Soldier of Misfortune: Frank Sweeney, Pt. 2

Speaker 1 This is an iHeart podcast.

Speaker 2 This is Sophie Cunningham from Show Me Something.

Speaker 3 Do you know the symptoms of moderate to severe obstructive sleep apnea or OSA in adults with obesity?

Speaker 6 They may be happening to you without you knowing.

Speaker 7 If anyone has ever said you snored loudly or if you spend your days fighting off excessive tiredness, irritability, and concentration issues, it may be due to OSA.

Speaker 8 OSA is a serious condition where your airway partially or completely collapses during sleep, which may cause breathing interruptions and oxygen deprivation.

Speaker 11 Learn more at don'tsleep on osa.com.

Speaker 13 This information is provided by Lilly, a medicine company.

Speaker 15 Hey, I'm Lindsay.

Speaker 16 Hydrodonitis superativa, HS, caused bumps and abscesses that made me feel embarrassed. I talked to my dermatologist and started a treatment that works for me, Cosentix.
I found relief.

Speaker 17 Cosentix secukinumab is prescribed for adults with moderate to severe hydridonitis superativa, HS. Don't use if allergic to COSENTICS.
Get checked for TB before starting.

Speaker 17 Increased risk of infections and lowered ability to fight them may occur, like TB or other serious bacterial, fungal, or viral infections. Some were fatal.

Speaker 17 Tell your doctor if you have an infection or symptoms, like fevers, sweats, chills, muscle aches, or cough. had a vaccine or plan to, or if IBD symptoms develop or worsen.

Speaker 17 Serious allergic reactions and severe eczema-like skin reactions may occur. Learn more at 1-844-COSENTIX or COSENTIX.com.

Speaker 16 You're stronger than HS. Ask your dermatologist about Cosentix.

Speaker 18 What does Zinn give you? Not just smoke-free nicotine satisfaction, but real freedom.

Speaker 19 Freedom to do what you love and choose your rewards.

Speaker 18 With Zinn Rewards, you can redeem points for premium tech, outdoor gear, and gift cards to your favorite retailers.

Speaker 18 Find your Zin and keep finding rewards that fit your lifestyle at zinn.com slash rewards.

Speaker 18 Warning, this product contains nicotine.

Speaker 19 Nicotine is an addictive chemical.

Speaker 21 With Fidelity Wealth Management, a dedicated advisor gets to know you and your goals to build a comprehensive plan to help grow and protect your wealth.

Speaker 21 Backed by a team of specialists, they'll analyze all your accounts, even the ones they don't manage, to keep an eye on taxes and provide proactive portfolio insights that can help you unlock your wealth's full potential.

Speaker 21 Learn more at fidelity.com slash wealth. Investment minimums apply, Fidelity Broker Services LLC, member NYSC SIPC.

Speaker 23 Are you a creator? This is your moment to elevate your content. Get ready for TikTok's Live Fest 2025, the biggest celebration of creators from around the world.

Speaker 23 From singing to gaming to dancing, wherever your passion lies, there's an audience waiting for you.

Speaker 23 Get a chance to take home real trophies and walk down the red carpet at their annual awards ceremony.

Speaker 23 Check out hashtag LiveFest 2025 on TikTok to find out how you can be part of this global celebration. Let's elevate live together.

Speaker 25 Cool Zone Media.

Speaker 25 I'm so glad you decided to come back for part two of the story of Frank Sweeney. If you didn't hear part one, you really need to.
This isn't the kind of story you can pick up midway through.

Speaker 25 You missed a cop getting shot with a machine gun in a New Jersey suburb, the Rhodesian Bush War, possible CIA involvement in an Australian political crisis, and we're just about to pick up with our escaped spy.

Speaker 25 The second 40 years of Frank's life are just as weird as the first 40. There's a serial killer, a mafia trial, two different secret wives, and a lot of misuse of the Postal Service.

Speaker 25 I'm Molly Conger, and this is Weird Little Guys.

Speaker 25 Now, when we left off last week, Frank was making friends in prison.

Speaker 25 His new friend in 1978 was Christopher Boyce, who'd just been convicted of espionage for selling documents he stole from his job as a CIA contractor to the Soviets. And then he escaped from prison.

Speaker 25 Whether or not Frank was still in custody on the day Christopher Boyce escaped from prison is surprisingly hard to pin down.

Speaker 25 Several newspaper articles about Frank's role in the ensuing manhunt for the missing spy put his release a month before the escape, but others put it a month after.

Speaker 25 Seems like this detail would really matter, but no one seemed very concerned about it in 1980.

Speaker 25 Newspapers that appeared to be quoting the same unnamed source from the U.S.

Speaker 25 Marshals published conflicting stories, with some saying Frank flew to South Africa shortly before Boyce's escape and others putting that trip slightly after the escape, although both of these articles say it was exactly 23 days before or after.

Speaker 25 But in my frustrated search through 40-year-old newspapers trying to figure out which prison Frank was calling home that year, I found another surprise. Another stabbing.

Speaker 25 Shortly after Frank was transferred to a state prison in Maine in 1978, he stabbed another inmate in the chest during an argument in the prison library.

Speaker 25 And again, we have this problem that keeps coming up in Frank's life. He loves to talk to reporters and he loves to lie.
It's the 70s. These reporters don't have the internet.

Speaker 25 They don't have access to electronic court records. So a lot of Frank's lies get published.

Speaker 25 When he files a lawsuit against the prison warden in Maine about the conditions in solitary confinement, Newspapers publish his claim that he was placed in solitary for a stabbing he'd been suspected of, but he says the investigation cleared him.

Speaker 25 A local newspaper in Bangar, Main, however, had a reporter in the courtroom when he entered a guilty plea to that stabbing.

Speaker 25 But regardless of whether he got out in December of 79 or February of 1980, we know Frank flew to South Africa soon after he got out and that he stayed there for a couple of months.

Speaker 25 The story of Christopher Boyce's 19 months on the lamb is long and strange.

Speaker 25 Sean Penn plays Boyce's friend, the cocaine dealer Dalton Lee, in the 1985 film adaptation of the book The Falcon and the Snowman about the entire affair. I didn't watch it.

Speaker 25 There's only so much I can do. But remember, this is the Cold War.
A missing Soviet spy is a pretty big PR problem for the United States government.

Speaker 25 There was speculation that the KGB had helped him escape. Boyce himself called a reporter from a payphone a few months after the escape and laughed about the idea that he'd had foreign assistance.

Speaker 25 He says he just climbed the fence and walked out.

Speaker 25 The task force focused on finding Boyce believed all along that he'd never actually left California. And they weren't too far off.
He was in Idaho the whole time.

Speaker 25 But a lot of resources ended up getting expended pursuing a false lead planted by our friend Frank.

Speaker 25 Now, I can't prove Frank sent all of these letters himself. I can't even find contemporaneous reporting where anyone ever outright said that they believed Frank sent these letters.

Speaker 25 And he was never charged in connection with his meddling in this investigation. But just a few weeks after Boyce went missing, the United States ambassador in South Africa got a letter.

Speaker 25 The postmark indicated that it had been mailed from within South Africa.

Speaker 25 And the letter said, a known mercenary named Shellhammer had assisted the convicted American spy, Christopher Boyce, in entering South Africa by way of a fake passport.

Speaker 25 Now, who do we know with a history of forging passports, of mailing anonymous letters to officials in southern Africa implicating himself in crimes, and using the pseudonym Shellhammer.

Speaker 25 And he absolutely knew the feds would tie him to that alias because it was the one he had used in those classified ads in 1976 that put him in prison for mail fraud.

Speaker 25 And Frank was in South Africa in February of 1980 when that letter was mailed. It seems he wanted the authorities to know he was involved.
Why else would he write his own pseudonym into the story?

Speaker 25 So feds quickly turned their attention to Frank. They placed a tracking beacon on his car.
They followed him for months. And he probably knew he was being followed.

Speaker 25 They followed him from his home in New Jersey all the way out to California. And from a California motel, he made several phone calls to an apartment in Hermosa Beach.

