Pod Insights Behind the Bastards Behind the Bastards Presents: Weird Little Guys About this episode Here are a couple of our favorite episodes of Molly Conger's Weird Little Guys podcast series.
Soldier of Misfortune: Frank Sweeney, Parts 1 & 2
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Transcript 20,666 words · 8 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:45 Robert Evans? Hey, everybody. Robert here. Because it's the holidays, we will be continuing our normally scheduled Behind the Bastards episodes. But every week, we're also doing a compilation of one of the other new shows on our network. Some aren't so new, but this one is. It's called Weird Little Guys. It launched this year with one of my friends and favorite researchers, the great Molly Conger. And you're going to listen to a two-part episode, which we've cut together for you with a lot less ads than normal, about a guy named Frank Sweeney. So please enjoy and happy holidays.
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4:58 Speaker 03 This is a story that begins and ends in bank parking lots, more or less, in the way that stories can really begin or end. Our subject today was alive before the story begins, and as I'm writing this, he's still alive. But for the purposes of this telling, we'll start outside the Palisade Trust Company Bank in Englewood, New Jersey on February 23rd, 1962, when an 18-year-old member of the American Nazi Party was arrested after skipping school to try to rob a bank with a toy gun. And we'll mark the beginning of the end of his story in a Wells Fargo parking lot in Garden City, Idaho, on October 13th, 2018, when an elderly ex-con was caught on security cam footage getting into an altercation with a couple
5:43 Speaker 03 who didn't move forward quickly enough at the drive-up ATM. In the decades in between, Frank Sweeney went to prison at least half a dozen times, fought as a foreign mercenary, got deported from both Rhodesia and South Africa, helped an escaped spy evade US marshals, turned state's witness against a Hitler-worshipping serial killer, tried to help the mob, and waged a three-year campaign of terror and harassment against a woman who made a passing comment about how he was parked outside the post office. I'm Molly Conger, and this is Weird Little Guys.
6:35 Speaker 03 This is a strange one. The first few episodes of this show were stories I already knew and thought you should know too. Kevin Strom was a prominent figure in the white supremacist movement for decades and it was big local news here in Charlottesville when he was arrested 20 years ago. The Gerald Drake case was something I read about when it happened. The cases against the gun trafficking Nazi paramilitary group was a story I spent years reading, paying 10 cents a page, one court filing at a time, as it wound its way through the system. But this one, this one is brand new to me. And I think it will be brand new to just about everybody because for as many times as this man shows up in the newspaper over the last 60 years, I haven't found any one
7:20 Speaker 03 source that's gathered together the threads of his life and tried to make sense of how one man's name could appear in so many other people's stories. Because that's where I found him, in someone else's story. I was reading a biography of a particularly nasty little guy, one we'll definitely get to eventually in another episode, when my weird little guy detector went off. Call it a gut feeling, but this passing mention of a side character in the life of a serial killer was enough to get me to put that book down and spend days digging through newspaper
8:01 Speaker 03 archives trying to figure out Frank. And what I found was kind of a bizarro world Forrest Gump. One man whose life keeps intersecting with major historical events, just wandering in and out of the lives of gullible reporters, frustrated federal agents, and the innocent bystanders who accidentally became his targets. Just bumbling his way through history, but without any of Tom Hanks's charm. I know we don't really know each other yet. I haven't earned the trust it takes to know you'll believe me when I promise you a two-parter is worth the wait in between, but I think you'll agree. Frank's story is weird enough for two episodes.
8:47 Speaker 03 Frank Abbott Sweeney Jr. was born in August of 1943 in New Jersey to Frank Abbott Sweeney Sr., a realtor, and Marie Gleason Sweeney, a homemaker who taught violin lessons and volunteered with the Red Cross. As a lifelong con artist, a lot of what he's told reporters about his own life is self-serving fiction, which would sometimes get published without fact-checking and then reappear in later accounts as fact. It was in the newspaper, after all. So I've taken great pains to verify what I can, debunk what I can, and take note of the things I can only offer you with a grain of salt. Some of Frank's own lies are easily disproved, like the resume he gave a Rhodesian Army recruiter.
9:30 Speaker 03 On it, he claimed he graduated from Georgetown University in 1965 with a degree in psychology, but he couldn't possibly have matriculated at Georgetown in 1961. He was a senior at Tenevly High School in 1962 when he was sent to the Annandale Reformatory for two and a half years. He never finished high school. His claim that his alias Francis Shellhammer derives from his mother's maiden name also fails to hold up to scrutiny. His mother was born Marie Gleason to John Gleason, a fireman, and Lottie Gross Gleason in Chicago. And I was generous here. I wasted a lot of time. I even checked his grandparents. His middle name, Abbott, was his paternal grandmother Martha's maiden name.
10:14 Speaker 03 I went as far as to track his family tree all the way back to Ireland, giving him the benefit of the doubt that maybe there's a Shellhammer in there somewhere. I didn't find one. It's possible that I started mixing up my Martha's, Mary's, John's, and Frances's by the time I was cross-referencing marriage records from the 1870s, but he probably just made it up. He does a lot of that. And other aspects of Frank's story would require a trip to the National Archive to sift through dusty boxes of ancient court transcripts and an unlikely degree of transparency from the Central Intelligence Agency, or a deathbed confession from a mobster, or a few tell-all memoirs from US Marshals to ever hope to sort out.
10:58 Speaker 03 The rest is somewhere in between.
11:02 Speaker 03 But I'll stick with what we do know to be true. And I said this story begins outside of a bank. On February 23rd, 1962, Frank Sweeney skipped school. Shortly after 9:00 AM, he walked into a bank in Englewood, New Jersey, approached the teller, and slid a plastic toy gun that he'd painted black out of a manila envelope. "I'd like to make a withdrawal," he told the teller as he cocked the toy pistol. I don't know if the teller could tell the gun was fake, or if she just didn't think this gangly, redheaded teenager had it in him to shoot her. Or maybe she just was having a bad day and didn't care anymore. Because according to local news reports,
11:46 Speaker 03 she smeared at him, got up, and walked away, leaving him standing there alone at the counter with his toy gun. And bewildered by the teller's apparent disinterest in being held at gunpoint, he just put the plastic pistol back in his pocket, turned around, and walked out the front door. And as he was leaving, an off-duty policeman just happened to be walking into the bank. An employee told the officer what had just happened, and he turned right around and caught Frank just outside. He dragged him back inside the bank to be identified by the teller. And as the patrolman is making the arrest, Frank says to him, "Well, I guess it didn't work." Later, under interrogation, he would tell the officers
12:31 Speaker 03 that his plan had been to "support the movement", to use the money from the bank robbery to support the activities of the American Nazi Party under George Lincoln Rockwell. At his arraignment, the judge asked Frank, "Aren't you the fellow who's been painting swastikas on synagogues around here?" Frank denied this, and he told the judge, "I never did anything illegal in my life." And then he pleaded guilty to the attempted bank robbery. There's no other mention of Frank in connection with that anti-Semitic vandalism the judge mentioned, but I did find several newspaper articles about incidents of that sort from the prior two years, when Frank would have still been a minor. In January 1960, three unnamed teenage boys were accused of painting swastikas on parked
13:14 Speaker 03 cars in Emerson, just eight miles away. In February of 1961, someone hung a swastika banner over the entrance of the synagogue in Tenefly. Newspaper articles about that banner reference a similar recent incident at the synagogue in nearby Englewood. A few days later, someone painted a swastika over a plaque nearby. In June, two teenage boys were spotted fleeing the scene after two trailers belonging to a contractor were broken into and left a swastika painted on the floor inside. In all of these incidents, police told the papers at the time that they had referred the cases to the juvenile division. It's not like antisemitic incidents are so rare that I'm saying that Frank is the only possible suspect here in every 1960s Bergen County news article about a swastika.
13:59 Speaker 03 I found plenty of other newspaper reports during those same two years about a local man flying a swastika flag outside of his home, about attacks on Jewish businesses and synagogues in neighboring cities, and other incidents that just don't fit this particular pattern of teenage Nazi vandalism. And the comment the judge made makes it sound like Frank had been there before. But any appearance he'd made in court as a minor wouldn't have been reported with his name attached to it, and it's hard enough to get any information about a juvenile case in 2024, so forget figuring out what happened in 1961. But it does seem pretty likely he'd at least been a suspect in some of those incidents. Because at the hearing where he pled guilty to the attempted bank robbery, Frank did
14:44 Speaker 03 admit that the police had spoken to him on numerous occasions specifically concerning his involvement in George Lincoln Rockwell's American Nazi Party. For the attempted bank robbery, Frank was sentenced to an indeterminate term at a boys' reformatory, and he was released in October of 1964, shortly after his 21st birthday, after serving about two and a half years. After his first stint in jail, Frank returned to his parents' home in New Jersey. He worked occasionally as a shipping clerk, but it doesn't seem like he was holding down a steady job. One afternoon in July of 1967, neighbors reported hearing gunshots in the woods. An officer drove by to check it out and saw a car parked on the side of the road.
15:29 Speaker 03 The car looked empty, so the officer kept driving without stopping to investigate. Suddenly, the car pulled out behind him and tried to run the officer off the road. A brief vehicle chase ensued, with the officer following the vehicle for about a mile before the driver, Frank, parked outside of his parents' home, got out, and walked toward the front door. The officer asked Frank if he'd been shooting guns in the woods, to which Frank replied only, "No," and then warned the officer that he was on private property before walking away and into the house. But Frank left something on the front seat of the car, unfortunately, and it was a Thompson submachine gun that he'd been firing in the woods. The officer saw the gun and called for backup.
16:15 Speaker 03 And when they arrived, Frank opened fire on them from inside the home, kicking off a 75-minute gun battle with more than a dozen cops firing shots at the house as Frank fired at them through the windows. Frank's father and brother pleaded with him to come out, or at least to send the family dog out. After Police Captain Peter Zerla was shot in the arm, the officers lobbed four canisters of tear gas through the windows, finally driving Frank out into the front yard where he was arrested without further incident. And as they put the handcuffs on him, he turned to Captain Zerla, who's still standing there in the front yard, bleeding from a gunshot wound, and Frank says, "Some shot when I got you through the window, huh?"
16:58 Speaker 03 There's no follow-up I can find about whether the dog was hurt or how Mrs. Sweeney got the tear gas out of her upholstery. It was the 60s, so maybe her sofa was safely Scotch-guarded or wrapped up in one of those weird plastic covers that were popular back then. But you have to figure she at least had to replace the curtains.
17:17 Speaker 03 Frank entered a not guilty plea and unsuccessfully tried to suppress the evidence of the gun found on the front seat of the car, with his attorney arguing that it was discovered in an illegal search because the cop didn't have probable cause to look through the window of the parked car. That's not how that works. At trial, the defense put on three psychiatrists to argue for insanity, and the state put on two of their own who testified that Frank was certainly disturbed, but not legally insane. The jury deliberated for just three hours before finding Frank guilty of attempted homicide, assault with the intent to kill, possession of a machine gun, and something called atrocious assault, that I've never heard of. We don't have that here in Virginia.
