Behind the Bastards Presents: Weird Little Guys

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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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media.

Speaker 2 (00:03):
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. So aart so now,
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

(00:24):
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.

Speaker 3 (00:39):
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,

(01:01):
on February twenty third, nineteen sixty two, when an eighteen
year old member of the American Nazi Party was arrested
after skipping school to try to rob a bank with
a toy gun and will mark the beginning of the
end of his story in a Wells Fargo parking lot
in Garden City, Idaho, on October thirteenth, twenty eighteen, when
an elderly ex Cohn was caught on security cam footage

(01:22):
getting into an altercation with a couple 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, bought as a foreign mercenary, got
deported from both Rhodesia and South Africa, helped an escaped
spy of ad U s Marshals, turned state's witness against
a Hitler worshiping serial killer, tried to help the mob,

(01:45):
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 brune La.

Speaker 4 (01:59):
Guys, this is a strange one.

Speaker 3 (02:18):
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 Charlesville. When
he was arrested twenty 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

(02:39):
I spent years reading, paying ten 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 sixty years, I haven't found any one source that's

(03:02):
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

(03:23):
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 archives trying
to figure out Frank.

Speaker 1 (03:46):
And what I found was kind of.

Speaker 3 (03:47):
A bizarro world forest Gum. One man whose life keeps
intersecting with major historical events, just wandering in and out
of the lives of gullible reporters, frustrating to the federal
agents and the innocent bystanders who accidentally became his targets,
just bumbling his way through history, but without any of

(04:09):
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 weight in between. But I think
you'll agree Frank's story is weird enough for two episodes.
Frank Abbott Sweeney Junior was born in August of nineteen

(04:31):
forty three in New Jersey, to Frank Abbott Sweeney Senior,
a realtor, and Marie Gleeson 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.

Speaker 1 (04:52):
It was in the newspaper after all.

Speaker 3 (04:54):
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 on it. He
claimed he graduated from Georgetown University in nineteen sixty five

(05:15):
at the degree in psychology, but he couldn't possibly have
matriculated at Georgetown in nineteen sixty one. He was a
senior at Tenafly High School in nineteen sixty two, when
he was sent to the Annandell Reformatory for two and
a half years.

Speaker 1 (05:28):
He never finished high school.

Speaker 3 (05:31):
His claim that his alias, Francis Shellhammer derives from his
mother's maiden name.

Speaker 1 (05:35):
Also fails to hold up to scrutiny.

Speaker 3 (05:38):
His mother was born Marie Gleeson to John Gleeson, 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.
I went as far as to track his family treat
all the way back to Ireland, giving him the benefit

(06:00):
to the doubt that maybe.

Speaker 1 (06:01):
There's a shell hammer in there somewhere. I didn't find one.

Speaker 3 (06:05):
It's possible that I started mixing up my Martha's, Mary's, John's,
and Francis's by the time I was cross referencing marriage
records from the eighteen seventies.

Speaker 1 (06:13):
But he probably just made it up. He does a
lot of that.

Speaker 3 (06:18):
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 marshalls to
ever hope to sort out. The rest is somewhere in between.

(06:42):
But I'll stick with what we do know to be true,
And I said, this story begins outside of a bank.
On February twenty third, nineteen sixty two, Frank Sweeney skipped school.
Shortly after nine 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.

(07:04):
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

(07:25):
to local news reports, she sneered 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,

(07:48):
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.

Speaker 1 (08:06):
Well, I guess it didn't work.

Speaker 3 (08:09):
Later, under interrogation, he would tell the officers 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

(08:30):
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 to years when Frank would have still
been a minor. In January nineteen sixty three, unnamed teenage

(08:52):
boys were accused of painting swastikas on parked cars in Emerson,
just eight miles away. In February of nineteen sixty one,
one hung a swastika banner over the entrance of the
synagogue in Tenafly. 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.

(09:14):
In June, two teenage boys respotted fleeing the scene after
two trailers belonging to a contract or were broken into
and left a swastika painted on the floor inside. In
all these incidents, police told the papers of the time
that they had referred the cases to the juvenile division.
It's not like anti Semitic incidents are so rare that
I'm saying that Frank is the only possible suspect here

(09:35):
in every nineteen sixties Bergen County news article about a swastika,
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 and neighboring cities, and other incidents that just don't
fit this particular pattern of teenage Nazi vandalism. And the

(09:57):
comment the judge made makes it sound like Frank had
been there before. But any appearance he'd made in court
as a miner 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 twenty twenty four, So
forget figuring out what happened in nineteen sixty one, but
it does seem pretty likely he'd at least been a

(10:18):
suspect in some of those incidents, because at the hearing
where he pled guilty to the attempted bank robbery, Frank
did 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 boy's reformatory, and

(10:41):
he was released on October of nineteen sixty four, shortly
after his twenty first birthday. After serving about two and
a half years. After his first stent 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. After Noon in
July of nineteen sixty seven, neighbors reported hearing gunshots in

(11:04):
the woods. An officer drove by to check it out
and saw a car parked on the side of the road.
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

(11:25):
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 for walking away and into the house. But Frank
left something on the front seat of the car, unfortunately,

(11:47):
and it was a Thompson submachine gun that he'd been
firing in the woods. The officer saw the gun and
called for backup, and when they arrived, Frank opened fire
on them from inside the home, kicking off a seventy
five 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

(12:10):
to come out, or at least to send the family
dog out. After police Captain Peter Zurla 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

(12:31):
a gunshot wound, and Frank says, some shot when I
got you through the window. Huh. There's no follow up
I can find about whether the dog was heard, or
how missus Sweeney got the tear gas out of her upholstery.
It was the sixties, 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

(12:53):
to figure she at least had to replace the curtains.
Frank entered a not guilty plea and unsuccessfully try I
to suppressed 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.

Speaker 1 (13:14):
A trial.

Speaker 3 (13:14):
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

(13:36):
that I've never heard of. We don't have that here
in Virginia, but in New Jersey, atrocious assault is an
assault in battery, savage and cruel in character which results.

Speaker 1 (13:46):
In maiming or wounding. So that definitely qualifies. And he
was sentenced to six.

Speaker 3 (13:53):
Years, which, honestly, that's kind of remarkable, right. I'm not
going to for the Corsoal 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 sixties news stories about this
event was fascinating. This cop who got shot by a

(14:16):
Nazi with a Tommy gun is described in every article
as quote lightly wounded. 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.

Speaker 1 (14:32):
But that's not what they would put in the newspaper
today you know it.

Speaker 3 (14:37):
And the cops didn't drive a tank through the front
of the suburban home or unload their guns into him
when he came out. There's been such a massive culture
shift over the years and 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

(14:59):
the story of this siege in this New York suburb.

Speaker 1 (15:03):
What was he doing that day?

