October 16, 2025 • 40 mins
Before he joined the American Nazi Party in 1965, Frank Smith was already a career criminal working for the New England mafia.
Sources:
https://www.nytimes.com/1952/05/06/archives/friend-of-sutton-seized-as-suspect-in-schuster-death-armed-burglar.html
https://www.ellsworthamerican.com/news/legacy-of-the-commander/article_c5ebf480-2fef-536c-aee8-11a2925441a0.html
Simonelli, Frederick J. (1999). American Fuehrer: George Lincoln Rockwell and the American Nazi Party. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
https://law.justia.com/cases/massachusetts/supreme-court/1961/342-mass-180-2.html
https://time.com/archive/6618452/people-visions/
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
In December of twenty eighteen, a jury in Charlottesville, Virginia
returned a guilty verdict in the trial of James Alexfields Junior.
They recommended a sentence of life in prison for the
murder of Heather Hire and another four hundred and nineteen
years for the wounding of members of the crowd of
peaceful demonstrators he'd rammed with his car after a Nazi
(00:25):
rally the previous summer. I remember sitting in that courtroom
when the verdict was read aloud. It was filled to capacity.
I could barely write in my notebook for the lack
of elbow room almost usually empty wooden benches. This was
big news. Reporters from outlets all over the country, the
world even had descended on Charlottesville to write about this trial,
(00:49):
and beyond the walls of my local courtroom, reporters who
couldn't make it to the trial in person were writing
about it too. Every time, Charlottesville's back in the news
for all the wrong reasons. Little newspapers and towns you've
never heard of look for local angles. On the aftermath
of that Nazi rally, they interview middle school classmates of
(01:11):
men who were identified in photos of violent mobs that
beat students with torches and bloodied members of the clergy
in a public park. After that verdict was in in
December of twenty eighteen, in a tiny town in May,
eight hundred miles away from Charlottesville, a reporter from the
(01:31):
Ellsworth American found her local angle as front pages of
newspapers everywhere were once again filled with pictures of Nazis.
She paid a visit to a Nazi who had been
living in their midst in Maine for decades. He hadn't
marched in Charlottesville. His marching days are long.
Speaker 1 (01:49):
Passed, but at ninety eight years old, Frank Smith still
had fond memories of his close friendship with Commander George
Lincoln Rockwell.
Speaker 2 (02:02):
I'm my conguered and this is weird. Little guys. You
(02:22):
probably thought we were moving on from the American Nazi Party.
I thought I was done too. I never even really
had much interest in writing about the party's founder, George
Lincoln Rockwell at all. I did four episodes in three
weeks about his assassination and a whole episode about his
weird funeral. How much could there really be left to
(02:46):
say about the circumstances surrounding one man's death a lot,
as it turns out, and I was willing to let
it lie, to leave some stones unturned, to leave some
stories for another day, move on for now, and put
a pin in some of these events, to revisit down
(03:07):
the road with a different weird little guy as our
focal point. There are so many side characters in the
story of the American Nazi Party who warrant their own episodes.
I have no doubt that I will eventually subject you
to God, probably at least a month's worth of episodes
about William Luther Pearce. And obviously eventually we'll have to
(03:31):
talk about James Mason. Before he was an elderly pedophile
living in government housing in Denver and advising young terrorists,
he was a teenage boy who joined the American Nazi Party,
and Ralph Forbes had a long, strange career that I'd
like to dig into. So I know we aren't done
(03:52):
with these characters, and I know I can't get lost
down every rabbit hole while I'm just trying to get
across the finish line on one story. But there was
one strange little side quest that I couldn't let go
of Frank Smith. Something about Frank just wouldn't let me
(04:17):
mark him down in my notes as something to come
back to later. He was setting off my weird little
guy radar in a way I could not ignore. And
I'll tell you my instincts were not wrong. I found
dynamite organized crime, FBI wiredtap memos about mafia hits, a
(04:41):
fake church, a nazi's mistress having a secret baby under
a fake name, And for some reason, the disgraced mayor
of Pawtucket, Rhode Island, if he listened to the last
five episodes, the ones about Rockwell's murder and his funeral,
you heard a little bit about Frank Smith. You even
(05:03):
heard from Frank himself in clips from interviews over the years.
He very publicly insisted that John Patler was not guilty
of the murder of George Lincoln Rockwell. He set it
on the stand at Patler's trial in nineteen sixty seven,
and he was still saying it fifty years later, in
a rambling interview with a South African neo Nazi in
(05:26):
twenty sixteen. And you might remember him from the dramatic
shootout with Christopher Vidyevitch in nineteen sixty eight, an incident
that Frank believed was an attempted assassination to prevent him
from getting to the real truth about Rockwell's murder. In
the two biographies of Rockwell that I read while I
was researching John Patler, Frank Smith really just gets a
(05:51):
few passing mentions as a member of the American Nazi
Party and as a witness at Patler's trial. But when
I start started reading the actual trial transcripts, something caught
my eye. I can't quite describe it. He talks like
a con man. I don't know how else to put it.
(06:14):
I've sat through a fair number of trials, and I've
read thousands of pages of trial transcripts, over a thousand
in this case alone. And most people aren't great on
the stand. They're nervous. They give short answers, and when
you press them, they sort of backtrack. They don't want
(06:37):
to commit to a lot of specific, hard details, especially
if you push hard and they get rattled on cross examination.
Most people do, it's normal, But Frank Smith was chatty
up there. I mean, he talked up a storm on
the witness stand. He was giving answers that spanned multiple
(07:02):
pages of the transcript without interruption from the attorney asking
him the questions. He claimed to recollect specific verbatim quotes
from long conversations, but he would never quite commit to
the specifics when it came to exactly where he was
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at any particular time. Specifically, there's no proof of where
he was or wasn't at three pm on June twenty seventh,
nineteen sixty seven. There's only so much they could ask
him about June twenty seventh, nineteen sixty seven. At that trial,
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he wasn't on trial, and George Lincoln Rockwell didn't die
on June twenty seventh. Rockwell died on August twenty fifth,
nineteen sixty seven, and John Patler killed him. But Rockwell
had survived a prior assassination attempt just two months before
his death. As he was pulling into the driveway with
(08:08):
the Nazi Party barracks in Arlington, Virginia that afternoon, someone
fired a single shot at him, but they missed, and
I assumed, Well, that was John Patler, right, that makes sense.
At his trial, a witness said that he saw him
doing target practice in July, the month before the murder.
(08:31):
In August, So you can see how it would make
sense to assume that he tried to shoot Rockwell in June.
He missed, he practiced some, he tried again. His aim
was better the second time. Rockwell's dead makes sense. When
Rockwell wrote about the assassination attempt in his newsletter, he
(08:53):
said he didn't see who did it, But at trial,
Mantius Cole testified that Rockwell had privately confined him that
the shooter was John Patler. William Luther Pierce years later,
told his own biographer the same thing. Rockwell told me
he saw him, and it was Patler, And like I said,
(09:14):
it makes perfect sense that that's who it would have been.
But I don't think it was. I don't think John
Patler was the only person who took a shot at
George Lincoln Rockwall in the summer of nineteen sixty seven.
