Soldier of Misfortune: Frank Sweeney, Pt. 2

In part two of the life of the Forrest Gump of fascism, Frank Sweeney leads the CIA on an international goose chase, befriends and then betrays a serial killer, and just can't stop committing crimes by mail.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media. I'm so glad you decided to come
back for part two of the story of Frank Sweeney.
If you didn't hear part one, you really need to.
This isn't the kind of story you can pick up
midway through. You missed a cop getting shot with a
machine gun in a New Jersey suburb, the Rhodesian bush War,

(00:24):
possible CIA involvement in an Australian political crisis, and we're
just about to pick up with our escaped spy. The
second forty years of Frank's life are just as weird
as the first forty. There's a serial killer, a mafia trial,
two different secret wives, and a lot of misuse of
the postal service. I'm Molly Conger, and this is weird,

(00:48):
little guys.

Speaker 2 (01:04):
Now.

Speaker 1 (01:04):
When we left off last week, Frank was making friends
in prison. His new friend in nineteen seventy eight was
Christopher Boyce, who had just been convicted of espionage for
selling documents he stole from his job as a CIA
contractor to the Soviets, and then he escaped from prison.
Whether or not Frank was still in custody on the
day Christopher boyce escape from prison is surprisingly hard to

(01:26):
pin down. Several newspaper articles about Frank's role in the
ensuing manhunt for the missing spy put his release a
month before the escape, but others put it a month after.
Seems like this detail would really matter, but no one
seemed very concerned about it. In nineteen eighty, newspapers that
appeared to be quoting the same unnamed source from the
US Marshalls published conflicting stories, with some saying Frank flew

(01:49):
to South Africa shortly before Boyce's escape, and others putting
that trip slightly after the escape, although both of these
articles say it was exactly twenty three days after. But
in my frustrated search through forty year old newspapers trying
to figure out which prison Frank was calling home that year,
I found another surprise, another stabbing. Shortly after Frank was

(02:13):
transferred to a state prison in Maine in nineteen seventy eight,
he stabbed another inmate in the chest during an argument
in the prison library. And again we have this problem
that keeps coming up in Frank's life. He loves to
talk to reporters, and he loves to lie. It's the seventies.
These reporters don't have the Internet. They don't have access
to electronic court records, so a lot of Frank's lies

(02:34):
get published. When he files a lawsuit against the prison
warden in Maine about the conditions in solitary confinement, newspapers
publish his claim that he was placed in solitary for
a stabbing he'd been suspected of, but he says the
investigation cleared him. A local newspaper in bang Or Main, however,
had a reporter in the courtroom when he entered a
guilty plea to that stabbing. But regardless of whether he

(02:57):
got out in December of seventy nine or February of
nineteen eighty, we know Frank flew to South Africa soon
after he got out, and that he stayed there for
a couple of months. The story of Christopher Boyce's nineteen
months on the Lamb is long and strange. Sean Penn
plays Boyce's friend, the cocaine dealer Dalton Lee in the

(03:18):
nineteen eighty five film adaptation of the book The Falcon
and the Snowman about the entire affair, I didn't watch it.
There's only so much I can do. But remember this
is the Cold War. A missing Soviet spy is a
pretty big pr problem for the United States government. There
was speculation that the KGB had helped him escape. Boyce
himself called a reporter from a payphone a few months

(03:39):
after the escape and laughed about the idea that he'd
had foreign assistance. He says, he just climbed the fence
and walked out. The task force focused on finding boys
believed all along that he'd never actually left California, and
they weren't too far off. He was in Idaho the
whole time, But a lot of resources ended up getting
expended pursuing a false lead planted by our friend Frank.

(04:04):
Now I can't prove Frank sent all of these letters himself.
I can't even find contemporane his reporting where anyone ever
outright said that they believed Frank sent these letters. And
he was never charged in connection with his meddling in
this investigation. But just a few weeks after Boyce went missing,
the United States ambassador in South Africa got a letter.

(04:25):
The postmark indicated that had been mailed from within South Africa,
and the letter said a known mercenary named shell Hammer
had assisted the convicted American spy, Christopher Boyce in entering
South Africa by way of a fake passport. Now, who
do we know with a history of forging passports, of
mailing anonymous letters to officials in Southern Africa implicating himself

(04:48):
in crimes and using the pseudonym shell Hammer. And he
absolutely knew the FEDS would tie him to that alias
because it was the one he had used in those
classified ads in nineteen seventy six that put him in
prison for mail fraud. And Frank was in South Africa
in February of nineteen eighty when that letter was mailed.
It seems he wanted the authorities to know he was involved.

(05:10):
Why else would he write his own pseudonym into the story.
So FEDS quickly turned their attention to Frank. They placed
a tracking beacon on his car. They followed him for months,
and he probably knew he was being followed. They followed
him from his home in New Jersey all the way
out to California, and from a California motel, he made
several phone calls to an apartment in Hermosa Beach and

(05:33):
when they searched that apartment they found it abandoned, but
they found several letters that Frank had sent to a
third man, another friend of theirs, from prison, one of
which read somehow they discovered that I helped him get
into South Africa. I suspect an informer has been at work,
but there was no informer. Frank wanted them to find

(05:54):
those letters, and Boyce was never in South Africa. The
only reason anyone thought Boyce might be in South Africa
is because Frank was planting false clues all over the
world to point them as far away as possible from
a little hunting cabin in the mountains of Idaho, US
Marshalls eventually got frustrated following Frank around. A federal prosecutor

(06:14):
would actually say an open court that Frank's arrest in
July of nineteen eighty one was specifically intended to give
them leverage to make him cooperate in the boy's case.
It seemed like he knew something and they wanted to
know what it was. As a felon, Frank wasn't allowed
to have any guns, and of course Frank had guns.

(06:34):
Did find one newspaper article that wrapped a sort of
suspicious sounding hint that they only picked Frank up for
that gun charge because of an anonymous tip, so maybe
that was him too. But they picked him up in
New Jersey at the end of July, and he pretended
to be very cooperative, telling them that he actually had
some documents that would leave them straight to boys and

(06:55):
he would happily show them to them. He voluntarily turned
over the key to the bank deposit box he was
keeping them in, and inside they found several letters to
Frank that had been mailed from South Africa. Sounds like
more red herrings planted by Frank. He'd flown to South
Africa several times in the year and a half since
his release and was probably mailing himself these letters on

(07:17):
those visits. So now in August of nineteen eighty one,
it seems like there could be some evidence that Boyce
really was in South Africa. Frank says he was promised
placement in the Witness Protection program for his help, and
maybe they did make that promise if he really could
help them recover their missing spy, that's a reasonable enough deal.

