WEBVTT - Behind the Bastards Presents: Weird Little Guys 0:00:01.760 --> 0:00:02.920 Cool Zone Media. 0:00:03.640 --> 0:00:07.120 Hey everybody, Robert here, because it's the holidays. We will 0:00:07.160 --> 0:00:10.119 be continuing our normally scheduled Behind the Bastards episodes, but 0:00:10.200 --> 0:00:12.680 every week we're also doing a compilation of one of 0:00:12.680 --> 0:00:15.480 the other new shows on our network. So aart so now, 0:00:15.560 --> 0:00:17.520 but this one is It's called Weird Little Guys. It 0:00:17.640 --> 0:00:20.800 launched this year with one of my friends and favorite researchers, 0:00:20.840 --> 0:00:23.959 the Great Molly Conger, and you're going to listen to 0:00:24.000 --> 0:00:26.680 a two part episode which we've cut together for you 0:00:26.760 --> 0:00:29.600 with a lot less ads than normal, about a guy 0:00:29.760 --> 0:00:34.080 named Frank Sweeney. So please enjoy and happy holidays. 0:00:39.040 --> 0:00:42.360 This is a story that begins and ends in bank 0:00:42.400 --> 0:00:46.519 parking lots, more or less in the way that stories 0:00:46.560 --> 0:00:51.320 can really begin or end. Our subject today was alive 0:00:51.400 --> 0:00:54.200 before the story begins, and as I'm writing this, he's 0:00:54.240 --> 0:00:57.560 still alive. But for the purposes of this telling, we'll 0:00:57.600 --> 0:01:01.240 start outside the Palisade Trust Company Bank in Englewood, New Jersey, 0:01:01.320 --> 0:01:04.880 on February twenty third, nineteen sixty two, when an eighteen 0:01:04.959 --> 0:01:07.480 year old member of the American Nazi Party was arrested 0:01:07.480 --> 0:01:09.560 after skipping school to try to rob a bank with 0:01:09.720 --> 0:01:12.480 a toy gun and will mark the beginning of the 0:01:12.560 --> 0:01:14.920 end of his story in a Wells Fargo parking lot 0:01:15.000 --> 0:01:19.320 in Garden City, Idaho, on October thirteenth, twenty eighteen, when 0:01:19.360 --> 0:01:22.320 an elderly ex Cohn was caught on security cam footage 0:01:22.480 --> 0:01:24.720 getting into an altercation with a couple who didn't move 0:01:24.760 --> 0:01:28.640 forward quickly enough at the drive up atm In the 0:01:28.640 --> 0:01:31.640 decades in between, Frank Sweeney went to prison at least 0:01:31.640 --> 0:01:34.759 half a dozen times, bought as a foreign mercenary, got 0:01:34.760 --> 0:01:38.560 deported from both Rhodesia and South Africa, helped an escaped 0:01:38.560 --> 0:01:41.720 spy of ad U s Marshals, turned state's witness against 0:01:41.760 --> 0:01:45.120 a Hitler worshiping serial killer, tried to help the mob, 0:01:45.240 --> 0:01:48.560 and waged a three year campaign of terror and harassment 0:01:48.880 --> 0:01:51.880 against a woman who made a passing comment about how 0:01:51.920 --> 0:01:57.120 he was parked outside the post office. I'm Molly Conger 0:01:57.200 --> 0:01:59.040 and this is brune La. 0:01:59.120 --> 0:02:17.320 Guys, this is a strange one. 0:02:18.320 --> 0:02:20.639 The first few episodes of this show were stories I 0:02:20.680 --> 0:02:24.680 already knew and thought you should know too. Kevin Strom 0:02:24.800 --> 0:02:27.520 was a prominent figure in the white supremacist movement for decades, 0:02:27.560 --> 0:02:30.040 and it was big local news here in Charlesville. When 0:02:30.040 --> 0:02:33.560 he was arrested twenty years ago. The Gerald Drake case 0:02:33.639 --> 0:02:36.360 was something I read about when it happened. The cases 0:02:36.400 --> 0:02:39.440 against the gun trafficking Nazi paramilitary group was a story 0:02:39.480 --> 0:02:42.639 I spent years reading, paying ten cents a page, one 0:02:42.720 --> 0:02:44.720 court filing at a time as it wound its way 0:02:44.720 --> 0:02:49.440 through the system. But this one, this one is brand 0:02:49.520 --> 0:02:52.360 new to me, and I think it will be brand 0:02:52.360 --> 0:02:55.560 new to just about everybody, because for as many times 0:02:55.600 --> 0:02:58.000 as this man shows up in the newspaper over the 0:02:58.120 --> 0:03:02.200 last sixty years, I haven't found any one source that's 0:03:02.400 --> 0:03:05.920 gathered together the threads of his life and tried to 0:03:05.919 --> 0:03:09.120 make sense of how one man's name could appear in 0:03:09.280 --> 0:03:14.840 so many other people's stories. Because that's where I found him. 0:03:15.160 --> 0:03:20.120 In someone else's story. I was reading a biography of 0:03:20.160 --> 0:03:23.640 a particularly nasty little guy, one we'll definitely get to 0:03:23.800 --> 0:03:28.480 eventually in another episode when my weird little guy detector 0:03:28.520 --> 0:03:33.400 went off. Call it a gut feeling, but this passing 0:03:33.520 --> 0:03:35.760 mention of a side character in the life of a 0:03:35.760 --> 0:03:38.640 serial killer was enough to get me to put that 0:03:38.680 --> 0:03:43.040 book down and spend days digging through newspaper archives trying 0:03:43.080 --> 0:03:45.040 to figure out Frank. 0:03:46.360 --> 0:03:47.840 And what I found was kind of. 0:03:47.760 --> 0:03:52.840 A bizarro world forest Gum. One man whose life keeps 0:03:52.880 --> 0:03:57.120 intersecting with major historical events, just wandering in and out 0:03:57.160 --> 0:04:00.560 of the lives of gullible reporters, frustrating to the federal 0:04:00.600 --> 0:04:05.480 agents and the innocent bystanders who accidentally became his targets, 0:04:06.560 --> 0:04:09.680 just bumbling his way through history, but without any of 0:04:09.800 --> 0:04:13.520 Tom Hanks's charm. I know we don't really know each 0:04:13.520 --> 0:04:16.479 other yet. I haven't earned the trust it takes to 0:04:16.520 --> 0:04:18.520 know you'll believe me when I promise you a two 0:04:18.520 --> 0:04:21.520 parter is worth the weight in between. But I think 0:04:21.560 --> 0:04:26.400 you'll agree Frank's story is weird enough for two episodes. 0:04:27.960 --> 0:04:30.960 Frank Abbott Sweeney Junior was born in August of nineteen 0:04:31.040 --> 0:04:34.080 forty three in New Jersey, to Frank Abbott Sweeney Senior, 0:04:34.200 --> 0:04:37.599 a realtor, and Marie Gleeson Sweeney, a homemaker who taught 0:04:37.680 --> 0:04:41.200 violin lessons and volunteered with the Red Cross. As a 0:04:41.200 --> 0:04:44.040 lifelong con artist, A lot of what he's told reporters 0:04:44.040 --> 0:04:47.719 about his own life is self serving fiction, which would 0:04:47.720 --> 0:04:50.600 sometimes get published without fact checking and then reappear in 0:04:50.680 --> 0:04:51.880 later accounts as fact. 0:04:52.480 --> 0:04:55.720 It was in the newspaper after all. 0:04:54.920 --> 0:04:58.039 So I've taken great pains to verify what i can, 0:04:58.640 --> 0:05:01.679 debunk what I can, and take note of the things 0:05:01.720 --> 0:05:03.599 I can only offer you with a grain of salt. 0:05:05.080 --> 0:05:08.479 Some of Frank's own lies are easily disproved, like the 0:05:08.520 --> 0:05:11.640 resume he gave a Rhodesian Army recruiter on it. He 0:05:11.680 --> 0:05:15.080 claimed he graduated from Georgetown University in nineteen sixty five 0:05:15.080 --> 0:05:18.800 at the degree in psychology, but he couldn't possibly have 0:05:18.800 --> 0:05:22.760 matriculated at Georgetown in nineteen sixty one. He was a 0:05:22.800 --> 0:05:25.120 senior at Tenafly High School in nineteen sixty two, when 0:05:25.120 --> 0:05:27.080 he was sent to the Annandell Reformatory for two and 0:05:27.120 --> 0:05:27.719 a half years. 0:05:28.760 --> 0:05:30.040 He never finished high school. 0:05:31.080 --> 0:05:33.839 His claim that his alias, Francis Shellhammer derives from his 0:05:33.920 --> 0:05:35.120 mother's maiden name. 0:05:35.520 --> 0:05:37.279 Also fails to hold up to scrutiny. 0:05:38.320 --> 0:05:41.760 His mother was born Marie Gleeson to John Gleeson, a fireman, 0:05:41.880 --> 0:05:46.360 and Lottie Gross Gleason in Chicago. And I was generous here. 0:05:46.960 --> 0:05:50.160 I wasted a lot of time. I even checked his grandparents. 0:05:50.360 --> 0:05:53.840 His middle name, Abbott was his paternal grandmother Martha's maiden name. 0:05:54.720 --> 0:05:56.960 I went as far as to track his family treat 0:05:57.200 --> 0:06:00.000 all the way back to Ireland, giving him the benefit 0:06:00.160 --> 0:06:01.560 to the doubt that maybe. 0:06:01.320 --> 0:06:04.520 There's a shell hammer in there somewhere. I didn't find one. 0:06:05.520 --> 0:06:09.239 It's possible that I started mixing up my Martha's, Mary's, John's, 0:06:09.279 --> 0:06:11.880 and Francis's by the time I was cross referencing marriage 0:06:11.920 --> 0:06:13.240 records from the eighteen seventies. 0:06:13.240 --> 0:06:16.480 But he probably just made it up. He does a 0:06:16.520 --> 0:06:17.040 lot of that. 0:06:18.240 --> 0:06:21.440 And other aspects of Frank's story would require a trip 0:06:21.480 --> 0:06:24.279 to the National Archive to sift through dusty boxes of 0:06:24.279 --> 0:06:28.600 ancient court transcripts and an unlikely degree of transparency from 0:06:28.600 --> 0:06:32.440 the Central Intelligence Agency, or a deathbed confession from a mobster, 0:06:32.920 --> 0:06:35.839 or a few tell all memoirs from US marshalls to 0:06:35.960 --> 0:06:41.279 ever hope to sort out. The rest is somewhere in between. 0:06:42.760 --> 0:06:45.560 But I'll stick with what we do know to be true, 0:06:45.880 --> 0:06:48.240 And I said, this story begins outside of a bank. 0:06:49.360 --> 0:06:53.480 On February twenty third, nineteen sixty two, Frank Sweeney skipped school. 0:06:54.720 --> 0:06:57.440 Shortly after nine am, he walked into a bank in Englewood, 0:06:57.480 --> 0:07:01.040 New Jersey, approached the teller and slid a plastic toy 0:07:01.080 --> 0:07:03.760 gun that he'd painted black out of a Manila envelope. 0:07:04.960 --> 0:07:08.000 I'd like to make a withdrawal, he told the teller 0:07:08.040 --> 0:07:11.800 as he cocked the toy pistol. I don't know if 0:07:11.800 --> 0:07:15.040 the teller could tell the gun was fake, or if 0:07:15.080 --> 0:07:18.160 she just didn't think this gangly, redheaded teenager had it 0:07:18.200 --> 0:07:21.200 in him to shoot her, or maybe she just was 0:07:21.240 --> 0:07:25.200 having a bad day and didn't care anymore, because, according 0:07:25.200 --> 0:07:29.320 to local news reports, she sneered at him, got up 0:07:29.880 --> 0:07:33.480 and walked away, leaving him standing there alone at the 0:07:33.480 --> 0:07:37.440 counter with his toy gun and bewildered by the teller's 0:07:37.440 --> 0:07:41.320 apparent disinterest in being held at gunpoint. He just put 0:07:41.320 --> 0:07:45.040 the plastic pistol back in his pocket, turned around and 0:07:45.080 --> 0:07:48.040 walked out the front door, and as he was leaving, 0:07:48.080 --> 0:07:51.119 an off duty policeman just happened to be walking into 0:07:51.200 --> 0:07:54.440 the bank. An employee told the officer what had just happened, 0:07:54.480 --> 0:07:57.640 and he turned right around and caught Frank just outside. 0:07:58.480 --> 0:08:00.640 He dragged him back inside the bank to be identified 0:08:00.680 --> 0:08:03.560 by the teller, and as the patrolman is making the arrest, 0:08:04.280 --> 0:08:07.440 Frank says to him. 0:08:06.360 --> 0:08:07.679 Well, I guess it didn't work. 0:08:09.120 --> 0:08:11.800 Later, under interrogation, he would tell the officers that his 0:08:11.880 --> 0:08:15.440 plan had been to support the movement to use the 0:08:15.440 --> 0:08:17.760 money from the bank robbery to support the activities of 0:08:17.800 --> 0:08:22.360 the American Nazi Party under George Lincoln Rockwell. At his arraignment, 0:08:22.400 --> 0:08:25.320 the judge asked, Frank, aren't you the fellow who's been 0:08:25.320 --> 0:08:30.040 painting swastikas on synagogues around here. Frank denied this, and 0:08:30.120 --> 0:08:33.000 he told the judge I never did anything illegal in 0:08:33.040 --> 0:08:37.080 my life, and then he pleaded guilty to the attempted 0:08:37.120 --> 0:08:40.480 bank robbery. There's no other mention of Frank in connection 0:08:40.520 --> 0:08:43.240 with that anti Semitic vandalism the judge mentioned, But I 0:08:43.280 --> 0:08:46.120 did find several newspaper articles about incidents of that sort 0:08:46.160 --> 0:08:48.640 from the prior to years when Frank would have still 0:08:48.679 --> 0:08:52.760 been a minor. In January nineteen sixty three, unnamed teenage 0:08:52.800 --> 0:08:56.040 boys were accused of painting swastikas on parked cars in Emerson, 0:08:56.480 --> 0:08:59.800 just eight miles away. In February of nineteen sixty one, 0:09:00.040 --> 0:09:02.040 one hung a swastika banner over the entrance of the 0:09:02.040 --> 0:09:05.880 synagogue in Tenafly. Newspaper articles about that banner reference a 0:09:05.920 --> 0:09:10.040 similar recent incident at the synagogue in nearby Englewood. A 0:09:10.080 --> 0:09:13.080 few days later, someone painted a swastika over a plaque nearby. 0:09:14.080 --> 0:09:16.880 In June, two teenage boys respotted fleeing the scene after 0:09:16.920 --> 0:09:19.599 two trailers belonging to a contract or were broken into 0:09:19.679 --> 0:09:23.320 and left a swastika painted on the floor inside. In 0:09:23.360 --> 0:09:25.560 all these incidents, police told the papers of the time 0:09:25.600 --> 0:09:28.280 that they had referred the cases to the juvenile division. 0:09:29.360 --> 0:09:32.280 It's not like anti Semitic incidents are so rare that 0:09:32.360 --> 0:09:35.080 I'm saying that Frank is the only possible suspect here 0:09:35.120 --> 0:09:39.040 in every nineteen sixties Bergen County news article about a swastika, 0:09:39.640 --> 0:09:42.600 I found plenty of other newspaper reports during those same 0:09:42.679 --> 0:09:45.680 two years about a local man flying a swastika flag 0:09:45.679 --> 0:09:48.679 outside of his home, about attacks on Jewish businesses and 0:09:48.679 --> 0:09:52.200 synagogues and neighboring cities, and other incidents that just don't 0:09:52.240 --> 0:09:57.120 fit this particular pattern of teenage Nazi vandalism. And the 0:09:57.200 --> 0:09:59.800 comment the judge made makes it sound like Frank had 0:09:59.800 --> 0:10:03.280 been there before. But any appearance he'd made in court 0:10:03.320 --> 0:10:05.480 as a miner wouldn't have been reported with his name 0:10:05.520 --> 0:10:08.240 attached to it. And it's hard enough to get any 0:10:08.240 --> 0:10:11.120 information about a juvenile case in twenty twenty four, So 0:10:11.760 --> 0:10:15.440 forget figuring out what happened in nineteen sixty one, but 0:10:15.520 --> 0:10:18.240 it does seem pretty likely he'd at least been a 0:10:18.440 --> 0:10:21.480 suspect in some of those incidents, because at the hearing 0:10:21.480 --> 0:10:24.480 where he pled guilty to the attempted bank robbery, Frank 0:10:24.559 --> 0:10:26.720 did admit that the police had spoken to him on 0:10:27.040 --> 0:10:32.040 numerous occasions, specifically concerning his involvement in George Lincoln Rockwell's 0:10:32.040 --> 0:10:36.280 American Nazi Party. For the attempted bank robbery, Frank was 0:10:36.320 --> 0:10:41.480 sentenced to an indeterminate term at a boy's reformatory, and 0:10:41.559 --> 0:10:44.080 he was released on October of nineteen sixty four, shortly 0:10:44.080 --> 0:10:47.000 after his twenty first birthday. After serving about two and 0:10:47.040 --> 0:10:50.960 a half years. After his first stent in jail, Frank 0:10:51.000 --> 0:10:54.000 returned to his parents' home in New Jersey. He worked 0:10:54.040 --> 0:10:57.000 occasionally as a shipping clerk, but it doesn't seem like 0:10:57.040 --> 0:11:00.360 he was holding down a steady job. After Noon in 0:11:00.440 --> 0:11:04.480 July of nineteen sixty seven, neighbors reported hearing gunshots in 0:11:04.520 --> 0:11:07.520 the woods. An officer drove by to check it out 0:11:07.559 --> 0:11:09.360 and saw a car parked on the side of the road. 0:11:10.000 --> 0:11:12.280 The car looked empty, so the officer kept driving without 0:11:12.320 --> 0:11:15.800 stopping to investigate. Suddenly, the car pulled out behind him 0:11:15.800 --> 0:11:18.560 and tried to run the officer off the road. A 0:11:18.600 --> 0:11:21.319 brief vehicle chase ensued, with the officer following the vehicle 0:11:21.360 --> 0:11:25.200 for about a mile before the driver Frank parked outside 0:11:25.240 --> 0:11:28.400 of his parents' home, got out and walked toward the 0:11:28.440 --> 0:11:31.920 front door. The officer asked Frank if he'd been shooting 0:11:31.920 --> 0:11:34.920 guns in the woods, to which Frank replied only no, 0:11:35.880 --> 0:11:38.360 and then warned the officer that he was on private 0:11:38.440 --> 0:11:43.600 property for walking away and into the house. But Frank 0:11:43.720 --> 0:11:47.160 left something on the front seat of the car, unfortunately, 0:11:47.840 --> 0:11:50.480 and it was a Thompson submachine gun that he'd been 0:11:50.480 --> 0:11:54.280 firing in the woods. The officer saw the gun and 0:11:54.440 --> 0:11:58.079 called for backup, and when they arrived, Frank opened fire 0:11:58.200 --> 0:12:01.000 on them from inside the home, kicking off a seventy 0:12:01.080 --> 0:12:03.560 five minute gun battle, with more than a dozen cops 0:12:03.559 --> 0:12:06.480 firing shots at the house as Frank fired at them 0:12:06.559 --> 0:12:10.880 through the windows. Frank's father and brother pleaded with him 0:12:10.880 --> 0:12:13.080 to come out, or at least to send the family 0:12:13.120 --> 0:12:16.920 dog out. After police Captain Peter Zurla was shot in 0:12:16.960 --> 0:12:20.040 the arm, the officers lobbed four canisters of tear gas 0:12:20.080 --> 0:12:22.679 through the windows, finally driving Frank out into the front yard, 0:12:22.720 --> 0:12:25.760 where he was arrested without further incident. And as they 0:12:25.760 --> 0:12:28.680 put the handcuffs on him, he turned to Captain Zerla, 0:12:28.679 --> 0:12:31.679 who's still standing there in the front yard bleeding from 0:12:31.720 --> 0:12:35.920 a gunshot wound, and Frank says, some shot when I 0:12:35.960 --> 0:12:39.520 got you through the window. Huh. There's no follow up 0:12:39.520 --> 0:12:41.720 I can find about whether the dog was heard, or 0:12:41.880 --> 0:12:45.120 how missus Sweeney got the tear gas out of her upholstery. 0:12:45.240 --> 0:12:47.800 It was the sixties, so maybe her sofa was safely 0:12:47.840 --> 0:12:50.120 scotch guarded or wrapped up in one of those weird 0:12:50.160 --> 0:12:53.640 plastic covers that were popular back then. But you have 0:12:53.679 --> 0:12:55.840 to figure she at least had to replace the curtains. 0:12:57.320 --> 0:13:00.120 Frank entered a not guilty plea and unsuccessfully try I 0:13:00.120 --> 0:13:01.920 to suppressed the evidence of the gun found on the 0:13:01.920 --> 0:13:04.440 front seat of the car, with his attorney arguing that 0:13:04.480 --> 0:13:07.080 it was discovered in an illegal search because the cop 0:13:07.120 --> 0:13:09.400 didn't have probable cause to look through the window of 0:13:09.440 --> 0:13:13.040 the parked car. That's not how that works. 0:13:14.280 --> 0:13:14.720 A trial. 0:13:14.720 --> 0:13:17.480 The defense put on three psychiatrists to argue for insanity, 0:13:17.800 --> 0:13:19.480 and the state put on two of their own who 0:13:19.520 --> 0:13:24.160 testified that Frank was certainly disturbed but not legally insane. 0:13:25.280 --> 0:13:28.200 The jury deliberated for just three hours before finding Frank 0:13:28.200 --> 0:13:31.440 guilty of attempted homicide, assault with the intent to kill, 0:13:32.000 --> 0:13:36.479 possession of a machine gun, and something called atrocious assault 0:13:36.920 --> 0:13:39.240 that I've never heard of. We don't have that here 0:13:39.240 --> 0:13:42.760 in Virginia, but in New Jersey, atrocious assault is an 0:13:42.800 --> 0:13:46.920 assault in battery, savage and cruel in character which results. 0:13:46.600 --> 0:13:51.960 In maiming or wounding. So that definitely qualifies. And he 0:13:52.000 --> 0:13:53.920 was sentenced to six. 0:13:53.720 --> 0:13:59.440 Years, which, honestly, that's kind of remarkable, right. I'm not 0:13:59.480 --> 0:14:01.960 going to for the Corsoal state here, far from it. 0:14:02.000 --> 0:14:05.480 You know more, jail time doesn't really fix anybody, and 0:14:05.760 --> 0:14:09.160 we'll come to see that jail never comes close to 0:14:09.200 --> 0:14:12.800 fixing Frank. But reading those sixties news stories about this 0:14:12.880 --> 0:14:16.360 event was fascinating. This cop who got shot by a 0:14:16.440 --> 0:14:19.640 Nazi with a Tommy gun is described in every article 0:14:19.720 --> 0:14:25.160 as quote lightly wounded. I mean, he does seem to 0:14:25.160 --> 0:14:27.600 have not been seriously injured. He was shot, you know, 0:14:27.640 --> 0:14:29.280 in the upper arm. I don't think it went through 0:14:29.280 --> 0:14:32.080 the bone, so it really he was lightly wounded. 