One Man Race War: Joseph Paul Franklin, Pt. 1

only Donald Glen Draws, Missouri. At twenty three years old, she'd been a mother for ten months and a widow for seven. For the next thirty nine hours, nearly fifty thousand people walked from Arlington National Cemetery to the White House. Each marcher carried with them the name of a United States service member killed in the warren vying noam. They didn't chant or saying. The only sound came from the

six drummers slowly tapping out a funeral cadence. Inside the White House, Richard Nixon fumed as peace activists marched overnight in the freezing rain. He joked about sending a low flying helicopter to blow out their candles. By Saturday morning, half a million people were in Washington, d c. Demanding an end to the war. It's easy to say now that they were right, but in nineteen sixty nine, the widows and clergy and students who opposed the war were

beaten and tearcast. They were sneered at and called hippies and communists and traders. It wasn't just Richard Nixon who was upset by the demonstration. The night before the Three Day March against the War was scheduled to begin, a small group of neo Nazis snuck into the DC offices of the New Mobilization Committee to end the war in Vietnam,

one of the groups organizing the event. Whatever happened on the ninth floor of that office building on Vermont Avenue barely made the news, but it left a lasting impression on two teenage Nazis. James Mason would go on to tell that story for years, including it several times in his book of essays extolling the Virtues of Terrorism. For Joseph Paul Franklin, it was an introduction to a thrilling possibility. If someone is doing something you don't like, you can

hunt them down and hurt them. I'm Molly Conger and this is We're little guides. This is a story about a serial killer, part of it anyway. I'll be honest with you. I had a hard time concentrating this week, and when I ran out of time and sat down to write, I felt like I was out of words. Actually, I got bogged down in the details and my heart wasn't quite in it. But I did promise you and

not see serial killer. So we will start the story and get through as much of it as I can get onto the page before Rory starts asking where the file is. Joseph Paul Franklin was a murderer. I've written about murderers before, but this one's different. He's not a mass shooter or a terrorist with a single mass casualty event, or some guy who snapped and drove his car into

a crowd. This is a serial killer. This is the first time that our weird little guy has been the subject of TV true crime documentary shows like Criminal, Mindscape, FBI Files, and Mugshots. He's been covered by true crime podcasts with names like Murder in America, Death Cast, True Murder, True Crime, All the Time, Killer Stories, Murder Files, Unsealed, Crime in Comedy, Serial chillers, mamicide, and something called tequila. She wrote Limes, crimes, and murder times. I mean, there

are a lot of true crime podcasts out there. I don't know what's going on here, and I didn't actually listen to any of those. I'm sure they're all perfectly fine. This is, technically, I guess, a true crime podcast. I mean, look at your podcast app. That's where the show's categorized. That's not how I would describe my work, but I can understand how that decision was made. These stories are true and there's usually a lot of crime. I'm not trying to pick a fight with the marketing department or

the true crime girlies, don't get me wrong. I just think this show occupies a slightly different place in the information ecosystem. But that's something I learned while I was writing it. I didn't know what I was writing until I had been writing it for a few months a year and a half ago, when I suddenly found myself responsible for writing a weekly podcast. I didn't know what it was about. I mean, I had a general concept. I wrote some pitch notes that someone approved. The bones

were there, the idea was solid. I loved telling a story about a weird little guy. That's why it's called that. Sophie, our eternally patient executive producer, jotted that phrase down on a notepad during a meeting months before I had any plans of hosting my own show, because she noticed how often I used that particular phrase to describe some awful extremists whose life and crimes I'm excited to dig into.