Speaker 25 And when they searched that apartment, they found it abandoned, but they found several letters that Frank had sent to a third man, another friend of theirs from prison.

Speaker 25 One of which read, somehow they discovered that I helped him get into South Africa. I suspect suspect an informer has been at work.

Speaker 25 But there was no informer. Frank wanted them to find those letters and Boyce was never in South Africa.

Speaker 25 The only reason anyone thought Boyce might be in South Africa is because Frank was planting false clues all over the world to point them as far away as possible from a little hunting cabin in the mountains of Idaho.

Speaker 25 U.S. Marshals eventually got frustrated following Frank around.

Speaker 25 A federal prosecutor would actually say in open court that Frank's arrest in July July of 1981 was specifically intended to give them leverage to make him cooperate in the boys case.

Speaker 25 It seemed like he knew something and they wanted to know what it was.

Speaker 25 As a felon, Frank wasn't allowed to have any guns. And of course, Frank had guns.

Speaker 25 I did find one newspaper article that dropped a sort of suspicious sounding hint that they only picked Frank up for that gun charge because of an anonymous tip. So maybe that was him too.

Speaker 25 But they picked him up in New Jersey at the end of July, and he pretended to be very cooperative, telling them that he actually had some documents that would lead them straight to Boyce and he would happily show them to them.

Speaker 25 He voluntarily turned over the key to the bank deposit box he was keeping them in. And inside, they found several letters to Frank that had been mailed from South Africa.

Speaker 25 Sounds like more red herrings planted by Frank. He'd flown to South Africa several times in the year and a half since his release and was probably mailing himself these letters on those visits.

Speaker 25 So now in August of 1981, it seems like there could be some evidence that Boyce really was in South Africa.

Speaker 25 Frank says he was promised placement in the witness protection program for his help, and maybe they did make that promise.

Speaker 25 If he really could help them recover their missing spy, that's a reasonable enough deal.

Speaker 25 And just a few weeks after all of Frank's help, Boyce was recaptured. But it wasn't due in any part to Frank's information.

Speaker 25 During his year and a half on the run, Boyce obviously couldn't get a job. So he made money the old-fashioned way.
Bank robbery.

Speaker 25 He kept it pretty small time, nothing flashy where you get into the vault, just little stick-ups, a few thousand at a time from the teller.

Speaker 25 He's tied to at least 17 bank robberies in Idaho and Washington State during that time, eventually teaming up with a couple of brothers from Idaho.

Speaker 25 And it was one of those men who turned Boyce in for the reward money.

Speaker 25 No honor among thieves, I

Speaker 25 Boyce was taken back into custody on August 21st, 1981.

Speaker 25 And he wasn't in South Africa.

Speaker 27 Nationwide flight ended for Christopher Boyce here at the Pit Stop Drive-In in Port Angeles, Washington. He was eating a cheeseburger and onion rings when eight federal agents jumped him.

Speaker 27 Boyce was apparently living a triple life.

Speaker 27 So,

Speaker 25 Frank lied. Obviously.
He lied pretty egregiously. He falsified documents.
he led U.S. Marshals and the CIA on an international goose chase, and maybe that's why he never got charged for it.

Speaker 25 That's pretty embarrassing to put on the record.

Speaker 25 But they did still have that gun charge they'd picked him up on to use his leverage. So they set a sentencing date, but Frank didn't show up.
He was trying to skip the country. Again.

Speaker 25 Remember back in 1976, he got all the way to South Africa after skipping his sentencing date for mail fraud.

Speaker 25 But this time he was picked up just a few days after he missed court when a motel clerk in Montvale, New Jersey recognized him.

Speaker 25 When he was finally dragged in for sentencing, the government said they'd hoped Frank was going to be able to help them in the boys case, but nothing he said was of any use.

Speaker 25 Frank said he had no choice but to flee the country and start a new life on a cattle ranch in Australia with his wife because the government had reneged on their deal to put him in witness protection.

Speaker 25 I have to imagine there was some bickering back and forth between an indignant Frank and an exasperated federal prosecutor because in the end, Judge H.

Speaker 25 Curtis Meiner said, I have neither the time nor the inclination to unravel all of the mysteries in this case.

Speaker 25 However, they'd all ended up in his courtroom, whatever the convoluted backstory is here, this is a sentencing for illegal possession of a firearm, and that's really all the judge can do that day.

Speaker 25 So he sentenced Frank to four years.

Speaker 25 Judge Meiner said Frank was an explosive type of individual and that he was dangerous and mentally sick.

Speaker 25 And he urged Frank to take advantage of the opportunity to get psychiatric help while he was in prison this time.

Speaker 25 And yes, I did say, wife.

Speaker 25 When I first started poking around trying to build my biographical backstory to sort of sketch out a skeleton of this man's life, I found a New Jersey state record for a marriage in August 1981 between a Frank A.

Speaker 25 Sweeney and Adina M. Madison in Bergen County.

Speaker 25 There are other men named Frank Sweeney, obviously, but it was a middle-initial match and it's the right county county and it was one of the rare months that Frank wasn't in prison.

Speaker 25 But it didn't seem right, so I set it aside.

Speaker 25 But this offhand mention at his sentencing hearing about a wife sent me back to it. It is him.

Speaker 25 After the feds picked him up at the end of July 1981 on that gun charge, he was released from custody. He was cooperating.
He took them to the bank to look at his fake evidence, all that.

Speaker 25 And Sometime that month, he got married.

Speaker 25 I have no idea how they met or where she came from or what she thought she was going to get out of any of this or if she knew Frank was planning on entering witness protection that month or what on earth she saw in this man.

Speaker 25 But I do know how the marriage ended.

Speaker 25 Frank went back to prison that very same year, so they didn't have much time together.

Speaker 25 I don't know where Deanna was while Frank was away, but By 1985, according to a decision by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, Dana was living in Texas with her new boyfriend, Danny Lee Strong.

Speaker 25 They couldn't have known each other very long before moving in together because Strong had only just gotten out of prison again for another in a string of pretty run-of-the-mill robbery and fraud charges.

Speaker 25 And they didn't stay together long before they were arrested for murdering a man Strong said made a pass at Deanna.

Speaker 25 She was ultimately only convicted of stealing the victim's car, which they fled the scene in, but Strong got 99 years for the brutal beating and asphyxiation of Robert Eugene Thomas.

Speaker 25 Frank doesn't really factor into this story. He's in prison in another state this whole time, but his name appears in a footnote of an appeals court decision upholding Strong's conviction.

Speaker 25 Strong had sent Frank a letter after finding out that Deanna was planning to testify against him for the murder.

Speaker 25 I can't imagine what you write in a letter to your girlfriend's husband about a situation like this, but all that to say, Frank really did have a wife that he planned to start a new life with in Australia, but she ended up watching her boyfriend choke a man to death in an apartment in Fort Worth instead.

Speaker 2 This is Sophie Cunningham from Show Me Something.

Speaker 3 Do you know the symptoms of moderate to severe obstructive sleep apnea or OSA in adults with obesity?

Speaker 6 They may be happening to you without you knowing.

Speaker 7 If anyone has ever said you snored loudly or if you spend your days fighting off excessive tiredness, irritability, and concentration issues, it may be due to OSA.

Speaker 8 OSA is a serious condition where your airway partially or completely collapses during sleep, which may cause breathing interruptions and oxygen deprivation.

Speaker 11 Learn more at don'tsleep on osa.com.

Speaker 13 This information is provided by Lilly, a medicine company.

Speaker 1 Holidays with kids and family? Magical, but let's be honest, overwhelming. Between hanging lights, cleaning, wrapping gifts, and prepping for the in-laws, the list never ends.

Speaker 1 That's why I use Air Tasker. With a few taps, I found local taskers to decorate, organize, and even assemble that toy castle Santa, aka grandma, is bringing.

Speaker 1 I also got someone to play our family elf for photos because why not? Airtasker saves me time so I can actually enjoy the season and the people I love.

Speaker 1 Download the Airtasker app or go to airtasker.com. Airtasker, get anything done.

Speaker 24 What does Zinn offer you? Not just hands-free nicotine satisfaction, but the opportunity to be yourself. The chance to find connection.
The freedom to do things your way.