(07:38):
And just a few weeks after all of Frank's help,
Boyce was recaptured, but it wasn't due in any part
to Frank's information during his year and a half on
the run. Boyce obviously couldn't get a job, so he
made money the old fashioned way bank robbery. He kept
it pretty small time, nothing flashy where you get into

(07:59):
the vault, just little stick ups a few thousand at
a time from the teller. He's tied to at least
seventeen bank robberies in Idaho and Washington State during that time,
eventually teaming up with a couple of brothers from Idaho.
And it was one of those men who turned boys
in for the reward money, no honor among thieves, I guess.
Boyce was taken back into custody on August twenty first,

(08:21):
nineteen eighty one, and he wasn't in South Africa.

Speaker 3 (08:25):
Nationwide flight ended for Christopher Boyce here at the pit
stop drive in at Port Angelus, Washington. He was eating
a cheeseburger and onion rings when eight federal agents jumped him.
Boyce was apparently living a triple.

Speaker 1 (08:37):
Life, so franklyed obviously he lied pretty egregiously. He falsified documents,
He led US Marshalls and the CIA on an international
goose chase, and maybe that's why he never got charged
for it. That's pretty embarrassing to put on the record,

(08:58):
but they did still have that uncharged they'd picked him
up on to use his leverage, so they said a
sentencing date, but Frank didn't show up. He was trying
to skip the country again. Remember back in nineteen seventy
six he got all the way to South Africa after
skipping his sentencing date for mail fraud. But this time
he was picked up just a few days after he
missed court when a motel clerk in Montvale, New Jersey

(09:20):
recognized him. When he was finally dragged in for sentencing,
the government said they hoped Frank was going to be
able to help them in the boy's case, but nothing
he said was of any use. Frank said he had
no choice but to flee the country and start a
new life on a cattle ranch in Australia with his
wife because the government had renegged on their deal to
put him in witness protection. I have to imagine there

(09:41):
was some bickering back and forth between an indignant Frank
and an exasperated federal prosecutor, because in the end, Judge H.
Curtis Mener said, I have neither the time nor the
inclination to unravel all of the mysteries. In this case, however,
they'd all ended up in his court room. Whatever the
convoluted backstory is here, this is a sentencing or illegal
possession a firearm, and that's really all the judge can

(10:02):
do that day, so he sentenced Frank to four years.
Judge Meaner said Frank was an explosive type of individual
and that he was dangerous and mentally sick, and he
urged Frank to take advantage of the opportunity to get
psychiatric help while he was in prison this time. And yes,
I did say wife. When I first started poking around

(10:25):
trying to build my biographical backstory, to sort of sketch
out a skeleton of this man's life, I found a
new Jersey state record for a marriage in August nineteen
eighty one between a Frank A. Sweeney and aDNA M.
Madison in Bergen County. There are other men named Frank Sweeney, obviously,
but it was a middle initial match and it's the

(10:47):
right county, and it was one of the rare months
that Frank wasn't in prison. But it didn't seem right,
so I set it aside. But this offhand mention at
his sentencing hearing about a wife sent me back to it.
It is him. After the FEDS picked him up at
the end of July nineteen eighty one on that gun charge,
he was released from custody. He was cooperating. He took

(11:08):
them to the bank to look at his fake evidence.
All that, and sometime that month he got married. I
have no idea how they met, or where she came from,
or what she thought she was going to get out
of any of this, or if she knew Frank was
planning on entering witness protection that month, or what on
earth she saw in this man. But I do know

(11:29):
how the marriage ended. Frank went back to prison that
very same year, so they didn't have much time together.
I don't know where Diana was while Frank was away,
But by nineteen eighty five, according to a decision by
the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, Dana was living in
Texas with her new boyfriend, Danny Lee Strong. They couldn't
have known each other very long before moving in together

(11:50):
because Strong had only just gotten out of prison again
for another and a string of pretty run of the
mill robbery and fraud charges, and they didn't stay together
long before they were arrested for murdering a man Strong
said made a pass at Deanna. She was ultimately only
convicted of stealing the victim's car, which they fled the
scene in, but Strong got ninety nine years for the

(12:11):
brutal beating and asphyxiation of Robert Eugene Thomas. Frank doesn't
really factor into this story. He's in prison in another
state this whole time, but his name appears in a
footnote of an appeals court decision upholding Strong's conviction. Strong
had sent Frank a letter after finding out that Deanna
was planning to testify against him for the murder. I

(12:31):
can't imagine what you write in a letter to your
girlfriend's husband about a situation like this. But all that
to say, Frank really did have a wife that he
planned to start a new life with in Australia, but
she ended up watching her boyfriend choke a man to
death in an apartment in Fort Worth instead. On January ninth,

(13:02):
nineteen eighty two, the UVA men's basketball team lost to
the tar Heels in a close game, sixty to sixty
five at UNC's Carmichael Arena. I'm not a basketball fan,
and I wasn't born then, but I guess it was
an exciting game. Unc had knocked Uva out of the
Final four the year before. But Joseph Paul Franklin, an

(13:22):
avowed neo Nazi who'd recently been handed his first couple
of life sentences for two of his many murders, didn't
care much for basketball. He was in the wreck room
at the Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, Missouri,
and he was trying to watch American bandstand. According to
frank whose time at the Springfield prison overlapped with Franklins
for a few weeks in nineteen eighty one until Franklin's

(13:43):
transfer at the end of January nineteen eighty two, the
serial killer became enraged when a black prison guard changed
the channel. Later that year, Joseph Paul Franklin was back
in court. He'd spent years traveling the country, robbing banks
and murdering young black men in in racial couples, so
it would take years to sort out what to do
with him. This time, he was on trial for the

(14:05):
unsuccessful assassination attempt on civil rights activists Vernon Jordan on
May twenty ninth, nineteen eighty The Fort Wayne, Indiana chapter
of the National Urban League was hosting a banquet in
honor of a visit from National Urban League President Vernin Jordan,
when a volunteer dropped him off at his hotel. Later
that evening, a single bullet from a thirty six rifle
tore through his back. He survived, but it's hard to

