Soldier of Misfortune: Frank Sweeney, Pt. 2

as the first forty. There's a serial killer, a mafia trial, two different secret wives, and a lot of misuse of the postal service. I'm Molly Conger, and this is weird, little guys.

pin down. Several newspaper articles about Frank's role in the ensuing manhunt for the missing spy put his release a month before the escape, but others put it a month after. Seems like this detail would really matter, but no one

seemed very concerned about it. In nineteen eighty, newspapers that appeared to be quoting the same unnamed source from the US Marshalls published conflicting stories, with some saying Frank flew to South Africa shortly before Boyce's escape, and others putting that trip slightly after the escape, although both of these

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

talk to reporters, and he loves to lie. It's the seventies. These reporters don't have the Internet. They don't have access to electronic court records, so a lot of Frank's lies get published. When he files a lawsuit against the prison warden in Maine about the conditions in solitary confinement, newspapers publish his claim that he was placed in solitary for a stabbing he'd been suspected of, but he says the

investigation cleared him. A local newspaper in bang Or Main, however, had a reporter in the courtroom when he entered a guilty plea to that stabbing. But regardless of whether he got out in December of seventy nine or February of nineteen eighty, we know Frank flew to South Africa soon after he got out, and that he stayed there for a couple of months. The story of Christopher Boyce's nineteen

months on the Lamb is long and strange. Sean Penn plays Boyce's friend, the cocaine dealer Dalton Lee in the nineteen eighty five film adaptation of the book The Falcon and the Snowman about the entire affair, I didn't watch it. There's only so much I can do. But remember this is the Cold War. A missing Soviet spy is a pretty big pr problem for the United States government. There

was speculation that the KGB had helped him escape. Boyce himself called a reporter from a payphone a few months after the escape and laughed about the idea that he'd had foreign assistance. He says, he just climbed the fence and walked out. The task force focused on finding boys believed all along that he'd never actually left California, and

they weren't too far off. He was in Idaho the whole time, But a lot of resources ended up getting expended pursuing a false lead planted by our friend Frank. Now I can't prove Frank sent all of these letters himself. I can't even find contemporane his reporting where anyone ever outright said that they believed Frank sent these letters. And he was never charged in connection with his meddling in

this investigation. But just a few weeks after Boyce went missing, the United States ambassador in South Africa got a letter. The postmark indicated that had been mailed from within South Africa, and the letter said a known mercenary named shell Hammer had assisted the convicted American spy, Christopher Boyce in entering

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

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

and he probably knew he was being followed. They followed him from his home in New Jersey all the way out to California, and from a California motel, he made several phone calls to an apartment in Hermosa Beach and when they searched that apartment they found it abandoned, but they found several letters that Frank had sent to a third man, another friend of theirs, from prison, one of which read somehow they discovered that I helped him get

into South Africa. I suspect an informer has been at work, but there was no informer. Frank wanted them to find those letters, and Boyce was never in South Africa. The only reason anyone thought Boyce might be in South Africa is because Frank was planting false clues all over the world to point them as far away as possible from a little hunting cabin in the mountains of Idaho, US

Marshalls eventually got frustrated following Frank around. A federal prosecutor would actually say an open court that Frank's arrest in July of nineteen eighty one was specifically intended to give them leverage to make him cooperate in the boy's case. It seemed like he knew something and they wanted to know what it was. As a felon, Frank wasn't allowed to have any guns, and of course Frank had guns.

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

he would happily show them to them. He voluntarily turned over the key to the bank deposit box he was keeping them in, and inside they found several letters to Frank that had been mailed from South Africa. Sounds like more red herrings planted by Frank. He'd flown to South Africa several times in the year and a half since his release and was probably mailing himself these letters on those visits. So now in August of nineteen eighty one, it seems like there could be some evidence that Boyce

really was in South Africa. Frank says he was promised placement in the Witness Protection program for his help, and maybe they did make that promise if he really could help them recover their missing spy, that's a reasonable enough deal. And just a few weeks after all of Frank's help, Boyce was recaptured, but it wasn't due in any part to Frank's information during his year and a half on the run. Boyce obviously couldn't get a job, so he

made money the old fashioned way bank robbery. He kept it pretty small time, nothing flashy where you get into the vault, just little stick ups a few thousand at a time from the teller. He's tied to at least seventeen bank robberies in Idaho and Washington State during that time, eventually teaming up with a couple of brothers from Idaho. And it was one of those men who turned boys in for the reward money, no honor among thieves, I guess.

