Disorganized Crime, Pt. 1

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Speaker 12 In December of 2018, A jury in Charlottesville, Virginia returned a guilty verdict in the trial of James Alex Fields Jr.

Speaker 12 They recommended a sentence of life in prison for the murder of Heather Heyer and another 419 years for the wounding of members of the crowd of peaceful demonstrators he'd rammed with his car after a Nazi rally the previous summer.

Speaker 12 I remember sitting in that courtroom when the verdict was read aloud. It was filled to capacity.
I could barely write in my notebook for the lack of elbow room on those usually empty wooden benches.

Speaker 12 This was big news. Reporters from outlets all over the country, the world even, had descended on Charlottesville to write about this trial.

Speaker 12 And beyond the walls of my local courtroom, reporters who couldn't make it to the trial in person were writing about it too.

Speaker 12 Every time Charlottesville is back in the news for all the wrong reasons, Little newspapers in towns you've never heard of look for local angles on the aftermath of that Nazi rally.

Speaker 12 They interview middle school classmates of men who were identified in photos of violent mobs that beat students with torches and bloodied members of the clergy in a public park.

Speaker 12 After that verdict was in, in December of 2018, in a tiny town in Maine, 800 miles away from Charlottesville, a reporter from the Ellsworth American found her local angle.

Speaker 12 As front pages of newspapers everywhere were once again filled with pictures of Nazis, she paid a visit to a Nazi who'd been living in their midst in Maine for decades.

Speaker 12 He hadn't marched in Charlottesville. His marching days are long past.

Speaker 12 But at 98 years old, Frank Smith still had fond memories of his close friendship with Commander George Lincoln Rockwell.

Speaker 12 I'm Molly Conger, and this is Weird Little Guys.

Speaker 12 You probably thought we were moving on from the American Nazi Party.

Speaker 12 I thought I was done too.

Speaker 12 I never even really had much interest in writing about the party's founder, George Lincoln Rockwell, at all.

Speaker 12 I did four episodes in three weeks about his assassination and a whole episode about about his weird funeral.

Speaker 12 How much could there really be left to say about the circumstances surrounding one man's death? A lot, as it turns out.

Speaker 12 And I was willing to let it lie, to leave some stones unturned, to leave some stories for another day, move on for now and put a pin in some of these events to revisit down the road with a different weird little guy as our focal point.

Speaker 12 There There are so many side characters in the story of the American Nazi Party who warrant their own episodes.

Speaker 12 I have no doubt that I will eventually subject you to, God, probably at least a month's worth of episodes about William Luther Pierce.

Speaker 12 And obviously, eventually, we'll have to talk about James Mason.

Speaker 12 Before he was an elderly pedophile living in government housing in Denver and advising young terrorists, he was a teenage boy who joined the American Nazi Party.

Speaker 12 And Ralph Forbes had a long, strange career that I'd like to dig into.

Speaker 12 So I know we aren't done with these characters. And I know I can't get lost down every rabbit hole while I'm just trying to get across the finish line on one story.

Speaker 12 But there was one strange little side quest

Speaker 16 that I couldn't let go of:

Speaker 16 Frank Smith.

Speaker 12 Something about Frank just wouldn't let me mark him down in my notes as something to come back to later.

Speaker 12 He was setting off my weird little guy radar in a way I could not ignore. And I'll tell you, my instincts were not wrong.

Speaker 12 I found dynamite, organized crime, FBI wiretap memos about mafia hits, a fake church, a Nazi mistress having a secret baby under a fake name, and for some reason, the disgraced mayor of Pawtucket, Rhode Island.

Speaker 12 If you listened to the last five episodes, the ones about Rockwell's murder and his funeral, you heard a little bit about Frank Smith.

Speaker 12 You even heard from Frank himself in clips from interviews over the years.

Speaker 12 He very publicly insisted that John Patler was not guilty of the murder of George Lincoln Rockwell.

Speaker 12 He said it on the stand at Patler's trial in 1967, and he was still saying it 50 years later in a rambling interview with a South African neo-Nazi in 2016.

Speaker 12 And you might remember him from the dramatic shootout with Christopher Vidievich in 1968.

