Joseph Paul Franklin’s 1978 shooting attempt on Hustler publisher Larry Flint—paralyzing him and wounding attorney Gene Reeves—marked a violent escalation after years of crimes: bank robberies, synagogue bombings (Tennessee), and murders targeting Jews and interracial couples. His extremist ties included the National Socialist White People’s Party, where he clashed with founder George Rockwell over nonviolence, and the Ku Klux Klan, joining in 1976 to learn bomb-making despite timeline inconsistencies. Motivated by Hustler’s December 1975 interracial porn cover and a claimed divine directive after eviction, Franklin’s actions reveal how white supremacist rhetoric and media fueled targeted racial violence, even as societal shifts like the 1967 Supreme Court ruling on interracial marriage failed to curb extremism. [Automatically generated summary]
In the middle of the night, Saskia awoke in a haze.
Her husband Mike was on his laptop.
What was on his screen would change Saskia's life forever.
I said, I need you to tell me exactly what you're doing.
And immediately, the mask came off.
You're supposed to be safe.
That's your home.
That's your husband.
Listen to Betrayal Season 5 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
1969, Malcolm and Martin are gone.
America is in crisis.
And at Morehouse College, the students make their move.
These students, including a young Samuel L. Jackson, locked up the members of the Board of Trustees, including Martin Luther King Sr.
It's the true story of protest and rebellion in Black American history that you'll never forget.
I'm Hans Charles, our mental at Lamoomba.
Listen to the A Building on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Over the last couple years, didn't we learn that the folding chair was invented by black people because of what happened in Alabama?
This Black History Month, the podcast Selective Ignorance with Mandy B unpacks Black history and culture with comedy, clarity, and conversations that shake the status quo.
The Crown Act in New York was signed in July of 2019, and that is a bill that was passed to prohibit discrimination based on hairstyles associated with race.
To hear this and more, listen to Selective Ignorance with Mandy B from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
I'm Bowen Yang, and I'm Matt Rogers.
During this season of the Two Guys Five Rings podcast, in the lead up to the Milan-Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic Games, we've been joined by some of our friends.
Hi, Bob!
Hello!
Hey, Elmo!
Hey, Matt, hey, Bowen!
Larry Flint's Controversial Fight00:06:10
Hi, Cookie!
Hi!
Now, the Winter Olympic Games are underway, and we are in Italy to give you experiences from our hearts to your ears.
Listen to Two Guys Five Rings on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Also media on March 6, 1978, Larry Flint had jello salad and grapefruit juice for lunch.
He'd had lunch at the V ⁇ J cafeteria in Lawrenceville, Georgia, every day since his trial began the week prior.
A little afternoon, he started to walk the three blocks back to the courthouse.
He never made it, and he never walked again.
Larry Flint was no stranger to controversy.
He courted it, reveled in it, even.
It was no accident that he was on trial in Georgia, though this wasn't exactly the venue he'd had in mind.
Prosecutors in Georgia were waging a war on pornography in the mid-1970s, and the publisher of Hustler magazine was eager to fight on the front line.
When the prosecutor in Fulton County started rounding up the proprietors of adult bookstores and X-rated movie theaters on obscenity charges, Flint took notice.
When a newsstand owner in Atlanta was arrested for selling issues of Hustler, Flint flew down to Georgia and leased a storefront on Peachtree Street, right in downtown Atlanta.
He stood behind the counter himself, personally selling copies of his pornographic magazine to customers and issuing a public challenge to the Fulton County prosecutor.
Come and get me.
He was trying to pick a fight in Atlanta.
He wanted to go to court.
He didn't even really care if he got convicted.
He wanted to challenge the state's obscenity laws.
And he did get arrested.
But it was nearby Gwinnett County that managed to get him into court first.
When he got to Lawrenceville for the trial, he found it was a small town and the people were friendly.
He hadn't even brought along his usual retinue of bodyguards.
He didn't think he needed them.
He got death threats and bomb threats, threatening letters and phone calls.
Those were a dime a dozen.
He even had to get a zoning variance to construct a massive privacy fence around his home in Ohio.
But here in Lawrenceville, he felt safe.
As he stepped out of the restaurant after lunch, he was even feeling pretty optimistic about getting a not guilty verdict from this jury.
No one could quite agree where the shots came from.
It was initially reported that they'd been fired from a passing car, but that wasn't right.
One account incorrectly claimed witnesses saw a man run up to Flint and press a gun right into his stomach.
But a .44 caliber shell casing was found in an abandoned building across the street.
That's where the would-be assassin had been lying in wait with his rifle.
Larry Flint was hit twice in the stomach, leaving him paralyzed from the waist down.
The shot that hit his attorney, Gene Reeves, bounced around inside of his abdomen, rupturing several vital organs and leaving him in a coma for weeks.
As the two men lay bleeding on the ground, the killer quietly slipped away, leaving nothing but a single shell casing and a few conflicting eyewitness accounts.
But who could have done it?
Maybe it was the mafia.
There's a lot of money in pornography, and maybe the mafia thought he was encroaching on their business.
Maybe it was someone who took the law into their own hands, some kind of anti-pornography crusader who was unwilling to wait for the Georgia courts to punish Flint for publishing smut.
Flint's wife told reporters she knew exactly who shot her husband.
It was the Central Intelligence Agency.
Carrying out the hit in the Bible Belt was the perfect cover, she thought.
