In the final chapter of his life, Frank Smith really did start the whites only church he first proposed to George Lincoln Rockwell. Sources: https://www.middlebury.edu/institute/academics/centers-initiatives/ctec/ctec-publications/christian-identitys-new-role-extreme-right https://gnet-research.org/2023/05/10/the-revitalisation-of-christian-identity-content-on-youtube-twitter-and-tiktok/ https://www.upi.com/Archives/1992/01/31/Ex-Rhode-Island-mayor-sentenced-for-racketeering/5824696834000/ https://law.resource.org/pub/us/case/reporter/F2/975/975.F2d.17.92-1180.html https://law.justia.com/cases/nebraska/supreme-court/1989/946-0.html https://www.ellsworthamerican.com/news/legacy-of-the-commander/article_c5ebf480-2fef-536c-aee8-11a2925441a0.html https://www.providencejournal.com/story/news/2016/08/12/from-malinowski-archives-sarault-linked-financially-to-pair-with-mob-nazi-ties/26059574007/ Sunshine, Spencer. (2024). Neo-Nazi terrorism and countercultural fascism: The Origins and Afterlife of James Mason’s Siege. Taylor & Francis.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
The murder of an 18-year-old girl in Graves County, Kentucky, went unsolved for years.
Until a local housewife, a journalist, and a handful of girls came forward with a story.
America, y'all better wake the hell up.
Bad things happens to good people in small towns.
Listen to Graves County 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.
A new true crime podcast from Tenderfoot TV in the city of Mons in Belgium.
Women began to go missing.
It was only after their dismembered remains began turning up in various places that residents realized a sadistic serial killer was lurking among them.
The murders have never been solved.
Three decades later, we've unearthed new evidence.
Le Monstre, Season 2, is available now.
Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I knew I wanted to obey and submit, but I didn't fully grasp for the rest of my life what that meant.
For my heart podcasts and Rococo Punch, this is the Turning River Road.
In the woods of Minnesota, a cult leader married himself to 10 girls and forced them into a secret life of abuse.
But in 2014, the youngest escaped.
Listen to the Turning River Road on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
On a cold January day in 1995, 18-year-old Krista Pike killed 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer in the woods of Knoxville, Tennessee.
Since her conviction, Krista has been sitting on death row.
How does someone prove that they deserve to live?
We are starting the recording now.
Please state your first and last name.
Krista Pike.
Listen to Unrestorable Season 2, Proof of Life, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Cool Zone Media.
On December 8th, 2000, a bishop ordained a new minister in his church.
The procedure for this sort of thing varies depending on the denomination.
But in this case, the ceremony didn't take place in a church.
There was no ceremony, and there wasn't really much of a church to speak of.
There's not even any evidence that these two men ever met face to face.
The ordination took place through the mail.
And by the time William Fink was holding the envelope containing his certificate of ordination, it had already been opened.
Federal prisons open most of the mail sent to the people they house.
A few years into his 14-year sentence for beating a man to death while working as a corrections officer in New Jersey, Fink felt divinely called to reinterpret the Bible.
He even learned ancient Greek to create his own translations of biblical texts, all in service of proving that Jewish people were the descendants of Satan.
And this certificate made it official.
He was a Christian identity minister.
Today, William Fink is one of the leading purveyors of Christian identity propaganda.
The man who ordained him, Frank Smith, is dead.
I'm Mollie Conger, and this is Weird Little Guys.
This is the story of Frank Smith's final evolution.
He was a bank robber, a bomber, a hitman, a loan shark, a Nazi, and for the latter half of his life, a minister.
As a young man in the early 1950s, he worked as a boxing promoter, but he kept getting arrested for bank robbery.
If you believe a prosecutor in New York, he was also available as a murderer for hire.
He had a reputation for being the guy to call when members of New England organized crime needed something bombed.
While he was in prison for blowing up a man's house, he read a few issues of the Rockwell Report, a newsletter written by American Nazi Party leader George Lincoln Rockwell.
He was so intrigued by Rockwell's message that he drove down to Virginia to meet the man, just weeks after being released from prison.
In 1965, Frank Smith had a proposition for the Nazi Party.
He owned 600 acres of land up in Maine that the Nazis could use to start a fake church.
It would provide the party with some institutional legitimacy, and it would make it easier for the group to accept donations.
After meeting with Rockwell, Frank reported back to a man in charge of a different organization, Raymond Patriarcha, head of the New England Mafia.
He hoped that the two groups could have a mutually beneficial relationship.
But it wasn't meant to be.
Frank ran afoul of the mafia by ordering hits without permission from the boss, and he found himself on the wrong end of a gun one night in March of 1965.
After barely surviving the attempted hit, Frank went back down to Virginia to help out with Rockwell's campaign for governor.
It was there that he met his wife Claudia, one of the Nazi Party secretaries.