Speaker 24 When is the right time for Zinn? Anytime you need more time, more time for the moment, more time to find what moves you. Smoke-free, device-free time for you.
Why bring Zin into your life?

Speaker 24 Because America's number one nicotine pouch opens up the endless possibilities of right now.

Speaker 24 From the night out you're waiting to have, to the friends you need to catch up with, to the project you're thinking about starting, and the satisfaction that will come once you do.

Speaker 24 With Zin, you don't just find freedom, you keep finding it again and again. Find your Zen.
Learn more at Zinn.com.

Speaker 24 Morning, this product contains nicotine. Nicotine is an addictive chemical.

Speaker 20 At PNC Wealth Management, our brilliantly boring investment philosophy is designed to help create confident investors.

Speaker 20 These investors may go on vacations where they wear floral shirts unbuttoned generously or pose for pictures that look like they're holding up ancient architecture using only their finger.

Speaker 28 Though we are not responsible for any of this, we are proud to provide comprehensive financial planning services designed to help clients achieve their goals.

Speaker 20 So we're sorry.

Speaker 22 And you're welcome. PNC Wealth Management Member Finn Recipik.
Results vary by customer and are not guaranteed.

Speaker 19 If you're a maintenance supervisor at a manufacturing facility and your machinery isn't working right, Granger knows you need to understand what's wrong as soon as possible.

Speaker 19 So when a conveyor motor falters, Granger offers diagnostic tools like calibration kits and multimeters to help you identify and fix the problem.

Speaker 19 With Granger, you can be confident you have everything you need to keep your facility running smoothly. Call 1-800-GRANGER, clickgranger.com, or just stop by.

Speaker 15 Granger for the ones who get it done.

Speaker 25 On January 9th, 1982, the UVA men's basketball team lost to the Tar Heels in a close game, 60-65, at UNC's Carmichael Arena.

Speaker 25 I'm not a basketball fan, and I wasn't born then, but I guess it was an exciting game. UNC had knocked UVA out of the Final Four the year before.

Speaker 25 But Joseph Paul Franklin, an avowed neo-Nazi who'd recently been handed his first couple of life sentences for two of his many murders, didn't care much for basketball.

Speaker 25 He was in the rec room at the Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, Missouri, and he was trying to watch American bandstand.

Speaker 25 According According to Frank, whose time at the Springfield prison overlapped with Franklin's for a few weeks in 1981 until Franklin's transfer at the end of January 1982, the serial killer became enraged when a black prison guard changed the channel.

Speaker 25 Later that year, Joseph Paul Franklin was back in court.

Speaker 25 He'd spent years traveling the country, robbing banks and murdering young black men and interracial couples, so it would take years to sort out what to do with him.

Speaker 25 This time, he was on trial for the unsuccessful assassination attempt on civil rights activist activist Vernon Jordan.

Speaker 25 On May 29th, 1980, the Fort Wayne, Indiana chapter of the National Urban League was hosting a banquet in honor of a visit from National Urban League President Vernon Jordan.

Speaker 25 When a volunteer dropped him off at his hotel later that evening, a single bullet from a 3006 rifle tore through his back.

Speaker 25 He survived, but it's hard to build a case against a drifter sniper. Nobody saw him.

Speaker 25 The investigators had some handwriting analysis on a motel registration card, testimony from a grocery store clerk who identified Franklin as a man he'd had a strange conversation with, and a general idea that the crime fit Franklin's pattern, but it was a bit thin.

Speaker 25 And then came Frank. Oh, Frank loves to talk.
He loves to be helpful.

Speaker 25 He's still in prison on that gun charge, but he told federal authorities that in the brief couple of weeks he'd been on the same cell block as Franklin, they'd chatted a few times, and Franklin had confessed to him on several occasions about shooting Vernon Jordan.

Speaker 25 On the stand, Frank testified about that evening in January when the guard changed the channel to the basketball game. And it's a pretty good detail.

Speaker 25 Frank was very specific that it was a UVA-UNC game, though he couldn't recall the date.

Speaker 25 They were only on that cell block together for a few weeks, and there was in fact a UVA-UNC basketball game during that time period that would have been on television.

Speaker 25 He testified that Franklin was furious about the incident and spent days fuming about it.

Speaker 25 The two inmates were walking together in the exercise area a few days later when Franklin spotted that same guard again and turned to Frank and said, I'd like to blow him away like I shot that N-word bigwig in Indiana.

Speaker 25 Frank says he also lamented that Jordan just wouldn't die after being shot and that he was, sorry I didn't shoot that white slut first, referring to the white woman who'd given Jordan a ride that night.

Speaker 25 Frank was one of three jailhouse informants the government put on during that trial, all men who'd been in jail with Franklin, and all of whom said Franklin had admitted to various aspects of the crime in casual conversation.

Speaker 25 Joseph Paul Franklin was actually acquitted at that federal trial.

Speaker 25 Jurors said they believed Franklin shot Jordan, but they were hung up on the wording of the indictment, which specifically charged him with the shooting as a violation of Jordan's civil rights.

Speaker 25 Years later, on death row for a variety of other murders, Franklin did confess to shooting Vernon Jordan.

Speaker 25 When the trial was over, though, jurors who spoke to the press said they'd only believed one of the three jailhouse informants informants who'd testified.

Speaker 25 Frank.

Speaker 25 On cross-examination, Frank Sweeney seemed surprised to learn that the other two men had been paid thousands of dollars for their cooperation. He wasn't getting paid.
But he wasn't upset.

Speaker 25 He didn't need the money. He'd inherited a quarter of a million dollars, which would be about a million dollars today, when his parents died.

Speaker 25 All he wanted was witness protection and a positive letter to the New Jersey Parole Board.

Speaker 25 Just like in the Boyce Boyce case, he very conveniently had some information the government wanted, and all he wanted in return was witness protection.

Speaker 25 And this time, he got it.

Speaker 25 But he didn't get to keep it.

Speaker 25 In 1984, Frank filed a lawsuit against the warden of the Alabama prison where he was still serving his sentence on that gun charge.

Speaker 25 He said he was not receiving the protection afforded to him as a protected witness.

Speaker 25 The warden's response to the suit was that Frank would not stop telling people that he was a protected witness, which was causing a lot of problems. You're not supposed to do that.

Speaker 25 In court, the warden's executive assistant said that the prison was considering contacting the Office of Enforcement Operations, the division of the DOJ that administers the witness security program, to recommend his removal from the program, because they believed he was intentionally causing problems by talking about this constantly.

Speaker 25 And it seems he was ultimately removed from the witness security program around this time.

Speaker 25 And maybe that had something to do with his decision to testify on behalf of Anthony Spilotro, the hot-headed Chicago mobster who handled the family's business in Las Vegas.

Speaker 25 It couldn't have been an attempt to get back in the program. He was testifying for the defense.

Speaker 25 But maybe it was just spite. He wanted to get somebody else kicked out of the program.

Speaker 25 In 1983, when he was still in prison and still considered a protected witness, he briefly shared a cell with another guy in the program. Frank Culata was a mobster.

Speaker 25 He was a member of Tony Spilotro's Hole in the Wall gang. If you've seen the 1995 Scorsese movie Casino, it's that.

Speaker 26 Quite literally.

Speaker 25 Frank Marino, the character played by the guy who played Phil Leotardo and the Sopranos, is supposed to be Frank Culada. Joe Pesci's character, Nikki Santoro, is based on Tony Spilotro.

Speaker 25 Just watch the movie, it's all very complicated and our friend Frank Sweeney had nothing to do with it.

Speaker 25 But in 1983, the real-life Frank Culada was sharing a cell with Frank Sweeney because they had both turned state's witness against very dangerous men.

Speaker 25 Frank Sweeney had just testified against a serial killer and Frank Culada had turned on Spilotro after the FBI played him a recording of his friend talking about having him killed.

Speaker 25 When Anthony Spilotro went on trial in 1986, Frank Culadta was out of prison and in the program. And he was the government's star witness against Spilotro.

Speaker 25 Frank Sweeney was finally out of prison again and home in New Jersey when he read in the paper that Culada was going to be testifying.