(14:29):
build a case against a drifter sniper. Nobody saw him.
The investigators had some handwriting analysis on a motel registration card,
testimony from a grocery store clerk who identified Franklin as
a man he'd had a strange conversation with, and a
general idea that the crime fit Franklin's pattern, but it
was a bit thin. And then came frank Oh, frank

(14:51):
loves to talk, he loves to be helpful. He's still
in prison on that gun charge, but he told federal
authorities that in the brief couple of weeks he'd been
on the same s cell block as Franklin. They chatted
a few times, and Franklin had confessed to him on
several occasions about shooting Vernon Jordan. On the stand, frank
testified about that evening in January when the guard changed

(15:12):
the channel to the basketball game and it's a pretty
good detail. Frank was very specific that it was a
Uva UNC game that we couldn't recall the date. They
were only on that cell block together for a few weeks,
and there was in fact a Uva UNC basketball game
during that time period that would have been on television.
He testified that Franklin was furious about the incident and

(15:33):
spent days fuming about it. The two inmates were walking
together in the exercise area a few days later when
Franklin spotted that same guard again and turned to frank
and said, I'd like to blow him away, like I
shot that and were big wig in Indiana. Frank says.
He also lamented that Jordan just wouldn't die after being shot,
and that he was sorry I didn't shoot that white

(15:56):
slut first, referring to the white woman who'd given Jordan
a ride that night. Frank was one of three jail
house informants the government put on during that trial, all
men who'd been in jail with Franklin, and all of
whom said Franklin had admitted to various aspects of the
crime and casual conversation. Josephaul Franklin was actually acquitted at
that federal trial, jurors said they believed Franklin shot Jordan,

(16:19):
but they were hung up on the wording of the indictment,
which specifically charged him with the shooting as a violation
of Jordan's civil rights. Years later, on death row for
a variety of other murders, Franklin did confess to shooting
Vernon Jordan when the trial was over, though jurors who
spoke to the press said they'd only believed one of
the three jail house informants who testified frank On cross examination,

(16:43):
frank Sweeney seemed surprised to learn that the other two
men had been paid thousands of dollars for their cooperation.
He wasn't getting paid, but he wasn't upset. He didn't
need the money. He'd inherited a quarter of million dollars,
which would be about a million dollars today. When his
parents died. All he wanted was witness protection, then a

(17:04):
positive letter to the New Jersey Parole Board. Just like
in the boy's case, he very conveniently had some information
the government wanted, and all he wanted in return was
witness protection. And this time it got it. But he
didn't get to keep it. In nineteen eighty four, Frank
filed a lawsuit against the warden of the Alabama prison

(17:26):
where he was still serving his sentence on that gun charge.
He said he was not receiving the protection afforded to
him as a protected witness. The warden's response to the
suit was that Frank would not stop telling people that
he was a protected witness, which was causing a lot
of problems. You're not supposed to do that in court.
The warden's executive assistant said that the prison was considering

(17:48):
contacting in the Office of Enforcement Operations, the division of
the DOJ that administers the Witness Security program, to recommend
his removal from the program because they believed he was
intentionally causing problem by talking about this constantly. And it
seems he was ultimately removed from the Witness Security program
around this time, and maybe that had something to do

(18:09):
with his decision to testify on behalf of Anthony Spalotro,
the hot headed Chicago mobster who handled the family's business
in Las Vegas. It couldn't have been an attempt to
get back in the program. He was testifying for the defense,
but maybe he was just spiite. He wanted to get
somebody else kicked out of the program. In nineteen eighty three,

(18:32):
when he was still in prison and still considered a
protected witness, he briefly shared a cell with another guy
in the program. Frank Kulatta was a mobster. He was
a member of Tony Spilotro's Hole in the Wall gang.
If you've seen the nineteen ninety five Scorsese movie Casino,
it's that quite literally. Frank Marino, the character played by

(18:53):
the guy who played Phil Leotardo on The Sopranos, is
supposed to be Frank Kulatta. Joe Peshi's character, Nikison Toro
is based on Tony Spilotrow. Just watch the movie. It's
all very complicated, and our friend Frank Sweeney had nothing
to do with it. But in nineteen eighty three, the
real life Frank Kulata was sharing a cell with Frank
Sweeney because they had both turned state's witness against very

(19:15):
dangerous men. Frank Sweeney had just testified against a serial
killer and Frank Kulatta had turned on Spilotro after the
FBI played him a recording of his friend talking about
having him killed. When Anthony Spilotro went on trial, in
nineteen eighty six, Frank Kulatta was out of prison and
in the program, and he was the government's star witness

(19:35):
against Spilotroe. Frank Sweeney was finally out of prison again
in home in New Jersey when he read in the
paper that Kulata was going to be testifying. According to Frank,
he felt compelled to contact Spilotro's defense attorney because when
they were cell mates, Culata would often brag about committing perjury,
So the defense flew Frank out to Las Vegas and

(19:57):
put him on the stand. He claimed that after one
of Coulada's appearances in court back in nineteen eighty three,
he came back to their shared cell and bragged, Frankie,
I'd just put another one away. You've heard of the
traveling circus. I'm the original traveling perjurer. On cross examination,
Frank Sweeney admitted that when he'd been in the witness
protection program, he had on several occasions threatened and even

(20:21):
faked suicide attempts to get what he wanted out of
federal prosecutors. I wish I had more information on that.
That is incredibly strange behavior, and it does actually happen again.
Later in the end, though his testimony in that mob
trial is just a strange little footnote his third brush
with the witness protection program, his testimony didn't matter much.

