Behind the Bastards Presents: Weird Little Guys

but this one is It's called Weird Little Guys. It launched this year with one of my friends and favorite researchers, the Great Molly Conger, and you're going to listen to a two part episode which we've cut together for you with a lot less ads than normal, about a guy named Frank Sweeney. So please enjoy and happy holidays.

still alive. But for the purposes of this telling, we'll start outside the Palisade Trust Company Bank in Englewood, New Jersey, on February twenty third, nineteen sixty two, when an eighteen year old member of the American Nazi Party was arrested after skipping school to try to rob a bank with a toy gun and will mark the beginning of the end of his story in a Wells Fargo parking lot in Garden City, Idaho, on October thirteenth, twenty eighteen, when

an elderly ex Cohn was caught on security cam footage getting into an altercation with a couple who didn't move forward quickly enough at the drive up atm In the decades in between, Frank Sweeney went to prison at least half a dozen times, bought as a foreign mercenary, got deported from both Rhodesia and South Africa, helped an escaped spy of ad U s Marshals, turned state's witness against a Hitler worshiping serial killer, tried to help the mob,

and waged a three year campaign of terror and harassment against a woman who made a passing comment about how he was parked outside the post office. I'm Molly Conger and this is brune La.

was something I read about when it happened. The cases against the gun trafficking Nazi paramilitary group was a story I spent years reading, paying ten cents a page, one court filing at a time as it wound its way

through the system. But this one, this one is brand new to me, and I think it will be brand new to just about everybody, because for as many times as this man shows up in the newspaper over the last sixty years, I haven't found any one source that's gathered together the threads of his life and tried to make sense of how one man's name could appear in so many other people's stories. Because that's where I found him.

In someone else's story. I was reading a biography of a particularly nasty little guy, one we'll definitely get to eventually in another episode when my weird little guy detector went off. Call it a gut feeling, but this passing mention of a side character in the life of a serial killer was enough to get me to put that book down and spend days digging through newspaper archives trying to figure out Frank.

parter is worth the weight in between. But I think you'll agree Frank's story is weird enough for two episodes. Frank Abbott Sweeney Junior was born in August of nineteen forty three in New Jersey, to Frank Abbott Sweeney Senior, a realtor, and Marie Gleeson Sweeney, a homemaker who taught

violin lessons and volunteered with the Red Cross. As a lifelong con artist, A lot of what he's told reporters about his own life is self serving fiction, which would sometimes get published without fact checking and then reappear in later accounts as fact.

matriculated at Georgetown in nineteen sixty one. He was a senior at Tenafly High School in nineteen sixty two, when he was sent to the Annandell Reformatory for two and a half years.

On February twenty third, nineteen sixty two, Frank Sweeney skipped school. Shortly after nine am, he walked into a bank in Englewood, New Jersey, approached the teller and slid a plastic toy gun that he'd painted black out of a Manila envelope. I'd like to make a withdrawal, he told the teller

as he cocked the toy pistol. I don't know if the teller could tell the gun was fake, or if she just didn't think this gangly, redheaded teenager had it in him to shoot her, or maybe she just was having a bad day and didn't care anymore, because, according to local news reports, she sneered at him, got up and walked away, leaving him standing there alone at the counter with his toy gun and bewildered by the teller's

apparent disinterest in being held at gunpoint. He just put the plastic pistol back in his pocket, turned around and walked out the front door, and as he was leaving, an off duty policeman just happened to be walking into the bank. An employee told the officer what had just happened, and he turned right around and caught Frank just outside. He dragged him back inside the bank to be identified by the teller, and as the patrolman is making the arrest, Frank says to him.

bank robbery. There's no other mention of Frank in connection with that anti Semitic vandalism the judge mentioned, But I did find several newspaper articles about incidents of that sort from the prior to years when Frank would have still been a minor. In January nineteen sixty three, unnamed teenage boys were accused of painting swastikas on parked cars in Emerson, just eight miles away. In February of nineteen sixty one, one hung a swastika banner over the entrance of the

synagogue in Tenafly. Newspaper articles about that banner reference a similar recent incident at the synagogue in nearby Englewood. A few days later, someone painted a swastika over a plaque nearby. In June, two teenage boys respotted fleeing the scene after two trailers belonging to a contract or were broken into and left a swastika painted on the floor inside. In all these incidents, police told the papers of the time that they had referred the cases to the juvenile division.

It's not like anti Semitic incidents are so rare that I'm saying that Frank is the only possible suspect here in every nineteen sixties Bergen County news article about a swastika, I found plenty of other newspaper reports during those same two years about a local man flying a swastika flag outside of his home, about attacks on Jewish businesses and synagogues and neighboring cities, and other incidents that just don't

fit this particular pattern of teenage Nazi vandalism. And the comment the judge made makes it sound like Frank had been there before. But any appearance he'd made in court as a miner wouldn't have been reported with his name

attached to it. And it's hard enough to get any information about a juvenile case in twenty twenty four, So forget figuring out what happened in nineteen sixty one, but it does seem pretty likely he'd at least been a suspect in some of those incidents, because at the hearing where he pled guilty to the attempted bank robbery, Frank did admit that the police had spoken to him on numerous occasions, specifically concerning his involvement in George Lincoln Rockwell's