Speaker 3 (15:05):
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

(15:28):
East Clinton Avenue and Woodland Street, about a mile from
where Frank lived.

Speaker 1 (15:31):
At the time.

Speaker 3 (15:33):
They used to put everything in the newspaper. It's so beautiful,
every detail, every boring little bit in which 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 Tenafly, New Jersey, and there is a large wooded
area you could walk straight into if you parked your

(15:53):
car at that intersection, And those woods surround a large
building that first opened its doors in nineteen fifty, the
Kaplan Jewish Community Center. The clearest account of the next

(16:18):
phase of Frank's life comes from an essay written in
twenty nineteen 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,

(16:41):
and maybe his memory has faded a bit in the
nearly fifty 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
nineteen seventies. I'll try to walk the tightrope here of
providing a little more con text than just Rhodesia was

(17:02):
very bad and white supremacist 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.

Speaker 1 (17:20):
Now.

Speaker 3 (17:20):
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

(17:41):
southern Africa. In the early twentieth century, Rhodesia was a
British territory. The legacy of Cecil Roads is British South
Africa Company. The area was effectively ruled by the company
until the nineteen twenties, when it became a self governing
colony of the UK, and by the nineteen fifties, decolonization
was happening all across the African continent. These fading European

(18:03):
empires couldn't or didn't want to hold on to all
the colonies they'd collected during the previous centuries scramble for Africa.
In nineteen sixty 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.

Speaker 5 (18:22):
The wind of change is blowing through this continent.

Speaker 2 (18:26):
Whether we like it or not.

Speaker 5 (18:29):
This growth national consciousness is a political fact, and we
was all accepted as a fact. Our national policies must
take a contribute.

Speaker 3 (18:43):
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.

Speaker 1 (18:53):
Here.

Speaker 3 (18:54):
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 and Congo
and the French in Algeria fighting these costly wars with
Africans who wanted an end to European colonial rule, and

(19:15):
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 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

(19:37):
we 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.

Speaker 1 (19:51):
That was not on their minds.

Speaker 3 (19:54):
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 lass here.

Speaker 1 (20:02):
This is the Cold War.

Speaker 3 (20:03):
They don't want to give the Soviets an opportunity to
come in behind them.

Speaker 1 (20:08):
But it was this.

Speaker 3 (20:09):
Policy, or rather defiance of it, that led Rhodesia under
Ian Smith, to make the unilateral declaration of independence in
nineteen sixty five. White colonists made up just five percent
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

(20:29):
the other ninety five percent 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 fifteen year period
of civil conflict between the white minority led government and
the African nationalist guerrilla forces. The number of foreign mercenaries

(20:53):
who actually traveled to Rhodesia during the war remains up
for debate. Most of the countries the mercenaries came from
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

(21:14):
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,

(21:34):
Nobody benefits from knowing what happened here. But at the
high end it was really only a few thousand mercenaries
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.

(21:58):
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. Dylan Rufe, who was
welcomed with open arms at an evening Bible study at
a manual African Methodist Episcopal church in Charleston, South Carolina,

(22:18):
registered the domain last Rhodesian dot com a few months
before he murdered nine of the parishioners who thought he
was joining them for prayer that night. Rufe made his
final edit to that site his digital manifesto, just hours
before carrying out that attack. In twenty fifteen, the cultural
moment where magazines like Soldier of Fortune ran full page

(22:39):
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 in the conflict was insignificant. But unlike
many of those Americans who did end up in Rhodesia
in this seventies, Frank Sweeney didn't see an advertisement and

(23:03):
Soldier of Fortune. That magazine's first issue, bearing a cover
story about American mercenaries in Africa, was published in the
summer of nineteen seventy five, 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, d C.

(23:24):
In nineteen seventy two and asked how to join up.
The information center was not technically a diplomatic office because
Rhodesia was not technically a country, the 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 for Major Nick Lamprecht,

(23:48):
the Rhodesian Army's chief recruiter. David Annibl, a reporter for
the Christian Science Monitor, who interviewed Frank in nineteen seventy
five 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

(24:09):
a thirty minute presentation about Americans already fighting in the
conflict and the pay and benefits a mercenary could expect,
including paid airfare, all violations of international sanctions in US
federal law, the visitor was offered Major Lamprek's contact information
That recruiter Nick Lamprek worked closely with Soldier of Fortune

(24:29):
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, Lampreck 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. I think Lamprek knew
he was lying about how much fun you could have

(24:50):
fighting in the Bush War. His own son, Vincent, had
already fled to South Africa to avoid military service. In
what you maybe sends is a theme here. The details
of frank service in Rhodesia are a little murky.

Speaker 1 (25:05):
The details of.

Speaker 3 (25:06):
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 Annibal in that
nineteen seventy five 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

(25:28):
we shot him right there in the bush when we
were told not to take prisoners. 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
nineteen seventy four, Portuguese troops were in Mozambique fighting to
put down the Mozambiquan War of Independence, and Frank said

(25:51):
sometimes they'd go over the border to raid gorilla camps,
perhaps those belonging to the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army,
which had strong ties to the group's fight for independence
In Mozambique. These Rhodesian raids over the border into Mozambique
continued even after that nation gain sovereignty in nineteen seventy five.
But it's hard to pin down when Frank would have

(26:11):
been doing this, if he even did. I can at
least say that Frank was no longer in Rhodesia. During
one of the war's worst atrocities, a Rhodesian raid on
a refugee camp in Mozambique killed over one thousand civilians.
David Animal published a couple of articles in nineteen seventy
five in nineteen seventy six about Rhodesia, and he often

(26:33):
quoted Frank Sweeney about his time there.

Speaker 1 (26:35):
After all, there weren't.

Speaker 3 (26:36):
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 nineteen seventy five, Frank placed ads in
magazines like Shotgun News and Gun Week that read.

Speaker 6 (26:56):
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 seven
to two Creston Avenue, Tenafly, New Jersey, zero seven six
seven zero.

Speaker 3 (27:14):
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 Lamprecked himself who 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

(27:35):
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 Annabel that he'd received hundreds of letters in
response to his ads and responded to all of them.
But then again, he also told Annabel he was a

(27:57):
college graduate, and you know that's not true. An animal
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. I'm sure Frank
did show Annimal something. He probably did show him papers

(28:19):
that indicated as much, and I don't fault him for
reporting it. It turns out Frank was quite skilled at forgery.
Frank claims he was in Washington, d c. Getting recruited
into the Rhodesian Army in nineteen seventy two, but he
may have actually still been in prison in nineteen seventy two.

Speaker 1 (28:38):
For shooting that cop.

Speaker 3 (28:40):
It's hard to pin down exactly when he was released.
One newspaper article years later puts his parole date for
that conviction at nineteen seventy four, 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 probably didn't. When

(29:00):
Frank was later arrested for his role in the escape
of a Soviet spy, an FBI agent puts his date
of enlistment at nineteen seventy three, So the truth is
in there somewhere.