For two years, Frank was an active member of the American Nazi Party, and apparently a close friend of both George Lincoln Rockwell and Rockwell's mistress, Barbara von Goetz.
Rockwell even gave Frank a fun nickname, the Holy Father.
He had, after all, approached Rockwell with the great idea of forming a whites-only church.
But Frank wasn't actually all that religious.
He was, however, full of bullet holes from that botched mob hit.
When they first met in early 1965, the timing seemed perfect.
Rockwell had been considering the possibility of hiding his Nazi rhetoric behind some kind of faux Christian front for years.
And now here's Frank offering him the resources to bring that idea to life.
Rockwell himself had no attachment to Christianity or religion of any kind, but he saw the political value in pretending his message was a Christian one, and he was in close contact with the burgeoning Christian identity movement.
I think it bears repeating every time this comes up, which is not infrequently.
But Christian identity means something specific, and it isn't Christianity.
To say someone is an adherent of Christian identity isn't just another way of saying they are someone who identifies as a Christian.
This isn't someone who is Methodist or Presbyterian or Catholic or anything like that.
It isn't a Christian denomination, and there's no real doctrinal unity among its adherents.
At its core, though, the one thing all Christian identity adherents share is a commitment to a deeply racist, anti-Semitic belief system centered around the idea that white Europeans are God's true chosen people.
Rockwell knew that.
In the 1960s, he was in contact with men like Wesley Swift, the father of the Christian identity movement, and Richard Butler, the man who would later turn Swift's church into the Aryan nations.
But Frank didn't.
Frank was just a career criminal, an opportunist looking for a new way to get ahead in organized crime.
He didn't know a damn thing about anything besides collecting payments from guys who made bad bets on boxing matches.
I'm downstairs with a bunch of kids from the coast and they're telling me I'm of Israel.
So I want the commanders of what is this?
Ah, listen.
Yes.
I know all about the Jews and the history, right?
Yeah. I'm down there.
I says, and they're telling me I'm a Jew.
They're telling me I'm Israel.
Yeah.
I didn't know anything about the ten tribes and all that and all that stuff.
When members of the American Nazi Party first explained Christian identity to Frank on his first visit down to the barracks in 1965, he was offended.
They said he was a descendant of the true Israelites, and he didn't know what that meant.
So he thought they were accusing him of being Jewish.
And we never discussed that either.
I never knew of any particular faith he had, never asked him.
And we just stayed away from it.
It was political and we took it that way.
So it was political and racial.
Absolutely racial.
That's Frank describing the original plan he and Rockwell had for their partnership.
He's remarkably candid in this interview.
He has no problem admitting what was on his mind when he started down the path of forming his church.
He's talking about 1965, but that interview was recorded in 2016.
You can probably tell, even just from the handful of clips I've used throughout this series, he's rambling.
He sort of fades in and out and he mumbles and he doesn't finish all of his thoughts and some of his thoughts seem to start in the middle or he's reminiscing about things that don't quite make sense.
He was 95 years old in 2016.
So even though I listened to the entire interview a few times, there's a lot missing there.
So he's speaking very openly about how he knew this church idea was a scam when he first thought of it in 1965.
But there's no explanation offered of how or when or why he changed his mind.
Because I think he did.
He did end up forming a church and it seems like maybe, eventually, he really believed he was a minister.
He didn't end up forming the church that he and Rockwell had talked about.
Rockwell was murdered in 1967, so that plan was out the window.
When Rockwell's murderer, John Patler, went on trial, Frank testified for the defense.
A few months after the trial, American Nazi Party member Christopher Vidnevich showed up outside Frank's house in Maine.
The pair had a shootout, but no one was injured.
And no one went to jail.
This apparent attempt to kill him ended Frank's interest in continued involvement with the American Nazi Party.
But not with its core beliefs.
And the idea of forming that church must have still been rattling around in his mind, too.
He lived quietly for a few years, as far as I can tell.
He pops up in some old issues of his local newspaper, The Ellsworth American, from time to time.
In February of 1969, he was offering boxing lessons to local high school boys at a theater after school.
A few months later, he called the fire department after losing control of a fire he'd set on his property.
He says he set the fire to burn the grass on his property.
I'm not entirely sure what he means by that, but it was treated as a perfectly reasonable explanation by the newspaper.
After the fire was extinguished, firefighters walked the property just to double check that there were no lingering embers behind the house that could reignite.
And they discovered two separate caches of dynamite.
One inside of a rusty metal container and the other hidden under a pile of hay.
Frank said he had no idea how that got there and it wasn't his, and he was very grateful that the firefighters found it before something terrible happened.
The paper doesn't mention Frank's history with dynamite.
But maybe they didn't know.
Now remember, Frank Smith owns about 600 acres of land in Ellsworth, Maine.
He bought it back in the mid-50s, not long after he was accused of several bank robberies.
And in 1970, he signed over the deed to all of his property to a recent law school graduate in Rhode Island.