It was made to look like some religious nut did this, but really the government was trying to silence him.
Hustler magazine was offering a $1 million cash reward for proof that the CIA was behind the JFK assassination.
And he'd obviously been shot because he was getting too close to the truth.
Police questioned hundreds of people and spent thousands of hours investigating.
But they came up with nothing.
Larry Flint spent years fully convinced he'd been the victim of a botched government hit before the real shooter got bored in prison and decided he wanted credit for his work.
I'm Molly Conger, and this is Weird Little Guys.
Joseph Paul Franklin did not kill Larry Flint.
But that's only because Larry Flint didn't die.
Not from the gunshot wound anyway.
He lived to the ripe old age of 78, dying of heart failure in 2021.
By the time Franklin took that shot at Flint in Georgia in March of 1978, he'd already committed at least two bank robberies, bombed the home of the head of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, bombed a synagogue in Tennessee, murdered an interracial couple in Wisconsin, killed a man outside a synagogue in Missouri, and shot a second interracial couple in Georgia, killing one victim and paralyzing the other.
He was eight months into a three-year killing spree, and he was starting to settle into his new life as a sniper killer.
Joseph Paul Franklin's Reign00:10:27
Maybe it's a fool's errand to try to answer questions like, why?
Or to try to sort out what might actually be true in his decades of self-serving interviews with curious journalists, psychologists, detectives, and prosecutors.
But I think you know by now that I just can't help it.
Because this should have been such an easy story to write.
Two episodes in and out.
The details of the crime are very well established.
It didn't need to be complicated.
I should be grateful no one in the marketing department listens to my show because they'd probably be tearing their hair out and demanding to know why I'm just talking in circles about this true crime story without actually getting to the damn crimes.
And I'm sorry, I'm trying.
God knows this would be less stressful if I had the discipline to get to the point, but I don't.
And I have this intractable compulsion to try to figure out why this dead Nazi is lying to me from these old newspaper clippings.
Because he was, of course, a liar.
They all are.
Maybe he didn't think he was lying.
The details of the crimes he starts confessing to once he's in prison are true.
But the mythology he created around them was reported alongside those facts, as though this were just as unquestionably true as the caliber of weapon he used or the kind of car he was driving.
And I just can't abide by repeating Nazi lore.
So we have to go back to my timeline.
As much as he loved being interviewed about his crimes, he never gave much detail about the years leading up to them, which is why I'm so insatiably curious about what he doesn't want to talk about.
We know he attended the National Socialist White People's Party convention in the fall of 1969.
We covered that.
He had so much fun with the Nazis in Virginia that he stuck around, and he lived for a while in the party barracks in Arlington.
The September 1970 issue of the party's newsletter, the National Socialist Bulletin, features a story about the group's protest of Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meyer's visit to the White House.
His name isn't in that article, but it wasn't keyword searching.
I told you I read every issue of the National Socialist Bulletin from the 1970s.
So his name's not there.
But his picture is.
Those thick glasses are hard to miss.
He's wearing a little stormtrooper uniform with a swastika armband, but it's him, handing out anti-Semitic leaflets to people passing by this little demonstration outside the White House.
And he was so pleased with this picture that he cut it out and he mailed it to his sister.
A few weeks later, those same Nazis were back at the White House.
This time they were protesting about the Vietnam War.
Not in the way you might be thinking.
They weren't protesting against the war.
That would be hippie nonsense.
Communism or something, right?
No, they were protesting Richard Nixon's refusal to win the war.
Nixon had recently proposed a plan for a ceasefire and a gradual drawdown of U.S. troops in Vietnam, which they found unacceptable.
The Nazis marched with banners that read, Drop Nixon on Hanoi, and Nixon is a no-win swine.
Their tiny march of two dozen or so stormtroopers was a little bit of a sideshow next to a much larger pro-war march that was happening that day in DC.
So the news stories I could find just say that 52 people in total were arrested that day.
It doesn't list their names or their charges or which groups they were with.
But the National Socialist Bulletin does name their members who were arrested.
Several stormtroopers were involved in scuffles with the police, including one they claim was injured when a black police officer, quote, deliberately gunned his scooter into him while he was crossing the street.
The young Nazi who bravely skinned his knees in the crosswalk was listed in the newsletter as James Vaughan, which was Franklin's name until he had it legally changed in 1976.
The newsletter says that the party paid for his legal defense, and later reporting shows that he was acquitted on a charge of assault the following year.
And this is where I kind of lose him again for a year or two.
His sister once showed a reporter a photo that he'd mailed to her from California.
In the picture, he's standing outside of the National Socialist White People's Party office in Los Angeles.
She couldn't remember exactly when he'd sent it to her, and he would often send her things without any accompanying note, just the photo in an envelope.
But she guessed it was probably 1971.
And if he did visit California in 1971, it seems likely that he would have been one of the stormtroopers chosen to accompany their leader on his official visit to the California chapter in February.
Matias Kale always traveled with a retinue of uniformed stormtroopers, and the party's ranks weren't exactly swollen with members who could travel at a moment's notice.
Franklin's FBI file has a vague note in it that in March of 1971, he was formally disciplined by the party.
Whoever typed this memo left out a word, though.
So it just reads that he was disciplined for, quote, supposedly the founder of the party, George Rockwell.
So I think he supposedly somethinged the founder.
There's a handwritten notation above the line where they tried to write in the missing word, but it's illegible.
