Soldier of Misfortune: Frank Sweeney, Pt. 1

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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.

Our subject today was alive 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 23rd, 1962, when an 18-year-old member of the American Nazi Party was arrested after skipping school to try to rob a bank with a toy gun.

And we'll mark the beginning of the end of his story in a Wells Fargo parking lot in Garden City, Idaho on October 13th, 2018, 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 dozen times, fought as a foreign mercenary, got deported from both Rhodesia and South Africa, helped an escaped spy evade U.S.

marshals, turned state's witness against a Hitler-worshipping 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, and this is Bruno Guys.

This is a strange one.

The first few episodes of this show were stories I already knew and thought you should know too.

Kevin Strome was a prominent figure in the white supremacist movement for decades, and it was big local news here in Charlottesville when he was arrested 20 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 I spent years reading, paying 10 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 it will be brand new to just about everybody because for as many times as this man shows up in the newspaper over the last 60 years,

I haven't found any one source that's 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 we'll definitely get to eventually in another episode, when my weird little guy 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.

And what I found was kind of a bizarro world forest gum.

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' charm.

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 wait in between, but I think you'll agree.

Frank's story is weird enough for two episodes.

Frank Abbott Sweeney Jr.

was born in August of 1943 in New Jersey to Frank Abbott Sweeney Sr., a realtor, and Marie Gleason 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 life is self-serving fiction, which would sometimes get published without fact-checking and then reappear in later accounts as fact.

It was in the newspaper after all.

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 1965 with a degree in psychology, but he couldn't possibly have matriculated at Georgetown in 1961.

He was a senior at Tenafly High School in 1962 when he was sent to the Annandale Reformatory for two and a half years.

He never finished high school.

His claim that his alias Francis Shellhammer derives from his mother's maiden name also fails to hold up to scrutiny.

His mother was born Marie Gleason to John Gleason, 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 tree all the way back to Ireland, giving him the benefit of the doubt that maybe there's a shellhammer in there somewhere.

I didn't find one.

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 1870s, but he probably just made it up.

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 a mobster or a few tell-all memoirs from U.S.

Marshals to ever hope to sort out.

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 23, 1962, Frank Sweeney skipped school.

Shortly after 9 a.m., he walked into a bank in Englewood, New Jersey, approached 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 red-headed teenager had it in him to shoot her.

Or maybe she just was having a bad day and didn't care anymore.

Because according to local news reports, she sneered at him, got up, and walked away, leaving 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 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 him back inside the bank to be identified by the teller, and as the patrolman is making the arrest, Frank says to him, well, I guess it didn't work.

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 Frank denied this, and 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 two years when Frank would have still been a minor.

In January 1960, three unnamed teenage boys were accused of painting swastikas on parked cars in Emerson, just eight miles away.

In February of 1961, 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.

In June, two teenage boys were spotted fleeing the scene after two trailers belonging to a contractor were broken into and left a swastika painted on the floor inside.

In all of these incidents, police told the papers at 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 in every 1960s 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 in neighboring cities, and other incidents that just don't fit this particular pattern of teenage Nazi vandalism.

And the comment the judge made makes it sound like Frank had been there before.

But any appearance he'd made in court as a minor 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 2024, so forget figuring out what happened in 1961.

But it does seem pretty likely he'd at least been a suspect in some of those incidents.

Because at the hearing where he pled guilty to the attempted bank robbery, Frank did admit that the police had spoken to him on numerous occasions, specifically specifically concerning his involvement in George Lincoln Rockwell's American Nazi Party.

For the attempted bank robbery, Frank was sentenced to an indeterminate term at a boys' reformatory, and he was released in October of 1964, shortly after his 21st 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 1967, neighbors reported hearing gunshots 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 outside of his parents' home, got out, and walked toward the front door.

The officer asked 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 before 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 officer saw the gun and called for backup.

And when they arrived, Frank opened fire on them from inside the home, kicking off a 75-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 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 Zurla, who's who's still standing there in the front yard, bleeding from a gunshot wound.

And Frank says, Some shot when I got you through the window, huh?

There's no follow-up I can find about whether the dog was hurt or how Mrs.

Sweeney got the tear gas out of her upholstery.

It was the 60s, 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 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, 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 in character, which results in maiming or wounding.

So that definitely qualifies.

And he was sentenced to...

six years,

which

honestly, that's kind of remarkable, right?