He just gave this man hundreds of acres of land.
Frank's sister Florence, who had also purchased some land in Ellsworth, sold her property to the same man on the same day.
Frank would later offer the vague explanation that the gift had been a sort of bond for work done that he couldn't repay.
The man's name was Brian Sorot.
At least, I think it's Sorreau.
I could only find one recording of someone saying this man's name out loud, and that person said, Serault, which is what it looks like spelled out.
But the man in the recording also said, Pawtucket, in the same sentence, and I've been informed by the Rhode Islanders in the audience that it's Pawtucket.
So I'm not sure we can trust this.
In my quest for accurate pronunciation, I did watch a couple of old videos of hockey fights.
There used to be a Canadian hockey player named Yves Sorot, and both the French and English language announcers pronounce it Sorot.
The name does seem to be generally associated with people of French-Canadian descent.
So I really do go out of my way to try to pronounce names of people and places correctly, but it's an uphill battle when the world is full of people and places who proudly wield their pronunciation of proper nouns as some kind of weapon in an assault against the very idea of phonics.
Despite my extreme efforts to find recordings of locals saying these things, I don't think I'll ever escape the humbling experience of the regional shibboleth.
I mean, I'm from Virginia, home of Buda Vista, Buck Annan, Botatot, and Stanton.
None of those are spelled how you think.
I grew up in Norfolk.
I get it.
If you say the R or the L, you're not from here.
So, I've chosen to go with Sorot.
I did my best.
Now, if you're from Rhode Island, you almost certainly know how that man's name is pronounced, because you probably know that Brian J. Sorot was elected mayor of Pawtucket, Rhode Island in 1987.
And he was still the mayor when the FBI arrested him in 1991 for running a massive extortion, bribery, and kickback operation out of City Hall.
But when Frank gave him all that land in 1970, he was fresh out of law school.
He'd only passed the bar a few months earlier.
Frank sort of implies that the land was payment for legal work.
But it's hard to imagine what kind of work Sorot could have been doing for Frank that would have been worth 600 acres of land in just a few months as a recent law school graduate.
He wasn't even licensed to practice in the state of Maine.
Now, I don't want to imply anything I can't prove.
Brian Sorot may be disbarred, but he's still out there, so I'm not making any allegations.
But there are some clues here that Frank hadn't given up on the idea that the land could serve some criminal purpose.
I couldn't find anything directly linking Brian Sorot to organized crime.
At least not beyond his own racketeering case.
No one's accusing Sorot of moving money around for the mafia.
But I did find his father's name in Raymond Patriarcha's FBI file.
The same Raymond Patriarcha who ran the Providence Mafia, the same Raymond Patriarcha who maybe told an FBI informant to shoot Frank.
In 1961, an FBI agent wrote a memo about an unsuccessful attempt by their informant to get information about Patriarcha out of one of his associates, a man named Amay Sorot.
Again, there's just no winning with French.
I looked at a lot of videos of people saying this name, it's A-I-M-E.
It could be MA, could be AIM, M. A. May is what I saw most often.
Don't email me about pronouncing Quebecois French.
Amei Sorot, Brian's father, and Brian's brother Stephen Sorot, were involved in several massive and very confusing fraud schemes over the years.
In 1979, Amay Sorot's name was on the incorporation paperwork for a company in Florida that was formed for the sole purpose of engaging in mortgage fraud.
His name was actually on the incorporation paperwork for quite a few companies in the late 70s and early 80s.
And most of those companies show up in federal court filings in cases for mail fraud, wire fraud, securities fraud, mortgage fraud, really any kind of financial crime you can think of.
And some I hadn't heard of.
Which is interesting.
Because when Frank Smith did finally get around to forming his church in 1978, the paperwork filed with the state of Maine lists Amei Sorot as the vice president of the church.
And his son, Stephen Sorot, was on the board of directors.
This is a tape-recorded statement.
Person being interviewed is Krista Gayal Pike.
This is in regards to the death of Colleen Slimmer.
She just started throwing off on me when I hit her.
And I just hit her in here and I hit her in the hit.
On a cold January day in 1995, 18-year-old Krista Pike killed 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer in the woods of Knoxville, Tennessee.
Since her conviction, Krista has been sitting on death row.
The state has asked for an execution date for Krista.
We let people languish in prison for decades, raising questions about who we consider fundamentally unrestorable.
How does someone prove that they deserve to live?
We are starting the recording now.
Please state your first and last name.
Krista Pike.
Listen to Unrestorable Season 2, Proof of Life, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Malcolm Gladwell here.
This season on Revisionist History, we're going back to the spring of 1988 to a town in northwest Alabama where a man committed a crime that would spiral out of control.
35 years.
That's how long Elizabeth Sennett's family waited for justice to occur.
35 long years.
I want to figure out why this case went on for as long as it did.
Why it took so many bizarre and unsettling turns along the way.
And why, despite our best efforts to resolve suffering, we all too often make suffering worse.