She knew it was a good idea, and I knew she'd produced enough podcasts to know what she was talking about. So I dove right into the deep end and committed to a production schedule that meant coming up with an exciting new idea every week. I mean, how hard could it be. I'd never done this before. I have no idea what people want. I wasn't sure what the tone was supposed to be, or how to make coherent, interesting

narratives out of my own peculiar and intense obsessions. The first episode aired on August eighth, twenty twenty four, and it was fine. The second episode was already done and I was struggling that week to write the third one. I actually don't care for the way that one came out, If we're being honest, but it was a learning curve and I was starting to panic. Not even three episodes into this thing I had committed to, and I'd hit a brick wall. How was I supposed to come up

with a new good idea every week? But I'm a white woman in my thirties. I've listened to true crime podcasts, and if that's what the network thought the show was, then maybe that's what it was supposed to be. Looking at the version history now on a Google document that's just called ideas, the very first bullet point I typed on August ninth, twenty twenty four, just says Joseph Paul Franklin, Nazi serial killer. I ordered a used copy of a book about him that afternoon, and I started reading it

the day it arrived. I felt a little defeated, but maybe there's no shame in reading a book and then finding a way to repackage it in an interesting way. Plenty of people do it. A lot of shows don't cite their sources, but if you've read the book they're summarizing,

you can spot it. I got thirty nine pages in before I put the book down on the floor near the laundry pile in my office, and I left it there for sixteen months because on page thirty nine of mel Aton's book Dark Soul of the South, The Life and Crimes of racist killer Joseph Paul Franklin, Ayton describes a conversation Franklin had with another inmate at the federal prison where he was being held in nineteen eighty one. After I closed the book, I added a new bullet

point to the list, Frank Abbott Sweeney. This offhand mention of a conversation between a serial killer and a con man in the prison yard had potential. I needed to find out more about the guy bragging to the serial killer about his time as a Rhodesian mercenary. I think that's when I realized that this could be fun. I don't have to write stories I already know, or stories whose details all already exist in a book someone else already wrote, or are spread across filings in a single

docket in a single court case. I can write stories that don't exist yet. I can do my own original research and run headlong down every single rabbit holes days reading old Nazi newsletters pieced together painstakingly detailed timelines, and follow my curiosity wherever it takes us, no matter how long it takes to finish the story. Yeah, it's a true crime show, I guess, but that doesn't mean I'm

beholden to the conventions of the genre. I'm not interested in breathlessly recounting the details of every single murder and the trial as they were presented in the newspaper. I want to find out about that failed mercenary who was addicted to mail fraud. So now, almost half a million words into what, I didn't realize that the outset was going to be a convoluted attempt at a comprehensive history of the American far right. I want to come back to that first bullet point on my list of ideas.

Not because I'm suddenly interested this week in telling you a straightforward true crime story about a serial killer, but because I see something else there now, because what have I been telling you all this time? Everything is connected and there are no lone wolves. Joseph Paul Franklin was a murderer and he was a racist, and those two things cannot be disentangled. He killed because he was trying

to start a race war. Officially, he was only convicted of eight murders Tony Schenn and Alphonse Manning, an interracial couple in Madison, Wisconsin, in nineteen seventy seven. Gerald Gordon as he was leaving a bar mitzvah at a synagogue in Saint Louis, Missouri in nineteen seventy seven. William Bryant Tatum, a black man who was out to dinner with his

white girlfriend in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in nineteen seventy eight. Daryl Lane and Dante Evans Brown, two young black boys who snuck out of their grandmother's house to buy candy at the corner store in Cincinnati, Ohio, in nineteen eighty. And Theodore Fields Junior and David Martin, young black men who were jogging with their white female friends at a park in Salt Lake City in nineteen eighty. He was never prosecuted for more than a dozen other murders he either

confessed to or was credibly linked to. In the last eight months alone, right before his capture. Outside of Blood in Florida, he murdered eleven people across six states. For three years, he roamed the country, robbing banks, building bombs, and shooting the enemies of the white race. Interracial couples, Jewish people, black men and boys, and white women who dated black men. He hunted them, preferring to shoot his

victims from a distance. Two of the men he shot but failed to kill, were planned assassination attempts, pornographer Larry Flint and civil rights leader Vernon Jordan. But for the most part, he just found parking lots to sit in and wait, hoping to spot an interracial couple. And he acted alone. That part's true. He killed alone. By the time he started killing, he was out there on the road on his own. He wasn't part of an organized

terror cell. He wasn't taking orders, he wasn't getting outside funding. If anyone could be called a lone wolf, I guess it's him, And you'll certainly find both journalists and academics who do call him that. I can't blame them for it. It makes sense depending on what you think that means. The problem is, no one knows what it means, or

if it means anything. Academics in the field of terrorism studies have been using the phrase lone wolf for thirty years, but it made its way into the scholarly lexicon by way of Tom Metzger the leader of White Arian Resistance. Metzger was the one who popularized the term in the nineties, and if you read what Metzker actually wrote about the idea, I don't understand why you would try to repurpose the term into something sincere. He was pleading for plausible deniability.