Speaker 1 (29:10):
Either way.

Speaker 3 (29:11):
He wasn't in Rhodesia for very long before he really
really wanted to go home. 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,

(29:31):
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 nineteenth century. The BSAP was Rhodesia's regular
police force, but the line between regular policing and military

(29:54):
operations was blurry, and during the Bush War there were
military units made up of BSAP officers and they developed
counterinsurgency and counter terrorism units. They oversaw the intelligence gathering
arm of the infamously brutal Selu Scouts, and they killed
hundreds of people by introducing poisoned food and medicine into

(30:17):
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 nineteen seventies, he
was assigned to the Homicide Unit of bsap's Criminal Investigative Division,

(30:40):
and in twenty nineteen he wrote down his recollections of
Frank Sweeney for a newsletter published by his Veterans Association.
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 seventies.

Speaker 1 (30:58):
It's not perfect.

Speaker 3 (31:00):
Honestly, I almost discarded it without reading past the first page.
Who's off to a pretty bad start when the first
paragraph placed these events in September of nineteen seventy seven,
which would, of course be entirely impossible. Frank could not
have been in a Rhodesian Army barracks in September of
nineteen seventy seven, because according to the US Marshalls.

Speaker 1 (31:23):
The FBI, the DOJ, the CIA.

Speaker 3 (31:24):
In the New York Times, Frank was hanging out with
a Soviet spy in the exercise yard at a federal
prison in Los Angeles in September of nineteen seventy seven.
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 nineteen seventy five, and

(31:45):
the data side there is enough meat to Hickman's account
and the supporting primary documentation he provided that supports the
idea that the story is.

Speaker 1 (31:54):
More or less true.

Speaker 3 (31:57):
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 nineteen seventy five, probably Frank,
went to the bathroom at the barracks he was living in.
Inside the shared facilities, two infantrymen who had been drinking

(32:18):
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.

Speaker 1 (32:35):
Water on him.

Speaker 3 (32:37):
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, he runs
back to his bunk and comes right back with a
seven inch dagger and pulls the shower curtain aside and

(32:59):
stabs this aked 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

(33:20):
said that a private Fa Sweeney had been convicted of
the attempted murder of a policeman in the United States.
It was Hickman, our essayist, who first suspected that Frank
may actually have written this letter himself, and when he
pressed Frank for a handwriting sample to prove it, he
cracked immediately.

Speaker 1 (33:41):
He'd sent the letter himself, hoping that.

Speaker 3 (33:43):
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.

Speaker 1 (33:55):
And if that letter had.

Speaker 3 (33:56):
Only arrived a few days earlier, they probably would have
done just that before anybody had to get stabbed. 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

(34:18):
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 nineteen sixty seven.
And the timeline isn't the only thing that's off in
this version. Frank says the shootout only lasted ten minutes,

(34:41):
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
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

(35:01):
in the woods and the neighbors reporting the noise and
the officer arriving in the car chase, but he claimed
the gun he was shooting in the woods was one
he purchased from an advertisement and soldier of Fortune magazine,
which is obviously not possible because that magazine didn't exist
in nineteen sixty seven. I don't know, maybe he was
just updating the story so it would sound more current.

(35:22):
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
in his modification of the weapon maybe things weren't one
hundred percent and he was worried that it would explode
when fired, so he lashed it to a tree and

(35:44):
set it to fully automatic and rigged a string to
the trigger and hid behind another tree for cover.

Speaker 1 (35:50):
This sounds so Looney.

Speaker 3 (35:51):
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

(36:12):
note that a search undertaken based on Sweeney's fingerprint, records
revealed no such incident, 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 one
hundred percent true, but he is admitting to almost all

(36:35):
of the real details for the real crime he really
did go to prison for.

Speaker 1 (36:41):
So you you probably should.

Speaker 3 (36:42):
Have figured that out before he told you, and you
definitely should have been able to figure.

Speaker 1 (36:46):
It out after he told you.

Speaker 3 (36:49):
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 ten to fly New Jersey
at random and just asked, 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

(37:09):
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 got some mail

(37:29):
an envelope containing two United States passports and three hundred
dollars in cash. Both passports bore Frank's photo in Frank's
birth date, but only one had Frank's name on it.
The other was for Francis august Schellhammer, a man who
doesn't exist. He explained to the officers that he was
quite good at making such things, and even offered to

(37:52):
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?

Speaker 1 (38:08):
I don't.

Speaker 3 (38:09):
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 nineteen seventy five, Frank Sweeney
was kicked out at the Rhodesian Light Infantry and deported
from Rhodesia. He got his free flight home after all,
and was permanently banned from a country that never existed.

(38:46):
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 twenty second.

Speaker 1 (39:06):
Nineteen seventy five.

Speaker 3 (39:08):
So if he's already home and realizing his mail is missing,
and writing the letter in August of seventy five, that
all the events before that happened earlier in nineteen seventy five,
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

(39:29):
he spent in Rhodesia.

Speaker 6 (39:32):
It's one big racial cessfool 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

(39:53):
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, loyalty to Rhodesa remains as strong
as ever.

Speaker 3 (40:05):
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.

(40:28):
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 MP forty Schmeiser
submachine guns for sale, he didn't use his own name.
He used the name Francis August Shellhammer, the name from

(40:49):
the forged passport, and he 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
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.

(41:12):
So in March of nineteen seventy six, 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.

Speaker 1 (41:23):
In just a few weeks. Notice.

Speaker 3 (41:25):
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 about his
time in Rhodesia. But at the same time, in March
of nineteen seventy six, he's also entering a guilty plead
to that federal mail fraud charge. The La Times article,

(41:45):
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 a little more likely
that he's a compulsive liar who got a thrill out
of working in this kernel of truth because the FBI

(42:09):
had just been to his house, that part's true, but
they were there to arrest him for mail fraud, 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

(42:30):
him right back and he was arrested by US marshals
as he was getting off the plane at JFK in
June of nineteen seventy six. And while marshals were arresting him,
his suitcase was loaded off the plane and it went
through customs without him. Customs officials seized a nine millimeters
Luguar pistol because he lacked the proper paperwork to bring
the firearm into the US from a foreign country, and inexplicably,

(42:54):
there were no additional charges brought for any of that.
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
seventies were a different time, and it wasn't a big deal.

Speaker 1 (43:10):
To bring a gun to.

Speaker 3 (43:11):
The airport, but fleeing the country to avoid going to
prison is always been illegal.

Speaker 1 (43:17):
I'm pretty sure of it.

Speaker 3 (43:19):
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 two hundred and forty four dollars storage fee. I

(43:40):
don't know what that comes out to per month for
the four years he was in prison, but that seems steep,
and so Frank claims he walked right into the Customs
office inside the World Trade Center in May of nineteen eighty,
paid the fee, failed 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

(44:02):
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 are guns back in New York
City just for the asking. Federal gun laws are versical.

