October 23, 2025 • 45 mins
When Frank Smith got out of prison in 1964, he went right back to working for the New England mafia. He also joined the American Nazi Party. And he had a dream that the two organizations could work together.
Sources:
https://newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/the-boston-irish-gang-wars-terrify-a-city/
https://www.nytimes.com/1965/11/04/archives/the-boston-gang-war-a-deadly-web-of-revenge.html
https://mattofboston.com/boston-gang-wars-the-first-irish-gang-war-mclaughlin-v-mclean-introduction/
https://jimcrowmuseum.ferris.edu/pdfs-docs/origins/ms-littest55.pdf
https://idahopotato.com/dr-potato/length-and-circumference-of-a-potato
https://utia.tennessee.edu/cpa/wp-content/uploads/sites/106/2020/10/CPA-222.pdf
Simonelli, Frederick J. (1999). American Fuehrer: George Lincoln Rockwell and the American Nazi Party. Urbana: University of Illinois Press
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Col Zone Media. Just after midnight on March fifteenth, nineteen
sixty five, Frank Smith was dropping off his girlfriend after
a night out in Boston. The pair were sitting in
his car outside of her apartment when two men emerged
from the shadows. They walked up to the driver's side window, and,
(00:25):
without saying a word, fired eight times into the car.
Marilyn Marx was miraculously unhurt, and she ran for help.
Frank was not so lucky. He'd been hit five times
in the neck, chest, and shoulder. His glasses were shattered
in the attack, sending shards of glass into his one
(00:49):
good eye. When the Monday morning edition of The Boston
Globe came off the presses a few hours later, it
was reported that he'd been rushed into emergency surgery overnight
to save his life, and he was now headed back
into the operating room where surgeons would attempt to save
his eyesight. When he woke up in the hospital that afternoon,
(01:10):
the chief of the Somerville Police Department was waiting outside
his room with a warrant for his arrest. They'd found
a loaded revolver with one bullet missing in the back
seat of his car. Something he wasn't supposed to have.
Just five months after his release from prison for blowing
up a man's house, he told police he had no
(01:30):
idea who would want to shoot him, saying only I've
been a good boy since I got out, and then
he hummed a tune as he ignored their follow up questions.
His girl friend, the same woman who'd provided his alibi
on the night of that bombing in nineteen fifty seven,
refused to even look at photos of possible suspects in
(01:51):
this shooting, telling police she hadn't seen a thing. The
discovery of Nazi books in PAMs in his car raised
the possibility that the shooting had something to do with
Frank's membership in the American Nazi Party, and they even
sent a detective down to Virginia to question George Lincoln
Rockwell about their relationship. The more likely explanation, though, was
(02:16):
that the shooting had been part of the ongoing gang
wars in Boston, and one detective speculated to the press
that perhaps it was retaliation from the intended target of
Frank's bosched bombing in nineteen fifty seven. The FBI doesn't
seem to have volunteered that they already had a pretty
(02:36):
good idea why Frank Smith got shot. He just wasn't
important enough to anyone for them to be willing to
jeopardize their ongoing illegal wire tap on the head of
the patriarchal crime family. I'm Molly Conger and this was
(02:58):
more little guys. When we left off last week, Frank
Smith was on his way to prison. He was, by
(03:22):
his own account, a boxing promoter. That's what he always
told the police when he was getting booked into some
jail or another anyway, and he's spent much of the
nineteen fifties doing just that. He was arrested for bank
robbery at least twice, he was accused of murder for
hire and the daylight shooting of an attorney in New
York City, and by the time he was convicted for
(03:44):
bombing a home in the Boston suburbs in nineteen fifty seven,
police strongly suspected that he'd been behind a string of
similar bombings. The common thread connecting all of the crimes
Frank Smith was believed to have been involved in was
organized crime. He managed to wiggle his way out of
(04:05):
a surprising number of criminal charges, but at the end
of nineteen fifty seven, he was sentenced to fifteen years
in prison, and he'd serve seven of those before he
was paroled in November of nineteen sixty four. After his release,
Frank went to live with his sister in Tewkesbury, Massachusetts.
(04:25):
He spent the holidays with family, but then it was
time to get back to business. He wanted to meet
the man whose Nazi newsletters he'd been reading in prison.
In the first few days of the new year in
nineteen sixty five, he drove down to Arlington, Virginia to
meet George Lincoln Rockwell. He'd had a lot of time
(04:46):
to think over the past couple of years, and he
had a proposition for the commander of the American Nazi Party.
He arrived in Arlington on January third, and he was
invited to accompany Rockwell and his storm Troopers to Washington,
d c. The following morning, where he would witness one
of Rockwell's more outrageous publicity stunts. Most of the Stormtroopers
(05:10):
who usually hung around the Nazi Party barracks had gone
home to see their families for the holidays, so there
wasn't much of an entourage for this trip. It looks
like it was just Rockwell, John Patler, Robert Lloyd, and
Frank Rockwell was no stranger to pulling some ugly little
(05:30):
stunt for attention. He'd done it in Washington, d C.
So many times that most of the police officers at
the Capitol knew him by sight, with or without a
Nazi entourage. But this one in January of nineteen sixty
five is particularly egregious. January fourth, nineteen sixty five, was
(05:54):
the first day of the congressional session, the day new
members of Congress are sworn in. The Mississippi Democratic Freedom
Party had announced ahead of time that they intended to
challenge the seating of the all white delegation from Mississippi
because the state had unconstitutionally disenfranchised black voters. Just to
(06:15):
sort of position us in history here. The Voting Rights
Act wasn't signed until later in nineteen sixty five, so
in nineteen sixty four, the year these white congressmen were
elected in Mississippi, the state still levied a poll tax
and used literacy tests to selectively deny people the right
to vote. As I was writing this, I thought to
(06:40):
actually try to find a copy of a literacy test
One that was actually in use in Mississippi in the
nineteen sixties. I mean, I understand the concept. I learned
about it in school, and it doesn't really matter in
the end what the questions were, because it's unfair and
(07:02):
unconstitutional for it to exist at all. And even if
you've got all the questions right, the klansmen at the
registrar's office could just say you didn't. But I found one,
and honestly, I was kind of surprised. I think most
people would struggle with this. The test I found required
(07:25):
the voter to copy down a section of the state constitution,
followed by the instruction to quote, write in the space
below a reasonable interpretation of the section of the Mississippi
State Constitution which you have just copied. The next question
asks the voter to write in the space below a
(07:45):
statement setting forth your understanding of the duties and obligations
of citizenship under a constitutional form of government. And there's
not really very much room to write anything at all.
And then, of course to even get to the polls
on election day to then be subjected to an illegal
(08:05):
tax and an unconstitutional written exam. You had to register
to vote in the summer of nineteen sixty four. In
the lead up to this contested election, James Cheney, Andrew Goodman,
and Michael Schwerner were brutally murdered by a gang of
(08:25):
klansmen that included the local sheriff and his deputies. The
cops and the clan beat shot and mutilated those men
to stop them from registering black voters in Mississippi. So
(08:46):
the surface level narrative of what happened on January fourth,
nineteen sixty five is a group of black women showed
up at the capitol to say that these white men
weren't elected legitimately, and I don't think that does it justice.
There was no free and fair election in Mississippi in
nineteen sixty four. In August of nineteen sixty four, not
(09:11):
two months after those murders, members of the Mississippi Democratic
Freedom Party held their own state convention to elect delegates
to send to the Democratic National Convention, And when they
got to the DNC, the Democratic Party challenged their credentials.