Boyce was taken back into custody on August twenty first, nineteen eighty one, and he wasn't in South Africa.

to skip the country again. Remember back in nineteen seventy six he got all the way to South Africa after skipping his sentencing date for mail fraud. But this time he was picked up just a few days after he missed court when a motel clerk in Montvale, New Jersey recognized him. When he was finally dragged in for sentencing, the government said they hoped Frank was going to be able to help them in the boy's case, but nothing

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

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

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

so I set it aside. But this offhand mention at his sentencing hearing about a wife sent me back to it. It is him. After the FEDS picked him up at the end of July nineteen eighty one on that gun charge, he was released from custody. He was cooperating. He took them to the bank to look at his fake evidence.

All that, and sometime that month he got married. I have no idea how they met, or where she came from, or what she thought she was going to get out of any of this, or if she knew Frank was planning on entering witness protection that month, or what on earth she saw in this man. But I do know how the marriage ended. Frank went back to prison that very same year, so they didn't have much time together.

I don't know where Diana was while Frank was away, But by nineteen eighty five, according to a decision by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, Dana was living in

Texas with her new boyfriend, Danny Lee Strong. They couldn't have known each other very long before moving in together because Strong had only just gotten out of prison again for another and a string of pretty run of the mill robbery and fraud charges, and they didn't stay together long before they were arrested for murdering a man Strong

said made a pass at Deanna. She was ultimately only convicted of stealing the victim's car, which they fled the scene in, but Strong got ninety nine years for the brutal beating and asphyxiation of Robert Eugene Thomas. Frank doesn't really factor into this story. He's in prison in another state this whole time, but his name appears in a footnote of an appeals court decision upholding Strong's conviction. Strong had sent Frank a letter after finding out that Deanna

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

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

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

in court. He'd spent years traveling the country, robbing banks and murdering young black men in in racial couples, so it would take years to sort out what to do with him. This time, he was on trial for the unsuccessful assassination attempt on civil rights activists Vernon Jordan on May twenty ninth, nineteen eighty The Fort Wayne, Indiana chapter of the National Urban League was hosting a banquet in honor of a visit from National Urban League President Vernin Jordan,

when a volunteer dropped him off at his hotel. Later that evening, a single bullet from a thirty six rifle tore through his back. He survived, but it's hard to build a case against a drifter sniper. Nobody saw him. The investigators had some handwriting analysis on a motel registration card, testimony from a grocery store clerk who identified Franklin as a man he'd had a strange conversation with, and a general idea that the crime fit Franklin's pattern, but it

was a bit thin. And then came frank Oh, frank loves to talk, he loves to be helpful. He's still in prison on that gun charge, but he told federal authorities that in the brief couple of weeks he'd been on the same s cell block as Franklin. They chatted a few times, and Franklin had confessed to him on several occasions about shooting Vernon Jordan. On the stand, frank testified about that evening in January when the guard changed the channel to the basketball game and it's a pretty

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

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

a ride that night. Frank was one of three jail house informants the government put on during that trial, all men who'd been in jail with Franklin, and all of whom said Franklin had admitted to various aspects of the crime and casual conversation. Josephaul Franklin was actually acquitted at that federal trial, jurors said they believed Franklin shot Jordan, but they were hung up on the wording of the indictment, which specifically charged him with the shooting as a violation

of Jordan's civil rights. Years later, on death row for a variety of other murders, Franklin did confess to shooting Vernon Jordan when the trial was over, though jurors who spoke to the press said they'd only believed one of the three jail house informants who testified frank On cross examination, frank Sweeney seemed surprised to learn that the other two men had been paid thousands of dollars for their cooperation. He wasn't getting paid, but he wasn't upset. He didn't

