August 28, 2024 • 54 mins
Frank Abbott Sweeney Jr may be the Forrest Gump of American white supremacy in the 20th century. Starting with a failed bank robbery for the American Nazi Party in the 60s, Frank stumbled his way into being an inconsequential side character in major historical events for decades.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Col Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
This is a story that begins and ends in bank
parking lots, more or less in the way that stories
can really begin or end.
Speaker 1 (00:17):
Our subject today was alive.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
Before the story begins, and as I'm writing this, he's
still alive. But for the purposes of this telling, we'll
start outside the Palisade Trust Company Bank in Englewood, New Jersey,
on February twenty third, nineteen sixty two, when an eighteen
year old member of the American Nazi Party was arrested
after skipping school to try to rob a bank with
a toy gun, and will mark the beginning of the
(00:40):
end of his story in a Wells Fargo parking lot
in Garden City, Idaho, on October thirteenth, twenty eighteen, when
an elderly ex con was caught on security cam footage
getting into an altercation with a couple who didn't move
forward quickly enough at the drive up atm In the
decades in between, Frank Sweeney went to prison at least
half a day times bought as a foreign mercenary, got
(01:02):
deported from both Rhodesia and South Africa, helped an escaped
spy of ade U S Marshals turned state's witness against
a Hitler worshiping serial killer, tried to help the mob,
and waged a three year campaign of terror and harassment
against a woman who made a passing comment about how
he was parked outside the post office. I'm Molly Conger,
(01:25):
and this is brune, little guys, this.
Speaker 1 (01:44):
Is a strange one.
Speaker 2 (01:46):
The first few episodes of this show were stories I
already knew and thought you should know too. Kevin Strom
was a prominent figure in the white supremacist movement for decades,
and it was big local news here in Charlesville when
he was arrested twenty years ago. The Gerald Drake case
was something I read about when it happened. The cases
against the gun trafficking Nazi paramilitary group was a story
(02:07):
I spent years reading, paying ten cents a page, one
court filing at a time as it wound its way
through the system. But this one, this one is brand
new to me, and I think he will be brand
new to just about everybody, because for as many times
as this man shows up in the newspaper over the
last sixty years, I haven't found any one's source that's
(02:30):
gathered together the threads of his life and tried to
make sense of how one man's name could appear in
so many other people's stories, because that's where I found him.
In someone else's story. I was reading a biography of
a particularly nasty little guy one will definitely get to
(02:51):
eventually in another episode when my weird little guide detector
went off. Call it a gut feeling, but this passing
mention of a side character in the life of a
serial killer was enough to get me to put that
book down and spend days digging through newspaper archives trying
to figure out Frank.
Speaker 1 (03:14):
And what I found was kind of.
Speaker 2 (03:15):
A bizarro world Forest Gump, one man whose life keeps
intersecting with major historical events, just wandering in and out
of the lives of gullible reporters, frustrated federal agents and
the innocent bystanders who accidentally became his targets, just bumbling
his way through history, but without any of Tom Hanks's charm.
(03:40):
I know we don't really know each other yet. I
haven't earned the trust it takes to know you'll believe
me when I promise you a two parter is worth
the weight in between.
Speaker 1 (03:48):
But I think you'll agree.
Speaker 2 (03:51):
Frank's story is weird enough for two episodes. Frank Abbott
Sweeney Junior was born in August of nineteen forty three
in New Jersey, to Frank Abbott Sweeney Senior, a realtor,
and Marie Gleeson Sweeney, a homemaker who taught violin lessons
and volunteered with the Red Cross. As a lifelong con artist,
a lot of what he's told reporters about his own
(04:12):
life is self serving fiction, which would sometimes get published
without fact checking and then reappear in later accounts as fact.
Speaker 1 (04:20):
It was in the newspaper, after all.
Speaker 2 (04:22):
So I've taken great pains to verify what I can,
debunk what I can, and take note of the things
I can only offer you with a grain of salt.
Some of Frank's own lies are easily disproved, like the
resume he gave a Rhodesian Army recruiter on it. He
claimed he graduated from Georgetown University in nineteen sixty five
(04:43):
at the degree in psychology, but he couldn't possibly have
matriculated at Georgetown in nineteen sixty one. He was a
senior at Tenafly High School in nineteen sixty two when
he was sent to the Annandell Reformatory for two and
a half years. He never finished high school. His claim
that has as Francis Shellhammer derives from his mother's maiden
name also fails to hold up to scrutiny. His mother
(05:06):
was born Marie Gleeson to John Gleeson, a fireman, and
Lottie Gross Gleason in Chicago, and I was generous here.
I wasted a lot of time. I even checked his grandparents.
His middle name, Abbott was his paternal grandmother Martha's maiden name.
I went as far as to track his family treat
all the way back to Ireland, giving him the benefit
(05:28):
of the doubt that maybe there's a shell Hammer in
there somewhere.
Speaker 1 (05:31):
I didn't find one.
Speaker 2 (05:33):
It's possible that I started mixing up my Martha's, Mary's,
John's and Francis's by the time I was cross referencing
marriage records from the eighteen seventies.
Speaker 1 (05:41):
But he probably just made it up.
Speaker 2 (05:44):
He does a lot of that and other aspects of
Frank's story would require a trip to the National Archive
to sift through dusty boxes of ancient court transcripts, and
an unlikely degree of transparency from the Central Intelligence Agency
or a deathbed confession from mobster, or a few tell
all memoirs from US marshalls to ever hope to sort out.
(06:06):
The rest is somewhere in between. But I'll stick with
what we do know to be true. And I said
this story begins outside of a bank. On February twenty third,
nineteen sixty two, Frank Sweeney skipped school. Shortly after nine am.
He walked into a bank in Englewood, New Jersey, approached
(06:27):
the teller and slid a plastic toy gun that he'd
painted black out of a Manila envelope. I'd like to
make a withdrawal, he told the teller as he cocked
the toy pistol. I don't know if the teller could
tell the gun was fake, or if she just didn't
think this gangly, redheaded teenager had it in him to
shoot her, or maybe she just was having a bad
(06:49):
day and didn't care anymore, because, according to local news reports,
she sneered at him, got up and walked away, leading
him standing there alone at the counter with his toy
gun and bewildered by the teller's apparent disinterest in being
held at gunpoint, he just put the plastic pistol back
(07:10):
in his pocket, turned around and walked out the front door,
and as he was leaving, an off duty policeman just
happened to be walking into the bank. An employee told
the officer what had just happened, and he turned right
around and caught Frank just outside. He dragged him back
inside the bank to be identified by the teller, and
as the patrolman is making the arrest, Frank says to him.
Speaker 1 (07:34):
Well, I guess it didn't work.
Speaker 2 (07:37):
Later, under interrogation, he would tell the officers that his
plan had been to support the movement to use the
money from the bank robbery to support the activities of
the American Nazi Party under George Lincoln Rockwell. At his arraignment,
the judge asked, Frank, aren't you the fellow who's been
painting swastikas on synagogues around here. Frank denied this, and
(07:58):
he told the judge I never did anything illegal in
my life, and then he pleaded guilty to the attempted
bank robbery. There's no other mention of Frank in connection
with that anti Semitic vandalism the judge mentioned, But I
did find several newspaper articles about incidents of that sort
from the prior to years when Frank would have still
been a minor. In January nineteen sixty three, unnamed teenage
(08:20):
boys were accused of painting swastikas on parked cars in Emerson,
just eight miles away. In February of nineteen sixty one,
someone hung a swastika banner over the entrance of the
synagogue in Tenafly. Newspaper articles about that banner reference a
similar recent incident at the synagogue in nearby Englewood. A
few days later, someone painted a swastika over a plaque nearby.
(08:42):
In June, two teenage boys respotted fleeing the scene after
two trailers belonging to a contract or were broken into
and left a swastika painted on the floor inside. In
all these incidents, police told the papers of the time
that they had referred the cases to the juvenile Division.
It's not like anti Semitic incidents are so rare that
I'm saying that Frank is the only possible suspect here.
(09:03):
In every nineteen sixties Bergen County News article about a swastika,
I found plenty of other newspaper reports during those same
two years about a local man flying a Swastika flag
outside of his home, about attacks on Jewish businesses and
synagogues and neighboring cities, and other incidents that just don't
fit this particular pattern of teenage Nazi vandalism, and the
(09:25):
comment the judge made makes it sound like Frank had
been there before. But any appearance he'd made in court
as a miner wouldn't have been reported with his name
attached to it. And it's hard enough to get any
information about a juvenile case in twenty twenty four, so
forget figuring out what how about in nineteen sixty one,
But it does seem pretty likely he'd at least been
(09:46):
a suspect in some of those incidents, because at the
hearing where he pled guilty to the attempt at bank robbery,
Frank did admit that the police had spoken to him
on numerous occasions, specifically concerning his involvement in George Lincoln
Rockwell American Nazi Party. For the attempted bank robbery, Frank
was sentenced to an indeterminate term at a boy's reformatory,
(10:09):
and he was released on October of nineteen sixty four,
shortly after his twenty first birthday after serving About two
and a half years after his first stint in jail,
Frank returned to his parents' home in New Jersey. He
worked occasionally as a shipping clerk, but it doesn't seem
like he was holding down a steady job. One afternoon
in July of nineteen sixty seven, neighbors reported hearing gunshots
(10:32):
in the woods. An officer drove by to check it
out and saw a car parked on the side of
the road. The car looked empty, so the officer kept
driving without stopping to investigate. Suddenly, the car pulled out
behind him and tried to run the officer off the road.
A brief vehicle chase ensued, with the officer following the
vehicle for about a mile before the driver. Frank parked
(10:52):
outside of his parents' home, got out and walked toward
the front door.
Speaker 1 (10:58):
The officer asked.
Speaker 2 (10:58):
Frank if he'd been shooting guns in the woods, to
which Frank replied only no, and then warned the officer
that he was on private property for walking away and
into the house. But Frank left something on the front
seat of the car, unfortunately, and it was a Thompson
submachine gun that he'd been firing in the woods. The
(11:21):
officer saw the gun and called for backup, and when
they arrived, Frank opened fire on them from inside the home,
kicking off a seventy five minute gun battle, with more
than a dozen cops firing shots at the house. As
Frank fired at them through the windows, Frank's father and
brother pleaded with him to come out, or at least
to send the family dog out. After police Captain Peter
(11:44):
Zurla was shot in the arm, the officers lobbed four
canisters of tear gas through the windows, finally driving Frank
out into the front yard, where he was arrested without
further incident. And as they put the handcuffs on him,
he turned to Captain Zerla, who's still standing there in
the front yard bleeding from a gun shot wound, and
Frank says, some shot when I got you through the window.
Speaker 1 (12:05):
Huh.
Speaker 2 (12:06):
There's no follow up I can find about whether the
dog was heard, or how missus Sweeney got the tear
gas out of her upholstery. It was the sixties, so
maybe her sofa was safely scotch guarded or wrapped up
in one of those weird plastic covers. That were popular
back then, but you have to figure she at least
had to replace the curtains. Frank entered a not guilty
plea and unsuccessfully tried to suppress the evidence of the
(12:29):
gun found on the front seat of the car, with
his attorney arguing that it was discovered in an illegal
search because the cop didn't have probable cause to look
through the window of the parked car. That's not how
that works. At trial, the defense put on three psychiatrists
to argue for insanity, and the state put on two
of their own, who testified that Frank was certainly disturbed,
(12:51):
but not legally insane. The jury deliberated for just three
hours before finding Frank guilty of attempted homicide, assault with
the intent to kill, possession of a machine gun, and
something called atrocious assault that I've never heard of. We
don't have that here in Virginia, but in New Jersey,
atrocious assault is an assault and battery, savage and cruel
(13:13):
in character which results in maiming or wounding.
