When Frank Smith got out of prison in 1964, he went right back to working for the New England mafia. He also joined the American Nazi Party. And he had a dream that the two organizations could work together.Sources:https://newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/the-boston-irish-gang-wars-terrify-a-city/ https://www.nytimes.com/1965/11/04/archives/the-boston-gang-war-a-deadly-web-of-revenge.html https://mattofboston.com/boston-gang-wars-the-first-irish-gang-war-mclaughlin-v-mclean-introduction/ https://golocal24.com/golocal-launches-the-patriarca-papers-the-fbi-files-on-the-man-that-led-the-new-england-crime-family-for-nearly-50-years/ https://jimcrowmuseum.ferris.edu/pdfs-docs/origins/ms-littest55.pdf https://idahopotato.com/dr-potato/length-and-circumference-of-a-potato https://utia.tennessee.edu/cpa/wp-content/uploads/sites/106/2020/10/CPA-222.pdf Simonelli, Frederick J. (1999). American Fuehrer: George Lincoln Rockwell and the American Nazi Party. Urbana: University of Illinois PressSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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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.
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Call Zone Media Just after midnight on March 15th, 1965.
Frank Smith was dropping off his girlfriend after a night out in Boston.
The pair were sitting in his car outside of her apartment when two men emerged from the shadows.
They walked up to the driver's side window and without saying a word, fired eight times into the car.
Marilyn Marks was miraculously unhurt, and she ran for help.
Frank was not so lucky.
He'd been hit five times in the neck, chest, and shoulder.
His glasses were shattered in the attack, sending shards of glass into his one good eye.
When the Monday morning edition of the Boston Globe came off the presses a few hours later, it was reported that he'd been rushed into emergency surgery overnight to save his life.
And he was now headed back into the operating room where surgeons would attempt to save his eyesight.
When he woke up in the hospital that afternoon, the chief of the Somerville Police Department was waiting outside his room with a warrant for his arrest.
They'd found a loaded revolver with one bullet missing in the back seat of his car.
Something he wasn't supposed to have just five months after his release from prison for blowing up a man's house.
He told police he had no idea who would want to shoot him, saying only, I've been a good boy since I got out.
And then he hummed a tune as he ignored their follow-up questions.
His girlfriend, the same woman who'd provided his alibi on the night of that bombing in 1957, refused to even look at photos of possible suspects in this shooting, telling police she hadn't seen a thing.
The discovery of Nazi books and pamphlets in his car raised the possibility that the shooting had something to do with Frank's membership in the American Nazi Party.
And they even sent a detective down to Virginia to question George Lincoln Rockwell about their relationship.
The more likely explanation, though, was that the shooting had been part of the ongoing gang wars in Boston.
And one detective speculated to the press that perhaps it was retaliation from the intended target of Frank's bosched bombing in 1957.
The FBI doesn't seem to have volunteered that they already had a pretty good idea why Frank Smith got shot.
He just wasn't important enough to anyone for them to be willing to jeopardize their ongoing illegal wiretap on the head of the patriarch of crime family.
I'm Molly Conger and this is Weird Little Guys.
When we left off last week, Frank Smith was on his way to prison.
He was, by his own account, a boxing promoter.
That's what he always told the police when he was getting booked into some jail or another, anyway.
And he spent much of the 1950s doing just that.
He was arrested for bank robbery at least twice.
He was accused of murder for hire in the daylight shooting of an attorney in New York City.
And by the time he was convicted for bombing a home in the Boston suburbs in 1957, police strongly suspected that he'd been behind a string of similar bombings.
The common thread connecting all of the crimes Frank Smith was believed to have been involved in was organized crime.
He managed to wiggle his way out of a surprising number of criminal charges.
But at the end of 1957, he was sentenced to 15 years in prison.
And he'd served seven of those before he was paroled in November of 1964.
After his release, Frank went to live with his sister in Tewkesbury, Massachusetts.
He spent the holidays with family, but then it was time to get back to business.
He wanted to meet the man whose Nazi newsletters he'd been reading in prison.