Speaker 12 An incident that Frank believed was an attempted assassination to prevent him from getting to the real truth about Rockwell's Rockwell's murder.

Speaker 12 In the two biographies of Rockwell that I read while I was researching John Patler, Frank Smith really just gets a few passing mentions as a member of the American Nazi Party and as a witness at Patler's trial.

Speaker 12 But when I started reading the actual trial transcripts, something caught my eye. I can't quite describe it.

Speaker 12 He talks like a con man.

Speaker 12 I don't know how else to put it.

Speaker 12 I've sat through a fair number of trials and I've read thousands of pages of trial transcripts, over a thousand in this case alone.

Speaker 12 And most people aren't great on the stand.

Speaker 12 They're nervous.

Speaker 12 They give short answers and when you press them, they sort of backtrack.

Speaker 12 They don't want to commit to a lot of specific, hard details, especially if you push hard and they get rattled on cross-examination.

Speaker 12 Most people do. It's normal.

Speaker 12 But Frank Smith was chatty up there.

Speaker 12 I mean, he talked up a storm on the witness stand.

Speaker 12 He was giving answers that spanned multiple pages of the transcript without interruption from the attorney asking him the questions.

Speaker 12 He claimed to recollect specific verbatim quotes from long conversations.

Speaker 12 But he would never quite commit to the specifics when it came to exactly where he was at any particular time.

Speaker 12 Specifically, there's no proof of where he was or wasn't at 3 p.m. on June 27th, 1967.

Speaker 12 There's only so much they could ask him about June June 27th, 1967 at that trial.

Speaker 12 He wasn't on trial and George Lincoln Rockwell didn't die on June 27th.

Speaker 12 Rockwell died on August 25th, 1967.

Speaker 12 And John Patler killed him. But Rockwell had survived a prior assassination attempt just two months before his death.

Speaker 12 As he was pulling into the driveway at the Nazi Party barracks in Arlington, Virginia that afternoon, someone fired a single shot at him,

Speaker 12 but they missed.

Speaker 12 And I assumed, well, that was John Patler.

Speaker 12 Right? That makes sense.

Speaker 12 At his trial, a witness said that he saw him doing target practice in July, the month before the murder in August.

Speaker 12 So you can see how it would make sense to assume that He tried to shoot Rockwell in June. He missed.
He practiced some. He tried again.
His aim was better the second time. Rockwell's dead.

Speaker 12 Makes sense.

Speaker 12 When Rockwell wrote about the assassination attempt in his newsletter, he said he didn't see who did it.

Speaker 12 But at trial, Matthias Cole testified that Rockwell had privately confided in him that the shooter was John Patler. William Luther Pierce, years later, told his own biographer, the same thing.

Speaker 12 Rockwell told me he saw him and it was Patler. And like I said, it makes perfect sense that that's who it would have been.

Speaker 12 But I don't think it was.

Speaker 12 I don't think John Patler was the only person who took a shot at George Lincoln Rockwell in the summer of 1967.

Speaker 12 Now, we've covered this, but Patler's alibi on the day of the actual murder was no good.

Speaker 12 His wife and his father-in-law testified to his schedule that morning. He'd been running errands with his wife.
He couldn't possibly have gotten to the murder scene.

Speaker 12 But when push comes to shove, the times weren't right. And witnesses couldn't really be sure when and where they'd seen him.

Speaker 12 I still believe that he fired the shot that killed Rockwell.

Speaker 12 But on the day that someone shot at Rockwell and missed,

Speaker 12 on June 27th,

Speaker 12 John Patler was in Washington, D.C.,

Speaker 12 taking a drawing class.

Speaker 12 People saw him.

Speaker 12 His name was on the sign-in sheet and a witness testified to having taken attendance that day himself.

Speaker 12 This wasn't a member of the American Nazi Party or his wife. This is someone with no reason to lie for him.
John Patler couldn't have been in Arlington on the afternoon of June 27th.

Speaker 12 When Rockwell saw this would-be assassin sprinting away, I think he did recognize him.

Speaker 12 According to the college student who was in the car with him when this happened, he cried out in surprise when he saw the man. And what he said was,

Speaker 14 the Holy Father.

Speaker 16 It's an odd sort of thing to yell.

Speaker 12 You know, it's not quite, oh my God, or Jesus Christ.

