Before he joined the American Nazi Party in 1965, Frank Smith was already a career criminal working for the New England mafia.Sources:https://www.nytimes.com/1952/05/06/archives/friend-of-sutton-seized-as-suspect-in-schuster-death-armed-burglar.htmlhttps://www.ellsworthamerican.com/news/legacy-of-the-commander/article_c5ebf480-2fef-536c-aee8-11a2925441a0.html Simonelli, Frederick J. (1999). American Fuehrer: George Lincoln Rockwell and the American Nazi Party. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.https://law.justia.com/cases/massachusetts/supreme-court/1961/342-mass-180-2.html https://time.com/archive/6618452/people-visions/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Hello, America's sweetheart, Johnny Knoxville here.
I want to tell you about my new true crime podcast, Crimelist, Hillbilly Heist, from smartless media, campside media, and big money players.
It's a wild tale about a gang of high functioning nitwits who somehow pulled off America's third largest cash heist.
Kind of like Robin Hood, except for the part where he steals from reaching gives to the poor.
I'm not that generous.
It's a damn near inspiring true story for anyone out there who's ever shot for the moon and just totally muffed up the landing.
They've stole 17 million dollars and had not bought a ticket to help him escape.
So we're saying like, oh god, what do we do?
What do we do?
That was dumb.
People do not follow my example.
Listen to Crimelist, Hill Billy Heist on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
Hey, it's Ed Helms, host of SNAFU, my podcast about history's greatest screw-ups.
On our new season, we're bringing you a new snafu every single episode.
32 lost nuclear weapons.
You're like, wait, stop?
What?
Yeah, it's gonna be a whole lot of history, a whole lot of funny, and a whole lot of fabulous guests.
Paul Scheer, Angela and Jenna Nick Kroll.
Jordan Clepper.
Listen to season four of Snafu with Ed Helms on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, it's Karen in Georgia, and we just celebrated our 500th episode of My Favorite Murder.
That's 500 podcasts filled with true crime, comedy, and some light girl math.
We're about to podcast for you.
Watch this.
We have to think of something to say after welcome every week.
And we're doing it every week for 10 years.
Almost 10 years.
10 years.
10.
That's what 500 episodes sounds like.
New episodes every Thursday.
Listen to my favorite murder on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Goodbye.
Two rich young Americans move to the Costa Rican jungle to start over, but one of them will end up dead, and the other tried for murder three times.
It starts with a dream, a nature reserve, and a spectacular new home.
But little by little, they lose it.
They actually lose it.
They sort of went nuts until one night.
Everything spins out of control.
Listen to Hell in Heaven on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Call Zone Media Call Zone Media In December of 2018, a jury in Charlottesville, Virginia returned a guilty verdict in the trial of James Alex Fields Jr.
They recommended a sentence of life in prison for the murder of Heather Heyer and another 419 years for the wounding of members of the crowd of peaceful demonstrators.
He'd rammed with his car after a Nazi rally the previous summer.
I remember sitting in that courtroom when the verdict was read aloud.
It was filled to capacity.
I could barely write in my notebook for the lack of elbow room on those usually empty wooden benches.
This was big news.
Reporters from outlets all over the country, the world even had descended on Charlottesville to write about this trial.
And beyond the walls of my local courtroom, reporters who couldn't make it to the trial in person were writing about it too.
Every time Charlottesville is back in the news for all the wrong reasons.
Little newspapers in towns you've never heard of look for local angles on the aftermath of that Nazi rally.
They interview middle school classmates of men who were identified in photos of violent mobs that beat students with torches and bloodied members of the clergy in a public park.
music After that verdict was in, in December of 2018, in a tiny town in Maine, 800 miles away from Charlottesville.
A reporter from the Ellsworth American found her local angle as front pages of newspapers everywhere were once again filled with pictures of Nazis.
She paid a visit to a Nazi who'd been living in their midst in Maine for decades.
He hadn't marched in Charlottesville.
His marching days are Long past.
But at 98 years old, Frank Smith still had fond memories of his close friendship with Commander George Lincoln Rockwell.
I'm Molly Conger, and this is Weird Little Guys.
���� You probably thought we were moving on from the American Nazi Party.
I thought I was done too.
I never even really had much interest in writing about the party's founder, George Lincoln Rockwell at all.
I did four episodes in three weeks about his assassination, and a whole episode about his weird funeral.
How much could there really be left to say about the circumstances surrounding one man's death?
A lot, as it turns out.
And I was willing to let it lie.
To leave some stones unturned, to leave some stories for another day.
Move on for now and put a pin in some of these events to revisit down the road, with a different weird little guy as our focal point.
There are so many side characters in the story of the American Nazi Party who warrant their own episodes.