In the first few days of the new year, 1965, he drove down to Arlington, Virginia to meet George Lincoln Rockwell.
He'd had a lot of time to think over the past couple of years, and he had a proposition for the commander of the American Nazi Party.
He arrived in Arlington on January 3rd, and he was invited to accompany Rockwell and his stormtroopers to Washington, D.C. the following morning, where he would witness one of Rockwell's more outrageous publicity stunts.
Most of the stormtroopers who usually hung around the Nazi Party barracks had gone home to see their families for the holidays.
So there wasn't much of an entourage for this trip.
It looks like it was just Rockwell, John Patler, Robert Lloyd, and Frank.
Rockwell was no stranger to pulling some ugly little stunt for attention.
He'd done it in Washington, D.C. so many times that most of the police officers at the Capitol knew him by sight, with or without a Nazi entourage.
But this one in January of 1965 is particularly egregious.
January 4th, 1965 was the first day of the congressional session, the day new members of Congress are sworn in.
The Mississippi Democratic Freedom Party had announced ahead of time that they intended to challenge the seating of the all-white delegation from Mississippi because the state had unconstitutionally disenfranchised black voters.
Just to sort of position us in history here, the Voting Rights Act wasn't signed until later in 1965.
So in 1964, the year these white congressmen were elected in Mississippi, the state still levied a poll tax and used literacy tests to selectively deny people the right to vote.
As I was writing this, I thought to actually try to find a copy of a literacy test, one that was actually in use in Mississippi in the 1960s.
I mean, I understand the concept.
I learned about it in school.
And it doesn't really matter, in the end, what the questions were because it's unfair and unconstitutional for it to exist at all.
And even if you got all the questions right, the Klansmen at the registrar's office could just say you didn't.
But I found one.
And honestly, I was kind of surprised.
I think most people would struggle with this.
The test I found required the voter to copy down a section of the state constitution, followed by the instruction to quote, write in the space below a reasonable interpretation of the section of the Mississippi State Constitution which you have just copied.
The next question asks the voter to write in the space below a statement setting forth your understanding of the duties and obligations of citizenship under a constitutional form of government.
And there's not really very much room to write anything at all.
And then, of course, to even get to the polls on election day, to then be subjected to an illegal tax and an unconstitutional written exam, you had to register to vote.
In the summer of 1964, in the lead up to this contested election, James Cheney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were brutally murdered by a gang of Klansmen that included the local sheriff and his deputies.
The cops and the Klan beat, shot, and mutilated those men to stop them from registering black voters in Mississippi.
So the surface-level narrative of what happened on January 4th, 1965, is a group of black women showed up at the Capitol to say that these white men weren't elected legitimately.
And I don't think that does it justice.
There was no free and fair election in Mississippi in 1964.
In August of 1964, not two months after those murders, members of the Mississippi Democratic Freedom Party held their own state convention to elect delegates to send to the Democratic National Convention.
And when they got to the DNC, the Democratic Party challenged their credentials.
They didn't refuse outright to seat the delegation, but a hearing was held before the Credentials Committee.
And at this televised hearing, Fannie Lou Hamer testified about her own struggle to register to vote in Mississippi and the violence she'd faced trying to register other black voters.
She'd been forced to take literacy tests.
She was retaliated against by the plantation owner whose land she worked as a sharecropper.
She was threatened, harassed, and shot at.
And during this hearing, her voice is strong and clear as she testified about the four days she spent in a Mississippi jail, where she was beaten almost to death.
She did not falter as she described listening helplessly to the screams of a 15-year-old girl who'd been stripped naked and was being beaten in an adjacent cell.
She sat in front of that committee, in front of this nation, and described the way those white police officers had groped her during those beatings.
And her voice was still strong, even as the tears ran down her face when she concluded her remarks with this question.
I question America.
Is this America the land of the free and the home of the brave?
Where we have to sleep with our telephones off of the hook because our lives be threatened daily because we want to live a decent human being in America.
Thank you.
President Johnson called an emergency press conference while she was speaking.
Music Not to announce that he was doing something about this absolute outrage in Mississippi, but because he feared the impact her words would have on the nation.