(20:44):
I don't think anyone believed it, and the case ended
in a mistrial over allegations of jury tampering, and Anthony
Spilotro went missing before they could retry the case. The
mobster and his brother were later found buried in a
cornfield in Indiana. Frank Kula stayed in the witness Protection
program for years, and Scorsese hired him as an onset
adviser when he shot Casino. Klada died of COVID in

(21:07):
twenty twenty, and in nineteen eighty nine, Frank went back
to prison for mail fraud. Again. The court record is
too old to get any documents without haggling with an archivist,
but the docket sheet does say that, in addition to
another fifty seven months in prison, the judge also banned
Frank from ever offering anything for sale by mail. So

(21:30):
at first I assumed he was pulling the same scam
he ran in nineteen seventy six, where he placed ads
for guns he didn't actually have and then ghosted would
be buyers after they sent him the money. But it's
much weirder than that. I wish it was guns. It
wasn't guns. This time. He was running what one journalist
called a cat scam. He'd cut the tails off regular

(21:53):
housecats and then run ads offering them as exotic purebred
cats for three hundred dollars. If he really was as
independently wealthy of his inheritance as he claimed, did he
really need three hundred dollars for a mutilated cat? Maybe
he's just addicted to mail fraud. As for the cats,

(22:14):
one of the earliest mentions I could find of Frank
in the newspaper archives was a nineteen fifty eight article
about the embalmed cat he got for his fifteenth birthday.
He was looking forward to dissecting it and adding it
to his collection of oddities that already included a cat skeleton.
So I hope all his fraudulent cats found happy homes,

(22:35):
even if their buyers were unhappy about losing three hundred dollars.
But it's in an appeals court decision related to a
parole violation in this second mail fraud case, where we
find the details of a campaign of terror against his
neighbors that foreshadows the events at the end of this long,
strange tale. He was paroled in nineteen ninety two after

(22:56):
serving about half of this sentence, and he was on
probation for three years. Just days before that three year
period ran out, he was charged with a probation violation.
He'd been convicted in New Jersey of sending obscene materials
through the mail to a minor. I know, I know,
this show is starting to feel like a tour of
America's weirdest sex crime guys. But to be honest, I

(23:19):
don't think there was anything sexual in his motivation for
sending pornomags to a nine year old. I know that
doesn't sound possible. Bear with me. But after he got
out of prison, he's living in an apartment back in
his hometown of Tenafly, New Jersey. A family of Russian
immigrants moves into the apartment next door. They have children.

(23:40):
Children are noisy. Frank says he asked them to keep
it down, but the noise continued. In what these Second
Circuit Court of Appeals would later call a rather bizarre
set of circumstances, he decided to get back at these
noisy children by engaging in a lengthy harassment campaign against
the entire family. At least twice, he shut off their electricity.

(24:03):
On multiple occasions, he filled the lock on their front
door with staples, making it impossible to open. He had
the family's mail forwarded to des Moines, Iowa. The father
of these noisy children was a doctor. One of his
colleagues received a letter purporting to be from an aid's
charity informing the recipient that the doctor, the father of
those noisy children, had tested positive for HIV. And along

(24:27):
that same line of thinking, he also sent a letter
to the children's school informing them that the nine year
old boy had been exposed to HIV by his father.
And he sent letters to the Jewish community center where
the family remembers, informing them that the entire family had
been exposed to the virus. Remember this is nineteen ninety three.
Telling people that this doctor has HIV could ruin his career.

(24:48):
The school could call social services, and they probably wouldn't
be welcome in the sauna at the community center if
people believed this. And in what would be his ultimate downfall,
here signed their nine year old son up for catalogs
that sold pornographic materials. It seems like he believed that
the child's father would get the mail, which apparently wasn't

(25:10):
going to Iowa anymore see the catalog, believe his son
had signed up for it and would punish the boy,
and if the boy was grounded, he wouldn't be so noisy.
But it backfired and Frank was discovered as the culprit.
Police searched his apartment and found the typewriter he'd used
to write all the letters, and he quickly confessed. He

(25:31):
got four months in jail in New Jersey for sending
him scene materials to a child, but the parole violation
landed him back in federal prison for another year. And
maybe this trip back to prison gave him a chance
to test out his own advice. You see, between getting
out in nineteen ninety two and going back in nineteen
ninety five, Frank was profiled in The New York Times.

(25:52):
The journalist Charles Strumm actually used to write for The
Bergen Record, the local paper Frank used to end up
in every time he got arrested in the sixties, but
Strum didn't come home from college and started the Record
until after Frank's arms stand off in the front yard
and they weren't talking about their shared hometown. They were
talking about Frank's new consulting business. In nineteen ninety four,

(26:14):
Frank put a classified ad in USA Today that read.

Speaker 2 (26:18):
Go into federal prison for the first time, we will
tell you what to expect and how to survive. All
consultants are graduates of the federal prison system. Frank aysweeneyan Associates,
Box fifteen Demarest, New Jersey zero seven six two seven.

Speaker 1 (26:35):
Frank told Strum that the idea came to him while
he was reading the paper one morning in September nineteen
ninety three. Lawrence Powell, one of the LA police officers
convicted for his role in the beating of Rodney King,
was quoted in the paper as being terrified at the
prospect of going to prison. Strum rights that Frank told him.

Speaker 2 (26:54):
I thought to myself, my god, there's probably a lot
of people go into prison who has never been in
jail before, only white collic criminals, and they're probably terrified too,
that just as frightened as he is. So I thought
maybe I could use my misfortune to help people and
maybe make a profit doing it.

Speaker 1 (27:12):
The article says Frank claims to have twenty seven clients
after just a few months of running his new consulting business,
though the author also prints without question Frank's claim that
he left high school in the eleventh grade because he
was bored with it, not because he was in a
youth correctional facility for bank robbery. In the article, Strum
writes out all of Frank's crimes and convictions, but that

(27:32):
nineteen sixty two bank robbery is missing. But again, they
didn't have the Internet then. Of his criminal record, Frank
told the reporter, I remember it was Nietzsche who wrote
the crime is not in the act, but in the
stupidity of being caught. I was caught and stupid, and
he'd get caught a few more times in the coming years,

(27:52):
but he stays humble. That Nietzsche quote is still his
favorite to this day. According to his Facebook profile, he
had to take a break from his new consulting career
when he went away for a year in nineteen ninety five,
but he picked right back up when he got out.
A nineteen ninety seven Newsweek article about his business claims
he was up to eighty seven clients now, with white
collar criminals paying Frank one thousand dollars for assistance and

(28:15):
getting favorable placement. So not only did Frank promise that
he could advise you about the differences in food facilities
and culture at different federal prisons, he claimed he had
connections and could influence your placement. A Bureau of Prison
spokesman denied Frank had any ability to arrange transfers or
promise placements at specific facilities, but at least one client

(28:37):
told the reporter that prison officials had denied his request
for a transfer during a five year sentence for embezzlement,
but after he wrote Frank and included a check for
one thousand dollars, his transfer came through. Now, promising these
transfers seems like it would put Frank back in mail
fraud territory. But if he had stopped short of fraud,