Speaker 1 (13:16):
So that definitely qualifies.
Speaker 2 (13:19):
And he was sentenced to six years, which, honestly, that's
kind of remarkable, right. I'm not going to bat for
the corsoral state here. Far from it, you know more,
jail time doesn't really fix anybody, and we'll come to
see that jail never comes close to fixing Frank. But
reading those sixties news stories about this event was fascinating.
(13:42):
This cop who got shot by a Nazi with a
Tommy gun is described in every article as quote lightly wounded.
I mean, he does seem to have not been seriously injured.
He was shot, you know, in the upper arm. I
don't think it went through the bone, so it really
he was lightly wounded. But that's not what they would
put in the newspaper today, you know it. And the
(14:05):
cops didn't drive a tank through the front of this
suburban home or unload their guns into him when he
came out. There's been such a massive culture shift over
the years and the way we justify aggressive police response
and the way that we talk about the risk to police.
It's just interesting to see that it wasn't always that way.
But there's another unanswered question in the story of this
(14:28):
siege in this New York suburb. What was he doing
that day? I mean shooting guns in the woods, obviously,
but why did he panic when that cop drove by
and why those woods in particular, We'll never really know.
Even if he told us, we wouldn't know. He's a liar.
(14:48):
But the newspaper articles at the time do say that
the officer initially saw Frank's car parked at the intersection
of East Clinton Avenue and Woodland Street, about a mile
from where Frank lived.
Speaker 1 (14:59):
At the time. They used to put everything in the newspaper.
Speaker 2 (15:03):
It's so beautiful, every detail, every boring little bit in
which they.
Speaker 1 (15:08):
Still did that.
Speaker 2 (15:10):
And I'm eternally curious about details that probably won't end
up mattering. But I pulled up a map of ten
of Flying, New Jersey, and there is a large wooded
area you could walk straight into if you parked your
car at that intersection, And those woods surround a large
building that first opened its doors in nineteen fifty, the
Kaplan Jewish Community Center. The clearest account of the next
(15:46):
phase of Frank's life comes from an essay written in
twenty nineteen by a retired Rhodesian military policeman. Despite being
the most likely to be more or less true, it's
still riddled with obvious factual inaccuracies, things that just can't
be true. Maybe because it was written as a humorous
recollection meant to be read by his fellow former Rhodesian soldiers,
(16:09):
and maybe his memory has faded a bit in the
nearly fifty years since the event in question, but it
does at the very least substantiate Frank's own claim about
having enlisted in the Rhodesian Light Infantry in the early
nineteen seventies. I'll try to walk the tight rope here
of providing a little more context than just Rhodesia was
(16:30):
very bad and white supremacists from other countries were obsessed
with the idea that they could travel there to kill
black people with impunity, while still stopping short of taking
us down the long road of the history and consequences
of European colonization in Africa. That's far from my area
of expertise, and it's not why you're here.
Speaker 1 (16:48):
Now.
Speaker 2 (16:48):
Even if you're coming into this with a completely blank
slate for some reason, you're probably thinking there's no country
called Rhodesia, and you're right, there is. There never really was.
Rhodesia was never recognized as a sovereign state. But we're
calling Rhodesia here as the present day state of Zimbabwe
(17:09):
in southern Africa. In the early twentieth century, Rhodesia was
a British territory. The legacy of Cecil Roads is British
South Africa Company. The area was effectively ruled by the
company until the nineteen twenties, when it became a self
governing colony of the UK, and by the nineteen fifties
decolonization was happening all across the African continent. These fading
(17:30):
European empires couldn't or didn't want to hold on to
all the colonies they'd collected during the previous centuries scramble
for Africa. In nineteen sixty British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan
gave his Wind of Change speech in an address to
the South African Parliament about the political necessity of moving
toward decolonization. The wind of change is blowing through this continent,
(17:54):
whether we like it or not. This growth national consciousness
is a political fact. We was all accepted as a fact.
Speaker 3 (18:07):
Our national policies must take a contribute.
Speaker 2 (18:11):
He'd actually given the same speech a few weeks earlier
in Ghana, but the press didn't pick it up the
first time. And I think the whether we like it
or not part of that statement matters a lot.
Speaker 1 (18:21):
Here. He wasn't advocating for decolonization out of the goodness
of his heart.
Speaker 2 (18:26):
He was reluctantly acknowledging the expensive and bloody political reality
of trying to hold on to these colonies at any cost.
He could see the Belgians and Congo, and the French
in Algeria fighting these costly wars with Africans who wanted
an end to European colonial rule, and as they worked
towards extricating themselves from these colonial arrangements, the British government
(18:47):
adopted a policy called no independence before majority rule, meaning
they wouldn't hand over sovereignty to a colony still run
exclusively by the white colonial minority. Now, obviously, this is
an immensely complicated bit of political history that I'm stripping
down to the studs and explaining badly so we get
through it quickly. So don't think I'm giving the British
(19:08):
Empire any kind of credit here. This policy did not
arise out of a genuine desire to undo the harms
of colonialism and address racism or anything like that. That
was not on their minds. But I think they knew
what it would look like if their decolonization looked exactly
like their colony. And we're not talking about a pr
(19:29):
loss here.
Speaker 1 (19:30):
This is the Cold War.
Speaker 2 (19:31):
They don't want to give the Soviets an opportunity to
come in behind them. But it was this policy, or
rather defiance of it, that led Rhodesia under Ian Smith
to make the unilateral declaration of independence in nineteen sixty five.
White colonists made up just five percent of the population
of the territory, but they were unwilling to accept that
(19:51):
the UK would only grant Rhodesian independence if they shared
even a crumb of political power with the other ninety
five percent of Rhodesia. And apologies again for these digressions.
I just love the context. I think it's so important.
But that brings us to where we were going. The
Rhodesian Bush War a fifteen year period of civil conflict
(20:14):
between the white minority led government and the African nationalist
guerrilla forces. The number of foreign mercenaries who actually traveled
to Rhodesia during the war remains up for debate. Most
of the countries the mercenaries came from were embarrassed by
the whole affair. International sanctions levied against the territory after
the illegal declaration of independence made it illegal for citizens
(20:37):
of many countries to participate in the conflict, even in
countries that didn't have their own domestic laws banning mercenary activity.
And there was some discomfort within Rhodesia too about this
perception that they needed foreigners to help with what they
saw as their war for independence. So, for deeply unflattering
and regrettable reasons, no one was very investing and getting
(21:00):
a thorough accounting of the situation, right, nobody benefits from
knowing what happened here. But at the high end, it
was really only a few thousand mercenaries over the total
course of the conflict, with best estimates for the number
of them who were Americans being somewhere in the low hundreds.
So a lot of guys talked about it, but not
(21:24):
very many of them actually did it. This idea of
American extremists traveling to Africa to violently enforce white rule
over black Africans is one that modern white supremacists still
cherish and celebrate. Dylan Rufe, who was welcomed with open
arms at an evening Bible study at a manual African
Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina registered the domain
(21:48):
last Rhodesian dot com a few months before he murdered
nine of the parishioners who thought he was joining them
for prayer that night. Rufe made his final edit to
that site his digital manifesto, just out before carrying out
that attack. In twenty fifteen. The cultural moment where magazines
like Soldier of Fortune ran full page advertisements for opportunities
(22:09):
to be a man among men in the African bush
looms large in our memories, But the reality is there
weren't many men who actually heeded the call, and their
role in the conflict was insignificant. But unlike many of
those Americans who did end up in Rhodesia in the seventies,
Frank Sweeney didn't see an advertisement in Soldier of Fortune.
(22:33):
That magazine's first issue, bearing a cover story about American
mercenaries in Africa, was published in the summer of nineteen
seventy five, just as Frank Sweeney was already on his
way home. According to Frank, which is a dangerous way
to start an assertion of fact. He walked into the
Rhodesian Information Center in Washington, d C. In nineteen seventy
(22:53):
two and asked how to join up. The information center
was not technical a diplomatic office because Rhodesia was not
technically a country, the fact that would get them into
some trouble in Australia, but they claimed that they were
just offering information about tourism. Frank says he was offered
the contact information for Major Nick Lamprecht, the Rhodesian Army's
(23:17):
chief recruiter. David Annibl, a reporter for the Christian Science
Monitor who interviewed Frank in nineteen seventy five, wrote that
he'd spoken to another recent visitor to that office. After
talking to Frank, this visitor walked into the office and
was given a brochure printed by the Rhodesian Department of
Labor about careers in Rhodesia, And after a thirty minute
(23:38):
presentation about Americans already fighting in the conflict and the
pay and benefits a mercenary could expect, including paid airfare,
all violations of international sanctions in US federal law, the
visitor was offered Major Lamprek's contact information that recruiter Nick
lamprect worked closely with Soldier of Fortune founder Robert K.
(23:58):
Brown to strategize how the magazine can be used to
convince more Americans to make the trip. In the latter
years of the conflict, Lampreck himself even wrote an article
for the magazine promising young American soldiers of fortune that
it would be easy for them to find a beautiful
white Rhodesian wife. I think Lamprek knew he was lying
about how much fun you could have fighting in the
(24:19):
Bush War. His own son, Vincent, had already fled to
South Africa to avoid military service. In what you may
be sensing as a theme here, the details of frank
service in Rhodesia are a little murky.
Speaker 1 (24:33):
The details of.
Speaker 2 (24:34):
A lot of what was going on in Rhodesia during
those years is not totally settled, and Frank's own involvement
far less so. He told reporter David Annibal in that
nineteen seventy five interview that as a corporal in the
Rhodesian Light Infantry, his detachment had taken many prisoners, but
when instructed to do so, they just executed people, saying
(24:56):
we shot him right there in the bush when we
were told not to take prisoners. He also admitted that
his unit had taken part in raids over the border
into neighboring Mozambique.
Speaker 1 (25:06):
He claimed that.
Speaker 2 (25:07):
Sometimes these trips over the border were to assist Portuguese troops,
and until late nineteen seventy four, Portuguese troops were in
Mozambique fighting to put down the Mozambique War of Independence,
and Frank said sometimes they'd go over the border to
raide gorilla camps, perhaps those belonging to the Zimbabwe African
National Liberation Army, which had strong ties to the groups
(25:27):
fighting for independence in Mozambique. These Rhodesian raids over the
border into Mozambique continued even after that nation gained sovereignty
in nineteen seventy five. But it's hard to pin down
when Frank would have been doing this, if he even did,
I can at least say that Frank was no longer
in Rhodesia. During one of the war's worst atrocities, a
(25:49):
Rhodesian raid on a refugee camp in Mozambique killed over
one thousand civilians. David Animal published a couple of articles
in nineteen seventy five and nineteen seventy six about Rode,
and he often quoted Frank Sweeney about his time there.
Speaker 1 (26:03):
After all, there weren't.
Speaker 2 (26:04):
Many Americans who'd been there, and even fewer who were
easy to find, and Frank was easy to find. He
was very public about his stint as a mercenary. After
returning home in nineteen seventy five, Frank placed ads in
magazines like Shotgun News and Gun Week that read.
Speaker 3 (26:24):
The Rhodesian Army offers excitement and adventure. I know I've
been there. Young Americans of European ancestry, write to me
for free. Details pertaining to recruiting Frank Abbott Sweeney seven
to two Creston Avenue, Tenafly, New Jersey, zero seven six
seven zero.