I have no doubt that I will eventually subject you to, God, probably at least a month's worth of episodes about William Luther Pierce.
And obviously, eventually, we'll have to talk about James Mason.
Before he was an elderly pedophile living in government housing in Denver and advising young terrorists.
He was a teenage boy who joined the American Nazi Party.
And Ralph Forbes had a long, strange career that I'd like to dig into.
So I know we aren't done with these characters.
And I know I can't get lost down every rabbit hole while I'm just trying to get across the finish line on one story.
But there was one strange little side quest that I couldn't let go of.
Frank Smith.
Something about Frank just wouldn't let me mark him down in my notes as something to come back to later.
He was setting off my weird little guy radar in a way I could not ignore.
And I'll tell you, my instincts were not wrong.
I found dynamite, organized crime, FBI wiretap memos about mafia hits, a fake church, a Nazi's mistress having a secret baby under a fake name, and for some reason, the disgraced mayor of Pawtucket Rhode Island.
If you listened to the last five episodes, the ones about Rockwell's murder and his funeral, you heard a little bit about Frank Smith.
You even heard from Frank himself in clips from interviews over the years.
He very publicly insisted that John Patler was not guilty of the murder of George Lincoln Rockwell.
He said it on the stand at Patler's trial in 1967, and he was still saying it 50 years later in a rambling interview with a South African neo-Nazi in 2016.
And you might remember him from the dramatic shootout with Christopher Vedevich in 1968.
An incident that Frank believed was an attempted assassination to prevent him from getting to the real truth about Rockwell's murder.
In the two biographies of Rockwell that I read while I was researching John Patler, Frank Smith really just gets a few passing mentions as a member of the American Nazi Party and as a witness at Pattler's trial.
But when I started reading the actual trial transcripts, something caught my eye.
I can't quite describe it.
He talks like a con man.
I don't know how else to put it.
I've sat through a fair number of trials, and I've read thousands of pages of trial transcripts, over a thousand in this case alone.
And most people aren't great on the stand.
They're nervous.
They give short answers, and when you press them, they sort of backtrack.
They don't want to commit to a lot of specific, hard details, especially if you push hard.
And they get rattled on cross-examination.
Most people do.
It's normal.
But Frank Smith was chatty up there.
I mean, he talked up a storm on the witness stand.
He was giving answers that spanned multiple pages of the transcript without interruption from the attorney asking him the questions.
He claimed to recollect specific verbatim quotes from long conversations.
But he would never quite commit to the specifics when it came to exactly where he was at any particular time.
Specifically, there's no proof of where he was or wasn't.
At 3 p.m. on June 27th, 1967.
There's only so much they could ask him about June 27th, 1967 at that trial.
He wasn't on trial, and George Lincoln Rockwell didn't die on June 27th.
Rockwell died on August 25th, 1967.
And John Pattler killed him.
But Rockwell had survived a prior assassination attempt just two months before his death.
As he was pulling into the driveway at the Nazi Party Barracks in Arlington, Virginia that afternoon, someone fired a single shot at him.
But they missed.
And I assumed, well, that was John Pattler.
Right?
That makes sense.
At his trial, a witness said that he saw him doing target practice in July, the month before the murder in August.
So you can see how it would make sense to assume that he tried to shoot Rockwell in June.
He missed.
He tried again.
His aim was better the second time.
Rockwell's dead.
Makes sense.
When Rockwell wrote about the assassination attempt in his newsletter, he said he didn't see who did it.
But at trial, Matthias Cole testified that Rockwell had privately confided in him that the shooter was John Pattler.
William Luther Pierce, years later, told his own biographer the same thing.
Rockwell told me he saw him, and it was Pattler.
And like I said, it makes perfect sense that that's who it would have been.
But I don't think it was.
I don't think John Patler was the only person who took a shot at George Lincoln Rockwell in the summer of 1967.
Now, we've covered this, but Patler's alibi on the day of the actual murder was no good.
His wife and his father-in-law testified to his schedule that morning.
He'd been running errands with his wife.
He couldn't possibly have gotten to the murder scene.
But when push comes to shove, the times weren't right.
And witnesses couldn't really be sure when and where they'd seen him.
I still believe that he fired the shot that killed Rockwell.
But on the day that someone shot at Rockwell and missed, on June 27th, John Patler was in Washington, D.C., taking a drawing class.
People saw him.
His name was on the sign-in sheet, and a witness testified to having taken attendance that day, himself.
This wasn't a member of the American Nazi Party or his wife.
This is someone with no reason to lie for him.
John Patler couldn't have been in Arlington on the afternoon of June 27th.