American Nazi Party. For the attempted bank robbery, Frank was sentenced to an indeterminate term at a boy's reformatory, and he was released on October of nineteen sixty four, shortly after his twenty first birthday. After serving about two and a half years. After his first stent in jail, Frank returned to his parents' home in New Jersey. He worked occasionally as a shipping clerk, but it doesn't seem like

he was holding down a steady job. After Noon in July of nineteen sixty seven, neighbors reported hearing gunshots in the woods. An officer drove by to check it out and saw a car parked on the side of the road. The car looked empty, so the officer kept driving without stopping to investigate. Suddenly, the car pulled out behind him

and tried to run the officer off the road. A brief vehicle chase ensued, with the officer following the vehicle for about a mile before the driver Frank parked outside of his parents' home, got out and walked toward the front door. The officer asked Frank if he'd been shooting guns in the woods, to which Frank replied only no, and then warned the officer that he was on private

property for walking away and into the house. But Frank left something on the front seat of the car, unfortunately, and it was a Thompson submachine gun that he'd been firing in the woods. The officer saw the gun and called for backup, and when they arrived, Frank opened fire on them from inside the home, kicking off a seventy five minute gun battle, with more than a dozen cops firing shots at the house as Frank fired at them

through the windows. Frank's father and brother pleaded with him to come out, or at least to send the family dog out. After police Captain Peter Zurla was shot in the arm, the officers lobbed four canisters of tear gas through the windows, finally driving Frank out into the front yard,

where he was arrested without further incident. And as they put the handcuffs on him, he turned to Captain Zerla, who's still standing there in the front yard bleeding from a gunshot wound, and Frank says, some shot when I got you through the window. Huh. There's no follow up I can find about whether the dog was heard, or how missus Sweeney got the tear gas out of her upholstery. It was the sixties, so maybe her sofa was safely scotch guarded or wrapped up in one of those weird

plastic covers that were popular back then. But you have to figure she at least had to replace the curtains. Frank entered a not guilty plea and unsuccessfully try I to suppressed the evidence of the gun found on the front seat of the car, with his attorney arguing that it was discovered in an illegal search because the cop didn't have probable cause to look through the window of the parked car. That's not how that works.

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

in the upper arm. I don't think it went through the bone, so it really he was lightly wounded.

Kaplan Jewish Community Center. The clearest account of the next phase of Frank's life comes from an essay written in twenty nineteen by a retired Rhodesian military policeman. Despite being the most likely to be more or less true, it's still riddled with obvious factual inaccuracies, things that just can't be true. Maybe because it was written as a humorous recollection meant to be read by his fellow former Rhodesian soldiers, and maybe his memory has faded a bit in the

nearly fifty years since the event in question. But it does at the very least substantiate Frank's own claim about having enlisted in the Rhodesian Light Infantry in the early

nineteen seventies. I'll try to walk the tightrope here of providing a little more con text than just Rhodesia was very bad and white supremacist from other countries were obsessed with the idea that they could travel there to kill black people with impunity, while still stopping short of taking us down the long road of the history and consequences of European colonization in Africa. That's far from my area of expertise, and it's not why you're here.

Africa Company. The area was effectively ruled by the company until the nineteen twenties, when it became a self governing colony of the UK, and by the nineteen fifties, decolonization was happening all across the African continent. These fading European empires couldn't or didn't want to hold on to all the colonies they'd collected during the previous centuries scramble for Africa.

In nineteen sixty British Prime Minister Harold macmillan gave his Wind of Change speech in an address to the South African Parliament about the political necessity of moving toward decolonization.

at any cost. He could see the Belgians and Congo and the French in Algeria fighting these costly wars with Africans who wanted an end to European colonial rule, and as they worked towards extricating themselves from these colonial arrangements, the British government adopted a policy called no independence before majority rule, meaning they wouldn't hand over sovereignty to a

colony still run exclusively by the white colonial minority. Now, obviously, this is an immensely complicated bit of political history that I'm stripping down to the studs and explaining badly so we get through it quickly. So don't think I'm giving the British Empire any kind of credit here. This policy did not arise out of a genuine desire to undo the harms of colonialism and address racism or anything like that.

it's so important. But that brings us to where we were going. The Rhodesian bush War a fifteen year period of civil conflict between the white minority led government and the African nationalist guerrilla forces. The number of foreign mercenaries who actually traveled to Rhodesia during the war remains up for debate. Most of the countries the mercenaries came from

were embarrassed by the whole affair. International sanctions levied against the territory after the illegal declaration of independence made it illegal for citizens of many countries to participate in the conflict, even in countries that didn't have their own domestic laws banning mercenary activity. And there was some discomfort within Rhodesia too about this perception that they needed foreigners to help

with what they saw as their war for independence. So, for deeply unflattering and regrettable reasons, no one was very invested in getting a thorough accounting of the situation. Right, Nobody benefits from knowing what happened here. But at the high end it was really only a few thousand mercenaries over the total course of the conflict, with best estimates for the number of them who were Americans being somewhere

in the low hundreds. So a lot of guys talked about it, but not very many of them actually did it. This idea of American extremists traveling to Africa to violently enforce white rule over black Africans is one that modern

white supremacists still cherish and celebrate. Dylan Rufe, who was welcomed with open arms at an evening Bible study at a manual African Methodist Episcopal church in Charleston, South Carolina, registered the domain last Rhodesian dot com a few months before he murdered nine of the parishioners who thought he was joining them for prayer that night. Rufe made his final edit to that site his digital manifesto, just hours

before carrying out that attack. In twenty fifteen, the cultural moment where magazines like Soldier of Fortune ran full page advertisements for opportunities to be a man among men in the African bush looms large in our memories, but the reality is there weren't many men who actually heeded the call, and their role in the conflict was insignificant. But unlike many of those Americans who did end up in Rhodesia in this seventies, Frank Sweeney didn't see an advertisement and

Soldier of Fortune. That magazine's first issue, bearing a cover story about American mercenaries in Africa, was published in the summer of nineteen seventy five, just as Frank Sweeney was already on his way home. According to Frank, which is a dangerous way to start an assertion of fact. He walked into the Rhodesian Information Center in Washington, d C. In nineteen seventy two and asked how to join up.