0:14:32.120 --> 0:14:34.680 But that's not what they would put in the newspaper 0:14:34.720 --> 0:14:35.960 today you know it. 0:14:37.200 --> 0:14:39.160 And the cops didn't drive a tank through the front 0:14:39.160 --> 0:14:42.000 of the suburban home or unload their guns into him 0:14:42.000 --> 0:14:45.120 when he came out. There's been such a massive culture 0:14:45.120 --> 0:14:47.640 shift over the years and the way we justify aggressive 0:14:47.680 --> 0:14:49.960 police response and the way that we talk about the 0:14:50.080 --> 0:14:54.600 risk to police. It's just interesting to see that it 0:14:54.640 --> 0:14:59.280 wasn't always that way. But there's another unanswered question in 0:14:59.560 --> 0:15:02.400 the story of this siege in this New York suburb. 0:15:03.400 --> 0:15:05.320 What was he doing that day? 0:15:05.760 --> 0:15:09.560 I mean shooting guns in the woods obviously, but why 0:15:09.560 --> 0:15:13.040 did he panic when that cop drove by, and why 0:15:13.520 --> 0:15:18.000 those woods in particular. We'll never really know. Even if 0:15:18.000 --> 0:15:20.960 he told us, we wouldn't know. He's a liar. But 0:15:21.720 --> 0:15:25.200 the newspaper articles at the time do say that the 0:15:25.240 --> 0:15:28.080 officer initially saw Frank's car parked at the intersection of 0:15:28.120 --> 0:15:30.960 East Clinton Avenue and Woodland Street, about a mile from 0:15:31.000 --> 0:15:31.760 where Frank lived. 0:15:31.800 --> 0:15:32.320 At the time. 0:15:33.080 --> 0:15:35.880 They used to put everything in the newspaper. It's so beautiful, 0:15:36.640 --> 0:15:40.400 every detail, every boring little bit in which they still 0:15:40.440 --> 0:15:45.680 did that, And I'm eternally curious about details that probably 0:15:45.720 --> 0:15:48.120 won't end up mattering. But I pulled up a map 0:15:48.160 --> 0:15:51.360 of Tenafly, New Jersey, and there is a large wooded 0:15:51.400 --> 0:15:53.560 area you could walk straight into if you parked your 0:15:53.600 --> 0:15:57.320 car at that intersection, And those woods surround a large 0:15:57.320 --> 0:16:00.880 building that first opened its doors in nineteen fifty, the 0:16:00.960 --> 0:16:18.640 Kaplan Jewish Community Center. The clearest account of the next 0:16:18.640 --> 0:16:20.920 phase of Frank's life comes from an essay written in 0:16:20.960 --> 0:16:26.640 twenty nineteen by a retired Rhodesian military policeman. Despite being 0:16:26.680 --> 0:16:31.320 the most likely to be more or less true, it's 0:16:31.360 --> 0:16:34.880 still riddled with obvious factual inaccuracies, things that just can't 0:16:34.920 --> 0:16:38.600 be true. Maybe because it was written as a humorous 0:16:38.600 --> 0:16:41.840 recollection meant to be read by his fellow former Rhodesian soldiers, 0:16:41.840 --> 0:16:44.240 and maybe his memory has faded a bit in the 0:16:44.280 --> 0:16:47.680 nearly fifty years since the event in question. But it 0:16:47.680 --> 0:16:50.960 does at the very least substantiate Frank's own claim about 0:16:50.960 --> 0:16:53.720 having enlisted in the Rhodesian Light Infantry in the early 0:16:53.840 --> 0:16:58.320 nineteen seventies. I'll try to walk the tightrope here of 0:16:58.600 --> 0:17:02.200 providing a little more con text than just Rhodesia was 0:17:02.320 --> 0:17:05.080 very bad and white supremacist from other countries were obsessed 0:17:05.119 --> 0:17:06.800 with the idea that they could travel there to kill 0:17:06.840 --> 0:17:09.920 black people with impunity, while still stopping short of taking 0:17:10.000 --> 0:17:12.680 us down the long road of the history and consequences 0:17:12.680 --> 0:17:16.720 of European colonization in Africa. That's far from my area 0:17:16.760 --> 0:17:19.160 of expertise, and it's not why you're here. 0:17:20.560 --> 0:17:20.760 Now. 0:17:20.800 --> 0:17:24.000 Even if you're coming into this with a completely blank slate. 0:17:24.320 --> 0:17:28.960 For some reason, you're probably thinking, there's no country called Rhodesia, 0:17:30.080 --> 0:17:35.560 and you're right, there isn't. There never really was. Rhodesia 0:17:35.600 --> 0:17:38.919 was never recognized as a sovereign state, but we're calling 0:17:39.000 --> 0:17:41.679 Rhodesia here as the present day state of Zimbabwe in 0:17:41.720 --> 0:17:45.159 southern Africa. In the early twentieth century, Rhodesia was a 0:17:45.200 --> 0:17:48.560 British territory. The legacy of Cecil Roads is British South 0:17:48.600 --> 0:17:52.200 Africa Company. The area was effectively ruled by the company 0:17:52.280 --> 0:17:54.600 until the nineteen twenties, when it became a self governing 0:17:54.640 --> 0:17:58.600 colony of the UK, and by the nineteen fifties, decolonization 0:17:58.800 --> 0:18:02.960 was happening all across the African continent. These fading European 0:18:03.000 --> 0:18:06.640 empires couldn't or didn't want to hold on to all 0:18:06.640 --> 0:18:10.080 the colonies they'd collected during the previous centuries scramble for Africa. 0:18:10.920 --> 0:18:13.800 In nineteen sixty British Prime Minister Harold macmillan gave his 0:18:14.080 --> 0:18:16.640 Wind of Change speech in an address to the South 0:18:16.640 --> 0:18:20.720 African Parliament about the political necessity of moving toward decolonization. 0:18:22.040 --> 0:18:25.360 The wind of change is blowing through this continent. 0:18:26.600 --> 0:18:27.800 Whether we like it or not. 0:18:29.560 --> 0:18:35.919 This growth national consciousness is a political fact, and we 0:18:36.080 --> 0:18:40.800 was all accepted as a fact. Our national policies must 0:18:40.800 --> 0:18:41.560 take a contribute. 0:18:43.320 --> 0:18:45.520 He'd actually given the same speech a few weeks earlier 0:18:45.520 --> 0:18:47.359 in Ghana, but the press didn't pick it up the 0:18:47.440 --> 0:18:51.119 first time, and I think the whether we like it 0:18:51.240 --> 0:18:53.720 or not part of that statement matters a lot. 0:18:53.800 --> 0:18:54.040 Here. 0:18:54.280 --> 0:18:57.679 He wasn't advocating for decolonization out of the goodness of 0:18:57.720 --> 0:19:01.960 his heart. He was reluctantly acknowledging the expensive and bloody 0:19:01.960 --> 0:19:04.520 political reality of trying to hold on to these colonies 0:19:04.560 --> 0:19:07.959 at any cost. He could see the Belgians and Congo 0:19:08.000 --> 0:19:10.720 and the French in Algeria fighting these costly wars with 0:19:10.840 --> 0:19:15.359 Africans who wanted an end to European colonial rule, and 0:19:15.440 --> 0:19:18.639 as they worked towards extricating themselves from these colonial arrangements, 0:19:18.640 --> 0:19:22.280 the British government adopted a policy called no independence before 0:19:22.400 --> 0:19:25.960 majority rule, meaning they wouldn't hand over sovereignty to a 0:19:25.960 --> 0:19:31.560 colony still run exclusively by the white colonial minority. Now, obviously, 0:19:31.600 --> 0:19:34.480 this is an immensely complicated bit of political history that 0:19:34.520 --> 0:19:37.760 I'm stripping down to the studs and explaining badly so 0:19:37.760 --> 0:19:40.200 we get through it quickly. So don't think I'm giving 0:19:40.240 --> 0:19:44.360 the British Empire any kind of credit here. This policy 0:19:44.400 --> 0:19:46.879 did not arise out of a genuine desire to undo 0:19:46.920 --> 0:19:51.560 the harms of colonialism and address racism or anything like that. 0:19:51.560 --> 0:19:53.320 That was not on their minds. 0:19:54.400 --> 0:19:56.040 But I think they knew what it would look like 0:19:56.119 --> 0:20:00.640 if their decolonization looked exactly like their colony. And we're 0:20:00.640 --> 0:20:02.200 not talking about a pr lass here. 0:20:02.240 --> 0:20:03.280 This is the Cold War. 0:20:03.760 --> 0:20:06.199 They don't want to give the Soviets an opportunity to 0:20:06.200 --> 0:20:08.200 come in behind them. 0:20:08.520 --> 0:20:09.160 But it was this. 0:20:09.200 --> 0:20:12.480 Policy, or rather defiance of it, that led Rhodesia under 0:20:12.520 --> 0:20:16.159 Ian Smith, to make the unilateral declaration of independence in 0:20:16.280 --> 0:20:20.639 nineteen sixty five. White colonists made up just five percent 0:20:20.680 --> 0:20:23.000 of the population of the territory, but they were unwilling 0:20:23.040 --> 0:20:26.000 to accept that the UK would only grant Rhodesian independence 0:20:26.040 --> 0:20:29.760 if they shared even a crumb of political power with 0:20:29.840 --> 0:20:34.520 the other ninety five percent of Rhodesians. And apologies again 0:20:34.600 --> 0:20:37.760 for these digressions. I just love the context. I think 0:20:37.760 --> 0:20:41.240 it's so important. But that brings us to where we 0:20:41.240 --> 0:20:45.320 were going. The Rhodesian bush War a fifteen year period 0:20:45.320 --> 0:20:48.000 of civil conflict between the white minority led government and 0:20:48.080 --> 0:20:53.159 the African nationalist guerrilla forces. The number of foreign mercenaries 0:20:53.160 --> 0:20:56.800 who actually traveled to Rhodesia during the war remains up 0:20:56.840 --> 0:21:00.280 for debate. Most of the countries the mercenaries came from 0:21:00.280 --> 0:21:04.679 were embarrassed by the whole affair. International sanctions levied against 0:21:04.680 --> 0:21:08.080 the territory after the illegal declaration of independence made it 0:21:08.119 --> 0:21:11.480 illegal for citizens of many countries to participate in the conflict, 0:21:11.960 --> 0:21:14.600 even in countries that didn't have their own domestic laws 0:21:14.640 --> 0:21:19.280 banning mercenary activity. And there was some discomfort within Rhodesia 0:21:19.359 --> 0:21:22.200 too about this perception that they needed foreigners to help 0:21:22.200 --> 0:21:26.080 with what they saw as their war for independence. So, 0:21:26.280 --> 0:21:31.360 for deeply unflattering and regrettable reasons, no one was very 0:21:31.440 --> 0:21:34.600 invested in getting a thorough accounting of the situation. Right, 0:21:34.680 --> 0:21:39.359 Nobody benefits from knowing what happened here. But at the 0:21:39.440 --> 0:21:43.200 high end it was really only a few thousand mercenaries 0:21:43.280 --> 0:21:46.800 over the total course of the conflict, with best estimates 0:21:46.840 --> 0:21:49.480 for the number of them who were Americans being somewhere 0:21:49.520 --> 0:21:53.920 in the low hundreds. So a lot of guys talked 0:21:53.960 --> 0:21:57.359 about it, but not very many of them actually did it. 0:21:58.760 --> 0:22:03.120 This idea of American extremists traveling to Africa to violently 0:22:03.240 --> 0:22:07.040 enforce white rule over black Africans is one that modern 0:22:07.080 --> 0:22:11.920 white supremacists still cherish and celebrate. Dylan Rufe, who was 0:22:11.960 --> 0:22:14.480 welcomed with open arms at an evening Bible study at 0:22:14.520 --> 0:22:18.000 a manual African Methodist Episcopal church in Charleston, South Carolina, 0:22:18.800 --> 0:22:23.080 registered the domain last Rhodesian dot com a few months 0:22:23.080 --> 0:22:25.399 before he murdered nine of the parishioners who thought he 0:22:25.440 --> 0:22:28.719 was joining them for prayer that night. Rufe made his 0:22:28.720 --> 0:22:32.159 final edit to that site his digital manifesto, just hours 0:22:32.200 --> 0:22:36.600 before carrying out that attack. In twenty fifteen, the cultural 0:22:36.680 --> 0:22:39.840 moment where magazines like Soldier of Fortune ran full page 0:22:39.880 --> 0:22:43.159 advertisements for opportunities to be a man among men in 0:22:43.200 --> 0:22:47.919 the African bush looms large in our memories, but the 0:22:47.960 --> 0:22:51.479 reality is there weren't many men who actually heeded the call, 0:22:51.800 --> 0:22:57.040 and their role in the conflict was insignificant. But unlike 0:22:57.080 --> 0:22:59.680 many of those Americans who did end up in Rhodesia 0:22:59.680 --> 0:23:03.080 in this seventies, Frank Sweeney didn't see an advertisement and 0:23:03.119 --> 0:23:06.960 Soldier of Fortune. That magazine's first issue, bearing a cover 0:23:07.040 --> 0:23:10.320 story about American mercenaries in Africa, was published in the 0:23:10.320 --> 0:23:13.800 summer of nineteen seventy five, just as Frank Sweeney was 0:23:13.840 --> 0:23:18.399 already on his way home. According to Frank, which is 0:23:18.440 --> 0:23:21.399 a dangerous way to start an assertion of fact. He 0:23:21.480 --> 0:23:24.520 walked into the Rhodesian Information Center in Washington, d C. 0:23:24.800 --> 0:23:27.880 In nineteen seventy two and asked how to join up. 0:23:29.200 --> 0:23:33.520 The information center was not technically a diplomatic office because 0:23:33.600 --> 0:23:37.480 Rhodesia was not technically a country, the fact that would 0:23:37.480 --> 0:23:40.439 get them into some trouble in Australia, but they claimed 0:23:40.480 --> 0:23:44.359 that they were just offering information about tourism. Frank says 0:23:44.359 --> 0:23:47.600 he was offered the contact information for Major Nick Lamprecht, 0:23:48.000 --> 0:23:52.359 the Rhodesian Army's chief recruiter. David Annibl, a reporter for 0:23:52.400 --> 0:23:55.280 the Christian Science Monitor, who interviewed Frank in nineteen seventy 0:23:55.280 --> 0:23:58.240 five wrote that he'd spoken to another recent visitor to 0:23:58.240 --> 0:24:02.040 that office. After talking to Frank, this visitor walked into 0:24:02.040 --> 0:24:04.040 the office and was given a brochure printed by the 0:24:04.080 --> 0:24:09.080 Rhodesian Department of Labor about careers in Rhodesia, and after 0:24:09.119 --> 0:24:12.159 a thirty minute presentation about Americans already fighting in the 0:24:12.200 --> 0:24:15.560 conflict and the pay and benefits a mercenary could expect, 0:24:15.600 --> 0:24:20.120 including paid airfare, all violations of international sanctions in US 0:24:20.119 --> 0:24:24.240 federal law, the visitor was offered Major Lamprek's contact information 0:24:25.840 --> 0:24:29.280 That recruiter Nick Lamprek worked closely with Soldier of Fortune 0:24:29.280 --> 0:24:32.159 founder Robert K. Brown to strategize how the magazine can 0:24:32.200 --> 0:24:34.760 be used to convince more Americans to make the trip. 0:24:34.800 --> 0:24:38.040 In the latter years of the conflict, Lampreck himself even 0:24:38.040 --> 0:24:41.160 wrote an article for the magazine promising young American Soldiers 0:24:41.160 --> 0:24:43.439 of Fortune that it would be easy for them to 0:24:43.520 --> 0:24:48.639 find a beautiful white Rhodesian wife. I think Lamprek knew 0:24:48.640 --> 0:24:50.760 he was lying about how much fun you could have 0:24:50.800 --> 0:24:54.000 fighting in the Bush War. His own son, Vincent, had 0:24:54.040 --> 0:24:58.600 already fled to South Africa to avoid military service. In 0:24:58.680 --> 0:25:01.760 what you maybe sends is a theme here. The details 0:25:01.800 --> 0:25:05.400 of frank service in Rhodesia are a little murky. 0:25:05.560 --> 0:25:06.360 The details of. 0:25:06.480 --> 0:25:08.840 A lot of what was going on in Rhodesia during 0:25:08.840 --> 0:25:12.480 those years is not totally settled, and Frank's own involvement 0:25:12.600 --> 0:25:16.200 far less so. He told reporter David Annibal in that 0:25:16.280 --> 0:25:19.080 nineteen seventy five interview that as a corporal in the 0:25:19.119 --> 0:25:23.240 Rhodesian Light Infantry, his detachment had taken many prisoners, but 0:25:23.280 --> 0:25:28.080 when instructed to do so, they just executed people, saying 0:25:28.320 --> 0:25:30.239 we shot him right there in the bush when we 0:25:30.240 --> 0:25:34.399 were told not to take prisoners. He also admitted that 0:25:34.440 --> 0:25:36.560 his unit had taken part in raids over the border 0:25:36.560 --> 0:25:40.400 into neighboring Mozambique. He claimed that sometimes these trips over 0:25:40.400 --> 0:25:44.000 the border were to assist Portuguese troops, and until late 0:25:44.040 --> 0:25:47.919 nineteen seventy four, Portuguese troops were in Mozambique fighting to 0:25:47.920 --> 0:25:51.600 put down the Mozambiquan War of Independence, and Frank said 0:25:51.640 --> 0:25:54.040 sometimes they'd go over the border to raid gorilla camps, 0:25:54.600 --> 0:25:57.960 perhaps those belonging to the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army, 0:25:58.000 --> 0:26:00.760 which had strong ties to the group's fight for independence 0:26:00.760 --> 0:26:05.280 In Mozambique. These Rhodesian raids over the border into Mozambique 0:26:05.280 --> 0:26:08.400 continued even after that nation gain sovereignty in nineteen seventy five. 0:26:08.480 --> 0:26:11.760 But it's hard to pin down when Frank would have 0:26:11.800 --> 0:26:16.399 been doing this, if he even did. I can at 0:26:16.480 --> 0:26:18.880 least say that Frank was no longer in Rhodesia. During 0:26:18.880 --> 0:26:22.200 one of the war's worst atrocities, a Rhodesian raid on 0:26:22.240 --> 0:26:26.200 a refugee camp in Mozambique killed over one thousand civilians. 0:26:27.560 --> 0:26:30.280 David Animal published a couple of articles in nineteen seventy 0:26:30.320 --> 0:26:33.200 five in nineteen seventy six about Rhodesia, and he often 0:26:33.280 --> 0:26:35.240 quoted Frank Sweeney about his time there. 0:26:35.880 --> 0:26:36.960 After all, there weren't. 0:26:36.720 --> 0:26:39.360 Many Americans who'd been there, and even fewer who were 0:26:39.359 --> 0:26:43.280 easy to find, and Frank was easy to find. He 0:26:43.480 --> 0:26:47.200 was very public about his stint as a mercenary. After 0:26:47.240 --> 0:26:50.040 returning home in nineteen seventy five, Frank placed ads in 0:26:50.080 --> 0:26:53.919 magazines like Shotgun News and Gun Week that read. 0:26:56.000 --> 0:27:00.240 The Rhodesian Army offers excitement and adventure. I know I've 0:27:00.280 --> 0:27:03.800 been there. Young Americans of European ancestry, write to me 0:27:03.920 --> 0:27:08.040 for free. Details pertaining to recruiting. Frank Abbott Sweeney seven 0:27:08.000 --> 0:27:11.400 to two Creston Avenue, Tenafly, New Jersey, zero seven six 0:27:11.520 --> 0:27:12.240 seven zero. 0:27:14.359 --> 0:27:16.679 When speaking with the reporter about his efforts to recruit 0:27:16.680 --> 0:27:19.400 others to make the trip, Frank spoke warmly of Major 0:27:19.480 --> 0:27:22.560 Lamprecht and claimed that it was Lamprecked himself who instructed 0:27:22.600 --> 0:27:26.120 Frank to get in touch with as many white applicants 0:27:26.160 --> 0:27:31.600 as possible, which is honestly probably not true, but who knows. 0:27:32.520 --> 0:27:35.399 Frank is described as a fan of Ian Smith, of 0:27:35.440 --> 0:27:39.919 white superiority and of the need to defend both, and 0:27:40.040 --> 0:27:42.960 is quoted as saying, if I could do anything to 0:27:43.000 --> 0:27:46.240 preserve Western civilization in the area, I would do it. 0:27:47.960 --> 0:27:50.879 Frank told Annabel that he'd received hundreds of letters in 0:27:50.920 --> 0:27:54.200 response to his ads and responded to all of them. 0:27:54.560 --> 0:27:57.119 But then again, he also told Annabel he was a 0:27:57.119 --> 0:28:01.199 college graduate, and you know that's not true. An animal 0:28:01.280 --> 0:28:04.360 claims Frank showed him his discharge papers from the Rhodesian 0:28:04.440 --> 0:28:08.199 Light Infantry, which were quote in order according to the article, 0:28:08.760 --> 0:28:11.040 and showed three years of good service and a rank 0:28:11.080 --> 0:28:16.200 of corporal, And that's definitely not true. I'm sure Frank 0:28:16.240 --> 0:28:19.920 did show Annimal something. He probably did show him papers 0:28:19.920 --> 0:28:22.720 that indicated as much, and I don't fault him for 0:28:22.760 --> 0:28:29.400 reporting it. It turns out Frank was quite skilled at forgery. 0:28:29.600 --> 0:28:32.280 Frank claims he was in Washington, d c. Getting recruited 0:28:32.280 --> 0:28:35.280 into the Rhodesian Army in nineteen seventy two, but he 0:28:35.320 --> 0:28:38.200 may have actually still been in prison in nineteen seventy two. 0:28:38.360 --> 0:28:39.440 For shooting that cop. 0:28:40.120 --> 0:28:42.720 It's hard to pin down exactly when he was released. 0:28:43.640 --> 0:28:46.480 One newspaper article years later puts his parole date for 0:28:46.520 --> 0:28:50.440 that conviction at nineteen seventy four, but I have a 0:28:50.480 --> 0:28:53.040 bad feeling that was just a reporter on a deadline 0:28:53.040 --> 0:28:55.280 who did the math on a six year sentence and 0:28:55.600 --> 0:29:00.200 assumed Frank served all of it, which probably didn't. When 0:29:00.200 --> 0:29:02.400 Frank was later arrested for his role in the escape 0:29:02.400 --> 0:29:05.400 of a Soviet spy, an FBI agent puts his date 0:29:05.400 --> 0:29:08.680 of enlistment at nineteen seventy three, So the truth is 0:29:08.680 --> 0:29:09.520 in there somewhere. 