When Rockwell saw this would-be assassin sprinting away, I think he did recognize him.
According to the college student who was in the car with him when this happened, he cried out in surprise when he saw the man.
And what he said was the Holy Father.
It's an odd sort of thing to yell.
You know, it's not quite, oh my God, or Jesus Christ.
Things you might say if someone was shooting at you.
But the Holy Father isn't really a thing people say, at least not as far as I know.
I mean, it is what Catholics call the Pope, but they don't use it as an exclamation, and Rockwell was raised Methodist anyway.
The young man who heard him yell this didn't really think much of it.
He didn't know that it was someone's name.
It was a nickname that Rockwell had given Frank Smith.
And it didn't have all that much to do with religion.
Frank Smith really was holy, in the sense that a mafia hitman had put five bullet holes in him.
Right around the time he joined the American Nazi Party.
But let's start at the beginning.
Francis Joseph Smith II was born in Massachusetts in December of 1920, just a few months after his parents' marriage.
According to the 1940 census, when he was 19, he was working as a waiter and living at home with his parents and two younger siblings in Medford, Massachusetts.
It's hard to say what he got up to in the 1940s.
But when he was arrested for bank robbery for the first time in 1952, newspapers reported his occupation as a boxing promoter.
But I never gave it much thought until I was writing about it this week.
Boxing was run by organized crime.
I mean, I had this vague notion about fixed fights and sports betting.
But in the 1950s, the mafia ran boxing.
Top to bottom.
I mean, they had a monopoly on the sport that the Department of Justice had to get involved with.
They didn't just promote the fights, fix the fights, and profit off the fights.
They also coerced young boxers to do a little work outside the ring, off the books.
And they were recruited to work as street-level enforcers.
And not having that knowledge top of mind, as I was going over all these old newspaper clippings, it seemed so strange to me that every time Frank Smith got arrested in the 1950s, all of his named associates seemed to be current or former boxers or boxing promoters.
I thought, you know, maybe the boys met at the boxing gym.
But given the context of New York and Boston in the 50s, the fact that all of these accused bank robbers and murderers are also boxers is really just short of absolute proof that the crimes were mafia-related.
From the studio who brought you the Pikten Massacre and Murder 101.
This is Incels.
I am a loser.
It's also women I wouldn't pay me either.
From the dark corners of the web, an emerging mindset.
I can't have you, girls.
I will destroy you.
A kind of subculture, a hidden world of resentment, cynicism, anger against women.
A seed of loneliness explodes.
I just hate myself.
I don't know why you girls aren't attracted to me, but I will punish you all for it.
At a deadly tipping point, incels will be added to the terrorism guide.
Police say a driver intentionally drove into a crowd killing 10 people.
Tomorrow is the day of retribution.
I will have my revenge.
This is Incels.
Listen to season one of Incels on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, it's Ed Helms, and welcome back to Snafu, my podcast about history's greatest screw-ups.
On our new season, we're bringing you a new SNAFU every single episode.
32 lost nuclear weapons.
You're like, wait, stop?
What?
Ernie Shackleton sounds like a solid 70s Basketball player.
Who still wore knee pads?
Yes.
It's gonna be a whole lot of history, a whole lot of funny, and a whole lot of guests.
The great Paul Scheer made me feel good.
I'm like, oh wow.
Angela and Jenna, I am so psyched you're here.
What was that like for you to soft launch into the show?
Sorry, Jenna, I'll be asking the questions today.
Um I forgot whose podcasts we were doing.
Nick Kroll, I hope the story is good enough to get you to toss that sandwich.
So let's let's let's see how it goes.
Listen to season four of Snap Foo with Ed Helms on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, it's Karen in Georgia, and we just celebrated our 500th episode of My Favorite Murder.
That's 500 podcasts filled with true crime, comedy, and some light girl math.
We're about to podcast for you.
Watch this.
We have to think of something to say after welcome every week.
And we're doing it.
Every week for 10 years.
Almost 10 years.
10 years.
10.
That's what 500 episodes sounds like.
New episodes every Thursday.
Listen to my favorite murder on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Goodbye.
All I know is what I've been told.
And that's a half-truth is a whole lie.
For almost a decade, the murder of an 18-year-old girl from a small town in Graves County, Kentucky went unsolved until a local homemaker, a journalist, and a handful of girls came forward with a story.
I'm telling you, we know Quincy Gilbert.
We know.
A story that law enforcement used to convict six people, and that got the Citizen Investigator on national TV.
Through sheer persistence and nerve, this Kentucky housewife helped give justice to Jessica Kerran.
My name is Maggie Freeling.
I'm a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, producer, and I wouldn't be here if the truth were that easy to find.