Speaker 12 Things you might say if someone was shooting at you.

Speaker 12 But the Holy Father isn't really a thing people say, at least not as far as I know.

Speaker 12 I mean, it is what Catholics call the Pope, but they don't use it as an exclamation, and Rockwell was raised Methodist anyway. The young man who heard him yell this

Speaker 12 didn't really think much of it. He didn't know that it was someone's name.
It was a nickname that Rockwell had given Frank Smith. And it didn't have all that much to do with religion.

Speaker 12 Frank Smith really was holy in the sense that a mafia hitman had put five bullet holes in him right around the time he joined the American Nazi Party. But let's start at the beginning.

Speaker 12 Francis Joseph Smith II was born in Massachusetts in December of 1920, just a few months after his parents' marriage.

Speaker 12 According to the 1940 census, when he was 19, he was working as a waiter and living at home with his parents and two younger siblings in Medford, Massachusetts.

Speaker 12 It's hard to say what he got up to in the 1940s, but when he was arrested for bank robbery for the first time in 1952, newspapers reported his occupation as a boxing promoter.

Speaker 12 Maybe everybody else already knew this, and I'm going to sound silly, but I never gave it much thought until I was writing about it this week. Boxing was run by organized crime.

Speaker 12 I mean, I had this vague notion about fixed fights and sports betting, but in the 1950s, the mafia ran boxing.

Speaker 12 Top to bottom. I mean, they had a monopoly on the sport that the Department of Justice had to get involved with.
They didn't just promote the fights, fix the fights, and profit off the fights.

Speaker 12 They also coerced young boxers to do a little work outside the ring, off the books. And they were recruited recruited to work as street-level enforcers.

Speaker 12 And not having that knowledge top of mind, as I was going over all these old newspaper clippings, it seemed so strange to me that every time Frank Smith got arrested in the 1950s, all of his named associates seemed to be current or former boxers or boxing promoters.

Speaker 12 I thought, you know, maybe the boys met at the boxing gym. But given the context of New York and Boston Boston in the 50s, the fact that all of these accused bank robbers and murderers are also boxers

Speaker 12 is really just short of absolute proof that the crimes were mafia related.

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Speaker 12 this is Incels.

Speaker 10 I am a loser. If I was a woman, I wouldn't pay me either.

Speaker 19 From the dark corners of the web,

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Speaker 20 A kind of subculture, a hidden world of resentment, cynicism, anger against women.

Speaker 19 A seed of loneliness explodes.

Speaker 12 I just hate myself.

Speaker 15 I don't know why you girls aren't attracted to me, but I will punish you all for it.

Speaker 19 At a deadly tipping point.

Speaker 21 Incels will be added to the terrorism guide.

Speaker 8 Police say a driver driver intentionally drove into a crowd, killing 10 people.

Speaker 20 Tomorrow is the day of retribution.

Speaker 15 I will have my revenge.

Speaker 19 This is Incels.

Speaker 22 Listen to season one of Incels on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 13 Hey, it's Ed Helms, and welcome back to Snafu, my podcast about history's greatest screw-ups. On our news season, we're bringing you a new Snafu every single episode.

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Speaker 12 Admittedly, I did not have time this week to learn about a whole new genre of terrible guy.

Speaker 12 I mean, I saw every episode of The Sopranos, obviously, but I don't actually know that much about organized crime, especially outside of the big New York names, because we're talking about Boston and Providence.

Speaker 12 And there is apparently a lot to know.

Speaker 12 And I bet the story would have made more sense faster if I had some pre-existing knowledge of this world, but this isn't my usual kind of guy, so we'll have to make do.

Speaker 12 My apologies to any listeners from New England who know the deep lore.

Speaker 12 In February of 1952, a 24-year-old pants salesman named Arthur Schuster was riding the subway in Brooklyn when he saw someone who looked familiar.

Speaker 12 It wasn't someone he knew, but he recognized the man from the wanted poster that had been sitting in his office for months.

Speaker 12 It was the missing bank robber, Willie Sutton. He followed Sutton off the train and alerted the police to his location, leading to the arrest of a man who was on the very first FBI's most wanted list.