(44:23):
You know, he's not a great guy, but he does
have some quips. You know, he's just out there doing bits.
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

(44:44):
meet Christopher Boyce, a young defense contractor who'd recently been
convicted of espionage in nineteen seventy four. A twenty one
year old college dropout, and 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

(45:05):
in an office before, but he.

Speaker 1 (45:07):
Started as a low level clerk.

Speaker 3 (45:09):
It helped that his retired FBI agent father was the
head of security at McDonald Douglas, 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

(45:33):
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.

(45:54):
On at least six occasions, he photographed documents inside the
VAULTA told Congress. Obviously, neither the government's clearance procedures nor
the company's security procedures worked very well, I'll say. In
his new position inside the vault, Boyce monitored satellite communications

(46:17):
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

(46:40):
questioned why a junior employee was opening the vault at
four am. 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 before someone politely
asked him to leave. Employees in the vault were supposed

(47:01):
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 my
ties with the Bacardi that they kept hidden behind the
cryptography machines.

Speaker 1 (47:19):
He claims it was common.

Speaker 3 (47:20):
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 that had been sent to them by mistake

(47:42):
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
nineteen seventy five 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

(48:05):
just cool to look at. We are living on my
red string board, and I've got to put this pushpin
in somewhere.

Speaker 4 (48:12):
Now.

Speaker 3 (48:13):
I know even less about Australia that I know about
the decolonization of Africa in the twentieth century, which is
to say, like not very much. I think they still
have the Queen. I guess it's the king.

Speaker 1 (48:27):
Now.

Speaker 3 (48:28):
Did they have to print new money after the queen died?
It doesn't matter, It doesn't matter.

Speaker 1 (48:34):
But I was.

Speaker 3 (48:34):
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.

Speaker 1 (48:49):
Now.

Speaker 3 (48:50):
Of course, of course, the United States government maintains that
the CIA had no role in pushing Prime Minister GoF
Whitlam out of office in nineteen seventy five, but Christopher
Boyce went to prison claiming otherwise. In the seventies, GoF
Whitlam was the head of the Australian Labor Party and
his administration was fairly socially progressive. He was also considering

(49:14):
closing Pine Gap, a US signals intelligence surveillance base in
central Australia run by the CIA. In nineteen seventy five,
the opposition party, which controlled the Senate deferred the passage
of an appropriations bill.

Speaker 1 (49:28):
I don't know.

Speaker 3 (49:30):
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 thing he had the power to do.

(49:52):
It's like they have a guy that can fire the president.

Speaker 1 (49:55):
I don't know.

Speaker 3 (49:55):
I just not my business what happens in Australia, and
at the time 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
nineteen seventy seven, President Jimmy Carter sent Warren Christopher, the
Deputy Secretary of State to Australia, to meet with Whitlam,

(50:18):
and Christopher told Whitlam that the United States quote would
never again interfere with Australia's democratic processes, never again, never again.
And Whitlam's personal secretary backs up this recollection of the
use of the word again.

Speaker 1 (50:40):
But I'll reiterate.

Speaker 3 (50:41):
The CIA says they were not involved.

Speaker 1 (50:44):
They said they didn't do it.

Speaker 3 (50:47):
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

(51:08):
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 manker. So he stole them,
and instead of going to the press, he and his

(51:29):
childhood friend, a cocaine dealer named Dalton 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.

Speaker 1 (51:42):
And maybe it would have worked.

Speaker 3 (51:45):
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 nineteen seventy seven outside the Soviet ms in
Mexico City. He wasn't arrested for espionage or drug trafficking,

(52:06):
two things he was definitely doing. He was arrested by
Mexican police for littering, 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
ten days later, and accounts vary as to whether or

(52:26):
not Dalton Lee gave boys 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 boys who had 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

(52:51):
because while all this CIA's skullduggery and Cold War espionage
is going on, Frank is 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

(53:12):
as likely an explanation as anything else. Christopher Boyce was
ultimately convicted of eight counts of espionage in nineteen seventy
seven and sentenced to forty years in prison, and for
several months in late seventy seven to early seventy eight,
the two men were on the same cell block at
Terminal Island. Much has been made of the apparent incongruity

(53:33):
of Frank, a man who fought as a mercenary against
communist gorillas, befriending Boyce, a man convicted of aiding the
Soviet Union, 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

(53:55):
way too long unsuccessfully trying to figure out transferred to
a prison in sometime in early nineteen seventy eight. Boyce
would eventually be transferred to Lompoc, a prison a few
hours north of Los Angeles, and in January of nineteen eighty,
Christopher Boyce escaped from prison. The ensuing manhunt for the

(54:17):
missing spy would last nearly two years, in part because
Frank was planting false clues from Cape Town to California
to lead investigators.

Speaker 1 (54:26):
In the long direction. And that's where I have to
leave you today.

Speaker 3 (54:31):
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 a
hundred percent clear run there were a bunch of snakes.

Speaker 1 (54:53):
Weird little guys. The production of cool Zone Media.

Speaker 6 (54:56):
For more from cool Zone.

Speaker 7 (54:57):
Media, visit our website Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us
out in the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcast.

Speaker 3 (55:15):
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

(55:37):
to pick up with.

Speaker 1 (55:38):
Our escaped spy.

Speaker 3 (55:40):
The second forty years of Frank's life are just as
weird as the first forty. There's a serial killer, a
mafia trial, two different secret wives, and a lot of
misuse of the postal service. I'm Molly Conger, and this
is weird, little guys.

Speaker 7 (56:13):
Now.

Speaker 3 (56:13):
When we left off last week, Frank was making friends
in prison. His new friend in nineteen seventy eight was
Christopher Boyce, who had 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 escape from prison is surprisingly hard to

(56:34):
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 nineteen eighty, newspapers that
appeared to be quoting the same unnamed source from the
US Marshalls published conflicting stories, with some saying Frank flew

(56:57):
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 twenty three days before or after.
But in my frustrated search through forty year old newspapers
trying to figure out which prison Frank was calling home
that year, I found another surprise, another stabbing. Shortly after

(57:21):
Frank was transferred to a state prison in Maine in
nineteen seventy eight, 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.
It's the seventies. These reporters don't have the Internet, they
don't have access to electronic court records, so a lot

(57:42):
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. A local newspaper in
Bangor Main, however, had a report in the courtroom when
he entered a guilty.

Speaker 1 (58:02):
Plea to that stabbing.