18:00 Speaker 03 But in New Jersey, atrocious assault is an assault and battery, savage and cruel in character, which results in maiming or wounding. So that definitely qualifies. And he was sentenced to six years, which honestly, that's kind of remarkable, right? I'm not going to bat for the carceral state here, far from it. You know, more jail time doesn't really fix anybody. And we'll come to see that jail never comes close to fixing Frank. But reading those 60s news stories about this event was fascinating. This cop who got shot by a Nazi with a Tommy gun is described in every article as, quote, lightly wounded.
18:42 Speaker 03 I mean, he does seem to have not been seriously injured. He was shot, you know, in the upper arm. I don't think it went through the bone. So it really, he was lightly wounded, but that's not what they would put in the newspaper today. You know it. And the cops didn't drive a tank through the front of this suburban home or unload their guns into him when he came out. There's been such a massive culture shift over the years in the way we justify aggressive police response and the way that we talk about the risk to police. It's just interesting to see that it wasn't always that way. But there's another unanswered question in the story of this siege in this New York suburb. What was he doing that day?
19:25 Speaker 03 I mean, shooting guns in the woods, obviously, but why did he panic when that cop drove by? And why those woods in particular? We'll never really know. Even if he told us, we wouldn't know, he's a liar. But the newspaper articles at the time do say that the officer initially saw Frank's car parked at the intersection of East Clinton Avenue and Woodland Street, about a mile from where Frank lived at the time. They used to put everything in the newspaper. It's so beautiful. Every detail, every boring little bit. I wish they still did that. And I'm eternally curious about details that probably won't end up mattering, but I pulled up a map of Tenerife, New Jersey.
20:09 Speaker 03 And there is a large wooded area you could walk straight into if you parked your car at that intersection. And those woods surround a large building that first opened its doors in 1950. The Kaplan Jewish Community Center.
20:36 Speaker 03 The clearest account of the next phase of Frank's life comes from an essay written in 2019 by a retired Rhodesian military policeman. Despite being the most likely to be more or less true, it's still riddled with obvious factual inaccuracies, things that just can't be true. Maybe because it was written as a humorous recollection meant to be read by his fellow former Rhodesian soldiers, and maybe his memory has faded a bit in the nearly 50 years since the event in question. But it does, at the very least, substantiate Frank's own claim about having enlisted in the Rhodesian Light Infantry in the early 1970s. I'll try to walk the tightrope here of providing a little more context than just Rhodesia
21:21 Speaker 03 was very bad and white supremacists from other countries were obsessed with the idea that they could travel there to kill black people with impunity, while still stopping short of taking us down the long road of the history and consequences of European colonization in Africa. That's far from my area of expertise, and it's not why you're here. Now, even if you're coming into this with a completely blank slate for some reason, you're probably thinking, there's no country called Rhodesia. And you're right. There isn't. There never really was. Rhodesia was never recognized as a sovereign state, but we're calling Rhodesia here as the present-day state of Zimbabwe in southern Africa.
22:02 Speaker 03 In the early 20th century, Rhodesia was a British territory, the legacy of Cecil Rhodes's British South Africa Company. The area was effectively ruled by the Company until the 1920s, when it became a self-governing colony of the UK. And by the 1950s, decolonization was happening all across the African continent. These fading European empires couldn't or didn't want to hold on to all the colonies they'd collected during the previous century's scramble for Africa. In 1960, British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan gave his "Wind of Change" speech in an address to the South African Parliament about the political necessity of moving toward decolonization.
22:41 Speaker 06 The wind of change is blowing through this continent. And whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact, and we must all accept it as a fact, and our national policies must take account of it.
23:03 Speaker 03 He'd actually given the same speech a few weeks earlier in Ghana, but the press didn't pick it up the first time. And I think the "whether we like it or not" part of that statement matters a lot here. He wasn't advocating for decolonization out of the goodness of his heart. He was reluctantly acknowledging the expensive and bloody political reality of trying to hold on to these colonies at any cost. He could see the Belgians in Congo and the French in Algeria fighting these costly wars with Africans who wanted an end to European colonial rule. And as they worked towards extricating themselves from these colonial arrangements, the British government adopted a policy called "No independence before majority rule," meaning they wouldn't
23:44 Speaker 03 hand over sovereignty to a colony still run exclusively by the white colonial minority. Now, obviously, this is an immensely complicated bit of political history that I'm stripping down to the studs and explaining badly so we can get through it quickly. So don't think I'm giving the British Empire any kind of credit here. This policy did not arise out of a genuine desire to undo the harms of colonialism and address racism or anything like that. That was not on their minds. But I think they knew what it would look like if their decolonization looked exactly like their colony. And we're not talking about a PR loss here. This is the Cold War. They don't want to give the Soviets an opportunity to come in behind them.
24:28 Speaker 03 But it was this policy, or rather defiance of it, that led Rhodesia under Ian Smith to make the unilateral Declaration of Independence in 1965.
24:38 Speaker 03 White colonists made up just 5% of the population of the Territory, but they were unwilling to accept that the UK would only grant Rhodesian independence if they shared even a crumb of political power with the other 95% of Rhodesians. And apologies again for these digressions. I just love the context. I think it's so important. But that brings us to where we were going: the Rhodesian Bush War, a 15-year period of civil conflict between the white minority-led government and the African nationalist guerrilla forces. The number of foreign mercenaries who actually traveled to Rhodesia during the war remains up for debate. Most of the countries the mercenaries came from
25:19 Speaker 03 were embarrassed by the whole affair. International sanctions levied against the Territory after the illegal Declaration of Independence made it illegal for citizens of many countries to participate in the conflict, even in countries that didn't have their own domestic laws banning mercenary activity. And there was some discomfort within Rhodesia, too, about this perception that they needed foreigners to help with what they saw as their war for independence. So for deeply unflattering and regrettable reasons, no one was very invested in getting a thorough accounting of the situation, right? Nobody benefits from knowing what happened here. But at the high end, it was really only a few thousand mercenaries
26:02 Speaker 03 over the total course of the conflict, with best estimates for the number of them who were Americans being somewhere in the low hundreds. So a lot of guys talked about it. But not very many of them actually did it. This idea of American extremists traveling to Africa to violently enforce white rule over black Africans is one that modern white supremacists still cherish and celebrate.
26:30 Speaker 03 Dylan Roof, who was welcomed with open arms at an evening Bible study at Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, registered the domain lastrodesian.com a few months before he murdered nine of the parishioners who thought he was joining them for prayer that night. Roof made his final edit to that site, his digital manifesto, just hours before carrying out that attack in 2015. The cultural moment where magazines like Soldier of Fortune ran full-page advertisements for opportunities to be a man among men in the African bush looms large in our memories. But the reality is, there weren't many men who actually heeded the call, and their role
27:11 Speaker 03 in the conflict was insignificant. But unlike many of those Americans who did end up in Rhodesia in the 70s, Frank Sweeney didn't see an advertisement in Soldier of Fortune. That magazine's first issue, bearing a cover story about American mercenaries in Africa, was published in the summer of 1975, just as Frank Sweeney was already on his way home. According to Frank, which is a dangerous way to start an assertion of fact, he walked into the Rhodesian Information Center in Washington DC in 1972 and asked how to join up. The information center was not technically a diplomatic office because Rhodesia was
27:54 Speaker 03 not technically a country, a fact that would get them into some trouble in Australia. But they claimed that they were just offering information about tourism. Frank says he was offered the contact information from Major Nick Lamprecht, the Rhodesian Army's chief recruiter. David Anable, a reporter for the Christian Science Monitor who interviewed Frank in 1975, wrote that he'd spoken to another recent visitor to that office after talking to Frank. This visitor walked into the office and was given a brochure printed by the Rhodesian Department of Labor about "Careers in Rhodesia." And after a 30-minute presentation about Americans already fighting in the conflict and the pay and benefits a mercenary could expect, including paid airfare, all violations
28:38 Speaker 03 of international sanctions and US federal law, the visitor was offered Major Lamprecht's contact information.
28:45 Speaker 03 That recruiter, Nick Lamprecht, worked closely with Soldier of Fortune founder Robert K. Brown to strategize how the magazine can be used to convince more Americans to make the trip in the latter years of the conflict. Lamprecht himself even wrote an article for the magazine, promising young American soldiers of fortune that it would be easy for them to find a beautiful, white Rhodesian wife.
29:07 Speaker 03 I think Lamprecht knew he was lying about how much fun you could have fighting in the Bush War. His own son Vincent had already fled to South Africa to avoid military service. In what you may be sensing as a theme here, the details of Frank's service in Rhodesia are a little murky. The details of a lot of what was going on in Rhodesia during those years is not totally settled, and Frank's own involvement far less so. He told reporter David Anable in that 1975 interview that, as a corporal in the Rhodesian Light Infantry, his detachment had taken many prisoners, but when instructed to do so, they just executed people, saying, "We shot them right there in the bush when we were told not to take prisoners."
29:53 Speaker 03 He also admitted that his unit had taken part in raids over the border into neighboring Mozambique. He claimed that sometimes these trips over the border were to assist Portuguese troops. And until late 1974, Portuguese troops were in Mozambique, fighting to put down the Mozambican War of Independence. And Frank said sometimes they'd go over the border to raid guerrilla camps, perhaps those belonging to the Zimbabwe-African National Liberation Army, which had strong ties to the groups fighting for independence in Mozambique. These Rhodesian raids over the border into Mozambique continued even after that nation gained sovereignty in 1975, but it's hard to pin down when Frank would have been doing this, if he even did. I can at least say that Frank was no longer in Rhodesia
30:38 Speaker 03 during one of the war's worst atrocities. A Rhodesian raid on a refugee camp in Mozambique killed over 1,000 civilians.
30:47 Speaker 03 David Anable published a couple of articles in 1975 and 1976 about Rhodesia, and he often quoted Frank Sweeney about his time there. After all, there weren't many Americans who'd been there, and even fewer who were easy to find. And Frank was easy to find. He was very public about his stint as a mercenary. After returning home in 1975, Frank placed ads in magazines like Shotgun News and Gun Week that read,
31:15 Speaker 07 "The Rhodesian Army offers excitement and adventure. I know, I've been there. Young Americans of European ancestry, write to me for free details pertaining to recruiting. Frank Abbott Sweeney, 72 Creston Avenue, Tenerly, New Jersey, 07670."
31:34 Speaker 03 When speaking with the reporter about his efforts to recruit others to make the trip, Frank spoke warmly of Major Lamprecht and claimed that it was Lamprecht himself who'd instructed Frank to "get in touch with as many white applicants as possible," which is honestly probably not true, but who knows? Frank is described as "a fan of Ian Smith, of white superiority, and of the need to defend both," and is quoted as saying, "If I could do anything to preserve Western civilization in the area, I would do it." Frank told Anable that he'd received hundreds of letters in response to his ads, and responded to all of them. But then again, he also told Anable he was a college graduate, and we know that's not true.
32:20 Speaker 03 And Anable claims Frank showed him his discharge papers from the Rhodesian Light Infantry, which were, quote, "in order," according to the article, and showed three years of good service and a rank of corporal. And that's definitely not true.
32:35 Speaker 03 I'm sure Frank did show Anable something. He probably did show him papers that indicated as much. And I don't fault him for reporting it. It turns out Frank was quite skilled at forgery.