I think it says defaming or disparaging.
I mean, he can't have done anything to Rockwell.
Rockwell had been dead for four years, but it would make sense that he would be disciplined for saying something disparaging about Rockwell.
I can't find any mention of any kind of party discipline in the newsletter, but the FBI says that he was suspended for six months, which, again, makes sense.
The memo continues saying that he was investigated by the police in December of 1971 for some kind of racial assault that occurred in connection with party activities.
It doesn't say what happened or where or if there was any kind of arrest.
It just says he was investigated.
So at least as far as the FBI knows, he was actively involved in the National Socialist White People's Party at least as late as the end of 71.
Mel Ayton's biography of Franklin is unable to pin him down here too.
After those demonstrations in 1970, the book just has a line that skips ahead to 1973, saying that during those three years, he was involved in several racial incidents and occasionally arrested, including once in 1972 for carrying a concealed firearm.
Throughout their correspondence while Ayton was writing the book, Franklin said that he left the National Socialist White People's Party because they weren't violent enough.
And that might actually be true.
Matthias Kale's newsletters show a leader who was very focused on running a respectable Nazi organization.
Dues paid, uniforms pressed, marching in formation, hair neatly trimmed, and a well-run annual convention.
And not much else.
If Franklin quit the party because Kale wasn't the Führer he wanted, he wasn't the only one.
Kale was wildly unpopular in the years after Rockwell's death, and there were a lot of high-profile defections and schisms in the early 1970s.
In 1973, Franklin tried to go home.
He went back to Alabama and he knocked on the door of his mother's house.
But the stranger who answered told him she'd been dead for a year.
It was around this time that he first met J.B. Stoner, the chairman of the National States Rights Party.
In one of the letters to his biographer, Franklin said that it was in 1973 that he met J.B. Stoner, quote, and Jerry, too.
The full text of the letter isn't reproduced in the book, but it struck me as awfully casual to say, Jerry.
Just Jerry.
He met J.B. Stoner and Jerry.
That seems like the way you'd refer to someone you had a fairly cordial relationship with, doesn't it?
I mean, J.B. Stoner was a superior, a mentor, a hero, and there's Jerry.
Of course, if you spent any time with J.B. Stoner in the 1970s, you would have met Jerry.
Because that's Jerry Ray, the youngest brother of James Earl Ray, the man who assassinated Martin Luther King Jr.
When Stoner volunteered to assist with James Earl Ray's defense in 1969, his brother Jerry became Stoner's bodyguard.
Even after Stoner's legal services were no longer needed, Jerry Ray remained Stoner's shadow everywhere he went for years.
There's a lot going on here that we're going to have to come back to.
I think J.B. Stoner is going to have to move up the list of my weird little guys of interest.
He pops up here and there, but I think he may be a real dark horse candidate for most influential racist of the era.
There's no time for a sidebar this complicated, but he has some really intriguing international connections.
If you recently listened to the South Africa episodes I re-ran over the holidays, it might pique your interest to know that J.B. Stoner traveled abroad a lot to do things like meet with the League of St. George in the United Kingdom and speak at the annual Nazi gathering at Dixmude in Belgium.
Fields of Confusion00:14:38
Two things that would have put him in close contact with just about everybody who was involved in that plot to smuggle guns and mercenaries into South Africa so that Afrikaner nationalists could start a race war to preserve apartheid.
I'll put a pin in that." In the middle of the night, Saskia awoke in a haze.
Her husband Mike was on his laptop.
What was on his screen would change Saskia's life forever.
I said, I need you to tell me exactly what you're doing.
And immediately, the mask came off.
You're supposed to be safe.
That's your home.
That's your husband.
So keep this secret.
For so many years, he's like a seasoned pro.
This is a story about the end of a marriage, but it's also the story of one woman who was done living in the dark.
You're a dangerous person who preys on vulnerable and trusting people.
Here, Peter Michael Leving.
Listen to Betrayal Season 5 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Welcome to the A Building.
I'm Hans Charles, our mental icle Mumba.
It's 1969.
Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. have both been assassinated, and Black America is out of breaking point.
Rioting and protests broke out on an unprecedented scale.
In Atlanta, Georgia, at Martin's Alma Mada, Morehouse College, the students had their own protest.
It featured two prominent figures in Black history, Martin Luther King Sr. and a young student, Samuel L. Jackson.
To be in what we really thought was a revolution.
I mean, people were dying.
1968, the murder of Dr. King, which traumatized everyone.
The FBI had a role in the murder of a Black Panther leader in Chicago.
This story is about protest.
It echoes in today's world far more than it should, and it will blow your mind.
Listen to the A Building on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Bowen Yang.
And I'm Matt Rogers.
During this season of the Two Guys Five Rings podcast, in the lead up to the Milan-Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic Games, we've been joined by some of our friends.
Hazard!
Hey, Elmo!
Hey, Matt!
Hey, Bowen!
Hi, Cookie!
Hi!
Now the Winter Olympic Games are underway, and we are in Italy to give you experiences from our hearts to your ears.
Listen to Two Guys Five Rings on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What if mind control is real?
If you could control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of life would you have?
Can you hypnotically persuade someone to buy a car?
When you look at your car, you're going to become overwhelmed with such good feelings.
Can you hypnotize someone into sleeping with you?
I gave her some suggestions to be sexually aroused.
Can you get someone to join your cult?