They didn't refuse outright to seat the delegation, but a
(09:33):
hearing was held before the credentials committee, and at this
televised hearing, Fanny lou Hamer testified about her own struggle
to register to vote in Mississippi and the violence she'd
faced trying to register other black voters. She'd been forced
to take literacy tests, she was retaliated against by the
(09:54):
plantation owner whose land she worked as a sharecropper. She
was threatened, asked, and shot at, and during this hearing,
her voice is strong and clear as she testified about
the four days she spent in a Mississippi jail where
she was beaten almost to death. She did not falter
(10:18):
as she described listening helplessly to the screams of a
fifteen year old girl who'd been stripped naked and was
being beaten in an adjacent cell. She sat in front
of that committee, in front of this nation, and described
the way those white police officers had groped her during
those beatings, and her voice was still strong even as
(10:43):
the tears ran down her face when she concluded her
remarks with this question, I.
Speaker 2 (10:52):
Question, Americans, it's this American, the line of the free
in the home of the brain.
Speaker 3 (11:00):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (11:00):
We have to sleep with our telephones out for the hook,
because our lives we threatened daily, because we want to live.
It did some human beings in America thank you.
Speaker 1 (11:22):
President Johnson called an emergency press conference while she was speaking,
not to announce that he was doing something about this
absolute outrage in Mississippi, but because he feared the impact
her words would have on the nation, and a presidential
press conference would preempt anything else that was on TV.
(11:46):
Most accounts of President Johnson's thought process here is that
he was between a rock and a hard place. He
had only just signed the Civil Rights Act. He knew
damn well that Mississippi was flouting that law, but he
couldn't afford to risk Southern states walking out of the
(12:07):
convention and losing Southern support in the upcoming presidential election.
So he proposed an ugly, half assed, insulting compromise two
of the group's sixty four delegates could be seated. They
(12:28):
responded by saying, all sixty four of them spent way
too long on that bus from Mississippi for only two
of them to get seats. If they couldn't run as
Democrats in Mississippi, they would run as independents. But Mississippi
Democratic Freedom Party candidates Fannie lou Hamer, Victoria Gray, and
Annie Divine were all denied ballot access In the nineteen
(12:49):
sixty four election. So when Congress convened in January of
nineteen sixty five, they planned to be present in person
to make their case to Congress that they were the
rightful representatives of the people of Mississippi, and George Lincoln
Rockwell planned to be there too. Those three black women
(13:15):
from Mississippi were not even allowed to enter the Capitol Building,
let alone the House chambers. They were stopped at the
door by the chief of the Capitol Police. They left
quietly and stood outside with their hundreds of supporters who
were lining the sidewalks. But for some reason, this crack
(13:36):
security team at the Capitol Building couldn't explain how somebody
else did manage to get inside. During the roll call
vote for the election of the Speaker of the House,
a man in blackface, a rumpled top hat, a furry loincloth,
(13:57):
and no pants came crashing onto the House floor, pushing
Congressman out of his way as he sprinted to the
center of the room. And he was shouting something that
I don't care to repeat in the way that he
said it. What he was saying was I'm the Mississippi
delegation and I want to be seated, But he was
(14:20):
using an extremely exaggerated affect that was meant to mock
black Southern vernacular. As the police dragged him from the
Congressional chambers, he yelled, long Live Rockwell. It should have
been impossible for Robert Lloyd to gain entry into the
(14:41):
Capitol Building on January fourth, nineteen sixty five, the President
was about to arrive to address Congress. Security at that
building was as tight as the United States Government can
get it, but somehow a Nazi in blackface with no
pay hands on managed to make it past multiple lock
(15:03):
doors and entrances guarded by police officers. He was charged
only with disorderly conduct, and he was released that same
day on a twenty dollars bond. This was Frank Smith's
introduction to the American Nazi Party, and he loved it.
Speaker 3 (15:27):
I got a kick out of this. Now this is
becoming very interesting, his first meeting with the commander. I
had met Aim the night before and talked briefly with him,
But now this little escape very interesting, and I had
the chuck away.
Speaker 1 (15:43):
The stunt had been fun and exciting, and Rockwell's cool
demeanor throughout had really impressed him. But this wasn't why
he drove all the way down to Virginia from Massachusetts.
He was really only on this racist field trip to
the capitol. By coincidence, he'd come down to Virginia to
(16:07):
talk business.
Speaker 3 (16:11):
Well, we did have the night before this demonstration. We
had a lengthy discussion. We talked with various topics. One
of them was the need for a church. The Muslims
were creating a successful movement on the black strictly the
(16:31):
black separate from the white, and they had their church,
and there was a need because of the integration of
schools and something. There seemed to be a need for
the whites for a church that could be farmed where
the whites could Because of religious.
Speaker 1 (16:49):
Conviction back in the nineteen fifties, around the time he
managed to escape conviction for those two separate bank robberies,
Frank Smith bought some land. He bought a lot of land. Actually,
he bought close to six hundred acres of mostly undeveloped
(17:12):
land in a small town in coastal Maine. Now six
hundred acres sounds big, and it is, but I don't
actually know how big because I don't totally know what
an acre is. So if you're in the same boat,
you're not alone. A football field minus the end zones
(17:35):
is just a little bit more than one acre, and
one square mile is six hundred and forty acres, So
he's got five hundred and fifty football fields, or about
ninety four percent of a square mile, If that helps.
(17:55):
I tried to find some examples that will be easier
for me to visualize, but one of the top Google
results for this is an article that had to have
been written by AI. It helpfully offers examples like ten
acres is fifteen eight hundred and forty potatoes, potatoes in
what direction? I think this is a garbled regurgitation of
(18:19):
an old meme claiming that one five hundred eighty four
potatoes lined up end to end would span the width
of one acre. But this claim requires you to believe
that the average potato is five inches long, and according
to doctor Potato, the cartoon scientist mascot on the Q
and a section of the Idaho Potato Commission's website, there
(18:42):
is no standard measurement for any potato. Anyway, if you're
an American trying to imagine what six hundred acres looks like,
just visualize a parking lot with room for ninety thousand cars.
This one's not actually AI. I found a paper written
by the director of the Center for Profitable Agriculture at
(19:04):
the University of Tennessee's Institute of Agriculture, So this one's real.
There's math either way. That's a lot of land for
a guy who's never had a legitimate form of income.
I guess robbing banks leaves you with a lot of
cash and you have to offload it somewhere, and buying
(19:24):
land isn't the worst idea. So he's been sitting on
six hundred acres of undeveloped land up in Maine for
a decade already, and in January of nineteen sixty five,
Frank Smith proposed to George Lincoln Rockwell that they could
use this property that he had up in Maine as
(19:46):
the home base for a church, a new religion that
he envisioned as a sort of whites only Nazi version
I guess of the Nation of Islam. I think that's
what he's describing. It would provide them with some kind
of institutional legitimacy to do things like fight school integration.
(20:11):
And it's easy to imagine that this is probably very cynical,
but I'm always saying, you can't know what's in a
man's heart. Maybe he does have some kind of hideous,
warped religious conviction. He doesn't. He helpfully explained the whole
idea in an interview he did with a reporter in
(20:33):
nineteen sixty eight. He wasn't bothering with any kind of complicated,
reverse engineered religious justification for racism. He just wanted to
take advantage of the legal and social benefits of being
a church by making racism itself his religion.
Speaker 3 (20:55):
And I want to say religion. We're not talking about
DoD mare any particular creed, but it depends on your
interpretation of the word religion. But a trech that one
of the beliefs of the tresch would be that you
would have to be of the right race. And then
other than that, we were keeping it open.