32:49 Speaker 03 Frank claims he was in Washington DC getting recruited into the Rhodesian Army in 1972, but he may have actually still been in prison in 1972 for shooting that cop. It's hard to pin down exactly when he was released. One newspaper article years later puts his parole date for that conviction at 1974, but I have a bad feeling that was just a reporter on a deadline who did the math on a six-year sentence and assumed Frank served all of it, which he probably didn't. When Frank was later arrested for his role in the escape of a Soviet spy, an FBI agent puts his date of enlistment at 1973. So the truth is in there somewhere.
33:30 Speaker 03 Either way, he wasn't in Rhodesia for very long before he really, really wanted to go home. You know, a war as hell for everybody. And here we have another unreliable narrator, Anthony Hickman. Hickman is a retired officer in the British South Africa Police, which no longer exists and confusingly was neither British nor South African, and they weren't always really just police. But it bore that name because it grew out of the paramilitary force run directly by Cecil Rhodes's British South Africa Company in the 19th century. The BSAP was Rhodesia's regular police force, but the line between regular policing and
34:13 Speaker 03 military operations was blurry. And during the Bush War, there were military units made up of BSAP officers, and they developed counterinsurgency and counterterrorism units, they oversaw the intelligence gathering arm of the infamously brutal Sulu Scouts, and they killed hundreds of people by introducing poisoned food and medicine into the supply lines for the insurgent forces. I don't know exactly what Hickman was doing for most of the war, maybe he didn't do any of that. But these days, he's retired in Johannesburg, South Africa, and makes detailed models of trains and farmhouses. In the early 1970s, he was assigned to the homicide unit of BSAP's Criminal Investigative
34:58 Speaker 03 Division. And in 2019, he wrote down his recollections of Frank Sweeney for a newsletter published by his Veterans Association.
35:08 Speaker 03 Like any account of Frank's life, Hickman's essay can't be taken as gospel truth. Between the lies Frank told him and his own fading memory of the 70s, it's not perfect. Honestly, I almost discarded it without reading past the first page. He was off to a pretty bad start when the first paragraph placed these events in September of 1977, which would of course be entirely impossible. Frank could not have been in a Rhodesian army barracks in September of 1977 because according to the US Marshals, the FBI, the DOJ, the CIA, and the New York Times, Frank was hanging out with a Soviet
35:47 Speaker 03 spy in the exercise yard at a federal prison in Los Angeles in September of 1977. But I'll cut Hickman some slack here on that faltering start because there's ample evidence within the story that puts these events somewhere in the springtime of 1975. And the date aside, there is enough meat to Hickman's account and the supporting primary documentation he provided that supports the idea that this story is more or less true. As a homicide detective, Hickman was involved in an investigation into Frank Sweeney for attempted murder at a Rhodesian military barracks. One evening sometime in early 1975,
36:30 Speaker 03 probably, Frank went to the bathroom at the barracks he was living in. Inside the shared facilities, two infantrymen who'd been drinking were laughing and joking around. One was quite drunk, undressed, and got into the shower to try to sober up a little bit. Three men were chatting pleasantly enough, but Frank was humorless and sober, and he was outraged when the drunk man splashed shower water on him. The men argued, and one of them called Frank a bloody yank. And Frank's not a guy who turns the other cheek. He takes every insult very personally. So, a little bit damp and with his pride wounded,
37:11 Speaker 03 he runs back to his bunk and comes right back with a seven-inch dagger and pulls the shower curtain aside and stabs this naked drunk man in the lower abdomen. The other soldier ran for help, and Frank was quickly arrested. And while he sat in custody, a mysterious letter arrived in the mail. The postmark indicated that it had been mailed from nearby Salisbury weeks earlier. The anonymous letter writer said that a "private FA Sweeney" had been convicted of the attempted murder of policemen in the United States. It was Hickman, our essayist, who first suspected that Frank may actually have written this letter himself.
37:54 Speaker 03 And when he pressed Frank for a handwriting sample to prove it, he cracked immediately.
38:01 Speaker 03 He'd sent the letter himself, hoping that it would be his ticket home, that they would kick him out and deport him when they found out he lied about not having a criminal history, and that he would get a free flight back to New Jersey without having to finish his term of service. And if that letter had only arrived a few days earlier, they probably would have done just that, before anybody had to get stabbed.
38:26 Speaker 03 The story Frank then told Hickman has elements of truth, but it's not quite right. He told Hickman that the shootout at his parents' house had happened just the year prior, and that he'd fled the country prior to being sentenced. So he's cutting out this six-year period that he spent in prison for the shooting, and pretending that he had just arrived there in Rhodesia immediately after the events that we know took place in July of 1967. And the timeline isn't the only thing that's off. In this version, Frank says the shootout only lasted 10 minutes, not over an hour. And he had decided to end the incident on his own terms, when he saw that his father had arrived, rather than the truth, which was that he argued with his distraught father for an hour
39:11 Speaker 03 while continuing to shoot through the windows until he was smoked out by tear gas. But the inciting incident in this version is similar. He told Hickman about shooting guns in the woods, and the neighbors reporting the noise, and the officer arriving, and the car chase. But he claimed the gun he was shooting in the woods was one he'd purchased from an advertisement in Soldier of Fortune magazine, which is obviously not possible, because that magazine didn't exist in 1967. I don't know, maybe he was just updating the story so it would sound more current. But Frank said he'd purchased the Tommy gun from the magazine, but it was missing some parts. It didn't have a firing pin and something else. So it didn't work. He manufactured the necessary replacement parts, but he was concerned that
39:55 Speaker 03 in his modification of the weapon, maybe things weren't 100% and he was worried that it would explode when fired. So he lashed it to a tree and set it to fully automatic and rigged a string to the trigger and hid behind another tree for cover. This sounds so Looney Tunes to me, like a literal Looney Tunes cartoon, right? This is, this is Daffy Duck behavior. But he tells this story to Hickman and in his essay Hickman writes, "True or false, impossible to believe, Sweeney had the uncanny ability to sound totally convincing, but it is significant to note that a search undertaken based on Sweeney's fingerprint records revealed no such incident."
40:40 Speaker 03 Which doesn't say much for the state of Rhodesian intelligence because yeah, Frank's taking a little creative license here. The story he's telling is not 100% true, but he is admitting to you almost all of the real details for the real crime he really did go to prison for. So you, you probably should have figured that out before he told you and you definitely should have been able to figure it out after he told you. They could have contacted a police department or a courthouse in New Jersey and just asked. Hell, they probably could have called any resident of Tenefly, New Jersey at random and just asked,
41:21 Speaker 03 "Do you remember the teenage Nazi bank robber who shot a cop in his mom's front yard?" It's kind of a small town. I bet everybody remembered. But I guess they didn't do that. They weren't even a real country, so maybe they didn't have a guy who knew how to do a background check. The Rhodesian police continued to hold Frank in custody. And while he was waiting to find out if they were going to try him for attempted murder, he got some mail. An envelope containing two United States passports and $300 in cash. Both passports bore Frank's photo and Frank's birthdate, but only one had Frank's name on it.
42:02 Speaker 03 The other was for Francis August Shellhammer, a man who doesn't exist. He explained to the officers that he was quite good at making such things and even offered to forge a pair of US passports for Hickman and the other detective. Hickman says that they declined the offer. Remarkably, the Rhodesian government opted to drop the charges and just send Frank home. Can you court martial a mercenary? I don't, that's not something I've ever needed to wonder about. I don't know really what the options were here, but it wasn't worth it to them. They sent him home. So sometime in the summer of 1975, Frank Sweeney was kicked out of the Rhodesian Light Inventory and deported from Rhodesia.
42:45 Speaker 03 He got his free flight home after all and was permanently banned from a country that never existed.
43:06 Speaker 03 Shortly after he got home to New Jersey, he wrote a letter to Hickman. Frank's mother had mailed him some more cash before all this trouble got started and it arrived in Rhodesia after he was already gone. And he wanted Hickman to put it back in the mail for him. His letter, which Hickman has actually held on to all these years, is dated August 22nd, 1975. So if he's already home and realizing his mail is missing and writing the letter in August of 75, that all the events before that happened earlier in 1975. You get it. In addition to asking Hickman to mail back the money from his mother, Frank tells the investigator that life in America is loathsome compared to the time he spent in Rhodesia.
43:52 Speaker 07 It's one big racial cesspool where the worst element is looked on and held in high esteem. With my RLI training to back me up, I have seriously thought of forming my own anti-terrorism unit here in the land of the red, white, and blue. The real problem is finding enough devoted men to form a small cadre. If you ever do visit America, I would genuinely enjoy meeting with you again, and I'm sure my family would like to meet you too. Even though my service in the military was cut short, my loyalty to Rhodesia remains as strong as ever.
44:25 Speaker 03 So now he's back in the United States, and this is during the same time period that he's placing those ads in gun magazines to recruit other Rhodesian mercenaries. He's also placing some other classified ads. So he's engaging in this federal crime of recruiting foreign mercenaries, using his own legal name and his parents' address. That's not a problem. The United States government had no real appetite for enforcing the statute prohibiting him from recruiting people into a foreign army. But when he placed ads offering four MP40 Schmeizer submachine guns for sale, he didn't use his own name. He used the name Francis August Shellhammer, the name from the forged passport, and he
45:10 Speaker 03 listed a commercial address in Fort Lee, New Jersey. It seems Frank never actually had these Nazi submachine guns, but he did collect the money sent by many interested collectors who thought they were buying these imaginary guns. It seems like a great hack to make free money, but unfortunately for Frank, that is mail fraud. So in March of 1976, he's being interviewed by a reporter from the LA Times, and he's telling this reporter he's enjoyed his time in Rhodesia so much that he's actually planning to move back to South Africa in just a few weeks. Notice he's moving to South Africa, not Rhodesia, because he is not allowed in Rhodesia. But he's planning this big move, he's telling this reporter about it, he's bragging
45:53 Speaker 03 about his time in Rhodesia. But at the same time, in March of 1976, he's also entering a guilty plea to that federal mail fraud charge. The LA Times article, which doesn't make any mention of his former or current criminal charges, does say that Frank said that he'd recently been visited by the FBI. And Frank says they came to his house to try to pressure him to provide information about other mercenaries. It seems over more likely that he's a compulsive liar who got a thrill out of working in this kernel of truth. Because the FBI had just been to his house. That part's true. But they were there to arrest him for mail fraud.
46:37 Speaker 03 But he wasn't lying about his plans for an upcoming move. After pleading guilty to the mail fraud charge, he skipped out on his sentencing hearing. He packed his bags and he caught a flight to Johannesburg, but South Africa sent him right back. And he was arrested by US Marshals as he was getting off the plane at JFK in June of 1976. And while Marshals were arresting him, his suitcase was loaded off the plane and it went through Customs without him. Customs officials seized a 9mm Luger pistol because he lacked the proper paperwork to bring the firearm into the US from a foreign country. And inexplicably, there were no additional charges brought for any of that.
47:20 Speaker 03 He wasn't supposed to have a gun at all, and he certainly wasn't supposed to try to flee the continent while awaiting sentencing for a federal crime. I know the 70s were a different time and it wasn't a big deal to bring a gun to the airport, but fleeing the country to avoid going to prison has always been illegal, and I'm pretty sure of it. I found a couple of cheeky little articles written a few years later about how the government ended up accidentally giving him that gun back. It was seized by Customs and put into storage while he was in prison. And when he got out of prison, he wrote to the Customs Office in New York to inquire about it, and they told him they'd return his property if he paid a $244 storage fee. I don't know what that comes out to per month for the four years he was in prison, but that seems steep.