Speaker 25 According to Frank, he felt compelled to contact Spilotro's defense attorney because when they were cellmates, Culada would often brag about committing perjury.

Speaker 25 So the defense flew Frank out to Las Vegas and put him on the stand.

Speaker 25 He claimed that after one of Culada's appearances in court back in 1983, he came back to their shared cell and bragged, Frankie, I just put another one away. You've heard of the Traveling Circus.

Speaker 25 I'm the original Traveling Perjurer.

Speaker 25 On cross-examination, Frank Sweeney admitted that when he'd been in the Witness Protection Program, he had on several occasions threatened and even faked suicide attempts to get what he wanted out of federal prosecutors.

Speaker 25 I wish I had more information on that. That is incredibly strange behavior, and it does actually happen again later.

Speaker 25 In the end, though, his testimony in that mob trial is just a strange little footnote, his third brush with the witness protection program. His testimony didn't matter much.

Speaker 25 I don't think anyone believed it, and the case ended in a mistrial over allegations of jury tampering, and Anthony Spilotro went missing before they could retry the case.

Speaker 25 The mobster and his brother were later found buried in a cornfield in Indiana.

Speaker 25 Frank Culada stayed in the Witness Protection Program for years, and Scorsese hired him as an onset advisor when he shot Cassino.

Speaker 25 Culada died of COVID in 2020.

Speaker 25 And in 1989, Frank went back to prison for mail fraud. Again.

Speaker 25 The court record is too old to get any documents without haggling with an archivist, but the docket sheet does say that in addition to another 57 months in prison, the judge also banned Frank from ever offering anything for sale by mail.

Speaker 25 So at first I assumed he was pulling the same scam he ran in 1976, where he placed ads for guns he didn't actually have and then ghosted would-be buyers after they sent him the money.

Speaker 25 But it's much weirder than that. I wish it was guns.
It wasn't guns this time.

Speaker 25 He was running what one journalist called a cat scam.

Speaker 25 He'd cut the tails off regular house cats and then run ads offering them as exotic purebred cats for $300.

Speaker 25 If he really was as independently wealthy off his inheritance as he claimed, did he really need $300 for a mutilated cat? Maybe he was just addicted to male fraud.

Speaker 25 As for the cats, one of the earliest mentions I could find of Frank in the newspaper archives was a 1958 article about the embalmed cat he got for his 15th birthday.

Speaker 25 He was looking forward to dissecting it and adding it to his collection of oddities that already included a cat skeleton.

Speaker 25 So, I hope all his fraudulent cats found happy homes even if their buyers were unhappy about losing $300.

Speaker 25 But it's in an appeals court decision related to a parole violation in the second mail fraud case where we find the details of a campaign of terror against his neighbors that foreshadows the events at the end of this long, strange tale.

Speaker 25 He was paroled in 1992 after serving about half of this sentence, and he was on probation for three years.

Speaker 25 Just days before that three-year period ran out, he was charged with a probation violation.

Speaker 25 He'd been convicted in New Jersey of sending obscene materials through the mail to a minor.

Speaker 25 I know, I know, this show is starting to feel like a tour of America's weirdest sex crime guys, but to be honest, I don't think there was anything sexual in his motivation for sending porno mags to a nine-year-old.

Speaker 25 I know that doesn't sound possible.

Speaker 22 Bear with me.

Speaker 25 But after he got out of prison, he's living in an apartment back in his hometown of Tenafly, New Jersey. A family of Russian immigrants moves into the apartment next door.
They have children.

Speaker 25 Children are noisy. Frank says he asked them to keep it down, but the noise continued.

Speaker 25 In what the Second Circuit Court of Appeals would later call a rather bizarre set of circumstances, he decided to get back at these noisy children by engaging in a lengthy harassment campaign against the entire family.

Speaker 25 At least twice, he shut off their electricity. On multiple occasions, he filled the lock on their front door with staples, making it impossible to to open.

Speaker 25 He had the family's mail forwarded to Des Moines, Iowa.

Speaker 25 The father of these noisy children was a doctor.

Speaker 25 One of his colleagues received a letter purporting to be from an AIDS charity informing the recipient that the doctor, the father of those noisy children, had tested positive for HIV.

Speaker 25 And along that same line of thinking, he also sent a letter to the children's school informing them that the nine-year-old boy had been exposed to HIV by his father.

Speaker 25 And he sent letters to the Jewish Community Center where the family were members, informing them that the entire family had been exposed to the virus.

Speaker 25 Remember, this is 1993. Telling people that this doctor has HIV could ruin his career.

Speaker 25 The school could call social services and they probably wouldn't be welcome in the sauna at the community center if people believed this.

Speaker 25 And in what would be his ultimate downfall here, he signed their nine-year-old son up for catalogs that sold pornographic materials.

Speaker 25 It seems like he believed that the child's father would get the mail, which apparently wasn't going to Iowa anymore, see the catalog, believe his son had signed up for it, and would punish the boy.

Speaker 25 And if the boy was grounded, he wouldn't be so noisy.

Speaker 25 But it backfired and Frank was discovered as the culprit. Police searched his apartment and found the typewriter he'd used to write all the letters and he quickly confessed.

Speaker 25 He got four months in jail in New Jersey for sending obscene materials to a child, but the parole violation landed him back in federal prison for another year.

Speaker 25 And maybe this trip back to prison gave him a chance to test out his own advice. You see, between getting out in 1992 and going back in 1995, Frank was profiled in the New York Times.

Speaker 25 The journalist Charles Strum actually used to write for the Bergen Record, the local paper Frank used to end up in every time he got arrested in the 60s, but Strum didn't come home from college and started the record until after Frank's armed standoff in the front yard.

Speaker 25 And they weren't talking about their shared hometown. They were talking about Frank's new consulting business.

Speaker 25 In 1994, Frank put a classified ad in USA Today that read:

Speaker 30 Go into federal prison for the first time? We will tell you what to expect and how to survive. Our consultants are graduates of the federal prison system.
Frank A.

Speaker 30 Sweeney and Associates, Box 15, Demarest, New Jersey, 07627.

Speaker 25 Frank told Strom that the idea came to him while he was reading the paper one morning in September 1993.

Speaker 25 Lawrence Powell, one of the LA police officers convicted for his role in the beating of Rodney King, was quoted in the paper as being terrified at the prospect of going to prison.

Speaker 25 Strum writes that Frank told him,

Speaker 30 I thought to myself, my God, there's probably a lot of people going to prison who's never been in jail before, primarily white-collar criminals. And they're probably terrified too.

Speaker 30 They're just as frightened as he is. So I thought maybe I can use my misfortune to help people and maybe make a profit doing it.

Speaker 25 The article says Frank claims to have 27 clients after just a few months of running his new consulting business.

Speaker 25 Though the author also prints without question Frank's claim that he left high school in the 11th grade because he was bored with it, not because he was in a youth correctional facility for bank robbery.

Speaker 25 In the article, Strum writes out all of Frank's crimes and convictions, but that 1962 bank robbery is missing. But again, they didn't have the internet then.

Speaker 25 Of his criminal record, Frank told the reporter,

Speaker 25 I remember it was Nietzsche who wrote, the crime is not in the act, but in the stupidity of being caught. I was caught.
And stupid.

Speaker 25 And he'd get caught a few more times in the coming years, but he stays humble. That Nietzsche quote is still his favorite to this day, according to his Facebook profile.

Speaker 25 He had to take a break from his new consulting career when he went away for a year in 1995, but he picked right back up when he got out.

Speaker 25 A 1997 Newsweek article about his business claims he was up to 87 clients now with white-collar criminals paying Frank $1,000 for assistance in getting favorable placement.

Speaker 25 So not only did Frank promise that he could advise you about the differences in food, facilities, and culture at different federal prisons, he claimed he had connections and could influence your placement.

Speaker 25 A Bureau of Prisons spokesman denied Frank had any ability to arrange transfers or promise placements at specific facilities, but at least one client told the reporter that prison officials had denied his request for a transfer during a five-year sentence for embezzlement.