NLP was used on me to access my subconscious.
NLP, aka Neuro-linguistic programming, is a blend of hypnosis, linguistics, and psychology.
Fans say it's like finally getting a user manual for your brain.
It's about engineering consciousness.
Mind games is the story of NLP.
Its crazy cast of disciples and the fake doctor who invented it at a new age commune and sold it to guys in suits.
He stood trial for murder and got acquitted.
The biggest mind game of all, NLP might actually work.
This is wild.
Listen to Mind Games on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
As far as J.B. Stoner's public image in the 1970s, though, I don't think anybody knew that he was meeting with Belgian Nazis about international terrorism and gun running.
But he was quite famous for being a raging anti-Semite and a vicious racist.
He ran for office in Georgia repeatedly.
It was a great way to get attention.
White supremacists have long mastered the art of pulling hideous little stunts in public to generate publicity.
But there was a growing movement to encourage reporters to starve them out and to refuse to run thousand-word pieces breathlessly repeating their message.
Stoner found a way to take advantage of a different kind of attention.
As a candidate for office, TV and radio stations couldn't lock him out.
They were legally required to play his campaign hats.
He ran for governor of Georgia in 1970, Senate in 1972, lieutenant governor in 1974, governor again in 78, and Senate in 1980.
He never did well.
He never even came close to winning a primary, but that wasn't the point.
The point was forcing the Federal Communications Commission to issue a formal ruling that it was illegal to stop him from saying the N-word on TV.
There's another funny little connection here between our side characters.
This isn't directly pertinent to the story at hand, but everything's connected, right?
During J.B. Stoner's campaign for governor in 1970, a teenage Don Black traveled to Atlanta to volunteer.
If you're updating your red string board, remember Don Black would go on to start the Nazi Forum Stormfront in the 90s.
But in 1969, when he was still in high school, his parents let him carpool to the Nazi conference with two strangers, who turned out to be David Duke and Joseph Paul Franklin.
So the following summer, Don Black travels to Atlanta to work on this campaign, and he's still a member of the National Socialist White People's Party.
And as such, a ranking member of that group told Don Black to steal a copy of J.B. Stoner's mailing list.
It would have been worth its weight in, I don't want to say gold, it's not that valuable, but worth its weight in Nazi armbands or something.
Because there were, allegedly, more than 15,000 names and addresses of people who had, at some point or another, subscribed to J.B. Stoner's racist newspaper.
And if you could get your newspaper into the hands of that many people, maybe some of them would buy something from you.
Don Black was caught in the act, though.
Stoner's assistant, Jerry Ray, walked in on him rifling through papers in Stoner's office and shot him in the chest.
He survived, obviously.
And Don Black turned 17 in the hospital a few days later.
So before he was even old enough to vote, he met David Duke, befriended a future serial killer, and was shot in the chest by the little brother of the man who killed Martin Luther King Jr.
He's had an odd life.
It was in the midst of Stoner's campaign for lieutenant governor in 1974, though, that Joseph Paul Franklin moved to Atlanta to help out.
When Franklin was finally arrested in 1980, J.B. Stoner told reporters he was quite sure that Franklin had never been a member of his organization.
He'd met him, perhaps, but they certainly weren't associates.
And as a matter of fact, he was sure he didn't even know anyone who ever had associated with him.
When he was confronted with newspaper clippings that proved Franklin had been a member of the National States Rights Party, he said he didn't recall any such thing.
But there he was.
In one of those old articles, he's mentioned by name, his old name, Jim Vaughan.
And he's proudly announcing to the chapter meeting that street sales of the party's newspaper are way up.
He was in charge of organizing other members of the chapter to assist in the sales campaign.
That reporting from 1980 describes one of the articles that they showed to Stoner, and I was able to track down the article I think they're talking about.
And it doesn't actually name Jim Vaughan or Joseph Paul Franklin as we know him, but I think it's him.
In April of 1974, the Atlanta Constitution ran a piece about Stoner's campaign, sort of highlighting his decades-long career as a professional racist and anti-Semite, and taking a look at the kinds of people he's surrounding himself with in the campaign.
So the article opens with a description of one of these campaign workers, these young racists who stand on street corners and try to convince people to pay a quarter for a copy of The Thunderbolt, the racist newspaper published by the National States Rights Party.
And again, this young man is not named, but he's in his 20s and he has long, messy brown hair, which is unusual for a member of a fascist movement in the 70s.
Long hair was for hippies, but it was Franklin's trademark.
And he's a bit unkempt, heavily tattooed, and wearing a black t-shirt.
And after explaining that integration is a communist plot to turn us into a nation of mongrels, he tells the reporter that he'd recently quit the American Nazi Party to join the National States Rights Party.
Because, quote, they're the same thing.
Only we don't use the swastika.
We're looking for a new symbol.
And just a quick note in case there's confusion here: the National Socialist White People's Party was the official name that the American Nazi Party started using in 1967.
So you'll see them used interchangeably sometimes in the late 60s, early 70s, because they were the same organization.
But officially, it's the National Socialist White People's Party.
He's just calling it the American Nazi Party because that's its legacy name.
When reporters reached the group's other co-founder, Ed Fields, after Franklin's arrest, he said he only vaguely recalled meeting Franklin, maybe just a couple of times, but it would have been a long time ago.