Speaker 12 A few days after Willie Sutton was arrested, Arthur Schuster went to the press. He believed that he'd been cheated out of a cash reward for this tip.

Speaker 12 It turned out the $70,000 reward was just an urban legend. But it was too late.
In his quest for credit, every newspaper in New York City had already run his picture.

Speaker 12 Two weeks later, he was shot in the head outside of his apartment.

Speaker 12 Police and FBI were scrambling to find the killer. And in May, they thought they had.

Speaker 12 They arrested Harvey Bastani, a known associate of Willie Sutton's and a career career bank robber in his own right.

Speaker 12 They didn't exactly have enough to charge Bastani in connection with the murder, but they were able to hold him for questioning because he was already wanted in connection with several armed robberies, a handful of burglaries involving safe cracking, and the theft of nearly $30,000 worth of fur coats.

Speaker 12 And once they had Bastani in custody, they started rolling up his associates.

Speaker 12 Over the course of two weeks in May of 1952, the FBI arrested 12 men in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Chicago, all of whom were believed to have been in Bastani's bank robbery gang.

Speaker 12 Arthur Schuster's murder was never actually solved, although years later a mob informant would claim that the hit had been ordered by a Gambino family boss.

Speaker 12 One of the first members of Bastani's gang to get picked up was William Smith, Frank's younger brother, a boxer and part-time bartender.

Speaker 12 At Williams' house, police found several suitcases full of loaded guns and ammunition, a suitcase full of burglary tools, a sought-off shotgun, a machine gun, disguises including a clerical collar and vestments and fake police uniforms, explosives, and a box full of stolen license plates.

Speaker 12 When they searched the bar where he worked nights, they found a cache of dynamite.

Speaker 12 Shortly after the raid at Williams' apartment, the FBI announced they were looking for his brother too.

Speaker 12 Frank was one of the last of the group to be arrested, and both brothers were charged in connection with a bank robbery in Medford, Massachusetts.

Speaker 12 Despite Harvey Bastani turning state's witness and testifying against them, Both Smith brothers were acquitted at trial for that Medford bank robbery.

Speaker 12 Unfortunately for Frank, the acquittal in February of 1953 wasn't the end of his troubles. Because after that first arrest, things kind of snowballed.

Speaker 12 In January of 1953, just weeks before his bank robbery trial was set to begin, Frank Smith was indicted on new charges.

Speaker 12 New York City Attorney Saul Rosenblatt identified Frank Smith as the man who'd fired three shots at him on Park Avenue in March of 1952, hitting him once in the thigh.

Speaker 12 When he went to trial in New York for the shooting, Frank Smith admitted that, sure,

Speaker 12 he was in New York City on the day that Rosenblatt was shot, but it was for business.

Speaker 12 A longtime friend of Frank's testified that Frank and his co-defendant, a mafia associate named Sammy Linden, had showed up at his hotel room that night, bragged about shooting Rosenblatt, and paid him to steal a car that they could use to leave the city.

Speaker 12 On the stand, the victim positively identified Frank as the man he saw shoot him in broad daylight.

Speaker 12 But the jury acquitted him.

Speaker 12 It's possible the jury was just confused about the lack of a clear motive presented at trial.

Speaker 12 Immediately after the shooting, Newspapers in New York ran wild with speculation that the attempted murder was connected to Rosenblatt's involvement in a particular high-profile case.

Speaker 12 He'd recently been named the sole beneficiary in one of his clients' wills,

Speaker 12 and the dead woman's sister was contesting the will in court.

Speaker 12 It didn't help that the dead woman in question was Eleanor Morgan Satterly, the granddaughter of J.P. Morgan.

Speaker 12 Yes, that J.P. Morgan, the one whose name is on your bank.
But as the investigation into the shooting continued, police were less convinced that Satterly's will had been the cause.

Speaker 12 And at trial, the judge reminded the jury that proving motive isn't necessary for a conviction. I think any criminal lawyer will tell you, though,

Speaker 12 juries are troubled by a crime without a motive. But it's also very possible.

Speaker 12 that those 12 New York City jurors knew well enough not to be seen in open court poking their nose into the business of organized crime. No one was ever convicted for shooting Saul Rosenblatt.

Speaker 12 And I'm pretty sure everyone involved is dead now. So I think it's safe to offer you my theory.