Speaker 25 But after he wrote Frank and included a check for $1,000,

Speaker 25 his transfer came through.

Speaker 25 Now, promising these transfers seems like it would put Frank back in mail fraud territory.

Speaker 25 But if he had stopped short of fraud, this isn't actually a terrible way for a guy like Frank to make a living. He really had been in a significant number of our nation's federal prisons.

Speaker 25 He'd been in facilities all over the country spanning decades. He's in a great position to offer advice about how to get through your sentence as smoothly as possible.

Speaker 25 So if he'd stuck to lifestyle advice for the incarcerated, I might say that this could have been a success story for Frank.

Speaker 25 There was another article about his consulting business in 1998, but then he kind of disappears.

Speaker 25 Not sure what he was up to.

Speaker 25 He pops up briefly in a couple of articles in 2000 and 2001.

Speaker 25 An old prison friend of his called him from a jail in Reno to ask for help exposing an alleged smuggling ring run by one of the guards out there in Nevada.

Speaker 25 David Wayne is described as one of the most dangerous inmates in the state prison system after a variety of escape attempts and prison riots involving Wayne holding hostages.

Speaker 25 And in 2000, he wanted Frank's help leveraging this information about a corrupt guard to get a better placement.

Speaker 25 So, friend or client, hard to say, but the guard did end up charged with smuggling a handcuff key to an inmate, and Frank spent about a year advocating for Wayne's transfer.

Speaker 25 Considering he had once held two prison nurses hostage for 12 hours by rigging up a Rube Goldberg-style contraption that would stab the women's eyes out with scalpels if anyone opened the door and had successfully escaped at least once, a low-security placement for David Wayne was out of the question.

Speaker 25 But then,

Speaker 25 quiet.

Speaker 25 Frank moved out to Idaho and stayed out of the paper.

Speaker 25 He's not a very good driver, so I know he moved to Ada County, Idaho, around 2001, because that's when he started getting a lot of traffic tickets there.

Speaker 25 In 2008, he was charged with battery and convicted, but he only served five days in jail and successfully completed his court-ordered anger management class.

Speaker 25 The docket indicates the victim, a woman who appears to be a nursing assistant in the Boise area, got a restraining order.

Speaker 25 But the Frank Sweeney who tried to rob a bank and fought in the Bush War and had a mob boss fly him to Vegas and bragged about being able to influence prison officials, that Frank seems to be gone.

Speaker 25 He's just an old man living in Boise.

Speaker 25 Until 2015.

Speaker 2 This is Sophie Cunningham from Show Me Something.

Speaker 3 Do you know the symptoms of moderate to severe obstructive sleep apnea or OSA in adults with obesity?

Speaker 6 They may be happening to you without you knowing.

Speaker 7 If anyone has ever said you snored loudly or if you spend your days fighting off excessive tiredness, irritability, and concentration issues, it may be due to OSA.

Speaker 8 OSA is a serious condition where your airway partially or completely collapses during sleep, which may cause breathing interruptions and oxygen deprivation.

Speaker 11 Learn more at don'tsleep on osa.com.

Speaker 13 This information is provided by Lilly, a medicine company.

Speaker 29 The busiest time of the year, it's here. You've got parties to go to, work to wrap up, and a house to decorate.

Speaker 31 But who has the time?

Speaker 29 With Airtasker, finding help is easy. Post your task, set your budget, and let local taskers handle the rest.

Speaker 32 Party planning? Done. Lights? Hung.

Speaker 28 Stress?

Speaker 29 Reduced. You can even get someone to build a gingerbread house that doesn't collapse this time.

Speaker 29 Download the Airtasker app or go to AirTasker.com for a season with less stress, less mess, and a lot more fun. Airtasker, get anything done.

Speaker 24 What does Zinn offer you? Not just hands-free nicotine satisfaction, but the opportunity to be yourself, the chance to find connection, the freedom to do things your way.

Speaker 24 When is the right time for Zinn? Anytime you need more time, more time for the moment, more time to find what moves you. Smoke-free, device-free time for you.
Why bring Zinn into your life?

Speaker 24 Because America's number one nicotine pouch opens up the endless possibilities of right now.

Speaker 24 From the night out you're waiting to have, to the friends you need to catch up with, to the project you're thinking about starting, and the satisfaction that will come once you do.

Speaker 24 With Zinn, you don't just find freedom, you keep finding it again and again. Find your Zen.

Speaker 24 Learn more at Zinn.com.

Speaker 24 Warning, this product contains nicotine. Nicotine is an addictive chemical.

Speaker 20 At PNC Wealth Management, our brilliantly boring boring investment philosophy is designed to help create confident investors.

Speaker 20 These investors may go on vacations where they wear floral shirts unbuttoned generously, or pose for pictures that look like they're holding up ancient architecture using only their finger.

Speaker 28 Though we are not responsible for any of this, we are proud to provide comprehensive financial planning services designed to help clients achieve their goals.

Speaker 22 So we're sorry, and you're welcome. PNC Wealth Management member Finn Recivic.
Results vary by customer and are not guaranteed.

Speaker 33 If you're a custodial supervisor at a local high school, you know that cleanliness is key and that the best place to get cleaning supplies is from Granger.

Speaker 33 Granger helps you stay fully stocked on the products you trust, from paper towels and disinfectants to floor scrubbers.

Speaker 33 Plus, you can rely on Granger for easy reordering so you never run out of what you need. Call 1-800GRANGER, clickgranger.com, or just stop by.
Granger for the ones who get it done.

Speaker 25 In December of 2015, Frank went to the post office near his home in Garden City, Idaho. He parked his truck in one of the accessible parking spots out front.

Speaker 25 A woman saw him get out of his car, which did not have a placard indicating he was supposed to be parked there, and said something to him.

Speaker 25 We don't know exactly what she said.

Speaker 25 Now, me personally, I probably wouldn't have said anything. For the most part, it's not worth it.
It's not your business.

Speaker 25 There are plenty of people who are not visibly disabled who really do need those parking spots. And Frank was in his 70s at this point.

Speaker 25 So even if he didn't have a state-issued parking placard, he's old. Just leave him alone.

Speaker 25 But she made a comment about it and the situation escalated. Pretty seriously.

Speaker 25 Court documents only say that they had a verbal altercation, so at least she didn't get stabbed, which he's done at least twice to people who offended him.

Speaker 25 But whatever she said, and for whatever reasons she chose to say it, she didn't deserve what happened next.

Speaker 25 The victims in this case are referred to only by their initials in the court record for obvious reasons.

Speaker 25 But it can be tricky to keep track of people with just a letter, so I've given them all fake names just to make this a little easier. We'll call the woman from the parking lot Ellen.

Speaker 25 Her husband will be Sam, and their adult daughters will be Kayla and Lucy.

Speaker 25 Again, it is possible to figure out who these people are, but please don't. They've been through enough.

Speaker 25 Two weeks after that heated exchange in the post office parking lot, the postcards started.

Speaker 25 The probation office in Boise got the first one. Ellen's adult daughter Kayla was at the time on probation for a misdemeanor DUI charge.

Speaker 25 The letter writer claimed that he had just the night before been in the car with Kayla and she was so drunk that he had to jump out at a red light for his own safety.

Speaker 25 Ellen's husband Sam received a postcard at his dental office the same day informing him that his wife had been in the post office the week before and she was so drunk that she was falling down.

Speaker 25 The letter, though very brief, contained a lot of really specific personal information.

Speaker 25 The fact that the couple had very recently purchased a new home, including the name of the suburb where they now lived, the city where their other adult daughter lived, the names of both of their daughters and information about Kayla's arrest that year.

Speaker 25 Ellen received a third postcard that week addressed to her at home.

Speaker 25 This one contained her social security number and an allegation that her daughter Lucy was engaged in acts of prostitution at her place of work, which was named.

Speaker 25 After the family received the first postcards in December of 2015, they met with detectives at the Ada County Sheriff's Office in Boise.

Speaker 25 And despite investigators' best efforts, The family would continue to receive increasingly bizarre and frightening postcards for three full

Speaker 22 years.