(28:59):
this isn't actually a terrible way for a guy like
Frank to make a living. He really had been in
a significant number of our nation's federal prisons. He'd been
in facilities all over the country spanning decades. He's in
a great position to offer advice about how to get
through your sentence as smoothly as possible. So if he'd
stuck to lifestyle advice for the incarcerated. I might say

(29:21):
that this could have been a success story for Frank.
There was another article about his consulting business in nineteen
ninety eight, but then he kind of disappears. I'm not
sure what he was up to. He pops up briefly
in a couple of articles in two thousand and two
thousand and one, an old prison friend of his called
him from a jail in Reno to ask for help

(29:41):
exposing an alleged smuggling ring run by one of the
guards out there in Nevada, David Wayne is described as
one of the most dangerous inmates in a state prison
system after a variety of escape attempts and prison riots
involving Wayne holding hostages, and in two thousand he wanted
Frank's help leveraging this information about a corrupt guard to
get a better placement. So friend or client hard to say,

(30:05):
but the guard did end up charged with smuggling a
handcuff key to an inmate, and Frank spent about a
year advocating for Wayne's transfer, considering he had once held
two prison nurses hostage for twelve hours by rigging up
a rube Goldberg style contraption that would stab the women's
eyes out with scalpels if anyone opened the door and

(30:25):
had successfully escaped. At least once, a low security placement
for David Wayne was out of the question. But then
quiet Frank moved out to Idaho and stayed out of
the paper. He's not a very good driver, so I
know he moved to Ada County, Idaho around two thousand

(30:45):
and one, because that's when he started getting a lot
of traffic tickets there. In two thousand and eight, he
was charged with battery and convicted, but he only served
five days in jail and successfully completed his court ordered
anger management class. The docket indicates the victim, woman who
appears to be a nursing assistant in the Boise area,
got a restraining order. But the Frank Sweeney, who tried

(31:06):
to drop a bank and fought in the Bush War
and had a mob boss fly him to Vegas and
bragged about being able to influence prison officials, that Frank
seems to be gone. He's just an old man living
in Boise until twenty fifteen. In December of twenty fifteen,

(31:38):
Frank went to the post office near his home in
Garden City, Idaho. He parked his truck in one of
the accessible parking spots out front. A woman saw him
get out of his car, which did not have a
placard indicating he was supposed to be parked there, and
said something to him. We don't know exactly what she said. Now,
me personally, I probably wouldn't have said anything. For the

(31:59):
most part, it's not worth it. It's not your business.
There are plenty of people who are not visibly disabled
who really do need those parking spots. And Frank was
in his seventies at this point, so even if he
didn't have a state issued parking placard, he's old. Just
leave him alone. But she made a comment about it,
and the situation escalated pretty seriously. Court documents only say

(32:22):
that they had a verbal altercation, so at least she
didn't get stabbed, which he's done at least twice to
people who offended him. But whatever she said, and for
whatever reasons she chose to say it, she didn't deserve
what happened next. The victims in this case are referred
to only by their initials in the court record for
obvious reasons, but it can be tricky to keep track

(32:45):
of people with just a letter. So I've given them
all fake names just to make this a little easier.
We'll call the women from the parking lot Ellen, her
husband will be Sam, and their adult daughters will be
Kayla and Lucy. Again, it is possible to figure out
who these people are, but please don't. They've been through enough.

(33:05):
Two weeks after that heated exchange in the post office
parking lot, the postcard started. The probation office in Boise
got the first one. Ellen's adult daughter, Kayla, was at
the time on probation for a misdemeanor dui charge. The
letter writer claimed that he had just the night before
been in the car with Kayla and she was so
drunk that he had to jump out at a red

(33:26):
light for his own safety. Ellen's husband, Sam, received a
postcard at his dental office the same day informing him
that his wife had been in the post office the
week before and she was so drunk that she was
falling down. The letter, though very brief, contained a lot
of really specific personal information, the fact that the couple
had very recently purchased a new home, including the name

(33:48):
of the suburb where they now lived, the city where
their other adult daughter lived, the names of both of
their daughters, and information about Kayla's arrest that year. Ellen
received a third postcard that week, addressed to her at home.
This one contained her social Security number and an allegation
that her daughter Lucy, was engaged in acts of prostitution

(34:09):
at her place of work, which was named after the
family received the first postcards. In December of twenty fifteen,
they met with detectives at the Aida County Sheriff's office
in Boise, and despite investigator's best efforts, the family would
continue to receive increasingly bizarre and frightening postcards for three
full years. Their neighbors and nearby schools received postcards that

(34:33):
appeared to be from the State Sex Offender Registry, informing
them that Sam was a sex offender, specifically that he
had sodomized a nine year old boy in nineteen seventy eight.
It probably goes without saying, but I will say it anyway.
That is not true. But it does kind of remind
you of what Frank did to that doctor in nineteen
ninety three, doesn't it, adding to the victim's distress. Sam

(34:57):
passed away unexpectedly in January of twenty seve sixteen, just
a few weeks after all this started, and obviously Frank
knew one of his victims was dead. Some of the
letters sent to the man's daughters taunted and blamed them
for driving their father into an early grave, but oddly
some of the letters pretended otherwise. While most of the
postcards were signed Carson Wells, the name of Woody Harrelson's

(35:20):
character in the movie No Country for Old Men, some
were signed with the names of her own children. Ellen
received one of those just two months after her husband's death,
purporting to be from her daughter Lucy, who lived out
of state. It said, dear Mommy, my blood test just
came back and yes I am HIV positive. I'm sure
I was infected by one of the two crips with

(35:41):
whom I was having an affair with. Regrettably, I will
never be able to give you and Daddy the grandchildren
you so desired. But we know now that Daddy is
a pedophile. He may have harmed the grandkids. Has he
been released from jail. And again, this is a woman
who just lost her husband. She knows this postcard isn't
from her adult daughter, even if she hadn't already gotten

(36:03):
a dozen other bizarre postcards. She would know that no
one's writing their mother a postcard on a typewriter. It's
not nineteen thirty two. And again, the recently deceased man
was not a pedophile, nor was he in jail. He
had just been buried by his family. Ellen and both

(36:23):
of her daughters continued getting postcards even after Ellen moved,
and Frank was also sending the postcards to other people
pretending to be members of the family. The Idaho Black
History Museum received one signed with Ellen's name, address, and
phone number that was so laden with racial slurs that
you can barely tell what it's supposed to be trying
to say. Lucy's boss received one advising him that his

(36:46):
employee was having rectal intercourse with black men, although Frank
described that in more vivid terms. Now, for as strange
as this man's life has been, you'd be forgiven if
you forgot where we started. Frank is a Nazi. He
was a member of the American Nazi Party, and he
fought as a Rhodesian mercenary. He's not just a guy

(37:08):
who loves doing mail fraud and hates his neighbors. He's
very racist and a lot of these postcards fixated on
the idea that Ellen's daughters were engaged in interracial relationships,
very graphically and racistly describing specific sex acts that they were,
in his mind having with black partners. And he was
particularly upset that Ellen, a Latina, had married a white man.