Now we've covered this, but Patler's alibi on the day
of the actual murder was no good. His wife and
(09:36):
his father in law testified to his schedule that morning,
he'd been running errands with his wife. He couldn't possibly
have gotten to the murder scene. But when push comes
to shove, the times weren't right, and witnesses couldn't really
be sure when and where they'd seen him. I still
believe that he fired the shot that killed Rockwell, but
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on the day that someone shot at Rockwell and missed.
On June twenty seventh, John Patler was in Washington, d c.
Taking a drawing class. People saw him. His name was
on the sign in sheet, and a witness testified to
having taken attendance that day himself. This wasn't a member
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of the American Nazi Party or his wife. This is
someone with no reason to lie for him. John Patler
couldn't have been in Arlington on the afternoon of June
twenty seventh when Rockwell saw this would be assassin sprinting away.
I think he did recognize him. According to the college
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student who was in the car with him when this happened,
he cried out in surprise when he saw the man,
and what he said was the Holy Father. It's an
odd sort of thing to yell, you know. It's not
quite oh my God or Jesus Christ, things you might
(11:03):
say if someone was shooting at you. But the Holy
Father isn't really a thing people say, at least not
as far as I know. I mean, it is what
Catholics call the pope, but they don't use it as
an exclamation. And Rockwell was raised Methodist anyway, The young
man who heard him yell this didn't really think much
(11:26):
of it. He didn't know that it was someone's name.
It was a nickname that Rockwell had given Frank Smith,
and it didn't have all that much to do with religion.
Frank Smith really was holy in the sense that a
mafia hit man had put five bullet holes in him
(11:48):
right around the time he joined the American Nazi Party.
But let's start at the beginning. Francis Joseph Smith the
second was born in Massachusetts in December nineteen twenty, just
a few months after his parents' marriage. According to the
nineteen forty census, when he was nineteen, he was working
as a waiter and living at home with his parents
(12:10):
and two younger siblings in Medford, Massachusetts. It's hard to
say what he got up to in the nineteen forties,
but when he was arrested for bank robbery for the
first time in nineteen fifty two, newspapers reported his occupation
as a boxing promoter. Maybe everybody else already knew this,
and I'm going to sound silly, but I never gave
(12:31):
it much thought until I was writing about it this week.
Boxing was run by organized crime. I mean, I had
this vague notion about fixed fights and sports betting, but
in the nineteen fifties, the mafia ran boxing top to bottom.
(12:53):
I mean, they had a monopoly on the sport that
the Department of Justice had to get involved with. They
didn't just promote the fights, fix the fights, and profit
off the fights. They also coerced young boxers to do
a little work outside the ring, off the books, and
they were recruited to work as street level enforcers. And
(13:15):
not having that knowledge top of mind, as I was
going over all these old newspaper clippings, it seemed so
strange to me that every time Frank Smith got arrested
in the nineteen fifties, all of his named associates seemed
to be current or former boxers or boxing promoters. I thought,
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you know, maybe the boys met at the boxing gym.
But given the context of New York and Boston in
the fifties, the fact that all of these accused bank
robbers and murderers are also boxers is really just short
of absolute proof. That the crimes were mafia related. Admittedly,
(14:09):
I did not have time this week to learn about
a whole new genre of terrible guy. I mean, I
saw every episode of The Sopranos, obviously, but I don't
actually know that much about organized crime, especially outside of
the big New York names, because we're talking about Boston
and Providence and there is apparently a lot to know,
(14:33):
And I bet the story would have made more sense
faster if I had some pre existing knowledge of this world.
But this isn't my usual kind of guy, so we'll
have to make do. My apologies to any listeners from
New England who know the deep lore. In February of
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nineteen fifty two, a twenty four year old pants salesman
named Arthur Schuster was riding the subway in Brooklyn when
he saw someone who looked familiar. It wasn't someone he knew,
but he recognized the man from the wanted poster that
had been sitting in his office for months. It was
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the missing bank robber Willie Sutton. He followed Sutton off
the train and alerted the police to his location, leading
to the arrest of a man who was on the
very first FBI's most wanted the list. A few days
after Willy Sutton was arrested, Arthur Schuster went to the press.
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He believed that he'd been cheated out of a cash
reward for this tip. It turned out the seventy thousand
dollars reward was just an urban legend, but it was
too late in his quest for credit. Every newspaper in
New York City had already run his picture. Two weeks later,
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he was shot in the head outside of his apartment.
Police and FBI were scrambling to find the kiseller, and
in May they thought they had. They arrested Harvey Bostani,
a known associate of Willie Sutton's and a career bank
robber in his own right. They didn't exactly have enough
to charge Bastani in connection with the murder, but they
(16:17):
were able to hold him for questioning because he was
already wanted in connection with several armed robberies, a handful
of burglaries involving safe cracking and the theft of nearly
thirty thousand dollars worth of fur coats. And once they
had Bastanian custody, they started rolling up his associates. Over
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the course of two weeks. In May of nineteen fifty two,
the FBI arrested twelve men in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Chicago,
all of whom were believed to have been in Bastani's
bank robbery. Gay Arthur Schuster's murder was never actually solved,
although years later a mob informant would claim that the
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hit had been ordered by a Gambino family boss. One
of the first members of Bastani's gang to get picked
up was William Smith, Frank's younger brother, a boxer and
part time bartender. At William's house, police found several suitcases
full of loaded guns and ammunition, a suitcase full of
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burglary tools, a sawt off shotgun, a machine gun, disguises
including a clerical caller, investments and fake police uniforms, explosives,
and a box full of stolen license plates. When they
searched the bar where he worked nights, they found a
cash of dynamite. Shortly after the raid at William's apartment,
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the FBI announced they were looking for his brother too.
Frank was one of the last of the group to
be arrested, and both brothers were charged in connection with
a bank robbery in Medford Massachusetts. Despite Harvey Bestani turning
state's witness and testifying against them, both Smith brothers were
acquitted at trial for that Medford bank robbery. Unfortunately, for Frank,
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the acquittal in February of nineteen fifty three wasn't the
end of his troubles, because after that first arrest, things
kind of snowballed. In January of nineteen fifty three, just
weeks before his bank robbery trial was set to begin,
Frank Smith was indicted on new charges. New York City
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attorney Saul Rosenblatt identified Frank Smith as the man who'd
fired three shots at him on Park Avenue in March
of nineteen fifty two, hitting him once in the thigh.
When he went to trial in New York for the shooting,
Frank Smith admitted that sure he was in New York
City on the day that Rosenblatt was shot, but it
was for business. A longtime friend of Frank's testified that
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Frank and his co defendant, a mafia associate named Sammy Lindon,
had showed up at his hotel room that night, bragged
about shooting Rosenblat, and paid him to steal a car
that they could use to leave the city. On the stand,
the victim positively identified Frank as the man he saw
shoot him in broad daylight, but the jury acquitted him.
(19:22):
It's possible the jury was just confused about the lack
of a clear motive presented at trial. Immediately after the shooting,
newspapers in New York ran wild with speculation that the
attempted murder was connected to Rosenblat's involvement in a particular
high profile case. He'd recently been named the sole beneficiary
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in one of his clients' wills, and the dead woman's
sister was contesting the will in court. It didn't help
that the dead woman in question was Eleanor Morgan Satterly,
the granddaughter of J. P. Morgan. Yes, that JP Morgan,
the one whose name is on your bank. But as
(20:06):
the investigation into the shooting continued, police were less convinced
that Satterly's will had been the cause, and at trial,
the judge reminded the jury that proving motive isn't necessary
for a conviction. I think any criminal lawyer will tell
you though, juries are troubled by a crime without a motive.