48:06 Speaker 03 And so Frank claims he walked right into the customs office inside the World Trade Center in May of 1980, paid the fee, filled out a form, and they gave him back his gun. A spokesman for the US Customs Service said they had no way of knowing he was a felon. Frank said it was all just a half-hearted joke, telling a reporter, "All I really wanted to do was test the gun laws to show there really is a need for federal gun legislation. The feds are giving criminals like me our guns back in New York City just for the asking. Federal gun laws are fursicle." You know, he's not a great guy, but he does have some quips, you know? He's just out there doing bits.
48:49 Speaker 03 And he ended up handing the gun back over to the ATF without incident a few months later. But back to the mail fraud. He got the four years for the mail fraud and was sent to federal prison. And it was in prison this time around that Frank would meet Christopher Boyce, a young defense contractor who'd recently been convicted of espionage. In 1974, a 21-year-old college dropout named Christopher Boyce got a job at TRW, an aerospace company with a lot of government contracts. He wasn't really qualified for the role, having never worked in an office before, but he started as a low-level clerk. It helped that his retired FBI agent father was the head of security at McDonnell Douglas,
49:33 Speaker 03 another aerospace and defense contracting company, and he had connections at TRW. But TRW didn't just make satellites and jet engines. In his own later testimony before a congressional committee, Boyce described the company as "a CIA contractor," something he'd had no idea about before his promotion to a highly sensitive position working on special projects. From inside the company's black vault, and with a top-secret CIA clearance, Boyce had access to the company's encrypted teletype connection with Langley. On at least a dozen occasions, he removed documents from the vault and photographed them.
50:14 Speaker 03 On at least six occasions, he photographed documents inside the vault. He later told Congress, "Obviously neither the government's clearance procedures nor the company's security procedures worked very well." I'll say.
50:32 Speaker 03 In his new position inside the vault, Boyce monitored satellite communications between the CIA, his employer TRW, and other CIA contacts around the world. In his congressional testimony, Boyce describes a "shockingly lax" approach to security for this allegedly super-secure black vault. He would come back to work late at night to return the documents he'd stolen, and no one questioned why a junior employee was opening the vault at 4:00 a.m. He made deliveries to secure CIA sites without having the proper clearance to enter them. And on one occasion, he wandered into a CIA code room, picked up a clipboard, and was flipping through the pages
51:15 Speaker 03 before someone politely asked him to leave. Employees in the vault were supposed to destroy the code cards used in the teletype machine at the end of each workday. Boyce says they just tossed the cards in a canvas bag in the corner, and they used the document destruction blender to make mai tais with the Bacardi that they kept hidden behind the cryptography machines. He claims it was common for the vault to receive transmissions from Langley that weren't actually meant for them: misdirected communications, these CIA cables that had nothing to do with TRW or their work with the agency, but no one really cared, and there was no clear accountability process for ensuring that these top-secret CIA documents
51:59 Speaker 03 that had been sent to them by mistake were actually destroyed. And these are the documents that Boyce stole. Okay, I know Frank's not even in this part, but I have to tell you just a little bit about the 1975 constitutional crisis in Australia. I know, I know, this is an even more egregious digression than the history of Rhodesia, but look at the show art. It's not just cool to look at. We are living on my red-string board, and I've got to put this pushpin in somewhere. Now, I know even less about Australia than I know about the decolonization of Africa in the 20th century, which is to say, like, not very much. I think they still have the Queen?
52:45 Speaker 03 I guess it's the king now. Did they have to print new money after the queen died? It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. But I was delighted to discover that CIA meddling in an Australian political crisis was even a possibility. How intriguing. You know, I know they like to keep it south of the equator, but I thought that was just a Western hemisphere thing. Now, of course, of course, the United States government maintains that the CIA had no role in pushing Prime Minister Gough Whitlam out of office in 1975. But Christopher Boyce went to prison claiming otherwise. In the 70s, Gough Whitlam was the head of the Australian
53:27 Speaker 03 Labor Party, and his administration was fairly socially progressive. He was also considering closing Pine Gap, a US Signals Intelligence Surveillance Base in Central Australia, run by the CIA. In 1975, the opposition party which controlled the Senate deferred the passage of an appropriations bill. I don't know and am not going to find out how the Australian government functions, but this sounds like the silly little crisis we seem to have every year where someone refuses to pass the bill that keeps the lights on at the government. And Australia's Governor General John Kerr used the fallout of this crisis as a justification to dismiss Whitlam as Prime Minister, which is apparently the
54:10 Speaker 03 thing he had the power to do. It's like they have a guy that can fire the president? I don't know. It's just not my business what happens in Australia. And at the time, Whitlam dismissed allegations of CIA involvement, saying Kerr didn't need any encouragement from anybody to fire him. But in his memoirs, published decades later, he wrote that in 1977, President Jimmy Carter sent Warren Christopher, the Deputy Secretary of State, to Australia to meet with Whitlam. And Christopher told Whitlam that the United States, quote, "would never again interfere with Australia's democratic processes." Never again? Never
54:53 Speaker 03 again. And Whitlam's personal secretary backs up this recollection of the use of the word "again." But I'll reiterate, the CIA says they were not involved. They said they didn't do it.
55:07 Speaker 03 All that to say, though, our pot-smoking, disaffected, college dropout who was getting drunk at lunch most days and making paper airplanes out of CIA encryption code cards probably didn't know anything about the Australian Senate blocking an appropriations bill. But by his account, he did sometimes read those misdirected CIA cables that he was supposed to destroy. And some of those messages were about a growing desire within the CIA to have Whitlam removed from office, referring to the Australian Governor General as "our man Kerr." So, he stole them. And instead of going to the press, he and his childhood friend, a cocaine dealer named Dalton
55:51 Speaker 03 Lee, decided to sell the documents to the Soviets. Lee would take the documents down to Mexico and deliver them to the Soviet Embassy and return with cash, which they split. And maybe it would have worked, maybe not forever, but would have worked for a while if not for a little mistake, a tiny careless act. In an absolutely absurd turn of history, Dalton Lee was arrested in 1977 outside the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City. He wasn't arrested for espionage or drug trafficking, two things he was definitely doing. He was arrested by Mexican police for littering.
56:33 Speaker 03 But under interrogation about the drugs and documents they subsequently found on him, he admitted everything. Christopher Boyce was arrested by authorities in the US just 10 days later. And accounts vary as to whether or not Dalton Lee gave Boyce up in that initial interview. He says he didn't, and he probably didn't need to. The authorities would have arrived at the conclusion that it was Boyce who'd stolen those documents, whether Dalton Lee gave him up or not, so, you know, we'll never know. But this is where Frank comes back. This is where Frank reappears in his own story. I haven't forgotten him. Because while all this CIA skullduggery and Cold War espionage is going on, Frank is
57:16 Speaker 03 sitting in a jail cell on Terminal Island, a low-security federal corrections facility in Los Angeles. I can't find a good reason for why he would have been transported to a prison in California after being arrested in New York, but government inefficiency is as likely an explanation as anything else. Christopher Boyce was ultimately convicted of eight counts of espionage in 1977 and sentenced to 40 years in prison. And for several months in late 77 to early 78, the two men were on the same cell block at Terminal Island. Much has been made of the apparent incongruity of Frank, a man who fought as a mercenary against communist guerrillas, befriending Boyce, a man convicted of aiding the Soviet Union.
58:01 Speaker 03 But I don't think either of them had a fully formed set of political beliefs at the time. Boyce's mother would later say that the two became quite close in those months. Frank was, for reasons I spent way too long unsuccessfully trying to figure out, transferred to a prison in Maine sometime in early 1978. Boyce would eventually be transferred to Lompoc, a prison a few hours north of Los Angeles. And in January of 1980, Christopher Boyce escaped from prison. The ensuing manhunt for the missing spy would last nearly two years, in part because Frank was planting false clues from Cape Town to California to lead investigators in the wrong
58:46 Speaker 03 direction. And that's where I have to leave you today. I do hope you'll come back next week for the second half of Frank's story. There's a serial killer, a mob boss, a jailhouse letter from his wife's boyfriend, Frank stabs another guy, and for reasons I'm still not 100% clear on, we're a bunch of snakes. Weird Little Guys is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedi.com, or check us out in the iHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts.
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1:02:12 Speaker 03 I'm so glad you decided to come back for part two of the story of Frank Sweeney. If you didn't hear part one, you really need to. This isn't the kind of story you can pick up midway through. You missed a cop getting shot with a machine gun in a New Jersey suburb, the Rhodesian Bush war, possible CIA involvement in an Australian political crisis, and we're just about to pick up with our escaped spy. The second 40 years of Frank's life are just as weird as the first 40. There's a serial killer, a mafia trial, two different secret wives, and a lot of misuse of the postal service.
1:02:51 Speaker 03 I'm Molly Conger, and this is Weird Little Guys.
1:03:10 Speaker 03 Now, when we left off last week, Frank was making friends in prison. His new friend in 1978 was Christopher Boyce, who'd just been convicted of espionage for selling documents he stole from his job as a CIA contractor to the Soviets. And then he escaped from prison. Whether or not Frank was still in custody on the day Christopher Boyce escaped from prison is surprisingly hard to pin down. Several newspaper articles about Frank's role in the ensuing manhunt for the missing spy put his release a month before the escape, but others put it a month after. Seems like this detail would really matter, but no one seemed very concerned about it in 1980. Newspapers that appeared to be quoting the same unnamed source from the US Marshals
1:03:52 Speaker 03 published conflicting stories, with some saying Frank flew to South Africa shortly before Boyce's escape, and others putting that trip slightly after the escape, although both of these articles say it was exactly 23 days before or after. But in my frustrated search through 40-year-old newspapers trying to figure out which prison Frank was calling home that year, I found another surprise: another stabbing. Shortly after Frank was transferred to a state prison in Maine in 1978, he stabbed another inmate in the chest during an argument in the prison library. And again, we have this problem that keeps coming up in Frank's life: he loves to talk to reporters, and he loves to lie.
1:04:32 Speaker 03 It's the 70s, these reporters don't have the internet, they don't have access to electronic court records, so a lot of Frank's lies get published. When he files a lawsuit against the prison warden in Maine about the conditions in solitary confinement, newspapers publish his claim that he was placed in solitary for a stabbing he'd been suspected of, but he says the investigation cleared him. The local newspaper in Bangor, Maine, however, had a reporter in the courtroom when he entered a guilty plea to that stabbing. But regardless of whether he got out in December of 79 or February of 1980, we know Frank flew to South Africa soon after he got out, and that he stayed there for a couple of months.
1:05:15 Speaker 03 The story of Christopher Boyce's 19 months on the lam is long and strange. Sean Penn plays Boyce's friend, the cocaine dealer Dalton Lee, in the 1985 film adaptation of the book The Falcon and the Snowman about the entire affair. I didn't watch it, there's only so much I can do. But remember, this is the Cold War. A missing Soviet spy is a pretty big PR problem for the United States government. There was speculation that the KGB had helped him escape. Boyce himself called a reporter from a payphone a few months after the escape and laughed about the idea that he'd had foreign assistance. He says he just climbed the fence and walked out. The task force focused on finding Boyce believed all along that he'd never actually left California. And they weren't too far off.