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

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

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

intentionally causing problem by talking about this constantly. And it seems he was ultimately removed from the Witness Security program around this time, and maybe that had something to do with his decision to testify on behalf of Anthony Spalotro, the hot headed Chicago mobster who handled the family's business in Las Vegas. It couldn't have been an attempt to get back in the program. He was testifying for the defense, but maybe he was just spiite. He wanted to get

somebody else kicked out of the program. In nineteen eighty three, when he was still in prison and still considered a protected witness, he briefly shared a cell with another guy in the program. Frank Kulatta was a mobster. He was a member of Tony Spilotro's Hole in the Wall gang. If you've seen the nineteen ninety five Scorsese movie Casino, it's that quite literally. Frank Marino, the character played by the guy who played Phil Leotardo on The Sopranos, is

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

dangerous men. Frank Sweeney had just testified against a serial killer and Frank Kulatta had turned on Spilotro after the FBI played him a recording of his friend talking about having him killed. When Anthony Spilotro went on trial, in nineteen eighty six, Frank Kulatta was out of prison and in the program, and he was the government's star witness against Spilotroe. Frank Sweeney was finally out of prison again in home in New Jersey when he read in the

paper that Kulata was going to be testifying. According to Frank, he felt compelled to contact Spilotro's defense attorney because when they were cell mates, Culata would often brag about committing perjury, So the defense flew Frank out to Las Vegas and put him on the stand. He claimed that after one of Coulada's appearances in court back in nineteen eighty three, he came back to their shared cell and bragged, Frankie, I'd just put another one away. You've heard of the

traveling circus. I'm the original traveling perjurer. On cross examination, Frank Sweeney admitted that when he'd been in the witness protection program, he had on several occasions threatened and even faked suicide attempts to get what he wanted out of federal prosecutors. I wish I had more information on that. That is incredibly strange behavior, and it does actually happen again.

Later in the end, though his testimony in that mob trial is just a strange little footnote his third brush with the witness protection program, his testimony didn't matter much. I don't think anyone believed it, and the case ended in a mistrial over allegations of jury tampering, and Anthony Spilotro went missing before they could retry the case. The mobster and his brother were later found buried in a

cornfield in Indiana. Frank Kula stayed in the witness Protection program for years, and Scorsese hired him as an onset adviser when he shot Casino. Klada died of COVID in twenty twenty, and in nineteen eighty nine, Frank went back to prison for mail fraud. Again. The court record is too old to get any documents without haggling with an archivist, but the docket sheet does say that, in addition to another fifty seven months in prison, the judge also banned

Frank from ever offering anything for sale by mail. So at first I assumed he was pulling the same scam he ran in nineteen seventy six, where he placed ads for guns he didn't actually have and then ghosted would be buyers after they sent him the money. But it's much weirder than that. I wish it was guns. It wasn't guns. This time. He was running what one journalist called a cat scam. He'd cut the tails off regular housecats and then run ads offering them as exotic purebred

cats for three hundred dollars. If he really was as independently wealthy of his inheritance as he claimed, did he really need three hundred dollars for a mutilated cat? Maybe he's just addicted to mail fraud. As for the cats, one of the earliest mentions I could find of Frank in the newspaper archives was a nineteen fifty eight article about the embalmed cat he got for his fifteenth birthday.

He was looking forward to dissecting it and adding it to his collection of oddities that already included a cat skeleton. So I hope all his fraudulent cats found happy homes, even if their buyers were unhappy about losing three hundred dollars. But it's in an appeals court decision related to a parole violation in this second mail fraud case, where we find the details of a campaign of terror against his neighbors that foreshadows the events at the end of this long,

strange tale. He was paroled in nineteen ninety two after serving about half of this sentence, and he was on probation for three years. Just days before that three year period ran out, he was charged with a probation violation. He'd been convicted in New Jersey of sending obscene materials through the mail to a minor. I know, I know, this show is starting to feel like a tour of America's weirdest sex crime guys. But to be honest, I don't think there was anything sexual in his motivation for

sending pornomags to a nine year old. I know that doesn't sound possible. Bear with me. But after he got out of prison, he's living in an apartment back in his hometown of Tenafly, New Jersey. A family of Russian immigrants moves into the apartment next door. They have children. Children are noisy. Frank says he asked them to keep