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But it's also very possible that those twelve New York
City jurors knew well enough not to be seen in
open court poking their nose into the business of organized crime.
No one was ever convicted for shooting Saul Rosenblock, and
I'm pretty sure everyone involved is dead now, so I
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think it's safe to offer you my theory. Frank Smith
and Sammy Lindon did shoot Saul Rosenblock, but it had
nothing to do with J. P. Morgan's granddaughter. Saul Rosenblatt
had other clients he was involved in other ongoing litigation,
and there was one client he dropped as soon as
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he got out of the hospital after the shooting. He
withdrew as counsel of record in a paternity suit. He'd
been representing a nightclub singer named Virginia Summers in her
lawsuit against a Boston lawyer named Joseph Sachs, and at
his trial, Frank Smith was asked about a recent flight
he'd taken to London. A month before the shooting. He
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flew to England, but he insisted that this had to
do with his boxing promotion and nothing to do with
following Virginia Summers, who had also recently flown to London. Now,
I can't find any source that concrete, openly and plainly
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accuses Joseph Sachs of working for the mob, But you
can make up your own mind what you think. Sax
had previously represented Frank's co defendant, Sammy Lindon, in an
armed robbery case that was definitely mob related, and Sax
would later represent Frank in a case involving a bombing
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that was definitely mob related. Joseph Sachs himself was later
accused of some pretty serious mob related crime. He was
to be fair acquitted at trial, but in nineteen sixty
two he was one of several men indicted on charges
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of trafficking thousands of pounds of heroine. The bust was
part of the investigation into the French Connection, a global
network run by the Corsican mafia that moved heroin through
France and into the United States, where it was then
distributed by organized crime outfits in major cities. Sacks was
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arrested in connection with an operation that had been taking
advantage of the diplomatic immunity afforded to ambassadors. The Guatemalan
ambassador to Belgium, a man named Mauricio Rosal, had been
acting as their courier bringing fifty kilos of heroin at
a time into New York City in his suitcase and
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what I think is a pretty rare move. Mauricio Rosal
was denied diplomatic immunity and he went to prison. But
like I said, Joseph Sachs was acquitted. There's a lot
of allegedly, a lot of maybe a lot of fill
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in the blank with your own most reasonable assumptions. The
jury said Frank Smith didn't shoot Saul Rosenblat. A jury
said Joseph Sachs wasn't in involved in a decade long
scheme to move thousands of pounds of heroin between the
Corsic and Mafia and the mafia in New York and Boston.
(24:09):
And I guess, legally speaking, these are all just a
series of unrelated facts about cases that never got solved.
And maybe Saul Rosenblat dropped Virginia Summer's case because he
wasn't feeling well after the gunshot wound, not because he
thought Joseph Sachs had him shot. As far as I
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can tell, the prosecutor didn't argue at trial that it
was a paid hit. But it is worth noting that
at Frank's bail hearing, the prosecutor told the judge that
Frank had been hired by people in Massachusetts to kill Rosenblatt.
He called him a plain and simple killer for hire.
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When the jury returned a not guilty verdict for Frank
in the Rosenblack case, the judge was visibly angry. Newspapers
quote him scolding the jury, saying, it is my opinion
that you have been fooled. It is strange to me
how grown men can be so naive. Again, you never
know why a jury makes the decisions they make. But
(25:18):
I don't think they were fools or naive. I don't
think they were tricked into thinking Frank was innocent. I
think they knew exactly what they were looking at, and
they didn't want to be involved in mafia business. The
newspaper that quoted the judge's angry outburst doesn't say whether
the judge looked amused when Frank Smith was arrested as
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he tried to leave the courtroom. He'd been acquitted in
New York, but he was wanted in New Jersey for
robbing a bank in Newark with a machine gun. So
New York City held him in their jail for a
few weeks pending extradition, which is pretty normal, and he
fought the extradition, which is a little less normal. I mean,
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you have a right to try. It's just not typical.
But it worked. He's in this jail in New York
City for a couple of weeks, no news, and then
suddenly there's just a passing mention in the Newark Star
Ledger two days before Christmas that the prosecutor changed his mind.
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The charges have been dropped and there are no other suspects,
so to put all of this in order. On March sixth,
nineteen fifty two, someone who looked just like Frank Smith
shot Saul Rosenblatt on Park Avenue. Two days after that,
someone unknown shot Arnold Schuster in the head outside of
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his apartment in New York City. Two days after that,
a couple of guys who might have been the Smith
brothers robbed a bank in Medford, Massachusetts. In April, someone
who looked just like Frank Smith robbed a bank in
Newark in May. Smith and a dozen associates of known
bank robber Harvey Bistani were all arrested in January of
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nineteen fifty three, Frank is charged for shooting Saul Rosenblatt.
In February, he's acquitted on that first bank robbery. In November,
he's acquitted on the shooting, but he's arrested for the
New Jersey bank robbery, and by December of nineteen fifty
three he's free and clear. He was accused of robbing
banks in two different states and trying to murder a
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man in a third, crimes that all took place within
mere weeks in the spring of nineteen fifty two, but
he celebrated the new year as a freeman in nineteen
fifty four. I can't pick him back up again in
the archives until May of fifty seven, when he's arrested again.
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But when he was arrested in nineteen fifty seven for
bombing a home in Wooburn, Massachusetts, police in the neighboring
towns expressed their interest in questioning him about similar unsolved
bombings over the last few years. Now, no one was
(28:23):
ever convicted in the first three bombings police suspected Frank
Smith was involved in. In June of nineteen fifty four,
four bombs exploded inside the Chelsea, Massachusetts home of boxing
promoter Sam Silverman. If you know a lot about old
school boxing promoters, you've heard of Sam Silverman. And if
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you don't know anything about old school boxing promoters, you
don't care who Sam Silverman is. But he had recently
cut ties with the International Boxing Club of New York,
that corporation whose monopoly on boxing was almost entirely under
the control of former murder inc hitman Frankie Carbo. A
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few months before the bombing, Ray Arcell, a promoter Silverman
worked with to televise the fights he promoted, was beaten
almost to death with a lead pipe. Arcell survived and
Silverman and his wife weren't home when those bombs went off,
but both men took these attacks as a clear message
from the mafia stop promoting fights. In May of nineteen
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fifty five, Vincent Denuno, a regional director of the Building
in Common Laborers Union with the AFL, was finalizing a
report on organized crime activity within his union when suddenly
his car exploded inside of his garage in East Boston.
Police believed it was the work of a professional killer
trying to take out the labour leader, but it was
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his twenty four year old son in law who was
gravely injured instead. Then, in June of nineteen fifty six,
John Sullivan, a booking agent in Medford, Massachusetts, narrowly escaped
being blown to bits when he walked out his front
door because he smelled smoke and he found a bomb
on his front porch that hadn't gone off yet. None
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of these bombings were ever solved, least as far as
I can tell, But Frank Smith was a very strong
suspect in all three after his arrest in May of
nineteen fifty seven. But this fourth bombing was pretty open
and shut. They thought maybe he did those other three,
but they saw him do this one. It was a
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little after midnight when two cops who were just sitting
in their patrol car saw a man sprinting down the
street in the dark. At first, they assumed the man
leaving Everett Bixby's yard was a burglar and they were
going to chase him, But just as the man disappeared
into a nearby wooded area, the bomb went off. A
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description of the man they'd seen went out over the radio,
and officers spotted him less than a mile away at
a phone booth. He was filthy and soaking wet, as
if he'd perhaps run in the dark through the thick
underbrush of the wooded area the bomber disappeared into. He
also had explosive residue embedded in burnmarks on his shoes.
