Disorganized Crime, Pt. 1

I could barely write in my notebook for the lack of elbow room almost usually empty wooden benches. This was big news. Reporters from outlets all over the country, the world even had descended on Charlottesville to write about this trial, and beyond the walls of my local courtroom, reporters who couldn't make it to the trial in person were writing about it too. Every time, Charlottesville's back in the news for all the wrong reasons. Little newspapers and towns you've

never heard of look for local angles. On the aftermath of that Nazi rally, they interview middle school classmates of men who were identified in photos of violent mobs that beat students with torches and bloodied members of the clergy

in a public park. After that verdict was in in December of twenty eighteen, in a tiny town in May, eight hundred miles away from Charlottesville, a reporter from the Ellsworth American found her local angle as front pages of newspapers everywhere were once again filled with pictures of Nazis. She paid a visit to a Nazi who had been living in their midst in Maine for decades. He hadn't marched in Charlottesville. His marching days are long.

weird funeral. How much could there really be left to say about the circumstances surrounding one man's death a lot, as it turns out, and I was willing to let it lie, to leave some stones unturned, to leave some stories for another day, move on for now, and put a pin in some of these events, to revisit down the road with a different weird little guy as our focal point. There are so many side characters in the story of the American Nazi Party who warrant their own episodes.

I have no doubt that I will eventually subject you to God, probably at least a month's worth of episodes about William Luther Pearce. And obviously eventually we'll have to talk about James Mason. Before he was an elderly pedophile living in government housing in Denver and advising young terrorists, he was a teenage boy who joined the American Nazi Party, and Ralph Forbes had a long, strange career that I'd

like to dig into. So I know we aren't done with these characters, and I know I can't get lost down every rabbit hole while I'm just trying to get across the finish line on one story. But there was one strange little side quest that I couldn't let go of Frank Smith. Something about Frank just wouldn't let me mark him down in my notes as something to come back to later. He was setting off my weird little guy radar in a way I could not ignore. And

I'll tell you my instincts were not wrong. I found dynamite organized crime, FBI wiredtap memos about mafia hits, a fake church, a nazi's mistress having a secret baby under a fake name, And for some reason, the disgraced mayor of Pawtucket, Rhode Island, if he listened to the last five episodes, the ones about Rockwell's murder and his funeral, you heard a little bit about Frank Smith. You even heard from Frank himself in clips from interviews over the years.

He very publicly insisted that John Patler was not guilty of the murder of George Lincoln Rockwell. He set it on the stand at Patler's trial in nineteen sixty seven, and he was still saying it fifty years later, in a rambling interview with a South African neo Nazi in twenty sixteen. And you might remember him from the dramatic shootout with Christopher Vidyevitch in nineteen sixty eight, an incident that Frank believed was an attempted assassination to prevent him

from getting to the real truth about Rockwell's murder. In the two biographies of Rockwell that I read while I was researching John Patler, Frank Smith really just gets a few passing mentions as a member of the American Nazi Party and as a witness at Patler's trial. But when I start started reading the actual trial transcripts, something caught my eye. I can't quite describe it. He talks like a con man. I don't know how else to put it.

I've sat through a fair number of trials, and I've read thousands of pages of trial transcripts, over a thousand in this case alone. And most people aren't great on the stand. They're nervous. They give short answers, and when you press them, they sort of backtrack. They don't want to commit to a lot of specific, hard details, especially if you push hard and they get rattled on cross examination. Most people do, it's normal, But Frank Smith was chatty up there. I mean, he talked up a storm on

the witness stand. He was giving answers that spanned multiple pages of the transcript without interruption from the attorney asking him the questions. He claimed to recollect specific verbatim quotes from long conversations, but he would never quite commit to the specifics when it came to exactly where he was at any particular time. Specifically, there's no proof of where he was or wasn't at three pm on June twenty seventh, nineteen sixty seven. There's only so much they could ask

him about June twenty seventh, nineteen sixty seven. At that trial, he wasn't on trial, and George Lincoln Rockwell didn't die on June twenty seventh. Rockwell died on August twenty fifth, nineteen sixty seven, and John Patler killed him. But Rockwell had survived a prior assassination attempt just two months before