Considering he's claiming to have met this man only in passing, probably eight years ago, he then offered up several very specific memories about how this poor guy was just so broke and nobody liked him and he didn't have a car and sometimes he worked odd jobs at the temp agency downtown.
And Fields said he felt bad for this guy, so he would give him a stack of party newspapers for free so he could make some pocket money selling them.
But he didn't know him.
And like Stoner, Fields was quite sure that Franklin had never been a member of the National States Rights Party.
But he also expressed doubt about Franklin's guilt when a reporter asked him what he thought about the murders.
He must have an incredible memory for names and faces because somehow he remembered eight years later that this man he never knew had terrible eyesight.
And those thick glasses he wore were only any good for one of his eyes.
And how could a man who's blind in one eye be a sniper?
A few days after that first conversation, a reporter called Ed Fields again.
Joseph Paul Franklin's sister had produced a photograph taken on her front porch in Mobile, Alabama.
It had been a memorable occasion.
Her brother's visit in 1974 was the last time she saw him.
And they'd gotten into a screaming argument when he found out that she'd hired a black maid to clean her house.
He didn't want to be in a house where a black person had been.
The photo must have been taken before the argument, but she held on to it all those years because it was all she had left of him.
And in the photo, there she is, standing on her porch with her brother.
And next to him is the couple he showed up with.
It's Ed Fields and his wife.
Fields offered no explanation for how he ended up on a road trip with a man he'd never met, eating lunch at this stranger's sister's house two years after they never met.
He maintained that Franklin was never a member and he didn't know him.
I wish someone had called Ed Fields back again, 15 years ago, when Franklin told his prison pen pal that he and Fields had taken karate lessons together every week for a year and a half in 1973.
But he probably would have denied that too.
In August of 1974, J.B. Stoner lost the primary in the lieutenant governor's race.
Obviously.
Franklin finished up his GED and started attending classes at a community college in Marietta, Georgia.
But he didn't stay long.
By the end of 1975, he'd moved on again, returning to the DC suburbs.
Last week, we focused just on the summer of 1977.
In the months before Joseph Paul Franklin started killing, Nazi newsletters were full of stories celebrating other men who killed for the movement that year.
White supremacist newsletters and broadcasts, things he was almost certainly consuming, were full of extreme rhetoric about the threat posed to the white race by the evils of race mixing.
Pornography is a Jewish plot to destroy the white race.
Black people are outbreeding whites.
Puerto Ricans are destroying New York.
The Jews are behind a new line of black baby dolls designed to fuel self-hatred in little white girls.
Integration is destroying education.
Affirmative action is destroying Schlitz beer.
White birth rates are falling.
White women are being raped and murdered by black men.
White women are being tricked by the Jewish-controlled media into marrying black men.
And on and on from all angles.
Nude Pictures and Racial Anxiety00:06:30
Was trying to build a little bit of context for what might have been going on in his mind the first time he murdered an interracial couple in August of 1977.
Now, of course, I'm only making an informed guess about what he was reading that summer, based on the groups he had joined and the friends that he had made and the circles he was running in and the kinds of things he was saying.
I think that's what he was reading.
And while the earliest confirmed murder was in August of 1977, he would later claim that the idea first came to him two years earlier, in December of 1975.
That was when he moved back to the Washington, D.C. area and was renting a room at a boarding house in Maryland.
When he failed to pay his rent, they gave him the boot.
According to the version of events he told forensic psychologist Dr. Chris Mohandi in 1999, it happened on Christmas Eve.
Quote, I just got really pissed off.
I just thought, I'm not going to put up with this shit anymore.
I'm going to start doing some killing.
I blamed the Jews on everything that happened to me.
Typical Nazi belief.
I figured, I'm going to get some of them.
Here I was, an intelligent man, and I couldn't hold a job.
Well, they got people a lot dumber than me with really good jobs.
I decided that wasn't fair.
That does sound like the kind of thing a Nazi who'd never had a real job besides selling racist newspapers would think.
This version of events, though, leaves out the one periodical I can actually guarantee you that he absolutely read in December of 1975.
And that's Hustler.
I threw that magazine down on the coffee table and thought I'm going to kill that guy.
You hear me?
Hear me?
Hear me?
Hear me.
Now, of course, a fine, upstanding white American neo-Nazi doesn't look at porn.
Pornography is degenerate, a tool of Jewish subversion or something like that.
The first time he told a reporter about the outrage he felt when he opened that December 1975 issue of Hustler, he claimed he'd never purchased an issue of that magazine.
He must have seen it on a newsstand.
But what did he just say?
Newsstands don't usually let you sit down in a chair next to a coffee table and peruse the center folds.
So color me skeptical.
And as scandalized as he claims to have been by the sight of hardcore pornography, I did find a mention in his FBI file that he was alleged to have kept a personal photo album containing nude pictures of the many, many sex workers he paid for their time over the years.
Point being, he was reading Hustler at the boarding house the week before Christmas in 1975.
And what he saw in that issue pushed him over the edge.
I mean, he couldn't have known what horrors he was about to see.
The cover had no warning.
A pretty white woman, nude and sitting with her knees drawn into her chest, filled out most of the cover.
And the cover lines promised articles about seducing virgins and having threesomes and teased an erotic short story about rape fantasies.
He must have been totally blindsided when he got to page 39.
I read a lot of source material about this.
It's abundantly clear from the secondary sources that what he found was interracial pornography, and that was very upsetting to him.