Speaker 2 (26:42):
When speaking with the reporter about his efforts to recruit
others to make the trip, Frank spoke warmly of Major
Lampreckt and claimed that it was Lamprecked himself who instructed
Frank to get in touch with as many white applicants
as possible, which is honestly probably not true, but who knows.
Frank is described as a fan of Ian Smith, of
(27:03):
white superiority, and of the need to defend both, and
is quoted as saying, if I could do anything to
preserve Western civilization in the area, I would do it.
Frank told Annabel that he'd received hundreds of letters in
response to his ads and responded to all of them.
But then again, he also told Annabel he was a
(27:25):
college graduate, and we know that's not true. An Annibal
claims Frank showed him his discharge papers from the Rhodesian
Light Infantry, which were quote in order according to the article,
and showed three years of good service and a rank
of corporal, and that's definitely not true. I'm sure Frank
did show Annibl something. He probably did show him papers
(27:48):
that indicated as much, and I don't fault him for
reporting it. It turns out Frank was quite skilled at forgery.
Frank claims he was in Washington, d c. Getting rid
recruited into the Rhodesian Army in nineteen seventy two, but
he may have actually still been in prison in nineteen
seventy two for shooting that cop. It's hard to pin
(28:08):
down exactly when he was released. One newspaper article years
later puts his parole date for that conviction at nineteen
seventy four. But I have a bad feeling that was
just a reporter on a deadline who did the math
on a six year sentence and assumed Frank served all
of it, which probably didn't. When Frank was later arrested
(28:29):
for his role in the escape of a Soviet spy,
an FBI agent puts his date of enlistment at nineteen
seventy three, so the truth is in there somewhere.
Speaker 1 (28:39):
Either way.
Speaker 2 (28:39):
He wasn't in Rhodesia for very long before he really
really wanted to go home. A war as hell for everybody.
And here we have another unreliable narrator, Anthony Hickman. Hickman
is a retired officer in the British South Africa Police,
(28:59):
which no longer exists, and confusingly was neither British nor
South African, and they weren't always really just police, but
it bore that name because it grew out of the
paramilitary force run directly by Cecil Rhodes's British South Africa
Company in the nineteenth century. The BSAP was Rhodesia's regular
police force, but the line between regular policing and military
(29:22):
operations was blurry, and during the Bush War there were
military units made up of BSAP officers and they developed
counterinsurgency and counter terrorism units. They oversaw the intelligence gathering
arm of the infamously brutal Selu Scouts, and they killed
hundreds of people by introducing poisoned food and medicine into
(29:45):
the supply lines for the insurgent forces. I don't know
exactly what Hickman was doing for most of the war.
Maybe he didn't do any of that. But these days
he's retired in Johannesburg, South Africa and makes detailed models
of trains and farmhouses. In the early nineteen seventies, he
was assigned to the homicide unit of bsap's Criminal Investigative Division,
(30:08):
and in twenty nineteen he wrote down his recollections of
Frank Sweeney for a newsletter published by his Veterans Association.
Like any account of Frank's life, Hickman's essay can't be
taken as gospel truth between the lies Frank told him
and his own fading memory of the seventies.
Speaker 1 (30:26):
It's not perfect.
Speaker 2 (30:28):
Honestly, I almost discarded it without reading past the first page.
Who's off to a pretty bad start When the first
paragraph placed these events in September of nineteen seventy seven,
which would of course be entirely impossible. Frank could not
have been in a Rhodesian Army barracks in September of
nineteen seventy seven, because according to the US Marshalls, the FBI,
(30:51):
the DOJ, the CIA in the New York Times, Frank
was hanging out with a Soviet spy in the exercise
yard at a federal prison in Los Angeles in September
of nineteen seventy seven. But I'll cut Hickman some slack
here on that faltering start, because there's ample evidence within
the story that puts these events somewhere in the springtime
of nineteen seventy five, and the data side, there is
(31:15):
enough meat to Hickman's account and the supporting primary documentation
he provided that supports the idea that the story is
more or less true. As a homicide detective, Hickman was
involved in an investigation into Frank Sweeney for attempted murder
at a Rhodesian military barracks. One evening sometime in early
(31:36):
nineteen seventy five, probably Frank went to the bathroom at
the barracks he was living in. Inside the shared facilities,
two infantrymen who had been drinking were laughing and joking around.
One was quite drunk, undressed and got into the shower
to try to sober up a little bit. Three men
were chatting pleasantly enough, but Frank was humorless and sober,
(32:00):
and he was outraged when the drunk man splashed shower.
Speaker 1 (32:03):
Water on him.
Speaker 2 (32:05):
The men argued, and one of them called Frank a
bloody yank. And Frank's not a guy who turns the
other cheek. He takes every insult very personally. So a
little bit damp, and with his pride wounded, he runs
back to his bunk and comes right back with a
seven inch dagger and pulls the shower curtain aside and
(32:27):
stabs this naked drunk man in the lower abdomen. The
other soldier ran for help, and Frank was quickly arrested,
and while he sat in custody, a mysterious letter arrived
in the mail. The postmark indicated that it had been
mailed from nearby Salisbury weeks earlier. The anonymous letter writer
(32:48):
said that a private Fa Sweeney had been convicted of
the attempted murder of a policeman in the United States.
Speaker 1 (32:56):
It was Hickman, our.
Speaker 2 (32:57):
Essayist, who first suspected that Frank may actually have written
this letter himself. And when he pressed Frank for a
handwriting sample to prove it, he cracked immediately. He'd sent
the letter himself, hoping that it would be his ticket home,
that they would kick him out and deport him when
they found out he lied about not having a criminal
(33:17):
history and that he would get a free flight back
to New Jersey without having to finish his term of service.
Speaker 1 (33:23):
And if that letter had.
Speaker 2 (33:24):
Only arrived a few days earlier, they probably would have
done just that before anybody had to get stabbed. The
story Frank then told Hickman has elements of truth, but
it's not quite right. He told Hickman that the shootout
at his parents' house had happened just the year prior,
(33:46):
and that he'd fled the country prior to being sentenced.
So he's cutting out this six year period that he
spent in prison for the shooting and pretending that he
had just arrived there in Rhodesia immediately after the events
that we know took place in July of nineteen sixty seven.
And the timeline isn't the only thing that's off in
this version. Frank says the shootout only lasted ten minutes,
(34:09):
not over an hour, and he had decided to end
the incident on his own terms when he saw that
his father had arrived, rather than the truth, which was
that he argued with his distraught father for an hour
while continuing to shoot through the windows until he was
smoked out by tear gas. But the inciting incident in
this version is similar. He told Hickman about shooting guns
(34:29):
in the woods and the neighbors reporting the noise and
the officer arriving in the car chase, but he claimed
the gun he was shooting in the woods was one
he purchased from an advertisement and soldier of Fortune magazine,
which is obviously not possible because that magazine didn't exist
in nineteen sixty seven.
Speaker 1 (34:45):
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (34:46):
Maybe he was just updating the story so it would
sound more current. But Frank said he'd purchased the Tommy
gun from the magazine, but it was missing some parts.
It didn't have a firing pin in something else, so
it didn't work. He manufactured the necessary replacement parts, but
he was concerned that in his modification of the weapon
maybe things weren't one hundred percent, and he was worried
(35:08):
that it would explode when fired, so he lashed it
to a tree and set it to fully automatic and
rigged a string to the trigger and hid behind another
tree for cover.
Speaker 1 (35:18):
This sounds so Looney Tunes to me.
Speaker 2 (35:20):
Like of literal Looney Tunes cartoon, right, this is this
is daffy duck behavior.
Speaker 1 (35:27):
But he tells this story to.
Speaker 2 (35:28):
Hickman, and in his essay Hickman writes true or false,
impossible to believe Sweeney had the uncanny ability to sound
totally convincing. But it is significant to note that a
search undertaken based on Sweeney's fingerprint records revealed no such incident,
(35:49):
which doesn't say much for the state of Rhodesian intelligence. Because, yeah,
Frank's taking a little creative license here. The story he's
telling is not one hundred percent, but he is admitting
to almost all of the real details for the real
crime he really did go to prison for. So you
(36:10):
probably should have figured that out before he told you,
and you definitely should have been able to figure it
out after he told you. They could have contacted a
police department or a courthouse in New Jersey and just asked, Hell.
They probably could have called any resident of ten tofly
New Jersey at random and just asked, do you remember
(36:31):
the teenage Nazi bank robber who shot a cop in
his mom's front yard. It's kind of a small town.
I bet everybody remembered, but I guess they didn't do that.
They weren't even a real country, so maybe they didn't
have a guy who knew how to do a background check.
The Rhodesian police continued to hold Frank in custody, and
(36:52):
while he was waiting to find out if they were
going to try him for attempted murder, got some mail
an envelope containing two United States pasports and three hundred
dollars in cash. Both passports bore Frank's photo in Frank's
birth date, but only one had Frank's name on it.
The other was for Francis August Schellhammer, a man who
(37:14):
doesn't exist. He explained to the officers that he was
quite good at making such things and even offered to
forge a pair of US passports. Were Hickman and the
other detective. Hickman says that they declined the offer. Remarkably,
the Rhodesian government opted to drop the charges and just
send Frank home. Can you court martial a mercenary? I
(37:36):
don't That's not something I've ever needed to wonder about.
I don't know really what the options were here, but
it wasn't worth it to them. They sent him home.
So sometime in the summer of nineteen seventy five, Frank
Sweeney was kicked out at the Rhodesian Light Infantry and
deported from Rhodesia. He got his free flight home after all,
(37:56):
and was permanently banned from a country that never existed.
Shortly after he got home to New Jersey, he wrote
(38:17):
a letter to Hickman. Frank's mother had mailed him some
more cash before all this trouble got started, and it
arrived in Rhodesia after he was already gone, and he
wanted Hickman to put it back in the mail for him.
His letter, which Hickman has actually held on to all
these years, is dated August twenty second, nineteen seventy five.
So if he's already home and realizing his mail is missing,
(38:39):
and writing the letter in August of seventy five, that
all the events before that happened earlier in nineteen seventy.
Speaker 1 (38:45):
Five, you get it.
Speaker 2 (38:48):
In addition to asking Hickman to mail back the money
from his mother, Frank tells the investigator that life in
America is loathsome compared to the time he spent in Rhodesia.
Speaker 3 (39:01):
It's one big racial cesspool where the worst elements looked
on and held in high esteem. With my RLI training
to back me up, I've seriously thought of forming my
own anti terrorism unit here in the land of the Red, White,
and Blue. The real problem is finding enough devoted men
to form a small cadre. If you ever do visit America,
I would genuinely enjoy meeting with you again, and I'm
(39:22):
sure my family would like to meet you too. Even
though my service in the military was cut short, my
loyalty to Rhodesia remains as strong as ever.
Speaker 2 (39:33):
So now he's back in the United States, and this
is during the same time period that he's placing those
ads in gun magazines to recruit other Rhodesian mercenaries. He's
also placing some other classified ads. So he's engaging in
this federal crime of recruiting foreign mercenaries using his own
legal name and his parents' address. That's not a problem.
(39:56):
The United States government had no real appetite for enforcing
these statute prohibiting him from recruiting people into a foreign army.
But when he placed ads offering four MP forty Schmeiser
submachine guns for sale, he didn't use his own name.
He used the name Francis August Shellhammer, the name from
(40:17):
the forged passport, and he listed a commercial address in
Fort Lee, New Jersey. It seems Frank never actually had
these Nazi submachine guns, but he did collect the money
sent by many interested collectors who thought they were buying
these imaginary guns. It seems like a great hack to
make free money, but unfortunately for Frank, that is mail fraud.