In nineteen ninety, Tom Metzger was found civilly liable for inciting one of his followers to commit a hate crime murder. He lost his house when he told the racists to read his newsletter to work alone, say nothing, don't join a group or go to meetings, and for God's sake,

don't keep any records of your actions. He was trying to avoid going back to court the next time a skinhead murdered someone after being trained and directed by top ranking members of the organization, he led be a lone wolf just meant keep killing, but keep me out of it. And in the thirty years since the term first showed up in an academic journal, no one can actually agree

on what they mean by it. A twenty fifteen report called lone wolf Terrorism from the National Security Critical Issue Task Force at Georgetown University has eight findings, and finding number one is that there is no single definition of what the term means. A twenty eleven paper in a Journal for the Study of Political Violence proposes four subcategories of the lone wolf, the loner, the lone wolf, the lone wolf pack, and the lone attacker. Of those four categories,

only the loaner is described as actually acting alone. The other three subtypes are either acting in concert with a small group or are an individual who is in direct contact with a larger group while carrying out a physical act alone. If three of the four subtypes of lone wolves are not alone at all, well what are we talking about. A twenty seventeen paper in Studies in Conflict and Terrorism suggests that maybe it's time to reconsider the

usefulness of the concept entirely. Obviously, that is also my position, because somewhere in between completely isolated individual acts entirely on his own with no outside influence of any kind, and organized networked group with a hierarchical structure and detailed written plans directs individual duce paying members to carry out specific acts,

there lies the vast majority of actual political violence. This is an idea we've bumped up against a few times on the show, but revisiting the story of Joseph Paul Franklin really sent me back to the academic literature on the subject, and it's something we'll talk more about next week. He acted alone, I don't dispute that, but he could not have acted in this way without the earlier influence

of these groups that he was a member of. And after those actions, the ones he did take alone, he became a symbol within those same groups, inspiring other men to do as he'd done and act alone. You can call him a lone wolf if you want, but he's in conversation with the pack. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

I ended up digging mel Aiden's biography of Franklin back out of that pile of sweaters under my office chair, because over the year I spent writing about other things, I kept coming across his name more often than I would have expected to, given the initial presentation of him as a pretty bog standard serial killer who just happened to also be a Nazi. The man who would be

come serial killer. Joseph Paul Franklin was born James Clayton Vaughan Junior in Mobile, Alabama on April thirteenth, nineteen fifty. He had a terrible childhood with abusive alcoholic parents, But that's a chunk of this story usually trotted out to illicit sympathy from jurors or try to explain to you how someone could become so violent. It's well covered in Aiden's book, and that is probably the source for this

section of his biography. In most of the true crime podcast episodes about him, I don't usually waste time on a nazi's childhood sob story, but it does seem to be fairly well corroborated that he had a miserable time growing up. Trying to make sense of Franklin's life is a minefield. The most thorough account is mel Aiden's book. He spent years writing it, and he corresponded with Franklin

and interviewed him multiple times. In any piece of media about Franklin produced after the book was published after twenty eleven, a surprising number of the quotes they use are pulled directly from Aiden's book, from the recorded interviews between them. In his introduction, Aiden cautions the reader up front that he was able to access a lot of primary source material police files, trial transcripts, prison records, interviews with people,

who knew Franklin. But the best source of information about what Franklin did when he was alone is Franklin himself, and Ayton calls him a notorious fabricator and manipulator. This is something I see in a lot of material produced by or about Nazis. He's lying on purpose, and the

lies he's telling don't necessarily stay consistent over time. He's just saying whatever feels good or whatever he thinks will get him what he wants in the moment where he's saying it, and other times the person relaying the information