But if I'm going to spend several 10-hour days finding and reading 100 issues of old Nazi newsletters, the least I could do was try to find a single ancient issue of Hustler.
I found a surprisingly massive catalog of old porno mags that have been digitalized and uploaded to the internet for free.
But this one was kind of tricky to find.
So I really hope I don't end up regretting using my credit card to purchase vintage pornography online.
And I hope there isn't some sort of HR violation in explaining why I need to expense that.
Now I'm hesitant to say that I'm glad that I spent money to purchase vintage hardcore pornography for work, but I am glad I saw the actual pictures.
The 10-page photo spread in question was called Butch, a black stud and his Georgia Peach.
Hustler isn't really my cup of tea, but as far as these things go, I have to say the pictures are kind of tasteful, I think.
I mean, I know that sounds like a wild descriptor for an issue of Hustler, but I thought it would be really horrifying or degrading or graphic, and it isn't.
Butch Williams, a black male performer at an adult club in Hawaii who was known for his naked waiter act and a white woman referred to only as peaches, are just embracing in a grove of palm trees and lying nude side by side on a sandy beach.
I still hustler, so the pictures do get a little more explicit, but again, it's not degrading.
Peaches looks like she's having a fine time on the beach getting railed, bent over on a palm tree stump.
I've looked at way worse stuff in my research for this show.
I guess for as much research as I've done about how racist people are and what people's racial attitudes were like in the 70s and how it was only eight years after the Supreme Court legalized interracial marriage nationwide, I guess I was just kind of surprised that these pictures of a black man and a white woman nude together were so shocking because it wasn't just Franklin who was shocked by this.
This was outrageous stuff.
I don't know, some of the photos look like something you might hang in your living room if you're a little bit freaky.
But that's what the catalyst was.
Klan Membership Revelations00:15:20
And he would tell both of those stories many times, but never together.
Right?
He would say that he got this mission from God to kill Jews after he was evicted on Christmas Eve in 1975.
And he would say that he decided to kill Larry Flint after he saw this interracial pornography in December of 1975.
Both of these versions of the truth are things he never walked back and would retell multiple times over many years, but I couldn't find any interview that contains both elements.
He's never telling both of these things in the same context.
And I wonder if that's because sometimes he's remembering an actual event.
And sometimes he's imagining that he is the fictional version of himself in William Luther Pierce's novel.
Sometimes he believes the mythology he invented.
But God didn't speak to Joseph Paul Franklin.
He was broke, he was mad at his landlord, and he saw some pornography that hurt his feelings.
And in every version that he tells, this is the moment that he decided.
Whatever it was in December of 1975, this is when he decided he had to do something.
In the middle of the night, Saskia awoke in a haze.
Her husband, Mike, was on his laptop.
What was on his screen would change Saskia's life forever.
I said, I need you to tell me exactly what you're doing.
And immediately, the mask came off.
You're supposed to be safe.
That's your home.
That's your husband.
To keep this secret for so many years, he's like a seasoned pro.
This is a story about the end of a marriage, but it's also the story of one woman who was done living in the dark.
You're a dangerous person who preys on vulnerable and trusting people.
You're invited, Michael Epengood.
Listen to Betrayal Season 5 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Welcome to the A Building.
I'm Hans Charles, our middle at Lamova.
It's 1969.
Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. have both been assassinated, and Black America was at a breaking point.
Rioting and protests broke out on an unprecedented scale.
In Atlanta, Georgia, at Martin's Alma Mada, Morehouse College, the students had their own protest.
It featured two prominent figures in Black history: Martin Luther King Sr. and a young student, Samuel L. Jackson.
To be in what we really thought was a revolution.
I mean, people would die.
1968, the murder of Dr. King, which traumatized everyone.
The FBI had a role in the murder of a Black Panther leader in Chicago.
This story is about protest.
It echoes in today's world far more than it should, and it will blow your mind.
Listen to the A Building on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Bowen Yang.
And I'm Matt Rogers.
During this season of the Two Guys Five Rings podcast, in the lead up to the Milan-Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic Games, we've been joined by some of our friends.
Hi, Hannah!
Hey, Palmo!
Hey, Matt!
Hey, Bowen!
Hi, Cookie!
Hi!
Now the Winter Olympic Games are underway, and we are in Italy to give you experiences from our hearts to your ears.
Listen to Two Guys Five Rings on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What if mind control is real?
If you could control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of wife would you have?
Can you hypnotically persuade someone to buy a car?
When you look at your car, you're going to become overwhelmed with such good feelings.
Can you hypnotize someone into sleeping with you?
I gave her some suggestions to be sexually aroused.
Can you get someone to join your cult?
NLP was used on me to access my subconscious.
NLP, aka neuro-linguistic programming, is a blend of hypnosis, linguistics, and psychology.
Fans say it's like finally getting a user manual for your brain.
It's about engineering consciousness.
Mind games is the story of NLP.
Its crazy cast of disciples and the fake doctor who invented it at a new age commune and sold it to guys in suits.
He stood trial for murder and got acquitted.
The biggest mind game of all, NLP might actually work.
This is wild.
Listen to Mind Games on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Peyton's book says that Franklin joined the Ku Klux Klan a few months after this.
And it says that he joined specifically because he intended to learn what he was going to need to know to carry out his plan.
He wanted to learn from members of the Klan.
He knew the Klan could provide him with paramilitary type training, instructions on bomb making, access to caches of weapons.