He would say to himself, turn to the right, to the victim's family, and apologize.
Turn to the left.
Tell my family I love them.
So he would have this little practice.
To the right, I'm sorry.
To the left, I love you.
From Revisionist History, this is the Alabama Murders.
Listen to Revisionist History, the Alabama Murders on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
For my heart podcasts and Rococo Punch, this is the turning River Road.
I knew I wanted to obey and submit, but I didn't fully grasp for the rest of my life what that meant.
In the woods of Minnesota, a cult leader married himself to 10 girls and forced them into a secret life of abuse.
Why did I think that way?
Why did I allow myself to get so sucked in by this man and thinking to the point that if I died for him, that would be the greatest honor?
But in 2014, the youngest of the girls escaped and sparked an international manhunt.
For all those years, you know, he was the predator and I was the prey.
And then he became the prey.
Listen to the turning River Road on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
From the studio who brought you the Piketon Massacre and Murder 101, this is Incels.
I am a loser.
It's also a woman.
I wouldn't dame me either.
From the dark corners of the web, an emerging mindset.
If 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 1 of Incels on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Now, this doesn't fit neatly into my story, and it's not entirely about Frank, but it's too weird to leave out.
When police in Florida showed up to ask questions about bad checks that were being deposited by that fake mortgage company in 1980, they didn't find the Soros.
They did find a washed-up minor league baseball player driving a car with a forged registration.
Bob Bonalowitz played a few seasons on farm teams for the St. Louis Cardinals, but he never made it to the majors.
His name pops up in connection with a couple of pretty serious crimes, but I can't actually find any indication he ever served time for any of them.
But he was definitely arrested that day in 1980.
The article about this curious incident with the bad checks in Florida says police believed the mastermind behind the scheme was a known con man named Michael Arthur Strauss.
But by the time the police got there, Strauss was in the wind.
A year later, 1981, Bonalowitz and Strauss were together again, and they were both on the run from charges related to a mail fraud scheme in Pennsylvania.
I think you probably know by now, but part of my process means spending a lot of time fleshing out the details of events I know full well are not going to be relevant, and they are not getting me any closer to finishing the episode.
I have reams of notes about stuff you'll never hear about, because it just isn't related to the story in any way, even by my standards.
Bob Bonalowitz, the minor league baseball player, is not a character in Frank's story.
I mean, he did some fraud with the father of the man that Frank gave that land to, but there's no way they have any meaningful connection, right?
There was no reason for me to look up the court records for a lawsuit Bonolowitz filed against Wynn Dixie after he slipped and fell in a grocery store in Florida in 1999, but I've got it in my notes, you know?
But I was poking around, learning a little bit more about this very tangentially relevant character, because you never know what you might find.
And this time, I'm glad I looked.
So in 1981, when Bonalowitz and Strauss are on the lamb after their scheme with the Soros went bust, they hid out at a friend's house in Massachusetts.
And the newspaper later reported that the FBI arrested a man named Theodore Green for harboring the fugitives.
And that name looked really familiar.
And it turned out I had it in my notes already.
But surely it's not the same Teddy Green.
I'm sure there are plenty of Teddy Greens living in the Boston suburbs.
But what a strange coincidence.
I know you know that at this point I forged ahead on my mission to waste my own time.
And sure enough, it wasn't a coincidence.
The ages matched up, which was a good clue.
But I think what really sealed it for me were the descriptions of Theodore Green in those articles written in the 1980s.
I mean, how many Teddy Greens in Boston could there be who had a history of bank robbery and once escaped from a Massachusetts state prison by shipping himself out in a crate of dirty rags?
There's just no way the Boston suburbs are home to two men named Theodore Greene, who famously tried and failed to escape from Alcatraz on a dozen separate occasions.
It's the same guy.
The man who was harboring those fugitives in 1981 is the exact same Teddy Green who was accused of robbing a bank with Frank Smith in Medford, Massachusetts in 1952.
They were members of the same bank robbery gang all throughout the early 50s.
So what is Teddy doing back in the story 30 years later?
It's an accumulation of hints that proves nothing, I know.
But it suggests that Frank never lost touch with his old associates, even as his interests shifted and his public presentation evolved.
He may have put on a clerical collar, but he's still doing business with the same people.
When Brian Sorrea was indicted in 1991, his finances were obviously of great interest to investigators.
He was accused of raking in about a million dollars in bribes and kickbacks over just a few short years.
They made the arrest after they got him on a wiretap accepting a bribe.
But that wasn't enough.
They wanted the whole picture.
And the whole picture included Frank and Claudia Smith.
A 1992 article in the Providence Journal says prosecutors weren't actually sure where all the money went.
Sorot definitely pocketed hundreds of thousands of dollars, but it didn't look like he was spending it.
He didn't live a lavish lifestyle.
He didn't drive a flashy car or live in a mansion.