I did not know her and I did not kill her or rape or burn or any of that other stuff that y'all said.
They literally made me say that I took a match and struck and threw it on her.
They made me say that I poured guess on her.
From Lava for Good, this is Graves County, a show about just how far our legal system will go in order to find someone to blame.
Bad things happens to good people and small towns.
Listen to Graves County in the Bone Valley feed on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
And to binge the entire season ad-free, subscribe to Lava For Good Plus on Apple Podcasts.
Admittedly, I did not have time this week to learn about a whole new genre of terrible guy.
Bye.
I mean, I saw every episode of the Sopranos, obviously, but I don't actually know that much about organized crime.
Especially outside of the big New York names, because we're talking about Boston and Providence.
And there is apparently a lot to know.
And I bet the story would have made more sense faster if I had some pre-existing knowledge of this world.
But this isn't my usual kind of guy, so we'll have to make do.
My apologies to any listeners from New England who know the deep lore.
In February of 1952, a 24-year-old pants salesman named Arthur Schuster was riding the subway in Brooklyn when he saw someone who looked familiar.
It wasn't someone he knew, but he recognized the man from the wanted poster that had been sitting in his office for months.
It was the missing bank robber Willie Sutton.
He followed Sutton off the train and alerted the police to his location, leading to the arrest of a man who was on the very first FBI's most wanted list.
A few days after Willie Sutton was arrested, Arthur Schuster went to the press.
He believed that he'd been cheated out of a cash reward for this tip.
It turned out the $70,000 reward was just an urban legend.
But it was too late.
In his quest for credit, every newspaper in New York City had already run his picture.
Two weeks later, he was shot in the head outside of his apartment.
Police and FBI were scrambling to find the killer.
And in May, they thought they had.
They arrested Harvey Bastani, a known associate of Willie Sutton's, and a career bank robber in his own right.
They didn't exactly have enough to charge Bastani in connection with the murder, but they were able to hold him for questioning because he was already wanted in connection with several armed robberies, a handful of burglaries involving safe cracking, and the theft of nearly $30,000 worth of fur coats.
And once they had Bastani in custody, they started rolling up his associates.
Over the course of two weeks in May of 1952, the FBI arrested 12 men in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Chicago, all of whom were believed to have been in Bastani's bank robbery gang.
Arthur Schuster's murder was never actually solved, although years later a mob informant would claim that the hit had been ordered by a Gambino family boss.
One of the first members of Bastani's gang to get picked up was William Smith, Frank's younger brother, a boxer and part-time bartender.
At Williams' house, police found several suitcases full of loaded guns and ammunition.
A suitcase full of burglary tools, a sawed off shotgun, a machine gun, disguises including a clerical collar and vestments and fake police uniforms, explosives, and a box full of stolen license plates.
When they searched the bar where he worked nights, they found a cache of dynamite.
Shortly after the raid at Williams' apartment, the FBI announced they were looking for his brother, too.
Frank was one of the last of the group to be arrested, and both brothers were charged in connection with a bank robbery in Medford, Massachusetts.
Despite Harvey Bastani turning state's witness and testifying against them, both Smith brothers were acquitted at trial for that Medford bank robbery.
Unfortunately for Frank, the acquittal in February of 1953 wasn't the end of his troubles.
Because after that first arrest, things kind of snowballed.
In January of 1953, just weeks before his bank robbery trial was set to begin, Frank Smith was indicted on new charges.
New York City attorney Saul Rosenblatt identified Frank Smith as the man who'd fired three shots at him on Park Avenue in March of 1952, hitting him once in the thigh.
When he went to trial in New York for the shooting, Frank Smith admitted that, sure, he was in New York City on the day that Rosenblatt was shot, but it was for business.
A longtime friend of Frank's testified that Frank and his co-defendant, a mafia associate named Sammy Linden, had showed up at his hotel room that night, bragged about shooting Rosenblatt, and paid him to steal a car that they could use to leave the city.
On the stand, the victim positively identified Frank as the man he saw shoot him in broad daylight.
but the jury acquitted him.
It's possible the jury was just confused about the lack of a clear motive presented at trial.
Immediately after the shooting, newspapers in New York ran wild with speculation that the attempted murder was connected to Rosenblatt's involvement in a particular high-profile case.
He'd recently been named the sole beneficiary in one of his client's wills.
And the dead woman's sister was contesting the will in court.
It didn't help that the dead woman in question was Eleanor Morgan Satterley, the granddaughter of JP Morgan.
Yes, that JP Morgan, the one whose name is on your bank.
But as the investigation into the shooting continued, police were less convinced that Satterley's will had been the cause.
And at trial, the judge reminded the jury that proving motive isn't necessary for a conviction.