is wrong by accident. People get confused, they forget, They confidently say things that were never true, just because there's an FBI agent sitting in a chair in their living room, drinking a cup of coffee asking them for details about things they didn't think were important at the time, and

now they're just talking nonsense. When his sisters were questioned about his whereabouts in the weeks before his arrest in nineteen eighty, one of them told the FBI she was quite sure he'd moved away to Washington, d C. In nineteen sixty five, and he'd been seventeen or eighteen at the time, and he'd joined the Klan before he left. None of those things are true, and some of them aren't even possible. She wasn't being malicious. She was just wrong,

and you can sort of untangle things like that. You can give her a pass on the year. It had been more than a decade. Probably moved from Alabama to the DC area in nineteen sixty eight, not nineteen sixty five. And in nineteen sixty eight he would have been eighteen, And by nineteen sixty eight he was already a card carrying member of a hate group. But it wasn't the Klan.

If I had to guess, I think she probably had some vague understanding at the time that her brother had joined some kind of unsavory organization, some kind of hate group, and she probably learned later on that he did join the Klan, and being from Alabama, she would have had some general knowledge about the Clan. That is probably the hate group that would come first to her mind, so she just assumed that was the one he'd joined first. The organization he joined around the time he dropped out

of high school wasn't the Klan. It was the National Socialist White People's Party. The name of the newly rebranded American Nazi Party. In nineteen sixty eight, just before he turned eighteen, he married a sixteen year old girl he'd gotten pregnant in the four months they lived together. After their shotgun wedding, he beat her mercilessly and started bringing home Nazi pamphlets. By spring, he'd left her behind in Alabama and moved to Virginia to become an active member

of the party. He was gone before his daughter was even born. One of the frustrating things about my insatiable need to create the perfect timeline of a weird little guy's life isn't just that he's a forgetful liar. He was a drifter. I'm used of my weird little guys telling their self serving lies or mixing up the details

of some event that was years ago. But usually when things don't line up, you can tell there's a piece missing, you know, where you need to start digging around to try to find an explanation, to find some other source to compare it to, and then weigh those competing truths. But for some of the gaps in the narrative of Franklin's life, some of these completely illogical sequences of events it's not because the facts we have are wrong. They're right.

They just don't make sense because the way he was living didn't make sense. He bought cars out of newspaper classified ads using stolen cash and registered them with a rotating list of aliases. He lived in motels under fake names. His family didn't know where he was. He moved constantly and for no discernible reason. He went years without having a fixed address or a job. His second wife didn't even know that he'd somehow managed to legally marry and

divorce her using an entirely fictitious identity. She and her daughter lived with a last name that he'd printed on a fake ID. He would take off for weeks at a time to rob banks and murder teenagers, and she

thought he was a plumber named Jim Cooper. She didn't find out his real name until the FBI took him into custody, when he called her from jail to let her know where he was, and then he broke the news about who he was, and he told her he really had committed all twelve of the murders they were accusing him of. All that to say, I don't know why he was living in Birmingham in August of nineteen sixty nine, or if he was living in Birmingham in

August of nineteen sixty nine. He really did abandon his first wife and mobile in the middle of nineteen sixty eight, and he does seem to have moved to Virginia at that time, but he must not have stayed. He was back in Alabama to signed divorce papers in January of nineteen sixty nine, and in June he was arrested in

Mobile for disorderly conduct. In all the interviews I found, all the articles and recollections from other people, I couldn't find anyone asking him directly, what were you doing that year? I mean, why would they write true crime stories? Are concerned with the crimes, and he didn't start killing until nineteen seventy seven. His FBI file doesn't seem to have been concerned about where he lived in nineteen sixty nine.

I know how much he paid for a hat he bought at a country Western wear store in Virginia in nineteen seventy seven, because a decade later, a detective in Wisconsin tracked down the store clerk who worked there that year, and she remembered having it in but five hundred pages of reports and memos show a remarkable lack of curiosity about what he was doing during his first year as

a Nazi. But either way, at the end of the summer of nineteen sixty nine, he was in Birmingham, Alabama, and he must not have had a car because he needed a ride back to Virginia, and the man who gave it to him was David Duke. In nineteen sixty nine, the National Socialist White People's Party was struggling to forge ahead after the death of George Lincoln Rockwell two years earlier.