Speaker 12 Frank Smith and Sammy Linden did shoot Saul Rosenblatt,

Speaker 12 but it had nothing to do with J.P. Morgan's granddaughter.
Saul Rosenblatt had other clients.

Speaker 12 He was involved in other ongoing litigation.

Speaker 12 And there was one client he dropped as soon as he got out of the hospital after the shooting. He withdrew as counsel of record in a paternity suit.

Speaker 12 He'd been representing a nightclub singer named Virginia Summers in her lawsuit against a Boston lawyer named Joseph Sachs.

Speaker 12 And at his trial, Frank Smith was asked about a recent flight he'd taken to London. A month before the shooting, he flew to England.

Speaker 12 But he insisted that this had to do with his boxing promotion and nothing to do with following Virginia Summers, who had also recently flown to London.

Speaker 12 Now, I can't find any source that concretely, openly, and plainly accuses Joseph Sachs of working for the mob.

Speaker 12 But

Speaker 12 you can make up your your own mind what you think.

Speaker 12 Sachs had previously represented Frank's co-defendant, Sammy Linden, in an armed robbery case that was definitely mob-related.

Speaker 12 And Sachs would later represent Frank in a case involving a bombing that was definitely mob-related.

Speaker 12 Joseph Sachs himself was later accused of some pretty serious mob-related crime.

Speaker 12 He was, to be fair, acquitted at trial. But in 1962, he was one of several men indicted on charges of trafficking thousands of pounds of heroin.

Speaker 12 The bust was part of the investigation into the French Connection, a global network run by the Corsican Mafia that moved heroin through France and into the United States, where it was then distributed by organized crime outfits in major cities.

Speaker 12 Sachs was arrested in connection with an operation that had been taking advantage of the diplomatic immunity afforded to ambassadors.

Speaker 12 The Guatemalan ambassador to Belgium, a man named Mauricio Rosal, had been acting as their courier, bringing 50 kilos of heroin at a time into New York City in a suitcase.

Speaker 12 In what I think is a pretty rare move, Mauricio Rosal was denied diplomatic immunity and he went to prison.

Speaker 12 But like I said, Joseph Sachs was acquitted.

Speaker 12 There's a lot of allegedly, a lot of maybe,

Speaker 12 a lot of fill in the blank with your own most reasonable assumptions.

Speaker 12 The jury said Frank Smith didn't shoot Saul Rosenblatt.

Speaker 12 A jury said Joseph Sachs wasn't involved in a decade-long scheme to move thousands of pounds of heroin between the Corsican mafia and the mafia in New York and Boston.

Speaker 12 I mean, I guess, legally speaking, these are all just a series of unrelated facts about cases that never got solved.

Speaker 12 And maybe Saul Rosenblatt dropped Virginia Summers' case because he wasn't feeling well after the gunshot wound, not because he thought Joseph Sachs had him shot.

Speaker 12 As far as I can tell, the prosecutor didn't argue at trial that it was a paid hit.

Speaker 12 But it is worth noting that at Frank's bail hearing, the prosecutor told the judge that Frank had been hired by people in Massachusetts to kill Rosenblatt.

Speaker 12 He called him a plain and simple killer for hire.

Speaker 12 When the jury returned a not guilty verdict for Frank in the Rosenblatt case, the judge was visibly angry. Newspapers quote him scolding the jury, saying,

Speaker 12 It is my opinion that you have been fooled.

Speaker 12 It is strange to me how grown men can be so naive.

Speaker 12 Again, you never know why a jury makes the decisions they make, but I don't think they were fooled or naive. I don't think they were tricked into thinking Frank was innocent.

Speaker 12 I think they knew exactly what they were looking at, and they didn't want to be involved in mafia business.

Speaker 12 The newspaper that quoted the judge's angry outburst doesn't say whether the judge looked amused when Frank Smith was arrested as he tried to leave the courtroom.

Speaker 12 He'd been acquitted in New York, but he was wanted in New Jersey for robbing a bank in Newark with a machine gun.

Speaker 12 So New York City held him in their jail for a few weeks pending extradition, which is pretty normal. And he fought the extradition, which is a little less normal.