1:06:00 Speaker 03 He was in Idaho the whole time. But a lot of resources ended up getting expended pursuing a false lead planted by our friend Frank. Now, I can't prove Frank sent all of these letters himself. I can't even find contemporary news reporting where anyone ever outright said that they believed Frank sent these letters. And he was never charged in connection with his meddling in this investigation. But just a few weeks after Boyce went missing, the United States ambassador in South Africa got a letter. The postmark indicated that it had been mailed from within South Africa. And the letter said, "A known mercenary named Shellhammer had assisted the convicted American
1:06:40 Speaker 03 spy Christopher Boyce in entering South Africa by way of a fake passport." Now, who do we know with a history of forging passports, of mailing anonymous letters to officials in Southern Africa implicating himself in crimes and using the pseudonym Shellhammer? And he absolutely knew the feds would tie him to that alias because it was the one he had used in those classified ads in 1976 that put him in prison for mail fraud. And Frank was in South Africa in February of 1980 when that letter was mailed. It seems he wanted the authorities to know he was involved. Why else would he write his own pseudonym into the story? So feds quickly turned their attention to Frank. They placed a tracking beacon on his car.
1:07:25 Speaker 03 They followed him for months. And he probably knew he was being followed. They followed him from his home in New Jersey all the way out to California. And from a California motel, he made several phone calls to an apartment in Hermosa Beach. And when they searched that apartment, they found it abandoned, but they found several letters that Frank had sent to a third man, another friend of theirs from prison. One of which read, "Somehow they discovered that I helped him get into South Africa. I suspect an informer has been at work." But there was no informer. Frank wanted them to find those letters, and Boyce was never in South Africa. The only reason anyone thought Boyce might be in South Africa is because Frank was planting
1:08:07 Speaker 03 false clues all over the world to point them as far away as possible from a little hunting cabin in the mountains of Idaho.
1:08:16 Speaker 03 US Marshals eventually got frustrated following Frank around. A federal prosecutor would actually say in open court that Frank's arrest in July of 1981 was specifically intended to give them leverage to make him cooperate in the Boyce case. It seemed like he knew something and they wanted to know what it was. As a felon, Frank wasn't allowed to have any guns. And of course Frank had guns. I did find one newspaper article that dropped a sort of suspicious sounding hint that they only picked Frank up for that gun charge because of an anonymous tip. So maybe that was him too. But they picked him up in New Jersey at the end of July and he pretended to be very cooperative, telling them that he actually had some documents that would lead them straight to Boyce and
1:09:01 Speaker 03 he would happily show them to them. He voluntarily turned over the key to the bank deposit box he was keeping them in. And inside, they found several letters to Frank that had been mailed from South Africa. Sounds like more red herrings planted by Frank. He'd flown to South Africa several times in the year and a half since his release and was probably mailing himself these letters on those visits. So now in August of 1981, it seems like there could be some evidence that Boyce really was in South Africa. Frank says he was promised placement in the witness protection program for his help. And maybe they did make that promise. If he really could help them recover their missing spy, that's a reasonable enough deal.
1:09:44 Speaker 03 And just a few weeks after all of Frank's help, Boyce was recaptured. But it wasn't due in any part to Frank's information. During his year and a half on the run, Boyce obviously couldn't get a job. So he made money the old fashioned way: bank robbery. He kept it pretty small time, nothing flashy where you get into the vault, just little stick-ups, a few thousand at a time from the teller. He's tied to at least 17 bank robberies in Idaho and Washington State during that time, eventually teaming up with a couple of brothers from Idaho. And it was one of those men who turned Boyce in for the reward money. No honor among thieves, I guess. Boyce was taken back into custody on August 21st, 1981.
1:10:29 Speaker 03 And he wasn't in South Africa.
1:10:31 Robert Evans? Nationwide flight ended for Christopher Boyce here at the pit stop drive-in at Port Angeles, Washington. He was eating a cheeseburger and onion rings when eight federal agents jumped him. Boyce was apparently living a triple life.
1:10:45 Speaker 03 So Frank lied, obviously. He lied pretty egregiously. He falsified documents, he led US Marshals in the CIA on an international goose chase. And maybe that's why he never got charged for it. That's pretty embarrassing to put on the record. But they did still have that gun charge they picked him up on to use as leverage. So they set a sentencing date, but Frank didn't show up. He was trying to skip the country, again. Remember back in 1976, he got all the way to South Africa after skipping his sentencing date for mail fraud? But this time, he was picked up just a few days after he missed court, when a motel clerk in Montvale, New Jersey, recognized him.
1:11:28 Speaker 03 When he was finally dragged in for sentencing, the government said they hoped Frank was going to be able to help them in the boy's case, but nothing he said was of any use. Frank said he had no choice but to flee the country and start a new life on a cattle ranch in Australia with his wife, because the government had reneged on their deal to put him in witness protection. I have to imagine there was some bickering back and forth between an indignant Frank and an exasperated federal prosecutor, because in the end, Judge H. Curtis Meehan said, "I have neither the time nor the inclination to unravel all of the mysteries in this case." However, they'd all ended up in his courtroom. Whatever the convoluted backstory is here, this is a sentencing for illegal possession of a firearm, and that's really all the judge can do that day. So he sentenced Frank to four years.
1:12:13 Speaker 03 Judge Meehan said Frank was an explosive type of individual, and that he was dangerous and mentally sick. And he urged Frank to take advantage of the opportunity to get psychiatric help while he was in prison this time. And yes, I did say "wife." When I first started poking around, trying to build my biographical backstory, to sort of sketch out a skeleton of this man's life, I found a New Jersey state record for a marriage in August 1981 between Frank A. Sweeney and Adina M. Madison in Bergen County. There are other men named Frank Sweeney, obviously, but it was a middle initial match, and it's the right county, and it was one of the rare months that Frank wasn't in prison.
1:12:57 Speaker 03 But it didn't seem right, so I set it aside.
1:13:02 Speaker 03 But this offhand mention at his sentencing hearing about a wife sent me back to it. It is him. After the feds picked him up at the end of July 1981 on that gun charge, he was released from custody. He was cooperating. He took them to the bank to look at his fake evidence, all that. And sometime that month, he got married. I have no idea how they met, or where she came from, or what she thought she was going to get out of any of this, or if she knew Frank was planning on entering witness protection that month. Or what on earth she saw in this man. But I do know how the marriage ended.
1:13:38 Speaker 03 Frank went back to prison that very same year, so they didn't have much time together.
1:13:43 Speaker 03 I don't know where Deanna was while Frank was away, but by 1985, according to a decision by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, Deanna was living in Texas with her new boyfriend, Danny Lee Strong. They couldn't have known each other very long before moving in together because Strong had only just gotten out of prison again for another in a string of pretty run-of-the-mill robbery and fraud charges. And they didn't stay together long before they were arrested for murdering a man Strong said made a pass at Deanna. She was ultimately only convicted of stealing the victim's car, which they fled the scene in, but Strong got 99 years for the brutal beating and asphyxiation of Robert Eugene Thomas. Frank doesn't really factor into this story. He's in prison in another state this whole
1:14:25 Speaker 03 time, but his name appears in a footnote of an appeals court decision upholding Strong's conviction. Strong had sent Frank a letter after finding out that Deanna was planning to testify against him for the murder. I can't imagine what you write in a letter to your girlfriend's husband about a situation like this, but all that to say, Frank really did have a wife that he planned to start a new life with in Australia, but she ended up watching her boyfriend choke Amanda to death in an apartment in Fort Worth instead.
1:15:07 Speaker 03 On January 9th, 1982, the UVA men's basketball team lost to the Tar Heels in a close game, 60 to 65, at UNC's Carmichael Arena. I'm not a basketball fan, and I wasn't born then, but I guess it was an exciting game. UNC had knocked UVA out of the Final Four the year before, but Joseph Paul Franklin, an avowed neo-Nazi who'd recently been handed his first couple of life sentences, or two of his many murders, didn't care much for basketball. He was in the rec room at the Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, Missouri, and he was trying to watch American Bandstand. According to Frank, whose time at the Springfield prison overlapped with Franklin's for a few
1:15:47 Speaker 03 weeks in 1981 until Franklin's transfer at the end of January 1982, the serial killer became enraged when a black prison guard changed the channel. Later that year, Joseph Paul Franklin was back in court. He'd spent years traveling the country, robbing banks and murdering young black men and interracial couples, so it would take years to sort out what to do with him. This time, he was on trial for the unsuccessful assassination attempt on civil rights activist Vernon Jordan. On May 29th, 1980, the Fort Wayne, Indiana, chapter of the National Urban League was hosting a banquet in honor of a visit from National Urban League president Vernon Jordan. When a volunteer dropped him off at his hotel later that evening, a single bullet from a .3006 rifle tore through his back.
1:16:31 Speaker 03 He survived, but it's hard to build a case against a drifter sniper. Nobody saw him. The investigators had some handwriting analysis on a motel registration card, testimony from a grocery store clerk who identified Franklin as a man he'd had a strange conversation with, and a general idea that the crime fit Franklin's pattern, but it was a bit thin. And then came Frank. Oh, Frank loves to talk. He loves to be helpful. He's still in prison on that gun charge, but he told federal authorities that in the brief couple of weeks he'd been on the same cell block as Franklin, they'd chatted a few times, and Franklin had confessed to him on several occasions about shooting Vernon Jordan.
1:17:15 Speaker 03 On the stand, Frank testified about that evening in January when the guard changed the channel to the basketball game. And it's a pretty good detail. Frank was very specific that it was a UVA-UNC game, though he couldn't recall the date. They were only on that cell block together for a few weeks, and there was, in fact, a UVA-UNC basketball game during that time period that would have been on television. He testified that Franklin was furious about the incident and spent days fuming about it. The two inmates were walking together in the exercise area a few days later when Franklin spotted that same guard again and turned to Frank and said, "I'd like to blow him away like I shot that N-word big wig in Indiana."
1:17:55 Speaker 03 Frank says he also lamented that Jordan just wouldn't die after being shot and that he was, "Sorry I didn't shoot that white slut first," referring to the white woman who'd given Jordan a ride that night.
1:18:07 Speaker 03 Frank was one of three jailhouse informants the government put on during that trial, all men who'd been in jail with Franklin and all of whom said Franklin had admitted to various aspects of the crime in casual conversation. Joseph Paul Franklin was actually acquitted at that federal trial. Jurors said they believed Franklin shot Jordan, but they were hung up on the wording of the indictment, which specifically charged him with the shooting as a violation of Jordan's civil rights. Years later, on death row for a variety of other murders, Franklin did confess to shooting Vernon Jordan.
1:18:39 Speaker 03 When the trial was over, though, jurors who spoke to the press said they'd only believed one of the three jailhouse informants who testified: Frank.