(40:40):
So in March of nineteen seventy six, he's being interviewed
by a reporter from the La Times and he's telling
this reporter he's enjoyed his time in Rhodesia so much
that he's actually planning to move back to South Africa.
Speaker 1 (40:51):
In just a few weeks. Notice he's moving to South.
Speaker 2 (40:54):
Africa, not Rhodesia, because he is not allowed in Rhodesia.
But he's planning this big move. He's telling this reporter
about it. He's bragging about his time in Rhodesia. But
at the same time, in March of nineteen seventy six,
he's also entering a guilty plead to that federal mail
fraud charge. The La Times article, which doesn't make any
(41:15):
mention of his former or current criminal charges, does say
that Frank said that he'd recently been visited by the FBI,
and Frank says they came to his house to try
to pressure him to provide information about other mercenaries. It
seems a little more likely that he's a compulsive liar
who got a thrill out of working in this kernel
of truth because the FBI had just been to his house,
(41:39):
That part's true, but they were there to arrest him
for mail fraud, but he wasn't lying about his plans
for an upcoming move. After pleading guilty to the mail
fraud charge, he skipped out on his sentencing hearing. He
packed his bags and he caught a flight to Johannesburg,
but South Africa sent him right back and he was
(42:00):
arrested by US marshals as he was getting off the
plane at JFK in June of nineteen seventy six. And
while marshals were arresting him, his suitcase was loaded off
the plane and it went through customs without him. Customs
officials seized a nine millimeters lugar pistol because he lacked
the proper paperwork to bring the firearm into the US
from a foreign country, and inexplicably there were no additional
(42:25):
charges brought for any of that. He wasn't supposed to
have a gun at all, and he certainly wasn't supposed
to try to flee the continent while awaiting sentencing for
a federal crime. I know the seventies were a different
time and it wasn't a big deal to bring a
gun to the airport, but fleeing the country to avoid
going to prison is always been illegal, I'm pretty.
Speaker 1 (42:45):
Sure of it.
Speaker 2 (42:47):
I found a couple of cheeky little articles written a
few years later about how the government ended up accidentally
giving him that gun back. It was seized by accustoms
and put into storage while he was in prison, and
when he got out of prison, he wrote to the
Customs office in New York to inquire about it, and
they told him they'd return his property if he paid
a two hundred and forty four dollars storage fee. I
(43:09):
don't know what that comes out to per month for
the four years he was in prison, but that seems steep,
and so Frank claims he walked right into the Customs
office inside the World Trade Center in May of nineteen eighty,
paid the fee, failed out a form, and they gave
him back his gun. A spokesman for the US Customs
Service said they had no way of knowing he was
(43:30):
a felon. Frank said it was all just a half
hearted joke, telling a reporter all I really wanted to
do was test the gun laws to show there really
is a need for federal gun legislation. The Feds are
giving criminals like me our guns back in New York
City just for the asking. Federal gun laws are versical.
(43:51):
You know, he's not a great guy, but he does
have some quips.
Speaker 1 (43:54):
You know, he's just out there doing bits.
Speaker 2 (43:58):
And he ended up handing the gun back over to
the ATF without incident a few months later, but back
to the mail fraud. He got the four years for
the mail fraud and was sent to federal prison. And
it was in prison this time around that Frank would
meet Christopher Boyce, a young defense contractor who'd recently been
convicted of espionage in nineteen seventy four. A twenty one
(44:22):
year old college dropout in Christopher Boyce got a job
at TRW, an aerospace company with a lot of government contracts.
He wasn't really qualified for the role, having never worked
in an office before, but he started as a low
level clerk. It helped that his retired FBI agent father
was the head of security at McDonald Douglas, another aerospace
(44:42):
and defense contracting company, and he had connections at TRW.
But TRW didn't just make satellites and jet engines. In
his own later testimony before a Congressional committee, Boyce described
the company as a CIA contractor, something he'd had no
idea about. For his promotion to a highly sensitive position
(45:04):
working on special projects from inside the company's black vault
and with a top secret CIA clearance, Boyce had access
to the company's encrypted teletype connection with Langley. On at
least a dozen occasions, he removed documents from the vault
and photographed them. On at least six occasions he photographed
(45:24):
documents inside the vault. He later told Congress. Obviously, neither
the government's clearance procedures nor the company's security procedures worked
very well, I'll say. In his new position inside the vault,
Boyce monitored satellite communications between the CIA, his employer TRW
(45:49):
and other CIA contacts around the world. In his congressional testimony,
Boyce describes a shockingly lax approach to security for this
alleged super secure black vault. He would come back to
work late at night to return the documents he'd stolen,
and no one questioned why a junior employee was opening
(46:10):
the vault at four am. He made deliveries to secure
CIA sites without having the proper clearance to enter them,
and on one occasion, he wandered into a CIA code room,
picked up a clipboard and was flipping through the pages
before someone politely asked him to leave. Employees in the
vault were supposed to destroy the code cards used in
(46:31):
the teletype machine at.
Speaker 1 (46:32):
The end of each workday.
Speaker 2 (46:35):
Boyce says they just tossed the cards in a canvas
bag in the corner, and they used the document destruction
blender to make my ties with the Bacardi that they
kept hidden behind the cryptography machines. He claims it was
common for the vault to receive transmissions from Langley that
weren't actually meant for them, misdirected communications. These CIA cables
(46:56):
that had nothing to do with trw or their work
with the agency, but no one really cared, and there
was no clear accountability process for ensuring that these top
secret CAIA documents that had been sent to them by
mistake were actually destroyed. And these are the documents that
Boyce stole. Okay, I know Frank's not even in this part,
(47:20):
but I have to tell you just a little bit
about the nineteen seventy five constitutional crisis in Australia. I know,
I know, this is an even more egregious digression than
the history of Rhodesia. But look at the show art.
It's not just cool to look at. We are living
on my red string board and I've got to put
this pushpin in somewhere. Now. I know even less about
(47:42):
Australia that I know about the decolonization of Africa in
the twentieth century, which is to say, like not very much.
Speaker 1 (47:51):
I think they still have the Queen. I guess it's
the king. Now.
Speaker 2 (47:56):
Did they have to print new money after the Queen died?
A matter?
Speaker 1 (48:00):
It doesn't matter.
Speaker 2 (48:02):
But I was delighted to discover that CIA meddling in
an Australian political crisis was even a possibility.
Speaker 1 (48:10):
How intriguing you know.
Speaker 2 (48:12):
I know they like to keep it south of the equator,
but I thought that was just a Western Hemisphere thing.
Speaker 1 (48:18):
Now.
Speaker 2 (48:18):
Of course, of course, the United States government maintains that
the CIA had no role in pushing Prime Minister GoF
Whitlam out of office in nineteen seventy five, but Christopher
Boyce went to prison claiming otherwise. In the seventies, GoF
Whitlam was the head of the Australian Labor Party and
his administration was fairly socially progressive. He was also considering
(48:42):
closing Pine Gap, a US signals intelligence surveillance base in
central Australia run by the CIA. In nineteen seventy five,
the Opposition party, which controlled the Senate deferred the passage
of an appropriations bill.
Speaker 1 (48:56):
I don't know and.
Speaker 2 (48:58):
Am not going to find out the Australian government functions,
but this sounds like the silly little crisis we seem
to have every year where someone refuses to pass the
bill that keeps the lights on at the government. And
Australia's Governor General, John Kerr used the fallout of this
crisis as a justification to dismiss Whitlam as Prime Minister,
which is apparently the thing he had the power to do.
(49:20):
It's like they have a guy that can fire the president.
Speaker 1 (49:23):
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (49:23):
I just thought my business what happens in Australia. And
at the time Whitlam dismissed allegations of CIA involvement, saying
Kerr didn't need any encouragement from anybody to fire him,
But in his memoirs published decades later, he wrote that
in nineteen seventy seven, President Jimmy Carter sent Warren Christopher,
the Deputy Secretary of State, to Australia to meet with Whitlam,
(49:46):
and Christopher told Whitlam that the United States quote would
never again interfere with Australia's democratic processes, never again, never again.
And Whitlam's personal secretary backs up this recollection of the
use of the word again. But I'll reiterate. The CIA
(50:10):
says they were not involved.
Speaker 1 (50:13):
They said they didn't do it. All that to say, though.
Speaker 2 (50:17):
Our pot smoking, disaffected college dropout who was getting drunk
at lunch most days and making paper airplanes out of
CIA encryption code cards, probably didn't know anything about the
Australian Senate blocking an appropriations bill. But by his account.
He did sometimes read those misdirected CIA cables that he
(50:38):
was supposed to destroy, and some of those messages were
about a growing desire within the CIA to have Whitlam
removed from office, referring to the Australian Governor General as
our man cur So he stole them, and instead of
going to the press, he and his childhood friend, a
(50:58):
cocaine dealer named Dalton Lee, decided to sell the documents
to the Soviets. Lee would take the documents down to
Mexico and deliver them to the Soviet embassy and return
with cash which they split. And maybe it would have worked,
Maybe not forever, but would have worked for a while,
if not for a little mistake, a tiny careless act
(51:22):
in an absolutely absurd turn of history, Dalton Lee was
arrested in nineteen seventy seven outside the Soviet Embassy.
Speaker 1 (51:28):
In Mexico City.
Speaker 2 (51:29):
He wasn't arrested for espionage or drug trafficking, two things
he was definitely doing. He was arrested by Mexican police
for littering, but under interrogation about the drugs and documents
they subsequently found on him, he admitted everything. Christopher Boyce
was arrested by authorities in the US just ten days later,
(51:53):
and accounts vary as to whether or not Dalton Lee
gave Boys up. In that initial interview, he says he
didn't and he probably didn't need to. The authorities would
have arrived at the conclusion that it was Boyce who
had stolen those documents, whether Dalton Lee gave him up
or not. So you know, we'll never know. But this
is where Frank comes back. This is where Frank reappears
(52:15):
in his own story. I haven't forgotten him because while
all this CIA skullduggery and Cold War espionage is going on,
Frank is sitting in a jail cell on Terminal Island,
a low security federal corrections facility in Los Angeles. I
can't find a good reason for why he would have
been transported to a prison in California after being arrested
(52:36):
in New York, but government inefficiency is as likely an
explanation as anything else. Christopher Boyce was ultimately convicted of
eight counts of espionage in nineteen seventy seven and sentenced
to forty years in prison, and for several months in
late seventy seven to early seventy eight, the two men
were on the same cell block at Terminal Island. Much
(52:59):
has been made of the apparent in congruity of Frank,
a man who fought as a mercenary against Communist gorillas,
befriending Boyce, a man convicted of aiding the Soviet Union.
But I don't think either of them had a fully
formed set of political beliefs at the time. Boyce's mother
would later say that the two became quite close in
those months. Frank was, for reasons I spent way too
(53:24):
long unsuccessfully trying to figure out, transferred to a prison
in Maine sometime in early nineteen seventy eight. Boyce would
eventually be transferred to Lompoc, a prison a few hours
north of Los Angeles, and in January of nineteen eighty,
Christopher Boyce escaped from prison. The ensuing manhunt for the
(53:45):
missing spy would last nearly two years, in part because
Frank was planting false clues from Cape Town to California
to lead investigators in the long direction.
Speaker 1 (53:56):
And that's where I have to leave you today.
Speaker 2 (53:59):
I do hope I'll come back next week for the
second half of Frank's story. There's a serial killer, a
mob boss, a jailhouse letter from his wife's boyfriend, Frank
Stabs another guy and for Resince, I'm still not a
hundle On. There're a bunch of snakes.
Speaker 1 (54:21):
Weird little guys.