Speaker 12 I mean, you have a right to try, it's just not typical.

Speaker 16 But it worked.

Speaker 12 He's He's in this jail in New York City for a couple of weeks, no news.

Speaker 12 And then suddenly, there's just a passing mention in the Newark Star ledger two days before Christmas that the prosecutor changed his mind, the charges have been dropped, and there are no other suspects.

Speaker 12 So, to put all of this in order, on March 6th, 1952,

Speaker 12 someone who looked just like Frank Smith shot Saul Rosenblatt on Park Avenue. Two days after that, someone, unknown, shot Arnold Schuster in the head outside of his apartment in New York City.

Speaker 12 Two days after that, a couple of guys who might have been the Smith brothers robbed a bank in Medford, Massachusetts. In April, someone who looked just like Frank Smith robbed a bank in Newark.

Speaker 12 In May, Smith and a dozen associates of known bank robber Harvey Bastani were all arrested. In January of 1953, Frank is charged for shooting Saul Rosenblatt.

Speaker 12 In February, he's acquitted on that first bank robbery. In November, he's acquitted on the shooting, but he's arrested for the New Jersey bank robbery.
And by December of 1953, he's free and clear.

Speaker 12 He was accused of robbing banks in two different states and trying to murder a man in a third. Crimes that all took place within mere weeks in the spring of 1952.

Speaker 12 But he celebrated the new year as a free man in 1954.

Speaker 12 I can't pick him back up again in the archives until May of 57, when he's arrested again.

Speaker 12 But when he was arrested in 1957 for bombing a home in Woburn, Massachusetts, police in three neighboring towns expressed their interest in questioning him about similar unsolved bombings over the last few years.

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Speaker 19 From the studio who brought you the Piketon Massacre and Murder 101,

Speaker 12 this is Incels.

Speaker 10 I am a loser. If I was a woman, I wouldn't pay me either.

Speaker 19 From the dark corners of the web,

Speaker 19 an emerging mindset.

Speaker 15 If I can't have you, girls, I will destroy you.

Speaker 20 A kind of subculture, a hidden world of resentment, cynicism, anger against women.

Speaker 19 A seed of loneliness explodes.

Speaker 12 I just hate myself.

Speaker 15 I don't know why you girls aren't attracted to me, but I will punish you all for it.

Speaker 19 At a deadly tipping point.

Speaker 21 Incels will be added to the terrorism guide.

Speaker 8 Police say a driver intentionally drove into a crowd, killing 10 people.

Speaker 20 Tomorrow is the day of retribution.

Speaker 12 I will have my revenge.

Speaker 19 This is Incels.

Speaker 22 Listen to season one of Incels on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Speaker 12 Now, no one was ever convicted in the first three bombings police suspected Frank Smith was involved in.

Speaker 12 In June of 1954, Four bombs exploded inside the Chelsea, Massachusetts home of boxing promoter Sam Silverman.

Speaker 12 If you know a lot about old school boxing promoters, you've heard of Sam Silverman. And if you don't know anything about old school boxing promoters, you don't care who Sam Silverman is.

Speaker 12 But he had recently cut ties with the International Boxing Club of New York, that corporation whose monopoly on boxing was almost entirely under the control of former Murder Inc. hitman Frankie Carbo.

Speaker 12 A few months before the bombing, Ray Arcell, a promoter Silverman worked with to televise the fights he promoted, was beaten almost to death with a lead pipe.

Speaker 12 Arcel survived, and Silverman and his wife weren't home when those bombs went off. But both men took these attacks as a clear message from the mafia.

Speaker 12 Stop promoting fights.

Speaker 12 In May of 1955, Vincent Denuno, a regional director of the Building and Common Laborers Union with the AFL, was finalizing a report on organized crime activity within his union when suddenly his car exploded inside of his garage in East Boston.

Speaker 12 Police believed it was the work of a professional killer trying to take out the labor leader, but it was his 24-year-old son-in-law who was gravely injured instead.

Speaker 12 Then in June of 1956, John Sullivan, a booking agent in Medford, Massachusetts, narrowly escaped being blown to bits when he walked out his front door because he smelled smoke and he found a bomb on his front porch that hadn't gone off yet.