0:29:10.920 --> 0:29:11.400 Either way. 0:29:11.520 --> 0:29:14.840 He wasn't in Rhodesia for very long before he really 0:29:15.520 --> 0:29:21.320 really wanted to go home. A war as hell for everybody. 0:29:22.400 --> 0:29:28.600 And here we have another unreliable narrator, Anthony Hickman, Hickman 0:29:28.680 --> 0:29:31.600 is a retired officer in the British South Africa Police, 0:29:31.640 --> 0:29:36.480 which no longer exists and confusingly was neither British nor 0:29:36.800 --> 0:29:40.560 South African, and they weren't always really just police, but 0:29:40.720 --> 0:29:42.400 it bore that name because it grew out of the 0:29:42.440 --> 0:29:46.600 paramilitary force run directly by Cecil Rhodes's British South Africa 0:29:46.600 --> 0:29:51.160 Company in the nineteenth century. The BSAP was Rhodesia's regular 0:29:51.240 --> 0:29:54.560 police force, but the line between regular policing and military 0:29:54.600 --> 0:29:59.480 operations was blurry, and during the Bush War there were 0:30:00.000 --> 0:30:03.720 military units made up of BSAP officers and they developed 0:30:03.760 --> 0:30:08.200 counterinsurgency and counter terrorism units. They oversaw the intelligence gathering 0:30:08.320 --> 0:30:13.240 arm of the infamously brutal Selu Scouts, and they killed 0:30:13.600 --> 0:30:17.200 hundreds of people by introducing poisoned food and medicine into 0:30:17.200 --> 0:30:21.360 the supply lines for the insurgent forces. I don't know 0:30:21.520 --> 0:30:24.160 exactly what Hickman was doing for most of the war. 0:30:24.440 --> 0:30:28.000 Maybe he didn't do any of that, But these days 0:30:28.000 --> 0:30:31.640 he's retired in Johannesburg, South Africa and makes detailed models 0:30:31.640 --> 0:30:35.760 of trains and farmhouses. In the early nineteen seventies, he 0:30:35.800 --> 0:30:39.880 was assigned to the Homicide Unit of bsap's Criminal Investigative Division, 0:30:40.760 --> 0:30:43.280 and in twenty nineteen he wrote down his recollections of 0:30:43.320 --> 0:30:47.320 Frank Sweeney for a newsletter published by his Veterans Association. 0:30:49.240 --> 0:30:51.840 Like any account of Frank's life, Hickman's essay can't be 0:30:51.880 --> 0:30:55.400 taken as gospel truth between the lies Frank told him 0:30:55.440 --> 0:30:57.520 and his own fading memory of the seventies. 0:30:58.400 --> 0:30:59.680 It's not perfect. 0:31:00.160 --> 0:31:04.000 Honestly, I almost discarded it without reading past the first page. 0:31:04.600 --> 0:31:07.240 Who's off to a pretty bad start when the first 0:31:07.280 --> 0:31:12.120 paragraph placed these events in September of nineteen seventy seven, 0:31:12.520 --> 0:31:16.880 which would, of course be entirely impossible. Frank could not 0:31:16.920 --> 0:31:19.240 have been in a Rhodesian Army barracks in September of 0:31:19.320 --> 0:31:23.520 nineteen seventy seven, because according to the US Marshalls. 0:31:23.080 --> 0:31:25.000 The FBI, the DOJ, the CIA. 0:31:24.720 --> 0:31:27.080 In the New York Times, Frank was hanging out with 0:31:27.120 --> 0:31:29.760 a Soviet spy in the exercise yard at a federal 0:31:29.760 --> 0:31:33.320 prison in Los Angeles in September of nineteen seventy seven. 0:31:34.760 --> 0:31:37.560 But I'll cut Hickman some slack here on that faltering start, 0:31:37.600 --> 0:31:41.040 because there's ample evidence within the story that puts these 0:31:41.040 --> 0:31:45.560 events somewhere in the springtime of nineteen seventy five, and 0:31:45.760 --> 0:31:48.320 the data side there is enough meat to Hickman's account 0:31:48.320 --> 0:31:52.720 and the supporting primary documentation he provided that supports the 0:31:52.800 --> 0:31:54.120 idea that the story is. 0:31:54.840 --> 0:31:56.200 More or less true. 0:31:57.840 --> 0:32:00.880 As a homicide detective, Hickman was involved in an investigation 0:32:00.960 --> 0:32:05.000 into Frank Sweeney for attempted murder at a Rhodesian military barracks. 0:32:06.240 --> 0:32:12.040 One evening sometime in early nineteen seventy five, probably Frank, 0:32:12.080 --> 0:32:15.120 went to the bathroom at the barracks he was living in. 0:32:15.120 --> 0:32:18.000 Inside the shared facilities, two infantrymen who had been drinking 0:32:18.080 --> 0:32:23.400 were laughing and joking around. One was quite drunk, undressed 0:32:23.400 --> 0:32:25.400 and got into the shower to try to sober up 0:32:25.440 --> 0:32:28.800 a little bit. Three men were chatting pleasantly enough, but 0:32:29.480 --> 0:32:33.640 Frank was humorless and sober, and he was outraged when 0:32:33.640 --> 0:32:35.760 the drunk man splashed shower. 0:32:35.440 --> 0:32:36.680 Water on him. 0:32:37.200 --> 0:32:39.520 The men argued, and one of them called Frank a 0:32:39.600 --> 0:32:43.800 bloody yank. And Frank's not a guy who turns the 0:32:43.840 --> 0:32:49.400 other cheek. He takes every insult very personally. So a 0:32:49.400 --> 0:32:52.640 little bit damp and with his pride wounded, he runs 0:32:52.640 --> 0:32:54.720 back to his bunk and comes right back with a 0:32:54.840 --> 0:32:58.800 seven inch dagger and pulls the shower curtain aside and 0:32:59.000 --> 0:33:04.360 stabs this aked drunk man in the lower abdomen. The 0:33:04.400 --> 0:33:07.400 other soldier ran for help and Frank was quickly arrested, 0:33:08.800 --> 0:33:12.680 and while he sat in custody, a mysterious letter arrived 0:33:12.680 --> 0:33:15.680 in the mail. The postmark indicated that it had been 0:33:15.720 --> 0:33:20.600 mailed from nearby Salisbury weeks earlier. The anonymous letter writer 0:33:20.720 --> 0:33:24.520 said that a private Fa Sweeney had been convicted of 0:33:24.520 --> 0:33:27.040 the attempted murder of a policeman in the United States. 0:33:28.200 --> 0:33:31.040 It was Hickman, our essayist, who first suspected that Frank 0:33:31.160 --> 0:33:35.560 may actually have written this letter himself, and when he 0:33:35.600 --> 0:33:38.840 pressed Frank for a handwriting sample to prove it, he 0:33:38.920 --> 0:33:40.080 cracked immediately. 0:33:41.480 --> 0:33:43.240 He'd sent the letter himself, hoping that. 0:33:43.240 --> 0:33:45.920 It would be his ticket home, that they would kick 0:33:46.000 --> 0:33:47.960 him out and deport him when they found out he 0:33:48.080 --> 0:33:50.440 lied about not having a criminal history, and that he 0:33:50.480 --> 0:33:52.840 would get a free flight back to New Jersey without 0:33:52.840 --> 0:33:54.520 having to finish his term of service. 0:33:55.680 --> 0:33:56.760 And if that letter had. 0:33:56.640 --> 0:34:01.120 Only arrived a few days earlier, they probably would have 0:34:01.160 --> 0:34:07.240 done just that before anybody had to get stabbed. The story, 0:34:07.280 --> 0:34:11.839 Frank then told Hickman has elements of truth, but it's 0:34:11.880 --> 0:34:15.719 not quite right. He told Hickman that the shootout at 0:34:15.719 --> 0:34:18.640 his parents' house had happened just the year prior, and 0:34:18.680 --> 0:34:21.600 that he'd fled the country prior to being sentenced. So 0:34:21.640 --> 0:34:24.399 he's cutting out this six year period that he spent 0:34:24.440 --> 0:34:27.080 in prison for the shooting and pretending that he had 0:34:27.120 --> 0:34:30.440 just arrived there in Rhodesia immediately after the events that 0:34:30.960 --> 0:34:33.560 we know took place in July of nineteen sixty seven. 0:34:34.680 --> 0:34:37.400 And the timeline isn't the only thing that's off in 0:34:37.440 --> 0:34:40.920 this version. Frank says the shootout only lasted ten minutes, 0:34:41.239 --> 0:34:44.120 not over an hour, and he had decided to end 0:34:44.120 --> 0:34:46.480 the incident on his own terms when he saw that 0:34:46.520 --> 0:34:49.640 his father had arrived, rather than the truth, which was 0:34:49.640 --> 0:34:52.120 that he argued with his distraught father for an hour 0:34:52.200 --> 0:34:54.320 while continuing to shoot through the windows until he was 0:34:54.320 --> 0:34:58.160 smoked out by tear gas. But the inciting incident in 0:34:58.160 --> 0:35:01.760 this version is similar. He told Hickman about shooting guns 0:35:01.760 --> 0:35:03.880 in the woods and the neighbors reporting the noise and 0:35:03.920 --> 0:35:07.400 the officer arriving in the car chase, but he claimed 0:35:07.400 --> 0:35:08.920 the gun he was shooting in the woods was one 0:35:08.960 --> 0:35:12.080 he purchased from an advertisement and soldier of Fortune magazine, 0:35:12.120 --> 0:35:16.000 which is obviously not possible because that magazine didn't exist 0:35:16.000 --> 0:35:18.520 in nineteen sixty seven. I don't know, maybe he was 0:35:18.600 --> 0:35:21.560 just updating the story so it would sound more current. 0:35:22.680 --> 0:35:25.160 But Frank said he'd purchased the Tommy gun from the magazine, 0:35:25.160 --> 0:35:27.279 but it was missing some parts. It didn't have a 0:35:27.320 --> 0:35:32.359 firing pin and something else, so it didn't work. He 0:35:32.440 --> 0:35:35.719 manufactured the necessary replacement parts, but he was concerned that 0:35:36.120 --> 0:35:39.359 in his modification of the weapon maybe things weren't one 0:35:39.400 --> 0:35:41.680 hundred percent and he was worried that it would explode 0:35:41.840 --> 0:35:44.360 when fired, so he lashed it to a tree and 0:35:44.440 --> 0:35:46.880 set it to fully automatic and rigged a string to 0:35:46.920 --> 0:35:50.160 the trigger and hid behind another tree for cover. 0:35:50.280 --> 0:35:51.799 This sounds so Looney. 0:35:51.520 --> 0:35:54.719 Tunes to me, like a literal Looney Tunes cartoon, right, 0:35:54.760 --> 0:35:59.560 This is this is daffy duck behavior. But he tells 0:35:59.600 --> 0:36:03.200 this story to Hickman, and in his essay Hickman writes 0:36:04.200 --> 0:36:08.759 true or false, impossible to believe. Sweeney had the uncanny 0:36:08.800 --> 0:36:12.640 ability to sound totally convincing. But it is significant to 0:36:12.640 --> 0:36:16.200 note that a search undertaken based on Sweeney's fingerprint, records 0:36:16.239 --> 0:36:23.719 revealed no such incident, which doesn't say much for the 0:36:23.760 --> 0:36:27.799 state of Rhodesian intelligence, because, yeah, Frank's taking a little 0:36:27.800 --> 0:36:31.120 creative license here. The story he's telling is not one 0:36:31.160 --> 0:36:35.560 hundred percent true, but he is admitting to almost all 0:36:35.600 --> 0:36:38.840 of the real details for the real crime he really 0:36:38.880 --> 0:36:40.000 did go to prison for. 0:36:41.160 --> 0:36:42.840 So you you probably should. 0:36:42.600 --> 0:36:44.600 Have figured that out before he told you, and you 0:36:44.680 --> 0:36:46.440 definitely should have been able to figure. 0:36:46.200 --> 0:36:48.400 It out after he told you. 0:36:49.640 --> 0:36:53.120 They could have contacted a police department or a courthouse 0:36:53.160 --> 0:36:57.520 in New Jersey and just asked, Hell, they probably could 0:36:57.520 --> 0:36:59.720 have called any resident of ten to fly New Jersey 0:36:59.719 --> 0:37:03.520 at random and just asked, do you remember the teenage 0:37:03.600 --> 0:37:05.840 Nazi bank robber who shot a cop in his mom's 0:37:05.840 --> 0:37:09.759 front yard. It's kind of a small town. I bet 0:37:09.760 --> 0:37:15.080 everybody remembered. But I guess they didn't do that. They 0:37:15.360 --> 0:37:17.640 weren't even a real country, so maybe they didn't have 0:37:17.680 --> 0:37:19.560 a guy who knew how to do a background check. 0:37:21.239 --> 0:37:24.439 The Rhodesian police continued to hold Frank in custody, and 0:37:24.560 --> 0:37:26.160 while he was waiting to find out if they were 0:37:26.200 --> 0:37:29.200 going to try him for attempted murder got some mail 0:37:29.920 --> 0:37:33.160 an envelope containing two United States passports and three hundred 0:37:33.200 --> 0:37:37.960 dollars in cash. Both passports bore Frank's photo in Frank's 0:37:37.960 --> 0:37:41.680 birth date, but only one had Frank's name on it. 0:37:42.680 --> 0:37:46.560 The other was for Francis august Schellhammer, a man who 0:37:46.560 --> 0:37:49.759 doesn't exist. He explained to the officers that he was 0:37:49.880 --> 0:37:52.560 quite good at making such things, and even offered to 0:37:52.640 --> 0:37:55.360 forge a pair of US passports for Hickman and the 0:37:55.400 --> 0:38:01.719 other detective. Hickman says that they declined the offer. Remarkably, 0:38:01.760 --> 0:38:04.920 the Rhodesian government opted to drop the charges and just 0:38:04.920 --> 0:38:08.279 send Frank home. Can you court martial a mercenary? 0:38:08.360 --> 0:38:08.720 I don't. 0:38:09.120 --> 0:38:11.120 That's not something I've ever needed to wonder about. I 0:38:11.120 --> 0:38:13.480 don't know really what the options were here, but it 0:38:13.520 --> 0:38:17.360 wasn't worth it to them. They sent him home, So 0:38:17.440 --> 0:38:20.680 sometime in the summer of nineteen seventy five, Frank Sweeney 0:38:20.719 --> 0:38:23.800 was kicked out at the Rhodesian Light Infantry and deported 0:38:23.840 --> 0:38:27.839 from Rhodesia. He got his free flight home after all, 0:38:28.719 --> 0:38:46.200 and was permanently banned from a country that never existed. 0:38:46.400 --> 0:38:49.120 Shortly after he got home to New Jersey, he wrote 0:38:49.120 --> 0:38:52.560 a letter to Hickman. Frank's mother had mailed him some 0:38:52.640 --> 0:38:55.080 more cash before all this trouble got started, and it 0:38:55.160 --> 0:38:58.000 arrived in Rhodesia after he was already gone, and he 0:38:58.000 --> 0:39:01.120 wanted Hickman to put it back in the mail for him. 0:39:01.239 --> 0:39:03.920 His letter, which Hickman has actually held on to all 0:39:03.920 --> 0:39:06.920 these years, is dated August twenty second. 0:39:06.760 --> 0:39:07.879 Nineteen seventy five. 0:39:08.360 --> 0:39:11.440 So if he's already home and realizing his mail is missing, 0:39:11.440 --> 0:39:13.520 and writing the letter in August of seventy five, that 0:39:14.280 --> 0:39:17.759 all the events before that happened earlier in nineteen seventy five, 0:39:18.480 --> 0:39:21.839 you get it. In addition to asking Hickman to mail 0:39:21.880 --> 0:39:24.919 back the money from his mother, Frank tells the investigator 0:39:24.920 --> 0:39:29.399 that life in America is loathsome compared to the time 0:39:29.440 --> 0:39:31.760 he spent in Rhodesia. 0:39:32.960 --> 0:39:36.040 It's one big racial cessfool where the worst element is 0:39:36.080 --> 0:39:39.280 looked on and held in high esteem. With my RLI 0:39:39.320 --> 0:39:41.600 training to back me up, I have seriously thought of 0:39:41.680 --> 0:39:44.600 forming my own anti terrorism unit here in the land 0:39:44.600 --> 0:39:47.480 of the Red, White, and Blue. The real problem is 0:39:47.520 --> 0:39:50.600 finding enough devoted men to form a small cadre. If 0:39:50.600 --> 0:39:53.640 you ever do visit America, I would genuinely enjoy meeting 0:39:53.640 --> 0:39:55.960 with you again, and I'm sure my family would like 0:39:56.000 --> 0:39:58.400 to meet you too. Even though my service in the 0:39:58.400 --> 0:40:02.120 military was cut short, loyalty to Rhodesa remains as strong 0:40:02.280 --> 0:40:02.840 as ever. 0:40:05.800 --> 0:40:07.799 So now he's back in the United States, and this 0:40:07.840 --> 0:40:10.239 is during the same time period that he's placing those 0:40:10.239 --> 0:40:15.359 ads in gun magazines to recruit other Rhodesian mercenaries. He's 0:40:15.360 --> 0:40:20.200 also placing some other classified ads. So he's engaging in 0:40:20.239 --> 0:40:24.319 this federal crime of recruiting foreign mercenaries using his own 0:40:24.400 --> 0:40:27.880 legal name and his parents' address. That's not a problem. 0:40:28.320 --> 0:40:31.520 The United States government had no real appetite for enforcing 0:40:31.600 --> 0:40:36.400 the statute prohibiting him from recruiting people into a foreign army. 0:40:36.719 --> 0:40:40.400 But when he placed ads offering four MP forty Schmeiser 0:40:40.480 --> 0:40:43.879 submachine guns for sale, he didn't use his own name. 0:40:44.800 --> 0:40:49.239 He used the name Francis August Shellhammer, the name from 0:40:49.280 --> 0:40:52.160 the forged passport, and he listed a commercial address in 0:40:52.200 --> 0:40:56.880 Fort Lee, New Jersey. It seems Frank never actually had 0:40:57.080 --> 0:40:59.839 these Nazi submachine guns, but he did collect the money 0:41:00.239 --> 0:41:03.600 by many interested collectors who thought they were buying these 0:41:03.640 --> 0:41:07.200 imaginary guns. It seems like a great hack to make 0:41:07.239 --> 0:41:11.200 free money, but unfortunately for Frank, that is mail fraud. 0:41:12.400 --> 0:41:15.360 So in March of nineteen seventy six, he's being interviewed 0:41:15.400 --> 0:41:18.000 by a reporter from the La Times, and he's telling 0:41:18.000 --> 0:41:20.959 this reporter he's enjoyed his time in Rhodesia so much 0:41:21.040 --> 0:41:24.240 that he's actually planning to move back to South Africa. 0:41:23.840 --> 0:41:25.560 In just a few weeks. Notice. 0:41:25.600 --> 0:41:27.799 He's moving to South Africa, not Rhodesia because he is 0:41:27.840 --> 0:41:32.160 not allowed in Rhodesia, but he's planning this big move. 0:41:32.200 --> 0:41:34.560 He's telling this reporter about it. He's bragging about his 0:41:34.640 --> 0:41:38.839 time in Rhodesia. But at the same time, in March 0:41:38.840 --> 0:41:41.680 of nineteen seventy six, he's also entering a guilty plead 0:41:41.719 --> 0:41:45.680 to that federal mail fraud charge. The La Times article, 0:41:45.719 --> 0:41:48.400 which doesn't make any mention of his former or current 0:41:48.440 --> 0:41:52.400 criminal charges, does say that Frank said that he'd recently 0:41:52.440 --> 0:41:55.520 been visited by the FBI, and Frank says they came 0:41:55.560 --> 0:41:57.560 to his house to try to pressure him to provide 0:41:57.560 --> 0:42:02.200 information about other mercenaries. It seems a little more likely 0:42:02.239 --> 0:42:05.319 that he's a compulsive liar who got a thrill out 0:42:05.320 --> 0:42:08.720 of working in this kernel of truth because the FBI 0:42:09.280 --> 0:42:13.200 had just been to his house, that part's true, but 0:42:13.280 --> 0:42:17.600 they were there to arrest him for mail fraud, but 0:42:17.680 --> 0:42:20.680 he wasn't lying about his plans for an upcoming move. 0:42:21.560 --> 0:42:24.640 After pleading guilty to the mail fraud charge, he skipped 0:42:24.680 --> 0:42:27.279 out on his sentencing hearing. He packed his bags and 0:42:27.360 --> 0:42:30.680 he caught a flight to Johannesburg, but South Africa sent 0:42:30.760 --> 0:42:33.920 him right back and he was arrested by US marshals 0:42:33.960 --> 0:42:36.000 as he was getting off the plane at JFK in 0:42:36.200 --> 0:42:40.640 June of nineteen seventy six. And while marshals were arresting him, 0:42:40.680 --> 0:42:42.799 his suitcase was loaded off the plane and it went 0:42:42.800 --> 0:42:47.320 through customs without him. Customs officials seized a nine millimeters 0:42:47.360 --> 0:42:50.480 Luguar pistol because he lacked the proper paperwork to bring 0:42:50.480 --> 0:42:54.880 the firearm into the US from a foreign country, and inexplicably, 0:42:54.960 --> 0:42:59.319 there were no additional charges brought for any of that. 0:43:00.400 --> 0:43:02.719 He wasn't supposed to have a gun at all, and 0:43:02.760 --> 0:43:05.240 he certainly wasn't supposed to try to flee the continent 0:43:05.320 --> 0:43:08.160 while awaiting sentencing for a federal crime. I know the 0:43:08.200 --> 0:43:10.799 seventies were a different time, and it wasn't a big deal. 0:43:10.840 --> 0:43:11.560 To bring a gun to. 0:43:11.480 --> 0:43:14.600 The airport, but fleeing the country to avoid going to 0:43:14.680 --> 0:43:16.680 prison is always been illegal. 