his death. As he was pulling into the driveway with the Nazi Party barracks in Arlington, Virginia that afternoon, someone fired a single shot at him, but they missed, and I assumed, Well, that was John Patler, right, that makes sense. At his trial, a witness said that he saw him doing target practice in July, the month before the murder. In August, So you can see how it would make sense to assume that he tried to shoot Rockwell in June. He missed, he practiced some, he tried again. His aim

was better the second time. Rockwell's dead makes sense. When Rockwell wrote about the assassination attempt in his newsletter, he said he didn't see who did it, But at trial, Mantius Cole testified that Rockwell had privately confined him that the shooter was John Patler. William Luther Pierce years later, told his own biographer the same thing. Rockwell told me he saw him, and it was Patler, And like I said, it makes perfect sense that that's who it would have been.

But I don't think it was. I don't think John Patler was the only person who took a shot at George Lincoln Rockwall in the summer of nineteen sixty seven. Now we've covered this, but Patler's alibi on the day of the actual murder was no good. His wife and his father in law testified to his schedule that morning, he'd been running errands with his wife. He couldn't possibly have gotten to the murder scene. But when push comes to shove, the times weren't right, and witnesses couldn't really

be sure when and where they'd seen him. I still believe that he fired the shot that killed Rockwell, but on the day that someone shot at Rockwell and missed. On June twenty seventh, John Patler was in Washington, d c. Taking a drawing class. People saw him. His name was on the sign in sheet, and a witness testified to having taken attendance that day himself. This wasn't a member of the American Nazi Party or his wife. This is

someone with no reason to lie for him. John Patler couldn't have been in Arlington on the afternoon of June twenty seventh when Rockwell saw this would be assassin sprinting away. I think he did recognize him. According to the college student who was in the car with him when this happened, he cried out in surprise when he saw the man, and what he said was the Holy Father. It's an odd sort of thing to yell, you know. It's not quite oh my God or Jesus Christ, things you might

say if someone was shooting at you. But the Holy Father isn't really a thing people say, at least not as far as I know. I mean, it is what Catholics call the pope, but they don't use it as an exclamation. And Rockwell was raised Methodist anyway, The young man who heard him yell this didn't really think much of it. He didn't know that it was someone's name. It was a nickname that Rockwell had given Frank Smith, and it didn't have all that much to do with religion.

Frank Smith really was holy in the sense that a mafia hit man had put five bullet holes in him right around the time he joined the American Nazi Party. But let's start at the beginning. Francis Joseph Smith the second was born in Massachusetts in December nineteen twenty, just a few months after his parents' marriage. According to the nineteen forty census, when he was nineteen, he was working as a waiter and living at home with his parents

and two younger siblings in Medford, Massachusetts. It's hard to say what he got up to in the nineteen forties, but when he was arrested for bank robbery for the first time in nineteen fifty two, newspapers reported his occupation as a boxing promoter. Maybe everybody else already knew this, and I'm going to sound silly, but I never gave it much thought until I was writing about it this week.

Boxing was run by organized crime. I mean, I had this vague notion about fixed fights and sports betting, but in the nineteen fifties, the mafia ran boxing top to bottom. I mean, they had a monopoly on the sport that the Department of Justice had to get involved with. They didn't just promote the fights, fix the fights, and profit off the fights. They also coerced young boxers to do a little work outside the ring, off the books, and

they were recruited to work as street level enforcers. And not having that knowledge top of mind, as I was going over all these old newspaper clippings, it seemed so strange to me that every time Frank Smith got arrested in the nineteen fifties, all of his named associates seemed to be current or former boxers or boxing promoters. I thought, you know, maybe the boys met at the boxing gym.