Speaker 12 None of these bombings were ever solved, at least as far as I can tell. But Frank Smith was a very strong suspect in all three after his arrest in May of 1957.

Speaker 12 But this fourth bombing was pretty open and shut.

Speaker 12 They thought maybe he did those other three,

Speaker 12 but they saw him do this one.

Speaker 12 It was a little after midnight when two two cops who were just sitting in their patrol car saw a man sprinting down the street in the dark.

Speaker 12 At first they assumed the man leaving Everett Bixby's yard was a burglar and they were going to chase him. But just as the man disappeared into a nearby wooded area, the bomb went off.

Speaker 12 A description of the man they'd seen went out over the radio and officers spotted him less than a mile away at a phone booth.

Speaker 12 He was filthy and soaking soaking wet, as if he'd perhaps run in the dark through the thick underbrush of the wooded area the bomber disappeared into.

Speaker 12 He also had explosive residue embedded in burn marks on his shoes. Police found him in a phone booth less than a mile away from the Bixby's house, and they found his car a mile in the other direction.

Speaker 12 parked outside of a friend's house. That friend happened to be a man named Louis Venios, a mafia associate who was due in court the following morning to face a federal mail fraud charge.

Speaker 12 Frank's story just kept changing. And honestly, none of the stories were very good.

Speaker 12 On the night of his arrest, he explained to the police that he's a prize fight trainer and he's just out doing some roadwork, which is apparently what boxers call running, at 3 a.m.

Speaker 12 in a town where he doesn't live. And they found him at the phone booth because while he was out running, he had the sudden thought that he needed to make a phone call to a friend.
Again, at 3 a.m.

Speaker 12 By the time he got to trial, he'd come up with what I guess he thought was a better story.

Speaker 12 He said that he couldn't have bombed the Bixby's house at 12.45 a.m. because he was at a bar with his friend Louis Venios.
from midnight until around 1 a.m.

Speaker 12 And then after the bar, they stopped back off at his apartment because he needed to wring out some wet laundry. And that's why he was all wet.

Speaker 12 And then after he got all wet at his apartment, he didn't change his clothes. He got into his car and drove Louis Venios home to Woburn.

Speaker 12 And then he left his car at Venios' house because he needed to borrow it. And when police found him in the phone booth, he was just calling his wife to come pick him up.

Speaker 12 Again, at 3 a.m.,

Speaker 12 I don't think you could make up a worse series of lies if you tried.

Speaker 12 Right? Because if he and Venios were at his apartment and Venios needed to both go home to Woburn and borrow Frank's car,

Speaker 12 why wouldn't Venios just drive himself home in Frank's car and Frank would just stay at his apartment?

Speaker 12 And if he had to be the one to drive, but his wife was able to come pick him up, why didn't she just follow him? Why didn't he tell her before he left the apartment?

Speaker 12 If he hadn't to call his wife, why didn't he call from Benios' house? Doesn't he have a phone?

Speaker 12 Why would you walk a mile in the dark at 3 a.m. to call your wife from a payphone?

Speaker 12 I just don't understand why he thought we would believe that he needed to walk a mile in the dark at 3 a.m.

Speaker 12 to call his wife to come pick him up from the fakest sounding errand anyone has ever made up.

Speaker 12 And at trial, they didn't even put Louis Venios on the stand to corroborate the alibi.

Speaker 12 I just can't get over,

Speaker 12 oh, I had to go home and wring out my wet laundry in between drinking at the bar and driving my friend home and then walking around in the dark. And that's why my shoes are all wet.

Speaker 12 I mean, God, at that point, just say you pissed on your own shoes. At least people might believe it.

Speaker 12 Reading between the lines in the appellate record in this case, it sounds like everyone in the courtroom knew that the Boston police officer the defense put on the stand was lying.

Speaker 12 Joseph Sachs, remember, he's the lawyer who, according to the jury who acquitted him, was not at this time, seven years into a decade-long international heroin smuggling operation for the mafia.

Speaker 12 Sachs put Boston patrolman John O'Neill on the stand to testify that he knew Frank Smith and Louis Vanios, and he remembered seeing them at the bar at the time of the bombing.

Speaker 12 The jury found Frank Smith guilty of the bombing, and he was given a sentence of 15 to 18 years

Speaker 12 in prison.

