attributes to Nietzsche. I think, regardless of your
Speaker 3: stance on the philosophical nature of crime and punishment, though
Speaker 3: there are better quotes from Frank's thousands of appearances in
Speaker 3: the newspaper over his six decades of crime.
Speaker 1: Maybe Judge H.
Speaker 3: Curtis Meaner had it write in nineteen eighty one when
Speaker 3: he cut off the bickering in the court room over
Speaker 3: exactly what the hell happened with Frank's mysterious South African
Speaker 3: letters about the missing spy, saying, I have neither the
Speaker 3: time nor inclination to unravel all the mysteries in this case,
Speaker 3: because we never really will unravel all the mysteries of
Speaker 3: Frank's past. He played a bit part in so many
Speaker 3: much bigger stories. They've made whole Hollywood films out of
Speaker 3: so many of these little slices of history that Frank
Speaker 3: passed through, from Cold War spy thrillers to Scorsese dramas
Speaker 3: about organized crime.
Speaker 1: Frank's there, it's not in the movie.
Speaker 3: He's just out of frame while history happens doing something
Speaker 3: really goddamn weird.
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