This is what he's saying, that he joined the Klan as part of his plan to carry out an attack that he had already come up with.
And the Klan was a great place to learn how to build a bomb.
And I have no doubt that whoever taught him the basics of bomb making absolutely had been in the clan at some point.
But I can't make the timeline make sense here.
He says he was a member of the clan for about six months, from spring through fall.
And Aiton is quite clear that it was the Atlanta chapter of the United Klans of America, and he was quickly promoted to the position of Kliegel, a ridiculous sounding term you might remember from the Barry Black episodes a while back.
A Kliegel is a regional recruiter, so he would have been responsible for recruiting and organizing new members of the chapter in Atlanta.
And Aiton's book says that this would have been from spring through fall of 76.
So a few months after this Christmas epiphany about murder.
But I'm wondering if it's not a mistake.
If maybe those six months in the Klan were in 75, not 76.
Because that would line up with his decision to leave Atlanta in November of 75.
if that's when he quit the Klan, makes sense.
Because he couldn't have been running Klan recruitment meetings in Atlanta in 1976 because he didn't live there.
This is where we do have some firm points back on our timeline.
The Secret Service knows exactly where Franklin was living in the spring of 1976 and it was in Atlanta.
And whether or not he was in the Klan in 75 or 76 would matter a lot less if we weren't arguing about just how much these groups he was involved with influenced his motive and means to commit those murders.
Did he join the Klan after making up his mind to kill?
And he only joined because he thought they could teach him how to do this thing he'd already come up with on his own and never told them about?
Or did he start thinking that God was telling him to blow up a synagogue after he spent six months attending a Klan training camp where they taught him how to blow up synagogues?
Hard to say.
I think it matters.
So I don't know when he joined the Klan or why, but I do know that in February of 1976, he was living in a trailer park in Hyattsville, Maryland.
The Secret Service tracked down his address after he sent a vaguely threatening letter to presidential candidate Jimmy Carter, accusing him of selling out white people and pandering to black voters.
The exact language of the letter isn't reproduced in the articles I could find, but it was described as a veiled threat.
And I have to imagine it used some much coarser racial language.
By the time the Secret Service showed up in Maryland, he'd already been evicted, again, for not paying his rent.
And the landlord at the trailer park didn't have a forwarding address.
The letter must not have been that serious, because this minor roadblock was enough trouble that the Secret Service just dropped it and closed the case.
And they must not have looked that hard because Franklin hadn't even left the county.
Just a few months later, he filed a petition in Prince George's County Court to legally change his name.
I've been calling him Franklin all this time for simplicity's sake.
But up until this moment, he's actually been James Clayton Vaughan Jr.
That's the name he was born with.
He hated his father, who was an abusive drunk who'd abandoned the family when he was a child, but it wasn't his father's namesake he was trying to get rid of.
It was his criminal record.
A legal name change wouldn't actually protect him from a proper background check if he came under intense scrutiny for another crime in the United States.
But he was probably correct in assuming the Rhodesian government would be fooled by it.
He had a plan.
A few quick targeted terrorist acts here in the United States.
And then before anyone could catch him, he'd flee the country.
He'd been reading about this war in Rhodesia.
They needed white mercenaries to fight for their white ethnostate.
It's a perfect plan.
What better place for an aspiring race warrior than this faraway land where there was a war already happening, where he could fight in an army that would pay him to shoot black people?
Rhodesia is something of a recurring theme on the show, but I guess any episode could be someone's first, and I can't remember if Rhodesia is a concept we're all familiar with, or if my frame of reference is broken because I've read too many manifestos.
But Rhodesia was never real.
The Rhodesian Bush War was real, and a lot of people were killed in the name of Rhodesia, but it was never internationally recognized as a sovereign nation.
The area was a British colony until white minority leader Ian Smith illegally declared independence in 1965.
And Rhodesia pretended to exist until 1979 when it became Zimbabwe.
If you hear someone referring to a physical place called Rhodesia or referring to a person as being Rhodesian, you can be very confident in assuming that person is a rabid white supremacist.
Because there is no Rhodesia.
I discussed the historical reality of Rhodesian mercenaries during the Bush War a little bit in the Frank Sweeney episodes.
Those originally aired back in 2024, but I re-ran them on the feed a few weeks ago.
But generally speaking, it seems like being a Rhodesian mercenary is something a lot of racists love thinking about.
But very few actually did.
Franklin was one of many American racists who saw ads in places like Soldier of Fortune magazine and thought it would be the adventure of a lifetime to go to darkest Africa to kill black Africans for sport.
The fact that it would be in service of violently maintaining a white ethno-state made it even more appealing.
Articles intended to entice would-be mercenaries promised that when the war was over, they could live in this new white paradise and there would be plenty of beautiful white wives for them to stay and marry.
That didn't happen.
There is no Rhodesia.
But even now, decades after the Bush War is over, this idea of the white warrior fighting for a white homeland in Rhodesia has a sort of mythic status in certain circles.
So it's not surprising that's where Franklin wanted to go in 1976.
Unfortunately for him, though, this illegal ethno-state waging a brutal war against Black Africans didn't accept murdered tourists who had criminal records for some reason.
And James Clayton Vaughan Jr. had been arrested quite a few times, mostly in connection with Nazi rallies that got a little too rowdy.
And he had a conviction for illegally carrying a concealed firearm.
Honestly, you probably shouldn't have worried so much about it.