The information center was not technically a diplomatic office because Rhodesia was not technically a country, the fact that would get them into some trouble in Australia, but they claimed that they were just offering information about tourism. Frank says he was offered the contact information for Major Nick Lamprecht,

the Rhodesian Army's chief recruiter. David Annibl, a reporter for the Christian Science Monitor, who interviewed Frank in nineteen seventy five wrote that he'd spoken to another recent visitor to

that office. After talking to Frank, this visitor walked into the office and was given a brochure printed by the Rhodesian Department of Labor about careers in Rhodesia, and after a thirty minute presentation about Americans already fighting in the conflict and the pay and benefits a mercenary could expect, including paid airfare, all violations of international sanctions in US federal law, the visitor was offered Major Lamprek's contact information

That recruiter Nick Lamprek worked closely with Soldier of Fortune founder Robert K. Brown to strategize how the magazine can be used to convince more Americans to make the trip. In the latter years of the conflict, Lampreck himself even wrote an article for the magazine promising young American Soldiers of Fortune that it would be easy for them to find a beautiful white Rhodesian wife. I think Lamprek knew he was lying about how much fun you could have

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

into neighboring Mozambique. He claimed that sometimes these trips over the border were to assist Portuguese troops, and until late nineteen seventy four, Portuguese troops were in Mozambique fighting to put down the Mozambiquan War of Independence, and Frank said sometimes they'd go over the border to raid gorilla camps, perhaps those belonging to the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army, which had strong ties to the group's fight for independence

In Mozambique. These Rhodesian raids over the border into Mozambique continued even after that nation gain sovereignty in nineteen seventy five. But it's hard to pin down when Frank would have been doing this, if he even did. I can at least say that Frank was no longer in Rhodesia. During one of the war's worst atrocities, a Rhodesian raid on a refugee camp in Mozambique killed over one thousand civilians.

David Animal published a couple of articles in nineteen seventy five in nineteen seventy six about Rhodesia, and he often quoted Frank Sweeney about his time there.

Frank is described as a fan of Ian Smith, of white superiority and of the need to defend both, and is quoted as saying, if I could do anything to preserve Western civilization in the area, I would do it. Frank told Annabel that he'd received hundreds of letters in response to his ads and responded to all of them. But then again, he also told Annabel he was a

college graduate, and you know that's not true. An animal claims Frank showed him his discharge papers from the Rhodesian Light Infantry, which were quote in order according to the article, and showed three years of good service and a rank of corporal, And that's definitely not true. I'm sure Frank did show Annimal something. He probably did show him papers that indicated as much, and I don't fault him for reporting it. It turns out Frank was quite skilled at forgery.

Frank claims he was in Washington, d c. Getting recruited into the Rhodesian Army in nineteen seventy two, but he may have actually still been in prison in nineteen seventy two.

Company in the nineteenth century. The BSAP was Rhodesia's regular police force, but the line between regular policing and military operations was blurry, and during the Bush War there were military units made up of BSAP officers and they developed counterinsurgency and counter terrorism units. They oversaw the intelligence gathering arm of the infamously brutal Selu Scouts, and they killed hundreds of people by introducing poisoned food and medicine into

the supply lines for the insurgent forces. I don't know exactly what Hickman was doing for most of the war. Maybe he didn't do any of that, But these days he's retired in Johannesburg, South Africa and makes detailed models of trains and farmhouses. In the early nineteen seventies, he was assigned to the Homicide Unit of bsap's Criminal Investigative Division, and in twenty nineteen he wrote down his recollections of Frank Sweeney for a newsletter published by his Veterans Association.

Like any account of Frank's life, Hickman's essay can't be taken as gospel truth between the lies Frank told him and his own fading memory of the seventies.

a little bit. Three men were chatting pleasantly enough, but Frank was humorless and sober, and he was outraged when the drunk man splashed shower.

in the mail. The postmark indicated that it had been mailed from nearby Salisbury weeks earlier. The anonymous letter writer said that a private Fa Sweeney had been convicted of the attempted murder of a policeman in the United States. It was Hickman, our essayist, who first suspected that Frank may actually have written this letter himself, and when he pressed Frank for a handwriting sample to prove it, he cracked immediately.

that he'd fled the country prior to being sentenced. So he's cutting out this six year period that he spent in prison for the shooting and pretending that he had just arrived there in Rhodesia immediately after the events that we know took place in July of nineteen sixty seven. And the timeline isn't the only thing that's off in

this version. Frank says the shootout only lasted ten minutes, not over an hour, and he had decided to end the incident on his own terms when he saw that his father had arrived, rather than the truth, which was that he argued with his distraught father for an hour while continuing to shoot through the windows until he was smoked out by tear gas. But the inciting incident in

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

But Frank said he'd purchased the Tommy gun from the magazine, but it was missing some parts. It didn't have a firing pin and something else, so it didn't work. He manufactured the necessary replacement parts, but he was concerned that in his modification of the weapon maybe things weren't one hundred percent and he was worried that it would explode when fired, so he lashed it to a tree and set it to fully automatic and rigged a string to the trigger and hid behind another tree for cover.

creative license here. The story he's telling is not one hundred percent true, but he is admitting to almost all of the real details for the real crime he really did go to prison for.

The Rhodesian police continued to hold Frank in custody, and while he was waiting to find out if they were going to try him for attempted murder got some mail an envelope containing two United States passports and three hundred dollars in cash. Both passports bore Frank's photo in Frank's birth date, but only one had Frank's name on it. The other was for Francis august Schellhammer, a man who

doesn't exist. He explained to the officers that he was quite good at making such things, and even offered to forge a pair of US passports for Hickman and the other detective. Hickman says that they declined the offer. Remarkably, the Rhodesian government opted to drop the charges and just send Frank home. Can you court martial a mercenary?

a letter to Hickman. Frank's mother had mailed him some more cash before all this trouble got started, and it arrived in Rhodesia after he was already gone, and he wanted Hickman to put it back in the mail for him. His letter, which Hickman has actually held on to all these years, is dated August twenty second.

to meet you too. Even though my service in the military was cut short, loyalty to Rhodesa remains as strong as ever.