Speaker 1 (21:21):
I couldn't find any primary source documentation that sheds light
on how Rockwell responded to Frank's proposal specifically, but there
is a lot of evidence that this is something Rockwell
had been thinking about for years. Rockwell was not religious
at all, but he'd been toying with the idea of
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using Christianity as a sort of front for the movement
since the late fifties. In the early sixties, he met
Richard Butler, the man whose passion for this warped Nazi
religion of Christian identity led him to found the Aryan Nations,
although that came later. And around that same time, in
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the early nineteen sixties, Rockwell was corresponding with a friend
of his, a German Nazi named Bruno Ludke. Didke had
recently translated Rockwell's memoir into German, and he suggested that
Rockwell should rewrite some of the passages to tone down
the anti Christian rhetoric a little bit. Not because he
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was offended by that, absolutely not. Both men shared the
belief that Christianity was Jewish and communist. Jesus was, after
all a Jewish man, and if your worldview centers around
destroying your enemies and exterminating the weak, it's hard to
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get much out of the Gospels. In their private correspondence,
they agreed that Christianity was merely a useful rapper. There
would be no Christ in this Christian Church, just a
man trying to, as Lutka put it, speak with the
political authority of the feurior and the moral authority of
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the Pope. In their letters, Rockwell was very open about
his intentions. His commitment to Hitler was his only religion.
But Americans, with their quote peanut brains, would be lured
in by this set dressing of Christianity. In correspondence with
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British Nazi Colin Jordan, he argued that there is a
clear tactical advantage deciding with Christians on political matters like
prayer in school. You don't have to mean it for
it to be an effective recruitment and propaganda tool. By
nineteen sixty four, Rockwell had a close working relationship with
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Wesley Swift, the father of the Christian Identity movement. He
wouldn't live to see it come to fruition, but the
groundwork he laid in the years before his death paved
the way for this complete fusion of Christian identity theology
and militant neo Nazi activism. So forming a Nazi church
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is something he'd already been thinking about for a decade
when Frank Smith approached him in nineteen sixty five. And
I have to believe Frank knew that right. I don't
know how he would have known it, but it's a
strange thing to say to someone if you didn't know
they were already consisted it. I couldn't track down anything
(25:03):
concrete that would point to who would have made that introduction.
Though after his meeting with Rockwell, Frank drove back to
New England, news of his trip to Virginia got home
before he did. On January fourth, the day after Frank
arrived at the American Nazi Party barracks in Virginia, the
(25:25):
head of the New England mafia already knew about it,
and so did j Edgar Hoover. The illegal recording device
the FBI had installed in Raymond Patriarca's office in nineteen
sixty two recorded several conversations that day. There was some
idle chat about some recent hits, some vague talk about
(25:48):
a stolen diamond, and on the topic of Frank Smith.
Patriarca was told that Frank had gone down to Virginia
to visit George Lincoln Rockwell, having become an avowed follow
while he was in prison. A few days later, on
January seventh, Frank Smith arrived in Providence, Rhode Island, for
(26:08):
a face to face meeting with Raymond Patriarca. Later that evening.
A memo was sent directly to j Edgar Hoover summarizing
the recordings of the conversation in Patriarca's office that day,
and it says that Frank's primary reason for making contact
with Patriarca that day was to get his blessing to
do a little loan sharking. He's fresh out of prison
(26:32):
and trying to get back to work. Patriarca gave him
permission to put a few thousand dollars out on the
street in Boston, as long as it didn't interfere with
any existing business. But with that out of the way,
Frank kept talking. He's the one who brought up George
Lincoln Rockwell, telling the mob boss that they were close associates,
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and that does end up being true in the future.
But when he's saying this on a Thursday, he just
met Rockwell for the first time on Sunday. And then
he rambles for a little bit about how the army
has too many black people in it and if black
people outnumber white people in the army, they'll take over
(27:18):
the country. He doesn't say black people, he uses different words,
and he told Patriarca that he just returned from a
visit to the Nazi Party headquarters, and the memo is
just a narrative. It's not actually a transcription of the recording,
but it says he described the physical layout of the property,
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including how many stormtroopers were there and how they were dressed.
He shares his upcoming travel plans, which includes trips to
Dallas and Los Angeles to meet with more members of
the American Nazi Party, and then he let Patriarca in
on his big plan. He wanted to pour a bunch
of money into Rockwell's operation, and the best way to
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do that without causing any legal or tax issues for
anyone involved, would be to make a Nazi church on
that land he has up in Maine. At some point
during the meeting, he shows off his machine gun to
one of the underbosses who's also there, and he says
the church would be called the White Church of America
(28:26):
of Maine. He also told Patriarca that Rockwell is planning
to run for governor of Virginia in the election later
that year. Later in this same memo, there's a brief
mention that Frank told Patriarca that once the Nazis are
established in New England. Presumably at this Nazi church in Maine,
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they'll be in a good position to infiltrate Massachusetts when
Ed Brooke runs for governor. Edbrooke never ran for governor
of Massage Chosets, but he did become the first black
Senator since reconstruction when he was elected to the US
Senate in nineteen sixty six. In nineteen sixty five, though
(29:11):
he was the Massachusetts state Attorney General, and as Attorney General,
he had opened an investigation into the Massachusetts State Racing Commission.
The Racing Commission allocates what are called racing days. There's
only a certain number of days per year where horse
(29:31):
racing can occur and bets can be placed, so the
Racing Commission decides which tracks have horse races on which days.
Shortly after he took office in nineteen sixty three, Brooke
opened an investigation into this allocation process, the process generally,
but specifically at this significant number of extra days that
(29:55):
had been allocated to the Hancock Raceway. This this happened to
be a racetrack that Raymond Patriarca had a significant financial
interest in. George Lincoln Rockwell had a special hatred for
Ed Brooke too. His name actually comes up more than
a few times in issues of the Rockwell Report, and
(30:16):
it's always very nasty. Not because Rockwell also had a
financial interest in horse racing in Massachusetts. Not as far
as I know, he just hated black people. So Frank's
mention of Brooke in this memo is very brief, and
it kind of feels out of place in the conversation.
(30:38):
There's no explanation provided in the memo. You're just supposed
to know what that means. But I think in this
broader context, it feels like a heavy implication. Right, if
we do business with the Nazis, we all win. If
we invest in bringing Nazis to New England, if we
(31:01):
pay to put them up in Maine, it'll be around.
It'll be available to do something about the possibility of
a black governor. The memo doesn't include any mention of
Patriarchra's response to any of this if he had won.
But Frank had his permission to get back to loan sharking,
(31:23):
so he went back home to Boston happy in January
of nineteen sixty five. A lot had changed while Frank
was away. The world moved on without him, while he
was sitting in prison in Walpole, Massachusetts from nineteen fifty
seven until the end of nineteen sixty four. The Soviets
(31:43):
launched a dog into outer space. Catholics got a new Pope,
Alaska and Hawaii became states.
Speaker 3 (31:51):
John F.
Speaker 1 (31:51):
Kennedy was elected president. There was another new Pope. JFK
was assassinated. The Beatles put out their first record, The
Berlin Wall went up, the Civil Rights Act was signed
to The war in Vietnam was really heating up. I mean,
it was a busy couple of years for the world,
and I don't know how much Frank cared about any
of that. But when he got home to Boston in
(32:13):
November of nineteen sixty four, he found himself in the
middle of a different kind of war. He was released
from prison during the bloodiest year of the First Boston
Gang War. I don't know a lot about the mafia.
Like I said last week, that's a totally different kind
(32:34):
of horrible guy than the ones I'm usually looking at.
But now that I've spent the better part of a
week squinting at grainy photo copies of Raymond Patriarca's eight
thousand page FBI file, I guess there are certain similarities
between the mafia and a Nazi group. You know, it's
(32:55):
a group of violent men who only barely get along
in pursuit of their s goals. There's constant splintering and
infighting and jockeying for power and shifting alliances. There's heavy
infiltration by the FBI. Half the gang is snitching, whether
for fun or for profit. I can see how a
man who has long been at home in one of
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those worlds wouldn't have much trouble stepping into the other.
The details of the stories are obviously quite different. When
I'm reading old FBI memos about a guy whose life
story I know half by heart, I can fill in
a lot of the blanks based on context. When every
(33:39):
other line is half redacted. That doesn't work as well.