Speaker 2 (54:22):
The production of cool Zone Media were more from cool
Zone Media. Visit our website coolzonmedia dot com, or check
us out on the iHeartRadio app or Wherever Again Here
podcast
Col Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
This is a story that begins and ends in bank
parking lots, more or less in the way that stories
can really begin or end.
Speaker 1 (00:17):
Our subject today was alive.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
Before the story begins, and as I'm writing this, he's
still alive. But for the purposes of this telling, we'll
start outside the Palisade Trust Company Bank in Englewood, New Jersey,
on February twenty third, nineteen sixty two, when an eighteen
year old member of the American Nazi Party was arrested
after skipping school to try to rob a bank with
a toy gun, and will mark the beginning of the
(00:40):
end of his story in a Wells Fargo parking lot
in Garden City, Idaho, on October thirteenth, twenty eighteen, when
an elderly ex con was caught on security cam footage
getting into an altercation with a couple who didn't move
forward quickly enough at the drive up atm In the
decades in between, Frank Sweeney went to prison at least
half a day times bought as a foreign mercenary, got
(01:02):
deported from both Rhodesia and South Africa, helped an escaped
spy of ade U S Marshals turned state's witness against
a Hitler worshiping serial killer, tried to help the mob,
and waged a three year campaign of terror and harassment
against a woman who made a passing comment about how
he was parked outside the post office. I'm Molly Conger,
(01:25):
and this is brune, little guys, this.
Speaker 1 (01:44):
Is a strange one.
Speaker 2 (01:46):
The first few episodes of this show were stories I
already knew and thought you should know too. Kevin Strom
was a prominent figure in the white supremacist movement for decades,
and it was big local news here in Charlesville when
he was arrested twenty years ago. The Gerald Drake case
was something I read about when it happened. The cases
against the gun trafficking Nazi paramilitary group was a story
(02:07):
I spent years reading, paying ten cents a page, one
court filing at a time as it wound its way
through the system. But this one, this one is brand
new to me, and I think he will be brand
new to just about everybody, because for as many times
as this man shows up in the newspaper over the
last sixty years, I haven't found any one's source that's
(02:30):
gathered together the threads of his life and tried to
make sense of how one man's name could appear in
so many other people's stories, because that's where I found him.
In someone else's story. I was reading a biography of
a particularly nasty little guy one will definitely get to
(02:51):
eventually in another episode when my weird little guide detector
went off. Call it a gut feeling, but this passing
mention of a side character in the life of a
serial killer was enough to get me to put that
book down and spend days digging through newspaper archives trying
to figure out Frank.
Speaker 1 (03:14):
And what I found was kind of.
Speaker 2 (03:15):
A bizarro world Forest Gump, one man whose life keeps
intersecting with major historical events, just wandering in and out
of the lives of gullible reporters, frustrated federal agents and
the innocent bystanders who accidentally became his targets, just bumbling
his way through history, but without any of Tom Hanks's charm.
(03:40):
I know we don't really know each other yet. I
haven't earned the trust it takes to know you'll believe
me when I promise you a two parter is worth
the weight in between.
Speaker 1 (03:48):
But I think you'll agree.
Speaker 2 (03:51):
Frank's story is weird enough for two episodes. Frank Abbott
Sweeney Junior was born in August of nineteen forty three
in New Jersey, to Frank Abbott Sweeney Senior, a realtor,
and Marie Gleeson Sweeney, a homemaker who taught violin lessons
and volunteered with the Red Cross. As a lifelong con artist,
a lot of what he's told reporters about his own
(04:12):
life is self serving fiction, which would sometimes get published
without fact checking and then reappear in later accounts as fact.
Speaker 1 (04:20):
It was in the newspaper, after all.
Speaker 2 (04:22):
So I've taken great pains to verify what I can,
debunk what I can, and take note of the things
I can only offer you with a grain of salt.
Some of Frank's own lies are easily disproved, like the
resume he gave a Rhodesian Army recruiter on it. He
claimed he graduated from Georgetown University in nineteen sixty five
(04:43):
at the degree in psychology, but he couldn't possibly have
matriculated at Georgetown in nineteen sixty one. He was a
senior at Tenafly High School in nineteen sixty two when
he was sent to the Annandell Reformatory for two and
a half years. He never finished high school. His claim
that has as Francis Shellhammer derives from his mother's maiden
name also fails to hold up to scrutiny. His mother
(05:06):
was born Marie Gleeson to John Gleeson, a fireman, and
Lottie Gross Gleason in Chicago, and I was generous here.
I wasted a lot of time. I even checked his grandparents.
His middle name, Abbott was his paternal grandmother Martha's maiden name.
I went as far as to track his family treat
all the way back to Ireland, giving him the benefit
(05:28):
of the doubt that maybe there's a shell Hammer in
there somewhere.
Speaker 1 (05:31):
I didn't find one.
Speaker 2 (05:33):
It's possible that I started mixing up my Martha's, Mary's,
John's and Francis's by the time I was cross referencing
marriage records from the eighteen seventies.
Speaker 1 (05:41):
But he probably just made it up.
Speaker 2 (05:44):
He does a lot of that and other aspects of
Frank's story would require a trip to the National Archive
to sift through dusty boxes of ancient court transcripts, and
an unlikely degree of transparency from the Central Intelligence Agency
or a deathbed confession from mobster, or a few tell
all memoirs from US marshalls to ever hope to sort out.
(06:06):
The rest is somewhere in between. But I'll stick with
what we do know to be true. And I said
this story begins outside of a bank. On February twenty third,
nineteen sixty two, Frank Sweeney skipped school. Shortly after nine am.
He walked into a bank in Englewood, New Jersey, approached
(06:27):
the teller and slid a plastic toy gun that he'd
painted black out of a Manila envelope. I'd like to
make a withdrawal, he told the teller as he cocked
the toy pistol. I don't know if the teller could
tell the gun was fake, or if she just didn't
think this gangly, redheaded teenager had it in him to
shoot her, or maybe she just was having a bad
(06:49):
day and didn't care anymore, because, according to local news reports,
she sneered at him, got up and walked away, leading
him standing there alone at the counter with his toy
gun and bewildered by the teller's apparent disinterest in being
held at gunpoint, he just put the plastic pistol back
(07:10):
in his pocket, turned around and walked out the front door,
and as he was leaving, an off duty policeman just
happened to be walking into the bank. An employee told
the officer what had just happened, and he turned right
around and caught Frank just outside. He dragged him back
inside the bank to be identified by the teller, and
as the patrolman is making the arrest, Frank says to him.
Speaker 1 (07:34):
Well, I guess it didn't work.
Speaker 2 (07:37):
Later, under interrogation, he would tell the officers that his
plan had been to support the movement to use the
money from the bank robbery to support the activities of
the American Nazi Party under George Lincoln Rockwell. At his arraignment,
the judge asked, Frank, aren't you the fellow who's been
painting swastikas on synagogues around here. Frank denied this, and
(07:58):
he told the judge I never did anything illegal in
my life, and then he pleaded guilty to the attempted
bank robbery. There's no other mention of Frank in connection
with that anti Semitic vandalism the judge mentioned, But I
did find several newspaper articles about incidents of that sort
from the prior to years when Frank would have still
been a minor. In January nineteen sixty three, unnamed teenage
(08:20):
boys were accused of painting swastikas on parked cars in Emerson,
just eight miles away. In February of nineteen sixty one,
someone hung a swastika banner over the entrance of the
synagogue in Tenafly. Newspaper articles about that banner reference a
similar recent incident at the synagogue in nearby Englewood. A
few days later, someone painted a swastika over a plaque nearby.
(08:42):
In June, two teenage boys respotted fleeing the scene after
two trailers belonging to a contract or were broken into
and left a swastika painted on the floor inside. In
all these incidents, police told the papers of the time
that they had referred the cases to the juvenile Division.
It's not like anti Semitic incidents are so rare that
I'm saying that Frank is the only possible suspect here.
(09:03):
In every nineteen sixties Bergen County News article about a swastika,
I found plenty of other newspaper reports during those same
two years about a local man flying a Swastika flag
outside of his home, about attacks on Jewish businesses and
synagogues and neighboring cities, and other incidents that just don't
fit this particular pattern of teenage Nazi vandalism, and the
(09:25):
comment the judge made makes it sound like Frank had
been there before. But any appearance he'd made in court
as a miner wouldn't have been reported with his name
attached to it. And it's hard enough to get any
information about a juvenile case in twenty twenty four, so
forget figuring out what how about in nineteen sixty one,
But it does seem pretty likely he'd at least been
(09:46):
a suspect in some of those incidents, because at the
hearing where he pled guilty to the attempt at bank robbery,
Frank did admit that the police had spoken to him
on numerous occasions, specifically concerning his involvement in George Lincoln
Rockwell American Nazi Party. For the attempted bank robbery, Frank
was sentenced to an indeterminate term at a boy's reformatory,
(10:09):
and he was released on October of nineteen sixty four,
shortly after his twenty first birthday after serving About two
and a half years after his first stint in jail,
Frank returned to his parents' home in New Jersey. He
worked occasionally as a shipping clerk, but it doesn't seem
like he was holding down a steady job. One afternoon
in July of nineteen sixty seven, neighbors reported hearing gunshots
(10:32):
in the woods. An officer drove by to check it
out and saw a car parked on the side of
the road. The car looked empty, so the officer kept
driving without stopping to investigate. Suddenly, the car pulled out
behind him and tried to run the officer off the road.
A brief vehicle chase ensued, with the officer following the
vehicle for about a mile before the driver. Frank parked
(10:52):
outside of his parents' home, got out and walked toward
the front door.
Speaker 1 (10:58):
The officer asked.
Speaker 2 (10:58):
Frank if he'd been shooting guns in the woods, to
which Frank replied only no, and then warned the officer
that he was on private property for walking away and
into the house. But Frank left something on the front
seat of the car, unfortunately, and it was a Thompson
submachine gun that he'd been firing in the woods. The
(11:21):
officer saw the gun and called for backup, and when
they arrived, Frank opened fire on them from inside the home,
kicking off a seventy five minute gun battle, with more
than a dozen cops firing shots at the house. As
Frank fired at them through the windows, Frank's father and
brother pleaded with him to come out, or at least
to send the family dog out. After police Captain Peter
(11:44):
Zurla was shot in the arm, the officers lobbed four
canisters of tear gas through the windows, finally driving Frank
out into the front yard, where he was arrested without
further incident. And as they put the handcuffs on him,
he turned to Captain Zerla, who's still standing there in
the front yard bleeding from a gun shot wound, and
Frank says, some shot when I got you through the window.
Speaker 1 (12:05):
Huh.
Speaker 2 (12:06):
There's no follow up I can find about whether the
dog was heard, or how missus Sweeney got the tear
gas out of her upholstery. It was the sixties, so
maybe her sofa was safely scotch guarded or wrapped up
in one of those weird plastic covers. That were popular
back then, but you have to figure she at least
had to replace the curtains. Frank entered a not guilty
plea and unsuccessfully tried to suppress the evidence of the
(12:29):
gun found on the front seat of the car, with
his attorney arguing that it was discovered in an illegal
search because the cop didn't have probable cause to look
through the window of the parked car. That's not how
that works. At trial, the defense put on three psychiatrists
to argue for insanity, and the state put on two
of their own, who testified that Frank was certainly disturbed,
(12:51):
but not legally insane. The jury deliberated for just three
hours before finding Frank guilty of attempted homicide, assault with
the intent to kill, possession of a machine gun, and
something called atrocious assault that I've never heard of. We
don't have that here in Virginia, but in New Jersey,
atrocious assault is an assault and battery, savage and cruel
(13:13):
in character which results in maiming or wounding.