(37:33):
He called her racial slurs and wrote to her daughters
calling them mongrels. It seems the only time he wasn't
sending postcards was when he was out of the country.
You see, he might have another wife. It's not entirely clear,
but several times a year Frank would travel to Effert,
the capital of the German state of Turingia and Central Germany,

(37:54):
to visit a woman he's known for a very long time,
Uta Schernig, who performs professionally as a belly dancer under
the name Madame Chamila, has on several occasions referred to
Frank as her husband. This may be literal, it may
be a cheeky little joke. My German is not good
enough to really read tone, and it may just be

(38:17):
that they've been in a relationship for so long that
they think of each other this way. My research game
is strong, but a potentially non existent German marriage certificate
evades my grasp. Nevertheless, he does own a home in effort,
and she lives in it. She refers to him occasionally
as her house Positzer, which you could translate as landlord,

(38:38):
but you wouldn't really, you'd call the person you rent
your home from, your permeter house Positzer just means he
owns her house. And he occasionally calls her Liebchen my love,
and she calls him Frankie when he visited in twenty
fifteen and they went to see her mother in the
nursing home together. Her photo captions are about Frank's visit

(38:59):
to his mother in law. As with so much in
Frank's life, it's hard to pin this down. I have
a handful of photos of Frank with this woman that
appeared to be from the eighties or early nineties based
on the photo quality, Frank's apparent age and to be honest,
per hair. But we're talking about Germany, so dating by
the fashion could put us off by a decade or more.

(39:23):
No offense, you know, it's true, But at least in
the present era of his life, he's visiting Germany every
now and again. She breeds and shows Mexican and Peruvian
hairless dog, some of which have been quite successful internationally.
Some of her show dogs list Frank Sweeney as a
co owner. In September of twenty sixteen, his victims had

(39:44):
a brief reprieve from his letters because he was in
Germany attending a seminar on dog genetics with Ute. These
rare breed dogs are very prone to genetic problems and
in breeding, so I'm glad they're staying on top of
best practices, I guess. But when he was at home
in Idaho, the campaign of harassment was relentless. He even

(40:05):
found a way to outsource the terror. Frank sent postcards
to inmates in prisons all over the country. He signed
them with Ellen's name and address, and requested that the
men write her back. She received at least seventy five letters,
all addressed to her at home from murderers and as
if she might not get it, like maybe she didn't

(40:27):
put two and two together here, Like maybe she thought
this was some totally separate, unrelated new problem she just
happens to be having. Frank made sure she understood that
he did this. He sent her numerous postcards explaining the situation.

Speaker 2 (40:43):
Every creep every social degenerate who has written to you
has your address, social Security number, and date of birth.
Likewise for Lucy two. Some of these freaks have already
passed this information on to their criminal friends outside of prison.
Last month, I've I did to your house twice in
the early morning hours while you slept. Naturally, I've removed

(41:04):
my license plates so that street cameras could not identify
my car, and I still patrol the post office daily
in an effort to spot you. You only have your
big mouth to blame for all of this.

Speaker 1 (41:18):
In December of twenty sixteen, after the first full year,
he wrote to her, saying it was their anniversary, telling
her I intend to be with you her life. The
letter has just kept coming, reminding her that he was
watching her outside her home, that he waited for her
at the post office almost every day, and sending her
postcards containing her own personal information like her license plate

(41:40):
number and information about her family, just so she knew
he had it too. He continued writing to Ellen and
both of her daughters, calling them racial slurs, slots whores,
threatening to report them for I sorted imaginary crimes like
tax fraud and drug dealing, and always remembering to write
them on their birthdays. Investigators were stumped. They knew the

(42:03):
letter writer was the man from the post office parking lot.
He said as much in his letters, but Ellen didn't
recognize him. She had only a vague description of his vehicle,
and she didn't get the license plate. Why would she
have thought she needed to? Postcards were always wiped clean
of prints. They were perfectly generic United States Postal Service
issued materials that he always bought in small quantities and

(42:26):
paid cash. He may truly have tormented this woman until
one of them died if he hadn't done what he's
always done, more crime. And here's that beginning of the end.
It's not the end. But I told you this story
that began outside of a bank in New Jersey in
nineteen sixty two, would start its final chapter outside of

(42:47):
a bank in Idaho fifty six years later. On October thirteenth,
twenty eighteen, Frank got into another argument in a parking lot.
These victims, too, are only identified by their inn in
the court records, So I'm going to call them Liam
and Denise. They were in their car outside the Wells
Fargo in Garden City, Idaho. Frank conked at them. There

(43:10):
was again some kind of verbal altercation. Maybe they gave
him the finger or shouted, who knows. You know, this
is the kind of thing that happens every day. You know,
you don't pull forward fast enough, the guy behind you honks,
You tell him to fuck off. Nobody's being their best selves.
But life goes on, but not for Frank. Frank can't
take it. He stabbed a guy in the guts for

(43:32):
splashing him in nineteen seventy five. So two weeks after
Liam and Denise experienced this angry driver at the bank,
they start getting postcards. Like Ellen and her family, this family, too,
starts hearing that their neighbors and nearby schools are getting
postcards that pretend to be from the state Sex Offender Registry,

(43:53):
alerting people that Liam is a pedophile. He's not, and specifically,
the postcards say that he sodomized a nine year old boy.
That is a very specific and very gross detail to
recycle from one victim to the next, right like that,
that has to mean something, but I can't figure it out,