I think any criminal lawyer will tell you, though, juries are troubled by a crime without a motive.
But it's also very possible that those 12 New York City jurors knew well enough not to be seen in open court, poking their nose into the business of organized crime.
No one was ever convicted for shooting Saul Rosenblatt.
And I'm pretty sure everyone involved is dead now.
So I think it's safe to offer you my theory.
Frank Smith and Sammy Linden did shoot Saul Rosenblatt, but it had nothing to do with JP Morgan's granddaughter.
Saul Rosenblatt had other clients.
He was involved in other ongoing litigation.
And there was one client he dropped as soon as he got out of the hospital after the shooting.
He withdrew as counsel of record in a paternity suit.
He'd been representing a nightclub singer named Virginia Summers in her lawsuit against a Boston lawyer named Joseph Sachs.
And at his trial, Frank Smith was asked about a recent flight he'd taken to London.
A month before the shooting, he flew to England.
But he insisted that this had to do with his boxing promotion and nothing to do with following Virginia Summers, who had also recently flown to London.
Now I can't find any source that concretely, openly, and plainly accuses Joseph Sachs of working for the mob.
But you can make up your own mind, what you think.
Sachs had previously represented Frank's co-defendant, Sammy Linden, in an armed robbery case that was definitely mob-related.
And Sachs would later represent Frank in a case involving a bombing that was definitely mob-related.
Joseph Sachs himself was later accused of some pretty serious mob-related crime.
He was, to be fair, acquitted at trial.
But in 1962, he was one of several men indicted on charges of trafficking thousands of pounds of heroin.
The bust was part of the investigation into the French Connection, a global network run by the Corsican Mafia that moved heroin through France and into the United States, where it was then distributed by organized crime outfits in major cities.
Sachs was arrested in connection with an operation that had been taking advantage of the diplomatic immunity afforded to ambassadors.
The Guatemalan ambassador to Belgium, a man named Mauricio Rosal, had been acting as their courier, bringing 50 kilos of heroin at a time into New York City in a suitcase.
In what I think is a pretty rare move, Mauricio Rosal was denied diplomatic immunity and he went to prison.
Thank you.
But like I said, Joseph Sachs was acquitted.
There's a lot of allegedly, a lot of maybe, a lot of fill in the blank with your own most reasonable assumptions.
questions.
The jury said Frank Smith didn't shoot Saul Rosenblatt.
A jury said Joseph Sachs wasn't involved in a decade-long scheme to move thousands of pounds of heroin between the Corsican Mafia and the Mafia in New York and Boston.
I mean, I guess, legally speaking, these are all just a series of unrelated facts about cases that never got solved.
And maybe Saul Rosenblatt dropped Virginia Summers' case because he wasn't feeling well after the gunshot wound.
Not because he thought Joseph Sachs had him shot.
As far as I can tell, the prosecutor didn't argue at trial that it was a paid hit.
But it is worth noting that at Frank's bail hearing, the prosecutor told the judge that Frank had been hired by people in Massachusetts to kill Rosenblatt.
He called him a plain and simple killer for hire.
When the jury returned a not guilty verdict for Frank in the Rosenblatt case, the judge was visibly angry.
Newspapers quote him scolding the jury, saying, It is my opinion that you have been fooled.
It is strange to me how grown men can be so naive.
Again, you never know why a jury makes the decisions they make, but I don't think they were fooled or naive.
I don't think they were tricked into thinking Frank was innocent.
I think they knew exactly what they were looking at, and they didn't want to be involved in mafia business.
The newspaper that quoted the judge's angry outburst doesn't say whether the judge looked amused when Frank Smith was arrested as he tried to leave the courtroom.
He'd been acquitted in New York, but he was wanted in New Jersey for robbing a bank in Newark with a machine gun.
So New York City held him in their jail for a few weeks, pending extradition, which is pretty normal.
And he fought the extradition, which is a little less normal.
I mean, you have a right to try, it's just not typical.
But it worked.
He's in this jail in New York City for a couple of weeks.
No news.
And then suddenly there's just a passing mention in the Newark Star Ledger two days before Christmas.
That the prosecutor changed his mind, the charges have been dropped, and there are no other suspects.
So to put all of this in order, on March 6th, 1952, someone who looked just like Frank Smith shot Saul Rosenblatt on Park Avenue.
Two days after that, someone, unknown, shot Arnold Schuster in the head outside of his apartment in New York City.
Two days after that, a couple of guys who might have been the Smith brothers robbed a bank in Medford, Massachusetts.
In April, someone who looked just like Frank Smith robbed a bank in Newark.
In May, Smith and a dozen associates of known bank robber Harvey Bastani were all arrested.