And a presidential press conference would preempt anything else that was on TV.
Most accounts of President Johnson's thought process here is that he was between a rock and a hard place.
He had only just signed the Civil Rights Act.
He knew damn well that Mississippi was flouting that law.
But he couldn't afford to risk southern states walking out of the convention and losing Southern support in the upcoming presidential election.
So he proposed an ugly, half-assed, insulting compromise.
Two of the group's 64 delegates could be seated.
They responded by saying all 64 of them spent way too long on that bus from Mississippi for only two of them to get seats.
If they couldn't run as Democrats in Mississippi, they would run as independents.
But Mississippi Democratic Freedom Party candidates Fannie Lou Hamer, Victoria Gray, and Annie Devine were all denied ballot access in the 1964 election.
So when Congress convened in January of 1965, they planned to be present in person to make their case to Congress that they were the rightful representatives of the people of Mississippi.
And George Lincoln Rockwell planned to be there too.
Those three black women from Mississippi were not even allowed to enter the Capitol building, let alone the House chambers.
They were stopped at the door by the chief of the Capitol Police.
They left quietly and stood outside with their hundreds of supporters who were lining the sidewalks.
But for some reason, this crack security team at the Capitol building couldn't explain how somebody else did manage to get inside.
During the roll call vote for the election of the Speaker of the House, a man in blackface, a rumpled top hat, a furry loincloth, and no pants came crashing onto the House floor, pushing Congressman out of his way as he sprinted to the center of the room.
And he was shouting something that I don't care to repeat in the way that he said it.
What he was saying was, I'm the Mississippi delegation and I want to be seated, but he was using an extremely exaggerated affect that was meant to mock black southern vernacular.
As the police dragged him from the congressional chambers, he yelled, long live Rockwell.
It should have been impossible for Robert Lloyd to gain entry into the Capitol building on January 4th, 1965.
The president was about to arrive to address Congress.
Security at that building was as tight as the United States government can get it.
But somehow, a Nazi in blackface with no pants on managed to make it past multiple locked doors and entrances guarded by police officers.
He was charged only with disorderly conduct, and he was released that same day on a $20 bond.
This was Frank Smith's introduction to the American Nazi Party.
And he loved it.
I got a kick out of this now.
This is becoming very interesting.
This first meeting with the commander, I had met him the night before and talked briefly with him, but now this little escapade became very interesting.
And I had to check away.
The stunt had been fun and exciting.
And Rockwell's cool demeanor throughout had really impressed him.
But this wasn't why he drove all the way down to Virginia from Massachusetts.
He was really only on this racist field trip to the Capitol by coincidence.
He'd come down to Virginia to talk business.
Well, we did have the night before this demonstration, we had a lengthy discussion.
We talked of various topics.
One of them was the need for a church.
The Muslims were creating a successful movement on the black, the strictly the black separate from the white.
And they had their church.
And there was a need because of the integration of schools and stuff.
There seemed to be a need for the whites for a church that could be formed where the whites could because of religious conviction.
Back in the 1950s, around the time he managed to escape conviction for those two separate bank robberies, Frank Smith bought some land.
He bought a lot of land, actually.
He bought close to 600 acres of mostly undeveloped land in a small town in coastal Maine.
Now 600 acres sounds big and it is, but I don't actually know how big because I don't totally know what an acre is.
So if you're in the same boat, you're not alone.
A football field minus the end zones is just a little bit more than one acre.
And one square mile is 640 acres.
So he's got 550 football fields or about 94% of a square mile, if that helps.
I tried to find some examples that would be easier for me to visualize, but one of the top Google results for this is an article that had to have been written by AI.
It helpfully offers examples like, 10 acres is 15,840 potatoes.
Potatoes in what direction?
I think this is a garbled regurgitation of an old meme claiming that 1,584 potatoes lined up end to end would span the width of one acre.
But this claim requires you to believe that the average potato is five inches long.
And according to Dr. Potato, the cartoon scientist mascot on the Q ⁇ A section of the Idaho Potato Commission's website, there is no standard measurement for any potato.