When I'm waiting into new territory. I don't know what's
behind those reactions, so I'm working with more blanks than usual.
So for this part of the story, I relied much
more heavily than I normally would on secondary sources, rather
(34:00):
than trying to become enough of an expert on something
outside my wheelhouse that I can analyze and decipher These
primary sources in the way that I'm comfortable with. To
get my bearings on the Gang War. I read a
summary written by the New England Historical Society, and some
more detailed write ups on a blog written by Matthew Connolly,
(34:20):
a retired attorney in Massachusetts who's been writing about the
history of Boston organized crime for more than a decade.
I also read some interesting congressional testimony about the FBI's
role in all of this, and part of a hitman's memoir,
but it wasn't very good. I did read as much
as I physically could of that eight thousand page FBI
(34:43):
file on New England mob boss Raymond Patriarcha. But I
just want to say how grateful I am to an
outlet called go Local in Providence, Rhode Island. They not
only successfully secured the release of that file from the FBI,
digitized the entire thing, and then spent more than a
(35:04):
year writing about it. So many outlets hoard their primary
source documents and force you to rely on their analysis
without letting you look at them. So I just love
to see a reporter making their documents available to the public.
So with that out of the way, the Gang War
(35:40):
in nineteen sixty the Irish gangs in the Boston area
more or less coexisted pretty amicably. There was the winter
Hill Gang in Somerville led by Buddy McLean, and the
McLaughlin Gang in the Charlestown neighborhood of Boston, led by
brothers Bernie Georgie and Punchy McLaughlin. They both had their
(36:01):
own territories and their own operations. They did a little
loan sharking, a little bookmaking the occasional druck high jacking
the usual, and both of these Irish gangs paid tribute
to the same Italian mafia family. Raymond Patriarca head of
the Patriarcha crime family out of Rhode Island, had agreements
(36:23):
with the New York families that everything east of the
Connecticut River was Patriarcha territory. The Genevesees could keep Hartford,
Connecticut and Springfield, Massachusetts, but he controlled Rhode Island, Maine,
and most of Massachusetts and Connecticut. In Boston, these Irish
(36:44):
gangs did a lot of the street level work. They
stayed out of each other's way, and they paid the
patriarchas for the privilege of doing crime in Boston. Until
Labor Day of nineteen sixty one. There are a lot
of vers of what happened here exactly, but they all
(37:04):
boil down to the same basic idea. Georgie McLachlin, a
member of the McLachlin Gang from Charlestown, disrespected somebody's girl.
Who's girl exactly varies in the retellings, but it's always
the girlfriend of a member of the Winter Hill Gang
from Somerville. The nature of the offense is different depending
(37:29):
on who you ask. Some versions just say he hit
on her and this led to an argument between the men.
A more elaborate version of the tale says Georgie McLaughlin
slapped this woman across the face after she refused his advances.
In one very weird version of this story, he bit
(37:51):
the woman. But I can't find any information that makes
that make any more sense. But in every version of
the story, Georgie McLaughlin got the shit kicked out of
him from making a pass at a woman who was
spoken for by a member of the other gang. While
(38:14):
Georgie was recovering in the hospital, his two brothers went
to Buddy McLean, head of the Winter Hill Gang, and
they asked him to turn over the names of the
men who'd put Georgie in the hospital, but he refused,
so they wired dynamite to the ignition switch on his
wife's car. The bomb was faulty and no one got hurt,
(38:38):
but now everybody's pretty upset. So Buddy mc lean responded
to this attempted assassination by murdering Bernie McLaughlin, Georgie's older brother.
And just as a strange little side note here, when
Buddy mc lean shot Bernie McLaughlin, he had a getaway driver,
(39:00):
a man named Alexander Petrocone. Both men were arrested for
this murder. I mean it happened in broad daylight in
front of a ton of witnesses, but when they got
the case in front of a grand jury, he couldn't
get an indictment. Nobody wants to testify in the middle
of a gang war. Once he was out, Petrocone saw
(39:23):
the writing on the wall. Things are getting too hot
here and the smart move is to get out of
town for good. So he did. He moved to California
and changed his name to alex Rocco. He signed up
for acting lessons with Leonard Nimoy and in nineteen seventy two,
(39:44):
he was cast in The Godfather for the role of
Moe Green, the Las Vegas casino owner. After the Winter
Hill Boys murdered one of the McLoughlin brothers in the
fall of nineteen sixty one, things spiraled out of control.
What started out is a moment of drunken rudeness at
(40:05):
a Labor Day beach party had escalated into a full
blown war that lasted years and killed dozens of people,
some of them in horrific ways. I don't think Raymond
Patriarca particularly cared if a bunch of irishmen in Boston
(40:25):
killed each other, but it was bad for business. Both
of these gangs had been working for and paying him,
but now they're too busy fighting each other to do
either of those things. It was hurting revenue, and it
was attracting a lot of unwonted attention from law enforcement.
(40:49):
The killing started in the fall of nineteen sixty one
and between March of sixty four in January of sixty
five alone. In that nine month period, there were at
least eighteen successful hits in Boston. An FBI memo dated
January twenty sixth, nineteen sixty five describes a conversation that
(41:11):
took place in Patriarca's office about the escalation of violence
in recent months. People were scared, they were staying off
the streets, and guys who aren't out on the streets
aren't collecting payments. This conversation was recorded just a day
after someone shot Joe Francone in the head inside of
(41:33):
his own apartment. Patriarcha said, if the killings don't stop,
I'll declare martial law. Six weeks later, on March tenth,
nineteen sixty five, Frank Smith was back in Providence to
meet with Patriarca again. This time he was looking for
permission to run a gambling operation out of the back
(41:55):
of a restaurant in East Boston. Patriarcha and give him
a final answer on the matter, but he said he'd
make a decision after he'd talked to one of his
guys in Boston. But again, you know, while he's here,
while he's got the boss's ear, Frank starts talking and
he's going on about Rockwell again. He's ranting about the
(42:17):
Jews and about black people, and he says that this
plan to open a Nazi church in Maine is starting
to move forward, and it'll be a good, clean way
to fund the American Nazi Party. He's optimistic about Rockwell's
chances of winning the upcoming election for governor in Virginia,
and he tells Patriarca that if Rockwell does win, he's
(42:40):
already promised Frank that he can run all the illegal
activity down in the Norfolk, Virginia area, and of course
Frank's willing to cut Patriarca in on that in exchange
for a little assistance. Maybe Raymond Patriarca really did intend
to talk to the guy who ran the gambling in
(43:01):
East Boston before he gave Frank a yes or no answer,
Or maybe he didn't think Frank's craps games in the
back of a restaurant was going to be anybody's problem anymore.
In memos dated just days before Frank shows up in
Providence in March, Patriarca tells close associates that he's frustrated
(43:23):
with Frank. Frank talks too much, Frank moves too fast,
and he's out of line. The week before Frank Smith
got shot, an FBI memo describes Raymond Patriarcha as enraged
when he found out that hit in January had been
(43:44):
done on Frank's orders. The wiretap then recorded him making
arrangements to meet with Jimmy Flemy and Joe Barboza later
in the garage. Whatever it was that he had to
say to two of the most prolific murderers on his payroll,
(44:06):
he didn't say it near that FBI microphone. Next week,
we'll talk about the two years Frank Smith spent as
George Lincoln Rockwell's best friend, the woman half his age
he married after meeting her in a Nazi campaign office,
the brief tragic life of Rockwell's Secret Baby, and more
(44:27):
than a decade after Rockwell's death, Frank finally gets around
to starting that fake church. Weird Little Guys as a
(44:49):
production of Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio. It's researched, written
and recorded by me Wiley Conger. Our executive producers are
Sophie Lichtermann and Robert Evans. The show is edited by
I Think Wildly Talented where he Ga. The theme music
was composed by Brad Dickert. You can email me at
Weird Little Guys Podcast at gmail dot com. I will
definitely read it, but I probably won't answer it. It's
nothing personal. You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show
(45:11):
with other listeners only Weird Little Guys sub reddit. Just
don't post anything you wouldn't say into the FBI wiretap
Col Zone Media. Just after midnight on March fifteenth, nineteen
sixty five, Frank Smith was dropping off his girlfriend after
a night out in Boston. The pair were sitting in
his car outside of her apartment when two men emerged
from the shadows. They walked up to the driver's side window, and,
(00:25):
without saying a word, fired eight times into the car.