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

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

And he sent letters to the Jewish community center where the family remembers, informing them that the entire family had been exposed to the virus. Remember this is nineteen ninety three. Telling people that this doctor has HIV could ruin his career. The school could call social services, and they probably wouldn't be welcome in the sauna at the community center if people believed this. And in what would be his ultimate downfall, here signed their nine year old son up for catalogs

that sold pornographic materials. It seems like he believed that the child's father would get the mail, which apparently wasn't going to Iowa anymore see the catalog, believe his son had signed up for it and would punish the boy, and if the boy was grounded, he wouldn't be so noisy. But it backfired and Frank was discovered as the culprit. Police searched his apartment and found the typewriter he'd used

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

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

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

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

getting favorable placement. So not only did Frank promise that he could advise you about the differences in food facilities and culture at different federal prisons, he claimed he had

connections and could influence your placement. A Bureau of Prison spokesman denied Frank had any ability to arrange transfers or promise placements at specific facilities, but at least one client told the reporter that prison officials had denied his request for a transfer during a five year sentence for embezzlement, but after he wrote Frank and included a check for one thousand dollars, his transfer came through. Now, promising these transfers seems like it would put Frank back in mail

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

There was another article about his consulting business in nineteen ninety eight, but then he kind of disappears. I'm not

sure what he was up to. He pops up briefly in a couple of articles in two thousand and two thousand and one, an old prison friend of his called him from a jail in Reno to ask for help exposing an alleged smuggling ring run by one of the guards out there in Nevada, David Wayne is described as one of the most dangerous inmates in a state prison system after a variety of escape attempts and prison riots involving Wayne holding hostages, and in two thousand he wanted

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

had successfully escaped. At least once, a low security placement for David Wayne was out of the question. But then quiet Frank moved out to Idaho and stayed out of the paper. He's not a very good driver, so I know he moved to Ada County, Idaho around two thousand and one, because that's when he started getting a lot of traffic tickets there. In two thousand and eight, he was charged with battery and convicted, but he only served five days in jail and successfully completed his court ordered

anger management class. The docket indicates the victim, woman who appears to be a nursing assistant in the Boise area, got a restraining order. But the Frank Sweeney, who tried to drop a bank and fought in the Bush War and had a mob boss fly him to Vegas and bragged about being able to influence prison officials, that Frank seems to be gone. He's just an old man living in Boise until twenty fifteen. In December of twenty fifteen, Frank went to the post office near his home in

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

who really do need those parking spots. And Frank was in his seventies at this point, so even if he didn't have a state issued parking placard, he's old. Just leave him alone. But she made a comment about it, and the situation escalated pretty seriously. Court documents only say that they had a verbal altercation, so at least she didn't get stabbed, which he's done at least twice to people who offended him. But whatever she said, and for whatever reasons she chose to say it, she didn't deserve

what happened next. The victims in this case are referred to only by their initials in the court record for obvious reasons, but it can be tricky to keep track of people with just a letter. So I've given them all fake names just to make this a little easier. We'll call the women from the parking lot Ellen, her husband will be Sam, and their adult daughters will be Kayla and Lucy. Again, it is possible to figure out who these people are, but please don't. They've been through enough.

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

light for his own safety. Ellen's husband, Sam, received a postcard at his dental office the same day informing him that his wife had been in the post office the week before and she was so drunk that she was falling down. The letter, though very brief, contained a lot of really specific personal information, the fact that the couple had very recently purchased a new home, including the name of the suburb where they now lived, the city where their other adult daughter lived, the names of both of