Speaker 1 (13:16):
So that definitely qualifies.
Speaker 2 (13:19):
And he was sentenced to six years, which, honestly, that's
kind of remarkable, right. I'm not going to bat for
the corsoral state here. Far from it, you know more,
jail time doesn't really fix anybody, and we'll come to
see that jail never comes close to fixing Frank. But
reading those sixties news stories about this event was fascinating.
(13:42):
This cop who got shot by a Nazi with a
Tommy gun is described in every article as quote lightly wounded.
I mean, he does seem to have not been seriously injured.
He was shot, you know, in the upper arm. I
don't think it went through the bone, so it really
he was lightly wounded. But that's not what they would
put in the newspaper today, you know it. And the
(14:05):
cops didn't drive a tank through the front of this
suburban home or unload their guns into him when he
came out. There's been such a massive culture shift over
the years and the way we justify aggressive police response
and the way that we talk about the risk to police.
It's just interesting to see that it wasn't always that way.
But there's another unanswered question in the story of this
(14:28):
siege in this New York suburb. What was he doing
that day? I mean shooting guns in the woods, obviously,
but why did he panic when that cop drove by
and why those woods in particular, We'll never really know.
Even if he told us, we wouldn't know. He's a liar.
(14:48):
But the newspaper articles at the time do say that
the officer initially saw Frank's car parked at the intersection
of East Clinton Avenue and Woodland Street, about a mile
from where Frank lived.
Speaker 1 (14:59):
At the time. They used to put everything in the newspaper.
Speaker 2 (15:03):
It's so beautiful, every detail, every boring little bit in
which they.
Speaker 1 (15:08):
Still did that.
Speaker 2 (15:10):
And I'm eternally curious about details that probably won't end
up mattering. But I pulled up a map of ten
of Flying, New Jersey, and there is a large wooded
area you could walk straight into if you parked your
car at that intersection, And those woods surround a large
building that first opened its doors in nineteen fifty, the
Kaplan Jewish Community Center. The clearest account of the next
(15:46):
phase of Frank's life comes from an essay written in
twenty nineteen by a retired Rhodesian military policeman. Despite being
the most likely to be more or less true, it's
still riddled with obvious factual inaccuracies, things that just can't
be true. Maybe because it was written as a humorous
recollection meant to be read by his fellow former Rhodesian soldiers,
(16:09):
and maybe his memory has faded a bit in the
nearly fifty years since the event in question, but it
does at the very least substantiate Frank's own claim about
having enlisted in the Rhodesian Light Infantry in the early
nineteen seventies. I'll try to walk the tight rope here
of providing a little more context than just Rhodesia was
(16:30):
very bad and white supremacists from other countries were obsessed
with the idea that they could travel there to kill
black people with impunity, while still stopping short of taking
us down the long road of the history and consequences
of European colonization in Africa. That's far from my area
of expertise, and it's not why you're here.
Speaker 1 (16:48):
Now.
Speaker 2 (16:48):
Even if you're coming into this with a completely blank
slate for some reason, you're probably thinking there's no country
called Rhodesia, and you're right, there is. There never really was.
Rhodesia was never recognized as a sovereign state. But we're
calling Rhodesia here as the present day state of Zimbabwe
(17:09):
in southern Africa. In the early twentieth century, Rhodesia was
a British territory. The legacy of Cecil Roads is British
South Africa Company. The area was effectively ruled by the
company until the nineteen twenties, when it became a self
governing colony of the UK, and by the nineteen fifties
decolonization was happening all across the African continent. These fading
(17:30):
European empires couldn't or didn't want to hold on to
all the colonies they'd collected during the previous centuries scramble
for Africa. In nineteen sixty British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan
gave his Wind of Change speech in an address to
the South African Parliament about the political necessity of moving
toward decolonization. The wind of change is blowing through this continent,
(17:54):
whether we like it or not. This growth national consciousness
is a political fact. We was all accepted as a fact.
Speaker 3 (18:07):
Our national policies must take a contribute.
Speaker 2 (18:11):
He'd actually given the same speech a few weeks earlier
in Ghana, but the press didn't pick it up the
first time. And I think the whether we like it
or not part of that statement matters a lot.
Speaker 1 (18:21):
Here. He wasn't advocating for decolonization out of the goodness
of his heart.
Speaker 2 (18:26):
He was reluctantly acknowledging the expensive and bloody political reality
of trying to hold on to these colonies at any cost.
He could see the Belgians and Congo, and the French
in Algeria fighting these costly wars with Africans who wanted
an end to European colonial rule, and as they worked
towards extricating themselves from these colonial arrangements, the British government
(18:47):
adopted a policy called no independence before majority rule, meaning
they wouldn't hand over sovereignty to a colony still run
exclusively by the white colonial minority. Now, obviously, this is
an immensely complicated bit of political history that I'm stripping
down to the studs and explaining badly so we get
through it quickly. So don't think I'm giving the British
(19:08):
Empire any kind of credit here. This policy did not
arise out of a genuine desire to undo the harms
of colonialism and address racism or anything like that. That
was not on their minds. But I think they knew
what it would look like if their decolonization looked exactly
like their colony. And we're not talking about a pr
(19:29):
loss here.
Speaker 1 (19:30):
This is the Cold War.
Speaker 2 (19:31):
They don't want to give the Soviets an opportunity to
come in behind them. But it was this policy, or
rather defiance of it, that led Rhodesia under Ian Smith
to make the unilateral declaration of independence in nineteen sixty five.
White colonists made up just five percent of the population
of the territory, but they were unwilling to accept that
(19:51):
the UK would only grant Rhodesian independence if they shared
even a crumb of political power with the other ninety
five percent of Rhodesia. And apologies again for these digressions.
I just love the context. I think it's so important.
But that brings us to where we were going. The
Rhodesian Bush War a fifteen year period of civil conflict
(20:14):
between the white minority led government and the African nationalist
guerrilla forces. The number of foreign mercenaries who actually traveled
to Rhodesia during the war remains up for debate. Most
of the countries the mercenaries came from were embarrassed by
the whole affair. International sanctions levied against the territory after
the illegal declaration of independence made it illegal for citizens
(20:37):
of many countries to participate in the conflict, even in
countries that didn't have their own domestic laws banning mercenary activity.
And there was some discomfort within Rhodesia too about this
perception that they needed foreigners to help with what they
saw as their war for independence. So, for deeply unflattering
and regrettable reasons, no one was very investing and getting
(21:00):
a thorough accounting of the situation, right, nobody benefits from
knowing what happened here. But at the high end, it
was really only a few thousand mercenaries over the total
course of the conflict, with best estimates for the number
of them who were Americans being somewhere in the low hundreds.
So a lot of guys talked about it, but not
(21:24):
very many of them actually did it. This idea of
American extremists traveling to Africa to violently enforce white rule
over black Africans is one that modern white supremacists still
cherish and celebrate. Dylan Rufe, who was welcomed with open
arms at an evening Bible study at a manual African
Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina registered the domain
(21:48):
last Rhodesian dot com a few months before he murdered
nine of the parishioners who thought he was joining them
for prayer that night. Rufe made his final edit to
that site his digital manifesto, just out before carrying out
that attack. In twenty fifteen. The cultural moment where magazines
like Soldier of Fortune ran full page advertisements for opportunities
(22:09):
to be a man among men in the African bush
looms large in our memories, But the reality is there
weren't many men who actually heeded the call, and their
role in the conflict was insignificant. But unlike many of
those Americans who did end up in Rhodesia in the seventies,
Frank Sweeney didn't see an advertisement in Soldier of Fortune.
(22:33):
That magazine's first issue, bearing a cover story about American
mercenaries in Africa, was published in the summer of nineteen
seventy five, just as Frank Sweeney was already on his
way home. According to Frank, which is a dangerous way
to start an assertion of fact. He walked into the
Rhodesian Information Center in Washington, d C. In nineteen seventy
(22:53):
two and asked how to join up. The information center
was not technical a diplomatic office because Rhodesia was not
technically a country, the fact that would get them into
some trouble in Australia, but they claimed that they were
just offering information about tourism. Frank says he was offered
the contact information for Major Nick Lamprecht, the Rhodesian Army's
(23:17):
chief recruiter. David Annibl, a reporter for the Christian Science
Monitor who interviewed Frank in nineteen seventy five, wrote that
he'd spoken to another recent visitor to that office. After
talking to Frank, this visitor walked into the office and
was given a brochure printed by the Rhodesian Department of
Labor about careers in Rhodesia, And after a thirty minute
(23:38):
presentation about Americans already fighting in the conflict and the
pay and benefits a mercenary could expect, including paid airfare,
all violations of international sanctions in US federal law, the
visitor was offered Major Lamprek's contact information that recruiter Nick
lamprect worked closely with Soldier of Fortune founder Robert K.
(23:58):
Brown to strategize how the magazine can be used to
convince more Americans to make the trip. In the latter
years of the conflict, Lampreck himself even wrote an article
for the magazine promising young American soldiers of fortune that
it would be easy for them to find a beautiful
white Rhodesian wife. I think Lamprek knew he was lying
about how much fun you could have fighting in the
(24:19):
Bush War. His own son, Vincent, had already fled to
South Africa to avoid military service. In what you may
be sensing as a theme here, the details of frank
service in Rhodesia are a little murky.
Speaker 1 (24:33):
The details of.
Speaker 2 (24:34):
A lot of what was going on in Rhodesia during
those years is not totally settled, and Frank's own involvement
far less so. He told reporter David Annibal in that
nineteen seventy five interview that as a corporal in the
Rhodesian Light Infantry, his detachment had taken many prisoners, but
when instructed to do so, they just executed people, saying
(24:56):
we shot him right there in the bush when we
were told not to take prisoners. He also admitted that
his unit had taken part in raids over the border
into neighboring Mozambique.
Speaker 1 (25:06):
He claimed that.
Speaker 2 (25:07):
Sometimes these trips over the border were to assist Portuguese troops,
and until late nineteen seventy four, Portuguese troops were in
Mozambique fighting to put down the Mozambique War of Independence,
and Frank said sometimes they'd go over the border to
raide gorilla camps, perhaps those belonging to the Zimbabwe African
National Liberation Army, which had strong ties to the groups
(25:27):
fighting for independence in Mozambique. These Rhodesian raids over the
border into Mozambique continued even after that nation gained sovereignty
in nineteen seventy five. But it's hard to pin down
when Frank would have been doing this, if he even did,
I can at least say that Frank was no longer
in Rhodesia. During one of the war's worst atrocities, a
(25:49):
Rhodesian raid on a refugee camp in Mozambique killed over
one thousand civilians. David Animal published a couple of articles
in nineteen seventy five and nineteen seventy six about Rode,
and he often quoted Frank Sweeney about his time there.
Speaker 1 (26:03):
After all, there weren't.
Speaker 2 (26:04):
Many Americans who'd been there, and even fewer who were
easy to find, and Frank was easy to find. He
was very public about his stint as a mercenary. After
returning home in nineteen seventy five, Frank placed ads in
magazines like Shotgun News and Gun Week that read.
Speaker 3 (26:24):
The Rhodesian Army offers excitement and adventure. I know I've
been there. Young Americans of European ancestry, write to me
for free. Details pertaining to recruiting Frank Abbott Sweeney seven
to two Creston Avenue, Tenafly, New Jersey, zero seven six
seven zero.
Speaker 2 (26:42):
When speaking with the reporter about his efforts to recruit
others to make the trip, Frank spoke warmly of Major
Lampreckt and claimed that it was Lamprecked himself who instructed
Frank to get in touch with as many white applicants
as possible, which is honestly probably not true, but who knows.