I'm not going to bat for the carceral 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 60s news stories about this event was fascinating.

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 was lightly wounded, but that's not what they would put in the newspaper today.

You know it.

And the 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 in 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 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.

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 at the time.

They used to put everything in the newspaper.

It's so beautiful.

Every detail, every boring little bit.

I wish they still did that.

And I'm eternally curious about details that probably won't end up mattering, but I pulled up a map of Tenafly, 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 1950.

The Kaplan Jewish Community Center.

It was an unimaginable crime.

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Why did the prosecution take this?

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The clearest account of the next phase of Frank's life comes from an essay written in 2019 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, and maybe his memory has faded a bit in the nearly 50 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 1970s.

I'll try to walk the tightrope here of providing a little more context than just Rhodesia was 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.

Now, 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 isn't.

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 in southern Africa.

In the early 20th century, Rhodesia was a British territory, the legacy of Cecil Rhodes's British South Africa Company.

The area was effectively ruled by the company until the 1920s when it became a self-governing colony of the UK.

And by the 1950s, decolonization was happening all across the African continent.

These fading European empires couldn't or didn't want to hold on to all the colonies they'd collected during the previous century's scramble for Africa.

In 1960, 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.

And whether we like it or not,

this growth of national consciousness is a political fact.

And we must all accept it as a fact.

And our national policies must take account of it.

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 here.

He wasn't advocating for decolonization out of the goodness of his heart.

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 in 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 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 can get through it quickly.

So don't think I'm giving the British 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 loss here.

This is the Cold War.

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 1965.

White colonists made up just 5% of the population of the territory, but they were unwilling to accept that the UK would only grant Rhodesian independence if they shared even a crumb of political power with the other 95% of Rhodesians.

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 15-year period of civil conflict 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 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 invested in getting 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 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 Roof, who was welcomed with open arms at an evening Bible study at Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, registered the domain lastrodesian.com a few months before he murdered nine of the parishioners who thought he was joining them for prayer that night.

Roof made his final edit to that site, his digital manifesto, just hours before carrying out that attack in 2015.

The cultural moment where magazines like Soldier of Fortune ran full-page advertisements for opportunities 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 Americans who did end up in Rhodesia in the 70s, Frank Sweeney didn't see an advertisement in Soldier of Fortune.

That magazine's first issue, bearing a cover story about American mercenaries in Africa, was published in the summer of 1975, 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 1972 and asked how to join up.

The Information Center was not technically a diplomatic office because Rhodesia was not technically a country, a 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 chief recruiter.

David Annable, a reporter for the Christian Science Monitor, who interviewed Frank in 1975, wrote that he'd spoken to another recent visitor 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 30-minute 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 and U.S.

federal law, the visitor was offered Major Lamprecht's contact information.

That recruiter, Nick Lamprecht, worked closely with Soldier of Fortune founder Robert K.

Brown to strategize how the magazine can be used to convince more Americans to make the trip in the latter years of the conflict.

Lamprecht 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 Lamprecht knew he was lying about how much fun you could have fighting in the 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's service in Rhodesia are a little murky.

The details of 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 Annable in that 1975 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, we shot them 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.

He claimed that sometimes these trips over the border were to assist Portuguese troops.

And until late 1974, Portuguese troops were in Mozambique fighting to put down the Mozambican War of Independence.

And Frank said sometimes they'd go over the border to raid guerrilla camps, perhaps those belonging to the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army, which had strong ties to the groups fighting for independence in Mozambique.

These Rhodesian raids over the border into Mozambique continued even after that nation gained sovereignty in 1975, 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 Rhodesian raid on a refugee camp in Mozambique killed over a thousand civilians.

David Annable published a couple of articles in 1975 and 1976 about Rhodesia, and he often quoted Frank Sweeney about his time there.

After all, there weren't 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 1975, Frank placed ads in magazines like Shotgun News and Gun Week that read:

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, 72 Creston Avenue, Tenafly, New Jersey, 07670.

When speaking with the reporter about his efforts to recruit others to make the trip, Frank spoke warmly of Major Lamprecht and claimed that it was Lamprecht himself who'd 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 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 Annibal that he'd received hundreds of letters in response to his ads.

and responded to all of them.

But then again, he also told Annibal he was a college graduate, and we know that's not true.

And 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 Annibal something.