But given the context of New York and Boston in the fifties, the fact that all of these accused bank robbers and murderers are also boxers is really just short of absolute proof. That the crimes were mafia related. Admittedly, I did not have time this week to learn about

a whole new genre of terrible guy. I mean, I saw every episode of The Sopranos, obviously, but I don't actually know that much about organized crime, especially outside of the big New York names, because we're talking about Boston and Providence and there is apparently a lot to know, And I bet the story would have made more sense faster if I had some pre existing knowledge of this world. But this isn't my usual kind of guy, so we'll have to make do. My apologies to any listeners from

New England who know the deep lore. In February of nineteen fifty two, a twenty four year old pants salesman named Arthur Schuster was riding the subway in Brooklyn when he saw someone who looked familiar. It wasn't someone he knew, but he recognized the man from the wanted poster that had been sitting in his office for months. It was the missing bank robber Willie Sutton. He followed Sutton off the train and alerted the police to his location, leading to the arrest of a man who was on the

very first FBI's most wanted the list. A few days after Willy Sutton was arrested, Arthur Schuster went to the press. He believed that he'd been cheated out of a cash reward for this tip. It turned out the seventy thousand dollars reward was just an urban legend, but it was too late in his quest for credit. Every newspaper in New York City had already run his picture. Two weeks later, he was shot in the head outside of his apartment. Police and FBI were scrambling to find the kiseller, and

in May they thought they had. They arrested Harvey Bostani, a known associate of Willie Sutton's and a career bank robber in his own right. They didn't exactly have enough to charge Bastani in connection with the murder, but they were able to hold him for questioning because he was already wanted in connection with several armed robberies, a handful of burglaries involving safe cracking and the theft of nearly thirty thousand dollars worth of fur coats. And once they

had Bastanian custody, they started rolling up his associates. Over the course of two weeks. In May of nineteen fifty two, the FBI arrested twelve men in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Chicago, all of whom were believed to have been in Bastani's bank robbery. Gay Arthur Schuster's murder was never actually solved, although years later a mob informant would claim that the

hit had been ordered by a Gambino family boss. One of the first members of Bastani's gang to get picked up was William Smith, Frank's younger brother, a boxer and part time bartender. At William's house, police found several suitcases full of loaded guns and ammunition, a suitcase full of burglary tools, a sawt off shotgun, a machine gun, disguises including a clerical caller, investments and fake police uniforms, explosives,

and a box full of stolen license plates. When they searched the bar where he worked nights, they found a cash of dynamite. Shortly after the raid at William's apartment, the FBI announced they were looking for his brother too. Frank was one of the last of the group to be arrested, and both brothers were charged in connection with a bank robbery in Medford Massachusetts. Despite Harvey Bestani turning state's witness and testifying against them, both Smith brothers were

acquitted at trial for that Medford bank robbery. Unfortunately, for Frank, the acquittal in February of nineteen fifty three wasn't the end of his troubles, because after that first arrest, things kind of snowballed. In January of nineteen fifty three, just weeks before his bank robbery trial was set to begin,

Frank Smith was indicted on new charges. New York City attorney Saul Rosenblatt identified Frank Smith as the man who'd fired three shots at him on Park Avenue in March of nineteen fifty two, hitting him once in the thigh. When he went to trial in New York for the shooting, Frank Smith admitted that sure he was in New York City on the day that Rosenblatt was shot, but it

was for business. A longtime friend of Frank's testified that Frank and his co defendant, a mafia associate named Sammy Lindon, had showed up at his hotel room that night, bragged about shooting Rosenblat, and paid him to steal a car that they could use to leave the city. On the stand, the victim positively identified Frank as the man he saw shoot him in broad daylight, but the jury acquitted him. It's possible the jury was just confused about the lack

of a clear motive presented at trial. Immediately after the shooting, newspapers in New York ran wild with speculation that the attempted murder was connected to Rosenblat's involvement in a particular high profile case. He'd recently been named the sole beneficiary in one of his clients' wills, and the dead woman's sister was contesting the will in court. It didn't help that the dead woman in question was Eleanor Morgan Satterly, the granddaughter of J. P. Morgan. Yes, that JP Morgan,

the one whose name is on your bank. But as the investigation into the shooting continued, police were less convinced that Satterly's will had been the cause, and at trial, the judge reminded the jury that proving motive isn't necessary for a conviction. I think any criminal lawyer will tell you though, juries are troubled by a crime without a motive.