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Police found him in a phone booth less than a
mile away from the Bixby's house, and they found his
car a mile in the other direction, parked outside of
a friend's house. That friend happened to be a man
named Louis Venios, a mafia associate who was due in
court the following morning to face a federal mail fraud charge.
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Frank's story just kept changing, and honestly, none of the
stories were very good. On the night of his arrest,
he explained to the police that he's a prize fight
trainer and he's just out doing some roadwork, which is
apparently what boxers call r at three am in a
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town where he doesn't live, and they found him at
the phone booth because while he was out running, he
had this sudden thought that he needed to make a
phone call to a friend again at three am. By
the time he got to trial, he'd come up with
what I guess he thought was a better story. He
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said that he couldn't have bombed the Bixby's house at
twelve forty five am because he was at a bar
with his friend Louis Venios from midnight and till around
one am, and then after the bar they stopped back
off at his apartment because he needed to wring out
some wet laundry and that's why he was all wet.
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And then after he got all wet at his apartment,
he didn't change his clothes. He got into his car
and drove Louis Venios home to Wuburn, and then he
left his car at Venios's house because he needed to
borrow it, and when police found him in the phone booth,
he was just calling his wife to come pick him
up again at three am. I don't think he could
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make up a worse series of lies if he tried, right,
Because if he and Venios were at his apartment and
Venios needed to both go home to Woburn and borrow
Frank's car, why wouldn't Venios just drive himself home in
Frank's car and Frank would just stay at his apartment.
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And if he had to be the one to drive,
but his wife was able to come pick him up,
why didn't she just follow him? Why didn't he tell
her before he left the apartment. If he hadn't to
call his wife, why didn't he call from Benios's house?
Doesn't he have a phone? Why would you walk a
mile in the dark at three am to call your
(33:55):
wife from a payphone. I just don't understand why he
thought we would believe that he needed to walk a
mile in the dark at three am to call his
wife to come pick him up from the fakes sounding
errand anyone has ever made up And at trial they
didn't even put Louis Venios on the stand to corroborate
the alibi. I just can't get over. Oh, I had
(34:19):
to go home and wring out my wet laundry in
between drinking at the bar and driving my friend home
and then walking around in the dark, And that's why
my shoes are all wet. I mean, got at that
point just say you pissed on your own shoes. At
least people might believe it. Reading between the lines and
the appellate record in this case, it sounds like everyone
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in the courtroom knew that the Boston Police officer the
defense put on the stand was lying. Joseph Sachs. Remember
he's the lawyer who, according to the jury who acquitted him,
was not at this time, seven years into a decade
law international heroin smuggling operation for the mafia. Sachs put
(35:04):
Boston patrolman John O'Neil on the stand to testify that
he knew Frank Smith and Louis Venios and he remembered
seeing them at the bar at the time of the bombing.
The jury found Frank Smith guilty of the bombing, and
he was given a sentence of fifteen to eighteen years
in prison. Based on the admittedly limited information that we have,
(35:29):
it seems very possible that Everett Bixby wasn't the intended
target of this bombing. He was a funeral director with
no known ties to organized crime. He was the chairman
of the Woburn Licensing Board, so I guess it's possible
that there was a dispute over a liquor license. But
(35:52):
in nineteen fifty seven, the city of Wooburn only issued
liquor licenses to stores that sell liquor. In Massachusetts, they
call them package stores, and a local newspaper that year
said that the city of Wooburn had plenty of package stores,
but they didn't actually have any bars, and Bixby told
(36:14):
the newspaper that no one had even applied for a
liquor license lately. There was nothing for there to be
a dispute over it. Kind of looks like Frank got
the wrong house. I saw a few news stories that
made vague mention of the fact that the Bixby's lived
pretty close by to several known gangland figures. That's all
(36:38):
it ever, really says, just several known figures in this world,
they're never named. Look is it possible to cross reference
seventy year old property records with the names of known
mafia associates in the Boston suburbs. Look? I thought about it,
and I think I probably could do it if I
(37:01):
had an extra day this week?
Speaker 3 (37:03):
Did I? No?
Speaker 2 (37:06):
I had to file my taxes this week. It's October,
I know, but I was getting married in the spring,
so I was like kind of busy. So I got
an extension. So they're like, actually do now. So that's
what I did this week instead of finding out which
patriarch of crime family associates might have been ever at
Bixby's neighbor in wober, Massachusetts. In nineteen fifty seven. So
(37:30):
I'm sorry, but I think the fact that Frank Smith
had parked his car at Louis Venios's house and Venios
was due in federal court the very next morning, I
think that does imply the possibility of a relationship between
these things, you know. And finally, at the end of
(37:54):
nineteen fifty seven, Frank Smith went to prison on some
time in jail after his prior arrests when he couldn't
make bail. But this was the real thing. He's guilty
of a felony now, and he's staring down the barrel
of fifteen years. He didn't end up serving his whole sentence.
(38:17):
He was released in November of nineteen sixty four. And
while he was in prison, he got his hands on
some interesting reading material. Someone had been sending him copies
of the Rockwell Report.
Speaker 3 (38:34):
The first week in January of nineteen sixty five, I
went to Rolington, Virginia, Tom Command of Rockwell. I'd heard
about him, I'd read some of the things about him,
and I'd read some of his rock Werry reports, and
we were akin in our thanking.
Speaker 2 (38:56):
Just weeks after he got out of prison, Frank Smith
drove from Massa chooseys to Virginia to meet the man
whose newsletter he'd been reading in prison. He spent the
nineteen fifties robbing banks and bombing houses for the Mob.
He must have spent those seven years behind bars planning
his next big move, because he really didn't hesitate to
(39:16):
start taking big swings when he got out. Immediately upon
his return from the Nazi Party headquarters, Frank Smith had
a face to face meeting with Raymond Patriarca, the head
of the New England Mafia. Frank wanted to cut Patriarca
in on a deal, a mutually beneficial arrangement between the
(39:39):
mafia and the Nazis. You'll have to wait until next
week to find out how Frank ended up full of
bullet holes in the midst of a gang war, and
why Frank's name is on the birth certificate for George
Lincoln Rockwell's i legitimate daughter. And maybe by next week
Kull have made some more progress trying to sort out
(39:59):
exactly what to make of the fact that a Nazi
in his fake church show up in the financial record.
It's a corrupt mayor who went to prison for racketeering.
Weird little Guys is a production of cool Zone Media
and iHeartRadio. It's researched, written and recorded by Me Molly Conger.
Our executive producers are Sophie Littman and Robert Evans. The
(40:20):
show is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gaigan. The
theme music was composed by Brad Dickert. You can email
me at Weird Little Guy's podcast at gmail dot com.
I will definitely read it, but I probably won't answer.
It's nothing personal. You can exchange conspiracy theories about the
show with other listeners on me Weird Little Guy subreddit.
Just don't post anything that's going to make you one
(40:41):
of my weird Little Guys.
Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
In December of twenty eighteen, a jury in Charlottesville, Virginia
returned a guilty verdict in the trial of James Alexfields Junior.
They recommended a sentence of life in prison for the
murder of Heather Hire and another four hundred and nineteen
years for the wounding of members of the crowd of
peaceful demonstrators he'd rammed with his car after a Nazi
(00:25):
rally the previous summer. I remember sitting in that courtroom
when the verdict was read aloud. It was filled to capacity.
I could barely write in my notebook for the lack
of elbow room almost usually empty wooden benches. This was
big news. Reporters from outlets all over the country, the
world even had descended on Charlottesville to write about this trial,
(00:49):
and beyond the walls of my local courtroom, reporters who
couldn't make it to the trial in person were writing
about it too. Every time, Charlottesville's back in the news
for all the wrong reasons. Little newspapers and towns you've
never heard of look for local angles. On the aftermath
of that Nazi rally, they interview middle school classmates of
(01:11):
men who were identified in photos of violent mobs that
beat students with torches and bloodied members of the clergy
in a public park. After that verdict was in in
December of twenty eighteen, in a tiny town in May,
eight hundred miles away from Charlottesville, a reporter from the
(01:31):
Ellsworth American found her local angle as front pages of
newspapers everywhere were once again filled with pictures of Nazis.
She paid a visit to a Nazi who had been
living in their midst in Maine for decades. He hadn't
marched in Charlottesville. His marching days are long.
Speaker 1 (01:49):
Passed, but at ninety eight years old, Frank Smith still
had fond memories of his close friendship with Commander George
Lincoln Rockwell.
Speaker 2 (02:02):
I'm my conguered and this is weird. Little guys. You
(02:22):
probably thought we were moving on from the American Nazi Party.
I thought I was done too. I never even really
had much interest in writing about the party's founder, George
Lincoln Rockwell at all. I did four episodes in three
weeks about his assassination and a whole episode about his
weird funeral. How much could there really be left to
(02:46):
say about the circumstances surrounding one man's death a lot,
as it turns out, and I was willing to let
it lie, to leave some stones unturned, to leave some
stories for another day, move on for now, and put
a pin in some of these events, to revisit down
(03:07):
the road with a different weird little guy as our
focal point. There are so many side characters in the
story of the American Nazi Party who warrant their own episodes.
I have no doubt that I will eventually subject you
to God, probably at least a month's worth of episodes
about William Luther Pearce. And obviously eventually we'll have to
(03:31):
talk about James Mason. Before he was an elderly pedophile
living in government housing in Denver and advising young terrorists,
he was a teenage boy who joined the American Nazi Party,
and Ralph Forbes had a long, strange career that I'd
like to dig into. So I know we aren't done
(03:52):
with these characters, and I know I can't get lost
down every rabbit hole while I'm just trying to get
across the finish line on one story. But there was
one strange little side quest that I couldn't let go
of Frank Smith. Something about Frank just wouldn't let me
(04:17):
mark him down in my notes as something to come
back to later. He was setting off my weird little
guy radar in a way I could not ignore. And
I'll tell you my instincts were not wrong. I found
dynamite organized crime, FBI wiredtap memos about mafia hits, a
(04:41):
fake church, a nazi's mistress having a secret baby under
a fake name, And for some reason, the disgraced mayor
of Pawtucket, Rhode Island, if he listened to the last
five episodes, the ones about Rockwell's murder and his funeral,
you heard a little bit about Frank Smith. You even
(05:03):
heard from Frank himself in clips from interviews over the years.
He very publicly insisted that John Patler was not guilty
of the murder of George Lincoln Rockwell. He set it
on the stand at Patler's trial in nineteen sixty seven,
and he was still saying it fifty years later, in
a rambling interview with a South African neo Nazi in
(05:26):
twenty sixteen. And you might remember him from the dramatic
shootout with Christopher Vidyevitch in nineteen sixty eight, an incident
that Frank believed was an attempted assassination to prevent him
from getting to the real truth about Rockwell's murder. In
the two biographies of Rockwell that I read while I
was researching John Patler, Frank Smith really just gets a
(05:51):
few passing mentions as a member of the American Nazi
Party and as a witness at Patler's trial. But when
I start started reading the actual trial transcripts, something caught
my eye. I can't quite describe it. He talks like
a con man. I don't know how else to put it.
(06:14):
I've sat through a fair number of trials, and I've
read thousands of pages of trial transcripts, over a thousand
in this case alone. And most people aren't great on
the stand. They're nervous. They give short answers, and when
you press them, they sort of backtrack. They don't want
(06:37):
to commit to a lot of specific, hard details, especially
if you push hard and they get rattled on cross examination.
Most people do, it's normal, But Frank Smith was chatty
up there. I mean, he talked up a storm on
the witness stand. He was giving answers that spanned multiple
(07:02):
pages of the transcript without interruption from the attorney asking
him the questions. He claimed to recollect specific verbatim quotes
from long conversations, but he would never quite commit to
the specifics when it came to exactly where he was
(07:23):
at any particular time. Specifically, there's no proof of where
he was or wasn't at three pm on June twenty seventh,
nineteen sixty seven. There's only so much they could ask
him about June twenty seventh, nineteen sixty seven. At that trial,
(07:46):
he wasn't on trial, and George Lincoln Rockwell didn't die
on June twenty seventh. Rockwell died on August twenty fifth,
nineteen sixty seven, and John Patler killed him. But Rockwell
had survived a prior assassination attempt just two months before
his death. As he was pulling into the driveway with
(08:08):
the Nazi Party barracks in Arlington, Virginia that afternoon, someone
fired a single shot at him, but they missed, and
I assumed, Well, that was John Patler, right, that makes sense.
At his trial, a witness said that he saw him
doing target practice in July, the month before the murder.
(08:31):
In August, So you can see how it would make
sense to assume that he tried to shoot Rockwell in June.
He missed, he practiced some, he tried again. His aim
was better the second time. Rockwell's dead makes sense. When
Rockwell wrote about the assassination attempt in his newsletter, he
(08:53):
said he didn't see who did it, But at trial,
Mantius Cole testified that Rockwell had privately confined him that
the shooter was John Patler. William Luther Pierce years later,
told his own biographer the same thing. Rockwell told me
he saw him, and it was Patler, And like I said,
(09:14):
it makes perfect sense that that's who it would have been.
But I don't think it was. I don't think John
Patler was the only person who took a shot at
George Lincoln Rockwall in the summer of nineteen sixty seven.
Now we've covered this, but Patler's alibi on the day
of the actual murder was no good. His wife and
(09:36):
his father in law testified to his schedule that morning,
he'd been running errands with his wife. He couldn't possibly
have gotten to the murder scene. But when push comes
to shove, the times weren't right, and witnesses couldn't really
be sure when and where they'd seen him. I still
believe that he fired the shot that killed Rockwell, but
(09:56):
on the day that someone shot at Rockwell and missed.
On June twenty seventh, John Patler was in Washington, d c.
Taking a drawing class. People saw him. His name was
on the sign in sheet, and a witness testified to
having taken attendance that day himself. This wasn't a member
(10:19):
of the American Nazi Party or his wife. This is
someone with no reason to lie for him. John Patler
couldn't have been in Arlington on the afternoon of June
twenty seventh when Rockwell saw this would be assassin sprinting away.