Anyway, if you're an American trying to imagine what 600 acres looks like, just visualize a parking lot with room for 90,000 cars.
This one's not actually AI.
I found a paper written by the director of the Center for Profitable Agriculture at the University of Tennessee's Institute of Agriculture.
So this one's real.
There's math.
Either way, that's a lot of land for a guy who's never had a legitimate form of income.
I guess robbing banks leaves you with a lot of cash and you have to offload it somewhere and buying land isn't the worst idea.
So he's been sitting on 600 acres of undeveloped land up in Maine for a decade already.
And in January of 1965, Frank Smith proposed to George Lincoln Rockwell that they could use this property that he had up in Maine as the home base for a church.
A new religion that he envisioned as a sort of whites-only Nazi version, I guess, of the nation of Islam, I think that's what he's describing.
It would provide them with some kind of institutional legitimacy to do things like fight school integration.
And it's easy to imagine that this is probably very cynical.
But I'm always saying, you can't know what's in a man's heart.
Maybe he does have some kind of hideous, warped religious conviction.
He doesn't.
He helpfully explained the whole idea in an interview he did with a reporter in 1968.
He wasn't bothering with any kind of complicated, reverse-engineered religious justification for racism.
He just wanted to take advantage of the legal and social benefits of being a church by making racism itself his religion.
Now, when you say religion, we're not talking about dogma or any particular creed, but it depends on your interpretation of the word religion.
But one of the beliefs of the church would be that you would have to be of the right race.
And then other than that, we were keeping it open.
I couldn't find any primary source documentation that sheds light on how Rockwell responded to Frank's proposal specifically.
But there is a lot of evidence that this is something Rockwell had been thinking about for years.
Rockwell was not religious at all, but he'd been toying with the idea of using Christianity as a sort of front for the movement since the late 50s.
In the early 60s, he met Richard Butler, the man whose passion for this warped Nazi religion of Christian identity led him to found the Aryan Nations, although that came later.
And around that same time, in the early 1960s, Rockwell was corresponding with a friend of his, a German Nazi named Bruno Lutke.
Lutke had recently translated Rockwell's memoir into German, and he suggested that Rockwell should rewrite some of the passages to tone down the anti-Christian rhetoric a little bit.
Not because he was offended by that, absolutely not.
Both men shared the belief that Christianity was Jewish and communist.
Jesus was, after all, a Jewish man.
And if your worldview centers around destroying your enemies and exterminating the weak, it's hard to get much out of the Gospels.
In their private correspondence, they agreed that Christianity was merely a useful rapper.
There would be no Christ in this Christian church.
Just a man trying to, as Lutke put it, speak with the political authority of the Führer and the moral authority of the Pope.
In their letters, Rockwell was very open about his intentions.
His commitment to Hitler was his only religion.
But Americans, with their, quote, peanut brains, would be lured in by this set dressing of Christianity.
In correspondence with British Nazi Colin Jordan, he argued that there is a clear tactical advantage to siding with Christians on political matters like prayer and school.
You don't have to mean it for it to be an effective recruitment and propaganda tool.
By 1964, Rockwell had a close working relationship with Wesley Swift, the father of the Christian identity movement.
He wouldn't live to see it come to fruition, but the groundwork he laid in the years before his death paved the way for this complete fusion of Christian identity theology and militant neo-Nazi activism.
www.helenheaven.com But one will end up dead, the other tried for murder.
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John and Anne Bender are rich and attractive, and they're devoted to each other.
They create a nature reserve and build a spectacular circular home high on the top of a hill.
But little by little, their dream starts to crumble, and our couple retreat from reality.
They lose it.
They actually lose it.
They sort of went nuts.
Until one night, everything spins out of control.
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The Crying Wolf podcast is the story of two men bound by injustice, of a city haunted by its secrets, and the quest for redemption, no matter the price.
White victim, female, pretty, wealthy, black defendant.
Chicago, a white woman's murder, a black man behind bars for a crime he didn't commit.
I got 90 years for killing somebody I have never seen.