I mean, yes, the recruiter would have said they only take mercenaries of upstanding moral character with no criminal records.
But I don't think they actually checked.
Frank Sweeney managed to make it into the Rhodesian Light Infantry, and he'd been to prison for bank robbery and shooting a policeman with a machine gun.
When he confessed to having that criminal record to his superior officer in Rhodesia because he wanted them to send him home, they didn't believe him.
They claimed they looked into it and they determined that he was lying because he wanted to go home because they couldn't find any record of him committing a crime.
The imaginary government of Rhodesia couldn't find an American criminal record if you told them exactly what you did and what county you did it in.
I don't think they were going to run a full background check and find an old weapons charge.
But Franklin obviously believed they would.
So in July of 1976, he asked a judge in Maryland to grant him a name change.
James Clayton Vaughan Jr. wanted to be known as Joseph Paul Franklin.
He said he put a lot of thought into choosing this new name.
He wanted to honor both the heroes of the American Revolution and Nazi Germany.
He settled on Franklin out of admiration for Benjamin Franklin.
And Joseph Paul is a little twist on Goebbels' name.
Hitler's propaganda minister was born Paul Joseph Goebbels, though he was addressed informally only by his middle name, Joseph.
Franklin said he wanted to honor Goebbels, but he swapped the order of the names because Joseph Paul made him sound more like an English person.
Whatever that means.
His new name was supposed to be his ticket to a clean criminal record.
New Name, Old Troubles00:03:22
But he got in his own way immediately.
It was September when his petition for a name change was granted.
That same month, he was arrested for attacking an interracial couple.
He was out late at night when he spotted Aaron Miles, a young black man who was driving his white girlfriend, Carol Eastwood, home from their date.
He followed them aggressively for about 15 minutes before Miles took a wrong turn and accidentally ended up down a dead end.
Franklin caught up to them and swung around cutting them off, and he confronted the couple, calling Miles a racial slur and then spraying them both with chemical mace.
So now with this new arrest, his new name is tainted too.
He would later claim that he'd actually changed his mind about becoming a mercenary when he read that Rhodesian leader Ian Smith had agreed sometime in late 1976 to a compromise proposed by Henry Kissinger that would eventually introduce black majority rule.
It's hard to say if he actually had any kind of complex understanding of the political realities of the war, considering he also seemed to believe that by signing up to be a mercenary, he could just walk around southern Africa shooting anyone he wanted without any sort of structure or responsibilities.
But either way, Rhodesia was off the table.
He welcomed the new year as a new man.
In 1977, James Clayton Vaughan Jr. was gone, and Joseph Paul Franklin was desperate to do something.
He'd been dreaming of his first explosive act of violence for more than a year.
And before he started stalking Larry Flint, before he drove to Wisconsin to try to shoot a judge, before he murdered a young couple in a mall parking lot, he tried to emulate his hero, and he built a bomb.
In the summer of 1977, the feds were taking a hard look at J.B. Stoner.
There were rumors of an upcoming congressional inquiry to explore the possibility that he'd been a co-conspirator in the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.
He was about to be arrested for one of the more than a dozen church and synagogue bombings he'd been linked to more than a decade earlier.
As speculation raged about J.B. Stoner's involvement behind the scenes in some of the ugliest racial terror of the mid-20th century, the man who actually killed Martin Luther King escaped from prison.
James Earl Ray was recaptured three days later, but tensions were high.
Maybe it's a coincidence that Joseph Paul Franklin robbed his first bank that week.
Suddenly, he needed money to buy dynamite.
Weird Little Guys is a production of Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio.
It's researched, written, and recorded by me, Molly Conger.
James Earl Ray Recaptured00:02:40
Our executive producers are Sophie Litterman 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.
Just don't post anything that's going to make you one of my weird little guys.
In the middle of the night, Saskia awoke in a haze.
Her husband Mike was on his laptop.
What was on his screen would change Saskia's life forever.
I said, I need you to tell me exactly what you're doing.
And immediately, the mask came off.
You're supposed to be safe.
That's your home.
That's your husband.
Listen to Betrayal Season 5 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
1969, Malcolm and Martin are gone.
America is in crisis.
And at Morehouse College, the students make their move.
These students, including a young Samuel L. Jackson, locked up the members of the Board of Trustees, including Martin Luther King Sr.
It's the true story of protests and rebellion in Black American history that you'll never forget.
I'm Hans Charles, our menalik Lamooma.
Listen to the A Building on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Over the last couple years, didn't we learn that the folding chair was invented by black people because of what happened in Alabama?
This Black History Month, the podcast Selective Ignorance with Mandy B unpacks Black history and culture with comedy, clarity, and conversations that shake the status quo.
The Crown Act in New York was signed in July of 2019, and that is a bill that was passed to prohibit discrimination based on hairstyles associated with race.
To hear this and more, listen to Selective Ignorance with Mandy B from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Bowen Yang, and I'm Matt Rogers.
During this season of the Two Guys Five Rings podcast, in the lead-up to the Milan-Cortina 2026 Winter Olympic Games, we've been joined by some of our friends.
Hazard, hello!
Hey, Elmo!
Hey, Matt!
Hey, Bowen!
Hi, Kirky!
Hi!
Now, the Winter Olympic Games are underway, and we are in Italy to give you experiences from our hearts to your ears.
Listen to Two Guys Five Rings on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.