0:43:17.160 --> 0:43:18.120 I'm pretty sure of it. 0:43:19.400 --> 0:43:21.960 I found a couple of cheeky little articles written a 0:43:22.000 --> 0:43:24.839 few years later about how the government ended up accidentally 0:43:24.880 --> 0:43:28.640 giving him that gun back. It was seized by customs 0:43:28.640 --> 0:43:30.759 and put into storage while he was in prison, and 0:43:30.880 --> 0:43:32.560 when he got out of prison, he wrote to the 0:43:32.600 --> 0:43:35.280 Customs office in New York to inquire about it, and 0:43:35.520 --> 0:43:38.120 they told him they'd return his property if he paid 0:43:38.120 --> 0:43:40.960 a two hundred and forty four dollars storage fee. I 0:43:40.960 --> 0:43:42.680 don't know what that comes out to per month for 0:43:42.719 --> 0:43:44.800 the four years he was in prison, but that seems steep, 0:43:46.360 --> 0:43:49.320 and so Frank claims he walked right into the Customs 0:43:49.320 --> 0:43:52.440 office inside the World Trade Center in May of nineteen eighty, 0:43:53.080 --> 0:43:56.239 paid the fee, failed out a form, and they gave 0:43:56.320 --> 0:43:59.680 him back his gun. A spokesman for the US Customs 0:43:59.719 --> 0:44:02.400 Service said they had no way of knowing he was 0:44:02.440 --> 0:44:05.719 a felon. Frank said it was all just a half 0:44:05.719 --> 0:44:08.840 hearted joke, telling a reporter all I really wanted to 0:44:08.880 --> 0:44:10.919 do was test the gun laws to show there really 0:44:10.960 --> 0:44:14.239 is a need for federal gun legislation. The Feds are 0:44:14.239 --> 0:44:16.359 giving criminals like me are guns back in New York 0:44:16.400 --> 0:44:20.440 City just for the asking. Federal gun laws are versical. 0:44:23.280 --> 0:44:25.160 You know, he's not a great guy, but he does 0:44:25.200 --> 0:44:29.120 have some quips. You know, he's just out there doing bits. 0:44:30.239 --> 0:44:32.000 And he ended up handing the gun back over to 0:44:32.000 --> 0:44:36.000 the ATF without incident. A few months later, but back 0:44:36.000 --> 0:44:38.960 to the mail fraud. He got the four years for 0:44:38.960 --> 0:44:41.799 the mail fraud and was sent to federal prison. And 0:44:41.840 --> 0:44:44.480 it was in prison this time around that Frank would 0:44:44.480 --> 0:44:48.839 meet Christopher Boyce, a young defense contractor who'd recently been 0:44:48.880 --> 0:44:53.839 convicted of espionage in nineteen seventy four. A twenty one 0:44:53.920 --> 0:44:56.879 year old college dropout, and Christopher Boyce got a job 0:44:56.920 --> 0:45:01.640 at TRW, an aerospace company with a lot of government contracts. 0:45:02.719 --> 0:45:05.600 He wasn't really qualified for the role, having never worked 0:45:05.640 --> 0:45:07.399 in an office before, but he. 0:45:07.320 --> 0:45:08.720 Started as a low level clerk. 0:45:09.560 --> 0:45:12.080 It helped that his retired FBI agent father was the 0:45:12.080 --> 0:45:15.160 head of security at McDonald Douglas, another aerospace and defense 0:45:15.200 --> 0:45:20.399 contracting company, and he had connections at TRW. But TRW 0:45:20.600 --> 0:45:25.480 didn't just make satellites and jet engines. In his own 0:45:25.560 --> 0:45:28.880 later testimony before a Congressional committee, Boyce described the company 0:45:28.920 --> 0:45:33.640 as a CIA contractor, something he'd had no idea about 0:45:33.680 --> 0:45:36.560 before his promotion to a highly sensitive position working on 0:45:36.880 --> 0:45:41.719 special projects from inside the company's black vault and with 0:45:41.760 --> 0:45:45.319 a top secret CIA clearance, Boyce had access to the 0:45:45.320 --> 0:45:50.239 company's encrypted teletype connection with Langley. On at least a 0:45:50.320 --> 0:45:53.880 dozen occasions, he removed documents from the vault and photographed them. 0:45:54.400 --> 0:45:57.759 On at least six occasions, he photographed documents inside the 0:45:57.840 --> 0:46:04.560 VAULTA told Congress. Obviously, neither the government's clearance procedures nor 0:46:04.600 --> 0:46:13.239 the company's security procedures worked very well, I'll say. In 0:46:13.280 --> 0:46:17.840 his new position inside the vault, Boyce monitored satellite communications 0:46:17.880 --> 0:46:22.760 between the CIA, his employer TRW, and other CIA contacts 0:46:22.800 --> 0:46:27.920 around the world. In his congressional testimony, Boyce describes a 0:46:27.960 --> 0:46:33.440 shockingly lax approach to security for this allegedly super secure 0:46:33.480 --> 0:46:37.040 black vault. He would come back to work late at 0:46:37.120 --> 0:46:39.879 night to return the documents he'd stolen, and no one 0:46:40.000 --> 0:46:42.880 questioned why a junior employee was opening the vault at 0:46:42.920 --> 0:46:47.160 four am. He made deliveries to secure CIA sites without 0:46:47.200 --> 0:46:50.240 having the proper clearance to enter them, and on one occasion, 0:46:50.320 --> 0:46:53.080 he wandered into a CIA code room, picked up a 0:46:53.080 --> 0:46:57.080 clipboard and was flipping through the pages before someone politely 0:46:57.120 --> 0:47:01.760 asked him to leave. Employees in the vault were supposed 0:47:01.760 --> 0:47:04.760 to destroy the code cards used in the teletype machine 0:47:04.760 --> 0:47:07.880 at the end of each workday. Boyce says they just 0:47:08.120 --> 0:47:10.240 tossed the cards in a canvas bag in the corner, 0:47:10.280 --> 0:47:13.640 and they used the document destruction blender to make my 0:47:13.840 --> 0:47:16.440 ties with the Bacardi that they kept hidden behind the 0:47:16.440 --> 0:47:17.760 cryptography machines. 0:47:19.160 --> 0:47:20.480 He claims it was common. 0:47:20.200 --> 0:47:23.040 For the vault to receive transmissions from Langley that weren't 0:47:23.080 --> 0:47:28.360 actually meant for them, misdirected communications, these CIA cables that 0:47:28.400 --> 0:47:30.840 had nothing to do with TRW or their work with 0:47:30.880 --> 0:47:34.279 the agency, but no one really cared, and there was 0:47:34.760 --> 0:47:39.200 no clear accountability process for ensuring that these top secret 0:47:39.239 --> 0:47:41.760 CIA documents that had been sent to them by mistake 0:47:42.520 --> 0:47:50.000 were actually destroyed. And these are the documents that Boyce stole. Okay, 0:47:50.040 --> 0:47:52.680 I know Frank's not even in this part, but I 0:47:52.840 --> 0:47:55.040 have to tell you just a little bit about the 0:47:55.120 --> 0:47:59.279 nineteen seventy five constitutional crisis in Australia. I know, I know, 0:47:59.400 --> 0:48:02.120 this is an even more egregious digression than the history 0:48:02.160 --> 0:48:05.319 of Rhodesia. But look at the show art. It's not 0:48:05.400 --> 0:48:07.400 just cool to look at. We are living on my 0:48:07.560 --> 0:48:10.840 red string board, and I've got to put this pushpin 0:48:10.960 --> 0:48:11.680 in somewhere. 0:48:12.719 --> 0:48:13.000 Now. 0:48:13.560 --> 0:48:15.839 I know even less about Australia that I know about 0:48:15.840 --> 0:48:19.319 the decolonization of Africa in the twentieth century, which is 0:48:19.360 --> 0:48:23.839 to say, like not very much. I think they still 0:48:23.840 --> 0:48:27.040 have the Queen. I guess it's the king. 0:48:27.400 --> 0:48:27.760 Now. 0:48:28.440 --> 0:48:30.759 Did they have to print new money after the queen died? 0:48:31.640 --> 0:48:33.440 It doesn't matter, It doesn't matter. 0:48:34.239 --> 0:48:34.839 But I was. 0:48:34.840 --> 0:48:39.240 Delighted to discover that CIA meddling in an Australian political 0:48:39.320 --> 0:48:44.239 crisis was even a possibility. How intriguing, you know. I 0:48:44.280 --> 0:48:46.160 know they like to keep it south of the equator, 0:48:46.200 --> 0:48:48.879 but I thought that was just a Western Hemisphere thing. 0:48:49.960 --> 0:48:50.240 Now. 0:48:50.280 --> 0:48:53.799 Of course, of course, the United States government maintains that 0:48:53.880 --> 0:48:57.960 the CIA had no role in pushing Prime Minister GoF 0:48:58.000 --> 0:49:01.480 Whitlam out of office in nineteen seventy five, but Christopher 0:49:01.520 --> 0:49:06.319 Boyce went to prison claiming otherwise. In the seventies, GoF 0:49:06.360 --> 0:49:08.719 Whitlam was the head of the Australian Labor Party and 0:49:08.800 --> 0:49:13.920 his administration was fairly socially progressive. He was also considering 0:49:14.040 --> 0:49:18.360 closing Pine Gap, a US signals intelligence surveillance base in 0:49:18.400 --> 0:49:23.359 central Australia run by the CIA. In nineteen seventy five, 0:49:23.440 --> 0:49:26.520 the opposition party, which controlled the Senate deferred the passage 0:49:26.520 --> 0:49:27.799 of an appropriations bill. 0:49:28.760 --> 0:49:30.080 I don't know. 0:49:30.200 --> 0:49:32.640 And am not going to find out how the Australian 0:49:32.680 --> 0:49:36.320 government functions. But this sounds like the silly little crisis 0:49:36.320 --> 0:49:38.920 we seem to have every year where someone refuses to 0:49:38.920 --> 0:49:41.240 pass the bill that keeps the lights on at the government. 0:49:41.840 --> 0:49:44.640 And Australia's Governor General, John Kerr used the fallout of 0:49:44.640 --> 0:49:48.080 this crisis as a justification to dismiss Whitlam as Prime Minister, 0:49:48.840 --> 0:49:52.239 which is apparently the thing he had the power to do. 0:49:52.360 --> 0:49:54.560 It's like they have a guy that can fire the president. 0:49:55.040 --> 0:49:55.480 I don't know. 0:49:55.640 --> 0:49:59.000 I just not my business what happens in Australia, and 0:49:59.040 --> 0:50:03.759 at the time dismissed allegations of CIA involvement, saying Kerr 0:50:03.800 --> 0:50:07.880 didn't need any encouragement from anybody to fire him. But 0:50:07.920 --> 0:50:10.960 in his memoirs published decades later, he wrote that in 0:50:11.040 --> 0:50:14.480 nineteen seventy seven, President Jimmy Carter sent Warren Christopher, the 0:50:14.520 --> 0:50:18.440 Deputy Secretary of State to Australia, to meet with Whitlam, 0:50:18.840 --> 0:50:22.760 and Christopher told Whitlam that the United States quote would 0:50:22.800 --> 0:50:34.080 never again interfere with Australia's democratic processes, never again, never again. 0:50:35.520 --> 0:50:38.239 And Whitlam's personal secretary backs up this recollection of the 0:50:38.320 --> 0:50:39.600 use of the word again. 0:50:40.640 --> 0:50:41.480 But I'll reiterate. 0:50:41.760 --> 0:50:44.320 The CIA says they were not involved. 0:50:44.960 --> 0:50:46.040 They said they didn't do it. 0:50:47.920 --> 0:50:52.160 All that to say, though, our pot smoking, disaffected college 0:50:52.239 --> 0:50:54.719 dropout who was getting drunk at lunch most days and 0:50:54.760 --> 0:50:58.920 making paper airplanes out of CIA encryption code cards, probably 0:50:58.920 --> 0:51:03.040 didn't know anything about the Australian Senate blocking an appropriations bill. 0:51:04.320 --> 0:51:08.719 But by his account, he did sometimes read those misdirected 0:51:08.760 --> 0:51:12.560 CIA cables that he was supposed to destroy, and some 0:51:12.640 --> 0:51:15.359 of those messages were about a growing desire within the 0:51:15.400 --> 0:51:19.560 CIA to have Whitlam removed from office, referring to the 0:51:19.560 --> 0:51:27.040 Australian Governor General as our manker. So he stole them, 0:51:27.200 --> 0:51:29.120 and instead of going to the press, he and his 0:51:29.239 --> 0:51:33.160 childhood friend, a cocaine dealer named Dalton Lee, decided to 0:51:33.200 --> 0:51:36.719 sell the documents to the Soviets. Lee would take the 0:51:36.760 --> 0:51:39.120 documents down to Mexico and deliver them to the Soviet 0:51:39.160 --> 0:51:41.560 embassy and return with cash which they split. 0:51:42.560 --> 0:51:44.720 And maybe it would have worked. 0:51:45.360 --> 0:51:48.000 Maybe not forever, but would have worked for a while 0:51:49.040 --> 0:51:53.239 if not for a little mistake, a tiny careless act. 0:51:53.920 --> 0:51:57.480 In an absolutely absurd turn of history. Dalton Lee was 0:51:57.560 --> 0:52:00.400 arrested in nineteen seventy seven outside the Soviet ms in 0:52:00.440 --> 0:52:06.040 Mexico City. He wasn't arrested for espionage or drug trafficking, 0:52:06.120 --> 0:52:09.920 two things he was definitely doing. He was arrested by 0:52:09.960 --> 0:52:16.040 Mexican police for littering, but under interrogation about the drugs 0:52:16.040 --> 0:52:19.600 and documents they subsequently found on him, he admitted everything. 0:52:21.040 --> 0:52:23.600 Christopher Boyce was arrested by authorities in the US just 0:52:23.640 --> 0:52:26.880 ten days later, and accounts vary as to whether or 0:52:26.960 --> 0:52:29.720 not Dalton Lee gave boys up. In that initial interview, 0:52:30.280 --> 0:52:33.520 he says he didn't and he probably didn't need to. 0:52:33.719 --> 0:52:36.279 The authorities would have arrived at the conclusion that it 0:52:36.320 --> 0:52:38.719 was boys who had stolen those documents, whether Dalton Lee 0:52:38.800 --> 0:52:42.319 gave him up or not, so you know, we'll never know. 0:52:43.600 --> 0:52:46.759 But this is where Frank comes back. This is where 0:52:46.760 --> 0:52:50.760 Frank reappears in his own story. I haven't forgotten him 0:52:51.160 --> 0:52:55.160 because while all this CIA's skullduggery and Cold War espionage 0:52:55.239 --> 0:52:58.120 is going on, Frank is sitting in a jail cell 0:52:58.160 --> 0:53:01.480 on Terminal Island, a low security federal corrections facility in 0:53:01.520 --> 0:53:05.359 Los Angeles. I can't find a good reason for why 0:53:05.400 --> 0:53:07.719 he would have been transported to a prison in California 0:53:07.719 --> 0:53:11.920 after being arrested in New York, but government inefficiency is 0:53:12.040 --> 0:53:16.840 as likely an explanation as anything else. Christopher Boyce was 0:53:16.920 --> 0:53:19.800 ultimately convicted of eight counts of espionage in nineteen seventy 0:53:19.840 --> 0:53:23.399 seven and sentenced to forty years in prison, and for 0:53:23.520 --> 0:53:26.919 several months in late seventy seven to early seventy eight, 0:53:27.360 --> 0:53:29.120 the two men were on the same cell block at 0:53:29.160 --> 0:53:33.200 Terminal Island. Much has been made of the apparent incongruity 0:53:33.239 --> 0:53:35.840 of Frank, a man who fought as a mercenary against 0:53:35.840 --> 0:53:40.360 communist gorillas, befriending Boyce, a man convicted of aiding the 0:53:40.400 --> 0:53:43.120 Soviet Union, But I don't think either of them had 0:53:43.120 --> 0:53:46.920 a fully formed set of political beliefs at the time. 0:53:48.080 --> 0:53:50.600 Boyce's mother would later say that the two became quite 0:53:50.600 --> 0:53:55.719 close in those months. Frank was for reasons I spent 0:53:55.880 --> 0:53:59.279 way too long unsuccessfully trying to figure out transferred to 0:53:59.360 --> 0:54:03.320 a prison in sometime in early nineteen seventy eight. Boyce 0:54:03.320 --> 0:54:06.000 would eventually be transferred to Lompoc, a prison a few 0:54:06.000 --> 0:54:09.640 hours north of Los Angeles, and in January of nineteen eighty, 0:54:10.600 --> 0:54:17.120 Christopher Boyce escaped from prison. The ensuing manhunt for the 0:54:17.120 --> 0:54:20.800 missing spy would last nearly two years, in part because 0:54:20.840 --> 0:54:25.200 Frank was planting false clues from Cape Town to California 0:54:25.280 --> 0:54:27.120 to lead investigators. 0:54:26.440 --> 0:54:29.600 In the long direction. And that's where I have to 0:54:29.680 --> 0:54:31.080 leave you today. 0:54:31.360 --> 0:54:33.040 I do hope you'll come back next week for the 0:54:33.040 --> 0:54:36.719 second half of Frank's story. There's a serial killer, a 0:54:36.760 --> 0:54:40.560 mob boss, a jailhouse letter from his wife's boyfriend. Frank 0:54:40.600 --> 0:54:44.880 stabs another guy, and for reasons I'm still not a 0:54:45.280 --> 0:54:52.360 hundred percent clear run there were a bunch of snakes. 0:54:53.480 --> 0:54:55.880 Weird little guys. The production of cool Zone Media. 0:54:56.120 --> 0:54:57.400 For more from cool Zone. 0:54:57.239 --> 0:55:01.040 Media, visit our website Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us 0:55:01.040 --> 0:55:13.359 out in the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcast. 0:55:15.440 --> 0:55:17.759 I'm so glad you decided to come back for part 0:55:17.800 --> 0:55:20.799 two of the story of Frank Sweeney. If you didn't 0:55:20.840 --> 0:55:24.120 hear part one? You really need to. This isn't the 0:55:24.200 --> 0:55:27.319 kind of story you can pick up midway through. You 0:55:27.400 --> 0:55:29.759 missed a cop getting shot with a machine gun in 0:55:29.800 --> 0:55:34.000 a New Jersey suburb, the Rhodesian bush War, possible CIA 0:55:34.120 --> 0:55:37.720 involvement in an Australian political crisis, and we're just about 0:55:37.719 --> 0:55:38.319 to pick up with. 0:55:38.280 --> 0:55:39.960 Our escaped spy. 0:55:40.560 --> 0:55:43.359 The second forty years of Frank's life are just as 0:55:43.360 --> 0:55:46.279 weird as the first forty. There's a serial killer, a 0:55:46.320 --> 0:55:50.200 mafia trial, two different secret wives, and a lot of 0:55:50.239 --> 0:55:56.000 misuse of the postal service. I'm Molly Conger, and this 0:55:56.800 --> 0:56:12.280 is weird, little guys. 0:56:13.320 --> 0:56:13.440 Now. 0:56:13.440 --> 0:56:16.040 When we left off last week, Frank was making friends 0:56:16.040 --> 0:56:19.120 in prison. His new friend in nineteen seventy eight was 0:56:19.200 --> 0:56:21.840 Christopher Boyce, who had just been convicted of espionage for 0:56:21.880 --> 0:56:24.080 selling documents he stole from his job as a CIA 0:56:24.200 --> 0:56:27.880 contractor to the Soviets, and then he escaped from prison. 0:56:29.400 --> 0:56:31.239 Whether or not Frank was still in custody on the 0:56:31.320 --> 0:56:34.719 day Christopher boyce escape from prison is surprisingly hard to 0:56:34.719 --> 0:56:38.239 pin down. Several newspaper articles about Frank's role in the 0:56:38.320 --> 0:56:40.640 ensuing manhunt for the missing spy put his release a 0:56:40.680 --> 0:56:44.120 month before the escape, but others put it a month after. 0:56:45.120 --> 0:56:48.239 Seems like this detail would really matter, but no one 0:56:48.280 --> 0:56:52.080 seemed very concerned about it. In nineteen eighty, newspapers that 0:56:52.120 --> 0:56:54.360 appeared to be quoting the same unnamed source from the 0:56:54.480 --> 0:56:57.799 US Marshalls published conflicting stories, with some saying Frank flew 0:56:57.840 --> 0:57:01.480 to South Africa shortly before Boyce's escape, and others putting 0:57:01.480 --> 0:57:05.239 that trip slightly after the escape, although both of these 0:57:05.320 --> 0:57:09.040 articles say it was exactly twenty three days before or after. 0:57:10.520 --> 0:57:13.120 But in my frustrated search through forty year old newspapers 0:57:13.120 --> 0:57:15.319 trying to figure out which prison Frank was calling home 0:57:15.360 --> 0:57:21.360 that year, I found another surprise, another stabbing. Shortly after 0:57:21.360 --> 0:57:23.400 Frank was transferred to a state prison in Maine in 0:57:23.440 --> 0:57:25.919 nineteen seventy eight, he stabbed another inmate in the chest 0:57:25.960 --> 0:57:29.440 during an argument in the prison library. And again we 0:57:29.520 --> 0:57:31.720 have this problem that keeps coming up in Frank's life. 0:57:32.240 --> 0:57:35.320 He loves to talk to reporters and he loves to lie. 0:57:36.480 --> 0:57:39.200 It's the seventies. These reporters don't have the Internet, they 0:57:39.200 --> 0:57:42.160 don't have access to electronic court records, so a lot 0:57:42.160 --> 0:57:45.200 of Frank's lies get published when he files a lawsuit 0:57:45.200 --> 0:57:47.360 against the prison warden in Maine about the conditions in 0:57:47.400 --> 0:57:50.840 solitary confinement. Newspapers publish his claim that he was placed 0:57:50.840 --> 0:57:54.080 in solitary for a stabbing he'd been suspected of, but 0:57:54.200 --> 0:57:58.520 he says the investigation cleared him. A local newspaper in 0:57:58.560 --> 0:58:01.480 Bangor Main, however, had a report in the courtroom when 0:58:01.520 --> 0:58:02.760 he entered a guilty. 0:58:02.400 --> 0:58:03.520 Plea to that stabbing. 