Frank is described as a fan of Ian Smith, of
(27:03):
white superiority, and of the need to defend both, and
is quoted as saying, if I could do anything to
preserve Western civilization in the area, I would do it.
Frank told Annabel that he'd received hundreds of letters in
response to his ads and responded to all of them.
But then again, he also told Annabel he was a
(27:25):
college graduate, and we know that's not true. An Annibal
claims Frank showed him his discharge papers from the Rhodesian
Light Infantry, which were quote in order according to the article,
and showed three years of good service and a rank
of corporal, and that's definitely not true. I'm sure Frank
did show Annibl something. He probably did show him papers
(27:48):
that indicated as much, and I don't fault him for
reporting it. It turns out Frank was quite skilled at forgery.
Frank claims he was in Washington, d c. Getting rid
recruited into the Rhodesian Army in nineteen seventy two, but
he may have actually still been in prison in nineteen
seventy two for shooting that cop. It's hard to pin
(28:08):
down exactly when he was released. One newspaper article years
later puts his parole date for that conviction at nineteen
seventy four. But I have a bad feeling that was
just a reporter on a deadline who did the math
on a six year sentence and assumed Frank served all
of it, which probably didn't. When Frank was later arrested
(28:29):
for his role in the escape of a Soviet spy,
an FBI agent puts his date of enlistment at nineteen
seventy three, so the truth is in there somewhere.
Speaker 1 (28:39):
Either way.
Speaker 2 (28:39):
He wasn't in Rhodesia for very long before he really
really wanted to go home. A war as hell for everybody.
And here we have another unreliable narrator, Anthony Hickman. Hickman
is a retired officer in the British South Africa Police,
(28:59):
which no longer exists, and confusingly was neither British nor
South African, and they weren't always really just police, but
it bore that name because it grew out of the
paramilitary force run directly by Cecil Rhodes's British South Africa
Company in the nineteenth century. The BSAP was Rhodesia's regular
police force, but the line between regular policing and military
(29:22):
operations was blurry, and during the Bush War there were
military units made up of BSAP officers and they developed
counterinsurgency and counter terrorism units. They oversaw the intelligence gathering
arm of the infamously brutal Selu Scouts, and they killed
hundreds of people by introducing poisoned food and medicine into
(29:45):
the supply lines for the insurgent forces. I don't know
exactly what Hickman was doing for most of the war.
Maybe he didn't do any of that. But these days
he's retired in Johannesburg, South Africa and makes detailed models
of trains and farmhouses. In the early nineteen seventies, he
was assigned to the homicide unit of bsap's Criminal Investigative Division,
(30:08):
and in twenty nineteen he wrote down his recollections of
Frank Sweeney for a newsletter published by his Veterans Association.
Like any account of Frank's life, Hickman's essay can't be
taken as gospel truth between the lies Frank told him
and his own fading memory of the seventies.
Speaker 1 (30:26):
It's not perfect.
Speaker 2 (30:28):
Honestly, I almost discarded it without reading past the first page.
Who's off to a pretty bad start When the first
paragraph placed these events in September of nineteen seventy seven,
which would of course be entirely impossible. Frank could not
have been in a Rhodesian Army barracks in September of
nineteen seventy seven, because according to the US Marshalls, the FBI,
(30:51):
the DOJ, the CIA in the New York Times, Frank
was hanging out with a Soviet spy in the exercise
yard at a federal prison in Los Angeles in September
of nineteen seventy seven. But I'll cut Hickman some slack
here on that faltering start, because there's ample evidence within
the story that puts these events somewhere in the springtime
of nineteen seventy five, and the data side, there is
(31:15):
enough meat to Hickman's account and the supporting primary documentation
he provided that supports the idea that the story is
more or less true. As a homicide detective, Hickman was
involved in an investigation into Frank Sweeney for attempted murder
at a Rhodesian military barracks. One evening sometime in early
(31:36):
nineteen seventy five, probably Frank went to the bathroom at
the barracks he was living in. Inside the shared facilities,
two infantrymen who had been drinking were laughing and joking around.
One was quite drunk, undressed and got into the shower
to try to sober up a little bit. Three men
were chatting pleasantly enough, but Frank was humorless and sober,
(32:00):
and he was outraged when the drunk man splashed shower.
Speaker 1 (32:03):
Water on him.
Speaker 2 (32:05):
The men argued, and one of them called Frank a
bloody yank. And Frank's not a guy who turns the
other cheek. He takes every insult very personally. So a
little bit damp, and with his pride wounded, he runs
back to his bunk and comes right back with a
seven inch dagger and pulls the shower curtain aside and
(32:27):
stabs this naked drunk man in the lower abdomen. The
other soldier ran for help, and Frank was quickly arrested,
and while he sat in custody, a mysterious letter arrived
in the mail. The postmark indicated that it had been
mailed from nearby Salisbury weeks earlier. The anonymous letter writer
(32:48):
said that a private Fa Sweeney had been convicted of
the attempted murder of a policeman in the United States.
Speaker 1 (32:56):
It was Hickman, our.
Speaker 2 (32:57):
Essayist, who first suspected that Frank may actually have written
this letter himself. And when he pressed Frank for a
handwriting sample to prove it, he cracked immediately. He'd sent
the letter himself, hoping that it would be his ticket home,
that they would kick him out and deport him when
they found out he lied about not having a criminal
(33:17):
history and that he would get a free flight back
to New Jersey without having to finish his term of service.
Speaker 1 (33:23):
And if that letter had.
Speaker 2 (33:24):
Only arrived a few days earlier, they probably would have
done just that before anybody had to get stabbed. The
story Frank then told Hickman has elements of truth, but
it's not quite right. He told Hickman that the shootout
at his parents' house had happened just the year prior,
(33:46):
and that he'd fled the country prior to being sentenced.
So he's cutting out this six year period that he
spent in prison for the shooting and pretending that he
had just arrived there in Rhodesia immediately after the events
that we know took place in July of nineteen sixty seven.
And the timeline isn't the only thing that's off in
this version. Frank says the shootout only lasted ten minutes,
(34:09):
not over an hour, and he had decided to end
the incident on his own terms when he saw that
his father had arrived, rather than the truth, which was
that he argued with his distraught father for an hour
while continuing to shoot through the windows until he was
smoked out by tear gas. But the inciting incident in
this version is similar. He told Hickman about shooting guns
(34:29):
in the woods and the neighbors reporting the noise and
the officer arriving in the car chase, but he claimed
the gun he was shooting in the woods was one
he purchased from an advertisement and soldier of Fortune magazine,
which is obviously not possible because that magazine didn't exist
in nineteen sixty seven.
Speaker 1 (34:45):
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (34:46):
Maybe he was just updating the story so it would
sound more current. But Frank said he'd purchased the Tommy
gun from the magazine, but it was missing some parts.
It didn't have a firing pin in something else, so
it didn't work. He manufactured the necessary replacement parts, but
he was concerned that in his modification of the weapon
maybe things weren't one hundred percent, and he was worried
(35:08):
that it would explode when fired, so he lashed it
to a tree and set it to fully automatic and
rigged a string to the trigger and hid behind another
tree for cover.
Speaker 1 (35:18):
This sounds so Looney Tunes to me.
Speaker 2 (35:20):
Like of literal Looney Tunes cartoon, right, this is this
is daffy duck behavior.
Speaker 1 (35:27):
But he tells this story to.
Speaker 2 (35:28):
Hickman, and in his essay Hickman writes true or false,
impossible to believe Sweeney had the uncanny ability to sound
totally convincing. But it is significant to note that a
search undertaken based on Sweeney's fingerprint records revealed no such incident,
(35:49):
which doesn't say much for the state of Rhodesian intelligence. Because, yeah,
Frank's taking a little creative license here. The story he's
telling is not one hundred percent, but he is admitting
to almost all of the real details for the real
crime he really did go to prison for. So you
(36:10):
probably should have figured that out before he told you,
and you definitely should have been able to figure it
out after he told you. They could have contacted a
police department or a courthouse in New Jersey and just asked, Hell.
They probably could have called any resident of ten tofly
New Jersey at random and just asked, do you remember
(36:31):
the teenage Nazi bank robber who shot a cop in
his mom's front yard. It's kind of a small town.
I bet everybody remembered, but I guess they didn't do that.
They weren't even a real country, so maybe they didn't
have a guy who knew how to do a background check.
The Rhodesian police continued to hold Frank in custody, and
(36:52):
while he was waiting to find out if they were
going to try him for attempted murder, got some mail
an envelope containing two United States pasports and three hundred
dollars in cash. Both passports bore Frank's photo in Frank's
birth date, but only one had Frank's name on it.
The other was for Francis August Schellhammer, a man who
(37:14):
doesn't exist. He explained to the officers that he was
quite good at making such things and even offered to
forge a pair of US passports. Were Hickman and the
other detective. Hickman says that they declined the offer. Remarkably,
the Rhodesian government opted to drop the charges and just
send Frank home. Can you court martial a mercenary? I
(37:36):
don't That's not something I've ever needed to wonder about.
I don't know really what the options were here, but
it wasn't worth it to them. They sent him home.
So sometime in the summer of nineteen seventy five, Frank
Sweeney was kicked out at the Rhodesian Light Infantry and
deported from Rhodesia. He got his free flight home after all,
(37:56):
and was permanently banned from a country that never existed.
Shortly after he got home to New Jersey, he wrote
(38:17):
a letter to Hickman. Frank's mother had mailed him some
more cash before all this trouble got started, and it
arrived in Rhodesia after he was already gone, and he
wanted Hickman to put it back in the mail for him.
His letter, which Hickman has actually held on to all
these years, is dated August twenty second, nineteen seventy five.
So if he's already home and realizing his mail is missing,
(38:39):
and writing the letter in August of seventy five, that
all the events before that happened earlier in nineteen seventy.
Speaker 1 (38:45):
Five, you get it.
Speaker 2 (38:48):
In addition to asking Hickman to mail back the money
from his mother, Frank tells the investigator that life in
America is loathsome compared to the time he spent in Rhodesia.
Speaker 3 (39:01):
It's one big racial cesspool where the worst elements looked
on and held in high esteem. With my RLI training
to back me up, I've seriously thought of forming my
own anti terrorism unit here in the land of the Red, White,
and Blue. The real problem is finding enough devoted men
to form a small cadre. If you ever do visit America,
I would genuinely enjoy meeting with you again, and I'm
(39:22):
sure my family would like to meet you too. Even
though my service in the military was cut short, my
loyalty to Rhodesia remains as strong as ever.
Speaker 2 (39:33):
So now he's back in the United States, and this
is during the same time period that he's placing those
ads in gun magazines to recruit other Rhodesian mercenaries. He's
also placing some other classified ads. So he's engaging in
this federal crime of recruiting foreign mercenaries using his own
legal name and his parents' address. That's not a problem.
(39:56):
The United States government had no real appetite for enforcing
these statute prohibiting him from recruiting people into a foreign army.
But when he placed ads offering four MP forty Schmeiser
submachine guns for sale, he didn't use his own name.
He used the name Francis August Shellhammer, the name from
(40:17):
the forged passport, and he listed a commercial address in
Fort Lee, New Jersey. It seems Frank never actually had
these Nazi submachine guns, but he did collect the money
sent by many interested collectors who thought they were buying
these imaginary guns. It seems like a great hack to
make free money, but unfortunately for Frank, that is mail fraud.
(40:40):
So in March of nineteen seventy six, he's being interviewed
by a reporter from the La Times and he's telling
this reporter he's enjoyed his time in Rhodesia so much
that he's actually planning to move back to South Africa.