Speaker 25 Their neighbors in nearby schools received postcards that appeared to be from the state sex offender registry informing them that Sam was a sex offender, specifically that he had sodomized a nine-year-old boy in 1978.

Speaker 25 It probably goes without saying, but I will say it anyway. That is not true.

Speaker 25 But it does kind of remind you of what Frank did to that doctor in 1993, doesn't it?

Speaker 25 Adding to the victim's distress, Sam passed away unexpectedly in January of 2016, just a few weeks after all this started. And obviously, Frank knew one of his victims was dead.

Speaker 25 Some of the letters sent to the man's daughters taunted and blamed them for driving their father into an early grave, but oddly, some of the letters pretended otherwise.

Speaker 25 While most of the postcards were signed Carson Wells, the name of Woody Harrelson's character in the movie No Country for Old Men, Some were signed with the names of her own children.

Speaker 25 Ellen received one of those just two months after her husband's death.

Speaker 25 Purporting to be from her daughter Lucy, who lived out of state, it said, Dear mommy, my blood test just came back and yes, I am HIV positive.

Speaker 25 I'm sure I was infected by one of the two crips with whom I was having an affair with. Regrettably, I will never be able to give you and daddy the grandchildren you so desired.

Speaker 25 But we know now that daddy is a pedophile. He may have harmed the grandkids.
Has he been released from jail?

Speaker 25 And again, this is a woman who just lost her husband. She knows this postcard isn't from her adult daughter.
Even if she hadn't already gotten a dozen other bizarre postcards, she would know that.

Speaker 25 No one's writing their mother a postcard on a typewriter. It's not 1932.

Speaker 25 And again, the recently deceased man was not a pedophile, nor was he in jail.

Speaker 25 He had just been buried by his family.

Speaker 25 Ellen and both of her daughters continued getting postcards, even after Ellen moved. And Frank was also sending the postcards to other people pretending to be members of the family.

Speaker 25 The Idaho Black History Museum received one signed with Ellen's name, address, and phone number that was so laden with racial slurs that you can barely tell what it's supposed to be trying to say.

Speaker 25 Lucy's boss received one advising him that his employee was having rectal intercourse with black men, although Frank described that. in more vivid terms.

Speaker 25 Now, for as strange as this man's life has been, you'd be forgiven if you forgot where we started. Frank is a Nazi.
He was a member of the American Nazi Party and he fought as a Rhodesian mercenary.

Speaker 25 He's not just a guy who loves doing mail fraud and hates his neighbors, he's very racist.

Speaker 25 And a lot of these postcards fixated on the idea that Ellen's daughters were engaged in interracial relationships, very graphically and racistly describing specific sex acts that they were, in his mind, having with black partners.

Speaker 25 And he was particularly upset that Ellen, a Latina, had married a white man.

Speaker 25 He called her racial slurs and wrote to her daughters calling them mongrels.

Speaker 25 It seems the only time he wasn't sending postcards was when he was out of the country. You see, he might have another wife.
It's not entirely clear.

Speaker 25 But several times a year, Frank would travel to Erfurt, the capital of the German state of Thuringia in central Germany, to visit a woman he's known for a very long time.

Speaker 25 Uta Schoenig, who performs semi-professionally as a belly dancer under the name Madame Shamila, has on several occasions referred to Frank as her husband.

Speaker 25 This may be literal, it may be a cheeky little joke, my German is not good enough to really read tone, and it may just be that they've been in a relationship for so long that they think of each other this way.

Speaker 25 My research game is strong, but a potentially non-existent German marriage certificate evades my grasp. Nevertheless, he does own a home in Erfurt and she lives in it.

Speaker 25 She refers to him occasionally as her Hausbesitzer, which you could translate as landlord, but you wouldn't really. You'd call the person you rent your home from your Fermiter.

Speaker 25 Hausbesitzer just means he owns her house.

Speaker 25 And he occasionally calls her Liebtchen, my love, and she calls him Frankie.

Speaker 25 When he visited in 2015 and they went to see her mother in the nursing home together, her photo captions are about Frank's visit to his mother-in-law.

Speaker 25 As with so much in Frank's life, it's hard to pin this down.

Speaker 25 I have a handful of photos of Frank with this woman that appeared to be from the 80s or early 90s based on the photo quality, Frank's apparent age, and, to be honest, her hair.

Speaker 25 But we're talking about Germany, so dating by the fashion could put us off by a decade or more. No offense, you know it's true.

Speaker 25 But at least in the present era of his life, he's visiting Germany every now and again.

Speaker 25 She breeds and shows Mexican and Peruvian hairless dogs, some of which have been quite successful internationally. Some of her show dogs list Frank Sweeney as a co-owner.

Speaker 25 In September of 2016, his victims had a brief reprieve from his letters because he was in Germany attending a seminar on dog genetics with Ute.

Speaker 25 These rare breed dogs are very prone to genetic problems and inbreeding, so I'm glad they're staying on top of best practices, I guess.

Speaker 25 But when he was at home in Idaho, the campaign of harassment was relentless. He even found a way to outsource the terror.
Frank sent postcards to inmates in prisons all over the country.

Speaker 25 He signed them with Ellen's name and address and requested that the men write her back.

Speaker 25 She received at least 75 letters, all addressed to her at home, from murderers.

Speaker 25 And as if she might not get it, like maybe she didn't put two and two together here, like maybe maybe she thought this was some totally separate, unrelated new problem she just happens to be having.

Speaker 25 Frank made sure she understood that he did this. He sent her numerous postcards explaining the situation.

Speaker 30 Every creep, every social degenerate who has written to you has your address, social security number, and date of birth. Likewise for Lucy too.

Speaker 30 Some of these freaks have already passed this information on to their criminal friends outside of prison. Last month, I visited your house twice in the early morning hours while you slept.

Speaker 30 Naturally, I've removed my license plates so that street cameras could not identify my car. And I still patrol the post office daily in an effort to spot you.

Speaker 30 You only have your big mouth to blame for all of this.

Speaker 25 In December of 2016, after the first full year, he wrote to her saying it was their anniversary, telling her, I intend to be with you for life.

Speaker 25 The letters just kept coming, reminding her that he was watching her outside her home, that he waited for her at the post office almost every day, and sending her postcards containing her own personal information, like her license plate number and information about her family.

Speaker 25 Just so she knew he had it too.

Speaker 25 He continued writing to Ellen and both of her daughters, calling them racial slurs, sluts, whores, threatening to report them for assorted imaginary crimes like tax fraud and drug dealing, and always remembering to write them on their birthdays.

Speaker 25 Investigators were stumped. They knew the letter writer was the man from the post office parking lot.
He said as much in his letters, but Ellen didn't recognize him.

Speaker 25 She had only a vague description of his vehicle, and she didn't get the license plate. Why would she have thought she needed to?

Speaker 25 The postcards were always wiped clean of prints. They were perfectly generic.
United States Postal Service issued materials that he always bought in small quantities and paid cash.

Speaker 25 He may truly have tormented this woman until one of them died if he hadn't done what he's always done.

Speaker 26 More crime.

Speaker 25 And here's that beginning of the end.

Speaker 25 It's not the end, but I told you the story that began outside of a bank in New Jersey in 1962 would start its final chapter outside of a bank in Idaho 56 years later.

Speaker 25 On October 13th, 2018, Frank got into another argument in a parking lot.

Speaker 25 These victims too are only identified by their initials in the court records, so I'm going to call them Liam and Denise.

Speaker 25 They were in their car outside the Wells Fargo in Garden City, Idaho.

Speaker 15 Frank honked at them.

Speaker 25 There was, again, some kind of verbal altercation. Maybe they gave him the finger or shouted.
Who knows? You know, this is the kind of thing that happens every day.

Speaker 25 You know, you don't pull forward fast enough. The guy behind you honks.
You tell him to fuck off. Nobody's being their best selves.
But life goes on.

Speaker 25 But not for Frank. Frank can't take it.
He stabbed a guy in the guts for splashing him in 1975.

Speaker 25 So, two weeks after Liam and Denise experience this angry driver at the bank, they start getting postcards.

Speaker 25 Like Ellen and her family, this family too starts hearing that their neighbors and nearby schools are getting postcards that pretend to be from the state sex offender registry, alerting people that Liam is a pedophile.