Marilyn Marx was miraculously unhurt, and she ran for help.
Frank was not so lucky. He'd been hit five times
in the neck, chest, and shoulder. His glasses were shattered
in the attack, sending shards of glass into his one
(00:49):
good eye. When the Monday morning edition of The Boston
Globe came off the presses a few hours later, it
was reported that he'd been rushed into emergency surgery overnight
to save his life, and he was now headed back
into the operating room where surgeons would attempt to save
his eyesight. When he woke up in the hospital that afternoon,
(01:10):
the chief of the Somerville Police Department was waiting outside
his room with a warrant for his arrest. They'd found
a loaded revolver with one bullet missing in the back
seat of his car. Something he wasn't supposed to have.
Just five months after his release from prison for blowing
up a man's house, he told police he had no
(01:30):
idea who would want to shoot him, saying only I've
been a good boy since I got out, and then
he hummed a tune as he ignored their follow up questions.
His girl friend, the same woman who'd provided his alibi
on the night of that bombing in nineteen fifty seven,
refused to even look at photos of possible suspects in
(01:51):
this shooting, telling police she hadn't seen a thing. The
discovery of Nazi books in PAMs in his car raised
the possibility that the shooting had something to do with
Frank's membership in the American Nazi Party, and they even
sent a detective down to Virginia to question George Lincoln
Rockwell about their relationship. The more likely explanation, though, was
(02:16):
that the shooting had been part of the ongoing gang
wars in Boston, and one detective speculated to the press
that perhaps it was retaliation from the intended target of
Frank's bosched bombing in nineteen fifty seven. The FBI doesn't
seem to have volunteered that they already had a pretty
(02:36):
good idea why Frank Smith got shot. He just wasn't
important enough to anyone for them to be willing to
jeopardize their ongoing illegal wire tap on the head of
the patriarchal crime family. I'm Molly Conger and this was
(02:58):
more little guys. When we left off last week, Frank
Smith was on his way to prison. He was, by
(03:22):
his own account, a boxing promoter. That's what he always
told the police when he was getting booked into some
jail or another anyway, and he's spent much of the
nineteen fifties doing just that. He was arrested for bank
robbery at least twice, he was accused of murder for
hire and the daylight shooting of an attorney in New
York City, and by the time he was convicted for
(03:44):
bombing a home in the Boston suburbs in nineteen fifty seven,
police strongly suspected that he'd been behind a string of
similar bombings. The common thread connecting all of the crimes
Frank Smith was believed to have been involved in was
organized crime. He managed to wiggle his way out of
(04:05):
a surprising number of criminal charges, but at the end
of nineteen fifty seven, he was sentenced to fifteen years
in prison, and he'd serve seven of those before he
was paroled in November of nineteen sixty four. After his release,
Frank went to live with his sister in Tewkesbury, Massachusetts.
(04:25):
He spent the holidays with family, but then it was
time to get back to business. He wanted to meet
the man whose Nazi newsletters he'd been reading in prison.
In the first few days of the new year in
nineteen sixty five, he drove down to Arlington, Virginia to
meet George Lincoln Rockwell. He'd had a lot of time
(04:46):
to think over the past couple of years, and he
had a proposition for the commander of the American Nazi Party.
He arrived in Arlington on January third, and he was
invited to accompany Rockwell and his storm Troopers to Washington,
d c. The following morning, where he would witness one
of Rockwell's more outrageous publicity stunts. Most of the Stormtroopers
(05:10):
who usually hung around the Nazi Party barracks had gone
home to see their families for the holidays, so there
wasn't much of an entourage for this trip. It looks
like it was just Rockwell, John Patler, Robert Lloyd, and
Frank Rockwell was no stranger to pulling some ugly little
(05:30):
stunt for attention. He'd done it in Washington, d C.
So many times that most of the police officers at
the Capitol knew him by sight, with or without a
Nazi entourage. But this one in January of nineteen sixty
five is particularly egregious. January fourth, nineteen sixty five, was
(05:54):
the first day of the congressional session, the day new
members of Congress are sworn in. The Mississippi Democratic Freedom
Party had announced ahead of time that they intended to
challenge the seating of the all white delegation from Mississippi
because the state had unconstitutionally disenfranchised black voters. Just to
(06:15):
sort of position us in history here. The Voting Rights
Act wasn't signed until later in nineteen sixty five, so
in nineteen sixty four, the year these white congressmen were
elected in Mississippi, the state still levied a poll tax
and used literacy tests to selectively deny people the right
to vote. As I was writing this, I thought to
(06:40):
actually try to find a copy of a literacy test
One that was actually in use in Mississippi in the
nineteen sixties. I mean, I understand the concept. I learned
about it in school, and it doesn't really matter in
the end what the questions were, because it's unfair and
(07:02):
unconstitutional for it to exist at all. And even if
you've got all the questions right, the klansmen at the
registrar's office could just say you didn't. But I found one,
and honestly, I was kind of surprised. I think most
people would struggle with this. The test I found required
(07:25):
the voter to copy down a section of the state constitution,
followed by the instruction to quote, write in the space
below a reasonable interpretation of the section of the Mississippi
State Constitution which you have just copied. The next question
asks the voter to write in the space below a
(07:45):
statement setting forth your understanding of the duties and obligations
of citizenship under a constitutional form of government. And there's
not really very much room to write anything at all.
And then, of course to even get to the polls
on election day to then be subjected to an illegal
(08:05):
tax and an unconstitutional written exam. You had to register
to vote in the summer of nineteen sixty four. In
the lead up to this contested election, James Cheney, Andrew Goodman,
and Michael Schwerner were brutally murdered by a gang of
(08:25):
klansmen that included the local sheriff and his deputies. The
cops and the clan beat shot and mutilated those men
to stop them from registering black voters in Mississippi. So
(08:46):
the surface level narrative of what happened on January fourth,
nineteen sixty five is a group of black women showed
up at the capitol to say that these white men
weren't elected legitimately, and I don't think that does it justice.
There was no free and fair election in Mississippi in
nineteen sixty four. In August of nineteen sixty four, not
(09:11):
two months after those murders, members of the Mississippi Democratic
Freedom Party held their own state convention to elect delegates
to send to the Democratic National Convention, And when they
got to the DNC, the Democratic Party challenged their credentials.
They didn't refuse outright to seat the delegation, but a
(09:33):
hearing was held before the credentials committee, and at this
televised hearing, Fanny lou Hamer testified about her own struggle
to register to vote in Mississippi and the violence she'd
faced trying to register other black voters. She'd been forced
to take literacy tests, she was retaliated against by the
(09:54):
plantation owner whose land she worked as a sharecropper. She
was threatened, asked, and shot at, and during this hearing,
her voice is strong and clear as she testified about
the four days she spent in a Mississippi jail where
she was beaten almost to death. She did not falter
(10:18):
as she described listening helplessly to the screams of a
fifteen year old girl who'd been stripped naked and was
being beaten in an adjacent cell. She sat in front
of that committee, in front of this nation, and described
the way those white police officers had groped her during
those beatings, and her voice was still strong even as
(10:43):
the tears ran down her face when she concluded her
remarks with this question, I.