(44:14):
and maybe that's for the best. These postcards, too, are
generic ones from the post office, typed on a manual typewriter.
And again some of the postcards are signed Carson Wells,
and sometimes they're signed with the name of Liam's adult son.
And again there were letters to the family from murderers
answering requests for pen pals. But you know what, the

(44:38):
bank has a lot of security cameras, and unbeknowns to Frank,
shortly before he started terrorizing his second set of victims,
his case wasn't just a local matter anymore. In September
of twenty eighteen, the United States Postal Inspector Service started
looking into the postcards. That's right, the Mail Police. That

(45:02):
is a very real federal law enforcement agency with jurisdiction
over mail crimes. According to their most recent annual report,
the USPIS initiated more than fifty six hundred investigations in
twenty twenty three, and during that year, forty one hundred
cases related to their investigations ended in convictions. Most of
those numbers are things like mail theft and people mailing drugs. Also,

(45:27):
though a couple hundred people a year are assaulting postal employees,
knock that off. Don't do that. Be nice to your
mail carrier. So now we have the Mail Police on
the case. And as soon as they start trying to
figure out what's going on here. Again, this is September
of twenty eighteen, they're just looking at the postcards to
Ellen and her family. But within a few weeks of

(45:48):
them opening the investigation, the Idaho State Police let them
know that someone is sending postcards pretending to be from
their office. And these are these postcards about how Liam
is a pedophile that are being sent to schools and neighbors.
And because these postcards are made to look as though
they are coming from the State Sex Offender Registry, which
is run by the state Police, people are contacting the

(46:11):
state police about them. And now the state police are
talking to the mail police, and now the mail cops
see that there are more victims, and all of these
postcards seem to be from the same person. When postal
investigators speak to both families and compare the letters, it's
clear they're all from the same person. All of the
victims say they know who is sending them these postcards,

(46:35):
they just don't know who he is. Ellen knows it's
the guy from the post office. Liam knows it's the
guy from the bank. And they both describe some kind
of older truck and an older man who's thin with
a stiff gait and a very terrible distinctive scar on
his face. They're describing the same man, and surely a

(46:57):
bank teller or a postal service clerk would recognize description
like that. Local cops had shown Ellen photo lineups on
multiple occasions over the last three years as they're investigating this,
But Frank was never a suspect, so he was never
in any of the photo arrays. So each time they
showed her photos of potential suspects, she said, he's not

(47:17):
here because he wasn't and so she never picked out
any other possible suspect. But once the postal investigator zeroed
in on the man in the bank security footage, both
Ellen and Liam separately identified him in photo lineups, and
bank employees did know who he was, so by Christmas
of twenty eighteen, the male police have Frank's bank records.

(47:40):
He's been paying a private investigator. That's how he knew
so much personal information about all of his victims, information
about their real estate transactions, what kinds of cars they drove,
where they worked, where their adult children lived in different
cities and states. He's paying a PI Idaho is one
of several states where you don't actually have to have

(48:01):
a license of any kind to offer your services as
a PI, so she doesn't have one that can be
taken away, and she hasn't been charged with anything. Maybe
she only helped Frank with information that didn't cross a line,
and maybe she didn't ask enough questions about what he
was doing with it. It remains unclear how he got

(48:22):
everyone's Social Security numbers, though, but the PI he was
paying is a woman in her eighties who seems to
still be in the business just for the love of
the game. Barbara Jacobson describes herself on her website as
a cross between Nancy Drew and Jessica Fletcher with the
tenacity of Colombo, and credits her success to her Christian
faith and divine intervention. An article in a twenty seventeen

(48:46):
issue of Christian Living magazine quotes her as saying, God
is my business partner now again. This woman has not
been charged with a crime, but it seems like a
bad sign that she either didn't know or didn't care
that the client asking her for a lot of personal
information on people had a five decade long rap sheet

(49:09):
that included convictions related to harassment by mail. You're either
deeply unscrupulous or very bad at your job, and I'm
not sure which is worse either way. This investigation is
rapidly coming together. The postal investigator has Frank's bank records,
He's been identified by the victims. They're closing in on him,

(49:31):
and maybe he knows, maybe he doesn't. He did move
very suddenly in February twenty nineteen, leaving the house he'd
been renting for over a decade right as they got
the warrant to search it, and renting a different house nearby.
But he's still sending the letters. So if he knows
they're onto him, why is he still sending the letters.

(49:51):
On February thirteenth, twenty nineteen, six weeks after they know
Frank's their guy, right around the time that he's moving
to his new house, clerk at the post office calls
the investigator to say that an old man with a
terrible scar on his face just bought a stack of
postcards with cash, and the last postcard arrived on February nineteenth,

(50:12):
twenty nineteen. It signed Carson Wells, but the writer identifies
himself as the man who blew his horn at them
in the parking lot, and then he reminds Liam and
Denise that all the murderers who'd been writing to them
had already forwarded their personal information to criminals on the outside,
but it was already over. Two weeks later, they searched
Frank's home. They took his typewriter and his list of

(50:34):
federal inmates, the ones he'd been writing to as his victims,
and they found portraits of Hitler and Nazi memorabilia and
white supremacist literature, and two live rattlesnakes. Rattlesnakes don't live
in Idaho. These aren't snakes that he got outside. These
are snakes that he is breeding. Frank has a lifelong

(50:58):
interest in reptile breeding. I think he's a member of
the Idaho Herpetological Society, or at least he was before
he went to prison, And shortly before his arrest, he
commented on an online obituary for an old high school classmate,
reminiscing fondly about how they used to collect snakes in
the woods together in the fifties. Once he's in custody,

(51:18):
Frank confessed immediately, telling investigators on the day of his
arrest that he'd sent the postcards because he felt like
these people had embarrassed him and it made him feel
better to know he was causing them emotional distress. Shortly
after his arrest, he wrote to the judge to ask
the court to intervene in what he felt was an
inadequate response by the jail to what he called many

(51:38):
of the infirmities that affect the elderly, and says he
has the urge to commit suicide if his demands aren't met.
And I don't want to sound like I'm brushing this off.
I'm not saying that this couldn't possibly be a valid concern.
People die in jails and prisons every day because employees
don't care or don't have the resources to provide adequate care.