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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.
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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.
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They made me say that I poured gas on her.
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America, y'all better work the hell up.
Bad things happen to good people in small towns.
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So forming a Nazi church is something he'd already been thinking about for a decade when Frank Smith approached him in 1965.
And I have to believe Frank knew that.
Right?
I don't know how he would have known it, but it's a strange thing to say to someone if you didn't know they were already considering it.
I couldn't track down anything concrete that would point to who would have made that introduction, though.
After his meeting with Rockwell, Frank drove back to New England.
News of his trip to Virginia got home before he did.
On January 4th, the day after Frank arrived at the American Nazi Party barracks in Virginia, the head of the New England mafia already knew about it.
And so did J. Edgar Hoover.
The illegal recording device the FBI had installed in Raymond Patriarcha's office in 1962 recorded several conversations that day.
There was some idle chat about some recent hits, some vague talk about a stolen diamond.
And on the topic of Frank Smith, Patriarcha was told that Frank had gone down to Virginia to visit George Lincoln Rockwell, having become an avowed follower while he was in prison.
A few days later, on January 7th, Frank Smith arrived in Providence, Rhode Island for a face-to-face meeting with Raymond Patriarcha.
Later that evening, a memo was sent directly to J. Edgar Hoover, summarizing the recordings of the conversation in Patriarcha's office that day.
And it says that Frank's primary reason for making contact with Patriarcha that day was to get his blessing to do a little loan sharking.
He's fresh out of prison and trying to get back to work.
Patriarcha gave him permission to put a few thousand dollars out on the street in Boston as long as it didn't interfere with any existing business.
But with that out of the way, Frank kept talking.
He's the one who brought up George Lincoln Rockwell, telling the mob boss that they were close associates.
And that does end up being true in the future.
But when he's saying this on a Thursday, he just met Rockwell for the first time on Sunday.
And then he rambles for a little bit about how the army has too many black people in it.
And if black people outnumber white people in the army, they'll take over the country.
He doesn't say black people.
He uses different words.
And he told Patriarch that he just returned from a visit to the Nazi Party headquarters.
And the memo is just a narrative.
It's not actually a transcription of the recording.
But it says he described the physical layout of the property, including how many stormtroopers were there and how they were dressed.
He shares his upcoming travel plans, which includes trips to Dallas and Los Angeles to meet with more members of the American Nazi Party.
And then he let Patriarcha in on his big plan.
He wanted to pour a bunch of money into Rockwell's operation.
And the best way to do that without causing any legal or tax issues for anyone involved would be to make a Nazi church on that land he has up in Maine.
At some point during the meeting, he shows off his machine gun to one of the underbosses who's also there, and he says the church would be called the White Church of America of Maine.
He also told Patriarcha that Rockwell was planning to run for governor of Virginia in the election later that year.
Later in this same memo, there's a brief mention that Frank told Patriarcha that once the Nazis are established in New England, presumably at this Nazi church in Maine, they'll be in a good position to infiltrate Massachusetts when Ed Brooke runs for governor.
Ed Brooke never ran for governor of Massachusetts, but he did become the first black senator since Reconstruction when he was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1966.
In 1965, though, he was the Massachusetts State Attorney General.
And as Attorney General, he had opened an investigation into the Massachusetts State Racing Commission.
The Racing Commission allocates what are called racing days.
There's only a certain number of days per year where horse racing can occur and bets can be placed.
So the Racing Commission decides which tracks have horse races on which days.
Shortly after he took office in 1963, Brooke opened an investigation into this allocation process.
The process generally, but specifically at this significant number of extra days that had been allocated to the Hancock Raceway.
And this happened to be a racetrack that Raymond Patriarcha had a significant financial interest in.
George Lincoln Rockwell had a special hatred for Ed Brooke, too.
His name actually comes up more than a few times in issues of the Rockwell Report, and it's always very nasty.
Not because Rockwell also had a financial interest in horse racing in Massachusetts, not as far as I know.
He just hated black people.
So Frank's mention of Brooke in this memo is very brief, and it kind of feels out of place in the conversation.