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

family received the first postcards. In December of twenty fifteen, they met with detectives at the Aida County Sheriff's office in Boise, and despite investigator's best efforts, the family would continue to receive increasingly bizarre and frightening postcards for three

full years. Their neighbors and nearby schools received postcards that appeared to be from the State Sex Offender Registry, informing them that Sam was a sex offender, specifically that he had sodomized a nine year old boy in nineteen seventy eight. It probably goes without saying, but I will say it anyway. That is not true. But it does kind of remind you of what Frank did to that doctor in nineteen

ninety three, doesn't it, adding to the victim's distress. Sam passed away unexpectedly in January of twenty seve sixteen, just a few weeks after all this started, and obviously Frank knew one of his victims was dead. Some of the letters sent to the man's daughters taunted and blamed them for driving their father into an early grave, but oddly

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

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

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

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

you forgot where we started. Frank is a Nazi. He was a member of the American Nazi Party, and he fought as a Rhodesian mercenary. He's not just a guy who loves doing mail fraud and hates his neighbors. He's very racist and a lot of these postcards fixated on the idea that Ellen's daughters were engaged in interracial relationships, very graphically and racistly describing specific sex acts that they were,

in his mind having with black partners. And he was particularly upset that Ellen, a Latina, had married a white man. He called her racial slurs and wrote to her daughters calling them mongrels. It seems the only time he wasn't sending postcards was when he was out of the country.

You see, he might have another wife. It's not entirely clear, but several times a year Frank would travel to Effert, the capital of the German state of Turingia and Central Germany, to visit a woman he's known for a very long time, Uta Schernig, who performs professionally as a belly dancer under the name Madame Chamila, has on several occasions referred to Frank as her husband. This may be literal, it may

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

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

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

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

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

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

in an effort to spot you. You only have your big mouth to blame for all of this.

he had it too. He continued writing to Ellen and both of her daughters, calling them racial slurs, slots whores, threatening to report them for I sorted imaginary crimes like tax fraud and drug dealing, and always remembering to write them on their birthdays. Investigators were stumped. They knew the letter writer was the man from the post office parking lot. He said as much in his letters, but Ellen didn't recognize him. She had only a vague description of his vehicle,

and she didn't get the license plate. Why would she have thought she needed to? Postcards were always wiped clean of prints. They were perfectly generic United States Postal Service issued materials that he always bought in small quantities and paid cash. He may truly have tormented this woman until one of them died if he hadn't done what he's always done, more crime. And here's that beginning of the end.

It's not the end. But I told you this story that began outside of a bank in New Jersey in nineteen sixty two, would start its final chapter outside of a bank in Idaho fifty six years later. On October thirteenth, twenty eighteen, Frank got into another argument in a parking lot. These victims, too, are only identified by their inn in the court records, So I'm going to call them Liam and Denise. They were in their car outside the Wells Fargo in Garden City, Idaho. Frank conked at them. There

was again some kind of verbal altercation. Maybe they gave him the finger or shouted, who knows. You know, this is the kind of thing that happens every day. You know, you don't pull forward fast enough, the guy behind you honks, You tell him to fuck off. Nobody's being their best selves. But life goes on, but not for Frank. Frank can't take it. He stabbed a guy in the guts for splashing him in nineteen seventy five. So two weeks after Liam and Denise experienced this angry driver at the bank,

they start getting postcards. Like Ellen and her family, this family, too, starts hearing that their neighbors and nearby schools are getting postcards that pretend to be from the state Sex Offender Registry, alerting people that Liam is a pedophile. He's not, and specifically, the postcards say that he sodomized a nine year old boy. That is a very specific and very gross detail to recycle from one victim to the next, right like that, that has to mean something, but I can't figure it out,

and maybe that's for the best. These postcards, too, are generic ones from the post office, typed on a manual typewriter. And again some of the postcards are signed Carson Wells, and sometimes they're signed with the name of Liam's adult son. And again there were letters to the family from murderers answering requests for pen pals. But you know what, the bank has a lot of security cameras, and unbeknowns to Frank, shortly before he started terrorizing his second set of victims,

his case wasn't just a local matter anymore. In September of twenty eighteen, the United States Postal Inspector Service started looking into the postcards. That's right, the Mail Police. That is a very real federal law enforcement agency with jurisdiction over mail crimes. According to their most recent annual report, the USPIS initiated more than fifty six hundred investigations in twenty twenty three, and during that year, forty one hundred

cases related to their investigations ended in convictions. Most of those numbers are things like mail theft and people mailing drugs. Also, though a couple hundred people a year are assaulting postal employees, knock that off. Don't do that. Be nice to your mail carrier. So now we have the Mail Police on the case. And as soon as they start trying to figure out what's going on here. Again, this is September of twenty eighteen, they're just looking at the postcards to