His home was described as heavily mortgaged, and the missing money wasn't in his bank account.
Brian Sorrea ended up pleading guilty, so there was no trial.
And any court filings that might exist in that file are in a box on a shelf at the National Archives.
So there's no chance of getting my hands on them anytime soon.
All I really have to go on here is what the federal prosecutor told this reporter in 1992.
A lot of that missing money went directly into a bank account opened by Claudia Smith.
Sorre was listed as a trustee on the account, and he was observed making cash withdrawals from it a few weeks after he was arrested.
Frank Smith never really held a straight job.
At least, not after the 1950s.
I can't find any evidence that Claudia worked either.
But they always had money.
Claudia told people they didn't need to work because she had family money, some kind of large inheritance from oil wells on land her family owned.
I'm not entirely sure that's true.
Her family does not appear to have been wealthy.
Although I did find a notice in a newspaper in Alabama from 1950 about a pending claim in court.
It looks like Claudia and her sister shared a 164th interest in a parcel of land in Choctaw County, and one of the other interested holders of that land was the Magnolia Petroleum Company.
So there may have been oil and gas on that land, but I don't think it was the kind of oil money that funds you for life.
But for decades, Claudia Smith and Brian Sorrea were sharing access to several bank accounts.
In 1979, when Sorot needed money for a condo development project he was working on, he took out a loan from the trust.
In 1986, Sorot's law partner and personal attorney Charles Rogers borrowed $25,000 from an account held by Frank Smith's church.
There's no evidence either of these loans were repaid.
Disclosures filed with the State Ethics Committee show Sorot borrowed undisclosed sums from the Smiths in 1989 and 1990.
He refused to comment on how much money he'd borrowed, what it was for, and when or if it was repaid.
There are a lot of unanswered questions about this money, but it does start to paint a picture that Frank really was using that land exactly how he'd imagined when he proposed the idea to George Lincoln Rockwell.
Make a fake church and use it to move dirty money around.
Like I said, I don't think anyone is outright saying Brian Sorot was involved with organized crime.
But Frank never really left that world.
In 1992, Frank's church owned three cars.
And for some reason, he registered them in Rhode Island, not Maine.
The cars were registered to an address in Pawtucket, specifically, to a trailer park owned by lifelong patriarchal crime family associate Albo Vitale.
According to Claudia Smith's driver's license, that's where she lived.
Whether she did live there at some point or not isn't actually clear.
The FBI couldn't find her in 1992.
Frank said she wasn't living with him anymore and wouldn't say where she might be.
She did get two traffic tickets near Frank's home in Ellsworth in 1994, and the citations indicate her license listed a Pawtucket address.
When she died in 2000, she was living in Massachusetts, and I can't find any record that the couple ever filed for divorce.
And the paperwork for Frank's church was never updated after it was filed in 1978.
So even though she's been dead for 25 years, Claudia Smith is still the registered agent for the Church of Christ in Israel.
But back in 1992, the U.S. Attorney's Office and the FBI couldn't locate Claudia.
But they did subpoena Frank to testify before a grand jury.
This wasn't the grand jury that indicted Sorot.
It was one that came a few months after his arrest when they were looking into bringing additional charges against other people related to the corruption in Pawtucket.
Grand jury testimony is secret, of course.
So who knows, but Frank said on the stand in there.
Sorot's lawyer refused to comment on it, and so did the federal prosecutor.
Not a word.
The Providence Journal reported that one unnamed source said Frank showed up to court in a clerical collar.
I guess to try to sell the idea that he was just a mild-mannered Christian pastor whose attorney managed his money in a completely normal and legal way.
It does kind of remind me though, if you remember a few weeks ago, in 1952, Frank and his little brother William were both arrested in connection with that bank robbery in Medford.
And when they raided his little brother's apartment, they found a bunch of guns and ammo and lockpicks and dynamite.
But they also found a suitcase full of disguises, including a clerical collar and vestments.
So 40 years apart, he's got a real church now.
Kind of.
But the clerical collar is still just a disguise.
This is a tape-recorded statement.
Person being interviewed is Krista Gail Pike.
This is in regards to the death of a Colleen Slimmer.
She just started throwing off on me when I hit her.
I just hit her and hit her and hit her in here.
On a cold January day in 1995, 18-year-old Krista Pike killed 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer in the woods of Knoxville, Tennessee.
Since her conviction, Krista has been sitting on death row.
The state has asked for an execution date for Krista.
We let people languish in prison for decades, raising questions about who we consider fundamentally unrestorable.
How does someone prove that they deserve to live?
We are starting the recording now.
Please state your first and last name.
Krista Pike.
Listen to Unrestorable Season 2, Proof of Life, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Malcolm Gladwell here.
This season on Revisionist History, we're going back to the spring of 1988 to a town in northwest Alabama where a man committed a crime that would spiral out of control.
35 years.
That's how long Elizabeth Sennett's family waited for justice to occur.