0:58:05.000 --> 0:58:07.440 But regardless of whether he got out in December of 0:58:07.480 --> 0:58:11.200 seventy nine or February of nineteen eighty, we know Frank 0:58:11.240 --> 0:58:14.000 flew to South Africa soon after he got out, and 0:58:14.040 --> 0:58:18.120 that he stayed there for a couple of months. The 0:58:18.160 --> 0:58:20.760 story of Christopher Boyce's nineteen months on the Lamb is 0:58:21.200 --> 0:58:25.800 long and strange. Sean Penn plays Boyce's friend, the cocaine 0:58:25.800 --> 0:58:28.560 dealer Dalton Lee in the nineteen eighty five film adaptation 0:58:28.600 --> 0:58:30.400 of the book The Falcon and the Snowman about the 0:58:30.600 --> 0:58:34.080 entire affair, I didn't watch it. There's only so much 0:58:34.080 --> 0:58:36.919 I can do. But remember, this is the Cold War. 0:58:37.360 --> 0:58:40.600 A missing Soviet spy is a pretty big pr problem 0:58:40.600 --> 0:58:43.640 for the United States government. There was speculation that the 0:58:43.680 --> 0:58:47.480 KGB had helped him escape. Boyce himself called a reporter 0:58:47.520 --> 0:58:49.440 from a payphone a few months after the escape and 0:58:49.720 --> 0:58:53.160 laughed about the idea that he'd had foreign assistance. He says, 0:58:53.160 --> 0:58:56.520 he just climbed the fence and walked out. The task 0:58:56.560 --> 0:58:59.400 force focused on finding boys believed all along that he'd 0:58:59.400 --> 0:59:02.959 never Actually they left California, and they weren't too far off. 0:59:03.120 --> 0:59:06.439 He was in Idaho the whole time. But a lot 0:59:06.440 --> 0:59:09.520 of resources ended up getting expended pursuing a false lead 0:59:10.160 --> 0:59:13.840 planted by our friend Frank. Now I can't prove Frank 0:59:13.880 --> 0:59:17.640 sent all of these letters himself. I can't even find 0:59:17.640 --> 0:59:21.120 contemporane his reporting where anyone ever outright said that they 0:59:21.160 --> 0:59:24.800 believed Frank sent these letters. And he was never charged 0:59:24.840 --> 0:59:28.200 in connection with his meddling in this investigation. But just 0:59:28.240 --> 0:59:30.520 a few weeks after Boyce went missing, the United States 0:59:30.600 --> 0:59:35.520 Ambassador in South Africa got a letter the postmark indicated 0:59:35.560 --> 0:59:38.480 that had been mailed from within South Africa, and the 0:59:38.560 --> 0:59:42.480 letter said a known mercenary named Shellhammer had assisted the 0:59:42.520 --> 0:59:46.960 convicted American spy Christopher Boyce in entering South Africa by 0:59:47.040 --> 0:59:50.960 way of a fake passport. Now, who do we know 0:59:51.000 --> 0:59:54.720 with a history of forging passports of mailing anonymous letters 0:59:54.760 --> 0:59:58.280 to officials in Southern Africa implicating himself and crimes and 0:59:59.200 --> 1:00:03.040 using the pseudonyme shell Hammer. And he absolutely knew the 1:00:03.040 --> 1:00:04.800 FEDS would tie him to that alias because it was 1:00:04.840 --> 1:00:06.640 the one he had used in those classified ads in 1:00:06.680 --> 1:00:09.120 nineteen seventy six that put him in prison for mail fraud. 1:00:10.200 --> 1:00:13.000 And Frank was in South Africa in February of nineteen 1:00:13.040 --> 1:00:16.520 eighty when that letter was mailed. It seems he wanted 1:00:16.560 --> 1:00:19.600 the authorities to know he was involved. Why else would 1:00:19.600 --> 1:00:22.960 he write his own pseudonym into the story. So FEDS 1:00:23.040 --> 1:00:26.240 quickly turned their attention to Frank. They placed a tracking 1:00:26.280 --> 1:00:30.240 beacon on his car. They followed him for months, and 1:00:30.320 --> 1:00:31.640 he probably knew he. 1:00:31.600 --> 1:00:32.360 Was being followed. 1:00:33.560 --> 1:00:35.360 They followed him from his home in New Jersey all 1:00:35.360 --> 1:00:38.360 the way out to California, and from a California motel, 1:00:38.440 --> 1:00:41.120 he made several phone calls to an apartment in Hermosa Beach, 1:00:42.240 --> 1:00:44.560 and when they searched that apartment they found it abandoned. 1:00:44.880 --> 1:00:47.720 But they found several letters that Frank had sent to 1:00:47.760 --> 1:00:50.960 a third man, another friend of theirs, from prison, one 1:00:51.000 --> 1:00:54.080 of which read somehow They discovered that I helped him 1:00:54.080 --> 1:00:57.480 get into South Africa. I suspect an informer has been 1:00:57.520 --> 1:01:02.640 at work, but there was no informer. Frank wanted them 1:01:02.680 --> 1:01:05.200 to find those letters, and Boyce was never in South Africa. 1:01:05.720 --> 1:01:07.880 The only reason anyone thought Boyce might be in South 1:01:07.920 --> 1:01:10.720 Africa is because Frank was planting false clues all over 1:01:10.760 --> 1:01:11.520 the world. 1:01:11.680 --> 1:01:13.480 To point them as far away. 1:01:13.160 --> 1:01:16.440 As possible from a little hunting cabin in the mountains 1:01:16.440 --> 1:01:21.720 of Idaho. US Marshalls eventually got frustrated following Frank around. 1:01:22.120 --> 1:01:24.800 A federal prosecutor would actually say an open court that 1:01:25.240 --> 1:01:27.920 Frank's arrest in July of nineteen eighty one was specifically 1:01:28.000 --> 1:01:30.680 intended to give them leverage to make him cooperate in 1:01:30.720 --> 1:01:33.440 the boy's case. It seemed like he knew something and 1:01:33.720 --> 1:01:36.680 they wanted to know what it was. As a felon, 1:01:36.840 --> 1:01:40.840 Frank wasn't allowed to have any guns, and of course 1:01:41.040 --> 1:01:45.440 Frank had guns. Did find one newspaper article that wrapped 1:01:45.440 --> 1:01:48.959 a sort of suspicious sounding hint that they only picked 1:01:48.960 --> 1:01:52.320 Frank up for that gun charge because of an anonymous tip, 1:01:53.080 --> 1:01:53.680 so maybe that. 1:01:53.680 --> 1:01:55.000 Was him too. 1:01:55.200 --> 1:01:56.640 But they picked him up in New Jersey at the 1:01:56.680 --> 1:02:00.400 end of July, and he pretended to be very co operative, 1:02:00.800 --> 1:02:02.840 telling them that he actually had some documents that would 1:02:02.880 --> 1:02:05.280 leave them straight to boys and he would happily show 1:02:05.280 --> 1:02:08.440 them to them. He voluntarily turned over the key to 1:02:08.480 --> 1:02:11.160 the bank deposit box he was keeping them in, and 1:02:11.240 --> 1:02:14.280 inside they found several letters to Frank that had been 1:02:14.320 --> 1:02:18.400 mailed from South Africa. Sounds like more red herrings planted 1:02:18.440 --> 1:02:21.320 by Frank. He'd flown to South Africa several times in 1:02:21.360 --> 1:02:23.320 the year and a half since his release and was 1:02:23.360 --> 1:02:28.160 probably mailing himself these letters on those visits. So now 1:02:28.160 --> 1:02:30.280 in August of nineteen eighty one, it seems like there 1:02:30.520 --> 1:02:34.960 could be some evidence that Boyce really was in South Africa. 1:02:35.360 --> 1:02:37.760 Frank says he was promised placement in the Witness Protection 1:02:37.840 --> 1:02:40.720 program for his help, and maybe they did make that 1:02:40.760 --> 1:02:44.000 promise if he really could help them recover their missing spy, 1:02:44.160 --> 1:02:48.280 that's a reasonable enough deal. And just a few weeks 1:02:48.280 --> 1:02:53.240 after all of Frank's help, Boyce was recaptured, but it 1:02:53.320 --> 1:02:57.200 wasn't due in any part to Frank's information. During his 1:02:57.280 --> 1:02:59.400 year and a half on the run, Boyce obviously couldn't 1:02:59.400 --> 1:03:02.280 get a job, so he made money the old fashioned 1:03:02.320 --> 1:03:06.640 way bank robbery. He kept it pretty small time, nothing 1:03:06.680 --> 1:03:09.160 flashy where you get into the vault. Just little stick 1:03:09.240 --> 1:03:11.160 ups a few thousand at a time. From the teller. 1:03:12.240 --> 1:03:14.600 He's tied to at least seventeen bank robberies in Idaho 1:03:14.640 --> 1:03:17.080 and Washington State during that time, eventually teaming up with 1:03:17.120 --> 1:03:20.080 a couple of brothers from Idaho, and it was one 1:03:20.120 --> 1:03:22.840 of those men who turned Boys in for the reward 1:03:22.880 --> 1:03:25.520 money no honor among thieves. 1:03:25.560 --> 1:03:25.920 I guess. 1:03:26.840 --> 1:03:29.560 Boyce was taken back into custody on August twenty first, 1:03:30.120 --> 1:03:34.400 nineteen eighty one, and he wasn't in South Africa. 1:03:34.600 --> 1:03:37.400 Nationwide flight ended for Christopher Boyce here at the pit 1:03:37.520 --> 1:03:40.440 stop drive in at Port Angelus, Washington. He was eating 1:03:40.440 --> 1:03:43.840 a cheeseburger and onion rings when eight federal agents jumped him. 1:03:44.160 --> 1:03:47.480 Boys was apparently living a triple life. 1:03:48.000 --> 1:03:49.959 So Frank lied. 1:03:50.840 --> 1:03:56.600 Obviously, he lied pretty egregiously. He falsified documents. He led 1:03:56.680 --> 1:03:59.560 US marshals and the CIA on an international goose chase, 1:04:00.400 --> 1:04:03.120 and maybe that's why he never got charged for it. 1:04:03.840 --> 1:04:07.640 That's pretty embarrassing to put on the record. But they 1:04:07.680 --> 1:04:09.920 did still have that gun charge they'd picked him up 1:04:09.920 --> 1:04:13.160 on to use his leverage, so they said a sentencing date, 1:04:13.200 --> 1:04:14.800 but Frank didn't show up. 1:04:15.760 --> 1:04:17.920 He was trying to skip the country again. 1:04:18.640 --> 1:04:20.520 Remember back in nineteen seventy six he got all the 1:04:20.560 --> 1:04:22.800 way to South Africa after skipping his sentencing date for 1:04:22.880 --> 1:04:25.960 mail fraud. But this time he was picked up just 1:04:26.000 --> 1:04:27.920 a few days after he missed court when a motel 1:04:27.960 --> 1:04:31.720 clerk in Montvale, New Jersey recognized him. When he was 1:04:31.720 --> 1:04:34.439 finally dragged in for sentencing, the government said they hoped 1:04:34.480 --> 1:04:35.920 Frank was going to be able to help them in 1:04:35.920 --> 1:04:38.840 the boy's case, but nothing he said was of any use. 1:04:39.920 --> 1:04:41.640 Frank said he had no choice but to flee the 1:04:41.640 --> 1:04:43.600 country and start a new life on a cattle ranch 1:04:43.600 --> 1:04:46.480 in Australia with his wife because the government had renegged 1:04:46.480 --> 1:04:49.400 on their deal to put him in witness protection. I 1:04:49.400 --> 1:04:51.640 have to imagine there was some bickering back and forth 1:04:51.680 --> 1:04:54.840 between an indignant Frank and an exasperated federal prosecutor, because 1:04:54.880 --> 1:04:57.880 in the end, Judge H. Curtis Mener said, I have 1:04:58.000 --> 1:05:00.920 neither the time nor the inclination to unravel all of 1:05:00.960 --> 1:05:04.080 the mysteries in this case. However, they'd all ended up 1:05:04.080 --> 1:05:06.680 in his courtroom. Whatever the convoluted backstory is here, this 1:05:06.720 --> 1:05:09.840 is a sentencing or illegal possession of a firearm, and 1:05:09.880 --> 1:05:12.400 that's really all the judge can do that day, so 1:05:12.680 --> 1:05:16.920 he sentenced Frank to four years. Judge Meaner said Frank 1:05:17.080 --> 1:05:20.240 was an explosive type of individual and that he was 1:05:20.680 --> 1:05:24.280 dangerous and mentally sick, and he urged Frank to take 1:05:24.280 --> 1:05:26.840 advantage of the opportunity to get psychiatric help while he 1:05:26.880 --> 1:05:31.800 was in prison this time. And yes, I did say wife. 1:05:33.040 --> 1:05:35.560 When I first started poking around trying to build my 1:05:35.640 --> 1:05:38.840 biographical backstory, to sort of sketch out a skeleton of 1:05:39.040 --> 1:05:42.240 this man's life, I found a new Jersey state record 1:05:42.240 --> 1:05:44.720 for a marriage in August nineteen eighty one between a 1:05:44.800 --> 1:05:49.000 Frank A. Sweeney and aDNA M. Madison in Bergen County. 1:05:49.920 --> 1:05:53.720 There are other men named Frank Sweeney, obviously, but it 1:05:53.760 --> 1:05:56.400 was a middle initial match and it's the right county, 1:05:56.440 --> 1:05:58.360 and it was one of the rare months that Frank 1:05:58.480 --> 1:06:02.520 wasn't in prison. But it didn't seem right, so I 1:06:02.520 --> 1:06:06.240 set it aside. But this offhand mention at his sentencing 1:06:06.280 --> 1:06:09.120 hearing about a wife, sent me back to it. 1:06:09.120 --> 1:06:10.320 It is him. 1:06:11.040 --> 1:06:12.600 After the FEDS picked him up at the end of 1:06:12.640 --> 1:06:14.800 July nineteen eighty one on that gun charge. He was 1:06:14.880 --> 1:06:17.520 released from custody. He was cooperating. He took them to 1:06:17.560 --> 1:06:19.240 the bank to look at his fake evidence. All that, 1:06:20.440 --> 1:06:25.200 and sometime that month he got married. I have no 1:06:25.320 --> 1:06:27.720 idea how they met, or where she came from, or 1:06:27.760 --> 1:06:29.280 what she thought she was going to get out of 1:06:29.280 --> 1:06:31.600 any of this, or if she knew Frank was planning 1:06:31.600 --> 1:06:35.040 on entering witness protection that month, or what on earth 1:06:35.160 --> 1:06:38.400 she saw in this man. But I do know how 1:06:38.400 --> 1:06:42.000 the marriage ended. Frank went back to prison that very 1:06:42.000 --> 1:06:45.600 same year, so they didn't have much time together. I 1:06:45.680 --> 1:06:48.040 don't know where Diana was while Frank was away. But 1:06:48.400 --> 1:06:51.000 by nineteen eighty five, according to a decision by the 1:06:51.040 --> 1:06:54.200 Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, Dana was living in Texas 1:06:54.280 --> 1:06:57.600 with her new boyfriend, Danny Lee Strong. They couldn't have 1:06:57.680 --> 1:06:59.920 known each other very long before moving in together, because 1:07:00.280 --> 1:07:02.440 Strong had only just gotten out of prison again for 1:07:02.520 --> 1:07:04.480 another and a string of pretty run of the mill 1:07:04.600 --> 1:07:08.720 robbery and fraud charges, and they didn't stay together long 1:07:08.760 --> 1:07:11.480 before they were arrested for murdering a man Strong said 1:07:11.480 --> 1:07:15.280 made a pass at Deanna. She was ultimately only convicted 1:07:15.320 --> 1:07:17.560 of stealing the victim's car. Which they fled the scene 1:07:17.560 --> 1:07:20.000 in but Strong got ninety nine years for the brutal 1:07:20.000 --> 1:07:24.560 beating and asphyxiation of Robert Eugene Thomas. Frank doesn't really 1:07:24.640 --> 1:07:27.240 factor into this story. He's in prison in another state 1:07:27.360 --> 1:07:30.000 this whole time, but his name appears in a footnote 1:07:30.000 --> 1:07:34.400 of an appeals court decision upholding Strong's conviction. Strong had 1:07:34.400 --> 1:07:36.760 sent Frank a letter after finding out that Deanna was 1:07:36.800 --> 1:07:40.320 planning to testify against him for the murder. I can't 1:07:40.360 --> 1:07:42.880 imagine what you write in a letter to your girlfriend's 1:07:42.920 --> 1:07:46.120 husband about a situation like this. But all that to say, 1:07:46.720 --> 1:07:49.160 Frank really did have a wife that he planned to 1:07:49.160 --> 1:07:52.040 start a new life with in Australia, but she ended 1:07:52.080 --> 1:07:54.000 up watching her boyfriend choke a man to death in 1:07:54.000 --> 1:08:11.440 an apartment in fort Worth instead. On January ninth, nineteen 1:08:11.480 --> 1:08:14.560 eighty two, the UVA men's basketball team lost to the 1:08:14.600 --> 1:08:17.200 tar Heels in a close game, sixty to sixty five 1:08:17.640 --> 1:08:21.800 at UNC's Carmichael Arena. I'm not a basketball fan, and 1:08:22.320 --> 1:08:24.920 I wasn't born then, but I guess it was an 1:08:24.920 --> 1:08:28.080 exciting game. UNC had knocked Uva out of the Final 1:08:28.120 --> 1:08:31.479 Four the year before, but Joseph Paul Franklin, an avowed 1:08:31.479 --> 1:08:33.760 neo Nazi who'd recently been handed his first couple of 1:08:33.800 --> 1:08:37.639 life sentences for two of his many murders, didn't care 1:08:37.760 --> 1:08:40.760 much for basketball. He was in the wreck room at 1:08:40.800 --> 1:08:43.680 the Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, Missouri, and 1:08:43.720 --> 1:08:47.679 he was trying to watch American bandstand. According to frank 1:08:47.720 --> 1:08:50.240 whose time at the Springfield prison overlapped with Franklins for 1:08:50.280 --> 1:08:52.880 a few weeks in nineteen eighty one until Franklin's transfer 1:08:52.960 --> 1:08:55.920 at the end of January nineteen eighty two, the serial 1:08:56.000 --> 1:08:59.880 killer became enraged when a black prison guard changed the channel. 1:09:01.479 --> 1:09:03.800 Later that year, Joseph Paul Franklin was back in court. 1:09:04.600 --> 1:09:07.799 He'd spent years traveling the country, robbing banks and murdering 1:09:07.840 --> 1:09:10.320 young black men and interracial couples, so it would take 1:09:10.400 --> 1:09:11.400 years to sort out what. 1:09:11.400 --> 1:09:12.600 To do with him. 1:09:13.000 --> 1:09:15.800 This time, he was on trial for the unsuccessful assassination 1:09:15.840 --> 1:09:19.840 attempt on civil rights activist Vernon Jordan. On May twenty ninth, 1:09:19.880 --> 1:09:22.360 nineteen eighty the Fort Wayne, Indiana chapter of the National 1:09:22.479 --> 1:09:24.439 Urban League was hosting a banquet in honor of a 1:09:24.560 --> 1:09:27.960 visit from National Urban League President Vernin Jordan. When a 1:09:28.040 --> 1:09:30.439 volunteer dropped him off at his hotel. Later that evening, 1:09:30.880 --> 1:09:33.439 a single bullet from a thirty six rifle tore through 1:09:33.479 --> 1:09:38.040 his back. He survived, but it's hard to build a 1:09:38.080 --> 1:09:43.480 case against a drifter sniper. Nobody saw him. The investigators 1:09:43.520 --> 1:09:47.680 had some handwriting analysis on a motel registration card, testimony 1:09:47.680 --> 1:09:50.040 from a grocery store clerk who identified Franklin as a 1:09:50.040 --> 1:09:52.920 man he'd had a strange conversation with, and a general 1:09:52.960 --> 1:09:55.800 idea that the crime fit Franklin's pattern, but it was 1:09:55.840 --> 1:09:56.479 a bit thin. 1:09:57.960 --> 1:10:01.479 And then came frank Ohank loves to talk, he loves 1:10:01.520 --> 1:10:02.240 to be helpful. 1:10:03.120 --> 1:10:05.479 He's still in prison on that gun charge, but he 1:10:05.560 --> 1:10:07.960 told federal authorities that in the brief couple of weeks 1:10:07.960 --> 1:10:10.200 he'd been on the same cell block as Franklin. They 1:10:10.320 --> 1:10:12.920 chatted a few times, and Franklin had confessed to him 1:10:12.960 --> 1:10:18.400 on several occasions about shooting Vernon Jordan. On the stand, 1:10:18.439 --> 1:10:20.880 frank testified about that evening in January when the guard 1:10:20.920 --> 1:10:23.920 changed the channel to the basketball game, and it's a 1:10:23.960 --> 1:10:26.680 pretty good detail. Frank was very specific that it was 1:10:26.720 --> 1:10:29.559 a uva unc game that he couldn't recall the date 1:10:30.479 --> 1:10:32.320 they were only on that cell block together for a 1:10:32.360 --> 1:10:35.200 few weeks, and there was in fact a Uva unc 1:10:35.400 --> 1:10:38.040 basketball game during that time period that would have. 1:10:38.000 --> 1:10:38.800 Been on television. 1:10:39.880 --> 1:10:42.439 He testified that Franklin was furious about the incident and 1:10:42.479 --> 1:10:45.800 spent days fuming about it. The two inmates were walking 1:10:45.840 --> 1:10:48.000 together in the exercise area a few days later when 1:10:48.280 --> 1:10:51.040 Franklin spotted that same guard again and turned to frank 1:10:51.080 --> 1:10:53.559 and said, I'd like to blow him away, like I 1:10:53.640 --> 1:10:58.400 shot that and were big wig in Indiana. Frank says 1:10:58.400 --> 1:11:02.000 he also lamented that Jordan just wouldn't die after being shot, 1:11:02.040 --> 1:11:04.679 and that he was sorry I didn't shoot that white 1:11:04.720 --> 1:11:07.719 slut first, referring to the white woman who'd given Jordan 1:11:07.760 --> 1:11:11.479 a ride that night. Frank was one of three jail 1:11:11.520 --> 1:11:14.320 house informants the government put on during that trial, all 1:11:14.360 --> 1:11:16.439 men who'd been in jail with Franklin, and all of 1:11:16.439 --> 1:11:18.840 whom said Franklin had admitted to various aspects of the 1:11:18.840 --> 1:11:23.920 crime and casual conversation. Josephaul Franklin was actually acquitted at 1:11:23.920 --> 1:11:27.759 that federal trial. Jurors said they believed Franklin shot Jordan, 1:11:28.200 --> 1:11:30.200 but they were hung up on the wording of the indictment, 1:11:30.240 --> 1:11:32.759 which specifically charged him with the shooting as a violation 1:11:32.800 --> 1:11:36.400 of Jordan's civil rights. Years later, on death row for 1:11:36.479 --> 1:11:39.559 a variety of other murders, Franklin did confess to shooting 1:11:39.680 --> 1:11:43.320 Vernon Jordan when the trial was over, though jurors who 1:11:43.360 --> 1:11:45.880 spoke to the press said they'd only believed one of 1:11:45.880 --> 1:11:51.800 the three jailhouse informants who testified frank On cross examination, 1:11:51.880 --> 1:11:54.200 frank Sweeney seemed surprised to learn that the other two 1:11:54.240 --> 1:11:56.840 men had been paid thousands of dollars for their cooperation. 1:11:57.800 --> 1:12:01.400 He wasn't getting paid, but he was upset. He didn't 1:12:01.400 --> 1:12:04.400 need the money. He'd inherited a quarter a million dollars, 1:12:04.600 --> 1:12:07.080 which would be about a million dollars today when his 1:12:07.160 --> 1:12:12.680 parents died. All he wanted was witness protection, then a 1:12:12.720 --> 1:12:16.720 positive letter to the New Jersey Parole Board. Just like 1:12:16.720 --> 1:12:19.639 in the boy's case, he very conveniently had some information 1:12:19.720 --> 1:12:22.320 the government wanted, and all he wanted in return was 1:12:22.840 --> 1:12:29.200 witness protection. And this time he got it, but he 1:12:29.200 --> 1:12:32.479 didn't get to keep it. In nineteen eighty four, frank 1:12:32.520 --> 1:12:34.880 filed a lawsuit against the warden of the Alabama prison 1:12:34.920 --> 1:12:38.120 where he was still serving his sentence on that gun charge. 