Ellen and her family. But within a few weeks of them opening the investigation, the Idaho State Police let them know that someone is sending postcards pretending to be from their office. And these are these postcards about how Liam is a pedophile that are being sent to schools and neighbors. And because these postcards are made to look as though they are coming from the State Sex Offender Registry, which is run by the state Police, people are contacting the

state police about them. And now the state police are talking to the mail police, and now the mail cops see that there are more victims, and all of these postcards seem to be from the same person. When postal investigators speak to both families and compare the letters, it's clear they're all from the same person. All of the victims say they know who is sending them these postcards, they just don't know who he is. Ellen knows it's the guy from the post office. Liam knows it's the

guy from the bank. And they both describe some kind of older truck and an older man who's thin with a stiff gait and a very terrible distinctive scar on his face. They're describing the same man, and surely a bank teller or a postal service clerk would recognize description like that. Local cops had shown Ellen photo lineups on multiple occasions over the last three years as they're investigating this, But Frank was never a suspect, so he was never

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

He's been paying a private investigator. That's how he knew so much personal information about all of his victims, information about their real estate transactions, what kinds of cars they drove, where they worked, where their adult children lived in different cities and states. He's paying a PI Idaho is one of several states where you don't actually have to have a license of any kind to offer your services as a PI, so she doesn't have one that can be

taken away, and she hasn't been charged with anything. Maybe she only helped Frank with information that didn't cross a line, and maybe she didn't ask enough questions about what he was doing with it. It remains unclear how he got everyone's Social Security numbers, though, but the PI he was paying is a woman in her eighties who seems to still be in the business just for the love of

the game. Barbara Jacobson describes herself on her website as a cross between Nancy Drew and Jessica Fletcher with the tenacity of Colombo, and credits her success to her Christian faith and divine intervention. An article in a twenty seventeen issue of Christian Living magazine quotes her as saying, God

is my business partner now again. This woman has not been charged with a crime, but it seems like a bad sign that she either didn't know or didn't care that the client asking her for a lot of personal information on people had a five decade long rap sheet that included convictions related to harassment by mail. You're either deeply unscrupulous or very bad at your job, and I'm not sure which is worse either way. This investigation is

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

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

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

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

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

the woods together in the fifties. Once he's in custody, Frank confessed immediately, telling investigators on the day of his arrest that he'd sent the postcards because he felt like these people had embarrassed him and it made him feel

better to know he was causing them emotional distress. Shortly after his arrest, he wrote to the judge to ask the court to intervene in what he felt was an inadequate response by the jail to what he called many of the infirmities that affect the elderly, and says he has the urge to commit suicide if his demands aren't met. And I don't want to sound like I'm brushing this off. I'm not saying that this couldn't possibly be a valid concern.

People die in jails and prisons every day because employees don't care or don't have the resources to provide adequate care. This is a very real problem, and the urge to harm yourself is always very serious. But this isn't Frank's first rodeo. Remember, in the eighties he used to threaten suicide and would even fake suicide attempts in order to manipulate employees of the witness Protection program. So this may not be a brand new issue for Frank at any rate.

Within months of his arrest, he entered into a plea agreement. So once the mail cops got on the case, they actually sorted it out pretty quickly.

which he signed with his own name. When a US marshall searched Frank's house two years before his eventual arrest, I guess they didn't bother to check in with the local police, because in April of twenty seventeen, Frank sent a single letter to Gerald Shrr, the man who found it and for many years ran the witness protection program. I can't think of a worse guy to pick if you're going to send a threatening letter. Sure was long since retired by twenty seventeen. He passed away in twenty

twenty at the age of eighty six. But is there anyone on earth who had more chips to call in with the US Marshals? You think a US marshal isn't going to come to your house. If you sign your full legal name to a threatening letter to the guy who invented witness protection, you think you're going to scare the guy whose job was protecting mobsters from other mobsters. Truly a stupid move, even for Frank.