(51:58):
This is a very real problem, and the urge to
harm yourself is always very serious. But this isn't Frank's
first rodeo. Remember, in the eighties he used to threaten
suicide and would even fake suicide attempts in order to
manipulate employees of the witness Protection program. So this may

(52:19):
not be a brand new issue for Frank at any rate.
Within months of his arrest, he entered into a plea agreement.
So once the mail cops got on the case, they
actually sorted it out pretty quickly.

Speaker 2 (52:33):
Right.

Speaker 1 (52:33):
The USPIS got on the case in September of twenty eighteen,
and within three months they knew it was Frank. Maybe
they should have called the guys who solved mail crimes earlier.
I don't know, but if there had been more communication
between different law enforcement agencies, the whole situation could have
been resolved. When he sent a single letter a third victim,

(52:56):
which he signed with his own name. When a US
marshall searched Frank's house two years before his eventual arrest,
I guess they didn't bother to check in with the
local police, because in April of twenty seventeen, Frank sent
a single letter to Gerald Shrr, the man who found
it and for many years ran the witness protection program.

(53:19):
I can't think of a worse guy to pick if
you're going to send a threatening letter. Sure was long
since retired by twenty seventeen. He passed away in twenty
twenty at the age of eighty six. But is there
anyone on earth who had more chips to call in
with the US Marshals? You think a US marshal isn't
going to come to your house. If you sign your
full legal name to a threatening letter to the guy
who invented witness protection, you think you're going to scare

(53:43):
the guy whose job was protecting mobsters from other mobsters.
Truly a stupid move, even for Frank.

Speaker 2 (53:53):
You poisonous, licensious, so true. I thought that you would
have been long dead from cardiovascular disease do to obesity.
I was very much hoping to sit shiva for you,
to pray cottage over your fat corpse. You loasome. I
will remember you, although it's doubtful you will remember from
WITSEC units in Otisville of San Diego, paraid in with

(54:14):
your entourage to pray women from the Office of Enforcement Operations.
In nineteen eighty four, you expelled me from the program,
leaving me to fend for myself as a known inform
a rat in the general populations of very dangerous prisons.

Speaker 1 (54:31):
It had been more than thirty years, but Frank never
got over getting kicked out of the program. He flew
all over the world helping a spy in nineteen eighty
trying to leverage information on Christopher Boyce to get placement
in the program, and it didn't work. The information it
gave was not only not helpful, but by fabricating unhelpful
information in order to get something from the government, he

(54:53):
made things worse. And when he finally got what he
wanted by testifying against a serial killer in nineteen eighty two,
he couldn't keep his mouth shut about it, and so
he was removed from the program in nineteen eighty four.
In his letter to shir he claims that as a
result of losing his protected status in eighty four, he
was attacked by another inmate the following year, and he does,

(55:15):
without a doubt, bear a huge scar all down one
cheek to this day. Somebody cut Frank's face open pretty bad.
He takes care to mention in his letter that the
assailant was black, though he chooses different words to say that,
and who knows why Frank got cut. I'm not making
light of the violence that happens inside jails and prisons,

(55:37):
but you'd have to do some real mental gymnastics here
to come up with a satisfying explanation for why a
black man would cut Frank up in retaliation for Frank's
testimony against a Nazi serial killer who traveled the country
shooting black men. I just don't think that they would
be mad about that. But I can think think of

(56:01):
a variety of reasons why a black man who encountered
Frank in prison might get into it with him. I
mean racist hide. Frank's just kind of a hothead, not
a great guy to hang out with, always getting into
it with people. But also he loves saying racial slurs.
So I can think of a variety of reasons why
this might have happened that had nothing to do with
him testifying against a serial killer. We can't take Frank

(56:24):
at his word, and I couldn't find any reporting from
the time about a prison knife fight in nineteen eighty five,
So who else? After Shre received the letter, which Frank
had signed venomously Yours, Frank Abbott Sweeney, a US marshal
was sent out to Idaho to speak with Frank, and
Frank admitted that he sent the letter, but he said

(56:46):
he meant no harm by it, and he allowed the
marshal to search his home. It seems like if anyone
had compared notes, Frank could have been identified as the
Garden City postcard writer far sooner The language in this
letter was very similar to some of the postcards. If
they had just showed this letter to the sheriff, maybe
they would have recognized it, But yes, they didn't because

(57:08):
he wasn't. The local police in Pennsylvania where the letter
was received charged Frank with terroristic threats, but that's a
non extraditable misdemeanor in Pennsylvania, so they couldn't bring him
back to face the charge. So he's got an open
warrant in Pennsylvania. If he ever goes there, willingly, but
he probably won't and was sure now deceased. It doesn't

(57:30):
seem like that's likely to amount to anything. On December sixteenth,
twenty nineteen, Frank Sweeney was sentenced to fifty one months
for six counts of stalking. A few days later, his
German wife posted a photo of her Christmas Eve dinner.
A friend asked her if Frank would be celebrating with
her that year. She replied that no, Frank has been

(57:51):
ill for several months and can't fly right now. She
didn't say that he was back in federal prison for
at least the fifth time. Frank Sweeney was released from
prison in December of twenty twenty two. I just noticed,
as I'm writing this that it's his eighty first birthday today,
but it won't be by the time you hear this.

(58:11):
He's still in Idaho, he's still playing the violin, and
he still co owns a few Mexican hairless dogs on
the show circuit in Germany. In that nineteen ninety four
New York Times article about his prison consulting business, Frank
quipped that his favorite quote was the crime is not
in the act, but in the stupidity of being caught,

(58:32):
which he attributes to Nietzsche. I think, regardless of your
stance on the philosophical nature of crime and punishment, though
there are better quotes from Frank's thousands of appearances in
the newspaper over his six decades of crime. Maybe Judge H.
Curtis Meaner had it write in nineteen eighty one when
he cut off the bickering in the courtroom over exactly
what the hell happened with Frank's mysterious South African letters

(58:54):
about the missing spy, saying, I have neither the time
nor inclination to unravel all the monies in this case,
because we never really will unravel all the mysteries of
Frank's past. He played a bit part in so many
much bigger stories. They've made whole Hollywood films out of
so many of these little slices of history that Frank

(59:16):
passed through, from Cold War spy thrillers to Scorsese dramas
about organized crime. Frank's there, He's not in the movie.
He's just out of frame while history happens doing something
really goddamn weird. Weird little guys sit production of cool

(59:40):
Zone Media. For more from cool Zone Media, visit our
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