But when he placed ads offering four MP forty Schmeiser submachine guns for sale, he didn't use his own name. He used the name Francis August Shellhammer, the name from the forged passport, and he listed a commercial address in Fort Lee, New Jersey. It seems Frank never actually had these Nazi submachine guns, but he did collect the money by many interested collectors who thought they were buying these

imaginary guns. It seems like a great hack to make free money, but unfortunately for Frank, that is mail fraud. So in March of nineteen seventy six, he's being interviewed by a reporter from the La Times, and he's telling this reporter he's enjoyed his time in Rhodesia so much that he's actually planning to move back to South Africa.

to that federal mail fraud charge. The La Times article, which doesn't make any mention of his former or current criminal charges, does say that Frank said that he'd recently been visited by the FBI, and Frank says they came to his house to try to pressure him to provide

information about other mercenaries. It seems a little more likely that he's a compulsive liar who got a thrill out of working in this kernel of truth because the FBI had just been to his house, that part's true, but they were there to arrest him for mail fraud, but he wasn't lying about his plans for an upcoming move. After pleading guilty to the mail fraud charge, he skipped

out on his sentencing hearing. He packed his bags and he caught a flight to Johannesburg, but South Africa sent him right back and he was arrested by US marshals as he was getting off the plane at JFK in June of nineteen seventy six. And while marshals were arresting him, his suitcase was loaded off the plane and it went

through customs without him. Customs officials seized a nine millimeters Luguar pistol because he lacked the proper paperwork to bring the firearm into the US from a foreign country, and inexplicably, there were no additional charges brought for any of that. He wasn't supposed to have a gun at all, and he certainly wasn't supposed to try to flee the continent while awaiting sentencing for a federal crime. I know the seventies were a different time, and it wasn't a big deal.

a two hundred and forty four dollars storage fee. I don't know what that comes out to per month for the four years he was in prison, but that seems steep, and so Frank claims he walked right into the Customs office inside the World Trade Center in May of nineteen eighty, paid the fee, failed out a form, and they gave him back his gun. A spokesman for the US Customs Service said they had no way of knowing he was

a felon. Frank said it was all just a half hearted joke, telling a reporter all I really wanted to do was test the gun laws to show there really is a need for federal gun legislation. The Feds are giving criminals like me are guns back in New York City just for the asking. Federal gun laws are versical. You know, he's not a great guy, but he does have some quips. You know, he's just out there doing bits. And he ended up handing the gun back over to

the ATF without incident. A few months later, but back to the mail fraud. He got the four years for the mail fraud and was sent to federal prison. And it was in prison this time around that Frank would meet Christopher Boyce, a young defense contractor who'd recently been convicted of espionage in nineteen seventy four. A twenty one year old college dropout, and Christopher Boyce got a job at TRW, an aerospace company with a lot of government contracts.

He wasn't really qualified for the role, having never worked in an office before, but he.

didn't just make satellites and jet engines. In his own later testimony before a Congressional committee, Boyce described the company as a CIA contractor, something he'd had no idea about before his promotion to a highly sensitive position working on special projects from inside the company's black vault and with a top secret CIA clearance, Boyce had access to the

company's encrypted teletype connection with Langley. On at least a dozen occasions, he removed documents from the vault and photographed them. On at least six occasions, he photographed documents inside the VAULTA told Congress. Obviously, neither the government's clearance procedures nor the company's security procedures worked very well, I'll say. In his new position inside the vault, Boyce monitored satellite communications between the CIA, his employer TRW, and other CIA contacts

around the world. In his congressional testimony, Boyce describes a shockingly lax approach to security for this allegedly super secure black vault. He would come back to work late at night to return the documents he'd stolen, and no one questioned why a junior employee was opening the vault at

four am. He made deliveries to secure CIA sites without having the proper clearance to enter them, and on one occasion, he wandered into a CIA code room, picked up a clipboard and was flipping through the pages before someone politely asked him to leave. Employees in the vault were supposed to destroy the code cards used in the teletype machine

at the end of each workday. Boyce says they just tossed the cards in a canvas bag in the corner, and they used the document destruction blender to make my ties with the Bacardi that they kept hidden behind the cryptography machines.

were actually destroyed. And these are the documents that Boyce stole. Okay, I know Frank's not even in this part, but I have to tell you just a little bit about the nineteen seventy five constitutional crisis in Australia. I know, I know, this is an even more egregious digression than the history of Rhodesia. But look at the show art. It's not just cool to look at. We are living on my red string board, and I've got to put this pushpin in somewhere.

central Australia run by the CIA. In nineteen seventy five, the opposition party, which controlled the Senate deferred the passage of an appropriations bill.

didn't need any encouragement from anybody to fire him. But in his memoirs published decades later, he wrote that in nineteen seventy seven, President Jimmy Carter sent Warren Christopher, the Deputy Secretary of State to Australia, to meet with Whitlam, and Christopher told Whitlam that the United States quote would never again interfere with Australia's democratic processes, never again, never again. And Whitlam's personal secretary backs up this recollection of the use of the word again.

Australian Governor General as our manker. So he stole them, and instead of going to the press, he and his childhood friend, a cocaine dealer named Dalton Lee, decided to sell the documents to the Soviets. Lee would take the documents down to Mexico and deliver them to the Soviet embassy and return with cash which they split.

Christopher Boyce was arrested by authorities in the US just ten days later, and accounts vary as to whether or not Dalton Lee gave boys up. In that initial interview, he says he didn't and he probably didn't need to. The authorities would have arrived at the conclusion that it was boys who had stolen those documents, whether Dalton Lee gave him up or not, so you know, we'll never know. But this is where Frank comes back. This is where

Frank reappears in his own story. I haven't forgotten him because while all this CIA's skullduggery and Cold War espionage is going on, Frank is sitting in a jail cell on Terminal Island, a low security federal corrections facility in Los Angeles. I can't find a good reason for why he would have been transported to a prison in California after being arrested in New York, but government inefficiency is

as likely an explanation as anything else. Christopher Boyce was ultimately convicted of eight counts of espionage in nineteen seventy seven and sentenced to forty years in prison, and for several months in late seventy seven to early seventy eight, the two men were on the same cell block at

Terminal Island. Much has been made of the apparent incongruity of Frank, a man who fought as a mercenary against communist gorillas, befriending Boyce, a man convicted of aiding the Soviet Union, But I don't think either of them had a fully formed set of political beliefs at the time. Boyce's mother would later say that the two became quite close in those months. Frank was for reasons I spent way too long unsuccessfully trying to figure out transferred to

a prison in sometime in early nineteen seventy eight. Boyce would eventually be transferred to Lompoc, a prison a few hours north of Los Angeles, and in January of nineteen eighty, Christopher Boyce escaped from prison. The ensuing manhunt for the missing spy would last nearly two years, in part because Frank was planting false clues from Cape Town to California to lead investigators.