There's no explanation provided in the memo.
You're just supposed to know what that means.
But I think in this broader context, it feels like a heavy implication, right?
If we do business with the Nazis, we all win.
If we invest in bringing Nazis to New England, if we pay to put them up in Maine, they'll be around.
It'll be available to do something about the possibility of a black governor.
The memo doesn't include any mention of Patriarcha's response to any of this, if he had one.
But Frank had his permission to get back to loan sharking, so he went back home to Boston happy in January of 1965.
A lot had changed while Frank was away.
The world moved on without him while he was sitting in prison in Walpole, Massachusetts from 1957 until the end of 1964.
The Soviets launched a dog into outer space.
Catholics got a new pope.
Alaska and Hawaii became states.
John F. Kennedy was elected president.
There was another new pope.
JFK was assassinated.
The Beatles put out their first record.
The Berlin Wall went up.
The Civil Rights Act was signed, the war in Vietnam was really heating up.
I mean, it was a busy couple of years for the world.
And I don't know how much Frank cared about any of that.
But when he got home to Boston in November of 1964, he found himself in the middle of a different kind of war.
He was released from prison during the bloodiest year of the first Boston gang war.
I don't know a lot about the mafia.
Like I said last week, that's a totally different kind of horrible guy than the ones I'm usually looking at.
But now that I've spent the better part of a week squinting at grainy photocopies of Raymond Patriarcha's 8,000-page FBI file, I guess there are certain similarities between the mafia and a Nazi group.
You know, it's a group of violent men who only barely get along in pursuit of their shared goals.
There's constant splintering and infighting and jockeying for power and shifting alliances.
There's heavy infiltration by the FBI.
Half the gang is snitching, whether for fun or for profit.
I can see how a man who has long been at home in one of those worlds wouldn't have much trouble stepping into the other.
The details of the stories are obviously quite different.
When I'm reading old FBI memos about a guy whose life story I know half by heart, I can fill in a lot of the blanks based on context when every other line is half redacted.
That doesn't work as well when I'm wading into new territory.
I don't know what's behind those redactions.
So I'm working with more blanks than usual.
So for this part of the story, I relied much more heavily than I normally would on secondary sources.
Rather than trying to become enough of an expert on something outside my wheelhouse that I can analyze and decipher these primary sources in the way that I'm comfortable with.
To get my bearings on the gang war, I read a summary written by the New England Historical Society and some more detailed write-ups on a blog written by Matthew Connolly, a retired attorney in Massachusetts who's been writing about the history of Boston organized crime for more than a decade.
I also read some interesting congressional testimony about the FBI's role in all of this and part of a hitman's memoir, but it wasn't very good.
I did read as much as I physically could of that 8,000-page FBI file on New England mob boss Raymond Patriarcha.
But I just want to say how grateful I am to an outlet called Go Local in Providence, Rhode Island.
They not only successfully secured the release of that file from the FBI, but they digitized the entire thing and then spent more than a year writing about it.
So many outlets hoard their primary source documents and force you to rely on their analysis without letting you look at them.
So I just love to see a reporter making their documents available to the public.
So with that out of the way, the gang war.
In the new podcast, Hell in Heaven, two young Americans moved to the Costa Rican jungle to start over.
But one will end up dead, the other tried for murder.
Not once, people went wild.
Not twice, stunned, but three times.
John and Anne Bender are rich and attractive, and they're devoted to each other.
They create a nature reserve and build a spectacular circular home high on the top of a hill.
But little by little, their dream starts to crumble, and our couple retreat from reality.
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.
The Big Take podcast from Bloomberg News dives deep into one big global business story every weekday.
A shutdown means that we don't get the data, but it also means for President Trump that there's no chance of bad news on the labor market.
What does a bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich reveal about the economy?
Our breakfast foods are consistent consumer staples, and so they sort of become outsize indicators of inflation.
What's behind Elon Musk's trillion-dollar payout?
There's a sort of concerted effort to message that Musk is coming back.
He's putting politics aside.
He's left the White House.
And what can the PCE tell you that the CPI can't?