Speaker 2 (10:52):
Question, Americans, it's this American, the line of the free
in the home of the brain.
Speaker 3 (11:00):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (11:00):
We have to sleep with our telephones out for the hook,
because our lives we threatened daily, because we want to live.
It did some human beings in America thank you.
Speaker 1 (11:22):
President Johnson called an emergency press conference while she was speaking,
not to announce that he was doing something about this
absolute outrage in Mississippi, but because he feared the impact
her words would have on the nation, and a presidential
press conference would preempt anything else that was on TV.
(11:46):
Most accounts of President Johnson's thought process here is that
he was between a rock and a hard place. He
had only just signed the Civil Rights Act. He knew
damn well that Mississippi was flouting that law, but he
couldn't afford to risk Southern states walking out of the
(12:07):
convention and losing Southern support in the upcoming presidential election.
So he proposed an ugly, half assed, insulting compromise two
of the group's sixty four delegates could be seated. They
(12:28):
responded by saying, all sixty four of them spent way
too long on that bus from Mississippi for only two
of them to get seats. If they couldn't run as
Democrats in Mississippi, they would run as independents. But Mississippi
Democratic Freedom Party candidates Fannie lou Hamer, Victoria Gray, and
Annie Divine were all denied ballot access In the nineteen
(12:49):
sixty four election. So when Congress convened in January of
nineteen sixty five, they planned to be present in person
to make their case to Congress that they were the
rightful representatives of the people of Mississippi, and George Lincoln
Rockwell planned to be there too. Those three black women
(13:15):
from Mississippi were not even allowed to enter the Capitol Building,
let alone the House chambers. They were stopped at the
door by the chief of the Capitol Police. They left
quietly and stood outside with their hundreds of supporters who
were lining the sidewalks. But for some reason, this crack
(13:36):
security team at the Capitol Building couldn't explain how somebody
else did manage to get inside. During the roll call
vote for the election of the Speaker of the House,
a man in blackface, a rumpled top hat, a furry loincloth,
(13:57):
and no pants came crashing onto the House floor, pushing
Congressman out of his way as he sprinted to the
center of the room. And he was shouting something that
I don't care to repeat in the way that he
said it. What he was saying was I'm the Mississippi
delegation and I want to be seated, But he was
(14:20):
using an extremely exaggerated affect that was meant to mock
black Southern vernacular. As the police dragged him from the
Congressional chambers, he yelled, long Live Rockwell. It should have
been impossible for Robert Lloyd to gain entry into the
(14:41):
Capitol Building on January fourth, nineteen sixty five, the President
was about to arrive to address Congress. Security at that
building was as tight as the United States Government can
get it, but somehow a Nazi in blackface with no
pay hands on managed to make it past multiple lock
(15:03):
doors and entrances guarded by police officers. He was charged
only with disorderly conduct, and he was released that same
day on a twenty dollars bond. This was Frank Smith's
introduction to the American Nazi Party, and he loved it.
Speaker 3 (15:27):
I got a kick out of this. Now this is
becoming very interesting, his first meeting with the commander. I
had met Aim the night before and talked briefly with him,
But now this little escape very interesting, and I had
the chuck away.
Speaker 1 (15:43):
The stunt had been fun and exciting, and Rockwell's cool
demeanor throughout had really impressed him. But this wasn't why
he drove all the way down to Virginia from Massachusetts.
He was really only on this racist field trip to
the capitol. By coincidence, he'd come down to Virginia to
(16:07):
talk business.
Speaker 3 (16:11):
Well, we did have the night before this demonstration. We
had a lengthy discussion. We talked with various topics. One
of them was the need for a church. The Muslims
were creating a successful movement on the black strictly the
(16:31):
black separate from the white, and they had their church,
and there was a need because of the integration of
schools and something. There seemed to be a need for
the whites for a church that could be farmed where
the whites could Because of religious.
Speaker 1 (16:49):
Conviction back in the nineteen fifties, around the time he
managed to escape conviction for those two separate bank robberies,
Frank Smith bought some land. He bought a lot of land. Actually,
he bought close to six hundred acres of mostly undeveloped
(17:12):
land in a small town in coastal Maine. Now six
hundred acres sounds big, and it is, but I don't
actually know how big because I don't totally know what
an acre is. So if you're in the same boat,
you're not alone. A football field minus the end zones
(17:35):
is just a little bit more than one acre, and
one square mile is six hundred and forty acres, So
he's got five hundred and fifty football fields, or about
ninety four percent of a square mile, If that helps.
(17:55):
I tried to find some examples that will be easier
for me to visualize, but one of the top Google
results for this is an article that had to have
been written by AI. It helpfully offers examples like ten
acres is fifteen eight hundred and forty potatoes, potatoes in
what direction? I think this is a garbled regurgitation of
(18:19):
an old meme claiming that one five hundred eighty four
potatoes lined up end to end would span the width
of one acre. But this claim requires you to believe
that the average potato is five inches long, and according
to doctor Potato, the cartoon scientist mascot on the Q
and a section of the Idaho Potato Commission's website, there
(18:42):
is no standard measurement for any potato. Anyway, if you're
an American trying to imagine what six hundred acres looks like,
just visualize a parking lot with room for ninety thousand cars.
This one's not actually AI. I found a paper written
by the director of the Center for Profitable Agriculture at
(19:04):
the University of Tennessee's Institute of Agriculture, So this one's real.
There's math either way. That's a lot of land for
a guy who's never had a legitimate form of income.
I guess robbing banks leaves you with a lot of
cash and you have to offload it somewhere, and buying
(19:24):
land isn't the worst idea. So he's been sitting on
six hundred acres of undeveloped land up in Maine for
a decade already, and in January of nineteen sixty five,
Frank Smith proposed to George Lincoln Rockwell that they could
use this property that he had up in Maine as
(19:46):
the home base for a church, a new religion that
he envisioned as a sort of whites only Nazi version
I guess of the Nation of Islam. I think that's
what he's describing. It would provide them with some kind
of institutional legitimacy to do things like fight school integration.
(20:11):
And it's easy to imagine that this is probably very cynical,
but I'm always saying, you can't know what's in a
man's heart. Maybe he does have some kind of hideous,
warped religious conviction. He doesn't. He helpfully explained the whole
idea in an interview he did with a reporter in
(20:33):
nineteen sixty eight. He wasn't bothering with any kind of complicated,
reverse engineered religious justification for racism. He just wanted to
take advantage of the legal and social benefits of being
a church by making racism itself his religion.
Speaker 3 (20:55):
And I want to say religion. We're not talking about
DoD mare any particular creed, but it depends on your
interpretation of the word religion. But a trech that one
of the beliefs of the tresch would be that you
would have to be of the right race. And then
other than that, we were keeping it open.
Speaker 1 (21:21):
I couldn't find any primary source documentation that sheds light
on how Rockwell responded to Frank's proposal specifically, but there
is a lot of evidence that this is something Rockwell
had been thinking about for years. Rockwell was not religious
at all, but he'd been toying with the idea of
(21:43):
using Christianity as a sort of front for the movement
since the late fifties. In the early sixties, he met
Richard Butler, the man whose passion for this warped Nazi
religion of Christian identity led him to found the Aryan Nations,
although that came later. And around that same time, in
(22:06):
the early nineteen sixties, Rockwell was corresponding with a friend
of his, a German Nazi named Bruno Ludke. Didke had
recently translated Rockwell's memoir into German, and he suggested that
Rockwell should rewrite some of the passages to tone down
the anti Christian rhetoric a little bit. Not because he
(22:28):
was offended by that, absolutely not. Both men shared the
belief that Christianity was Jewish and communist. Jesus was, after
all a Jewish man, and if your worldview centers around
destroying your enemies and exterminating the weak, it's hard to
(22:51):
get much out of the Gospels. In their private correspondence,
they agreed that Christianity was merely a useful rapper. There
would be no Christ in this Christian Church, just a
man trying to, as Lutka put it, speak with the
political authority of the feurior and the moral authority of
(23:15):
the Pope. In their letters, Rockwell was very open about
his intentions. His commitment to Hitler was his only religion.