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 to South Africa shortly before Boyce's escape, and others putting that trip slightly after the escape, although both of these articles say it was exactly twenty three days before or after.

But in my frustrated search through forty year old newspapers trying to figure out which prison Frank was calling home that year, I found another surprise, another stabbing. Shortly after Frank was transferred to a state prison in Maine in nineteen seventy eight, he stabbed another inmate in the chest during an argument in the prison library. And again we have this problem that keeps coming up in Frank's life. He loves to talk to reporters and he loves to lie.

It's the seventies. These reporters don't have the Internet, they don't have access to electronic court records, so a lot of Frank's lies get published when he files a lawsuit against the prison warden in Maine about the conditions in solitary confinement. Newspapers publish his claim that he was placed in solitary for a stabbing he'd been suspected of, but he says the investigation cleared him. A local newspaper in Bangor Main, however, had a report in the courtroom when he entered a guilty.

I can do. But remember, this is the Cold War. A missing Soviet spy is a pretty big pr problem for the United States government. There was speculation that the KGB had helped him escape. Boyce himself called a reporter from a payphone a few months after the escape and laughed about the idea that he'd had foreign assistance. He says,

he just climbed the fence and walked out. The task force focused on finding boys believed all along that he'd never Actually they left California, and they weren't too far off. He was in Idaho the whole time. But a lot of resources ended up getting expended pursuing a false lead planted by our friend Frank. Now I can't prove Frank sent all of these letters himself. I can't even find contemporane his reporting where anyone ever outright said that they

believed Frank sent these letters. And he was never charged in connection with his meddling in this investigation. But just a few weeks after Boyce went missing, the United States Ambassador in South Africa got a letter the postmark indicated that had been mailed from within South Africa, and the letter said a known mercenary named Shellhammer had assisted the convicted American spy Christopher Boyce in entering South Africa by

way of a fake passport. Now, who do we know with a history of forging passports of mailing anonymous letters to officials in Southern Africa implicating himself and crimes and using the pseudonyme shell Hammer. And he absolutely knew the FEDS would tie him to that alias because it was the one he had used in those classified ads in nineteen seventy six that put him in prison for mail fraud. And Frank was in South Africa in February of nineteen

eighty when that letter was mailed. It seems he wanted the authorities to know he was involved. Why else would he write his own pseudonym into the story. So FEDS quickly turned their attention to Frank. They placed a tracking beacon on his car. They followed him for months, and he probably knew he.

at work, but there was no informer. Frank wanted them to find those letters, and Boyce was never in South Africa. The only reason anyone thought Boyce might be in South Africa is because Frank was planting false clues all over the world.

Frank had guns. Did find one newspaper article that wrapped a sort of suspicious sounding hint that they only picked Frank up for that gun charge because of an anonymous tip, so maybe that.

by Frank. He'd flown to South Africa several times in the year and a half since his release and was probably mailing himself these letters on those visits. So now in August of nineteen eighty one, it seems like there could be some evidence that Boyce really was in South Africa. Frank says he was promised placement in the Witness Protection program for his help, and maybe they did make that promise if he really could help them recover their missing spy,

that's a reasonable enough deal. And just a few weeks after all of Frank's help, Boyce was recaptured, but it wasn't due in any part to Frank's information. During his year and a half on the run, Boyce obviously couldn't get a job, so he made money the old fashioned way bank robbery. He kept it pretty small time, nothing flashy where you get into the vault. Just little stick ups a few thousand at a time. From the teller.

He's tied to at least seventeen bank robberies in Idaho and Washington State during that time, eventually teaming up with a couple of brothers from Idaho, and it was one of those men who turned Boys in for the reward money no honor among thieves.

Frank said he had no choice but to flee the country and start a new life on a cattle ranch in Australia with his wife because the government had renegged on their deal to put him in witness protection. I have to imagine there was some bickering back and forth between an indignant Frank and an exasperated federal prosecutor, because in the end, Judge H. Curtis Mener said, I have neither the time nor the inclination to unravel all of the mysteries in this case. However, they'd all ended up

in his courtroom. Whatever the convoluted backstory is here, this is a sentencing or illegal possession of a firearm, and that's really all the judge can do that day, so he sentenced Frank to four years. Judge Meaner said Frank was an explosive type of individual and that he was dangerous and mentally sick, and he urged Frank to take advantage of the opportunity to get psychiatric help while he was in prison this time. And yes, I did say wife.

When I first started poking around trying to build my biographical backstory, to sort of sketch out a skeleton of this man's life, I found a new Jersey state record for a marriage in August nineteen eighty one between a Frank A. Sweeney and aDNA M. Madison in Bergen County. There are other men named Frank Sweeney, obviously, but it was a middle initial match and it's the right county, and it was one of the rare months that Frank wasn't in prison. But it didn't seem right, so I

set it aside. But this offhand mention at his sentencing hearing about a wife, sent me back to it.