1:12:38.200 --> 1:12:40.360 He said he was not receiving the protection afforded to 1:12:40.439 --> 1:12:44.040 him as a protected witness. The warden's response to the 1:12:44.040 --> 1:12:47.559 suit was that Frank would not stop telling people that 1:12:47.600 --> 1:12:49.920 he was a protected witness, which was causing a lot 1:12:49.920 --> 1:12:54.679 of problems. You're not supposed to do that in court. 1:12:54.720 --> 1:12:57.559 The warden's executive assistant said that the prison was considering 1:12:57.600 --> 1:13:00.800 contacting in the Office of Enforcement Operations, the division of 1:13:00.840 --> 1:13:04.519 the DOJ that administers the Witness Security program, to recommend 1:13:04.560 --> 1:13:07.200 his removal from the program because they believed he was 1:13:07.240 --> 1:13:11.559 intentionally causing problems by talking about this constantly. And it 1:13:11.560 --> 1:13:14.320 seems he was ultimately removed from the Witness Security program 1:13:14.360 --> 1:13:18.040 around this time, and maybe that had something to do 1:13:18.120 --> 1:13:21.320 with his decision to testify on behalf of Anthony Spalotro, 1:13:21.880 --> 1:13:25.280 the hot headed Chicago mobster who handled the family's business. 1:13:24.920 --> 1:13:25.839 In Las Vegas. 1:13:26.960 --> 1:13:29.320 It couldn't have been an attempt to get back in 1:13:29.360 --> 1:13:32.800 the program. He was testifying for the defense, but maybe 1:13:32.800 --> 1:13:35.759 he was just spiite. He wanted to get somebody else 1:13:36.240 --> 1:13:41.200 kicked out of the program. In nineteen eighty three, when 1:13:41.240 --> 1:13:44.040 he was still in prison and still considered a protected witness. 1:13:44.520 --> 1:13:47.519 He briefly shared a cell with another guy in the program. 1:13:48.080 --> 1:13:51.760 Frank Kulatta was a mobster. He was a member of 1:13:51.800 --> 1:13:55.240 Tony Spalotro's Hole in the Wall gang. If you've seen 1:13:55.280 --> 1:14:00.000 the nineteen ninety five Scorsese movie Casino, it's that quite literally. 1:14:00.560 --> 1:14:03.160 Frank Marino, the character played by the guy who played 1:14:03.200 --> 1:14:06.439 Phil Leotardo on The Sopranos, is supposed to be Frank Kulatta. 1:14:07.200 --> 1:14:10.519 Joe Peshi's character, Nikki Sentorro, is based on Tony Spilotro. 1:14:11.200 --> 1:14:14.240 Just watch the movie. It's all very complicated, and our 1:14:14.280 --> 1:14:17.320 friend Frank Sweeney had nothing to do with it. But 1:14:17.360 --> 1:14:20.320 in nineteen eighty three, the real life Frank Kulata was 1:14:20.360 --> 1:14:23.000 sharing a cell with Frank Sweeney because they had both 1:14:23.000 --> 1:14:26.760 turned state's witness against very dangerous men. Frank Sweeney had 1:14:26.760 --> 1:14:29.760 just testified against a serial killer and Frank Kulatta had 1:14:29.760 --> 1:14:32.439 turned on Spilotro after the FBI played him a recording 1:14:32.479 --> 1:14:37.080 of his friend talking about having him killed. When Anthony 1:14:37.080 --> 1:14:40.040 Spilotro went on trial in nineteen eighty six, Frank Kulatta 1:14:40.120 --> 1:14:42.880 was out of prison and in the program, and he 1:14:42.960 --> 1:14:47.559 was the government's star witness against Spilotro. Frank Sweeney was 1:14:47.600 --> 1:14:49.679 finally out of prison again in home in New Jersey 1:14:49.680 --> 1:14:51.599 when he read in the paper that Kulata was going 1:14:51.600 --> 1:14:55.600 to be testifying. According to Frank, he felt compelled to 1:14:55.640 --> 1:14:58.760 contact Spilotro's defense attorney because when they were cell mates, 1:14:59.240 --> 1:15:04.000 Kulata would af in brag about committing perjury. So the 1:15:04.040 --> 1:15:06.680 defense flew Frank out to Las Vegas and put him 1:15:06.680 --> 1:15:10.160 on the stand. He claimed that after one of Colada's 1:15:10.160 --> 1:15:12.519 appearances in court back in nineteen eighty three, he came 1:15:12.560 --> 1:15:15.400 back to their shared cell and bragged, Frankie, I just 1:15:15.439 --> 1:15:18.200 put another one away. You've heard of the traveling circus. 1:15:18.680 --> 1:15:24.439 I'm the original traveling perjurer. On cross examination, Frank Sweeney 1:15:24.520 --> 1:15:27.080 admitted that when he'd been in the witness protection program, 1:15:27.479 --> 1:15:31.480 he had on several occasions threatened and even faked suicide 1:15:31.520 --> 1:15:35.280 attempts to get what he wanted out of federal prosecutors. 1:15:35.840 --> 1:15:37.920 I wish I had more information on that. That is 1:15:38.200 --> 1:15:41.599 incredibly strange behavior, and it does actually happen again later 1:15:43.520 --> 1:15:45.679 in the end, though his testimony in that mob trial 1:15:45.800 --> 1:15:48.880 is just a strange little footnote. His third brush with 1:15:48.920 --> 1:15:53.200 the witness protection program. His testimony didn't matter much. I 1:15:53.240 --> 1:15:56.160 don't think anyone believed it, and the case ended in 1:15:56.160 --> 1:15:59.879 a mistrial over allegations of jury tampering, and Anthony Spilotro 1:16:00.200 --> 1:16:03.839 went missing before they could retry the case. The mobster 1:16:03.920 --> 1:16:06.120 and his brother were later found buried in a cornfield 1:16:06.120 --> 1:16:10.280 in Indiana. Frank Kulatta stayed in the witness protection program 1:16:10.320 --> 1:16:13.000 for years, and Scorsese hired him as an onset adviser 1:16:13.000 --> 1:16:16.799 when he shot Casino. Klata died of COVID in twenty twenty, 1:16:18.360 --> 1:16:21.400 and in nineteen eighty nine, Frank went back to prison 1:16:21.479 --> 1:16:22.280 for mail fraud. 1:16:22.960 --> 1:16:26.599 Again. The court record is too old. 1:16:26.400 --> 1:16:28.720 To get any documents without haggling with an archivist, but 1:16:29.280 --> 1:16:31.719 the docket sheet does say that, in addition to another 1:16:31.760 --> 1:16:34.840 fifty seven months in prison, the judge also banned Frank 1:16:34.880 --> 1:16:39.240 from ever offering anything for sale by mail. So at 1:16:39.240 --> 1:16:41.519 first I assumed he was pulling the same scam he 1:16:41.600 --> 1:16:44.360 ran in nineteen seventy six, where he placed ads for 1:16:44.400 --> 1:16:46.760 guns he didn't actually have and then ghosted would be 1:16:46.760 --> 1:16:50.559 buyers after they sent him the money. But it's much 1:16:50.600 --> 1:16:53.880 weirder than that. I wish it was guns. It wasn't guns. 1:16:53.880 --> 1:16:57.640 This time, he was running what one journalist called. 1:16:57.479 --> 1:16:59.800 A cat scam. 1:17:00.400 --> 1:17:03.640 He'd cut the tails off regular house cats and then 1:17:03.760 --> 1:17:07.920 run ads offering them as exotic purebred cats for three 1:17:08.040 --> 1:17:12.120 hundred dollars. If he really was as independently wealthy off 1:17:12.160 --> 1:17:15.320 his inheritance as he claimed, did he really need three 1:17:15.400 --> 1:17:19.200 hundred dollars for a mutilated cat? Maybe he's just addicted 1:17:19.200 --> 1:17:23.599 to mail fraud. As for the cats, one of the 1:17:23.640 --> 1:17:26.200 earliest mentions I could find of Frank in the newspaper 1:17:26.280 --> 1:17:30.520 archives was a nineteen fifty eight article about the embalmed 1:17:30.640 --> 1:17:34.479 cat he got for his fifteenth birthday. He was looking 1:17:34.520 --> 1:17:37.280 forward to dissecting it and adding it to his collection 1:17:37.320 --> 1:17:41.599 of oddities that already included a cat skeleton. So I 1:17:41.640 --> 1:17:44.840 hope all his fraudulent cats found happy homes, even if 1:17:44.840 --> 1:17:49.120 their buyers were unhappy about losing three hundred dollars. But 1:17:49.160 --> 1:17:51.400 it's in an appeals court decision related to a parole 1:17:51.520 --> 1:17:53.960 violation in this second mail fraud case where we find 1:17:54.000 --> 1:17:57.360 the details of a campaign of terror against his neighbors 1:17:57.360 --> 1:18:00.400 that foreshadows the events at the end of this long, 1:18:00.520 --> 1:18:04.720 strange tale. He was paroled in nineteen ninety two after 1:18:04.760 --> 1:18:07.080 serving about half of this sentence, and he was on 1:18:07.160 --> 1:18:11.479 probation for three years. Just days before that three year 1:18:11.520 --> 1:18:14.400 period ran out, he was charged with a probation violation. 1:18:15.720 --> 1:18:18.920 He'd been convicted in New Jersey of sending obscene materials 1:18:18.920 --> 1:18:22.160 through the mail to a minor. I know, I know, 1:18:22.280 --> 1:18:23.920 this show is starting to feel like a tour of 1:18:23.920 --> 1:18:27.960 America's weirdest sex crime guys. But to be honest, I 1:18:28.240 --> 1:18:31.840 don't think there was anything sexual in his motivation for 1:18:31.920 --> 1:18:35.160 sending pornomags to a nine year old. I know that 1:18:35.160 --> 1:18:39.200 doesn't sound possible. Bear with me, But after he got 1:18:39.200 --> 1:18:41.040 out of prison, he's living in an apartment back in 1:18:41.040 --> 1:18:44.479 his hometown of Tenafly, New Jersey. A family of Russian 1:18:44.479 --> 1:18:48.200 immigrants moves into the apartment next door. They have children. 1:18:48.680 --> 1:18:52.280 Children are noisy. Frank says he asked them to keep 1:18:52.320 --> 1:18:56.200 it down, but the noise continued. In what these Second 1:18:56.200 --> 1:18:59.280 Circuit Court of Appeals would later call a rather bizarre 1:18:59.320 --> 1:19:02.519 set of circum stances, he decided to get back at 1:19:02.520 --> 1:19:05.799 these noisy children by engaging in a lengthy harassment campaign 1:19:05.840 --> 1:19:10.000 against the entire family. At least twice, he shut off 1:19:10.040 --> 1:19:14.200 their electricity on multiple occasions, he filled the lock on 1:19:14.240 --> 1:19:17.000 their front door with staples, making it impossible to open. 1:19:18.280 --> 1:19:21.080 He had the family's mail forwarded to des Moines, Iowa. 1:19:22.600 --> 1:19:25.599 The father of these noisy children was a doctor. One 1:19:25.640 --> 1:19:27.840 of his colleagues received a letter purporting to be from 1:19:27.880 --> 1:19:31.040 an aid's charity informing the recipient that the doctor, the 1:19:31.080 --> 1:19:34.280 father of those noisy children, had tested positive for HIV. 1:19:35.240 --> 1:19:37.439 And along that same line of thinking, he also sent 1:19:37.520 --> 1:19:39.560 a letter to the children's school informing them that the 1:19:39.640 --> 1:19:42.120 nine year old boy had been exposed to HIV by 1:19:42.200 --> 1:19:45.240 his father. And he sent letters to the Jewish community 1:19:45.240 --> 1:19:48.120 center where the family remembers, informing them that the entire 1:19:48.160 --> 1:19:51.760 family had been exposed to the virus. Remember this is 1:19:51.840 --> 1:19:55.360 nineteen ninety three. Telling people that this doctor has HIV 1:19:55.479 --> 1:19:58.960 could ruin his career. The school could call social services 1:19:58.960 --> 1:20:01.760 in the probably wouldn't be welcome in the sauna at 1:20:01.760 --> 1:20:06.240 the community center if people believed this. And in what 1:20:06.280 --> 1:20:09.280 would be his ultimate downfall here, he signed their nine 1:20:09.320 --> 1:20:12.720 year old son up for catalogs that sold pornographic materials. 1:20:13.840 --> 1:20:16.240 It seems like he believed that the. 1:20:16.240 --> 1:20:19.320 Child's father would get the mail, which apparently wasn't going 1:20:19.320 --> 1:20:23.240 to Iowa anymore see the catalog believe his son had 1:20:23.280 --> 1:20:26.880 signed up for it and would punish the boy, and 1:20:26.920 --> 1:20:30.000 if the boy was grounded, he wouldn't be so noisy. 1:20:31.240 --> 1:20:33.919 But it backfired and Frank was discovered as the culprit. 1:20:34.479 --> 1:20:37.200 Police searched his apartment and found the typewriter he'd used 1:20:37.200 --> 1:20:40.280 to write all the letters, and he quickly confessed. He 1:20:40.320 --> 1:20:42.360 got four months in jail in New Jersey for sending 1:20:42.439 --> 1:20:45.320 him scene materials to a child, but the parole violation 1:20:45.439 --> 1:20:49.160 landed him back in federal prison for another year. And 1:20:49.240 --> 1:20:51.120 maybe this trip back to prison gave him a chance 1:20:51.160 --> 1:20:54.880 to test out his own advice. You see, between getting 1:20:54.880 --> 1:20:56.880 out in nineteen ninety two and going back in nineteen 1:20:56.920 --> 1:20:59.920 ninety five, Frank was profiled in the New York Time. 1:21:01.080 --> 1:21:03.800 The journalist Charles Strum actually used to write for The 1:21:03.800 --> 1:21:06.280 Bergen Record, the local paper Frank used to end up 1:21:06.280 --> 1:21:08.040 in every time he got arrested in the sixties. But 1:21:08.600 --> 1:21:10.800 Strum didn't come home from college and started the Record 1:21:10.880 --> 1:21:13.800 until after Frank's arms stand off in the front yard, 1:21:14.600 --> 1:21:18.080 and they weren't talking about their shared hometown. They were 1:21:18.080 --> 1:21:23.120 talking about Frank's new consulting business in nineteen ninety four, 1:21:23.160 --> 1:21:25.919 Frank put a classified ad in USA Today that read. 1:21:27.560 --> 1:21:30.000 Go into federal prison for the first time, we will 1:21:30.040 --> 1:21:32.680 tell you what to expect and how to survive. All 1:21:32.720 --> 1:21:37.360 consultants are graduates of the federal prison system. Frank aysweeneyan Associates, 1:21:37.560 --> 1:21:41.559 Box fifteen Demarest, New Jersey zero seven six two seven. 1:21:44.160 --> 1:21:46.240 Frank told Strum that the idea came to him while 1:21:46.240 --> 1:21:48.360 he was reading the paper one morning in September nineteen 1:21:48.400 --> 1:21:51.799 ninety three. Lawrence Powell, one of the LA police officers 1:21:51.800 --> 1:21:53.920 convicted for his role in the beating of Rodney King, 1:21:54.680 --> 1:21:57.800 was quoted in the paper as being terrified at the 1:21:57.840 --> 1:22:03.519 prospect of going to prison. Strum rights that Frank told him. 1:22:02.840 --> 1:22:05.599 I thought to myself, my god, there's probably a lot 1:22:05.600 --> 1:22:07.920 of people go into prison who's never been in jail before, 1:22:08.320 --> 1:22:12.240 primarily white collar criminals, and they're probably terrified too, that 1:22:12.479 --> 1:22:15.080 just as frightened as he is. So I thought maybe 1:22:15.120 --> 1:22:18.080 I could use my misfortune to help people and maybe 1:22:18.080 --> 1:22:19.080 make a profit doing it. 1:22:20.800 --> 1:22:23.479 The article says Frank claims to have twenty seven clients 1:22:23.520 --> 1:22:25.920 after just a few months of running his new consulting business, 1:22:26.479 --> 1:22:29.160 though the author also prints without question Frank's claim that 1:22:29.160 --> 1:22:31.120 he left high school in the eleventh grade because he 1:22:31.240 --> 1:22:34.320 was bored with it, not because he was in a 1:22:34.360 --> 1:22:38.400 youth correctional facility for bank robbery. In the article, Strum 1:22:38.400 --> 1:22:41.000 writes out all of Frank's crimes and convictions, but that 1:22:41.080 --> 1:22:44.760 nineteen sixty two bank robbery is missing. But again, they 1:22:44.760 --> 1:22:48.840 didn't have the Internet then. Of his criminal record, Frank 1:22:48.880 --> 1:22:52.160 told the reporter, I remember it was Nietzsche who wrote 1:22:52.320 --> 1:22:53.840 the crime is not in the act, but in the 1:22:53.840 --> 1:22:59.040 stupidity of being caught. I was caught and stupid, and 1:22:59.120 --> 1:23:01.599 he'd get caught a few more times in the coming years, 1:23:01.640 --> 1:23:05.120 but he stays humble. That Nietzsche quote is still his 1:23:05.120 --> 1:23:09.400 favorite to this day. According to his Facebook profile, he 1:23:09.479 --> 1:23:11.439 had to take a break from his new consulting career 1:23:11.479 --> 1:23:13.400 when he went away for a year in nineteen ninety five, 1:23:13.439 --> 1:23:15.400 but he picked right back up when he got out. 1:23:16.000 --> 1:23:18.679 A nineteen ninety seven Newsweek article about his business claims 1:23:18.720 --> 1:23:21.040 he was up to eighty seven clients, now with white 1:23:21.040 --> 1:23:23.920 collar criminals paying Frank one thousand dollars for assistance and 1:23:23.960 --> 1:23:27.519 getting favorable placement. So not only did Frank promise that 1:23:27.560 --> 1:23:30.880 he could advise you about the differences in food facilities 1:23:30.920 --> 1:23:34.200 and culture at different federal prisons. He claimed he had 1:23:34.240 --> 1:23:39.320 connections and could influence your placement. A Bureau of Prison 1:23:39.400 --> 1:23:42.519 spokesman denied Frank had any ability to arrange transfers or 1:23:42.560 --> 1:23:46.240 promise placements at specific facilities, but at least one client 1:23:46.280 --> 1:23:49.040 told the reporter that prison officials had denied his request 1:23:49.080 --> 1:23:51.640 for a transfer during a five year sentence for embezzlement, 1:23:52.280 --> 1:23:55.040 but after he wrote Frank and included a check for 1:23:55.080 --> 1:24:00.760 one thousand dollars, his transfer came through. Now, promising these 1:24:00.840 --> 1:24:04.000 transfers seems like it would put Frank back in mail 1:24:04.040 --> 1:24:07.519 fraud territory. But if he had stopped short of fraud, 1:24:08.200 --> 1:24:10.280 this isn't actually a terrible way for a guy like 1:24:10.320 --> 1:24:13.479 Frank to make a living. He really had been in 1:24:13.479 --> 1:24:16.600 a significant number of our nation's federal prisons. He'd been 1:24:16.640 --> 1:24:20.160 in facilities all over the country spanning decades. He's in 1:24:20.200 --> 1:24:22.400 a great position to offer advice about how to get 1:24:22.439 --> 1:24:25.639 through your sentence as smoothly as possible. So if he'd 1:24:25.680 --> 1:24:29.800 stuck to lifestyle advice for the incarcerated, I might say 1:24:29.800 --> 1:24:31.960 that this could have been a success story for Frank. 1:24:33.720 --> 1:24:36.920 There was another article about his consulting business in nineteen 1:24:37.000 --> 1:24:39.440 ninety eight, but then he kind of disappears. 1:24:40.000 --> 1:24:41.519 I'm not sure what he was up to. 1:24:42.720 --> 1:24:44.600 He pops up briefly in a couple of articles in 1:24:44.600 --> 1:24:47.280 two thousand and two thousand and one, an old prison 1:24:47.360 --> 1:24:49.360 friend of his called him from a jail in Reno 1:24:49.479 --> 1:24:52.160 to ask for help exposing an alleged smuggling ring run 1:24:52.160 --> 1:24:55.200 by one of the guards out there. In Nevada, David 1:24:55.200 --> 1:24:58.160 Wayne is described as one of the most dangerous inmates 1:24:58.160 --> 1:25:00.840 in a state prison system after a variety of escape 1:25:00.840 --> 1:25:05.120 attempts and prison riots involving Wayne holding hostages, and in 1:25:05.120 --> 1:25:08.320 two thousand he wanted Frank's help leveraging this information about 1:25:08.320 --> 1:25:12.519 a corrupt guard to get a better placement. So friend 1:25:12.600 --> 1:25:15.400 or client hard to say, but the guard did end 1:25:15.439 --> 1:25:17.960 up charged with smuggling a handcuff key to an inmate, 1:25:18.040 --> 1:25:21.360 and Frank spent about a year advocating for Wayne's transfer, 1:25:22.479 --> 1:25:25.720 considering he had once held two prison nurses hostage for 1:25:25.800 --> 1:25:29.840 twelve hours by rigging up a Rube Goldberg style contraption 1:25:30.000 --> 1:25:32.479 that would stab the women's eyes out with scalpels if 1:25:32.479 --> 1:25:35.960 anyone opened the door and had successfully escaped at least once. 1:25:36.640 --> 1:25:39.960 A low security placement for David Wayne was out of 1:25:39.960 --> 1:25:47.320 the question, But then quiet Frank moved out to Idaho. 1:25:47.000 --> 1:25:48.160 And stayed out of the paper. 1:25:49.439 --> 1:25:52.080 He's not a very good driver, so I know he 1:25:52.120 --> 1:25:54.920 moved to Ada County, Idaho around two thousand and one, 1:25:54.960 --> 1:25:56.759 because that's when he started getting a lot of traffic 1:25:56.760 --> 1:25:59.920 tickets there. In two thousand and eight, he was charged 1:26:00.040 --> 1:26:02.479 with battery and convicted, but he only served five days 1:26:02.479 --> 1:26:05.960 in jail and successfully completed his court ordered anger management class. 