He probably did show him papers 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 recruited into the Rhodesian Army in 1972, but he may have actually still been in prison in 1972 for shooting that cop.

It's hard to pin down exactly when he was released.

One newspaper article years later puts his parole date for that conviction at 1974, 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 he probably didn't.

When Frank was later arrested for his role in the escape of a Soviet spy, an FBI agent puts his date of enlistment at 1973.

So the truth is in there somewhere.

Either way, he wasn't in Rhodesia for very long before he really, really wanted to go home.

You know, war is hell for everybody.

And here we have another unreliable narrator, Anthony Hickman.

Hickman is a retired officer in the British South Africa Police, 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 19th century.

The BSAP was Rhodesia's regular police force, but the line between regular policing and military operations was...

blurry.

And during the Bush War, there were military units made up of BSAP officers, and they developed counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism units, they oversaw the intelligence gathering arm of the infamously brutal Silu scouts, and they killed hundreds of people by introducing poison food and medicine into 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 1970s, he was assigned to the homicide unit of BSAP's Criminal Investigative Division.

And in 2019, 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 70s, it's not perfect.

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 1977?

Which would, of course, be entirely impossible.

Frank could not have been in a Rhodesian army barracks in September of 1977.

Because according to the U.S.

Marshals, the FBI, the DOJ, the CIA, and 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 1977.

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 1975.

And the date aside, there is enough meat to Hickman's account and the supporting primary documentation he provided that supports the idea that this 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 1975, probably,

Frank went to the bathroom at the barracks he was living in.

Inside the shared facilities, two infantrymen who'd 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, and he was outraged when the drunk man splashed shower water on him.

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 curtain aside and 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 said that a private F.A.

Sweeney had been convicted of the attempted murder of a policeman in the United States.

It was Hickman, our 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 history, and that he would get a free flight back to New Jersey without having to finish his term of service.

And if that letter had 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 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 1967.

And the timeline isn't the only thing that's off.

In this version, Frank says the shootout only lasted 10 minutes, 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 incident in this version is similar.

He told Hickman about shooting guns 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'd purchased from an advertisement in Soldier of Fortune magazine, which is obviously not possible because that magazine didn't exist in 1967.

I don't know, 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 and 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 100%, and he was worried 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.

This sounds so Looney Tunes to me, like a literal Looney Tunes cartoon, right?

This is

Daffy Duck behavior.

But he tells this story to 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.

Which doesn't say much for the state of Rhodesian intelligence because yet Frank's taking a little creative license here.

The story he's telling is not 100% true, but he is admitting to you almost all of the real details for the real crime he really did go to prison for.

So you, you probably should have figured that out before he told you.

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 Tenafly, New Jersey at random and just asked, do you remember 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 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 passports and $300 in cash.

Both passports bore Frank's photo and Frank's birth date, but only one had Frank's name on it.

The other was for Francis August Schellhammer, a man who 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 U.S.

passports for Hickman and the other detective.

Hickman says 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 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 1975, Frank Sweeney was kicked out of the Rhodesian light inventory and deported from Rhodesia.

He got his free flight home after all and was permanently banned from a country that never existed.

It was an unimaginable crime.

It's four consecutive life terms for Brian Koberger who killed the four University of Idaho students.

The defense are on a sinking ship.

It was clear at that point he was out of options.

Nearly 30 months of silence until

bombshell development Brian Koberger appearing set to accept a plea deal just five weeks before his quadruple murder trial was set to start.

No trial, no testimony.

He has pleaded guilty to five criminal counts, one of burglary and then four counts of murder.

In this final season, we returned to Moscow with interviews from those still searching for answers.

Why did the prosecution take this?

They were holding all the cars.

How on earth could you make a deal?

What message does that send?

Listen to season three of the Idaho Massacre on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Liz went from being interested in true crime to living true crime.

My husband comes back outside and he's shaking and he just looks like he's seen a ghost and he's just in shock.

And he said,

your dad's been killed.

This is Hands Tied, a true crime podcast exploring the murder of Jim Melgar.

Liz's mom had just been found shut in a closet, her hands and feet tied up, shouting for help.

I was just completely in shock.

Her dad had been stabbed to death.

It didn't feel real at all.

For more than a decade, Liz has been trying to figure out what happened.

There's a lot of guilt, I think, pushing me.

And I just, I want answers.