Speaker 3 (58:05):
But regardless of whether he got out in December of
seventy nine or February of nineteen eighty, we know Frank
flew to South Africa soon after he got out, and
that he stayed there for a couple of months. The
story of Christopher Boyce's nineteen months on the Lamb is
long and strange. Sean Penn plays Boyce's friend, the cocaine

(58:25):
dealer Dalton Lee in the nineteen eighty five 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

(58:47):
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 boys believed all along that he'd
never Actually they left California, and they weren't too far off.
He was in Idaho the whole time. But a lot
of resources ended up getting expended pursuing a false lead

(59:10):
planted by our friend Frank. Now I can't prove Frank
sent all of these letters himself. I can't even find
contemporane his 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

(59:30):
Ambassador in South Africa got a letter the postmark indicated
that had been mailed from within South Africa, and the
letter said a known mercenary named Shellhammer had assisted the
convicted American spy Christopher Boyce in entering South Africa by
way of a fake passport. Now, who do we know

(59:51):
with a history of forging passports of mailing anonymous letters
to officials in Southern Africa implicating himself and crimes and
using the pseudonyme shell Hammer. 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
nineteen seventy six that put him in prison for mail fraud.
And Frank was in South Africa in February of nineteen

(01:00:13):
eighty 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. They followed him for months, and
he probably knew he.

Speaker 1 (01:00:31):
Was being followed.

Speaker 3 (01:00:33):
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

(01:00:54):
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 false clues all over
the world.

Speaker 1 (01:01:11):
To point them as far away.

Speaker 3 (01:01:13):
As possible from a little hunting cabin in the mountains
of Idaho. US Marshalls eventually got frustrated following Frank around.
A federal prosecutor would actually say an open court that
Frank's arrest in July of nineteen eighty one was specifically
intended to give them leverage to make him cooperate in
the boy's case. It seemed like he knew something and

(01:01:33):
they wanted to know what it was. As a felon,
Frank wasn't allowed to have any guns, and of course
Frank had guns. Did find one newspaper article that wrapped
a sort of suspicious sounding hint that they only picked
Frank up for that gun charge because of an anonymous tip,
so maybe that.

Speaker 1 (01:01:53):
Was him too.

Speaker 3 (01:01:55):
But they picked him up in New Jersey at the
end of July, and he pretended to be very co operative,
telling them that he actually had some documents that would
leave them straight to boys and 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

(01:02:18):
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 nineteen eighty one, 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

(01:02:40):
promise if he really could help them recover their missing spy,
that's a reasonable enough deal. 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

(01:03:02):
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 seventeen 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 Boys in for the reward

(01:03:22):
money no honor among thieves.

Speaker 1 (01:03:25):
I guess.

Speaker 3 (01:03:26):
Boyce was taken back into custody on August twenty first,
nineteen eighty one, and he wasn't in South Africa.

Speaker 5 (01:03:34):
Nationwide flight ended for Christopher Boyce here at the pit
stop drive in at Port Angelus, Washington. He was eating
a cheeseburger and onion rings when eight federal agents jumped him.
Boys was apparently living a triple life.

Speaker 1 (01:03:48):
So Frank lied.

Speaker 3 (01:03:50):
Obviously, he lied pretty egregiously. He falsified documents. He led
US marshals and 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'd picked him up
on to use his leverage, so they said a sentencing date,

(01:04:13):
but Frank didn't show up.

Speaker 1 (01:04:15):
He was trying to skip the country again.

Speaker 3 (01:04:18):
Remember back in nineteen seventy six 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. 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.

(01:04:39):
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 renegged
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 Mener said, I have
neither the time nor the inclination to unravel all of

(01:05:00):
the mysteries in this case. However, they'd all ended up
in his courtroom. Whatever the convoluted backstory is here, this
is a sentencing or illegal possession of a firearm, and
that's really all the judge can do that day, so
he sentenced Frank to four years. Judge Meaner said Frank
was an explosive type of individual and that he was
dangerous and mentally sick, and he urged Frank to take

(01:05:24):
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 nineteen eighty one between a

(01:05:44):
Frank A. Sweeney and aDNA 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. But it didn't seem right, so I
set it aside. But this offhand mention at his sentencing

(01:06:06):
hearing about a wife, sent me back to it.

Speaker 1 (01:06:09):
It is him.

Speaker 3 (01:06:11):
After the FEDS picked him up at the end of
July nineteen eighty one 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

(01:06:31):
on entering witness protection that month, or what on earth
she saw in this man. But I do know how
the marriage ended. Frank went back to prison that very
same year, so they didn't have much time together. I
don't know where Diana was while Frank was away. But
by nineteen eighty five, according to a decision by the
Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, Dana was living in Texas

(01:06:54):
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 and 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

(01:07:15):
of stealing the victim's car. Which they fled the scene
in but Strong got ninety nine 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 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

(01:07:36):
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 a man to death in
an apartment in fort Worth instead. On January ninth, nineteen

(01:08:11):
eighty two, the UVA men's basketball team lost to the
tar Heels in a close game, sixty to sixty five
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

(01:08:33):
life sentences for two of his many murders, didn't care
much for basketball. He was in the wreck 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 Franklins for
a few weeks in nineteen eighty one until Franklin's transfer
at the end of January nineteen eighty two, the serial

(01:08:56):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:09:11):
To do with him.

Speaker 3 (01:09:13):
This time, he was on trial for the unsuccessful assassination
attempt on civil rights activist Vernon Jordan. On May twenty ninth,
nineteen eighty the Fort Wayne, Indiana chapter of the National
Urban League was hosting a banquet in honor of a
visit from National Urban League President Vernin Jordan. When a
volunteer dropped him off at his hotel. Later that evening,
a single bullet from a thirty six rifle tore through

(01:09:33):
his back. 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

(01:09:55):
a bit thin.

Speaker 1 (01:09:57):
And then came frank Ohank loves to talk, he loves
to be helpful.

Speaker 3 (01:10:03):
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
chatted a few times, and Franklin had confessed to him
on several occasions about shooting Vernon Jordan. On the stand,
frank testified about that evening in January when the guard
changed the channel to the basketball game, and it's a

(01:10:23):
pretty good detail. Frank was very specific that it was
a uva unc game that 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.

Speaker 1 (01:10:38):
Been on television.

Speaker 3 (01:10:39):
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 and were big wig in Indiana. Frank says
he also lamented that Jordan just wouldn't die after being shot,

(01:11:02):
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. Frank was one of three jail
house 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 and casual conversation. Josephaul Franklin was actually acquitted at

(01:11:23):
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 when the trial was over, though jurors who
spoke to the press said they'd only believed one of

(01:11:45):
the three jailhouse informants who testified frank 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 was upset. He didn't
need the money. He'd inherited a quarter a million dollars,
which would be about a million dollars today when his

(01:12:07):
parents died. All he wanted was witness protection, then a
positive letter to the New Jersey Parole Board. Just like
in the boy's 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, but he

(01:12:29):
didn't get to keep it. In nineteen eighty four, 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

(01:12:49):
of problems. You're not supposed to do that in court.
The warden's executive assistant said that the prison was considering
contacting in 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. And it

(01:13:11):
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 Spalotro,
the hot headed Chicago mobster who handled the family's business.