But it's also very possible that those twelve New York City jurors knew well enough not to be seen in open court poking their nose into the business of organized crime. No one was ever convicted for shooting Saul Rosenblock, and I'm pretty sure everyone involved is dead now, so I think it's safe to offer you my theory. Frank Smith and Sammy Lindon did shoot Saul Rosenblock, but it had

nothing to do with J. P. Morgan's granddaughter. Saul Rosenblatt had other clients he was involved in other ongoing litigation, and there was one client he dropped as soon as he got out of the hospital after the shooting. He withdrew as counsel of record in a paternity suit. He'd been representing a nightclub singer named Virginia Summers in her lawsuit against a Boston lawyer named Joseph Sachs, and at his trial, Frank Smith was asked about a recent flight

he'd taken to London. A month before the shooting. He flew to England, but he insisted that this had to do with his boxing promotion and nothing to do with following Virginia Summers, who had also recently flown to London. Now, I can't find any source that concrete, openly and plainly accuses Joseph Sachs of working for the mob, But you

can make up your own mind what you think. Sax had previously represented Frank's co defendant, Sammy Lindon, in an armed robbery case that was definitely mob related, and Sax would later represent Frank in a case involving a bombing that was definitely mob related. Joseph Sachs himself was later accused of some pretty serious mob related crime. He was to be fair acquitted at trial, but in nineteen sixty two he was one of several men indicted on charges

of trafficking thousands of pounds of heroine. The bust was part of the investigation into the French Connection, a global network run by the Corsican mafia that moved heroin through France and into the United States, where it was then distributed by organized crime outfits in major cities. Sacks was arrested in connection with an operation that had been taking

advantage of the diplomatic immunity afforded to ambassadors. The Guatemalan ambassador to Belgium, a man named Mauricio Rosal, had been acting as their courier bringing fifty kilos of heroin at a time into New York City in his suitcase and what I think is a pretty rare move. Mauricio Rosal was denied diplomatic immunity and he went to prison. But like I said, Joseph Sachs was acquitted. There's a lot of allegedly, a lot of maybe a lot of fill

in the blank with your own most reasonable assumptions. The jury said Frank Smith didn't shoot Saul Rosenblat. A jury said Joseph Sachs wasn't in involved in a decade long scheme to move thousands of pounds of heroin between the Corsic and Mafia and the mafia in New York and Boston. And I guess, legally speaking, these are all just a series of unrelated facts about cases that never got solved.

And maybe Saul Rosenblat dropped Virginia Summer's case because he wasn't feeling well after the gunshot wound, not because he thought Joseph Sachs had him shot. As far as I can tell, the prosecutor didn't argue at trial that it was a paid hit. But it is worth noting that at Frank's bail hearing, the prosecutor told the judge that Frank had been hired by people in Massachusetts to kill Rosenblatt. He called him a plain and simple killer for hire.

When the jury returned a not guilty verdict for Frank in the Rosenblack case, the judge was visibly angry. Newspapers quote him scolding the jury, saying, it is my opinion that you have been fooled. It is strange to me how grown men can be so naive. Again, you never know why a jury makes the decisions they make. But I don't think they were fools or naive. I don't think they were tricked into thinking Frank was innocent. I think they knew exactly what they were looking at, and

they didn't want to be involved in mafia business. The newspaper that quoted the judge's angry outburst doesn't say whether the judge looked amused when Frank Smith was arrested as he tried to leave the courtroom. He'd been acquitted in New York, but he was wanted in New Jersey for robbing a bank in Newark with a machine gun. So New York City held him in their jail for a few weeks pending extradition, which is pretty normal, and he fought the extradition, which is a little less normal. I mean,

you have a right to try. It's just not typical. But it worked. He's in this jail in New York City for a couple of weeks, no news, and then suddenly there's just a passing mention in the Newark Star Ledger two days before Christmas that the prosecutor changed his mind. The charges have been dropped and there are no other suspects, so to put all of this in order. On March sixth, nineteen fifty two, someone who looked just like Frank Smith

shot Saul Rosenblatt on Park Avenue. Two days after that, someone unknown shot Arnold Schuster in the head outside of his apartment in New York City. Two days after that, a couple of guys who might have been the Smith brothers robbed a bank in Medford, Massachusetts. In April, someone who looked just like Frank Smith robbed a bank in

Newark in May. Smith and a dozen associates of known bank robber Harvey Bistani were all arrested in January of nineteen fifty three, Frank is charged for shooting Saul Rosenblatt. In February, he's acquitted on that first bank robbery. In November, he's acquitted on the shooting, but he's arrested for the New Jersey bank robbery, and by December of nineteen fifty

three he's free and clear. He was accused of robbing banks in two different states and trying to murder a man in a third, crimes that all took place within mere weeks in the spring of nineteen fifty two, but he celebrated the new year as a freeman in nineteen fifty four. I can't pick him back up again in the archives until May of fifty seven, when he's arrested again.