1:26:07.200 --> 1:26:09.400 The docket indicates the victim, a woman who appears to 1:26:09.400 --> 1:26:11.640 be a nursing assistant in the Boise area, got a 1:26:11.640 --> 1:26:15.800 restraining order. But the Frank Sweeney, who tried to drop 1:26:15.800 --> 1:26:17.720 a bank and fought in the Bush War and had 1:26:17.760 --> 1:26:20.360 a mob boss fly him to Vegas and bragged about 1:26:20.400 --> 1:26:24.000 being able to influence prison officials, that Frank seems to 1:26:24.040 --> 1:26:27.360 be gone. He's just an old man living in Boise 1:26:29.160 --> 1:26:47.320 until twenty fifteen. In December of twenty fifteen, Frank went 1:26:47.320 --> 1:26:49.759 to the post office near his home in Garden City, Idaho. 1:26:50.840 --> 1:26:52.840 He parked his truck in one of the accessible parking 1:26:52.840 --> 1:26:55.600 spots out front. A woman saw him get out of 1:26:55.640 --> 1:26:57.960 his car, which did not have a placard indicating he 1:26:58.000 --> 1:27:01.200 was supposed to be parked there, said something to him. 1:27:02.040 --> 1:27:05.439 We don't know exactly what she said. Now, me personally, 1:27:05.479 --> 1:27:08.400 I probably wouldn't have said anything. For the most part, 1:27:08.439 --> 1:27:10.840 it's not worth it. It's not your business. There are 1:27:10.840 --> 1:27:13.320 plenty of people who are not visibly disabled who really 1:27:13.320 --> 1:27:13.760 do need. 1:27:13.640 --> 1:27:14.479 Those parking spots. 1:27:14.520 --> 1:27:17.120 And Frank was in his seventies at this point, so 1:27:17.360 --> 1:27:20.160 even if he didn't have a state issued parking placard, 1:27:20.600 --> 1:27:21.120 he's old. 1:27:21.680 --> 1:27:23.200 Just leave him alone. 1:27:23.360 --> 1:27:26.320 But she made a comment about it, and the situation 1:27:26.479 --> 1:27:32.040 escalated pretty seriously. Court documents only say that they had 1:27:32.040 --> 1:27:35.400 a verbal altercation, so at least she didn't get stabbed, 1:27:35.400 --> 1:27:38.960 which he's done at least twice to people who offended him. 1:27:39.479 --> 1:27:42.519 But whatever she said, and for whatever reasons she chose 1:27:42.560 --> 1:27:47.240 to say it, she didn't deserve what happened next. The 1:27:47.320 --> 1:27:49.519 victims in this case are referred to only by their 1:27:49.520 --> 1:27:53.080 initials in the court record for obvious reasons. But it 1:27:53.120 --> 1:27:54.840 can be tricky to keep track of people with just 1:27:54.880 --> 1:27:56.840 a letter, so I've given them all fake names just 1:27:56.880 --> 1:27:59.559 to make this a little easier. We'll call the woman 1:27:59.560 --> 1:28:03.280 from the park Ellen, her husband will be Sam, and 1:28:03.320 --> 1:28:07.360 their adult daughters will be Kayla and Lucy. Again, it 1:28:07.439 --> 1:28:10.120 is possible to figure out who these people are, but 1:28:10.840 --> 1:28:11.479 please don't. 1:28:11.800 --> 1:28:12.719 They've been through enough. 1:28:14.479 --> 1:28:16.800 Two weeks after that heated exchange in the post office 1:28:16.840 --> 1:28:21.920 parking lot, the postcard started. The probation office in Boise 1:28:22.040 --> 1:28:25.280 got the first one. Ellen's adult daughter, Kayla, was at 1:28:25.280 --> 1:28:29.240 the time on probation for a misdemeanor dui charge. The 1:28:29.320 --> 1:28:31.479 letter writer claimed that he had just the night before 1:28:31.560 --> 1:28:33.280 been in the car with Kayla and she was so 1:28:33.439 --> 1:28:35.360 drunk that he had to jump out at a red 1:28:35.439 --> 1:28:39.360 light for his own safety. Ellen's husband, Sam, received a 1:28:39.400 --> 1:28:42.000 postcard at his dental office the same day informing him 1:28:42.000 --> 1:28:43.600 that his wife had been in the post office the 1:28:43.600 --> 1:28:45.519 week before and she was so drunk that she was 1:28:45.560 --> 1:28:50.240 falling down. The letter, though very brief, contained a lot 1:28:50.280 --> 1:28:54.920 of really specific personal information, the fact that the couple 1:28:54.960 --> 1:28:57.599 had very recently purchased a new home, including the name 1:28:57.640 --> 1:29:00.639 of the suburb where they now lived, the city where 1:29:00.640 --> 1:29:03.200 their other adult daughter lived, the names of both of 1:29:03.280 --> 1:29:07.719 their daughters, and information about Kayla's arrest. That year, Ellen 1:29:07.760 --> 1:29:10.160 received a third postcard that week addressed to her at home. 1:29:11.080 --> 1:29:14.320 This one contained her social Security number and an allegation 1:29:14.439 --> 1:29:17.520 that her daughter Lucy, was engaged in acts of prostitution 1:29:17.840 --> 1:29:21.960 at her place of work, which was named after the 1:29:21.960 --> 1:29:24.799 family received the first postcards. In December of twenty fifteen, 1:29:24.880 --> 1:29:27.160 they met with detectives at the Aida County Sheriff's office 1:29:27.160 --> 1:29:31.719 in Boise, and despite investigator's best efforts, the family would 1:29:31.720 --> 1:29:36.560 continue to receive increasingly bizarre and frightening postcards for three 1:29:36.840 --> 1:29:42.439 full years. Their neighbors and nearby schools received postcards that 1:29:42.520 --> 1:29:45.280 appeared to be from the State Sex Offender Registry informing 1:29:45.320 --> 1:29:48.320 them that Sam was a sex offender, specifically that he 1:29:48.360 --> 1:29:51.559 had sodomized a nine year old boy in nineteen seventy eight. 1:29:52.600 --> 1:29:55.280 It probably goes without saying, but I will say it anyway. 1:29:55.920 --> 1:29:56.880 That is not true. 1:29:58.160 --> 1:30:00.320 But it does kind of remind you of what Frank 1:30:00.360 --> 1:30:03.120 died to that doctor in nineteen ninety three, doesn't it, 1:30:04.560 --> 1:30:07.800 adding to the victim's distress. Sam passed away unexpectedly in 1:30:07.920 --> 1:30:10.200 January of twenty sixteen, just a few weeks after all 1:30:10.240 --> 1:30:14.320 this started, and obviously Frank knew one of his victims 1:30:14.360 --> 1:30:16.759 was dead. Some of the letters sent to the man's 1:30:16.840 --> 1:30:19.680 daughters taunted and blamed them for driving their father into 1:30:19.720 --> 1:30:23.680 an early grave, But oddly, some of the letters pretended otherwise. 1:30:25.000 --> 1:30:27.920 While most of the postcards were signed Carson Wells, the 1:30:28.000 --> 1:30:30.479 name of Woody Harrelson's character in the movie No Country 1:30:30.479 --> 1:30:33.200 for Old Men, some were signed with the names of 1:30:33.240 --> 1:30:36.880 her own children. Ellen received one of those just two 1:30:36.920 --> 1:30:39.920 months after her husband's death, purporting to be from her 1:30:39.960 --> 1:30:43.360 daughter Lucy, who lived out of state. It said, dear Mommy, 1:30:43.680 --> 1:30:45.640 my blood test just came back and yes, I am 1:30:45.760 --> 1:30:48.840 HIV positive. I'm sure I was infected by one of 1:30:48.880 --> 1:30:52.440 the two crips with whom I was having an affair with. Regrettably, 1:30:52.479 --> 1:30:54.080 I will never be able to give you and Daddy 1:30:54.120 --> 1:30:57.519 the grandchildren you so desired. But we know now that 1:30:57.560 --> 1:31:00.200 Daddy is a pedophile. He may have harmed the grand 1:31:00.800 --> 1:31:04.280 has he been released from jail. And again, this is 1:31:04.320 --> 1:31:07.840 a woman who just lost her husband. She knows this 1:31:07.880 --> 1:31:11.040 postcard isn't from her adult daughter. Even if she hadn't 1:31:11.040 --> 1:31:14.320 already gotten a dozen other bizarre postcards, she would know 1:31:14.439 --> 1:31:17.679 that no one's writing their mother a postcard on a typewriter. 1:31:17.760 --> 1:31:22.240 It's not nineteen thirty two, and again the recently deceased 1:31:22.240 --> 1:31:26.000 man was not a pedophile, nor was he in jail. 1:31:27.240 --> 1:31:31.720 He had just been buried by his family. Ellen and 1:31:31.720 --> 1:31:35.760 both of her daughters continued getting postcards even after Ellen moved, 1:31:36.439 --> 1:31:38.799 and Frank was also sending the postcards to other people 1:31:38.880 --> 1:31:42.240 pretending to be members of the family. The Idaho Black 1:31:42.280 --> 1:31:45.040 History Museum received one signed with Ellen's name, address, and 1:31:45.080 --> 1:31:48.280 phone number that was so laden with racial slurs that 1:31:48.320 --> 1:31:50.840 you can barely tell what it's supposed to be trying 1:31:50.840 --> 1:31:55.000 to say. Lucy's boss received one advising him that his 1:31:55.040 --> 1:32:01.080 employee was having rectal intercourse with black men, although described 1:32:01.080 --> 1:32:06.080 that in more vivid terms. Now, for as strange as 1:32:06.080 --> 1:32:08.400 this man's life has been, you'd be forgiven if he 1:32:08.479 --> 1:32:12.240 forgot where we started. Frank is a Nazi. He was 1:32:12.280 --> 1:32:14.559 a member of the American Nazi Party, and he fought 1:32:14.560 --> 1:32:17.760 as a Rhodesian mercenary. He's not just a guy who 1:32:17.840 --> 1:32:21.280 loves doing mail fraud and hates his neighbors. He's very racist, 1:32:22.240 --> 1:32:24.880 and a lot of these postcards fixated on the idea 1:32:24.960 --> 1:32:29.520 that Ellen's daughters were engaged in interracial relationships, very graphically 1:32:29.560 --> 1:32:33.400 and racistly describing specific sex acts that they were, in 1:32:33.479 --> 1:32:38.000 his mind having with black partners, and he was particularly 1:32:38.120 --> 1:32:40.760 upset that Ellen, a Latina, had married a white man. 1:32:41.880 --> 1:32:44.519 He called her racial slurs and wrote to her daughters 1:32:44.560 --> 1:32:48.920 calling them mongrels. It seems the only time he wasn't 1:32:48.920 --> 1:32:50.960 sending postcards was when he was out of the country. 1:32:51.840 --> 1:32:56.360 You see, he might have another wife. It's not entirely clear, 1:32:57.400 --> 1:32:59.719 but several times a year Frank would travel to Effort, 1:33:00.080 --> 1:33:02.719 the capital of the German state of Taringia in central Germany, 1:33:03.280 --> 1:33:05.559 to visit a woman he's known for a very long time, 1:33:07.080 --> 1:33:10.160 Uta Schernig, who performs semi professionally as a belly dancer 1:33:10.200 --> 1:33:14.000 under the name Madame Chamila, has on several occasions referred 1:33:14.040 --> 1:33:17.800 to Frank as her husband. This may be literal, it 1:33:17.800 --> 1:33:21.400 may be a cheeky little joke. My German is not 1:33:21.600 --> 1:33:25.600 good enough to really read tone, and it may just 1:33:25.640 --> 1:33:27.479 be that they've been in a relationship for so long 1:33:27.520 --> 1:33:31.000 that they think of each other this way. My research 1:33:31.040 --> 1:33:34.479 game is strong, but a potentially non existent German marriage 1:33:34.479 --> 1:33:38.599 certificate evades my grasp. Nevertheless, he does own a home 1:33:38.640 --> 1:33:42.040 in Effort, and she lives in it. She refers to 1:33:42.080 --> 1:33:46.000 him occasionally as her house Positzer, which you could translate 1:33:46.040 --> 1:33:49.360 as landlord, but you wouldn't really, you'd call the person 1:33:49.400 --> 1:33:52.920 you rent your home from your fermeter house Positzer just 1:33:53.000 --> 1:33:57.879 means he owns her house, and he occasionally calls her Liebchen, 1:33:58.160 --> 1:34:02.760 my love, and she calls Frankie when he visited in 1:34:02.800 --> 1:34:04.680 twenty fifteen and they went to see her mother in 1:34:04.720 --> 1:34:08.160 the nursing home together. Her photocaptions are about Frank's visit 1:34:08.240 --> 1:34:11.439 to his mother in law. As with so much in 1:34:11.479 --> 1:34:14.760 Frank's life, it's hard to pin this down. I have 1:34:14.800 --> 1:34:16.640 a handful of photos of Frank with this woman that 1:34:16.680 --> 1:34:19.120 appeared to be from the eighties or early nineties based 1:34:19.160 --> 1:34:22.960 on the photo quality, Frank's apparent age, and to be honest, 1:34:23.200 --> 1:34:28.040 her hair. But we're talking about Germany, so dating by 1:34:28.080 --> 1:34:31.120 the fashion could put us off by a decade or more. 1:34:31.800 --> 1:34:35.280 No offense, you know, it's true, But at least in 1:34:35.400 --> 1:34:38.599 the present era of his life, he's visiting Germany every 1:34:38.640 --> 1:34:42.920 now and again. She breeds and shows Mexican and Peruvian 1:34:42.960 --> 1:34:45.920 hairless dogs, some of which have been quite successful internationally. 1:34:46.840 --> 1:34:49.000 Some of her show dogs list Frank Sweeney as a 1:34:49.000 --> 1:34:53.120 co owner in September of twenty sixteen. His victims had 1:34:53.160 --> 1:34:56.000 a brief reprieve from his letters because he was in 1:34:56.040 --> 1:35:00.559 Germany attending a seminar on dog genetics with Ute. These 1:35:00.760 --> 1:35:03.519 rare breed dogs are very prone to genetic problems and 1:35:03.640 --> 1:35:06.160 in breeding, so I'm glad they're staying on top of 1:35:06.160 --> 1:35:09.479 best practices, I guess. But when he was at home 1:35:09.520 --> 1:35:14.360 in Idaho, the campaign of harassment was relentless. He even 1:35:14.360 --> 1:35:18.000 found a way to outsource the terror. Frank sent postcards 1:35:18.040 --> 1:35:21.639 to inmates in prisons all over the country. He signed 1:35:21.640 --> 1:35:24.760 them with Ellen's name and address, and requested that the 1:35:24.800 --> 1:35:29.799 men write her back. She received at least seventy five letters, 1:35:29.840 --> 1:35:33.880 all addressed to her at home from murderers and as 1:35:33.920 --> 1:35:36.519 if she might not get it, like maybe she didn't 1:35:36.520 --> 1:35:38.400 put two and two together here, Like maybe she thought 1:35:38.400 --> 1:35:42.479 this was some totally separate, unrelated new problem she just 1:35:42.560 --> 1:35:45.640 happens to be having. Frank made sure she understood that 1:35:46.000 --> 1:35:50.200 he did this. He sent her numerous postcards explaining the situation. 1:35:52.520 --> 1:35:56.120 Every creep, every social degenerate who has written to you, 1:35:56.240 --> 1:35:59.960 has your address, social Security number, and date of birth. 1:36:00.439 --> 1:36:01.679 Likewise for Lucy too. 1:36:02.200 --> 1:36:04.640 Some of these freaks have already passed this information on 1:36:04.800 --> 1:36:08.559 to their criminal friends outside of prison. Last month, I've 1:36:08.640 --> 1:36:11.160 visited your house twice in the early morning hours while 1:36:11.160 --> 1:36:14.960 you slept naturally, I've removed my license plates so that 1:36:15.040 --> 1:36:18.439 street cameras could not identify my car, and I still 1:36:18.479 --> 1:36:21.960 patrol the post office daily in an effort to spot you. 1:36:21.960 --> 1:36:24.040 You only have your big mouth to blame for all 1:36:24.080 --> 1:36:24.400 of this. 1:36:27.080 --> 1:36:29.719 In December of twenty sixteen, after the first full year, 1:36:30.400 --> 1:36:33.759 he wrote to her, saying it was their anniversary, telling 1:36:33.800 --> 1:36:37.880 her I intend to be with you her life. The 1:36:37.960 --> 1:36:40.000 letter has just kept coming, reminding her that he was 1:36:40.040 --> 1:36:42.559 watching her outside her home, that he waited for her 1:36:42.560 --> 1:36:45.240 at the post office almost every day, and sending her 1:36:45.280 --> 1:36:48.960 postcards containing her own personal information like her license plate 1:36:49.080 --> 1:36:52.280 number and information about her family, just. 1:36:52.240 --> 1:36:53.599 So she knew he had it too. 1:36:54.960 --> 1:36:57.000 He continued writing to Ellen and both of her daughters, 1:36:57.040 --> 1:37:00.519 calling the racial slurs, slots whores, threatening to report them 1:37:00.520 --> 1:37:04.240 for assorted imaginary crimes like tax fraud and drug dealing, 1:37:04.280 --> 1:37:09.680 and always remembering to write them on their birthdays. Investigators 1:37:09.680 --> 1:37:12.680 were stumped. They knew the letter writer was the man 1:37:12.720 --> 1:37:14.960 from the post office parking lot. He said as much 1:37:15.000 --> 1:37:15.599 in his letters. 1:37:15.640 --> 1:37:19.240 But Ellen didn't recognize him. She had only a. 1:37:19.280 --> 1:37:21.840 Vague description of his vehicle, and she didn't get the 1:37:21.880 --> 1:37:24.760 license plate. Why would she have thought she needed to. 1:37:26.400 --> 1:37:29.720 Postcards were always wiped clean of prints. They were perfectly 1:37:29.760 --> 1:37:33.160 generic United States Postal Service issued materials that he always 1:37:33.160 --> 1:37:37.679 bought in small quantities and paid cash. He may truly 1:37:37.800 --> 1:37:40.120 have tormented this woman until one of them died if 1:37:40.160 --> 1:37:46.400 he hadn't done what he's always done, more crime. And 1:37:46.479 --> 1:37:49.960 here's that beginning of the end. It's not the end. 1:37:50.000 --> 1:37:51.880 But I told you this story that began outside of 1:37:51.920 --> 1:37:54.040 a bank in New Jersey in nineteen sixty two would 1:37:54.040 --> 1:37:56.599 start its final chapter outside of a bank in. 1:37:56.560 --> 1:37:58.320 Idaho fifty six years later. 1:38:00.160 --> 1:38:04.639 On October thirteenth, twenty eighteen, Frank got into another argument 1:38:04.680 --> 1:38:08.280 in a parking lot. These victims, too, are only identified 1:38:08.280 --> 1:38:10.360 by their initials in the court records. So I'm going 1:38:10.400 --> 1:38:13.720 to call them Liam and Denise. They were in their 1:38:13.720 --> 1:38:17.880 car outside the Wells Fargo in Garden City, Idaho. Frank 1:38:17.880 --> 1:38:21.840 conked at them. There was again some kind of verbal altercation. 1:38:22.280 --> 1:38:24.920 Maybe they gave him the finger or shouted, who knows, 1:38:25.000 --> 1:38:26.880 you know, this is the kind of thing that happens 1:38:26.920 --> 1:38:29.000 every day. You know, you don't pull forward fast enough. 1:38:29.040 --> 1:38:31.400 The guy behind you honks. You tell him to fuck off. 1:38:31.479 --> 1:38:36.479 Nobody's being their best selves, but life goes on, but 1:38:36.560 --> 1:38:40.240 not for Frank. Frank can't take it. He stabbed a 1:38:40.280 --> 1:38:43.040 guy in the guts for splashing him in nineteen seventy five. 1:38:44.479 --> 1:38:47.559 So two weeks after Liam and Denise experienced this angry 1:38:47.640 --> 1:38:53.040 driver at the bank, they start getting postcards. Like Ellen 1:38:53.040 --> 1:38:56.320 and her family, this family, too, starts hearing that their 1:38:56.680 --> 1:38:59.680 neighbors and nearby schools are getting postcards that pretend to 1:38:59.720 --> 1:39:02.920 be from the state Sex Offender Registry, alerting people that 1:39:02.960 --> 1:39:08.320 Liam is a pedophile. He's not, And specifically, the postcards 1:39:08.320 --> 1:39:12.040 say that he sodomized a nine year old boy. That 1:39:12.200 --> 1:39:16.959 is a very specific and very gross detail to recycle 1:39:16.960 --> 1:39:19.519 from one victim to the next, right like that, that 1:39:19.600 --> 1:39:23.439 has to mean something, but I can't figure it out, 1:39:23.479 --> 1:39:27.360 and maybe that's for the best. These postcards, too, are 1:39:27.479 --> 1:39:30.759 generic ones from the post office, typed on a manual typewriter. 1:39:31.160 --> 1:39:34.240 And again, some of the postcards are signed Carson Wells, 1:39:34.840 --> 1:39:38.680 and sometimes they're signed with the name of Liam's adult son. 1:39:38.880 --> 1:39:42.080 And again there were letters to the family from murderers 1:39:42.560 --> 1:39:46.960 answering requests for pen pals. But you know what, the 1:39:47.000 --> 1:39:52.559 bank has a lot of security cameras, and unbeknownst to Frank, 1:39:52.760 --> 1:39:56.439 shortly before he started terrorizing his second set of victims, 1:39:57.240 --> 1:40:01.320 his case wasn't just a local matter anymore. In September 1:40:01.320 --> 1:40:05.599 of twenty eighteen, the United States Postal Inspector Service started 1:40:05.600 --> 1:40:10.760 looking into the postcards. That's right, the Mail Police. That 1:40:10.880 --> 1:40:14.360 is a very real federal law enforcement agency with jurisdiction 1:40:14.479 --> 1:40:18.799 over mail crimes. According to their most recent annual report, 1:40:18.880 --> 1:40:22.960 the USPIS initiated more than fifty six hundred investigations in 1:40:23.000 --> 1:40:26.439 twenty twenty three, and during that year, forty one hundred 1:40:26.479 --> 1:40:30.400 cases related to their investigations ended in convictions. Most of 1:40:30.439 --> 1:40:35.800 those numbers are things like mail theft and people mailing drugs. Also, 1:40:35.920 --> 1:40:39.520 though a couple hundred people a year are assaulting postal employees, 1:40:40.240 --> 1:40:41.000 knock that off. 1:40:41.320 --> 1:40:41.880 Don't do that. 1:40:42.200 --> 1:40:45.760 Be nice to your mail carrier. So now we have 1:40:45.800 --> 1:40:48.519 the Mail Police on the case, and as soon as 1:40:48.560 --> 1:40:50.960 they start trying to figure out what's going on here. Again, 1:40:51.000 --> 1:40:53.800 this is September of twenty eighteen, they're just looking at 1:40:53.800 --> 1:40:56.559 the postcards to Ellen and her family, But within a 1:40:56.560 --> 1:40:59.280 few weeks of them opening the investigation, the Idaho State 1:40:59.320 --> 1:41:03.120 Police let them know that someone is sending postcards pretending 1:41:03.160 --> 1:41:06.240 to be from their office. And these are these postcards 1:41:06.280 --> 1:41:09.320 about how Liam is a pedophile that are being sent 1:41:09.360 --> 1:41:13.280 to schools and neighbors. And because these postcards are made 1:41:13.320 --> 1:41:15.599 to look as though they are coming from the State 1:41:15.640 --> 1:41:18.599 Sex Offender Registry, which is run by the state police, 1:41:19.240 --> 1:41:22.080 people are contacting the state police about them. And now 1:41:22.120 --> 1:41:24.960 the state police are talking to the mail police, and 1:41:25.000 --> 1:41:28.000 now the mail cops see that there are more victims, 1:41:28.720 --> 1:41:30.760 and all of these postcards seem to be from the 1:41:30.760 --> 1:41:35.120 same person. When postal investigators speak to both families and 1:41:35.160 --> 1:41:38.479 compare the letters, it's clear they're all from the same person. 