Speaker 1 (01:13:24):
In Las Vegas.

Speaker 3 (01:13:26):
It couldn't have been an attempt to get back in
the program. He was testifying for the defense, but maybe
he was just spiite. He wanted to get somebody else
kicked out of the program. In nineteen eighty three, when
he was still in prison and still considered a protected witness.
He briefly shared a cell with another guy in the program.

(01:13:48):
Frank Kulatta was a mobster. He was a member of
Tony Spalotro's Hole in the Wall gang. If you've seen
the nineteen ninety five Scorsese movie Casino, it's that quite literally.
Frank Marino, the character played by the guy who played
Phil Leotardo on The Sopranos, is supposed to be Frank Kulatta.
Joe Peshi's character, Nikki Sentorro, is based on Tony Spilotro.

(01:14:11):
Just watch the movie. It's all very complicated, and our
friend Frank Sweeney had nothing to do with it. But
in nineteen eighty three, the real life Frank Kulata was
sharing a cell with Frank Sweeney because they had both
turned state's witness against very dangerous men. Frank Sweeney had
just testified against a serial killer and Frank Kulatta had
turned on Spilotro after the FBI played him a recording

(01:14:32):
of his friend talking about having him killed. When Anthony
Spilotro went on trial in nineteen eighty six, Frank Kulatta
was out of prison and in the program, and he
was the government's star witness against Spilotro. Frank Sweeney was
finally out of prison again in home in New Jersey
when he read in the paper that Kulata was going
to be testifying. According to Frank, he felt compelled to

(01:14:55):
contact Spilotro's defense attorney because when they were cell mates,
Kulata would af in 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 Colada's
appearances in court back in nineteen eighty three, he came
back to their shared cell and bragged, Frankie, I just
put another one away. You've heard of the traveling circus.

(01:15:18):
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

(01:15:43):
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 Spilotro
went missing before they could retry the case. The mobster

(01:16:03):
and his brother were later found buried in a cornfield
in Indiana. Frank Kulatta stayed in the witness protection program
for years, and Scorsese hired him as an onset adviser
when he shot Casino. Klata died of COVID in twenty twenty,
and in nineteen eighty nine, Frank went back to prison
for mail fraud.

Speaker 1 (01:16:22):
Again. The court record is too old.

Speaker 3 (01:16:26):
To get any documents without haggling with an archivist, but
the docket sheet does say that, in addition to another
fifty seven months in prison, the judge also banned Frank
from ever offering anything for sale by mail. So at
first I assumed he was pulling the same scam he
ran in nineteen seventy six, where he placed ads for
guns he didn't actually have and then ghosted would be

(01:16:46):
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, he was running what one journalist called.

Speaker 4 (01:16:57):
A cat scam.

Speaker 3 (01:17:00):
He'd cut the tails off regular house cats and then
run ads offering them as exotic purebred cats for three
hundred dollars. If he really was as independently wealthy off
his inheritance as he claimed, did he really need three
hundred dollars for a mutilated cat? Maybe he's just addicted
to mail fraud. As for the cats, one of the

(01:17:23):
earliest mentions I could find of Frank in the newspaper
archives was a nineteen fifty eight article about the embalmed
cat he got for his fifteenth birthday. He was looking
forward to dissecting it and adding it to his collection
of oddities that already included a cat skeleton. So I
hope all his fraudulent cats found happy homes, even if

(01:17:44):
their buyers were unhappy about losing three hundred dollars. 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. He was paroled in nineteen ninety two after
serving about half of this sentence, and he was on

(01:18:07):
probation for three years. Just days before that three year
period ran out, he was charged with a probation violation.
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

(01:18:28):
don't think there was anything sexual in his motivation for
sending pornomags to a nine year old. I know that
doesn't sound possible. Bear with me, But after he got
out of prison, he's living in an apartment back in
his hometown of Tenafly, New Jersey. A family of Russian
immigrants moves into the apartment next door. They have children.

(01:18:48):
Children are noisy. Frank says he asked them to keep
it down, but the noise continued. In what these Second
Circuit Court of Appeals would later call a rather bizarre
set of circum stances, 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

(01:19:10):
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.
The father of these noisy children was a doctor. One
of his colleagues received a letter purporting to be from
an aid's charity informing the recipient that the doctor, the

(01:19:31):
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

(01:19:51):
nineteen ninety three. Telling people that this doctor has HIV
could ruin his career. The school could call social services
in the probably wouldn't be welcome in the sauna at
the community center if people believed this. And in what
would be his ultimate downfall here, he signed their nine
year old son up for catalogs that sold pornographic materials.

Speaker 1 (01:20:13):
It seems like he believed that the.

Speaker 3 (01:20:16):
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

(01:20:37):
to write all the letters, and he quickly confessed. He
got four months in jail in New Jersey for sending
him scene materials to a child, but the parole violation
landed him back in federal prison for another year. And
maybe this trip back to prison gave him a chance
to test out his own advice. You see, between getting
out in nineteen ninety two and going back in nineteen
ninety five, Frank was profiled in the New York Time.

(01:21:01):
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 sixties. But
Strum didn't come home from college and started the Record
until after Frank's arms stand off in the front yard,
and they weren't talking about their shared hometown. They were
talking about Frank's new consulting business in nineteen ninety four,

(01:21:23):
Frank put a classified ad in USA Today that read.

Speaker 8 (01:21:27):
Go into federal prison for the first time, we will
tell you what to expect and how to survive. All
consultants are graduates of the federal prison system. Frank aysweeneyan Associates,
Box fifteen Demarest, New Jersey zero seven six two seven.

Speaker 3 (01:21:44):
Frank told Strum that the idea came to him while
he was reading the paper one morning in September nineteen
ninety three. 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 rights that Frank told him.

Speaker 9 (01:22:02):
I thought to myself, my god, there's probably a lot
of people go into prison who's never been in jail before,
primarily white collar criminals, and they're probably terrified too, that
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.

Speaker 3 (01:22:20):
The article says Frank claims to have twenty seven 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 eleventh 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

(01:22:41):
nineteen sixty two 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,

(01:23:01):
but he stays humble. 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 nineteen ninety five,
but he picked right back up when he got out.
A nineteen ninety seven Newsweek article about his business claims
he was up to eighty seven clients, now with white
collar criminals paying Frank one thousand dollars for assistance and

(01:23:23):
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 Prison
spokesman denied Frank had any ability to arrange transfers or
promise placements at specific facilities, but at least one client

(01:23:46):
told the reporter that prison 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
one thousand dollars, 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,

(01:24:08):
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

(01:24:29):
that this could have been a success story for Frank.
There was another article about his consulting business in nineteen
ninety eight, but then he kind of disappears.