I think he did recognize him. According to the college
(10:42):
student who was in the car with him when this happened,
he cried out in surprise when he saw the man,
and what he said was the Holy Father. It's an
odd sort of thing to yell, you know. It's not
quite oh my God or Jesus Christ, things you might
(11:03):
say if someone was shooting at you. But the Holy
Father isn't really a thing people say, at least not
as far as I know. I mean, it is what
Catholics call the pope, but they don't use it as
an exclamation. And Rockwell was raised Methodist anyway, The young
man who heard him yell this didn't really think much
(11:26):
of it. He didn't know that it was someone's name.
It was a nickname that Rockwell had given Frank Smith,
and it didn't have all that much to do with religion.
Frank Smith really was holy in the sense that a
mafia hit man had put five bullet holes in him
(11:48):
right around the time he joined the American Nazi Party.
But let's start at the beginning. Francis Joseph Smith the
second was born in Massachusetts in December nineteen twenty, just
a few months after his parents' marriage. According to the
nineteen forty census, when he was nineteen, he was working
as a waiter and living at home with his parents
(12:10):
and two younger siblings in Medford, Massachusetts. It's hard to
say what he got up to in the nineteen forties,
but when he was arrested for bank robbery for the
first time in nineteen fifty two, newspapers reported his occupation
as a boxing promoter. Maybe everybody else already knew this,
and I'm going to sound silly, but I never gave
(12:31):
it much thought until I was writing about it this week.
Boxing was run by organized crime. I mean, I had
this vague notion about fixed fights and sports betting, but
in the nineteen fifties, the mafia ran boxing top to bottom.
(12:53):
I mean, they had a monopoly on the sport that
the Department of Justice had to get involved with. They
didn't just promote the fights, fix the fights, and profit
off the fights. They also coerced young boxers to do
a little work outside the ring, off the books, and
they were recruited to work as street level enforcers. And
(13:15):
not having that knowledge top of mind, as I was
going over all these old newspaper clippings, it seemed so
strange to me that every time Frank Smith got arrested
in the nineteen fifties, all of his named associates seemed
to be current or former boxers or boxing promoters. I thought,
(13:36):
you know, maybe the boys met at the boxing gym.
But given the context of New York and Boston in
the fifties, the fact that all of these accused bank
robbers and murderers are also boxers is really just short
of absolute proof. That the crimes were mafia related. Admittedly,
(14:09):
I did not have time this week to learn about
a whole new genre of terrible guy. I mean, I
saw every episode of The Sopranos, obviously, but I don't
actually know that much about organized crime, especially outside of
the big New York names, because we're talking about Boston
and Providence and there is apparently a lot to know,
(14:33):
And I bet the story would have made more sense
faster if I had some pre existing knowledge of this world.
But this isn't my usual kind of guy, so we'll
have to make do. My apologies to any listeners from
New England who know the deep lore. In February of
(14:53):
nineteen fifty two, a twenty four year old pants salesman
named Arthur Schuster was riding the subway in Brooklyn when
he saw someone who looked familiar. It wasn't someone he knew,
but he recognized the man from the wanted poster that
had been sitting in his office for months. It was
(15:13):
the missing bank robber Willie Sutton. He followed Sutton off
the train and alerted the police to his location, leading
to the arrest of a man who was on the
very first FBI's most wanted the list. A few days
after Willy Sutton was arrested, Arthur Schuster went to the press.
(15:33):
He believed that he'd been cheated out of a cash
reward for this tip. It turned out the seventy thousand
dollars reward was just an urban legend, but it was
too late in his quest for credit. Every newspaper in
New York City had already run his picture. Two weeks later,
(15:54):
he was shot in the head outside of his apartment.
Police and FBI were scrambling to find the kiseller, and
in May they thought they had. They arrested Harvey Bostani,
a known associate of Willie Sutton's and a career bank
robber in his own right. They didn't exactly have enough
to charge Bastani in connection with the murder, but they
(16:17):
were able to hold him for questioning because he was
already wanted in connection with several armed robberies, a handful
of burglaries involving safe cracking and the theft of nearly
thirty thousand dollars worth of fur coats. And once they
had Bastanian custody, they started rolling up his associates. Over
(16:37):
the course of two weeks. In May of nineteen fifty two,
the FBI arrested twelve men in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Chicago,
all of whom were believed to have been in Bastani's
bank robbery. Gay Arthur Schuster's murder was never actually solved,
although years later a mob informant would claim that the
(16:58):
hit had been ordered by a Gambino family boss. One
of the first members of Bastani's gang to get picked
up was William Smith, Frank's younger brother, a boxer and
part time bartender. At William's house, police found several suitcases
full of loaded guns and ammunition, a suitcase full of
(17:22):
burglary tools, a sawt off shotgun, a machine gun, disguises
including a clerical caller, investments and fake police uniforms, explosives,
and a box full of stolen license plates. When they
searched the bar where he worked nights, they found a
cash of dynamite. Shortly after the raid at William's apartment,
(17:45):
the FBI announced they were looking for his brother too.
Frank was one of the last of the group to
be arrested, and both brothers were charged in connection with
a bank robbery in Medford Massachusetts. Despite Harvey Bestani turning
state's witness and testifying against them, both Smith brothers were
acquitted at trial for that Medford bank robbery. Unfortunately, for Frank,
(18:09):
the acquittal in February of nineteen fifty three wasn't the
end of his troubles, because after that first arrest, things
kind of snowballed. In January of nineteen fifty three, just
weeks before his bank robbery trial was set to begin,
Frank Smith was indicted on new charges. New York City
(18:31):
attorney Saul Rosenblatt identified Frank Smith as the man who'd
fired three shots at him on Park Avenue in March
of nineteen fifty two, hitting him once in the thigh.
When he went to trial in New York for the shooting,
Frank Smith admitted that sure he was in New York
City on the day that Rosenblatt was shot, but it
was for business. A longtime friend of Frank's testified that
(18:55):
Frank and his co defendant, a mafia associate named Sammy Lindon,
had showed up at his hotel room that night, bragged
about shooting Rosenblat, and paid him to steal a car
that they could use to leave the city. On the stand,
the victim positively identified Frank as the man he saw
shoot him in broad daylight, but the jury acquitted him.
(19:22):
It's possible the jury was just confused about the lack
of a clear motive presented at trial. Immediately after the shooting,
newspapers in New York ran wild with speculation that the
attempted murder was connected to Rosenblat's involvement in a particular
high profile case. He'd recently been named the sole beneficiary
(19:44):
in one of his clients' wills, and the dead woman's
sister was contesting the will in court. It didn't help
that the dead woman in question was Eleanor Morgan Satterly,
the granddaughter of J. P. Morgan. Yes, that JP Morgan,
the one whose name is on your bank. But as
(20:06):
the investigation into the shooting continued, police were less convinced
that Satterly's will had been the cause, and at trial,
the judge reminded the jury that proving motive isn't necessary
for a conviction. I think any criminal lawyer will tell
you though, juries are troubled by a crime without a motive.
(20:29):
But it's also very possible that those twelve New York
City jurors knew well enough not to be seen in
open court poking their nose into the business of organized crime.