35 long years.
I want to figure out why this case went on for as long as it did.
Why it took so many bizarre and unsettling turns along the way.
And why, despite our best efforts to resolve suffering, we all too often make suffering worse.
He would say to himself, turn to the right to the victim's family and apologize.
Turn to the left.
Tell my family I love them.
So he would have this little practice.
To the right, I'm sorry.
To the left, I love you.
From Revisionist History, this is the Alabama Murders.
Listen to Revisionist History, the Alabama Murders on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
For my heart podcasts and Rococo Punch, this is the turning River Road.
I knew I wanted to obey and submit, but I didn't fully grasp for the rest of my life what that meant.
In the woods of Minnesota, a cult leader married himself to 10 girls and forced them into a secret life of abuse.
Why did I think that way?
Why did I allow myself to get so sucked in by this man and thinking to the point that if I died for him, that would be the greatest honor?
But in 2014, the youngest of the girls escaped and sparked an international manhunt.
For all those years, you know, he was the predator and I was the prey.
And then he became the prey.
Listen to the turning River Road on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
From the studio who brought you the Piketon Massacre and Murder 101, this is Incels.
I am a loser.
It's also a woman I wouldn't dame me either.
From the dark corners of the web, an emerging mindset.
If 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 1 of Incels on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Brian Saro eventually pleaded guilty and spent five years in prison.
There's no other reporting I can find on where all that bribe money ended up or whatever came of the subpoenas for Claudia Smith's bank accounts.
But let's get back to Frank and his church.
The Soros showing up on that paperwork and in Frank's bank accounts is a hint that the church is less of a religious institution and more of a front for some kind of financial shenanigans.
So the church is maybe not 100% sincere.
But what kind of church is he claiming to lead?
In January of 1978, Frank Smith filed paperwork with the state of Maine for an organization called the Church of Christ in Israel.
Just a few weeks after the church legally existed on paper, Brian Sorot gave all of the land back to Frank.
Not to him personally.
He gave it to the church.
And the church was initially granted tax-exempt status, but the Maine State Bureau of Taxation rescinded that exemption in 1979.
And that's when Frank went to the press.
He claimed to have been ordained four years earlier, so that would be 1975.
Although when he was asked the same question in 1982, he said he'd been ordained for five years, which would mean he was ordained in 77.
And I think the later date is the correct one.
He probably fudged it the first time to make it sound like he'd been a minister for more than a few months before he incorporated his church.
The article in 1982 quotes Frank saying that he was ordained into the Christian identity movement by a man named Glenn Wheeler in California.
That name meant nothing to me.
I never say that.
I always know the guy, but who's Glenn Wheeler?
I mean, with Frank's connections to the American Nazi Party and by extension, the broader movement, I kind of figured he would have been brought into Christian identity by a bigger name.
You know, a James Wickstrom or a William Potter Gale.
Dan Gaiman, maybe.
Not Glenn.
Just some guy named Glenn.
But I guess that's kind of the thing about Christian identity.
It's not a church.
It's an idea.
Anyone can just start writing a newsletter full of bizarre racist biblical hermeneutics.
Anyone can just mail certificates out saying, I'm a minister and now you are too.
Sometimes a Christian identity group might have a church in the traditional sense.
You know, a building and a congregation.
Something like Dan Gaiman's Church of Israel in Missouri.
Other times it might look like a church at the center of an entire compound, like Robert Miller's Elohim City in Oklahoma or Richard Butler's Aryan Nations in Idaho.
Sometimes a Christian identity group is less of a congregation and more of a terror cell.
Groups like the Aryan Republican Army, the Order, or the Covenant of the Sword and the Arm of the Lord.
But it seems like the most common kind of Christian identity minister is a guy whose church exists only in his newsletter.
The Laporte Church of Christ never had more than a few dozen members, but Pete Peters had a radio show, a monthly newsletter, a television program, and thousands of fans all over the country.
Kingdom Identity Ministries didn't have a church at all, but they sold books and tapes, and they broadcast their sermons 24-7 over shortwave radio.
Sheldon Emery's Lord's Covenant Church was so small they met in his living room.
But through his America's Promise Ministries, he bought airtime on stations all over the country to broadcast his message.
You know, it's kind of like what Brian Eno said about the Velvet Underground.
They may not have sold a lot of albums, but everybody who bought one went out and started their own band.
These physical congregations were small, but a lot of the people who got the message would go on to have an outsized impact.
And you can usually trace their ideological lineage to a specific organization.
Three men associated with America's Promised Ministries bombed an abortion clinic and a newspaper in 1996.
Another member of that congregation shot five people in a Jewish community center in Los Angeles in 1999.
When Eric Rudolph attended Dan Gaiman's Church of Israel in Missouri in the 80s, Gaiman tried to play matchmaker with his own daughter.
He wanted to make Eric Rudolph his son-in-law and perhaps his successor.