Speaker 1 (01:24:40):
I'm not sure what he was up to.

Speaker 3 (01:24:42):
He pops up briefly in a couple of articles in
two thousand and two thousand and one, 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 a state prison system after a variety of escape
attempts and prison riots involving Wayne holding hostages, and in

(01:25:05):
two thousand 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

(01:25:25):
twelve 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, But then quiet Frank moved out to Idaho.

Speaker 1 (01:25:47):
And stayed out of the paper.

Speaker 3 (01:25:49):
He's not a very good driver, so I know he
moved to Ada County, Idaho around two thousand and one,
because that's when he started getting a lot of traffic
tickets there. In two thousand and eight, 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

(01:26:11):
restraining order. But the Frank Sweeney, who tried to drop
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, that Frank seems to
be gone. He's just an old man living in Boise
until twenty fifteen. In December of twenty fifteen, Frank went

(01:26:47):
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, 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,

(01:27:08):
it's not worth it. It's not your business. There are
plenty of people who are not visibly disabled who really
do need.

Speaker 1 (01:27:13):
Those parking spots.

Speaker 3 (01:27:14):
And Frank was in his seventies at this point, so
even if he didn't have a state issued parking placard,
he's old.

Speaker 1 (01:27:21):
Just leave him alone.

Speaker 3 (01:27:23):
But she made a comment about it, and the situation
escalated pretty seriously. 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. The

(01:27:47):
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 park Ellen, her husband will be Sam, and
their adult daughters will be Kayla and Lucy. Again, it

(01:28:07):
is possible to figure out who these people are, but
please don't.

Speaker 1 (01:28:11):
They've been through enough.

Speaker 3 (01:28:14):
Two weeks after that heated exchange in the post office
parking lot, the postcard started. 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

(01:28:35):
light for his own safety. 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. 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

(01:28:57):
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

(01:29:17):
at her place of work, which was named after the
family received the first postcards. In December of twenty fifteen,
they met with detectives at the Aida County Sheriff's office
in Boise, and despite investigator's 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

(01:29:42):
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 nineteen seventy eight.
It probably goes without saying, but I will say it anyway.

Speaker 1 (01:29:55):
That is not true.

Speaker 3 (01:29:58):
But it does kind of remind you of what Frank
died to that doctor in nineteen ninety three, doesn't it,
adding to the victim's distress. Sam passed away unexpectedly in
January of twenty sixteen, 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

(01:30:19):
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

(01:30:39):
daughter Lucy, who lived out of state. It said, dear Mommy,
my blood test just came back and yes, I am
HIV positive. 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 grand

(01:31:00):
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 nineteen thirty two, and again the recently deceased

(01:31:22):
man was not a pedophile, nor was he in jail.
He had just been buried by his family. 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

(01:31:42):
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. Lucy's boss received one advising him that his
employee was having rectal intercourse with black men, although described
that in more vivid terms. Now, for as strange as

(01:32:06):
this man's life has been, you'd be forgiven if he
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

(01:32:29):
and racistly describing specific sex acts that they were, in
his mind having with black partners, 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.

(01:32:51):
You see, he might have another wife. It's not entirely clear,
but several times a year Frank would travel to Effort,
the capital of the German state of Taringia in central Germany,
to visit a woman he's known for a very long time,
Uta Schernig, who performs semi professionally as a belly dancer
under the name Madame Chamila, has on several occasions referred

(01:33:14):
to Frank as her husband. 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 non existent German marriage

(01:33:34):
certificate evades my grasp. Nevertheless, he does own a home
in Effort, and she lives in it. She refers to
him occasionally as her house Positzer, which you could translate
as landlord, but you wouldn't really, you'd call the person
you rent your home from your fermeter house Positzer just
means he owns her house, and he occasionally calls her Liebchen,

(01:33:58):
my love, and she calls Frankie when he visited in
twenty fifteen and they went to see her mother in
the nursing home together. Her photocaptions 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 eighties or early nineties based

(01:34:19):
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. She breeds and shows Mexican and Peruvian

(01:34:42):
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 twenty sixteen. His victims had
a brief reprieve from his letters because he was in
Germany attending a seminar on dog genetics with Ute. These
rare breed dogs are very prone to genetic problems and

(01:35:03):
in breeding, 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. He signed
them with Ellen's name and address, and requested that the

(01:35:24):
men write her back. She received at least seventy five 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

(01:35:46):
he did this. He sent her numerous postcards explaining the situation.

Speaker 9 (01:35:52):
Every creep, every social degenerate who has written to you,
has your address, social Security number, and date of birth.

Speaker 8 (01:36:00):
Likewise for Lucy too.

Speaker 9 (01:36:02):
Some of these freaks have already passed this information on
to their criminal friends outside of prison. Last month, I've
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.

Speaker 8 (01:36:21):
You only have your big mouth to blame for all
of this.

Speaker 3 (01:36:27):
In December of twenty sixteen, after the first full year,
he wrote to her, saying it was their anniversary, telling
her I intend to be with you her life. The
letter has 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

(01:36:49):
number and information about her family, just.

Speaker 1 (01:36:52):
So she knew he had it too.

Speaker 3 (01:36:54):
He continued writing to Ellen and both of her daughters,
calling the racial slurs, slots whores, threatening to report them
for assorted imaginary crimes like tax fraud and drug dealing,
and always remembering to write them on their birthdays. Investigators
were stumped. They knew the letter writer was the man
from the post office parking lot. He said as much

(01:37:15):
in his letters.

Speaker 1 (01:37:15):
But Ellen didn't recognize him. She had only a.

Speaker 3 (01:37:19):
Vague description of his vehicle, and she didn't get the
license plate. Why would she have thought she needed to.
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

(01:37:40):
he hadn't done what he's always done, more crime. 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 nineteen sixty two would
start its final chapter outside of a bank in.

Speaker 1 (01:37:56):
Idaho fifty six years later.

Speaker 3 (01:38:00):
On October thirteenth, twenty eighteen, 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
conked at them. There was again some kind of verbal altercation.

(01:38:22):
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 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 nineteen seventy five.

(01:38:44):
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

(01:39:08):
say that he sodomized a nine year old boy. 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.

(01:39:31):
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,

(01:39:52):
shortly before he started terrorizing his second set of victims,
his case wasn't just a local matter anymore. In September
of twenty eighteen, 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

(01:40:14):
over mail crimes. According to their most recent annual report,
the USPIS initiated more than fifty six hundred investigations in
twenty twenty three, and during that year, forty one hundred
cases related to their investigations ended in convictions. Most of
those numbers are things like mail theft and people mailing drugs. Also,

(01:40:35):
though a couple hundred people a year are assaulting postal employees,
knock that off.

Speaker 1 (01:40:41):
Don't do that.

Speaker 3 (01:40:42):
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 twenty eighteen, 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

(01:41:03):
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

(01:41:25):
now the 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.