1:18:48 Speaker 03 On cross-examination, Frank Sweeney seemed surprised to learn that the other two men had been paid thousands of dollars for their cooperation. He wasn't getting paid. But he wasn't upset. He didn't need the money. He'd inherited a quarter of a million dollars, which would be about a million dollars today, when his parents died. All he wanted was witness protection and a positive letter to the New Jersey parole board. Just like in the Boyce case, he very conveniently had some information the government wanted, and all he wanted in return was witness protection. And this time, he got it.
1:19:26 Speaker 03 But he didn't get to keep it. In 1984, Frank filed a lawsuit against the warden of the Alabama prison where he was still serving his sentence on that gun charge. He said he was not receiving the protection afforded to him as a protected witness. The warden's response to the suit was that Frank would not stop telling people that he was a protected witness, which was causing a lot of problems. You're not supposed to do that. In court, the warden's executive assistant said that the prison was considering contacting the Office of Enforcement Operations, the division of the DOJ that administers the Witness Security Program, to recommend his removal from the program because they believed he was intentionally causing problems by talking about this constantly.
1:20:08 Speaker 03 And it seems he was ultimately removed from the Witness Security Program around this time. And maybe that had something to do with his decision to testify on behalf of Anthony Spilotro, the hot-headed Chicago mobster who handled the family's business in Las Vegas. It couldn't have been an attempt to get back in the program. He was testifying for the defense. But maybe it was just spite. He wanted to get somebody else kicked out of the program.
1:20:37 Speaker 03 In 1983, when he was still in prison and still considered a protected witness, he briefly shared a cell with another guy in the program. Frank Kulata was a mobster. He was a member of Tony Spilotro's Hole-in-the-Wall gang. If you've seen the 1995 Scorsese movie Casino, it's that. Quite literally. Frank Marino, the character played by the guy who played Phil Leitardo on The Sopranos, is supposed to be Frank Kulata. Joe Pesci's character, Nikki Santoro, is based on Tony Spilotro. Just watch the movie. It's all very complicated and our friend Frank Sweeney had nothing to do with it. But in 1983, the real-life Frank Kulata was sharing a cell with Frank Sweeney because they had both turned state's witness against very dangerous men.
1:21:23 Speaker 03 Frank Sweeney had just testified against a serial killer and Frank Kulata had turned on Spilotro after the FBI played him a recording of his friend talking about having him killed.
1:21:34 Speaker 03 When Anthony Spolotro went on trial in 1986, Frank Kulata was out of prison and in the program. And he was the government's star witness against Spolotro. Frank Sweeney was finally out of prison again and home in New Jersey when he read in the paper that Kulata was going to be testifying. According to Frank, he felt compelled to contact Spolotro's defense attorney because, when they were cellmates, Kulata would often brag about committing perjury. So the defense flew Frank out to Las Vegas and put him on the stand. He claimed that after one of Kulata's appearances in court back in 1983, he came back to their shared cell and bragged, "Frankie, I just put another one away. You've heard of the traveling circus.
1:22:16 Speaker 03 I'm the original traveling perjurer." On cross-examination, Frank Sweeney admitted that when he'd been in the Witness Protection Program, he had on several occasions threatened and even faked suicide attempts to get what he wanted out of federal prosecutors. I wish I had more information on that. That is incredibly strange behavior and it does actually happen again later. In the end, though, his testimony in that mob trial is just a strange little footnote. His third brush with the Witness Protection Program. His testimony didn't matter much. I don't think anyone believed it. And the case ended in a mistrial over allegations of jury tampering and Anthony Spolotro went missing before they could retry the case.
1:23:00 Speaker 03 The mobster and his brother were later found buried in a cornfield in Indiana. Frank Kulata stayed in the Witness Protection Program for years and Scorsese hired him as an onset advisor when he shot Casino. Kulata died of COVID in 2020. And in 1989, Frank went back to prison for mail fraud. Again. The court record is too old to get any documents without haggling with an archivist, but the docket sheet does say that in addition to another 57 months in prison, the judge also banned Frank from ever offering anything for sale by mail.
1:23:36 Speaker 03 So at first I assumed he was pulling the same scam he ran in 1976, where he placed ads for guns he didn't actually have, and then ghosted would-be buyers after they sent him the money. But it's much weirder than that. I wish it was guns. It wasn't guns this time.
1:23:53 Speaker 03 He was running what one journalist called a "cat scam." He'd cut the tails off regular house cats, and then run ads offering them as exotic, purebred cats for $300. If he really was as independently wealthy off his inheritance as he claimed, did he really need $300 for a mutilated cat? Maybe he was just addicted to mail fraud. As for the cats, one of the earliest mentions I could find of Frank in the newspaper archives was a 1958 article about the embalmed cat he got for his 15th birthday. He was looking forward to dissecting it and adding it to his collection of oddities that already included a cat skeleton.
1:24:38 Speaker 03 So I hope all his fraudulent cats found happy homes, even if their buyers were unhappy about losing $300.
1:24:46 Speaker 03 But it's in an appeals court decision related to a parole violation in this second mail fraud case where we find the details of a campaign of terror against his neighbors that foreshadows the events at the end of this long, strange tale.
1:25:00 Speaker 03 He was paroled in 1992 after serving about half of this sentence, and he was on probation for three years. Just days before that three-year period ran out, he was charged with a probation violation.
1:25:13 Speaker 03 He'd been convicted in New Jersey of sending obscene materials through the mail to a minor. I know, I know, this show is starting to feel like a tour of America's weirdest sex crime guys, but to be honest, I don't think there was anything sexual in his motivation for sending porno mags to a nine-year-old. I know that doesn't sound possible. Bear with me.
1:25:36 Speaker 03 But after he got out of prison, he's living in an apartment back in his hometown of Tenerife, New Jersey. A family of Russian immigrants moves into the apartment next door. They have children. Children are noisy. Frank says he asked them to keep it down, but the noise continued. In what the Second Circuit Court of Appeals would later call a "rather bizarre set of circumstances," he decided to get back at these noisy children by engaging in a lengthy harassment campaign against the entire family. At least twice, he shut off their electricity. On multiple occasions, he filled the lock on their front door with staples, making it impossible to open. He had the family's mail forwarded to Des Moines, Iowa.
1:26:20 Speaker 03 The father of these noisy children was a doctor. One of his colleagues received a letter purporting to be from an AIDS charity informing the recipient that the doctor, the father of those noisy children, had tested positive for HIV. And along that same line of thinking, he also sent a letter to the children's school informing them that the nine-year-old boy had been exposed to HIV by his father. And he sent letters to the Jewish Community Center where the family remembers, informing them that the entire family had been exposed to the virus. Remember, this is 1993. Telling people that this doctor has HIV could ruin his career. The school could call Social Services, and they probably wouldn't be welcome in the sauna at the community center if people believed this.
1:27:03 Speaker 03 And in what would be his ultimate downfall here, he signed their nine-year-old son up for catalogs that sold pornographic materials. It seems like he believed that the child's father would get the mail, which apparently wasn't going to Iowa anymore, see the catalog, believe his son had signed up for it, and would punish the boy. And if the boy was grounded, he wouldn't be so noisy. But it backfired, and Frank was discovered as the culprit. Police searched his apartment and found the typewriter he'd used to write all the letters, and he quickly confessed. He got four months in jail in New Jersey for sending obscene materials to a child, but the parole violation landed him back in federal prison for another year.
1:27:46 Speaker 03 And maybe this trip back to prison gave him a chance to test out his own advice. You see, between getting out in 1992 and going back in 1995, Frank was profiled in the New York Times. The journalist, Charles Strum, actually used to write for the Bergen Record, the local paper Frank used to end up in every time he got arrested in the 60s. But Strum didn't come home from college and start at the record until after Frank's armed standoff in the front yard. And they weren't talking about their shared hometown. They were talking about Frank's new consulting business. In 1994, Frank put a classified ad in USA Today that read,
1:28:24 Speaker 07 "Going to federal prison for the first time? We will tell you what to expect and how to survive. Our consultants are graduates of the federal prison system. Frank A. Sweeney and Associates, Box 15, Demarest, New Jersey, 07627."
1:28:41 Speaker 03 Frank told Strum that the idea came to him while he was reading the paper one morning in September 1993. Lawrence Powell, one of the LA police officers convicted for his role in the beating of Rodney King, was quoted in the paper as being terrified at the prospect of going to prison. Strum writes that Frank told him,
1:29:00 Speaker 07 "I thought to myself, my God, there's probably a lot of people going to prison who's never been in jail before. Primarily white collar criminals. And they're probably terrified too. They're just as frightened as he is. So I thought maybe I could use my misfortune to help people and maybe make a profit doing it."
1:29:18 Speaker 03 The article says Frank claims to have 27 clients after just a few months of running his new consulting business. Though the author also prints without question Frank's claim that he left high school in the 11th grade because he was bored with it, not because he was in a youth correctional facility for bank robbery. In the article, Strum writes out all of Frank's crimes and convictions, but that 1962 bank robbery is missing. But again, they didn't have the internet then. Of his criminal record, Frank told the reporter, "I remember it was Nietzsche who wrote, 'The crime is not in the act, but in the stupidity of being caught.' I was caught and stupid." And he'd get caught a few more times in the coming years, but he stays humble.
1:30:01 Speaker 03 That Nietzsche quote is still his favorite to this day, according to his Facebook profile. He had to take a break from his new consulting career when he went away for a year in 1995, but he picked right back up when he got out. A 1997 Newsweek article about his business claims he was up to 87 clients now, with white collar criminals paying Frank $1,000 for assistance in getting favorable placement. So not only did Frank promise that he could advise you about the differences in food, facilities, and culture at different federal prisons, he claimed he had connections and could influence your placement. A Bureau of Prisons spokesman denied Frank had any ability to arrange transfers or promise placements at specific facilities, but at least one client told the reporter that prison
1:30:44 Speaker 03 officials had denied his request for a transfer during a five-year sentence for embezzlement. But after he wrote Frank and included a check for $1,000, his transfer came through. Now, promising these transfers seems like it would put Frank back in mail fraud territory. But if he had stopped short of fraud, this isn't actually a terrible way for a guy like Frank to make a living. He really had been in a significant number of our nation's federal prisons. He'd been in facilities all over the country, spanning decades. He's in a great position to offer advice about how to get through your sentence as smoothly as possible. So if he'd stuck to lifestyle advice for the incarcerated, I might say that this could
1:31:27 Speaker 03 have been a success story for Frank. There was another article about his consulting business in 1998, but then he kind of disappears. Not sure what he was up to. He pops up briefly in a couple of articles in 2000 and 2001. An old prison friend of his called him from a jail in Reno to ask for help exposing an alleged smuggling ring run by one of the guards out there in Nevada. David Wayne is described as "one of the most dangerous inmates in the state prison system" after a variety of escape attempts and prison riots involving Wayne holding hostages.
1:32:02 Speaker 03 And in 2000, he wanted Frank's help leveraging this information about a corrupt guard to get a better placement. So friend or client, hard to say, but the guard did end up charged with smuggling a handcuff key to an inmate, and Frank spent about a year advocating for Wayne's transfer. Considering he had once held two prison nurses hostage for 12 hours by rigging up a Rube Goldberg-style contraption that would stab the women's eyes out with scalpels if anyone opened the door and had successfully escaped at least once, a low-security placement for David Wayne was out of the question.