But Americans, with their quote peanut brains, would be lured
in by this set dressing of Christianity. In correspondence with
(23:39):
British Nazi Colin Jordan, he argued that there is a
clear tactical advantage deciding with Christians on political matters like
prayer in school. You don't have to mean it for
it to be an effective recruitment and propaganda tool. By
nineteen sixty four, Rockwell had a close working relationship with
(24:03):
Wesley Swift, the father of the Christian Identity movement. He
wouldn't live to see it come to fruition, but the
groundwork he laid in the years before his death paved
the way for this complete fusion of Christian identity theology
and militant neo Nazi activism. So forming a Nazi church
(24:41):
is something he'd already been thinking about for a decade
when Frank Smith approached him in nineteen sixty five. And
I have to believe Frank knew that right. I don't
know how he would have known it, but it's a
strange thing to say to someone if you didn't know
they were already consisted it. I couldn't track down anything
(25:03):
concrete that would point to who would have made that introduction.
Though after his meeting with Rockwell, Frank drove back to
New England, news of his trip to Virginia got home
before he did. On January fourth, the day after Frank
arrived at the American Nazi Party barracks in Virginia, the
(25:25):
head of the New England mafia already knew about it,
and so did j Edgar Hoover. The illegal recording device
the FBI had installed in Raymond Patriarca's office in nineteen
sixty two recorded several conversations that day. There was some
idle chat about some recent hits, some vague talk about
(25:48):
a stolen diamond, and on the topic of Frank Smith.
Patriarca was told that Frank had gone down to Virginia
to visit George Lincoln Rockwell, having become an avowed follow
while he was in prison. A few days later, on
January seventh, Frank Smith arrived in Providence, Rhode Island, for
(26:08):
a face to face meeting with Raymond Patriarca. Later that evening.
A memo was sent directly to j Edgar Hoover summarizing
the recordings of the conversation in Patriarca's office that day,
and it says that Frank's primary reason for making contact
with Patriarca that day was to get his blessing to
do a little loan sharking. He's fresh out of prison
(26:32):
and trying to get back to work. Patriarca gave him
permission to put a few thousand dollars out on the
street in Boston, as long as it didn't interfere with
any existing business. But with that out of the way,
Frank kept talking. He's the one who brought up George
Lincoln Rockwell, telling the mob boss that they were close associates,
(26:56):
and that does end up being true in the future.
But when he's saying this on a Thursday, he just
met Rockwell for the first time on Sunday. And then
he rambles for a little bit about how the army
has too many black people in it and if black
people outnumber white people in the army, they'll take over
(27:18):
the country. He doesn't say black people, he uses different words,
and he told Patriarca that he just returned from a
visit to the Nazi Party headquarters, and the memo is
just a narrative. It's not actually a transcription of the recording,
but it says he described the physical layout of the property,
(27:40):
including how many stormtroopers were there and how they were dressed.
He shares his upcoming travel plans, which includes trips to
Dallas and Los Angeles to meet with more members of
the American Nazi Party, and then he let Patriarca in
on his big plan. He wanted to pour a bunch
of money into Rockwell's operation, and the best way to
(28:04):
do that without causing any legal or tax issues for
anyone involved, would be to make a Nazi church on
that land he has up in Maine. At some point
during the meeting, he shows off his machine gun to
one of the underbosses who's also there, and he says
the church would be called the White Church of America
(28:26):
of Maine. He also told Patriarca that Rockwell is planning
to run for governor of Virginia in the election later
that year. Later in this same memo, there's a brief
mention that Frank told Patriarca that once the Nazis are
established in New England. Presumably at this Nazi church in Maine,
(28:49):
they'll be in a good position to infiltrate Massachusetts when
Ed Brooke runs for governor. Edbrooke never ran for governor
of Massage Chosets, but he did become the first black
Senator since reconstruction when he was elected to the US
Senate in nineteen sixty six. In nineteen sixty five, though
(29:11):
he was the Massachusetts state Attorney General, and as Attorney General,
he had opened an investigation into the Massachusetts State Racing Commission.
The Racing Commission allocates what are called racing days. There's
only a certain number of days per year where horse
(29:31):
racing can occur and bets can be placed, so the
Racing Commission decides which tracks have horse races on which days.
Shortly after he took office in nineteen sixty three, Brooke
opened an investigation into this allocation process, the process generally,
but specifically at this significant number of extra days that
(29:55):
had been allocated to the Hancock Raceway. This this happened to
be a racetrack that Raymond Patriarca had a significant financial
interest in. George Lincoln Rockwell had a special hatred for
Ed Brooke too. His name actually comes up more than
a few times in issues of the Rockwell Report, and
(30:16):
it's always very nasty. Not because Rockwell also had a
financial interest in horse racing in Massachusetts. Not as far
as I know, he just hated black people. So Frank's
mention of Brooke in this memo is very brief, and
it kind of feels out of place in the conversation.
(30:38):
There's no explanation provided in the memo. You're just supposed
to know what that means. But I think in this
broader context, it feels like a heavy implication. Right, if
we do business with the Nazis, we all win. If
we invest in bringing Nazis to New England, if we
(31:01):
pay to put them up in Maine, it'll be around.
It'll be available to do something about the possibility of
a black governor. The memo doesn't include any mention of
Patriarchra's response to any of this if he had won.
But Frank had his permission to get back to loan sharking,
(31:23):
so he went back home to Boston happy in January
of nineteen sixty five. A lot had changed while Frank
was away. The world moved on without him, while he
was sitting in prison in Walpole, Massachusetts from nineteen fifty
seven until the end of nineteen sixty four. The Soviets
(31:43):
launched a dog into outer space. Catholics got a new Pope,
Alaska and Hawaii became states.
Speaker 3 (31:51):
John F.
Speaker 1 (31:51):
Kennedy was elected president. There was another new Pope. JFK
was assassinated. The Beatles put out their first record, The
Berlin Wall went up, the Civil Rights Act was signed
to The war in Vietnam was really heating up. I mean,
it was a busy couple of years for the world,
and I don't know how much Frank cared about any
of that. But when he got home to Boston in
(32:13):
November of nineteen sixty four, he found himself in the
middle of a different kind of war. He was released
from prison during the bloodiest year of the First Boston
Gang War. I don't know a lot about the mafia.
Like I said last week, that's a totally different kind
(32:34):
of horrible guy than the ones I'm usually looking at.
But now that I've spent the better part of a
week squinting at grainy photo copies of Raymond Patriarca's eight
thousand page FBI file, I guess there are certain similarities
between the mafia and a Nazi group. You know, it's
(32:55):
a group of violent men who only barely get along
in pursuit of their s goals. There's constant splintering and
infighting and jockeying for power and shifting alliances. There's heavy
infiltration by the FBI. Half the gang is snitching, whether
for fun or for profit. I can see how a
man who has long been at home in one of
(33:17):
those worlds wouldn't have much trouble stepping into the other.
The details of the stories are obviously quite different. When
I'm reading old FBI memos about a guy whose life
story I know half by heart, I can fill in
a lot of the blanks based on context. When every
(33:39):
other line is half redacted. That doesn't work as well.
When I'm waiting into new territory. I don't know what's
behind those reactions, so I'm working with more blanks than usual.