In nineteen eighty four, you expelled me from the program, leaving me to fend for myself as a known inform a rat in the general populations of very dangerous prisons.

made things worse. And when he finally got what he wanted by testifying against a serial killer in nineteen eighty two, he couldn't keep his mouth shut about it, and so he was removed from the program in nineteen eighty four. In his letter to shir he claims that as a result of losing his protected status in eighty four, he was attacked by another inmate the following year, and he does, without a doubt, bear a huge scar all down one cheek to this day. Somebody cut Frank's face open pretty bad.

He takes care to mention in his letter that the assailant was black, though he chooses different words to say that, and who knows why Frank got cut. I'm not making light of the violence that happens inside jails and prisons, but you'd have to do some real mental gymnastics here to come up with a satisfying explanation for why a black man would cut Frank up in retaliation for Frank's testimony against a Nazi serial killer who traveled the country

shooting black men. I just don't think that they would be mad about that. But I can think think of a variety of reasons why a black man who encountered Frank in prison might get into it with him. I mean racist hide. Frank's just kind of a hothead, not a great guy to hang out with, always getting into it with people. But also he loves saying racial slurs. So I can think of a variety of reasons why this might have happened that had nothing to do with

him testifying against a serial killer. We can't take Frank at his word, and I couldn't find any reporting from the time about a prison knife fight in nineteen eighty five, So who else? After Shre received the letter, which Frank had signed venomously Yours, Frank Abbott Sweeney, a US marshal was sent out to Idaho to speak with Frank, and Frank admitted that he sent the letter, but he said he meant no harm by it, and he allowed the

marshal to search his home. It seems like if anyone had compared notes, Frank could have been identified as the Garden City postcard writer far sooner The language in this letter was very similar to some of the postcards. If they had just showed this letter to the sheriff, maybe they would have recognized it, But yes, they didn't because

he wasn't. The local police in Pennsylvania where the letter was received charged Frank with terroristic threats, but that's a non extraditable misdemeanor in Pennsylvania, so they couldn't bring him back to face the charge. So he's got an open warrant in Pennsylvania. If he ever goes there, willingly, but he probably won't and was sure now deceased. It doesn't seem like that's likely to amount to anything. On December sixteenth, twenty nineteen, Frank Sweeney was sentenced to fifty one months

for six counts of stalking. A few days later, his German wife posted a photo of her Christmas Eve dinner. A friend asked her if Frank would be celebrating with her that year. She replied that no, Frank has been ill for several months and can't fly right now. She didn't say that he was back in federal prison for at least the fifth time. Frank Sweeney was released from

prison in December of twenty twenty two. I just noticed, as I'm writing this that it's his eighty first birthday today, but it won't be by the time you hear this. He's still in Idaho, he's still playing the violin, and he still co owns a few Mexican hairless dogs on the show circuit in Germany. In that nineteen ninety four New York Times article about his prison consulting business, Frank quipped that his favorite quote was the crime is not in the act, but in the stupidity of being caught,

which he attributes to Nietzsche. I think, regardless of your stance on the philosophical nature of crime and punishment, though there are better quotes from Frank's thousands of appearances in

the newspaper over his six decades of crime. Maybe Judge H. Curtis Meaner had it write in nineteen eighty one when he cut off the bickering in the courtroom over exactly what the hell happened with Frank's mysterious South African letters about the missing spy, saying, I have neither the time nor inclination to unravel all the monies in this case, because we never really will unravel all the mysteries of Frank's past. He played a bit part in so many

much bigger stories. They've made whole Hollywood films out of so many of these little slices of history that Frank passed through, from Cold War spy thrillers to Scorsese dramas about organized crime. Frank's there, He's not in the movie. He's just out of frame while history happens doing something really goddamn weird. Weird little guys sit production of cool

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