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, 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 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 can't imagine what you write in a letter to your girlfriend's husband about a situation like this. But all that to say, Frank really did have a wife that he planned to start a new life with in Australia, but she ended up watching her boyfriend choke a man to death in an apartment in fort Worth instead. On January ninth, nineteen eighty two, the UVA men's basketball team lost to the tar Heels in a close game, sixty to sixty five

at UNC's Carmichael Arena. I'm not a basketball fan, and I wasn't born then, but I guess it was an exciting game. UNC had knocked Uva out of the Final Four the year before, but Joseph Paul Franklin, an avowed neo Nazi who'd recently been handed his first couple of life sentences for two of his many murders, didn't care much for basketball. He was in the wreck room at the Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, Missouri, and

he was trying to watch American bandstand. According to frank whose time at the Springfield prison overlapped with Franklins for a few weeks in nineteen eighty one until Franklin's transfer at the end of January nineteen eighty two, the serial killer became enraged when a black prison guard changed the channel. Later that year, Joseph Paul Franklin was back in court.

He'd spent years traveling the country, robbing banks and murdering young black men and interracial couples, so it would take years to sort out what.

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.

pretty good detail. Frank was very specific that it was a uva unc game that he couldn't recall the date they were only on that cell block together for a few weeks, and there was in fact a Uva unc basketball game during that time period that would have.

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, 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 jailhouse informants who testified frank On cross examination, frank Sweeney seemed surprised to learn that the other two men had been paid thousands of dollars for their cooperation. He wasn't getting paid, but he was upset. He didn't

need the money. He'd inherited a quarter a million dollars, which would be about a million dollars today when his parents died. All he wanted was witness protection, then a positive letter to the New Jersey Parole Board. Just like in the boy's case, he very conveniently had some information the government wanted, and all he wanted in return was witness protection. And this time he got it, but he

didn't get to keep it. In nineteen eighty four, frank filed a lawsuit against the warden of the Alabama prison where he was still serving his sentence on that gun charge. He said he was not receiving the protection afforded to him as a protected witness. The warden's response to the suit was that Frank would not stop telling people that he was a protected witness, which was causing a lot of problems. You're not supposed to do that in court.

The warden's executive assistant said that the prison was considering contacting in the Office of Enforcement Operations, the division of the DOJ that administers the Witness Security program, to recommend his removal from the program because they believed he was

intentionally causing problems by talking about this constantly. And it seems he was ultimately removed from the Witness Security program around this time, and maybe that had something to do with his decision to testify on behalf of Anthony Spalotro, the hot headed Chicago mobster who handled the family's business.

Tony Spalotro's Hole in the Wall gang. If you've seen the nineteen ninety five Scorsese movie Casino, it's that quite literally. Frank Marino, the character played by the guy who played Phil Leotardo on The Sopranos, is supposed to be Frank Kulatta. Joe Peshi's character, Nikki Sentorro, is based on Tony Spilotro. Just watch the movie. It's all very complicated, and our

friend Frank Sweeney had nothing to do with it. But in nineteen eighty three, the real life Frank Kulata was sharing a cell with Frank Sweeney because they had both turned state's witness against very dangerous men. Frank Sweeney had just testified against a serial killer and Frank Kulatta had turned on Spilotro after the FBI played him a recording

of his friend talking about having him killed. When Anthony Spilotro went on trial in nineteen eighty six, Frank Kulatta was out of prison and in the program, and he was the government's star witness against Spilotro. Frank Sweeney was finally out of prison again in home in New Jersey when he read in the paper that Kulata was going to be testifying. According to Frank, he felt compelled to contact Spilotro's defense attorney because when they were cell mates,

Kulata would af in brag about committing perjury. So the defense flew Frank out to Las Vegas and put him on the stand. He claimed that after one of Colada's appearances in court back in nineteen eighty three, he came back to their shared cell and bragged, Frankie, I just put another one away. You've heard of the traveling circus.

I'm the original traveling perjurer. On cross examination, Frank Sweeney admitted that when he'd been in the witness protection program, he had on several occasions threatened and even faked suicide attempts to get what he wanted out of federal prosecutors. I wish I had more information on that. That is incredibly strange behavior, and it does actually happen again later in the end, though his testimony in that mob trial is just a strange little footnote. His third brush with

the witness protection program. His testimony didn't matter much. I don't think anyone believed it, and the case ended in a mistrial over allegations of jury tampering, and Anthony Spilotro went missing before they could retry the case. The mobster and his brother were later found buried in a cornfield in Indiana. Frank Kulatta stayed in the witness protection program for years, and Scorsese hired him as an onset adviser

when he shot Casino. Klata died of COVID in twenty twenty, and in nineteen eighty nine, Frank went back to prison for mail fraud.

This time, he was running what one journalist called.

cat he got for his fifteenth birthday. He was looking forward to dissecting it and adding it to his collection of oddities that already included a cat skeleton. So I hope all his fraudulent cats found happy homes, even if

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

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 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. Children are noisy. Frank says he asked them to keep

it down, but the noise continued. In what these Second Circuit Court of Appeals would later call a rather bizarre set of circum stances, he decided to get back at these noisy children by engaging in a lengthy harassment campaign against the entire family. At least twice, he shut off their electricity on multiple occasions, he filled the lock on their front door with staples, making it impossible to open. He had the family's mail forwarded to des Moines, Iowa.

The father of these noisy children was a doctor. One of his colleagues received a letter purporting to be from an aid's charity informing the recipient that the doctor, the father of those noisy children, had tested positive for HIV. And along that same line of thinking, he also sent a letter to the children's school informing them that the nine year old boy had been exposed to HIV by

his father. And he sent letters to the Jewish community center where the family remembers, informing them that the entire family had been exposed to the virus. Remember this is nineteen ninety three. Telling people that this doctor has HIV could ruin his career. The school could call social services in the probably wouldn't be welcome in the sauna at

the community center if people believed this. And in what would be his ultimate downfall here, he signed their nine year old son up for catalogs that sold pornographic materials.

landed him back in federal prison for another year. And maybe this trip back to prison gave him a chance to test out his own advice. You see, between getting out in nineteen ninety two and going back in nineteen ninety five, Frank was profiled in the New York Time. The journalist Charles Strum actually used to write for The Bergen Record, the local paper Frank used to end up

in every time he got arrested in the sixties. But Strum didn't come home from college and started the Record until after Frank's arms stand off in the front yard, and they weren't talking about their shared hometown. They were talking about Frank's new consulting business in nineteen ninety four, Frank put a classified ad in USA Today that read.

didn't have the Internet then. Of his criminal record, Frank told the reporter, I remember it was Nietzsche who wrote the crime is not in the act, but in the stupidity of being caught. I was caught and stupid, and he'd get caught a few more times in the coming years, but he stays humble. 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

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

a corrupt guard to get a better placement. So friend or client hard to say, but the guard did end up charged with smuggling a handcuff key to an inmate, and Frank spent about a year advocating for Wayne's transfer, considering he had once held two prison nurses hostage for twelve hours by rigging up a Rube Goldberg style contraption that would stab the women's eyes out with scalpels if anyone opened the door and had successfully escaped at least once.