They'd already been in the process of rebranding from the American Nazi Party before Rockwell was assassinated by a former member, and there was some splitting in the aftermath of his death. The party's new leader, Mattias Kale, announced in early nineteen sixty nine that they would be holding the first ever party congress that fall. Attendance would be required. They needed to tighten up. Local chapters were ordered to start submitting

reports of their activities. New members would have to be interviewed in person at headquarters in Virginia, and everyone needed to get up to date on their dues cale. Needed to consolidate power and try to gain some momentum if the party hoped to outlive its founder. In nineteen sixty nine was the same year that they formed the youth wing called the National Socialist Liberation Front under the guidance

of Wily Luther Pierce. He was very focused on recruiting eager teenage boys, and his messaging in those days was far more explicitly violent than the kind of messaging he would claim later in life when some of those young men had grown into terrorists. I found old copies of the National Socialist Bulletin, the party news letter that were published that year. In issues published every two weeks from

May until August. The bulletin reminded members that if there was any way they could possibly get to Virginia on Labor Day weekend, there was no excuse not to attend the party congress. Registration was just two dollars or one dollar for students, and there would be floor space for sleeping bags. If he couldn't afford a motel. The party office would coordinate with attendees to arrange for carpooling down in Alabama. There were at least two members who needed

a ride. Don Black was newly sixteen, and he'd just finished his junior year of high school. He was still years away from trying to coop the government of an island nation or founding Stormfront, but he was already pretty far along in his journey to becoming a full fledged neo Nazi. Two years earlier, he found a racist book by a Christian identity presecut in his local library, and he wrote to the publisher to request more books. He

got newsletters. He ended up on mailing lists, and one of the groups that showered him with buttons and flyers and newsletters was the National Socialist White People's Party. He joined the party as a youth member by mail when he was just fifteen years old. When he got the newsletter in the spring of nineteen sixty nine announcing the party congress, he was desperate to attend. His parents were a little uneasy about it, but they said he could go.

They did draw the line at hitchhiking, though Don Black's parents waited with him in the parking lot at the bus station in Birmingham. He'd done just as the newsletter asked. He submitted his RSVP and one dollar registration feed by mail, and he requested to be connected with another member he could corporal with. Franklin arrived first decades later. A few weeks before Franklin was executed by the state of Missouri, Don Black posted on Stormfront that Nazi forum he founded

in the nineties. He said that Joseph Paul Franklin was the first white nationalist he ever actually met, but only by a few minutes. Had it been much longer, he wrote, I probably would have gone home with my parents, who had driven me to the Birmingham bus station to meet up with my ride to Arlington. They hadn't wanted me to go, but they at least wanted to meet these

scary people I was going with. Had they talked to Franklin those first few minutes, their worst fears would have been confirmed, and they'd have made me go back home with them. So luckily for Don Black and terribly unlucky for the world, Don Black's parents didn't have much time to chat with Joseph Paul Franklin because David Duke arrived few minutes later. In the late summer of nineteen sixty nine.

David Duke and Joseph Paul Franklin were both nineteen years old, Franklin, who was still using his birth name James Vaughan, was a high school dropout who had abandoned his pregnant sixteen year old wife. David Duke was about to start his sophomore year at Louisiana State University. Don Black claims he remembers being appalled by a quote crudely drawn swastika tattoo on Franklin's arm, but I wasn't able to find any source that confirms he would have had that tattoo at

that time. Memory is more about vibes than facts, though, as uneasy as that makes us to admit, so, even if Franklin didn't have a swastika tattoo on his arm in nineteen sixty nine, he definitely already had swastika tattoo energy The sixteen year old old wife he'd abandoned a year earlier, said he started sewing swastika patches onto his jackets in nineteen sixty eight. He was crude and loud, and he leered at women and girls, and he swore, and he spat, and half of what he said was