1:32:39 Speaker 03 But then, quiet. Frank moved out to Idaho and stayed out of the paper. He's not a very good driver, so I know he moved to Ada County, Idaho around 2001 because that's when he started getting a lot of traffic tickets there. In 2008, he was charged with battery and convicted, but he only served five days in jail and successfully completed his court-ordered anger management class. The docket indicates the victim, a woman who appears to be a nursing assistant in the Boise area, got a restraining order. But the Frank Sweeney who tried to rob a bank and fought in the Bush war and had a mob boss fly him to Vegas and bragged about being able to influence prison officials?
1:33:20 Speaker 03 That Frank seems to be gone. He's just an old man living in Boise. Until 2015.
1:33:42 Speaker 03 In December of 2015, Frank went to the post office near his home in Garden City, Idaho. He parked his truck in one of the accessible parking spots out front. A woman saw him get out of his car, which did not have a placard indicating he was supposed to be parked there, and said something to him. We don't know exactly what she said. Now, me personally, I probably wouldn't have said anything. For the most part, it's not worth it. It's not your business. There are plenty of people who are not visibly disabled who really do need those parking spots. And Frank was in his 70s at this point, so even if he didn't have a state-issued parking placard, he's old. Just leave him alone. But she made a comment about it, and the situation escalated. Pretty seriously.
1:34:27 Speaker 03 Court documents only say that they had a verbal altercation, so at least she didn't get stabbed, which he's done at least twice to people who offended him. But whatever she said, and for whatever reasons she chose to say it, she didn't deserve what happened next.
1:34:44 Speaker 03 The victims in this case are referred to only by their initials in the court record for obvious reasons. But it can be tricky to keep track of people with just a letter, so I've given them all fake names just to make this a little easier. We'll call the woman from the parking lot Ellen. Her husband will be Sam, and their adult daughters will be Kayla and Lucy. Again, it is possible to figure out who these people are, but please don't. They've been through enough. Two weeks after that heated exchange in the post office parking lot, the postcards started.
1:35:18 Speaker 03 The probation office in Boise got the first one. Ellen's adult daughter Kayla was at the time on probation for a misdemeanor DUI charge. The letter writer claimed that he had just the night before been in the car with Kayla, and she was so drunk that he had to jump out at a red light for his own safety.
1:35:35 Speaker 03 Ellen's husband Sam received a postcard at his dental office the same day informing him that his wife had been in the post office the week before, and she was so drunk that she was falling down.
1:35:45 Speaker 03 The letter, though very brief, contained a lot of really specific, personal information. The fact that the couple had very recently purchased a new home, including the name of the suburb where they now lived, the city where their other adult daughter lived, the names of both of their daughters, and information about Kayla's arrest that year. Ellen received a third postcard that week addressed to her at home. This one contained her social security number and an allegation that her daughter Lucy was engaged in acts of prostitution at her place of work, which was named.
1:36:19 Speaker 03 After the family received the first postcards in December of 2015, they met with detectives at the Ada County Sheriff's Office in Boise. And despite investigators' best efforts, the family would continue to receive increasingly bizarre and frightening postcards for three full years. Their neighbors and nearby schools received postcards that appeared to be from the state sex offender registry, informing them that Sam was a sex offender, specifically that he had sodomized a nine-year-old boy in 1978. It probably goes without saying, but I will say it anyway. That is not true. But it does kind of remind you of what Frank did to that doctor in 1993, doesn't it? Adding to the victim's distress,
1:37:03 Speaker 03 Sam passed away unexpectedly in January of 2016, just a few weeks after all this started. And obviously Frank knew one of his victims was dead. Some of the letters sent to the man's daughters taunted and blamed them for driving their father into an early grave, but oddly, some of the letters pretended otherwise. While most of the postcards were signed Carson Wells, the name of Woody Harrelson's character in the movie No Country For Old Men, some were signed with the names of her own children. Ellen received one of those just two months after her husband's death, purporting to be from her daughter Lucy, who lived out of state. It said, "Dear mommy, my blood test just came back, and yes, I am HIV positive.
1:37:44 Speaker 03 I'm sure I was infected by one of the two Crips with whom I was having an affair with. Regrettably, I will never be able to give you and daddy the grandchildren you so desired. But we know now that daddy is a pedophile. He may have harmed the grandkids. Has he been released from jail?" And again, this is a woman who just lost her husband. She knows this postcard isn't from her adult daughter. Even if she hadn't already gotten a dozen other bizarre postcards, she would know that. No one's writing their mother a postcard on a typewriter. It's not 1932. And again, the recently deceased man was not a pedophile, nor was he in jail. He had just been buried by his family.
1:38:28 Speaker 03 Ellen and both of her daughters continued getting postcards, even after Ellen moved. And Frank was also sending the postcards to other people pretending to be members of the family. The Idaho Black History Museum received one, signed with Ellen's name, address, and phone number, that was so laden with racial slurs that you can barely tell what it's supposed to be trying to say.
1:38:50 Speaker 03 Lucy's boss received one advising him that his employee was having "rectal intercourse" with black men, although Frank described that in more vivid terms. Now, for as strange as this man's life has been, you'd be forgiven if you forgot where we started. Frank is a Nazi. He was a member of the American Nazi Party, and he fought as a Rhodesian mercenary. He's not just a guy who loves doing mail fraud and hates his neighbors, he's very racist. And a lot of these postcards fixated on the idea that Ellen's daughters were engaged in interracial relationships, very graphically and racistically describing specific sex acts that they were, in his mind, having with black partners.
1:39:34 Speaker 03 And he was particularly upset that Ellen, a Latina, had married a white man. He called her racial slurs and wrote to her daughters, calling them "mongrels." It seems the only time he wasn't sending postcards was when he was out of the country. You see, he might have another wife. It's not entirely clear. But several times a year, Frank would travel to Erfurt, the capital of the German state of Turingia in central Germany, to visit a woman he's known for a very long time. Ute Schirnig, who performs semi-professionally as a belly dancer under the name Madame Chamila, has, on several occasions, referred to Frank as her husband.
1:40:13 Speaker 03 This may be literal, it may be a cheeky little joke, my German is not good enough to really read tone, and it may just be that they've been in a relationship for so long that they think of each other this way. My research game is strong, but a potentially nonexistent German marriage certificate evades my grasp. Nevertheless, he does own a home in Erfurt, and she lives in it. She refers to him occasionally as her "Hausbesitzer," which you could translate as landlord, but you wouldn't really. You'd call the person you rent your home from your Vermieter. Hausbesitzer just means "he owns her house."
1:40:53 Speaker 03 And he occasionally calls her "Liebchen," "my love," and she calls him Frankie. When he visited in 2015 and they went to see her mother in the nursing home together, her photo captions are about Frank's visit to his mother-in-law. As with so much in Frank's life, it's hard to pin this down. I have a handful of photos of Frank with this woman that appeared to be from the 80s or early 90s, based on the photo quality, Frank's apparent age, and, to be honest, her hair. But we're talking about Germany, so dating by the fashion could put us off by a decade or more. No offense, you know it's true. But at least in the present era of his life, he's visiting Germany every now and again.
1:41:38 Speaker 03 She breeds and shows Mexican and Peruvian hairless dogs, some of which have been quite successful internationally. Some of her show dogs list Frank Sweeney as a co-owner. In September of 2016, his victims had a brief reprieve from his letters because he was in Germany, attending a seminar on dog genetics with UT. These rare-breed dogs are very prone to genetic problems and inbreeding, so I'm glad they're staying on top of best practices, I guess. But when he was at home in Idaho, the campaign of harassment was relentless. He even found a way to outsource the terror. Frank sent postcards to inmates in prisons all over the country.
1:42:18 Speaker 03 He signed them with Ellen's name and address, and requested that the men write her back. She received at least 75 letters, all addressed to her at home, from murderers. And as if she might not get it, like, maybe she didn't put two and two together here, like, maybe she thought this was some totally separate, unrelated, new problem she just happens to be having, Frank made sure she understood that he did this. He sent her numerous postcards explaining the situation.
1:42:49 Speaker 07 Every creep, every social degenerate who has written to you has your address, social security number, and date of birth. Likewise for Lucy too. Some of these freaks have already passed this information on to their criminal friends outside of prison. Last month, I visited your house twice in the early morning hours while you slept. Naturally, I've removed my license plates so that street cameras could not identify my car. And I still patrol the post office daily in an effort to spot you. You only have your big mouth to blame for all of this.
1:43:24 Speaker 03 In December of 2016, after the first full year, he wrote to her saying it was their anniversary, telling her, "I intend to be with you for life." The letters just kept coming, reminding her that he was watching her outside her home, that he waited for her at the post office almost every day, and sending her postcards containing her own personal information, like her license plate number and information about her family, just so she knew he had it too. He continued writing to Ellen and both of her daughters, calling them racial slurs, sluts, whores, threatening to report them for assorted imaginary crimes like tax fraud and drug dealing, and always remembering to write them on their birthdays.
1:44:06 Speaker 03 Investigators were stumped. They knew the letter writer was the man from the post office parking lot, he said as much in his letters, but Ellen didn't recognize him. She had only a vague description of his vehicle, and she didn't get the license plate. Why would she have thought she needed to? The postcards were always wiped clean of prints. They were perfectly generic, United States Postal Service issued materials that he always bought in small quantities and paid cash. He may truly have tormented this woman until one of them died if he hadn't done what he's always done: more crime.
1:44:43 Speaker 03 And here's that beginning of the end. It's not the end, but I told you this story that began outside of a bank in New Jersey in 1962 would start its final chapter outside of a bank in Idaho 56 years later. On October 13th, 2018, Frank got into another argument in a parking lot. These victims too are only identified by their initials in the court records, so I'm going to call them Liam and Denise. They were in their car outside the Wells Fargo in Garden City, Idaho. Frank honked at them. There was again some kind of verbal altercation. Maybe they gave him the finger or shouted, who knows? You know, this is the kind of thing that happens every day. You know, you don't pull forward fast enough, the guy behind you honks, you tell him to
1:45:28 Speaker 03 fuck off, nobody's being their best selves, but life goes on. But not for Frank. Frank can't take it. He stabbed a guy in the guts for splashing him in 1975. So, two weeks after Liam and Denise experienced this angry driver at the bank, they start getting postcards. Like Ellen and her family, this family too starts hearing that their neighbors and nearby schools are getting postcards that pretend to be from the state sex offender registry alerting people that Liam is a pedophile. He's not. And specifically, the postcards say that he sodomized a nine-year-old boy.
1:46:09 Speaker 03 That is a very specific and very gross detail to recycle from one victim to the next, right? Like that, that has to mean something. But I can't figure it out, and maybe that's for the best. These postcards too are generic ones from the post office, typed on a manual typewriter. And again, some of the postcards are signed Carson Wells, and sometimes they're signed with the name of Liam's adult son. And again, there were letters to the family from murderers answering requests for pen pals. But, you know what the bank has? A lot of security cameras. And unbeknownst to Frank, shortly before he started terrorizing his second
1:46:53 Speaker 03 set of victims, his case wasn't just a local matter anymore. In September of 2018, the United States Postal Inspector Service started looking into the postcards. That's right, the mail police. That is a very real federal law enforcement agency with jurisdiction over mail crimes. According to their most recent annual report, the USPIS initiated more than 5,600 investigations in 2023, and during that year, 4,100 cases related to their investigations ended in convictions. Most of those numbers are things like mail theft and people mailing drugs. Also, though, a couple hundred people a year are assaulting postal employees. Knock that off.