In January of 1953, Frank is charged for shooting Saul Rosenblatt.
In February, he's acquitted on that first bank robbery.
In November, he's acquitted on the shooting, but he's arrested for the New Jersey bank robbery.
And by December of 1953, he's free and clear.
He was accused of robbing banks in two different states and trying to murder a man in a third.
Crimes that all took place within mere weeks in the spring of 1952.
But he celebrated the new year as a free man in 1954.
I can't pick him back up again in the archives until May of 57, when he's arrested again.
But when he was arrested in 1957 for bombing a home in Wuburn, Massachusetts, police in three neighboring towns expressed their interest in questioning him about similar unsolved bombings over the last few years.
The End From the studio who brought you the Pikedon Massacre and Murder 101, this is Incels.
I am a loser.
If also, I mean I wouldn't pay me either.
From the dark corners of the web, an emerging mindset.
I can't have you, girls.
I will destroy you.
A kind of subculture, a hidden world of resentment, cynicism, anger against women.
A seat of loneliness explodes.
I just hate myself.
I don't know why you girls aren't attracted to me.
But I will punish you all for it.
At a deadly tipping point.
Incels will be added to the terrorism guide.
Police say a driver intentionally drove into a crowd, killing ten people.
Tomorrow is the day of retribution.
I will have my revenge.
This is Incels.
Listen to season one of Incels on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, it's Ed Helms and welcome back to SNAFU, my podcast about history's greatest screw-ups.
On our news season, we're bringing you a new SNAFU every single episode.
32 lost nuclear weapons.
Wait, stop?
What?
Ernie Shackleton sounds like a solid 70s basketball player.
Who still wore knee pads?
Yes.
It's gonna be a whole lot of history, a whole lot of funny, and a whole lot of guests.
The great Paul Scheer.
Made me feel good.
I'm like, oh wow.
Angela and Jenna, I am so psyched you're here.
What was that like for you to soft launch into the show?
Sorry, Jenna, I'll be asking the questions today.
Um I forgot whose podcasts we were doing.
Nick Kroll.
I hope this story is good enough to get you to toss that sandwich.
So let's let's let's see how it goes.
Listen to season four of Snap Foo with Ed Helms on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, it's Karen in Georgia, and we just celebrated our 500th episode of My Favorite Murder.
That's 500 podcasts filled with true crime, comedy, and some light girl math.
We're about to podcast for you.
Watch this.
We have to think of something to say after welcome every week.
And we're doing it.
Every week for 10 years.
Almost 10 years.
10 years.
10.
That's what 500 episodes sounds like.
New episodes every Thursday.
Listen to my favorite murder on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Goodbye.
All I know is what I've been told.
And that's a half-truth is a whole lie.
For almost a decade, the murder of an 18-year-old girl from a small town in Graves County, Kentucky, went unsolved.
Until a local homemaker, a journalist, and a handful of girls came forward with a story.
I'm telling you, we know Quincy killed it.
We know.
A story that law enforcement used to convict six people, and that got the Citizen Investigator on national TV.
Through sheer persistence and nerve, this Kentucky housewife helped give justice to Jessica Kerran.
My name is Maggie Freeling.
I'm a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, producer, and I wouldn't be here if the truth were that easy to find.
I did not know her and I did not kill her or rape or burn or any of that other stuff that y'all said.
They literally made me say that I took a match and struck and threw it on her.
They made me say that I poor guests on her.
From Lava for Good, this is Graves County, a show about just how far our legal system will go in order to find someone to blame.
America, y'all better work the hell up.
Bad things happens to good people and small towns.
Listen to Graves County in the Bone Valley feed on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
And to binge the entire season ad-free, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts.
Now, no one was ever convicted in the first three bombings police suspected Frank Smith was involved in.
In June of 1954, four bombs exploded inside the Chelsea, Massachusetts home of boxing promoter Sam Silverman.
If you know a lot about old school boxing promoters, you've heard of Sam Silverman.
And if you don't know anything about old school boxing promoters, you don't care who Sam Silverman is.
But he had recently cut ties with the International Boxing Club of New York.
That corporation whose monopoly on boxing was almost entirely under the control of former Murder Inc.
hitman Frankie Carbo.
A few months before the bombing, Ray Arcell, a promoter Silverman worked with to televise the fights he promoted, was beaten almost to death with a lead pipe.
Our cell survived and Silverman and his wife weren't home when those bombs went off.
But both men took these attacks as a clear message from the Mafia.
Stop promoting fights.
In May of 1955, Vincent DeNuno, a regional director of the Building and Common Laborers Union with the AFL, was finalizing a report on organized crime activity within his union, when suddenly his car exploded inside of his garage in East Boston.