But when he was arrested in nineteen fifty seven for bombing a home in Wooburn, Massachusetts, police in the neighboring towns expressed their interest in questioning him about similar unsolved bombings over the last few years. Now, no one was ever convicted in the first three bombings police suspected Frank Smith was involved in. In June of nineteen fifty four, four bombs exploded inside the Chelsea, Massachusetts home of boxing promoter Sam Silverman. If you know a lot about old

school boxing promoters, you've heard of Sam Silverman. And if you don't know anything about old school boxing promoters, you don't care who Sam Silverman is. But he had recently cut ties with the International Boxing Club of New York, that corporation whose monopoly on boxing was almost entirely under the control of former murder inc hitman Frankie Carbo. A few months before the bombing, Ray Arcell, a promoter Silverman worked with to televise the fights he promoted, was beaten

almost to death with a lead pipe. Arcell survived and Silverman and his wife weren't home when those bombs went off, but both men took these attacks as a clear message from the mafia stop promoting fights. In May of nineteen fifty five, Vincent Denuno, a regional director of the Building in Common Laborers Union with the AFL, was finalizing a report on organized crime activity within his union when suddenly his car exploded inside of his garage in East Boston.

Police believed it was the work of a professional killer trying to take out the labour leader, but it was his twenty four year old son in law who was gravely injured instead. Then, in June of nineteen fifty six, John Sullivan, a booking agent in Medford, Massachusetts, narrowly escaped being blown to bits when he walked out his front door because he smelled smoke and he found a bomb

on his front porch that hadn't gone off yet. None of these bombings were ever solved, least as far as I can tell, But Frank Smith was a very strong suspect in all three after his arrest in May of nineteen fifty seven. But this fourth bombing was pretty open and shut. They thought maybe he did those other three, but they saw him do this one. It was a little after midnight when two cops who were just sitting in their patrol car saw a man sprinting down the

street in the dark. At first, they assumed the man leaving Everett Bixby's yard was a burglar and they were going to chase him, But just as the man disappeared into a nearby wooded area, the bomb went off. A description of the man they'd seen went out over the radio, and officers spotted him less than a mile away at a phone booth. He was filthy and soaking wet, as if he'd perhaps run in the dark through the thick

underbrush of the wooded area the bomber disappeared into. He also had explosive residue embedded in burnmarks on his shoes. Police found him in a phone booth less than a mile away from the Bixby's house, and they found his car a mile in the other direction, parked outside of a friend's house. That friend happened to be a man named Louis Venios, a mafia associate who was due in court the following morning to face a federal mail fraud charge.

Frank's story just kept changing, and honestly, none of the stories were very good. On the night of his arrest, he explained to the police that he's a prize fight trainer and he's just out doing some roadwork, which is apparently what boxers call r at three am in a town where he doesn't live, and they found him at the phone booth because while he was out running, he had this sudden thought that he needed to make a

phone call to a friend again at three am. By the time he got to trial, he'd come up with what I guess he thought was a better story. He said that he couldn't have bombed the Bixby's house at twelve forty five am because he was at a bar with his friend Louis Venios from midnight and till around one am, and then after the bar they stopped back off at his apartment because he needed to wring out some wet laundry and that's why he was all wet. And then after he got all wet at his apartment,

he didn't change his clothes. He got into his car and drove Louis Venios home to Wuburn, and then he left his car at Venios's house because he needed to borrow it, and when police found him in the phone booth, he was just calling his wife to come pick him