A low security placement for David Wayne was out of the question, But then quiet Frank moved out to Idaho.

restraining order. But the Frank Sweeney, who tried to drop a bank and fought in the Bush War and had a mob boss fly him to Vegas and bragged about being able to influence prison officials, that Frank seems to be gone. He's just an old man living in Boise until twenty fifteen. In December of twenty fifteen, Frank went to the post office near his home in Garden City, Idaho. He parked his truck in one of the accessible parking

spots out front. A woman saw him get out of his car, which did not have a placard indicating he was supposed to be parked there, said something to him. We don't know exactly what she said. Now, me personally, I probably wouldn't have said anything. For the most part, it's not worth it. It's not your business. There are plenty of people who are not visibly disabled who really do need.

initials in the court record for obvious reasons. But it can be tricky to keep track of people with just a letter, so I've given them all fake names just to make this a little easier. We'll call the woman from the park Ellen, her husband will be Sam, and their adult daughters will be Kayla and Lucy. Again, it is possible to figure out who these people are, but please don't.

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 of the suburb where they now lived, the city where their other adult daughter lived, the names of both of

their daughters, and information about Kayla's arrest. That year, Ellen received a third postcard that week addressed to her at home. This one contained her social Security number and an allegation that her daughter Lucy, was engaged in acts of prostitution at her place of work, which was named 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 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.

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

the two crips with whom I was having an affair with. Regrettably, I will never be able to give you and Daddy the grandchildren you so desired. But we know now that Daddy is a pedophile. He may have harmed the grand has he been released from jail. And again, this is a woman who just lost her husband. She knows this postcard isn't from her adult daughter. Even if she hadn't already gotten a dozen other bizarre postcards, she would know that no one's writing their mother a postcard on a typewriter.

It's not nineteen thirty two, and again the recently deceased man was not a pedophile, nor was he in jail. He had just been buried by his family. Ellen and both of her daughters continued getting postcards even after Ellen moved, and Frank was also sending the postcards to other people

pretending to be members of the family. The Idaho Black History Museum received one signed with Ellen's name, address, and phone number that was so laden with racial slurs that you can barely tell what it's supposed to be trying to say. Lucy's boss received one advising him that his employee was having rectal intercourse with black men, although described that in more vivid terms. Now, for as strange as this man's life has been, you'd be forgiven if he

forgot where we started. Frank is a Nazi. He was a member of the American Nazi Party, and he fought as a Rhodesian mercenary. He's not just a guy who

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

calling them mongrels. It seems the only time he wasn't sending postcards was when he was out of the country. You see, he might have another wife. It's not entirely clear, but several times a year Frank would travel to Effort, the capital of the German state of Taringia in central Germany, to visit a woman he's known for a very long time, Uta Schernig, who performs semi professionally as a belly dancer under the name Madame Chamila, has on several occasions referred

to Frank as her husband. This may be literal, it may be a cheeky little joke. My German is not good enough to really read tone, and it may just be that they've been in a relationship for so long that they think of each other this way. My research game is strong, but a potentially non existent German marriage certificate evades my grasp. Nevertheless, he does own a home

in Effort, and she lives in it. She refers to him occasionally as her house Positzer, which you could translate as landlord, but you wouldn't really, you'd call the person you rent your home from your fermeter house Positzer just means he owns her house, and he occasionally calls her Liebchen, my love, and she calls Frankie when he visited in twenty fifteen and they went to see her mother in the nursing home together. Her photocaptions are about Frank's visit

to his mother in law. As with so much in Frank's life, it's hard to pin this down. I have a handful of photos of Frank with this woman that appeared to be from the eighties or early nineties based on the photo quality, Frank's apparent age, and to be honest, her hair. But we're talking about Germany, so dating by the fashion could put us off by a decade or more. No offense, you know, it's true, But at least in the present era of his life, he's visiting Germany every

now and again. She breeds and shows Mexican and Peruvian hairless dogs, some of which have been quite successful internationally. Some of her show dogs list Frank Sweeney as a co owner in September of twenty sixteen. His victims had a brief reprieve from his letters because he was in Germany attending a seminar on dog genetics with Ute. These rare breed dogs are very prone to genetic problems and in breeding, so I'm glad they're staying on top of best practices, I guess. But when he was at home

in Idaho, the campaign of harassment was relentless. He even found a way to outsource the terror. Frank sent postcards to inmates in prisons all over the country. He signed them with Ellen's name and address, and requested that the

men write her back. She received at least seventy five letters, all addressed to her at home from murderers and as if she might not get it, like maybe she didn't put two and two together here, Like maybe she thought this was some totally separate, unrelated new problem she just happens to be having. Frank made sure she understood that he did this. He sent her numerous postcards explaining the situation.

But I told you this story that began outside of a bank in New Jersey in nineteen sixty two would start its final chapter outside of a bank in.

every day. You know, you don't pull forward fast enough. The guy behind you honks. You tell him to fuck off. Nobody's being their best selves, but life goes on, but not for Frank. Frank can't take it. He stabbed a guy in the guts for splashing him in nineteen seventy five. So two weeks after Liam and Denise experienced this angry

driver at the bank, they start getting postcards. Like Ellen and her family, this family, too, starts hearing that their neighbors and nearby schools are getting postcards that pretend to be from the state Sex Offender Registry, alerting people that Liam is a pedophile. He's not, And specifically, the postcards

say that he sodomized a nine year old boy. That is a very specific and very gross detail to recycle from one victim to the next, right like that, that has to mean something, but I can't figure it out, and maybe that's for the best. These postcards, too, are generic ones from the post office, typed on a manual typewriter. And again, some of the postcards are signed Carson Wells, and sometimes they're signed with the name of Liam's adult son.