Police believed it was the work of a professional killer trying to take out the labor leader, but it was his 24-year-old son-in-law who was gravely injured instead.
Then in June of 1956, John Sullivan, a booking agent in Medford, Massachusetts, narrowly escaped being blown to bits when he walked out his front door because he smelled smoke and he found a bomb on his front porch that hadn't gone off yet.
None of these bombings were ever solved, at least as far as I can tell.
But Frank Smith was a very strong suspect in all three after his arrest in May of 1957.
But this fourth bombing was pretty open and shut.
They thought maybe he did those other three, but they saw him do this one.
It was a little after midnight when two cops who were just sitting in their patrol car saw a man sprinting down the street in the dark.
At first, they assumed the man leaving Everett Bixby's yard was a burglar, and they were going to chase him.
But just as the man disappeared into a nearby wooded area, the bomb went off.
A description of the man they'd seen went out over the radio, and officers spotted him less than a mile away at a phone booth.
He was filthy and soaking wet, as if he'd perhaps run in the dark through the thick underbrush of the wooded area the bomber disappeared into.
He also had explosive residue embedded in burn marks on his shoes.
Police found him in a phone booth less than a mile away from the Bixby's house, and they found his car a mile in the other direction, parked outside of a friend's house.
That friend happened to be a man named Louis Venios, a mafia associate who was due in court the following morning to face a federal mail fraud charge.
Frank's story just kept changing.
And honestly, none of the stories were very good.
On the night of his arrest, he explained to the police that he's a prize fight trainer and he's just out doing some road work, which is apparently what boxers call running, at 3 a.m. in a town where he doesn't live.
And they found him at the phone booth because while he was out running, he had the sudden thought that he needed to make a phone call to a friend.
Again, at 3 a.m.
By the time he got to trial, he'd come up with what I guess he thought was a better story.
He said that he couldn't have bombed the Bixby's house at 1245 a.m. because he was at a bar with his friend Louis Venios from midnight and till around 1 a.m.
And then after the bar, they stopped back off at his apartment because he needed to wring out some wet laundry.
And that's why he was all wet.
And then after he got all wet at his apartment, he didn't change his clothes.
He got into his car and drove Louis Venios home to Wuburn, and then he left his car at Venios' house because he needed to borrow it.
And when police found him in the phone booth, he was just calling his wife to come pick him up.
Again, at 3 a.m.
I don't think you could make up a worse series of lies if you tried.
Right?
Because if he and Venios were at his apartment and Venios needed to both go home to Wuburn and borrow Frank's car, why wouldn't Venios just drive himself home in Frank's car and Frank would just stay at his apartment?
And if he had to be the one to drive, but his wife was able to come pick him up, why didn't she just follow him?
Why didn't he tell her before he left the apartment?
If he had to call his wife, why didn't he call from Venios' house?
Doesn't he have a phone?
Why would you walk a mile in the dark at 3 a.m. to call your wife from a payphone?
I just don't understand why he thought we would believe that he needed to walk a mile in the dark at 3 a.m. to call his wife to come pick him up from the fakest sounding errand anyone has ever made up.
And at trial, they didn't even put Louis Venios on the stand to corroborate the alibi.
I just can't get over.
Oh, I had to go home and wring out my wet laundry in between drinking at the bar and driving my friend home and then walking around in the dark.
And that's why my shoes are all wet.
I mean, God, at that point, just say you pissed on your own shoes.
At least people might believe it.
Reading between the lines in the appellate record in this case, it sounds like everyone in the courtroom knew that the Boston police officer the defense put on the stand was lying.
Joseph Sachs, remember, he's the lawyer who, according to the jury who acquitted him, was not at this time, seven years into a decade-long international heroin smuggling operation for the mafia.
Sachs put Boston patrolman John O'Neill on the stand to testify that he knew Frank Smith and Louis Venios, and he remembered seeing them at the bar at the time of the bombing.
The jury found Frank Smith guilty of the bombing, and he was given a sentence of 15 to 18 years in prison.
Based on the admittedly limited information that we have, it seems very possible that Everett Bixby wasn't the intended target of this bombing.
He was a funeral director with no known ties to organized crime.
He was the chairman of the Wuburn licensing board.
So I guess it's possible that there was a dispute over a liquor license, but in 1957, the city of Wuburn only issued liquor licenses to stores that sell liquor.
In Massachusetts, they call them package stores.
And a local newspaper that year said that the city of Woburn had plenty of package stores.
But they didn't actually have any bars.
And Bixby told the newspaper that no one had even applied for a liquor license lately.
There was nothing for there to be a dispute over.
It kind of looks like Frank got the wrong house.
