Soldier of Misfortune: Frank Sweeney, Pt. 1

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 con 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 day times bought as a foreign mercenary, got deported from both Rhodesia and South Africa, helped an escaped spy of ade 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, little guys, this.

through the system. But this one, this one is brand new to me, and I think he 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's 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 will definitely get to eventually in another episode when my weird little guide 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.

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. He never finished high school. His claim that has as Francis Shellhammer derives from his mother's maiden name also fails to hold up to scrutiny. His mother was born Marie Gleeson to John Gleeson, a fireman, and Lottie Gross Gleason in Chicago, and I was generous here.

I wasted a lot of time. I even checked his grandparents. His middle name, Abbott was his paternal grandmother Martha's maiden name. I went as far as to track his family treat all the way back to Ireland, giving him the benefit of the doubt that maybe there's a shell Hammer in there somewhere.

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, leading 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, someone 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 how about 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 attempt at bank robbery, Frank did admit that the police had spoken to him on numerous occasions, specifically concerning his involvement in George Lincoln

Rockwell 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 stint 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. One afternoon 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.

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 gun shot wound, and Frank says, some shot when I got you through the window.

had to replace the curtains. Frank entered a not guilty plea and unsuccessfully tried to suppress 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. At trial, the defense put on three psychiatrists to argue for insanity, and the state put on two of their own, who testified that Frank was certainly disturbed, but not legally insane. The jury deliberated for just three hours before finding Frank guilty of attempted homicide, assault with the intent to kill, possession of a machine gun, and

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

I mean, he does seem to have not been seriously injured. He was shot, you know, in the upper arm. I don't think it went through the bone, so it really he was lightly wounded. But that's not what they would put in the newspaper today, you know it. And the cops didn't drive a tank through the front of this suburban home or unload their guns into him when he

came out. There's been such a massive culture shift over the years and the way we justify aggressive police response and the way that we talk about the risk to police. It's just interesting to see that it wasn't always that way. But there's another unanswered question in the story of this siege in this New York suburb. What was he doing that day? I mean shooting guns in the woods, obviously, but why did he panic when that cop drove by and why those woods in particular, We'll never really know.

Even if he told us, we wouldn't know. He's a liar. But the newspaper articles at the time do say that the officer initially saw Frank's car parked at the intersection of East Clinton Avenue and Woodland Street, about a mile from where Frank lived.

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 tight rope here of providing a little more context than just Rhodesia was very bad and white supremacists 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.

South 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. The wind of change is blowing through this continent, whether we like it or not. This growth national consciousness is a political fact. We was all accepted as a fact.

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. That

was not on their minds. But I think they knew what it would look like if their decolonization looked exactly like their colony. And we're not talking about a pr loss here.

five percent of Rhodesia. And apologies again for these digressions. I just love the context. I think 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 investing and 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 out 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 the seventies, Frank Sweeney didn't see an advertisement in 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 technical 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 lamprect 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 may be sensing as a theme here, the details of frank service in Rhodesia are a little murky.

were told not to take prisoners. He also admitted that his unit had taken part in raids over the border into neighboring Mozambique.

fighting for independence in Mozambique. These Rhodesian raids over the border into Mozambique continued even after that nation gained 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 and nineteen seventy six about Rode, 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 we know that's not true. An Annibal 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 Annibl 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 rid recruited into the Rhodesian Army in nineteen seventy two, but he may have actually still been in prison in nineteen seventy two for shooting that cop. It's hard to pin down exactly when he was released. One newspaper article years later puts his parole date for that conviction at nineteen seventy four. But I have a bad feeling that was just a reporter on a deadline who did the math on a six year sentence and assumed Frank served all

of it, which probably didn't. When Frank was later arrested for his role in the escape of a Soviet spy, an FBI agent puts his date of enlistment at nineteen seventy three, so the truth is in there somewhere.

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.

which would of course be entirely impossible. Frank could not have been in a Rhodesian Army barracks in September of nineteen seventy seven, because according to the US Marshalls, the FBI, the DOJ, the CIA in the New York Times, Frank was hanging out with a Soviet spy in the exercise yard at a federal prison in Los Angeles in September

of nineteen seventy seven. But I'll cut Hickman some slack here on that faltering start, because there's ample evidence within the story that puts these events somewhere in the springtime of nineteen seventy five, and the data side, there is enough meat to Hickman's account and the supporting primary documentation he provided that supports the idea that the story is more or less true. As a homicide detective, Hickman was involved in an investigation into Frank Sweeney for attempted murder

at a Rhodesian military barracks. One evening sometime in early nineteen seventy five, probably Frank went to the bathroom at the barracks he was living in. Inside the shared facilities, two infantrymen who had been drinking were laughing and joking around. One was quite drunk, undressed and got into the shower to try to sober up 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.

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.

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.

Frank's taking a little creative license here. The story he's telling is not one hundred percent, but he is admitting to almost all of the real details for the real crime he really did go to prison for. So you probably should have figured that out before he told you, and you definitely should have been able to figure it out after he told you. They could have contacted a police department or a courthouse in New Jersey and just asked, Hell.

They probably could have called any resident of ten tofly New Jersey at random and just asked, do you remember the teenage Nazi bank robber who shot a cop in his mom's front yard. It's kind of a small town. I bet everybody remembered, but I guess they didn't do that. They weren't even a real country, so maybe they didn't have a guy who knew how to do a background check.

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 pasports 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. Were 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? I don't That's not something I've ever needed to wonder about. I don't know really what the options were here, but

it wasn't worth it to them. They sent him home. So sometime in the summer of nineteen seventy five, Frank Sweeney was kicked out at the Rhodesian Light Infantry and deported from Rhodesia. He got his free flight home after all, and was permanently banned from a country that never existed. Shortly after he got home to New Jersey, he wrote

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, nineteen seventy five.

So if he's already home and realizing his mail is missing, and writing the letter in August of seventy five, that all the events before that happened earlier in nineteen seventy.

sure my family would like to meet you too. Even though my service in the military was cut short, my loyalty to Rhodesia 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 sent 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.

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 lugar 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 to bring a gun to the airport, but fleeing the country to avoid going to prison is always been illegal, I'm pretty.

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 our 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.

He wasn't really qualified for the role, having never worked in an office before, but he started as a low level clerk. It helped that his retired FBI agent father was the head of security at McDonald Douglas, another aerospace and defense contracting company, and he had connections at TRW. But TRW 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. For 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 vault. He later 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

alleged 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.

weren't actually meant for them, misdirected communications. These CIA cables that had nothing to do with trw or their work with the agency, but no one really cared, and there was no clear accountability process for ensuring that these top secret CAIA documents that had been sent to them by mistake 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. Now. I know even less about Australia that I know about the decolonization of Africa in the twentieth century, which is to say, like not very much.

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

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. But I'll reiterate. The CIA says they were not involved.

He did sometimes read those misdirected CIA cables that he was supposed to destroy, and some of those messages were about a growing desire within the CIA to have Whitlam removed from office, referring to the Australian Governor General as our man cur 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. And maybe it would have worked, Maybe not forever, but would have worked for a while, if not for a little mistake, a tiny careless act in an absolutely absurd turn of history, Dalton Lee was arrested in nineteen seventy seven outside the Soviet Embassy.

didn't and he probably didn't need to. The authorities would have arrived at the conclusion that it was Boyce 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 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 in congruity 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 Maine 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 in the long direction.