No one was ever convicted for shooting Saul Rosenblock, and
I'm pretty sure everyone involved is dead now, so I
(20:51):
think it's safe to offer you my theory. Frank Smith
and Sammy Lindon did shoot Saul Rosenblock, but it had
nothing to do with J. P. Morgan's granddaughter. Saul Rosenblatt
had other clients he was involved in other ongoing litigation,
and there was one client he dropped as soon as
(21:14):
he got out of the hospital after the shooting. He
withdrew as counsel of record in a paternity suit. He'd
been representing a nightclub singer named Virginia Summers in her
lawsuit against a Boston lawyer named Joseph Sachs, and at
his trial, Frank Smith was asked about a recent flight
he'd taken to London. A month before the shooting. He
(21:39):
flew to England, but he insisted that this had to
do with his boxing promotion and nothing to do with
following Virginia Summers, who had also recently flown to London. Now,
I can't find any source that concrete, openly and plainly
(22:03):
accuses Joseph Sachs of working for the mob, But you
can make up your own mind what you think. Sax
had previously represented Frank's co defendant, Sammy Lindon, in an
armed robbery case that was definitely mob related, and Sax
would later represent Frank in a case involving a bombing
(22:24):
that was definitely mob related. Joseph Sachs himself was later
accused of some pretty serious mob related crime. He was
to be fair acquitted at trial, but in nineteen sixty
two he was one of several men indicted on charges
(22:45):
of trafficking thousands of pounds of heroine. The bust was
part of the investigation into the French Connection, a global
network run by the Corsican mafia that moved heroin through
France and into the United States, where it was then
distributed by organized crime outfits in major cities. Sacks was
(23:06):
arrested in connection with an operation that had been taking
advantage of the diplomatic immunity afforded to ambassadors. The Guatemalan
ambassador to Belgium, a man named Mauricio Rosal, had been
acting as their courier bringing fifty kilos of heroin at
a time into New York City in his suitcase and
(23:28):
what I think is a pretty rare move. Mauricio Rosal
was denied diplomatic immunity and he went to prison. But
like I said, Joseph Sachs was acquitted. There's a lot
of allegedly, a lot of maybe a lot of fill
(23:48):
in the blank with your own most reasonable assumptions. The
jury said Frank Smith didn't shoot Saul Rosenblat. A jury
said Joseph Sachs wasn't in involved in a decade long
scheme to move thousands of pounds of heroin between the
Corsic and Mafia and the mafia in New York and Boston.
(24:09):
And I guess, legally speaking, these are all just a
series of unrelated facts about cases that never got solved.
And maybe Saul Rosenblat dropped Virginia Summer's case because he
wasn't feeling well after the gunshot wound, not because he
thought Joseph Sachs had him shot. As far as I
(24:30):
can tell, the prosecutor didn't argue at trial that it
was a paid hit. But it is worth noting that
at Frank's bail hearing, the prosecutor told the judge that
Frank had been hired by people in Massachusetts to kill Rosenblatt.
He called him a plain and simple killer for hire.
(24:54):
When the jury returned a not guilty verdict for Frank
in the Rosenblack case, the judge was visibly angry. Newspapers
quote him scolding the jury, saying, it is my opinion
that you have been fooled. It is strange to me
how grown men can be so naive. Again, you never
know why a jury makes the decisions they make. But
(25:18):
I don't think they were fools or naive. I don't
think they were tricked into thinking Frank was innocent. I
think they knew exactly what they were looking at, and
they didn't want to be involved in mafia business. The
newspaper that quoted the judge's angry outburst doesn't say whether
the judge looked amused when Frank Smith was arrested as
(25:40):
he tried to leave the courtroom. He'd been acquitted in
New York, but he was wanted in New Jersey for
robbing a bank in Newark with a machine gun. So
New York City held him in their jail for a
few weeks pending extradition, which is pretty normal, and he
fought the extradition, which is a little less normal. I mean,
(26:03):
you have a right to try. It's just not typical.
But it worked. He's in this jail in New York
City for a couple of weeks, no news, and then
suddenly there's just a passing mention in the Newark Star
Ledger two days before Christmas that the prosecutor changed his mind.
(26:24):
The charges have been dropped and there are no other suspects,
so to put all of this in order. On March sixth,
nineteen fifty two, someone who looked just like Frank Smith
shot Saul Rosenblatt on Park Avenue. Two days after that,
someone unknown shot Arnold Schuster in the head outside of
(26:48):
his apartment in New York City. Two days after that,
a couple of guys who might have been the Smith
brothers robbed a bank in Medford, Massachusetts. In April, someone
who looked just like Frank Smith robbed a bank in
Newark in May. Smith and a dozen associates of known
bank robber Harvey Bistani were all arrested in January of
(27:12):
nineteen fifty three, Frank is charged for shooting Saul Rosenblatt.
In February, he's acquitted on that first bank robbery. In November,
he's acquitted on the shooting, but he's arrested for the
New Jersey bank robbery, and by December of nineteen fifty
three he's free and clear. He was accused of robbing
banks in two different states and trying to murder a
(27:32):
man in a third, crimes that all took place within
mere weeks in the spring of nineteen fifty two, but
he celebrated the new year as a freeman in nineteen
fifty four. I can't pick him back up again in
the archives until May of fifty seven, when he's arrested again.
(27:53):
But when he was arrested in nineteen fifty seven for
bombing a home in Wooburn, Massachusetts, police in the neighboring
towns expressed their interest in questioning him about similar unsolved
bombings over the last few years. Now, no one was
(28:23):
ever convicted in the first three bombings police suspected Frank
Smith was involved in. In June of nineteen fifty four,
four bombs exploded inside the Chelsea, Massachusetts home of boxing
promoter Sam Silverman. If you know a lot about old
school boxing promoters, you've heard of Sam Silverman. And if
(28:44):
you don't know anything about old school boxing promoters, you
don't care who Sam Silverman is. But he had recently
cut ties with the International Boxing Club of New York,
that corporation whose monopoly on boxing was almost entirely under
the control of former murder inc hitman Frankie Carbo. A
(29:05):
few months before the bombing, Ray Arcell, a promoter Silverman
worked with to televise the fights he promoted, was beaten
almost to death with a lead pipe. Arcell survived and
Silverman and his wife weren't home when those bombs went off,
but both men took these attacks as a clear message
from the mafia stop promoting fights. In May of nineteen
(29:29):
fifty five, Vincent Denuno, a regional director of the Building
in Common Laborers Union with the AFL, was finalizing a
report on organized crime activity within his union when suddenly
his car exploded inside of his garage in East Boston.
Police believed it was the work of a professional killer
trying to take out the labour leader, but it was
(29:51):
his twenty four year old son in law who was
gravely injured instead. Then, in June of nineteen fifty six,
John Sullivan, a booking agent in Medford, Massachusetts, narrowly escaped
being blown to bits when he walked out his front
door because he smelled smoke and he found a bomb
on his front porch that hadn't gone off yet. None
(30:12):
of these bombings were ever solved, least as far as
I can tell, But Frank Smith was a very strong
suspect in all three after his arrest in May of
nineteen fifty seven. But this fourth bombing was pretty open
and shut. They thought maybe he did those other three,
but they saw him do this one. It was a
(30:35):
little after midnight when two cops who were just sitting
in their patrol car saw a man sprinting down the
street in the dark. At first, they assumed the man
leaving Everett Bixby's yard was a burglar and they were
going to chase him, But just as the man disappeared
into a nearby wooded area, the bomb went off. A
(30:57):
description of the man they'd seen went out over the radio,
and officers spotted him less than a mile away at
a phone booth. He was filthy and soaking wet, as
if he'd perhaps run in the dark through the thick
underbrush of the wooded area the bomber disappeared into. He
also had explosive residue embedded in burnmarks on his shoes.