weighed down with racial slurs. He was gross. He wasn't the kind of guy you would let drive your son to a Nazi conference, even if you were for some reason letting someone drive your son to a Nazi conference. But David Duke was a clean cut, well spoken, young college student driving his family car, and Eli Saslow's twenty eighteen book Rising out of Hatred, he frames this fourteen hour car ride as pretty formative for Don Black. These were the first Nazis he'd ever met. Before he even

turned sixteen. He'd been ostracized at school and interviewed by the FBI for his involvement in the party, but he'd never had a chance to actually talk about his views with anyone who agreed with him, let alone these kind of cool guys who were just a little bit older than him. Asasla wrote, by the time the three teenagers finally arrived in Arlington for the conference, a transformation had taken place. Don no longer felt like a lone extremist searching for answers. He was part of a movement, a

soldier for the cause. According to the National Socialist Bulletin one hundred and twenty three members of the National Socialist White People's Party attended the party congress. I don't know if that's true. There are some pictures in an other newsletter that show a conference room full of chairs facing a speaker at electron. A good number of the chairs are empty, and the room doesn't look like it could have held more than fifty people. But maybe the rest

of their friends were there just out of frame. The descriptions of the speeches that ran in the newsletter sound pretty dull, but I really would have loved to have been a fly on the wall while the attendees socialized. Right, We've got Don Black at his first ever Nazi event, teenage David Duke, a budding serial killer. William Luther Pierce gave a speech, of course, as did Matius Kale. Frank Colin, who was still serving as Midwest Party coordinator, gave a

report about Nazi activity in Chicago. It would be about another year or so before he was ousted over rumors that he was Jewish, and a few more years before he would kick off the controversy that led to the Skokie Supreme Court decision and inspire the FAI same as Blues Brother's line, I Hate Illinois Nazis, And another few years before it was revealed that the rumors were true,

he had in fact been raised Jewish. He was later convicted of child molestation, and regardless of the actual attendance numbers, people did come in from all over. John Beatty was there from Canada, where he led the Canadian National Socialist Party.

Joseph Thomassi, one of William Luther Pierce's teenage revolutionaries, gave a report on his work running the racist hotline over on the West Coast, and this is where James Mason first met several of the men who would shape the worldview he laid out in the siege years later, in nineteen sixty nine, James Mason was a teenager too, like Don Black, he'd joined the party as a youth member

by mail while still in high school. A year before this conference, he'd written to the party headquarters to say that he was planning to murder his high school principal. William Luther Peers read his letter and offered him an alternative. He invited this seventeen year old to leave Ohio and

come live at the party office in Virginia. The newsletters don't give much detail about the content of the speeches, but years later, when James Mason sat down on his typewriter to tap out the newsletters that would eventually be collected into siege, that favorite tome of acceleration as neo Nazis. In the twenty tens, he recalled a scene from the room that weekend after William Luther Peers's speech, he opened

the floor to questions. According to mason quote, one naive delegate asked what we should do with the white race traders. He spoke, not a word, but gesturing with thumb and index finger forming the barrel and hammer of a histole being fired. Brought the entire assembly to its feet, and the loudest outburst of cheering an applause heard during that

three day gathering. So all the way back in nineteen eighty three, James Mason is doing the and everybody clapped bit right, But more importantly, amidst all this propaganda that we know they're being inundated with about killing black people, about killing Jewish people, somebody raised their hand and asked, what about the race traders? What do we do about them? What do we do about the white people who work

against us? Are they fair game? And in front of this room of mostly very young men that he had personally recruited and groomed, for violence. William Luther Pierce pantomimed firing a gun. Pierce would later deny inspiring Franklin or being an inspired by him to write his novel Hunter. And I'm sure Franklin heard plenty of other Nazis advocate for murdering race traders in the years between this meeting

and the first time he did it. But there in that room in nineteen sixty nine, his leader put the idea in his head, maybe for the first time. When the conference was over after the long weekend, Don Black had to go home. He had to go back to high school, but David Duke and Joseph Paul Franklin wanted to stick around for a bit, so Don's parents bought

him a plane ticket home. James Mason stuck around two obviously, he lived there and for a few months James Mason and Joseph Paul Franklin lived together in the Party barracks in Northern Virginia. The incident I described the opening. That attack on the new Mobilization office in November of nineteen sixty nine is so strange to me. I spent hours combing through newspaper archives trying to prove it happened at all. I scrounged around for Marxist papers that would have been