Speaker 1 (40:51):
In just a few weeks. Notice he's moving to South.
Speaker 2 (40:54):
Africa, not Rhodesia, because he is not allowed in Rhodesia.
But he's planning this big move. He's telling this reporter
about it. He's bragging about his time in Rhodesia. But
at the same time, in March of nineteen seventy six,
he's also entering a guilty plead to that federal mail
fraud charge. The La Times article, which doesn't make any
(41:15):
mention of his former or current criminal charges, does say
that Frank said that he'd recently been visited by the FBI,
and Frank says they came to his house to try
to pressure him to provide information about other mercenaries. It
seems a little more likely that he's a compulsive liar
who got a thrill out of working in this kernel
of truth because the FBI had just been to his house,
(41:39):
That part's true, but they were there to arrest him
for mail fraud, but he wasn't lying about his plans
for an upcoming move. After pleading guilty to the mail
fraud charge, he skipped out on his sentencing hearing. He
packed his bags and he caught a flight to Johannesburg,
but South Africa sent him right back and he was
(42:00):
arrested by US marshals as he was getting off the
plane at JFK in June of nineteen seventy six. And
while marshals were arresting him, his suitcase was loaded off
the plane and it went through customs without him. Customs
officials seized a nine millimeters lugar pistol because he lacked
the proper paperwork to bring the firearm into the US
from a foreign country, and inexplicably there were no additional
(42:25):
charges brought for any of that. He wasn't supposed to
have a gun at all, and he certainly wasn't supposed
to try to flee the continent while awaiting sentencing for
a federal crime. I know the seventies were a different
time and it wasn't a big deal to bring a
gun to the airport, but fleeing the country to avoid
going to prison is always been illegal, I'm pretty.
Speaker 1 (42:45):
Sure of it.
Speaker 2 (42:47):
I found a couple of cheeky little articles written a
few years later about how the government ended up accidentally
giving him that gun back. It was seized by accustoms
and put into storage while he was in prison, and
when he got out of prison, he wrote to the
Customs office in New York to inquire about it, and
they told him they'd return his property if he paid
a two hundred and forty four dollars storage fee. I
(43:09):
don't know what that comes out to per month for
the four years he was in prison, but that seems steep,
and so Frank claims he walked right into the Customs
office inside the World Trade Center in May of nineteen eighty,
paid the fee, failed out a form, and they gave
him back his gun. A spokesman for the US Customs
Service said they had no way of knowing he was
(43:30):
a felon. Frank said it was all just a half
hearted joke, telling a reporter all I really wanted to
do was test the gun laws to show there really
is a need for federal gun legislation. The Feds are
giving criminals like me our guns back in New York
City just for the asking. Federal gun laws are versical.
(43:51):
You know, he's not a great guy, but he does
have some quips.
Speaker 1 (43:54):
You know, he's just out there doing bits.
Speaker 2 (43:58):
And he ended up handing the gun back over to
the ATF without incident a few months later, but back
to the mail fraud. He got the four years for
the mail fraud and was sent to federal prison. And
it was in prison this time around that Frank would
meet Christopher Boyce, a young defense contractor who'd recently been
convicted of espionage in nineteen seventy four. A twenty one
(44:22):
year old college dropout in Christopher Boyce got a job
at TRW, an aerospace company with a lot of government contracts.
He wasn't really qualified for the role, having never worked
in an office before, but he started as a low
level clerk. It helped that his retired FBI agent father
was the head of security at McDonald Douglas, another aerospace
(44:42):
and defense contracting company, and he had connections at TRW.
But TRW didn't just make satellites and jet engines. In
his own later testimony before a Congressional committee, Boyce described
the company as a CIA contractor, something he'd had no
idea about. For his promotion to a highly sensitive position
(45:04):
working on special projects from inside the company's black vault
and with a top secret CIA clearance, Boyce had access
to the company's encrypted teletype connection with Langley. On at
least a dozen occasions, he removed documents from the vault
and photographed them. On at least six occasions he photographed
(45:24):
documents inside the vault. He later told Congress. Obviously, neither
the government's clearance procedures nor the company's security procedures worked
very well, I'll say. In his new position inside the vault,
Boyce monitored satellite communications between the CIA, his employer TRW
(45:49):
and other CIA contacts around the world. In his congressional testimony,
Boyce describes a shockingly lax approach to security for this
alleged super secure black vault. He would come back to
work late at night to return the documents he'd stolen,
and no one questioned why a junior employee was opening
(46:10):
the vault at four am. He made deliveries to secure
CIA sites without having the proper clearance to enter them,
and on one occasion, he wandered into a CIA code room,
picked up a clipboard and was flipping through the pages
before someone politely asked him to leave. Employees in the
vault were supposed to destroy the code cards used in
(46:31):
the teletype machine at.
Speaker 1 (46:32):
The end of each workday.
Speaker 2 (46:35):
Boyce says they just tossed the cards in a canvas
bag in the corner, and they used the document destruction
blender to make my ties with the Bacardi that they
kept hidden behind the cryptography machines. He claims it was
common for the vault to receive transmissions from Langley that
weren't actually meant for them, misdirected communications. These CIA cables
(46:56):
that had nothing to do with trw or their work
with the agency, but no one really cared, and there
was no clear accountability process for ensuring that these top
secret CAIA documents that had been sent to them by
mistake were actually destroyed. And these are the documents that
Boyce stole. Okay, I know Frank's not even in this part,
(47:20):
but I have to tell you just a little bit
about the nineteen seventy five constitutional crisis in Australia. I know,
I know, this is an even more egregious digression than
the history of Rhodesia. But look at the show art.
It's not just cool to look at. We are living
on my red string board and I've got to put
this pushpin in somewhere. Now. I know even less about
(47:42):
Australia that I know about the decolonization of Africa in
the twentieth century, which is to say, like not very much.
Speaker 1 (47:51):
I think they still have the Queen. I guess it's
the king. Now.
Speaker 2 (47:56):
Did they have to print new money after the Queen died?
A matter?
Speaker 1 (48:00):
It doesn't matter.
Speaker 2 (48:02):
But I was delighted to discover that CIA meddling in
an Australian political crisis was even a possibility.
Speaker 1 (48:10):
How intriguing you know.
Speaker 2 (48:12):
I know they like to keep it south of the equator,
but I thought that was just a Western Hemisphere thing.
Speaker 1 (48:18):
Now.
Speaker 2 (48:18):
Of course, of course, the United States government maintains that
the CIA had no role in pushing Prime Minister GoF
Whitlam out of office in nineteen seventy five, but Christopher
Boyce went to prison claiming otherwise. In the seventies, GoF
Whitlam was the head of the Australian Labor Party and
his administration was fairly socially progressive. He was also considering
(48:42):
closing Pine Gap, a US signals intelligence surveillance base in
central Australia run by the CIA. In nineteen seventy five,
the Opposition party, which controlled the Senate deferred the passage
of an appropriations bill.
Speaker 1 (48:56):
I don't know and.
Speaker 2 (48:58):
Am not going to find out the Australian government functions,
but this sounds like the silly little crisis we seem
to have every year where someone refuses to pass the
bill that keeps the lights on at the government. And
Australia's Governor General, John Kerr used the fallout of this
crisis as a justification to dismiss Whitlam as Prime Minister,
which is apparently the thing he had the power to do.
(49:20):
It's like they have a guy that can fire the president.
Speaker 1 (49:23):
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (49:23):
I just thought my business what happens in Australia. And
at the time Whitlam dismissed allegations of CIA involvement, saying
Kerr didn't need any encouragement from anybody to fire him,
But in his memoirs published decades later, he wrote that
in nineteen seventy seven, President Jimmy Carter sent Warren Christopher,
the Deputy Secretary of State, to Australia to meet with Whitlam,
(49:46):
and Christopher told Whitlam that the United States quote would
never again interfere with Australia's democratic processes, never again, never again.
And Whitlam's personal secretary backs up this recollection of the
use of the word again. But I'll reiterate. The CIA
(50:10):
says they were not involved.
Speaker 1 (50:13):
They said they didn't do it. All that to say, though.
Speaker 2 (50:17):
Our pot smoking, disaffected college dropout who was getting drunk
at lunch most days and making paper airplanes out of
CIA encryption code cards, probably didn't know anything about the
Australian Senate blocking an appropriations bill. But by his account.
He did sometimes read those misdirected CIA cables that he
(50:38):
was supposed to destroy, and some of those messages were
about a growing desire within the CIA to have Whitlam
removed from office, referring to the Australian Governor General as
our man cur So he stole them, and instead of
going to the press, he and his childhood friend, a
(50:58):
cocaine dealer named Dalton Lee, decided to sell the documents
to the Soviets. Lee would take the documents down to
Mexico and deliver them to the Soviet embassy and return
with cash which they split. And maybe it would have worked,
Maybe not forever, but would have worked for a while,
if not for a little mistake, a tiny careless act
(51:22):
in an absolutely absurd turn of history, Dalton Lee was
arrested in nineteen seventy seven outside the Soviet Embassy.
Speaker 1 (51:28):
In Mexico City.
Speaker 2 (51:29):
He wasn't arrested for espionage or drug trafficking, two things
he was definitely doing. He was arrested by Mexican police
for littering, but under interrogation about the drugs and documents
they subsequently found on him, he admitted everything. Christopher Boyce
was arrested by authorities in the US just ten days later,
(51:53):
and accounts vary as to whether or not Dalton Lee
gave Boys up. In that initial interview, he says he
didn't and he probably didn't need to. The authorities would
have arrived at the conclusion that it was Boyce who
had stolen those documents, whether Dalton Lee gave him up
or not. So you know, we'll never know. But this
is where Frank comes back. This is where Frank reappears
(52:15):
in his own story. I haven't forgotten him because while
all this CIA skullduggery and Cold War espionage is going on,
Frank is sitting in a jail cell on Terminal Island,
a low security federal corrections facility in Los Angeles. I
can't find a good reason for why he would have
been transported to a prison in California after being arrested
(52:36):
in New York, but government inefficiency is as likely an
explanation as anything else. Christopher Boyce was ultimately convicted of
eight counts of espionage in nineteen seventy seven and sentenced
to forty years in prison, and for several months in
late seventy seven to early seventy eight, the two men
were on the same cell block at Terminal Island. Much
(52:59):
has been made of the apparent in congruity of Frank,
a man who fought as a mercenary against Communist gorillas,
befriending Boyce, a man convicted of aiding the Soviet Union.
But I don't think either of them had a fully
formed set of political beliefs at the time. Boyce's mother
would later say that the two became quite close in
those months. Frank was, for reasons I spent way too
(53:24):
long unsuccessfully trying to figure out, transferred to a prison
in Maine sometime in early nineteen seventy eight. Boyce would
eventually be transferred to Lompoc, a prison a few hours
north of Los Angeles, and in January of nineteen eighty,
Christopher Boyce escaped from prison. The ensuing manhunt for the
(53:45):
missing spy would last nearly two years, in part because
Frank was planting false clues from Cape Town to California
to lead investigators in the long direction.
Speaker 1 (53:56):
And that's where I have to leave you today.
Speaker 2 (53:59):
I do hope I'll come back next week for the
second half of Frank's story. There's a serial killer, a
mob boss, a jailhouse letter from his wife's boyfriend, Frank
Stabs another guy and for Resince, I'm still not a
hundle On. There're a bunch of snakes.
Speaker 1 (54:21):
Weird little guys.
Speaker 2 (54:22):
The production of cool Zone Media were more from cool
Zone Media. Visit our website coolzonmedia dot com, or check
us out on the iHeartRadio app or Wherever Again Here
podcast
Host
Molly Conger
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