(31:21):
Police found him in a phone booth less than a
mile away from the Bixby's house, and they found his
car a mile in the other direction, parked outside of
a friend's house. That friend happened to be a man
named Louis Venios, a mafia associate who was due in
court the following morning to face a federal mail fraud charge.
(31:43):
Frank's story just kept changing, and honestly, none of the
stories were very good. On the night of his arrest,
he explained to the police that he's a prize fight
trainer and he's just out doing some roadwork, which is
apparently what boxers call r at three am in a
(32:03):
town where he doesn't live, and they found him at
the phone booth because while he was out running, he
had this sudden thought that he needed to make a
phone call to a friend again at three am. By
the time he got to trial, he'd come up with
what I guess he thought was a better story. He
(32:23):
said that he couldn't have bombed the Bixby's house at
twelve forty five am because he was at a bar
with his friend Louis Venios from midnight and till around
one am, and then after the bar they stopped back
off at his apartment because he needed to wring out
some wet laundry and that's why he was all wet.
(32:46):
And then after he got all wet at his apartment,
he didn't change his clothes. He got into his car
and drove Louis Venios home to Wuburn, and then he
left his car at Venios's house because he needed to
borrow it, and when police found him in the phone booth,
he was just calling his wife to come pick him
up again at three am. I don't think he could
(33:11):
make up a worse series of lies if he tried, right,
Because if he and Venios were at his apartment and
Venios needed to both go home to Woburn and borrow
Frank's car, why wouldn't Venios just drive himself home in
Frank's car and Frank would just stay at his apartment.
(33:35):
And if he had to be the one to drive,
but his wife was able to come pick him up,
why didn't she just follow him? Why didn't he tell
her before he left the apartment. If he hadn't to
call his wife, why didn't he call from Benios's house?
Doesn't he have a phone? Why would you walk a
mile in the dark at three am to call your
(33:55):
wife from a payphone. I just don't understand why he
thought we would believe that he needed to walk a
mile in the dark at three am to call his
wife to come pick him up from the fakes sounding
errand anyone has ever made up And at trial they
didn't even put Louis Venios on the stand to corroborate
the alibi. I just can't get over. Oh, I had
(34:19):
to go home and wring out my wet laundry in
between drinking at the bar and driving my friend home
and then walking around in the dark, And that's why
my shoes are all wet. I mean, got at that
point just say you pissed on your own shoes. At
least people might believe it. Reading between the lines and
the appellate record in this case, it sounds like everyone
(34:43):
in the courtroom knew that the Boston Police officer the
defense put on the stand was lying. Joseph Sachs. Remember
he's the lawyer who, according to the jury who acquitted him,
was not at this time, seven years into a decade
law international heroin smuggling operation for the mafia. Sachs put
(35:04):
Boston patrolman John O'Neil on the stand to testify that
he knew Frank Smith and Louis Venios and he remembered
seeing them at the bar at the time of the bombing.
The jury found Frank Smith guilty of the bombing, and
he was given a sentence of fifteen to eighteen years
in prison. Based on the admittedly limited information that we have,
(35:29):
it seems very possible that Everett Bixby wasn't the intended
target of this bombing. He was a funeral director with
no known ties to organized crime. He was the chairman
of the Woburn Licensing Board, so I guess it's possible
that there was a dispute over a liquor license. But
(35:52):
in nineteen fifty seven, the city of Wooburn only issued
liquor licenses to stores that sell liquor. In Massachusetts, they
call them package stores, and a local newspaper that year
said that the city of Wooburn had plenty of package stores,
but they didn't actually have any bars, and Bixby told
(36:14):
the newspaper that no one had even applied for a
liquor license lately. There was nothing for there to be
a dispute over it. Kind of looks like Frank got
the wrong house. I saw a few news stories that
made vague mention of the fact that the Bixby's lived
pretty close by to several known gangland figures. That's all
(36:38):
it ever, really says, just several known figures in this world,
they're never named. Look is it possible to cross reference
seventy year old property records with the names of known
mafia associates in the Boston suburbs. Look? I thought about it,
and I think I probably could do it if I
(37:01):
had an extra day this week?
Speaker 3 (37:03):
Did I? No?
Speaker 2 (37:06):
I had to file my taxes this week. It's October,
I know, but I was getting married in the spring,
so I was like kind of busy. So I got
an extension. So they're like, actually do now. So that's
what I did this week instead of finding out which
patriarch of crime family associates might have been ever at
Bixby's neighbor in wober, Massachusetts. In nineteen fifty seven. So
(37:30):
I'm sorry, but I think the fact that Frank Smith
had parked his car at Louis Venios's house and Venios
was due in federal court the very next morning, I
think that does imply the possibility of a relationship between
these things, you know. And finally, at the end of
(37:54):
nineteen fifty seven, Frank Smith went to prison on some
time in jail after his prior arrests when he couldn't
make bail. But this was the real thing. He's guilty
of a felony now, and he's staring down the barrel
of fifteen years. He didn't end up serving his whole sentence.
(38:17):
He was released in November of nineteen sixty four. And
while he was in prison, he got his hands on
some interesting reading material. Someone had been sending him copies
of the Rockwell Report.
Speaker 3 (38:34):
The first week in January of nineteen sixty five, I
went to Rolington, Virginia, Tom Command of Rockwell. I'd heard
about him, I'd read some of the things about him,
and I'd read some of his rock Werry reports, and
we were akin in our thanking.
Speaker 2 (38:56):
Just weeks after he got out of prison, Frank Smith
drove from Massa chooseys to Virginia to meet the man
whose newsletter he'd been reading in prison. He spent the
nineteen fifties robbing banks and bombing houses for the Mob.
He must have spent those seven years behind bars planning
his next big move, because he really didn't hesitate to
(39:16):
start taking big swings when he got out. Immediately upon
his return from the Nazi Party headquarters, Frank Smith had
a face to face meeting with Raymond Patriarca, the head
of the New England Mafia. Frank wanted to cut Patriarca
in on a deal, a mutually beneficial arrangement between the
(39:39):
mafia and the Nazis. You'll have to wait until next
week to find out how Frank ended up full of
bullet holes in the midst of a gang war, and
why Frank's name is on the birth certificate for George
Lincoln Rockwell's i legitimate daughter. And maybe by next week
Kull have made some more progress trying to sort out
(39:59):
exactly what to make of the fact that a Nazi
in his fake church show up in the financial record.
It's a corrupt mayor who went to prison for racketeering.
Weird little Guys is a production of cool Zone Media
and iHeartRadio. It's researched, written and recorded by Me Molly Conger.
Our executive producers are Sophie Littman and Robert Evans. The
(40:20):
show is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gaigan. The
theme music was composed by Brad Dickert. You can email
me at Weird Little Guy's podcast at gmail dot com.
I will definitely read it, but I probably won't answer.
It's nothing personal. You can exchange conspiracy theories about the
show with other listeners on me Weird Little Guy subreddit.
Just don't post anything that's going to make you one
(40:41):
of my weird Little Guys.
Host
Molly Conger
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