1:47:38 Speaker 03 Don't do that. Be nice to your mail carrier. So now we have the mail police on the case. And as soon as they start trying to figure out what's going on here, again, this is September of 2018, they're just looking at the postcards to Ellen and her family. But within a few weeks of them opening the investigation, the Idaho State Police let them know that someone is sending postcards pretending to be from their office. And these are these postcards about how Liam is a pedophile that are being sent to schools and neighbors. And because these postcards are made to look as though they are coming from the state sex offender registry, which is run by the state police, people are contacting the state police about them, and now the state police are talking to the mail police, and now the
1:48:22 Speaker 03 mail cops see that there are more victims. And all of these postcards seem to be from the same person. When postal investigators speak to both families and compare the letters, it's clear they're all from the same person. All of the victims say they know who is sending them these postcards. They just don't know who he is. Ellen knows it's the guy from the post office. Liam knows it's the guy from the bank. And they both describe some kind of older truck, and an older man who's thin with a stiff gait and a very terrible distinctive scar on his face. They're describing the same man. And surely a bank teller or a postal service clerk would recognize a description like that.
1:49:08 Speaker 03 Local cops had shown Ellen photo lineups on multiple occasions over the last three years as they're investigating this, but Frank was never a suspect, so he was never in any of the photo arrays. So each time they showed her photos of potential suspects, she said, "He's not here," because he wasn't. And so she never picked out any other possible suspect. But once the postal investigator zeroed in on the man in the bank's security footage, both Ellen and Liam separately identified him in photo lineups. And bank employees did know who he was. So by Christmas of 2018, the male police have Frank's bank records. He's been paying a private investigator. That's how he knew so much personal information
1:49:52 Speaker 03 about all of his victims. Information about their real estate transactions, what kinds of cars they drove, where they worked, where their adult children lived in different cities and states. He's paying a PI. Idaho is one of several states where you don't actually have to have a license of any kind to offer your services as a PI, so she doesn't have one that can be taken away. And she hasn't been charged of anything. Maybe she only helped Frank with information that didn't cross a line, and maybe she didn't ask enough questions about what he was doing with it. It remains unclear how he got everyone's social security numbers, though. But the PI he was paying is a woman in her 80s who
1:50:35 Speaker 03 seems to still be in the business just for the love of the game. Barbara Jacobson describes herself on her website as "a cross between Nancy Drew and Jessica Fletcher with the tenacity of Columbo," and credits her success to her Christian faith and divine intervention." An article in a 2017 issue of Christian Living magazine quotes her as saying, "God is my business partner."
1:50:59 Speaker 03 Now again, this woman has not been charged with a crime. But it seems like a bad sign that she either didn't know or didn't care that the client asking her for a lot of personal information on people had a five-decade-long rap sheet that included convictions related to harassment by male. You're either deeply unscrupulous or very bad at your job, and I'm not sure which is worse. Either way, this investigation is rapidly coming together. The postal investigator has Frank's bank records, he's been identified by the victims, they're closing in on him. And maybe he knows, maybe he doesn't. He did move very suddenly in February 2019, leaving the house he'd been renting for over
1:51:44 Speaker 03 a decade, right as they got the warrant to search it, and renting a different house nearby. But he's still sending the letters. So if he knows they're on to him, why is he still sending the letters? On February 13th, 2019, six weeks after they know Frank's their guy, right around the time that he's moving to his new house, a clerk at the post office calls the investigator to say that an old man with a terrible scar on his face just bought a stack of postcards with cash. And the last postcard arrived on February 19th, 2019. It's signed Carson Wells, but the writer identifies himself as the man who blew his horn at them in the parking lot. And then he reminds Liam and Denise that all the murderers who'd been writing to them
1:52:29 Speaker 03 had already forwarded their personal information to criminals on the outside. But it was already over. Two weeks later, they searched Frank's home. They took his typewriter and his list of federal inmates, the ones he'd been writing to as his victims, and they found portraits of Hitler and Nazi memorabilia and white supremacist literature, and two live rattlesnakes. Rattlesnakes don't live in Idaho. These aren't snakes that he got outside. These are snakes that he is breeding? Frank has a lifelong interest in reptile breeding. I think he's a member of the Idaho Herpetological Society, or at least he was before he went to prison. And shortly before his arrest, he commented on an online obituary for an old high school
1:53:14 Speaker 03 classmate, reminiscing fondly about how they used to collect snakes in the woods together in the 50s.
1:53:22 Speaker 03 Once he's in custody, Frank confessed immediately, telling investigators on the day of his arrest that he'd sent the postcards because he felt like these people had embarrassed him, and it made him feel better to know he was causing them emotional distress.
1:53:37 Speaker 03 Shortly after his arrest, he wrote to the judge to ask the court to intervene in what he felt was an inadequate response by the jail to what he called "many of the infirmities that affect the elderly," and says he has the urge to commit suicide if his demands aren't met. And I don't want to sound like I'm brushing this off. I'm not saying that this couldn't possibly be a valid concern. People die in jails and prisons every day because employees don't care or don't have the resources to provide adequate care. This is a very real problem, and the urge to harm yourself is always very serious. But this isn't Frank's first rodeo. Remember, in the 80s, he used to threaten suicide and would even fake suicide attempts
1:54:20 Speaker 03 in order to manipulate employees of the Witness Protection Program. So this may not be a brand-new issue for Frank. At any rate, within months of his arrest, he entered into a plea agreement. So once the mail cops got on the case, they actually sorted it out pretty quickly, right? The USPIS got on the case in September of 2018, and within three months, they knew it was Frank. Maybe they should have called the guys who solve mail crimes earlier? I don't know.
1:54:53 Speaker 03 But if there had been more communication between different law enforcement agencies, the whole situation could have been resolved when he sent a single letter to a third victim, which he signed with his own name.
1:55:06 Speaker 03 But when a US marshal searched Frank's house two years before his eventual arrest, I guess they didn't bother to check in with the local police. Because in April of 2017, Frank sent a single letter to Gerald Scher, the man who founded and for many years ran the Witness Protection Program. I can't think of a worse guy to pick if you're going to send a threatening letter. Sure, was long since retired by 2017. He passed away in 2020 at the age of 86. But is there anyone on earth who had more chips to call in with the US Marshals? You think a US Marshal isn't going to come to your house if you sign your full legal name to a threatening letter to the guy who invented witness protection?
1:55:48 Speaker 03 You think you're going to scare the guy whose job was protecting mobsters from other mobsters? Truly a stupid move, even for Frank.
1:55:59 Speaker 07 You poisonous, licentious old Jew. I thought that you would have been long dead from cardiovascular disease due to obesity. I was very much hoping to sit shiver for you, to pray Kaddish over your fat corpse, you loathsome [BLEEP]. I will remember you, although it's doubtful you will remember, from WITSEC units in Otisville or San Diego, parading with your entourage, depraved [BLEEP] women from the Office of Enforcement Operations. In 1984, you expelled me from the program, leaving me to fend for myself as a known informer, a rat in the general populations of very dangerous prisons.
1:56:37 Speaker 03 It had been more than 30 years, but Frank never got over getting kicked out of the program. He flew all over the world helping a spy in 1980, trying to leverage information on Christopher Boyce to get placement in the program. And it didn't work. The information he gave was not only not helpful, but by fabricating unhelpful information in order to get something from the government, he made things worse. And when he finally got what he wanted by testifying against a serial killer in 1982, he couldn't keep his mouth shut about it. And so he was removed from the program in 1984. In his letter to Schur, he claims that as a result of losing his protected status in 84, he was attacked by another inmate the following year. And he does, without a doubt,
1:57:22 Speaker 03 bear a huge scar all down one cheek to this day.
1:57:27 Speaker 03 Somebody cut Frank's face open pretty bad. He takes care to mention in his letter that the assailant was black, though he chooses different words to say that. And who knows why Frank got cut? I'm not making light of the violence that happens inside jails and prisons, but you'd have to do some real mental gymnastics here to come up with a satisfying explanation for why a black man would cut Frank up in retaliation for Frank's testimony against a Nazi serial killer who traveled the country shooting black men? I just don't think that they would be mad about that. But I can think of a variety of reasons why a black man who encountered Frank in prison
1:58:11 Speaker 03 might get into it with him. I mean, racist aside, Frank's just kind of a hothead, not a great guy to hang out with, always getting into it with people, but also he loves saying racial slurs. So I can think of a variety of reasons why this might have happened that had nothing to do with him testifying against a serial killer. We can't take Frank at his word, and I couldn't find any reporting from the time about a prison knife fight in 1985, so who knows? After Schur received the letter, which Frank had signed venomously yours, Frank Abbott Sweeney, a US marshal was sent out to Idaho to speak with Frank. And Frank admitted that he sent the letter, but he said he meant no harm by it, and he
1:58:54 Speaker 03 allowed the marshal to search his home. It seems like if anyone had compared notes, Frank could have been identified as the Garden City postcard writer far sooner. The language in this letter was very similar to some of the postcards. If they had just showed this letter to the sheriff, maybe they would have recognized it. But I guess they didn't, because he wasn't. The local police in Pennsylvania where the letter was received charged Frank with terroristic threats, but that's a non-extraditable misdemeanor in Pennsylvania, so they couldn't bring him back to face the charge. So he's got an open warrant in Pennsylvania if he ever goes there willingly, but he probably won't, and with Schur now deceased, it doesn't seem like that's likely to amount to anything.
1:59:40 Speaker 03 On December 16th, 2019, Frank Sweeney was sentenced to 51 months for six counts of stalking. A few days later, his German wife posted a photo of her Christmas Eve dinner. A friend asked her if Frank would be celebrating with her that year. She replied that, "No, Frank has been ill for several months and can't fly right now." She didn't say that he was back in federal prison for at least the fifth time? Frank Sweeney was released from prison in December of 2022. I just noticed as I'm writing this that it's his 81st birthday today, but it won't be by the time you hear this. He's still in Idaho, he's still playing the violin, and he still co-owns a few Mexican
2:00:23 Speaker 03 hairless dogs on the show circuit in Germany. In that 1994 New York Times article about his prison consulting business, Frank quipped that his favorite quote was, "The crime is not in the act, but in the stupidity of being caught," which he attributes to Nietzsche. I think regardless of your stance on the philosophical nature of crime and punishment, though, there are better quotes from Frank's thousands of appearances in the newspaper over his six decades of crime. Maybe Judge H. Curtis Mienner had it right in 1981, when he cut off the bickering in the courtroom over exactly what the hell happened with Frank's mysterious South African letters about the missing spy, saying, "I have neither the time nor inclination to unravel all the mysteries in this case."
2:01:08 Speaker 03 Because we never really will unravel all the mysteries of Frank's past. He played a bit part in so many much bigger stories. They've made whole Hollywood films out of so many of these little slices of history that Frank passed through. From Cold War spy thrillers to Scorsese dramas about organized crime, Frank's there. He's not in the movie. He's just out of frame while history happens, doing something really goddamn weird.
2:01:44 Speaker 04 Weird Little Guys is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.
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