CPI tries to measure out-of-pocket costs that consumers are paying for things, whereas the PCE index that the Fed targets is a little bit broader of a measure.
Listen to the big take from Bloomberg News every weekday afternoon on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
The Crying Wolf Podcast is the story of two men bound by injustice of a city haunted by its secrets and the quest for redemption, no matter the price.
White victim, female, pretty, wealthy, black defendant.
Chicago, a white woman's murder, a black man behind bars for a crime he didn't commit.
I had 90 years for killing somebody I have never seen.
He says the police are his friends, and then that's it.
They turn on him.
A corrupt detective.
How he was interrogated the techniques.
That's crazy.
A snitch and a life stolen.
They got the wrong guy.
But on the inside, Lee Harris finds an ally in his selly, Robert, who swears to tell the truth about what happened to Lee and free his friend.
And if you're with me, your goal is to take care of you.
I'm going to be with you.
You stuck with me for life.
Listen to the Crying Wolf podcast starting on October 22nd on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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 Hilda.
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 Curran.
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 gas 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 wake the hell up.
Bad things happen to good people in 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.
In 1960, the Irish gangs in the Boston area more or less coexisted pretty amicably.
family.
There was the Winter Hill gang in Somerville, led by Buddy McLean, and the McLaughlin gang in the Charlestown neighborhood of Boston, led by brothers Bernie, Georgie, and Punchy McLaughlin.
They both had their own territories and their own operations.
They did a little loan sharking, a little bookmaking, the occasional truck hijacking, the usual.
And both of these Irish gangs paid tribute to the same Italian mafia family.
Raymond Patriarcha, head of the patriarchal crime family out of Rhode Island, had agreements with the New York families that everything east of the Connecticut River was patriarcha territory.
The Genovese could keep Hartford, Connecticut, and Springfield, Massachusetts, but he controlled Rhode Island, Maine, and most of Massachusetts and Connecticut.
In Boston, these Irish gangs did a lot of the street-level work.
They stayed out of each other's way, and they paid the patriarchas for the privilege of doing crime in Boston until Labor Day of 1961.
There are a lot of variations of what happened here, exactly.
But they all boil down to the same basic idea.
Georgie McLaughlin, a member of the McLaughlin gang from Charlestown, disrespected somebody's girl.
Whose girl exactly varies in the retellings, but it's always the girlfriend of a member of the Winter Hill gang from Somerville.
The nature of the offense is different depending on who you ask.
Some versions just say he hit on her and this led to an argument between the men.
A more elaborate version of the tale says Georgie McLaughlin slapped this woman across the face after she refused his advances.
In one very weird version of this story, he bit the woman.
But I can't find any information that makes that make any more sense.
But in every version of the story, Georgie McLaughlin got the shit kicked out of him for making a pass at a woman who was spoken for by a member of the other gang.
While Georgie was recovering in the hospital, his two brothers went to Buddy McClain, head of the Winter Hill gang, and they asked him to turn over the names of the men who'd put Georgie in the hospital.
But he refused.
So they wired dynamite to the ignition switch on his wife's car.
The bomb was faulty and no one got hurt.
But now everybody's pretty upset.
So Buddy McClain responded to this attempted assassination by murdering Bernie McLaughlin, Georgie's older brother.
And just as a strange little side note here, when Buddy McClain shot Bernie McLaughlin, he had a getaway driver, a man named Alexander Petricone.
Both men were arrested for this murder.
I mean, it happened in broad daylight in front of a ton of witnesses.
But when they got the case in front of a grand jury, they couldn't get an indictment.
Nobody wants to testify in the middle of a gang war.
Once he was out, Petricone saw the writing on the wall, things are getting too hot here, and the smart move is to get out of town for good.
So he did.
He moved to California, changed his name to Alex Rocco.
He signed up for acting lessons with Leonard Nimoy.
And in 1972, he was cast in the Godfather for the role of Mo Green, the Las Vegas casino owner.
After the Winter Hill boys murdered one of the McLaughlin brothers in the fall of 1961, things spiraled out of control.