1:41:39.600 --> 1:41:42.040 All of the victims say they know who is sending 1:41:42.120 --> 1:41:45.240 them these postcards, they just don't know who he is. 1:41:46.080 --> 1:41:48.360 Ellen knows it's the guy from the post office. Liam 1:41:48.439 --> 1:41:49.360 knows it's the guy. 1:41:49.200 --> 1:41:49.800 From the bank. 1:41:50.280 --> 1:41:53.720 And they both describe some kind of older truck and 1:41:53.800 --> 1:41:57.000 an older man who's thin with a stiff gait and 1:41:57.080 --> 1:42:03.160 a very terrible distinctive skull on his face. They're describing 1:42:03.160 --> 1:42:06.760 the same man, and surely a bank teller or a 1:42:06.800 --> 1:42:11.719 postal service clerk would recognize a description like that. Local 1:42:11.720 --> 1:42:15.200 cops had shown Ellen photo lineups on multiple occasions over 1:42:15.240 --> 1:42:18.160 the last three years as they're investigating this, but Frank 1:42:18.240 --> 1:42:20.680 was never a suspect, so he was never in any 1:42:20.760 --> 1:42:23.400 of the photo arrays. So each time they showed her 1:42:23.439 --> 1:42:27.759 photos of potential suspects, she said, he's not here because 1:42:27.800 --> 1:42:30.960 he wasn't and so she never picked out any other 1:42:31.439 --> 1:42:35.000 possible suspect. But once the postal investigator zeroed in on 1:42:35.040 --> 1:42:37.599 the man in the bank security footage, both Ellen and 1:42:37.680 --> 1:42:42.480 Liam separately identified him in photo lineups, and bank employees 1:42:42.520 --> 1:42:46.120 did know who he was, so by Christmas of twenty eighteen, 1:42:46.160 --> 1:42:50.320 the male police have Frank's bank records. He's been paying 1:42:50.320 --> 1:42:54.280 a private investigator. That's how he knew so much personal 1:42:54.320 --> 1:42:57.680 information about all of his victims, information about their real 1:42:57.800 --> 1:43:00.719 estate transactions, what kinds of cars they drove, where they worked, 1:43:00.720 --> 1:43:03.519 where their adult children lived in different cities and states. 1:43:04.400 --> 1:43:05.680 Is paying a PI. 1:43:07.320 --> 1:43:10.000 Idaho is one of several states where you don't actually 1:43:10.040 --> 1:43:12.479 have to have a license of any kind to offer 1:43:12.520 --> 1:43:15.800 your services as a PI, so she doesn't have one 1:43:15.800 --> 1:43:18.719 that can be taken away, and she hasn't been. 1:43:18.640 --> 1:43:19.519 Charged of anything. 1:43:20.680 --> 1:43:24.040 Maybe she only helped Frank with information that didn't cross 1:43:24.040 --> 1:43:27.160 a line, and maybe she didn't ask enough questions about 1:43:27.280 --> 1:43:31.200 what he was doing with it. It remains unclear how 1:43:31.200 --> 1:43:35.599 he got everyone's Social Security numbers, though, but the PI 1:43:35.720 --> 1:43:37.799 he was paying is a woman in her eighties who 1:43:37.840 --> 1:43:39.680 seems to still be in the business just for the 1:43:39.720 --> 1:43:43.120 love of the game. Barbara Jacobson describes herself on her 1:43:43.120 --> 1:43:46.599 website as a cross between Nancy Drew and Jessica Fletcher 1:43:46.640 --> 1:43:49.960 with the tenacity of Colombo, and credits her success to 1:43:49.960 --> 1:43:54.240 her Christian faith and divine intervention. An article in a 1:43:54.280 --> 1:43:58.439 twenty seventeen issue of Christian Living magazine quotes her as saying, 1:43:59.120 --> 1:44:00.599 God is my business partner. 1:44:02.240 --> 1:44:02.719 Now again. 1:44:02.760 --> 1:44:06.040 This woman has not been charged with a crime, but 1:44:06.160 --> 1:44:09.320 it seems like a bad sign that she either didn't 1:44:09.360 --> 1:44:13.000 know or didn't care that the client asking her for 1:44:13.080 --> 1:44:16.519 a lot of personal information on people had a five 1:44:16.600 --> 1:44:21.080 decade long rap sheet that included convictions related to harassment 1:44:21.120 --> 1:44:25.920 by mail. You're either deeply unscrupulous or very bad at 1:44:25.920 --> 1:44:30.840 your job, and I'm not sure which is worse. Either way, 1:44:30.920 --> 1:44:35.000 this investigation is rapidly coming together. The postal investigator has 1:44:35.040 --> 1:44:38.200 Frank's bank records, He's been identified by the victims. They're 1:44:38.240 --> 1:44:41.880 closing in on him, and maybe he knows, maybe he doesn't. 1:44:42.680 --> 1:44:45.920 He did move very suddenly in February twenty nineteen, leaving 1:44:45.960 --> 1:44:48.479 the house he'd been renting for over a decade right 1:44:48.520 --> 1:44:51.439 as they got the warrant to search it, and renting 1:44:51.479 --> 1:44:55.160 a different house nearby. But he's still sending the letters. 1:44:56.080 --> 1:44:57.680 So if he knows they're onto him, why is he 1:44:57.760 --> 1:45:02.320 still sending the letters. On February thirteenth, twenty nineteen, six 1:45:02.360 --> 1:45:05.720 weeks after they know Frank's their guy, right around the 1:45:05.760 --> 1:45:08.880 time that he's moving to his new house, a clerk 1:45:08.920 --> 1:45:11.240 at the post office calls the investigator to say that 1:45:11.280 --> 1:45:14.040 an old man with a terrible scar on his face 1:45:14.920 --> 1:45:18.320 just bought a stack of postcards with cash, and the 1:45:18.360 --> 1:45:23.719 last postcard arrived on February nineteenth, twenty nineteen. It signed 1:45:23.760 --> 1:45:26.400 Carson Wells, but the writer identifies himself as the man 1:45:26.439 --> 1:45:28.200 who blew his horn at them in the parking lot. 1:45:28.880 --> 1:45:30.720 And then he reminds Liam and Denise that all the 1:45:30.800 --> 1:45:33.120 murderers who'd been writing to them had already forwarded their 1:45:33.120 --> 1:45:36.640 personal information to criminals on the outside, but it was 1:45:36.680 --> 1:45:40.960 already over Two weeks later, they searched Frank's home. They 1:45:40.960 --> 1:45:43.640 took his typewriter and his list of federal inmates, the 1:45:43.640 --> 1:45:46.559 ones he'd been writing to as his victims, and they 1:45:46.600 --> 1:45:51.200 found portraits of Hitler and Nazi memorabilia and white supremacist literature, 1:45:52.400 --> 1:45:58.920 and two live rattlesnakes. Rattlesnakes don't live in Idaho. These 1:45:58.920 --> 1:46:01.640 aren't snakes that he got outside. These are snakes that 1:46:01.680 --> 1:46:08.000 he is breeding. Frank has a lifelong interest in reptile breeding. 1:46:08.000 --> 1:46:10.959 I think he's a member of the Idaho Herpetological Society, 1:46:11.040 --> 1:46:12.920 or at least he was before he went to prison, 1:46:13.640 --> 1:46:16.160 and shortly before his arrest, he commented on an online 1:46:16.200 --> 1:46:19.920 obituary for an old high school classmate, reminiscing fondly about 1:46:19.920 --> 1:46:22.400 how they used to collect snakes in the woods together 1:46:22.840 --> 1:46:28.840 in the fifties. Once he's in custody, Frank confessed immediately, 1:46:29.640 --> 1:46:31.960 telling investigators on the day of his arrest that he'd 1:46:32.000 --> 1:46:34.120 sent the postcards because he felt like these people had 1:46:34.160 --> 1:46:36.720 embarrassed him and it made him feel better to know 1:46:36.760 --> 1:46:41.040 he was causing them emotional distress. Shortly after his arrest, 1:46:41.080 --> 1:46:42.560 he wrote to the judge to ask the court to 1:46:42.600 --> 1:46:45.559 intervene in what he felt was an inadequate response by 1:46:45.560 --> 1:46:48.440 the jail to what he called many of the infirmities 1:46:48.439 --> 1:46:51.400 that affect the elderly, and says he has the urge 1:46:51.400 --> 1:46:54.479 to commit suicide if his demands aren't met. And I 1:46:54.600 --> 1:46:57.160 don't want to sound like I'm brushing this off, I'm 1:46:57.200 --> 1:46:58.920 not saying that this couldn't. 1:46:58.600 --> 1:46:59.760 Possibly be a valid concern. 1:46:59.800 --> 1:47:03.960 People die in jails and prisons every day because employees 1:47:04.240 --> 1:47:07.479 don't care or don't have the resources to provide adequate care. 1:47:07.560 --> 1:47:10.640 This is a very real problem, and the urge to 1:47:10.680 --> 1:47:15.599 harm yourself is always very serious. But this isn't Frank's 1:47:15.600 --> 1:47:19.200 first rodeo. Remember in the eighties he used to threaten 1:47:19.479 --> 1:47:23.360 suicide and would even fake suicide attempts in order to 1:47:23.479 --> 1:47:28.519 manipulate employees of the Witness Protection program. So this may 1:47:28.520 --> 1:47:32.080 not be a brand new issue for Frank at any rate. 1:47:32.680 --> 1:47:35.799 Within months of his arrest he entered into a plea agreement. 1:47:37.560 --> 1:47:39.479 So once the mail cops got on the case, they 1:47:39.560 --> 1:47:43.439 actually sorted it out pretty quickly. Right the USPIS got 1:47:43.439 --> 1:47:45.679 on the case, in September of twenty eighteen, and within 1:47:45.760 --> 1:47:50.160 three months they knew it was Frank. Maybe they should 1:47:50.200 --> 1:47:54.080 have called the guys who solved Maile crimes earlier. I 1:47:54.120 --> 1:47:57.479 don't know, but if there had been more communication between 1:47:57.560 --> 1:48:00.839 different law enforcement agencies, the whole situation would have been resolved. 1:48:01.000 --> 1:48:05.519 When he sent a single letter a third victim, which 1:48:05.520 --> 1:48:09.200 he signed with his own name. But when a US 1:48:09.320 --> 1:48:12.519 Marshall searched Frank's house two years before his eventual arrest, 1:48:13.400 --> 1:48:15.240 I guess they didn't bother to check in with the 1:48:15.280 --> 1:48:19.639 local police, because in April of twenty seventeen, Frank sent 1:48:19.720 --> 1:48:23.800 a single letter to Gerald Shrr, the man who found 1:48:23.840 --> 1:48:27.680 it and for many years ran the witness protection program. 1:48:28.439 --> 1:48:30.880 I can't think of a worse guy to pick if 1:48:30.920 --> 1:48:34.000 you're going to send a threatening letter. Sure was long 1:48:34.040 --> 1:48:36.920 since retired by twenty seventeen. He passed away in twenty 1:48:36.960 --> 1:48:38.280 twenty at the age of eighty six. 1:48:38.360 --> 1:48:40.080 But is there anyone on. 1:48:40.040 --> 1:48:42.240 Earth who had more chips to call in with the 1:48:42.360 --> 1:48:44.920 US Marshals? You think a US marshal isn't going to 1:48:44.920 --> 1:48:46.719 come to your house if you sign your full legal 1:48:46.800 --> 1:48:49.080 name to a threatening letter to the guy who invented 1:48:49.280 --> 1:48:52.880 witness protection. You think you're going to scare the guy 1:48:52.920 --> 1:48:57.519 whose job was protecting mobsters from other mobsters. Truly a 1:48:57.600 --> 1:48:59.360 stupid move, even for Frank. 1:49:01.760 --> 1:49:06.120 You poisonous, licentious so jew. I thought that you would 1:49:06.120 --> 1:49:09.520 have been long dead from cardiovascular disease due to obesity. 1:49:10.000 --> 1:49:12.080 I was very much hoping to sit shiver for you, 1:49:12.400 --> 1:49:14.360 to pray cottage over your fat corpse. 1:49:14.400 --> 1:49:14.920 You loasome. 1:49:16.080 --> 1:49:19.240 I will remember you, although it's doubtful you will remember 1:49:19.400 --> 1:49:22.720 from WITSEC units in Otisville of San Diego parade in 1:49:22.800 --> 1:49:25.880 with your entourage to pray women from the Office of 1:49:25.960 --> 1:49:29.880 Enforcement Operations. In nineteen eighty four, you expelled me from 1:49:29.920 --> 1:49:32.880 the program, leaving me defend for myself as a known 1:49:32.920 --> 1:49:38.760 inform a rat in the general populations of very dangerous prisons. 1:49:40.200 --> 1:49:43.679 It had been more than thirty years, but Frank never 1:49:43.720 --> 1:49:47.280 got over getting kicked out of the program. He flew 1:49:47.320 --> 1:49:49.759 all over the world helping a spy in nineteen eighty 1:49:49.760 --> 1:49:53.000 trying to leverage information on Christopher Boyce to get placement 1:49:53.040 --> 1:49:56.000 in the program, and it didn't work. The information it 1:49:56.040 --> 1:49:59.240 gave was not only not helpful, but by fabricating unhelpful 1:49:59.240 --> 1:50:02.240 information in or to get something from the government, he 1:50:02.280 --> 1:50:05.400 made things worse, and when he finally got what he 1:50:05.479 --> 1:50:08.320 wanted by testifying against a serial killer in nineteen eighty two, 1:50:08.840 --> 1:50:10.680 he couldn't keep his mouth shut about it, and so 1:50:10.720 --> 1:50:13.320 he was removed from the program in nineteen eighty four. 1:50:14.800 --> 1:50:16.560 In his letter to Suir, he claims that as a 1:50:16.640 --> 1:50:19.439 result of losing his protected status in eighty four, he 1:50:19.520 --> 1:50:23.599 was attacked by another inmate the following year, and he does, 1:50:23.720 --> 1:50:27.200 without a doubt, bear a huge scar all down one 1:50:27.280 --> 1:50:32.000 cheek to this day. Somebody cut Frank's face open pretty bad. 1:50:33.200 --> 1:50:35.080 He takes care to mention in his letter that the 1:50:35.120 --> 1:50:38.439 assailant was black, though he chooses different words to say that. 1:50:39.120 --> 1:50:42.679 And who knows why Frank got cut. I'm not making 1:50:42.760 --> 1:50:45.439 light of the violence that happens inside jails and prisons, 1:50:46.040 --> 1:50:49.439 but you'd have to do some real mental gymnastics here 1:50:49.520 --> 1:50:52.000 to come up with a satisfying explanation for why a 1:50:52.160 --> 1:50:57.240 black man would cut Frank up in retaliation for Frank's 1:50:57.280 --> 1:51:00.519 testimony against a Nazi serial killer who try rabbled the 1:51:00.520 --> 1:51:04.960 country shooting black men. I just don't think that they 1:51:05.000 --> 1:51:09.000 would be mad about that. But I can think of 1:51:09.880 --> 1:51:13.000 a variety of reasons why a black man who encountered 1:51:13.000 --> 1:51:15.599 Frank in prison might get into it with him. 1:51:16.280 --> 1:51:17.240 I mean racist hide. 1:51:17.240 --> 1:51:19.880 Frank's just kind of a hotthead, not a great guy 1:51:19.960 --> 1:51:22.040 to hang out with, always getting into it with people. 1:51:22.080 --> 1:51:24.639 But also he loves saying racial slurs. 1:51:24.720 --> 1:51:26.880 So I can think of a variety of reasons why 1:51:26.920 --> 1:51:28.960 this might have happened that had nothing to do with 1:51:29.080 --> 1:51:33.400 him testifying against a serial killer. We can't take Frank 1:51:33.439 --> 1:51:35.599 at his word, and I couldn't find any reporting from 1:51:35.640 --> 1:51:38.160 the time about a prison knife fight in nineteen eighty five, 1:51:38.320 --> 1:51:43.439 So who else after sure received the letter, which Frank 1:51:43.479 --> 1:51:48.719 had signed venomously yours Frank Abbott Sweeney. A US marshal 1:51:48.880 --> 1:51:52.439 was sent out to Idaho to speak with Frank, and 1:51:52.520 --> 1:51:55.320 Frank admitted that he sent the letter, but he said 1:51:55.320 --> 1:51:57.200 he meant no harm by it, and he allowed the 1:51:57.240 --> 1:52:00.960 marshal to search his home. It seems like if anyone 1:52:00.960 --> 1:52:03.640 had compared notes, Frank could have been identified as the 1:52:03.640 --> 1:52:07.320 Garden City postcard writer far sooner. The language in this 1:52:07.479 --> 1:52:09.880 letter was very similar to some of the postcards. 1:52:09.920 --> 1:52:10.519 If they had just. 1:52:10.920 --> 1:52:13.439 Showed this letter to the sheriff, maybe they would have 1:52:13.439 --> 1:52:19.400 recognized it, but yes they didn't because he wasn't. The 1:52:19.439 --> 1:52:22.439 local police in Pennsylvania where the letter was received charged 1:52:22.479 --> 1:52:27.160 Frank with terroristic threats, but that's a non extraditable misdemeanor 1:52:27.200 --> 1:52:30.439 in Pennsylvania, so they couldn't bring him back to face 1:52:30.479 --> 1:52:33.040 the charge. So he's got an open warrant in Pennsylvania 1:52:33.080 --> 1:52:36.479 if he ever goes there, willingly, but he probably won't, 1:52:36.520 --> 1:52:39.719 and with Sure now deceased, it doesn't seem like that's 1:52:39.880 --> 1:52:44.559 likely to amount to anything. On December sixteenth, twenty nineteen, 1:52:45.080 --> 1:52:48.200 Frank Sweeney was sentenced to fifty one months for six 1:52:48.280 --> 1:52:51.880 counts of stalking. A few days later, his German wife 1:52:51.880 --> 1:52:54.920 posted a photo of her Christmas Eve dinner. A friend 1:52:55.000 --> 1:52:57.280 asked her if Frank would be celebrating with her that year. 1:52:58.479 --> 1:53:01.519 She replied that no, has been ill for several months 1:53:01.560 --> 1:53:02.439 and can't. 1:53:02.280 --> 1:53:03.720 Fly right now. 1:53:04.000 --> 1:53:05.960 She didn't say that he was back in federal prison 1:53:06.040 --> 1:53:10.719 for at least the fifth time. Frank Sweeney was released 1:53:10.720 --> 1:53:13.840 from prison in December of twenty twenty two. I just 1:53:13.960 --> 1:53:15.960 noticed as I'm writing this that it's his eighty first 1:53:15.960 --> 1:53:18.720 birthday today, but it won't be by the time you 1:53:18.760 --> 1:53:23.559 hear this. He's still in Idaho, he's still playing the violin, 1:53:24.520 --> 1:53:27.320 and he still co owns a few Mexican hairless dogs 1:53:27.360 --> 1:53:31.160 on the show circuit in Germany. In that nineteen ninety 1:53:31.160 --> 1:53:33.839 four New York Times article about his prison consulting business, 1:53:33.920 --> 1:53:37.240 Frank quipped that his favorite quote was the crime is 1:53:37.280 --> 1:53:40.280 not in the act, but in the stupidity of being caught, 1:53:41.040 --> 1:53:44.880 which he attributes to Nietzsche. I think, regardless of your 1:53:44.920 --> 1:53:48.120 stance on the philosophical nature of crime and punishment, though 1:53:48.560 --> 1:53:51.200 there are better quotes from Frank's thousands of appearances in 1:53:51.240 --> 1:53:53.320 the newspaper over his six decades of crime. 1:53:54.760 --> 1:53:55.439 Maybe Judge H. 1:53:55.560 --> 1:53:57.920 Curtis Meaner had it write in nineteen eighty one when 1:53:57.920 --> 1:53:59.599 he cut off the bickering in the court room over 1:53:59.640 --> 1:54:02.519 exactly what the hell happened with Frank's mysterious South African 1:54:02.560 --> 1:54:06.000 letters about the missing spy, saying, I have neither the 1:54:06.040 --> 1:54:09.639 time nor inclination to unravel all the mysteries in this case, 1:54:10.720 --> 1:54:13.519 because we never really will unravel all the mysteries of 1:54:13.600 --> 1:54:17.280 Frank's past. He played a bit part in so many 1:54:17.439 --> 1:54:21.600 much bigger stories. They've made whole Hollywood films out of 1:54:21.720 --> 1:54:25.040 so many of these little slices of history that Frank 1:54:25.160 --> 1:54:29.880 passed through, from Cold War spy thrillers to Scorsese dramas 1:54:29.920 --> 1:54:30.920 about organized crime. 1:54:31.720 --> 1:54:34.400 Frank's there, it's not in the movie. 1:54:34.920 --> 1:54:40.280 He's just out of frame while history happens doing something 1:54:41.080 --> 1:54:42.680 really goddamn weird. 1:54:47.280 --> 1:54:49.960 Weird Little Guys to production of Cool Zone Media. For 1:54:50.120 --> 1:54:51.000 more from Cool Zone 1:54:51.040 --> 1:54:54.840 Media, visit our website toolzonemedia dot com, or check us 1:54:54.840 --> 1:55:06.640 out on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.