published during that time period. I dug up old anti war newsletters, student activist publications. I looked hard, because something must have happened. There are multiple essays in Siege about

the attack on the anti war protesters. James Mason recalls this as his favorite demonstration years later as he's writing Siege, as he's collecting his thoughts and formulating this strategy for white revolution, Gassing those hippies in nineteen sixty nine is one of his fondest memories, and even when he's not a describing that particular incident, he writes often of Franklin, praising him as a man of action and something others

should aspire to. He mentions him for the first time in November of nineteen eighty, just a few days after Franklin was arrested. In that first essay about Franklin, Mason described the early days of their friendship, writing, I mainly recall the time in November of nineteen sixty nine when we decided to put the Reds of DC under siege during their massive treason orgy known as the Moratorium against

the Vietnam War effort. It was Vaughn, because of his non fascist appearance, who went into the high rise New Mobe headquarters on Vermont Avenue alone and caused the place to be evacuated three times using gas bombs without being caught. No One then guessed that we might be reading about him eleven years hence in such a manner, may his luck hold now. A year later, in another essay, he described the same incident, again referring to Franklin using the

name he'd known him by, Vaughn. I recall the night one of the most important missions of the year was in jeopardy because some of the men chosen to go out on it were refusing to be accompanied by Vaughn as part of the team that attacked the New Mobe headquarters in Washington, d C. I was forced to call each one up individually and beg and plead, shame and cajole until I could get them to come to their

senses and perform their duty. More than once I was hung up on and had to dial them right back up. In the end, while the rest of us provided escort and the backup, it was Vaughn who caused the place to be evacuated and closed. The essay attributes both Franklin's success and the other member's wariness of him to the same thing. He didn't fit in. He didn't have a regulation haircut or a party uniform, wasn't playing by the rules. And this is foundational Amazon's ideology. Get out there and

do terrorism. Prioritize action over all else, action over organization, action over doctrine. Get out there and do something. Just break something, just kill someone. Watching this long haired weirdo throw tear gas grenades into an office building while the stormtroopers waited in the car seems to have laid the groundwork for the kind of terror Mason encouraged for decades. Just get out there and do it. But did it actually happen. I can't prove it, and normally that would

lead me to believe he's making it up. But for some reason, I think something had to have happened. This seems too central to Mason's worldview to be made up. And I did find one single newspaper article that does describe members of the National Socialist White People's Party storming into the new Mob offices the night before the march,

So something happened. But that article describes Nazis who looked like Nazis, not one lone long haired weirdo, but big guys and matching coats and short hair and swastik lapel pins. And it doesn't mention a gas attack or an evacuation or shutting the building down or three incursions. It just describes one instance of a couple of guys coming in, handing out flyers and intimidating some of the women before

they were escorted out. Now, I do have to leave open the possibility that I can't find an article about anti war activists getting tear gased, because there are thousands of articles about the cops tear gassing that same group that same week. The keywords are pulling up a lot of unrelated content, so maybe it's there and it's just

buried in that one article I did find. They actually name the student activist who firmly asked the Nazis to leave, and he's still alive and I found him online, So I think I'm going to write to him and ask him if he remembers this happening. Fingers crossed, But whether or not an eighty year old man remembers getting tear gassed by a Nazi serial killer in nineteen sixty nine.

We'll pick back up next week with a Nazi adrift joining different hate groups throughout the nineteen seventies before waking up one Christmas morning and deciding it was time to start his one man race war. Weird Little Guys is a production of Pools One Media and iHeartRadio. It's research, written and recorded by me Mollie Kunger. Our executive producers are Sophie Litterman and Robert Evans. The show is edited by themes wildly talented Rory Gagan. The theme music was

composed by Brad Dickert. You can email me at Weird Little Guys podcast at gmail dot com. I will definitely read it, but I probably won't answer. It's nothing personal. You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other listeners on the Weird Little Guys subreddit. Just don't post anything that's going to make you away Weird Little Guys