I saw a few news stories that made vague mention of the fact that the Bixby's lived pretty close by to several known gangland figures.
That's all it ever really says, just several known figures in this world.
They're never named.
Look, is it possible to cross-reference 70-year-old property records with the names of known mafia associates in the Boston suburbs?
Look, I thought about it.
And I think I probably could do it if I had an extra day this week.
Did I?
No.
I had to file my taxes this week.
It's October, I know.
But I was getting married in the springs, I was like kind of busy, so I got an extension.
So they're like, actually due now.
So that's what I did this week instead of finding out which Patriarch of Crime Family Associates might have been ever at Bixby's neighbor in Wuburn, Massachusetts in 1957.
So I'm sorry.
But I think the fact that Frank Smith had parked his car at Louis Venios's house, and Venios was due in federal court the very next morning.
I think that does imply the possibility of a relationship between these things.
You know?
And finally, at the end of 1957, Frank Smith went to prison.
He'd done some time in jail after his prior arrests when he couldn't make bail.
But this was the real thing.
He's guilty of a felony now, and he's staring Down the barrel of 15 years.
He didn't end up serving his whole sentence.
He was released in November of 1964.
And while he was in prison, he got his hands on some interesting reading material.
Someone had been sending him copies of the Rockwell Report.
The first week in January of 1965.
I went to Warrington, Virginia to meet Commander Rockwell.
I'd heard about him, I'd read some of the things about him, and I'd read some of his uh his Rockwell reports.
And we were uh a kin in a thank you.
Just weeks after he got out of prison, Frank Smith drove from Massachusetts to Virginia to meet the man whose newsletter he'd been reading in prison.
He spent the 1950s robbing banks and bombing houses for the mob.
He must have spent those seven years behind bars planning his next big move.
Because he really didn't hesitate to start taking big swings when he got out.
Immediately upon his return from the Nazi Party headquarters, Frank Smith had a face-to-face meeting with Raymond Patriarca, the head of the New England Mafia.
Frank wanted to cut Patriarca in on a deal.
a mutually beneficial arrangement between the mafia and the Nazis.
You'll have to wait until next week to find out how Frank ended up full of bullet holes in the midst of a gang war, And why Frank's name is on the birth certificate for George Lincoln Rockwell's illegitimate daughter.
And maybe by next week, I'll have made some more progress.
Trying to sort out exactly what to make of the fact that a Nazi and his fake church show up in the financial records of a corrupt mayor went to prison for racketeering.
Weird Little Guys is a production of Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio.
It's researched, written, and recorded by me, Molly Conger.
Our executive producers are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans.
The show is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gagan.
The theme music was composed by Brad Dickert.
You can email me at Weird Little Guys Podcast at gmail.com.
I will definitely read it, but I probably won't answer it.
It's nothing personal.
You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other listeners on the Weird Little Guy subreddit.
Just don't post anything that's going to make you one of my weird little guys.
Hello, America's sweetheart, Johnny Knoxville here.
I want to tell you about my new true crime podcast, Crimeless Hillbilly Heist.
From smartless media, campside media, and big money players.
It's a wild tale about a gang of high-functioning nitwits who somehow pulled off America's third largest cash heist.
Kind of like Robin Hood, except for the part where he steals from the rich and gives to the poor.
I'm not that generous.
It's a damn near inspiring true story for anyone out there who's ever shot for the moon, then just totally muffed up the landing.
They stole 17 million dollars and had not bought a ticket to help him escape.
So we're sort of like, oh god, what do we do?
What do we do?
That was dumb.
People do not follow my example.
Listen to Crimelist, Hill Billy Heist on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
Hey, it's Ed Helms, host of SNAFU, my podcast about history's greatest screw-ups.
On our new season, we're bringing you a new SNAFU every single episode.
32 lost nuclear weapons.
You're like, wait, stop?
What?
It's gonna be a whole lot of history, a whole lot of funny, and a whole lot of fabulous guests.
Paul Scheer, Angela and Jenna, Nick Kroll.
Jordan Clepper.
Listen to season four of Snafu with Ed Helms on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, it's Karen and Georgia, and we just celebrated our 500th episode of My Favorite Murder.
That's 500 podcasts filled with true crime, comedy, and some light girl math.
We're about to podcast for you.
Watch this.
We have to think of something to say after welcome every week.
And we're doing it.
Every week for 10 years.
Almost 10 years.
10 years.
Ten.
That's what 500 episodes sounds like.
New episodes every Thursday.
Listen to my favorite murder on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Two rich young Americans move to the Costa Rican jungle to start over, but one of them will end up dead, and the other tried for murder three times.
It starts with a dream, a nature reserve, and a spectacular new home.