Listen to Hands Tied on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Shortly after he got home to New Jersey, he wrote 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 22nd, 1975.

So if he's already home and realizing his mail is missing and writing the letter in August of 75, that all the events before that happened earlier in 1975, you get it.

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.

It's one big racial cesspool where the worst element is looked on and held in high esteem.

With my RLI training to back me up, I have 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 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.

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.

The United States government had no real appetite for enforcing the statute prohibiting him from recruiting people into a foreign army.

But when he placed ads offering four MP-40 Schmeisser submachine guns for sale, he didn't use his own name.

He used the name Francis August Schellhammer, the name from 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.

So in March of 1976, 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 in just a few weeks.

Notice he's moving to South 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 1976, he's also also entering a guilty plea to that federal mail fraud charge.

The LA Times article, which doesn't make any 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.

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 arrested by U.S.

Marshals as he was getting off the plane at JFK in June of 1976.

And while marshals were arresting him, his suitcase was loaded off the plane and it went through customs without him.

Customs officials seized a 9mm Luger pistol because he lacked the proper paperwork to bring the firearm into the U.S.

from a foreign country.

And inexplicably, there were no additional 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 70s were a different time, and it wasn't a a big deal to bring a gun to the airport, but fleeing the country to avoid going to prison has always been illegal.

I'm pretty sure of it.

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 customs 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 $244 storage fee.

I 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 1980, paid the fee, filled out a form, and they gave him back his gun.

A spokesman for the U.S.

Customs Service said they had no way of knowing he was 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 farcical.

You know, he's not a great guy, but he does have some quips.

You know, he's just out there doing bits.

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 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 1974, a 21-year-old college dropout named 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 McDonnell Douglas, another aerospace 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 before his promotion to a highly sensitive position 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 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, and other CIA contacts around the world.

In his congressional testimony, Boyce describes a shockingly lax approach to security for this allegedly 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 the vault at 4 a.m.

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 the teletype machine at the end of each workday.

Boy 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 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 CIA 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, but I have to tell you just a little bit about the 1975 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 push pin in somewhere.

Now, I know even less about Australia than I know about the decolonization of Africa in the 20th century, which is to say, like,

not very much.

I think they still have the queen?

I guess it's the king now.

Do they have to print new money after the queen died?

It doesn't matter.

It doesn't matter.

But I was delighted to discover that CIA meddling in an Australian political crisis was even a possibility.

How intriguing.

You know, I know they like to keep it south of the equator, but I thought that was just a Western hemisphere thing.

Now, of course, of course, the United States government maintains that the CIA had no role in pushing Prime Minister Gough Whitlam out of office in 1975.

But Christopher Boyce went to prison claiming otherwise.

In the 70s, Gough Whitlam was the head of the Australian Labour Party, and his administration was fairly socially progressive.

He was also considering closing Pine Gap, a U.S.

signals intelligence surveillance base in Central Australia, run by the CIA.

In 1975, the opposition party, which controlled the Senate, deferred the passage of an appropriations bill.

I don't know and am not going to find out how 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.

It's like they have a guy that can fire the president.

I don't know.

It's just not 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 1977, President Jimmy Carter sent Warren Christopher, the Deputy Secretary of State, to Australia to meet with Whitlam.

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 says they were not involved.

They said they didn't do it.

All that to say, though, 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 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 Kerr.

So

he stole them.

And instead of going to the press, he and his childhood friend, a 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.

In an absolutely absurd turn of history, Dalton Lee was arrested in 1977 outside the Soviet embassy in Mexico City.

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 U.S.

just 10 days later.

And accounts vary as to whether or not Dalton Lee gave Boyce 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'd 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 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 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 1977 and sentenced to 40 years in prison.

And for several months in late 77 to early 78, the two men were on the same cell block at Terminal Island.

Much has been made of the apparent incongruity of Frank, a man who fought as a mercenary against communist guerrillas, befriending Boyce, a man convicted of aiding the 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 long unsuccessfully trying to figure out, transferred to a prison in Maine sometime in early 1978.

Boyce would eventually be transferred to Lompoc, a prison a few hours north of Los Angeles.

And in January of 1980, Christopher Boyce escaped from prison.

The ensuing manhunt for the 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 wrong direction.

And that's where I have to leave you today.

I do hope you'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 reasons I'm still not 100% clear on,

we're a bunch of snakes.

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