Speaker 25 He's not.

Speaker 25 And specifically, the postcards say that he sodomized a nine-year-old boy. That is a very specific and very gross detail to recycle from one victim to the next, right?

Speaker 25 Like that, that has to mean something.

Speaker 25 But I can't figure it out, and maybe that's for the best.

Speaker 25 These postcards, too, are generic ones from the post office, typed on a manual typewriter.

Speaker 25 And again, some of the postcards are signed Carson Wells, and sometimes they're signed with the name of Liam's adult son.

Speaker 25 And again, there were letters to the family from murderers answering requests for pen pals.

Speaker 25 But you know what the bank has?

Speaker 25 A lot of security cameras.

Speaker 25 And unbeknownst to Frank, shortly before he started terrorizing his second set of victims, his case wasn't just a local matter anymore.

Speaker 25 In September of 2018, the United States Postal Inspector Service started looking into the postcards. That's right, the mail police.

Speaker 25 That is a very real federal law enforcement agency with jurisdiction over mail crimes. According to their most recent annual report, the USPIS initiated more than 5,600 investigations in 2023.

Speaker 25 And during that year, 4,100 cases related to their investigations ended in convictions. Most of those numbers are things like mail theft and people mailing drugs.

Speaker 25 Also, though, a couple hundred people a year are assaulting postal employees. Knock that off.
Don't do that. Be nice to your mail carrier.

Speaker 25 So now we have the mail police on the case.

Speaker 25 And as soon as they start trying to figure out what's going on here, again, this is September of 2018, they're just looking at the postcards to Ellen and her family.

Speaker 25 But within a few weeks of them opening the investigation, the Idaho State Police let them know that Someone is sending postcards pretending to be from their office.

Speaker 25 And these are these postcards about how Liam is a a pedophile that are being sent to schools and neighbors.

Speaker 25 And because these postcards are made to look as though they are coming from the state sex offender registry, which is run by the state police, people are contacting the state police about them.

Speaker 25 And now the state police are talking to the mail police. And now the mail cops see that there are more victims.
And all of these postcards seem to be from the same person.

Speaker 25 When postal investigators speak to both families and compare the letters, it's clear they're all from the same person.

Speaker 25 All of the victims say they know who is sending them these postcards. They just don't know who he is.
Ellen knows it's the guy from the post office. Liam knows it's the guy from the bank.

Speaker 25 And they both describe some kind of older truck and an older man who's thin with a stiff gait and a very terrible, distinctive scar on his face. They're describing the same man.

Speaker 25 And surely a bank teller or a postal service clerk would recognize a description like that.

Speaker 25 Local cops had shown Ellen photo lineups on multiple occasions over the last three years as they're investigating this, but Frank was never a suspect, so he was never in any of the photo arrays.

Speaker 25 So each time they showed her photos of potential suspects, she said, he's not here, because he wasn't. And so she never picked out any other possible suspect.

Speaker 25 But once the postal investigator zeroed in on the man in the bank security footage, both Ellen and Liam separately identified him in photo lineups. And bank employees did know who he was.

Speaker 25 So by Christmas of 2018, the mail police have Frank's bank records. He's been paying a private investigator.
That's how he knew so much personal information about all of his victims.

Speaker 25 Information about their real estate transactions, what kinds of cars they drove, where they worked, where their adult children lived in different cities and states. He's paying a PI.

Speaker 25 Idaho is one of several states where you don't actually have to have a license of any kind to offer your services as a PI,

Speaker 25 so she doesn't have one that can be taken away. And she hasn't been charged with anything.

Speaker 25 Maybe she only helped Frank with information that didn't cross a line, and maybe she didn't ask enough questions about what he was doing with it.

Speaker 25 It remains unclear how he got everyone's social security numbers, though. But the PI he was paying is a woman in her 80s who seems seems to still be in the business just for the love of the game.

Speaker 25 Barbara Jacobson describes herself on her website as a cross between Nancy Drew and Jessica Fletcher with the tenacity of Columbo and credits her success to her Christian faith and divine intervention.

Speaker 25 An article in a 2017 issue of Christian Living magazine quotes her as saying, God is my business partner.

Speaker 25 Now, again, this woman has not been charged with a crime, but it seems like a bad sign that she either didn't know or didn't care that the client asking her for a lot of personal information on people had a five-decade long rap sheet that included convictions related to harassment by mail.

Speaker 25 You're either deeply unscrupulous or very bad at your job, and I'm not sure which is worse.

Speaker 25 Either way, This investigation is rapidly coming together. The postal investigator has Frank's bank records.
He's been identified by the victims. They're closing in on him.

Speaker 25 And maybe he knows, maybe he doesn't.

Speaker 25 He did move very suddenly in February 2019, leaving the house he'd been renting for over a decade right as they got the warrant to search it and renting a different house nearby.

Speaker 25 But he's still sending the letters. So if he knows they're onto him, why is he still sending the letters?

Speaker 25 On February 13th, 2019, six weeks after they know Frank's their guy, right around the time that he's moving to his new house, a clerk at the post office calls the investigator to say that an old man with a terrible scar on his face just bought a stack of postcards with cash.

Speaker 25 And the last postcard arrived on February 19th, 2019.

Speaker 25 It's signed Carson Wells, but the writer identifies himself as the man who blew his horn at them in the parking lot.

Speaker 25 And then he reminds Liam and Denise that all the murderers who'd been writing to them had already forwarded their personal information to criminals on the outside. But it was already over.

Speaker 25 Two weeks later, they searched Frank's home.

Speaker 25 They took his typewriter and his list of federal inmates, the ones he'd been writing to as his victims, and they found portraits of Hitler and Nazi memorabilia and white supremacist literature, and two live rattlesnakes.

Speaker 25 Rattlesnakes don't live in Idaho. These aren't snakes that he got outside.
These are snakes that he is

Speaker 25 breeding?

Speaker 25 Frank has a lifelong interest in reptile breeding. I think he's a member of the Idaho Herpetological Society, or at least he was before he went to prison.

Speaker 25 And shortly before his arrest, he commented on an online obituary for an old high school classmate, reminiscing fondly about how they used to collect snakes in the woods together in the 50s.

Speaker 25 Once he's in custody, Frank confessed immediately, telling investigators on the day of his arrest that he'd sent the postcards because he felt like these people had embarrassed him and it made him feel better to know he was causing them emotional distress.

Speaker 25 Shortly after his arrest, he wrote to the judge to ask the court to intervene in what he felt was an inadequate response by the jail to what he called many of the infirmities that affect the elderly and says he has the urge to commit suicide if his demands aren't met.

Speaker 25 And I don't want to sound like I'm brushing this off. I'm not saying that this couldn't possibly be a valid concern.

Speaker 25 People die in jails and prisons every day because employees don't care or don't have the resources to provide adequate care.

Speaker 25 This is a very real problem, and the urge to harm yourself is always very serious.

Speaker 25 But this isn't Frank's first rodeo. Remember, in the 80s, he used to threaten suicide and would even fake suicide attempts in order to manipulate employees of the witness protection program.
So

Speaker 25 this may not be a brand new issue for Frank.

Speaker 25 At any rate, Within months of his arrest, he entered into a plea agreement.

Speaker 25 So once the mail cops got on the case, they actually sorted it out pretty quickly, right? The USPIS got on the case in September of 2018, and within three months, they knew it was Frank.

Speaker 25 Maybe they should have called the guys who solve mail crimes earlier?

Speaker 26 I don't know.

Speaker 25 But if there had been more communication between different law enforcement agencies, the whole situation could have been resolved when he sent a single letter to a third victim, which he signed with his own name.

Speaker 25 But when a U.S. Marshal searched Frank's house two years before his eventual arrest, I guess they didn't bother to check in with the local police.

Speaker 25 Because in April of 2017, Frank sent a single letter to Gerald Schur, the man who founded and for many years ran the witness protection program.

Speaker 25 I can't think of a worse guy to pick if you're going to send a threatening letter. Schur was long since retired by 2017.