So for this part of the story, I relied much
more heavily than I normally would on secondary sources, rather
(34:00):
than trying to become enough of an expert on something
outside my wheelhouse that I can analyze and decipher These
primary sources in the way that I'm comfortable with. To
get my bearings on the Gang War. I read a
summary written by the New England Historical Society, and some
more detailed write ups on a blog written by Matthew Connolly,
(34:20):
a retired attorney in Massachusetts who's been writing about the
history of Boston organized crime for more than a decade.
I also read some interesting congressional testimony about the FBI's
role in all of this, and part of a hitman's memoir,
but it wasn't very good. I did read as much
as I physically could of that eight thousand page FBI
(34:43):
file on New England mob boss Raymond Patriarcha. But I
just want to say how grateful I am to an
outlet called go Local in Providence, Rhode Island. They not
only successfully secured the release of that file from the FBI,
digitized the entire thing, and then spent more than a
(35:04):
year writing about it. So many outlets hoard their primary
source documents and force you to rely on their analysis
without letting you look at them. So I just love
to see a reporter making their documents available to the public.
So with that out of the way, the Gang War
(35:40):
in nineteen sixty the Irish gangs in the Boston area
more or less coexisted pretty amicably. There was the winter
Hill Gang in Somerville led by Buddy McLean, and the
McLaughlin Gang in the Charlestown neighborhood of Boston, led by
brothers Bernie Georgie and Punchy McLaughlin. They both had their
(36:01):
own territories and their own operations. They did a little
loan sharking, a little bookmaking the occasional druck high jacking
the usual, and both of these Irish gangs paid tribute
to the same Italian mafia family. Raymond Patriarca head of
the Patriarcha crime family out of Rhode Island, had agreements
(36:23):
with the New York families that everything east of the
Connecticut River was Patriarcha territory. The Genevesees could keep Hartford,
Connecticut and Springfield, Massachusetts, but he controlled Rhode Island, Maine,
and most of Massachusetts and Connecticut. In Boston, these Irish
(36:44):
gangs did a lot of the street level work. They
stayed out of each other's way, and they paid the
patriarchas for the privilege of doing crime in Boston. Until
Labor Day of nineteen sixty one. There are a lot
of vers of what happened here exactly, but they all
(37:04):
boil down to the same basic idea. Georgie McLachlin, a
member of the McLachlin Gang from Charlestown, disrespected somebody's girl.
Who's girl exactly varies in the retellings, but it's always
the girlfriend of a member of the Winter Hill Gang
from Somerville. The nature of the offense is different depending
(37:29):
on who you ask. Some versions just say he hit
on her and this led to an argument between the men.
A more elaborate version of the tale says Georgie McLaughlin
slapped this woman across the face after she refused his advances.
In one very weird version of this story, he bit
(37:51):
the woman. But I can't find any information that makes
that make any more sense. But in every version of
the story, Georgie McLaughlin got the shit kicked out of
him from making a pass at a woman who was
spoken for by a member of the other gang. While
(38:14):
Georgie was recovering in the hospital, his two brothers went
to Buddy McLean, head of the Winter Hill Gang, and
they asked him to turn over the names of the
men who'd put Georgie in the hospital, but he refused,
so they wired dynamite to the ignition switch on his
wife's car. The bomb was faulty and no one got hurt,
(38:38):
but now everybody's pretty upset. So Buddy mc lean responded
to this attempted assassination by murdering Bernie McLaughlin, Georgie's older brother.
And just as a strange little side note here, when
Buddy mc lean shot Bernie McLaughlin, he had a getaway driver,
(39:00):
a man named Alexander Petrocone. Both men were arrested for
this murder. I mean it happened in broad daylight in
front of a ton of witnesses, but when they got
the case in front of a grand jury, he couldn't
get an indictment. Nobody wants to testify in the middle
of a gang war. Once he was out, Petrocone saw
(39:23):
the writing on the wall. Things are getting too hot
here and the smart move is to get out of
town for good. So he did. He moved to California
and changed his name to alex Rocco. He signed up
for acting lessons with Leonard Nimoy and in nineteen seventy two,
(39:44):
he was cast in The Godfather for the role of
Moe Green, the Las Vegas casino owner. After the Winter
Hill Boys murdered one of the McLoughlin brothers in the
fall of nineteen sixty one, things spiraled out of control.
What started out is a moment of drunken rudeness at
(40:05):
a Labor Day beach party had escalated into a full
blown war that lasted years and killed dozens of people,
some of them in horrific ways. I don't think Raymond
Patriarca particularly cared if a bunch of irishmen in Boston
(40:25):
killed each other, but it was bad for business. Both
of these gangs had been working for and paying him,
but now they're too busy fighting each other to do
either of those things. It was hurting revenue, and it
was attracting a lot of unwonted attention from law enforcement.
(40:49):
The killing started in the fall of nineteen sixty one
and between March of sixty four in January of sixty
five alone. In that nine month period, there were at
least eighteen successful hits in Boston. An FBI memo dated
January twenty sixth, nineteen sixty five describes a conversation that
(41:11):
took place in Patriarca's office about the escalation of violence
in recent months. People were scared, they were staying off
the streets, and guys who aren't out on the streets
aren't collecting payments. This conversation was recorded just a day
after someone shot Joe Francone in the head inside of
(41:33):
his own apartment. Patriarcha said, if the killings don't stop,
I'll declare martial law. Six weeks later, on March tenth,
nineteen sixty five, Frank Smith was back in Providence to
meet with Patriarca again. This time he was looking for
permission to run a gambling operation out of the back
(41:55):
of a restaurant in East Boston. Patriarcha and give him
a final answer on the matter, but he said he'd
make a decision after he'd talked to one of his
guys in Boston. But again, you know, while he's here,
while he's got the boss's ear, Frank starts talking and
he's going on about Rockwell again. He's ranting about the
(42:17):
Jews and about black people, and he says that this
plan to open a Nazi church in Maine is starting
to move forward, and it'll be a good, clean way
to fund the American Nazi Party. He's optimistic about Rockwell's
chances of winning the upcoming election for governor in Virginia,
and he tells Patriarca that if Rockwell does win, he's
(42:40):
already promised Frank that he can run all the illegal
activity down in the Norfolk, Virginia area, and of course
Frank's willing to cut Patriarca in on that in exchange
for a little assistance. Maybe Raymond Patriarca really did intend
to talk to the guy who ran the gambling in
(43:01):
East Boston before he gave Frank a yes or no answer,
Or maybe he didn't think Frank's craps games in the
back of a restaurant was going to be anybody's problem anymore.
In memos dated just days before Frank shows up in
Providence in March, Patriarca tells close associates that he's frustrated
(43:23):
with Frank. Frank talks too much, Frank moves too fast,
and he's out of line. The week before Frank Smith
got shot, an FBI memo describes Raymond Patriarcha as enraged
when he found out that hit in January had been
(43:44):
done on Frank's orders. The wiretap then recorded him making
arrangements to meet with Jimmy Flemy and Joe Barboza later
in the garage. Whatever it was that he had to
say to two of the most prolific murderers on his payroll,
(44:06):
he didn't say it near that FBI microphone. Next week,
we'll talk about the two years Frank Smith spent as
George Lincoln Rockwell's best friend, the woman half his age
he married after meeting her in a Nazi campaign office,
the brief tragic life of Rockwell's Secret Baby, and more
(44:27):
than a decade after Rockwell's death, Frank finally gets around
to starting that fake church. Weird Little Guys as a
(44:49):
production of Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio. It's researched, written
and recorded by me Wiley Conger. Our executive producers are
Sophie Lichtermann and Robert Evans. The show is edited by
I Think Wildly Talented where he Ga. The theme music
was composed by Brad Dickert. You can email me at
Weird Little Guys Podcast at gmail dot com. I will
definitely read it, but I probably won't answer it. It's
nothing personal. You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show
(45:11):
with other listeners only Weird Little Guys sub reddit. Just
don't post anything you wouldn't say into the FBI wiretap
Host
Molly Conger
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