up again at three am. I don't think he could make up a worse series of lies if he tried, right, Because if he and Venios were at his apartment and Venios needed to both go home to Woburn and borrow Frank's car, why wouldn't Venios just drive himself home in Frank's car and Frank would just stay at his apartment. And if he had to be the one to drive, but his wife was able to come pick him up, why didn't she just follow him? Why didn't he tell

her before he left the apartment. If he hadn't to call his wife, why didn't he call from Benios's house? Doesn't he have a phone? Why would you walk a mile in the dark at three am to call your wife from a payphone. I just don't understand why he thought we would believe that he needed to walk a mile in the dark at three am to call his wife to come pick him up from the fakes sounding errand anyone has ever made up And at trial they didn't even put Louis Venios on the stand to corroborate

the alibi. I just can't get over. Oh, I had to go home and wring out my wet laundry in between drinking at the bar and driving my friend home and then walking around in the dark, And that's why my shoes are all wet. I mean, got at that point just say you pissed on your own shoes. At least people might believe it. Reading between the lines and the appellate record in this case, it sounds like everyone in the courtroom knew that the Boston Police officer the

defense put on the stand was lying. Joseph Sachs. Remember he's the lawyer who, according to the jury who acquitted him, was not at this time, seven years into a decade law international heroin smuggling operation for the mafia. Sachs put Boston patrolman John O'Neil on the stand to testify that he knew Frank Smith and Louis Venios and he remembered seeing them at the bar at the time of the bombing.

The jury found Frank Smith guilty of the bombing, and he was given a sentence of fifteen to eighteen years in prison. Based on the admittedly limited information that we have, it seems very possible that Everett Bixby wasn't the intended target of this bombing. He was a funeral director with no known ties to organized crime. He was the chairman of the Woburn Licensing Board, so I guess it's possible

that there was a dispute over a liquor license. But in nineteen fifty seven, the city of Wooburn only issued liquor licenses to stores that sell liquor. In Massachusetts, they call them package stores, and a local newspaper that year said that the city of Wooburn had plenty of package stores, but they didn't actually have any bars, and Bixby told the newspaper that no one had even applied for a liquor license lately. There was nothing for there to be

a dispute over it. Kind of looks like Frank got the wrong house. I saw a few news stories that made vague mention of the fact that the Bixby's lived pretty close by to several known gangland figures. That's all it ever, really says, just several known figures in this world, they're never named. Look is it possible to cross reference seventy year old property records with the names of known

mafia associates in the Boston suburbs. Look? I thought about it, and I think I probably could do it if I had an extra day this week?

Bixby's neighbor in wober, Massachusetts. In nineteen fifty seven. So I'm sorry, but I think the fact that Frank Smith had parked his car at Louis Venios's house and Venios was due in federal court the very next morning, I think that does imply the possibility of a relationship between these things, you know. And finally, at the end of nineteen fifty seven, Frank Smith went to prison on some time in jail after his prior arrests when he couldn't

make bail. But this was the real thing. He's guilty of a felony now, and he's staring down the barrel of fifteen years. He didn't end up serving his whole sentence. He was released in November of nineteen sixty four. And while he was in prison, he got his hands on some interesting reading material. Someone had been sending him copies of the Rockwell Report.

start taking big swings when he got out. Immediately upon his return from the Nazi Party headquarters, Frank Smith had a face to face meeting with Raymond Patriarca, the head of the New England Mafia. Frank wanted to cut Patriarca in on a deal, a mutually beneficial arrangement between the mafia and the Nazis. You'll have to wait until next week to find out how Frank ended up full of bullet holes in the midst of a gang war, and why Frank's name is on the birth certificate for George

Lincoln Rockwell's i legitimate daughter. And maybe by next week Kull have made some more progress trying to sort out exactly what to make of the fact that a Nazi in his fake church show up in the financial record. It's a corrupt mayor who went to prison for racketeering. Weird little Guys is a production of cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio. It's researched, written and recorded by Me Molly Conger. Our executive producers are Sophie Littman and Robert Evans. The

show is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gaigan. The theme music was composed by Brad Dickert. You can email me at Weird Little Guy's podcast at gmail dot com. I will definitely read it, but I probably won't answer. It's nothing personal. You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other listeners on me Weird Little Guy subreddit. Just don't post anything that's going to make you one of my weird Little Guys.