Speaker 25 He passed away in 2020 at the age of 86, but is there anyone on earth who had more chips to call in with the U.S. Marshals? You think a U.S.

Speaker 25 Marshal isn't going to come to your house if you sign your full legal name to a threatening letter to the guy who invented witness protection?

Speaker 25 You think you're going to scare the guy whose job was protecting mobsters from other mobsters?

Speaker 25 Truly a stupid move, even for Frank.

Speaker 30 You poisonous licentious old Jew. I thought that you would have been long dead from cardiovascular disease due to obesity.

Speaker 30 I was very much hoping to sit-shiver for you, to pray coddish over your fat corpse, you loathsome.

Speaker 30 I will remember you, although it's doubtful you will remember, from Witsec units in Otisville or San Diego, parading with your entourage, depraved women from the Office of Enforcement Operations.

Speaker 30 In 1984, you expelled me from the program, leaving me to fend for myself as a known informer, a rat in the general populations of very dangerous prisons.

Speaker 25 It had been more than 30 years, but Frank never got over getting kicked out of the program.

Speaker 25 He flew all over the world helping a spy in 1980 trying to leverage information on Christopher Boyce to get placement in the program. And it didn't work.

Speaker 25 The information he gave was not only not helpful, but by fabricating unhelpful information in order to get something from the government, He made things worse.

Speaker 25 And when he finally got what he wanted by testifying against a serial killer in 1982, he couldn't keep his mouth shut about it. And so he was removed from the program in 1984.

Speaker 25 In his letter to Schur, he claims that as a result of losing his protected status in 84, he was attacked by another inmate the following year.

Speaker 25 And he does, without a doubt, bear a huge scar all down one cheek to this day.

Speaker 25 Somebody cut Frank's face open pretty bad. He takes care to mention in his letter that the assailant was black, though he chooses different words to say that.
And who knows why Frank got cut?

Speaker 25 I'm not making light of the violence that happens inside jails and prisons, but you'd have to do some real mental gymnastics here to come up with a satisfying explanation for why a black man would cut Frank up in retaliation for

Speaker 25 Frank's testimony against a Nazi serial killer who traveled the country shooting black men.

Speaker 25 I just don't think that they would be mad about that.

Speaker 25 But I I can think of a variety of reasons why a black man who encountered Frank in prison might get into it with him.

Speaker 25 I mean, race aside, Frank's just kind of a hothead, not a great guy to hang out with, always getting into it with people. But also, he loves saying racial slurs.

Speaker 25 So I can think of a variety of reasons why this might have happened that had nothing to do with him testifying against a serial killer.

Speaker 25 We can't take Frank at his word, and I couldn't find any reporting from the time about a prison knife fight in 1985. So, who knows?

Speaker 25 After Schur received the letter, which Frank had signed venomously yours, Frank Abbott Sweeney, a U.S. Marshal was sent out to Idaho to speak with Frank.

Speaker 25 And Frank admitted that he sent the letter, but he said he meant no harm by it, and he allowed the marshal to search his home.

Speaker 25 It seems like if anyone had compared notes, Frank could have been identified as the Garden City postcard writer far sooner. The language in this letter was very similar to some of the postcards.

Speaker 25 If they had just showed this letter to the sheriff, maybe they would have recognized it. But I guess they didn't because he wasn't.

Speaker 25 The local police in Pennsylvania, where the letter was received, charged Frank with terroristic threats, but that's a non-extraditable misdemeanor in Pennsylvania, so they couldn't bring him back to face the charge.

Speaker 25 So he's got an open warrant in Pennsylvania if he ever goes there willingly, but he probably won't. And with Schur now deceased, it doesn't seem like that's likely to amount to anything.

Speaker 25 On December 16th, 2019, Frank Sweeney was sentenced to 51 months for six counts of stalking. A few days later, his German wife posted a photo of her Christmas Eve dinner.

Speaker 25 A friend asked her if Frank would be celebrating with her that year.

Speaker 25 She replied that, no, Frank has been ill for several months and can't fly right now. She didn't say that he was back in federal prison for at least the fifth time.

Speaker 25 Frank Sweeney was released from prison in December of 2022. I just noticed as I'm writing this that it's his 81st birthday today, but it won't be by the time you hear this.

Speaker 25 He's still in Idaho. He's still playing the violin.
And he still co-owns a few Mexican hairless dogs on the show circuit in Germany.

Speaker 25 In that 1994 New York Times article about his prison consulting business, Frank quipped that his favorite quote was, the crime is not in the act, but in the stupidity of being caught, which he attributes to Nietzsche.

Speaker 25 I think, regardless of your stance on the philosophical nature of crime and punishment, though, there are better quotes from Frank's thousands of appearances in the newspaper over his six decades of crime.

Speaker 25 Maybe Judge H.

Speaker 25 Curtis Meiner had it right in 1981 when he cut off the bickering in the courtroom over exactly what the hell happened with Frank's mysterious South African letters about the missing spy, saying, I have neither the time nor inclination to unravel all the mysteries in this case.

Speaker 25 Because we never really will unravel all the mysteries of Frank's past.

Speaker 25 He played a bit part in so many much bigger stories. They've made whole Hollywood films out of so many of these little slices of history that Frank passed through.

Speaker 25 From Cold War spy thrillers to Scorsese dramas about organized crime, Frank's there.

Speaker 25 He's not in the movie. He's just out of frame while history happens.

Speaker 25 Doing something really goddamn weird.

Speaker 25 Weird Little Guides to the production of CoolZone Media. For more from CoolZone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 2 This is Sophie Sophie Cunningham from Show Me Something.

Speaker 5 Do you know the symptoms of moderate to severe obstructive sleep apnea or OSA in adults with obesity?

Speaker 6 They may be happening to you without you knowing.

Speaker 7 If anyone has ever said you snored loudly or if you spend your days fighting off excessive tiredness, irritability, and concentration issues, it may be due to OSA.

Speaker 8 OSA is a serious condition where your airway partially or completely collapses during sleep, which may cause breathing interruptions and oxygen deprivation.

Speaker 11 Learn more at don'tsleep on osa.com.

Speaker 13 This information is provided by Lilly, a medicine company.

Speaker 31 Honestly, honestly, honestly, no one wants to think about HIV, but there are things that everyone can do to help prevent it. Things like PrEP.

Speaker 31 PrEP stands for Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis, and it means routinely taking prescription medicine before you're exposed to HIV to help reduce your chances of getting it.

Speaker 31 PrEP can be about 99% effective when taken as prescribed. It doesn't protect against other STIs though, so be sure to use condoms and other healthy sex practices.

Speaker 15 Ask a healthcare provider about all your prevention options and visit findoutaboutprep.com to learn more. Sponsored by Gilead.

Speaker 32 The holidays get hectic fast. That's why I start with Airtasker, where you can get anything done.

Speaker 29 From decorating and cleaning to assembling furniture, wrapping gifts, or running last-minute errands, local taskers make it all happen.

Speaker 29 I just post my tasks, set my budget, and actually have time to enjoy the season. I even got someone to dress up as Santa for my dog's photo shoot.

Speaker 29 This year, my holidays look amazing without the stress.

Speaker 32 Download the Airtasker app or go to Airtasker.com.

Speaker 29 Airtasker, get anything done.

Speaker 34 Okay.

Speaker 16 Only 10 more presents to wrap.

Speaker 23 You're almost at the finish line.

Speaker 34 But first.

Speaker 34 There,

Speaker 34 the last one.

Speaker 24 Enjoy a Coca-Cola for a pause that

Speaker 1 refreshes.

Speaker 34 Let's unpack the myths behind GLP-1 drugs. Myth number one, GLP-1 can be a long-term solution for weight loss.
True, they can. If you want to be on a drug that changes your body's natural instincts.

Speaker 34 Myth number two, GLP-1 can fix your metabolism. False, GLP-1s fix hunger and this leads to weight loss.
Try the natural GLP-1 therapy, Metabolism Ignite.

Speaker 34 Get 15% off your first order with promo code iHeart at VeracitySelfcare.com. V-E-R-A-C-I-T-Y Selfcare.com.

Speaker 1 This is an iHeart podcast.