What started out as a moment of drunken rudeness at a Labor Day beach party had escalated into a full-blown war that lasted years and killed dozens of people, some of them in horrific ways.
I don't think Raymond Patriarcha particularly cared if a bunch of Irishmen in Boston killed each other, but it was bad for business.
Both of these gangs had been working for and paying him, but now they're too busy fighting each other to do either of those things.
It was hurting revenue, and it was attracting a lot of unwanted attention from law enforcement.
The killing started in the fall of 1961, and between March of 64 and January of 65 alone in that nine-month period, there were at least 18 successful hits in Boston.
An FBI memo dated January 26, 1965, describes a conversation that took place in Patriarch's office about the escalation of violence in recent months.
People were scared.
They were staying off the streets.
And guys who aren't out on the streets aren't collecting payments.
This conversation was recorded just a day after someone shot Joe Francione in the head inside of his own apartment.
Patriarcha said, if the killings don't stop, I'll declare martial law.
Six weeks later, on March 10th, 1965, Frank Smith was back in Providence to meet with Patriarcha again.
This time he was looking for permission to run a gambling operation out of the back of a restaurant in East Boston.
Patriarcha didn't give him a final answer on the matter, but he said he'd make a decision after he'd talked to one of his guys in Boston.
But again, you know, while he's here, while he's got the boss's ear, Frank starts talking.
And he's going on about Rockwell again.
He's ranting about the Jews and about black people.
And he says that this plan to open a Nazi church in Maine is starting to move forward.
And it'll be a good, clean way to fund the American Nazi Party.
He's optimistic about Rockwell's chances of winning the upcoming election for governor in Virginia.
And he tells Patriarcha that if Rockwell does win, he's already promised Frank that he can run all the illegal activity down in the Norfolk, Virginia area.
And of course, Frank's willing to cut Patriarcha in on that in exchange for a little assistance.
Maybe Raymond Patriarcha really did intend to talk to the guy who ran the gambling in East Boston before he gave Frank a yes or no answer.
Or maybe he didn't think Frank's crap scams in the back of a restaurant was going to be anybody's problem anymore.
In memos dated just days before Frank shows up in Providence in March, Patriarcha tells close associates that he's frustrated with Frank.
Frank talks too much.
Frank moves too fast and he's out of line.
The week before Frank Smith got shot, an FBI memo describes Raymond Patriarcha as enraged when he found out that hit in January had been done on Frank's orders.
The wiretap then recorded him making arrangements to meet with Jimmy Fleming and Joe Barboza later in the garage.
Whatever it was that he had to say to two of the most prolific murderers on his payroll, he didn't say it near that FBI microphone.
Next week, we'll talk about the two years Frank Smith spent as George Lincoln Rockwell's best friend.
The woman half his age he married after meeting her at a Nazi campaign office.
The brief, tragic life of Rockwell's secret baby.
And more than a decade after Rockwell's death, Frank finally gets around to starting that fake church.
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 Dickard.
You can email me at ReadLittleGuysPodcast 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 you wouldn't say into the FBI wiretap.
Johnny Knoxville here.
Check out Crimeless, Hillbilly Heist, my new true crime podcast from Smartless Media, Campside Media, and Big Money Players.
It's the true story of the almost perfect crime and the Nimrods who almost pulled it off.
It was kind of like the perfect storm in a sewer.
That was dumb.
Do not follow my example.
Listen to Crimeless, Hillbilly Heist 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.
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.
The Big Take podcast from Bloomberg News keeps you on top of the biggest stories of the day.
My fellow Americans, this is Liberation Day.
Stories that move markets.
Chair Powell opened the door to this first interest rate cut.
Impact politics, change businesses.
This is a really stunning development for the AI world and how you think about your bottom line.
Listen to the big take from Bloomberg News every weekday afternoon on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Chicago.
A white woman's murder, a black man behind bars for a crime he didn't commit.
90 years for killing somebody I have never seen.
The Crying Wolf Podcast is the story of a corrupt detective, two men bound by injustice, and the quest for redemption, no matter the price.