A decade later, Rudolph set off a bomb at the Atlanta Olympics before bombing two abortion clinics and a lesbian bar.
Members of the Order murdered Alan Berg, a Jewish talk radio host, because he was disrespectful in an on-air debate with Christian identity minister Pete Peters.
A man named Michael Ryan was so inspired by the sermons of James Wickstrom that he started a small cult compound and eventually brutally murdered two of his own followers when they expressed doubt about Christian identity teachings.
So I think there is value in finding out who Glenn Wheeler was.
Who was it that ordained Frank?
And what version of Christian identity was Frank steeped in?
Because there is a wide spectrum.
Everything from guys who've never actually opened a Bible but are likely to nod in agreement if you tell them it says black people aren't human.
Guys like George Lincoln Rockwell who don't actually care at all what's in the Bible, but they have a cynical understanding of the political value of tricking that first kind of guy into being more racist.
And then there are guys who truly believe that God commands them to incite a bloody race war because of a genuinely held belief in a warped understanding of pre-millennialist eschatology.
And then there's kinds of guys you and I have never even imagined and all kinds of guys in between.
Sometimes it really is just a tax dodge.
But sometimes it is a terrorist plot aimed at triggering Armageddon.
So that's why I usually just give you the short version.
It is a racist misunderstanding of the book of Genesis.
There's a lot going on here.
The man who actually ordained Frank into the Christian identity ministry is pretty obscure.
Admittedly, I could keep digging.
I could try begging the special collections librarian at the University of Kansas to scan the papers in a box labeled Glenn Wheeler, 1977 to 1979, in their collection of James Mason's personal papers.
You can only access that collection in person due to the discovery of some child pornography in the materials Mason donated to the library.
I've heard you have to request the boxes in advance so they can be pre-screened.
I will make it out to Kansas one day, but for now, I do know what at least one of those documents is.
Glenn Wheeler ordained at least one other person besides Frank Smith in 1977.
It was James Mason, the author of the Adam Waffen Bible Siege.
While Mason was in prison in the 90s after an arrest for sexual exploitation of a minor, he wrote a collection of essays on the Bible.
In that book, called One Verse Charlie's, he includes a scan of the certificate Glenn Wheeler mailed him in 1977, ordaining him as a minister in Christ's identity church.
I did find a little bit more about Glenn Wheeler, but nothing about his church.
None of what I found about Glenn Wheeler had anything to do with Christian identity.
He ran for California State Assembly in 1970 on the American Independent Party ticket, the party formed so that George Wallace could run for president on the segregation platform.
And he actually met with George Wallace at some point in 1969.
And earlier in the 60s, he formed some kind of racist discussion group called Western Front with a man whose real name is Walter White.
But I think that's for another day.
Walter White had a very interesting wife.
But as far as Frank goes, I'm not sure he had much contact with Glenn after the ordination.
But he was in touch with other people in the movement.
When Frank was explaining his beliefs to a reporter in 1979, he mentioned a few guys by name.
He talked about Dan Gaiman and Sheldon Emery.
And when he was back in the newspaper again in 1982, complaining about his ongoing battle for tax exemption, he told a reporter that Sheldon Emery had offered to connect him with a group called the Christian Law Association for some assistance.
And he also mentioned a recent conference in Wisconsin.
Based on the location and the timing, that has to be James Wickstrom.
Frank clearly had a soft spot for Sheldon Emery.
He dropped that name twice in interviews about his church.
And his name shows up in at least one of Emory's newsletters as a supporter.
In 1980, Frank hosted an event in Sanford, Maine.
It was advertised in the newspaper as a benign-sounding interfaith Easter program featuring gospel music and the presentation of a film.
The film was called Heirs of the Promise.
It's a very generic sort of phrase.
And it's a phrase that appears in mostly innocuous religious writing that doesn't have a Christian identity angle.
The phrase itself doesn't necessarily mean we're in Christian identity territory.
So it made it a little hard to search for.
But this videotape is actually something pretty specific.
And Frank seemed to really like this tape.
Not only did he show it at the Interfaith Easter program in 1980, in 1991, after he testified before that grand jury in Rhode Island, he mailed a copy of this video to the federal prosecutor.
Why, of all the people of the earth, has it been only this white Caucasian race, these so-called Gentiles, who have claimed Jesus Christ as their God and who have taken this book as the foundation of their religion?
The answer, the truth which is avoided and even denied by the clergy, is simple.
These people are the Israelites, the children of Abraham, God's chosen people.
I did watch Heirs of the Promise.
It's only about 40 minutes long, and it was a waste of my time.
But the voice you just heard is Pastor Sheldon Emory of America's Promise Ministries, a Christian identity minister in Arizona.
So we know Frank was a big fan of Emory, and they were in touch at least a little bit.
There is a scan of an undated pamphlet published by Emory's Ministry that was archived in the Gordon Hall and Grace Hoag Collection of Dissenting and Extremist Printed Propaganda.