(01:41:46):
Ellen knows it's the guy from the post office. Liam
knows it's the guy.

Speaker 1 (01:41:49):
From the bank.

Speaker 3 (01:41:50):
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 skull 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. Local

(01:42:11):
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

(01:42:35):
the man in the bank security footage, both Ellen and
Liam separately identified him in photo lineups, and bank employees
did know who he was, so by Christmas of twenty eighteen,
the male police have Frank's bank records. He's been paying
a private investigator. That's how he knew so much personal
information about all of his victims, information about their real

(01:42:57):
estate transactions, what kinds of cars they drove, where they worked,
where their adult children lived in different cities and states.

Speaker 1 (01:43:04):
Is paying a PI.

Speaker 3 (01:43:07):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:43:18):
Charged of anything.

Speaker 3 (01:43:20):
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 eighties who
seems to still be in the business just for the
love of the game. Barbara Jacobson describes herself on her

(01:43:43):
website as a cross between Nancy Drew and Jessica Fletcher
with the tenacity of Colombo, and credits her success to
her Christian faith and divine intervention. An article in a
twenty seventeen issue of Christian Living magazine quotes her as saying,
God is my business partner.

Speaker 1 (01:44:02):
Now again.

Speaker 3 (01:44:02):
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 mail. You're either deeply unscrupulous or very bad at

(01:44:25):
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 twenty nineteen, leaving

(01:44:45):
the house he'd been renting for over 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 onto him, why is he
still sending the letters. On February thirteenth, twenty nineteen, six
weeks after they know Frank's their guy, right around the
time that he's moving to his new house, a clerk

(01:45:08):
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 nineteenth, twenty nineteen. It 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

(01:45:30):
murderers who'd been writing to them 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,

(01:45:52):
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,

(01:46:13):
and shortly before his arrest, he commented on an online
obituary for an old high school classmate, reminiscing fondly about
how they used to collect snakes in the woods together
in the fifties. 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

(01:46:34):
embarrassed him and it made him feel better to know
he was causing them emotional distress. 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

(01:46:54):
don't want to sound like I'm brushing this off, I'm
not saying that this couldn't.

Speaker 1 (01:46:58):
Possibly be a valid concern.

Speaker 3 (01:46:59):
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 eighties he used to threaten
suicide and would even fake suicide attempts in order to

(01:47:23):
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 twenty eighteen, and within

(01:47:45):
three months they knew it was Frank. Maybe they should
have called the guys who solved Maile crimes earlier. I
don't know, but if there had been more communication between
different law enforcement agencies, the whole situation would have been resolved.
When he sent a single letter a third victim, which
he signed with his own name. But when a US

(01:48:09):
Marshall 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 twenty seventeen, Frank sent
a single letter to Gerald Shrr, the man who found
it and for many years ran the witness protection program.
I can't think of a worse guy to pick if

(01:48:30):
you're going to send a threatening letter. Sure was long
since retired by twenty seventeen. He passed away in twenty
twenty at the age of eighty six.

Speaker 1 (01:48:38):
But is there anyone on.

Speaker 3 (01:48:40):
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. You think you're going to scare the guy
whose job was protecting mobsters from other mobsters. Truly a
stupid move, even for Frank.

Speaker 9 (01:49:01):
You poisonous, licentious so 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 cottage over your fat corpse.

Speaker 8 (01:49:14):
You loasome.

Speaker 9 (01:49:16):
I will remember you, although it's doubtful you will remember
from WITSEC units in Otisville of San Diego parade in
with your entourage to pray women from the Office of
Enforcement Operations. In nineteen eighty four, you expelled me from
the program, leaving me defend for myself as a known
inform a rat in the general populations of very dangerous prisons.

Speaker 3 (01:49:40):
It had been more than thirty years, but Frank never
got over getting kicked out of the program. He flew
all over the world helping a spy in nineteen eighty
trying to leverage information on Christopher Boyce to get placement
in the program, and it didn't work. The information it
gave was not only not helpful, but by fabricating unhelpful
information in or to get something from the government, he

(01:50:02):
made things worse, and when he finally got what he
wanted by testifying against a serial killer in nineteen eighty two,
he couldn't keep his mouth shut about it, and so
he was removed from the program in nineteen eighty four.
In his letter to Suir, he claims that as a
result of losing his protected status in eighty four, he
was attacked by another inmate the following year, and he does,

(01:50:23):
without a doubt, bear a huge scar all down one
cheek to this day. 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,

(01:50:46):
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 try rabbled the
country shooting black men. I just don't think that they
would be mad about that. But I can think of

(01:51:09):
a variety of reasons why a black man who encountered
Frank in prison might get into it with him.

Speaker 1 (01:51:16):
I mean racist hide.

Speaker 3 (01:51:17):
Frank's just kind of a hotthead, not a great guy
to hang out with, always getting into it with people.

Speaker 1 (01:51:22):
But also he loves saying racial slurs.

Speaker 3 (01:51:24):
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 nineteen eighty five,
So who else after sure received the letter, which Frank
had signed venomously yours Frank Abbott Sweeney. A US marshal

(01:51:48):
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 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.

Speaker 1 (01:52:09):
If they had just.

Speaker 3 (01:52:10):
Showed this letter to the sheriff, maybe they would have
recognized it, but yes 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

(01:52:33):
if he ever goes there, willingly, but he probably won't,
and with Sure now deceased, it doesn't seem like that's
likely to amount to anything. On December sixteenth, twenty nineteen,
Frank Sweeney was sentenced to fifty one months for six
counts of stalking. A few days later, his German wife
posted a photo of her Christmas Eve dinner. A friend

(01:52:55):
asked her if Frank would be celebrating with her that year.
She replied that no, has been ill for several months
and can't.

Speaker 1 (01:53:02):
Fly right now.

Speaker 3 (01:53:04):
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 twenty twenty two. I just
noticed as I'm writing this that it's his eighty first
birthday today, but it won't be by the time you
hear this. He's still in Idaho, he's still playing the violin,

(01:53:24):
and he still co owns a few Mexican hairless dogs
on the show circuit in Germany. In that nineteen ninety
four 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

(01:53:44):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:53:54):
Maybe Judge H.

Speaker 3 (01:53:55):
Curtis Meaner had it write in nineteen eighty one when
he cut off the bickering in the court room 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,
because we never really will unravel all the mysteries of
Frank's past. He played a bit part in so many

(01:54:17):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:54:31):
Frank's there, it's not in the movie.

Speaker 3 (01:54:34):
He's just out of frame while history happens doing something
really goddamn weird.

Speaker 1 (01:54:47):
Weird Little Guys to production of Cool Zone Media. For
more from Cool Zone

Speaker 7 (01:54:51):
Media, visit our website toolzonemedia dot com, or check us
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