And again there were letters to the family from murderers answering requests for pen pals. But you know what, the bank has a lot of security cameras, and unbeknownst to Frank, shortly before he started terrorizing his second set of victims, his case wasn't just a local matter anymore. In September of twenty eighteen, the United States Postal Inspector Service started looking into the postcards. That's right, the Mail Police. That is a very real federal law enforcement agency with jurisdiction

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, though a couple hundred people a year are assaulting postal employees, knock that off.

to schools and neighbors. And because these postcards are made to look as though they are coming from the State Sex Offender Registry, which is run by the state police, people are contacting the state police about them. And now the state police are talking to the mail police, and now the mail cops see that there are more victims, and all of these postcards seem to be from the

same person. When postal investigators speak to both families and compare the letters, it's clear they're all from the same person. All of the victims say they know who is sending them these postcards, they just don't know who he is. Ellen knows it's the guy from the post office. Liam knows it's the guy.

of the photo arrays. So each time they showed her photos of potential suspects, she said, he's not here because he wasn't and so she never picked out any other possible suspect. But once the postal investigator zeroed in on the man in the bank security footage, both Ellen and Liam separately identified him in photo lineups, and bank employees did know who he was, so by Christmas of twenty eighteen, the male police have Frank's bank records. He's been paying

a private investigator. That's how he knew so much personal information about all of his victims, information about their real estate transactions, what kinds of cars they drove, where they worked, where their adult children lived in different cities and states.

her Christian faith and divine intervention. An article in a twenty seventeen issue of Christian Living magazine quotes her as saying, God is my business partner.

Frank's bank records, He's been identified by the victims. They're closing in on him, and maybe he knows, maybe he doesn't. He did move very suddenly in February twenty nineteen, leaving the house he'd been renting for over a decade right as they got the warrant to search it, and renting a different house nearby. But he's still sending the letters. So if he knows they're onto him, why is he

still sending the letters. On February thirteenth, twenty nineteen, six weeks after they know Frank's their guy, right around the time that he's moving to his new house, a clerk at the post office calls the investigator to say that an old man with a terrible scar on his face just bought a stack of postcards with cash, and the

last postcard arrived on February nineteenth, twenty nineteen. It signed Carson Wells, but the writer identifies himself as the man who blew his horn at them in the parking lot. And then he reminds Liam and Denise that all the murderers who'd been writing to them had already forwarded their personal information to criminals on the outside, but it was

already over Two weeks later, they searched Frank's home. They took his typewriter and his list of federal inmates, the ones he'd been writing to as his victims, and they found portraits of Hitler and Nazi memorabilia and white supremacist literature, and two live rattlesnakes. Rattlesnakes don't live in Idaho. These aren't snakes that he got outside. These are snakes that he is breeding. Frank has a lifelong interest in reptile breeding.

I think he's a member of the Idaho Herpetological Society, or at least he was before he went to prison, and shortly before his arrest, he commented on an online obituary for an old high school classmate, reminiscing fondly about how they used to collect snakes in the woods together

in the fifties. Once he's in custody, Frank confessed immediately, telling investigators on the day of his arrest that he'd sent the postcards because he felt like these people had embarrassed him and it made him feel better to know he was causing them emotional distress. Shortly after his arrest, he wrote to the judge to ask the court to intervene in what he felt was an inadequate response by the jail to what he called many of the infirmities that affect the elderly, and says he has the urge

to commit suicide if his demands aren't met. And I don't want to sound like I'm brushing this off, I'm not saying that this couldn't.

Within months of his arrest he entered into a plea agreement. So once the mail cops got on the case, they actually sorted it out pretty quickly. Right the USPIS got on the case, in September of twenty eighteen, and within three months they knew it was Frank. Maybe they should have called the guys who solved Maile crimes earlier. I don't know, but if there had been more communication between different law enforcement agencies, the whole situation would have been resolved.

When he sent a single letter a third victim, which he signed with his own name. But when a US Marshall searched Frank's house two years before his eventual arrest, I guess they didn't bother to check in with the local police, because in April of twenty seventeen, Frank sent a single letter to Gerald Shrr, the man who found it and for many years ran the witness protection program. I can't think of a worse guy to pick if 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.

in the program, and it didn't work. The information it gave was not only not helpful, but by fabricating unhelpful information in or to get something from the government, he made things worse, and when he finally got what he wanted by testifying against a serial killer in nineteen eighty two, he couldn't keep his mouth shut about it, and so he was removed from the program in nineteen eighty four.

In his letter to Suir, he claims that as a result of losing his protected status in eighty four, he was attacked by another inmate the following year, and he does, 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, but you'd have to do some real mental gymnastics here to come up with a satisfying explanation for why a black man would cut Frank up in retaliation for Frank's testimony against a Nazi serial killer who try rabbled the country shooting black men. I just don't think that they

would be mad about that. But I can think of a variety of reasons why a black man who encountered Frank in prison might get into it with him.

had signed venomously yours Frank Abbott Sweeney. A US marshal was sent out to Idaho to speak with Frank, and Frank admitted that he sent the letter, but he said he meant no harm by it, and he 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.

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, has been ill for several months and can't.

on the show circuit in Germany. In that nineteen ninety four New York Times article about his prison consulting business, Frank quipped that his favorite quote was the crime is not in the act, but in the stupidity of being caught, which he attributes to Nietzsche. I think, regardless of your 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.

much bigger stories. They've made whole Hollywood films out of so many of these little slices of history that Frank passed through, from Cold War spy thrillers to Scorsese dramas about organized crime.