That's a special collection of materials held at the Brown University Library.
And this old pamphlet from Emory's Ministry has a stamp on it showing that it was mailed to the Church of Christ in Israel.
Now that's the name of Frank's church.
But the address isn't right.
Frank's church was in Ellsworth, Maine.
And this stamp says Dover, New Hampshire.
It turns out that when Frank told reporters that he had started churches in other New England towns that he traveled around to check in on from time to time, he wasn't totally lying.
I mean, I don't know that any of these churches had members, but there was at least a guy in New Hampshire.
The church in Dover was headed by a man named Alan Goodrich, who was, incidentally, one of the other hosts at Frank's Interfaith Easter program.
There isn't much surviving evidence that I can find about Frank's church directly.
He doesn't appear to have published a newsletter, at least not one that was archived online or written about in a newspaper, at least not that I could find.
And there are factors complicating the search.
Churches that share the same name might be chapters of the same organization.
They might be inspired by one another or totally unrelated and just inspired by the same source material.
Sometimes the same organization has several names over time or even at the same time.
A lot of Christian identity organizations have names that look like they were assembled by drawing a few words out of a hat, and there's only so many words in the lexicon here.
It's just a sort of random hodgepodge of the words Christ, Jesus, Israel, identity, kingdom, ministry, America.
So you do sometimes end up with organizations that have the same name that don't have anything to do with each other.
But there aren't very many references to something specifically called the Church of Christ in Israel.
Now, there is a Christian denomination called the Church of Christ, and I think it does have a church in Israel.
That is a completely different thing.
But within the Christian identity movement, there are only a few references to something called the Church of Christ in Israel.
And I know Alan Goodrich's church in New Hampshire is connected to Frank's because Goodrich wrote a letter to Grace Hoague in 1981 that was preserved in the Hall Hoag collection.
But there were at least two other people using the name The Church of Christ in Israel.
And both of them pop up in the 90s.
There was a chiropractor in Central California who wrote prolifically in a very unhinged newsletter, but he doesn't seem to have done much else.
And then there was a group in a tiny town in the middle of nowhere in Pennsylvania.
The Church of Christ in Israel in Pennsylvania was run by a man named August Kreis at the direction of James Wickstrom.
So there is a chance that the shared name here indicates some relationship because I believe Frank was in touch with Wickstrom.
But I just can't find the connective tissue to prove this.
It would be just like Frank to have known August Christ though.
I mean, Frank knew all kinds of strange characters.
Frank was getting into hijinks he just wouldn't even believe, so it would make perfect sense if he knew a man like August Kreis.
He might have lived a life stranger than Frank's.
He served nine months in the Navy during Vietnam, but he was discharged for being unfit to serve.
He was a Klansman.
When the Aryan nation splintered after Richard Butler's death, he led one of the factions and he tried to form an alliance with al-Qaeda.
He had his own Christian identity church.
He was on two episodes of Jerry Springer.
And before he went to prison for fraudulently obtaining veterans benefits and a truly horrific series of sex crimes against children, he lost both of his legs to diabetes.
We will have to come back to August Kreis.
But I think we're done with Frank, though.
I'm not done with the stories going on all around him.
But I haven't decided yet if we're staying here or moving on for now.
I did spend an awful lot of time this week reading some shockingly racist interpretations of the Bible based on a misunderstanding of ancient Greek.
So I think I will have to tell you a little bit more about the man Frank Smith ordained in 2000.
I mean, if we're going to talk about guys who believe Eve had sex with a snake in the Garden of Eden, there's just no avoiding Bill Fink's weird blog.
But Frank's part in the story is over.
Francis Joseph Smith II, the man George Lincoln Rockwell called the Holy Father, the man the FBI called Boston Blackie, a bank robber, bomber, loan shark, Nazi, and Christian identity minister, died on October 2nd, 2020, just shy of his 100th birthday.
He signed a will a year before he died, and in it, he left what little he had to his daughter.
He scratched out his initials at the bottom of a page whose final line reads, I have not left my son anything, and this was a deliberate choice.
Frank's actual parting gift to his son was leaving his mailing address on file with the city as the point of contact for the church.
The church still owns all that land.
And as of this recording, the city of Ellsworth, Maine is still sending Frank's son past due notices for a growing real estate tax bill.
He never did convince the state of Maine that it was a real church.
Weird Little Guys is a production of Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio.
It's research, written, and recorded by me, Molly Conger.
You probably noticed that I have a cold this week, so I'm sorry my voice sounds a little nasally.
Our executive producers are Sophie Licherman 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 WeirdLittleGuysPodcast 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 Guys subreddit.
And if you're listening to this around the time it came out, you can go over to the subreddit and post in the pinned thread if you have questions you'd like answered in an upcoming Q episode.
I think we'll be doing that sometime in December.
As always, don't post anything that's going to make you one of my weird little guys.
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