Speaker 12 Based on the admittedly limited information that we have,

Speaker 12 it seems very possible that Everett Bixby wasn't the intended target of this bombing. He was a funeral director with no known ties to organized crime.

Speaker 12 He was the chairman of the Woburn Licensing Board.

Speaker 12 So I guess it's possible that there was a dispute over a liquor license, but in 1957, the city of Woburn only issued liquor licenses to stores that sell liquor.

Speaker 12 In Massachusetts, they call them package stores.

Speaker 12 And a local newspaper that year said that the city of Woburn had plenty of package stores, but they didn't actually have any bars.

Speaker 12 And Bixby told the newspaper that no one had even applied for a liquor license lately. There was nothing for there to be a dispute over.

Speaker 12 It kind of looks like Frank got the wrong house. I saw a few news stories that made vague mention.
of the fact that the Bixbys lived pretty close by to several known gangland figures.

Speaker 12 That's all it ever really says, just several known figures in this world. They're never named.

Speaker 16 Look,

Speaker 12 is it possible to cross-reference 70-year-old property records with the names of known mafia associates in the Boston suburbs?

Speaker 12 Look, I thought about it, and I think I probably could do it. if I had an extra day this week.
Did I?

Speaker 12 No, I had to file my taxes this week. It's October, I know, but I was getting married in the spring, so I was like, kind of busy, so I got an extension.
So they're like, actually, due now.

Speaker 12 So that's what I did this week instead of finding out which patriarch of crime family associates might have been Everett Bixby's neighbor in Woburn, Massachusetts in 1957. So I'm sorry.

Speaker 12 But I think the fact that Frank Smith had parked his car at Louis Venios' house and Venios was due in federal court the very next morning, I think that does imply the possibility of a relationship between these things.

Speaker 12 You know?

Speaker 12 And finally, at the end of 1957,

Speaker 12 Frank Smith went to prison.

Speaker 12 He'd done some time in jail after his prior arrests when he couldn't make bail.

Speaker 12 But this was the real thing.

Speaker 12 He's guilty of a felony now, and he's staring down the barrel of 15 years.

Speaker 12 He didn't end up serving his whole sentence.

Speaker 12 He was released in November of 1964.

Speaker 12 And while he was in prison, he got his hands on some interesting reading material.

Speaker 12 Someone had been sending him copies of the Rockwell Report.

Speaker 31 The first week in January of 1965,

Speaker 31 I went to Wilmington, Virginia

Speaker 31 to meet Commander Rockwell. I'd heard about him, I'd read some of the things about him, and I'd read some of his Rockwell reports.
And we were

Speaker 31 akin in our thinking.

Speaker 12 Just weeks after he got out of prison, Frank Smith drove from Massachusetts to Virginia. to meet the man whose newsletter he'd been reading in prison.

Speaker 12 He spent the 1950s robbing banks and bombing houses for the mob.

Speaker 12 He must have spent those seven years behind bars planning his next big move because he really didn't hesitate to start taking big swings when he got out.

Speaker 12 Immediately upon his return from the Nazi Party headquarters, Frank Smith had a face-to-face meeting with Raymond Patriarcha,

Speaker 12 the head of the New England Mafia.

Speaker 12 Frank wanted to cut Patriarcha in on a deal, a mutually beneficial arrangement between the mafia

Speaker 12 and the Nazis.

Speaker 12 You'll have to wait until next week to find out how Frank ended up full of bullet holes in the midst of a gang war and why Frank's name is on the birth certificate for George Lincoln Rockwell's illegitimate daughter.

Speaker 12 And maybe by next week, I'll have made some more progress trying to sort out exactly what to make of the fact that A Nazi and his fake church show up in the financial records of a corrupt mayor who went to prison for racketeering.

Speaker 12 Weird Little Guys is a production of CoolZone Media and iHeartRadio. It's researched, written, and recorded by me, Molly Conger.
Our executive producers are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans.

Speaker 12 The show is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gakin. The theme music was composed by Brad Dickert.

Speaker 12 You can email me at WeirdLittleGuyspodcast at gmail.com. I will definitely read it, but I probably won't answer it.
It's nothing personal.

Speaker 12 You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other listeners on the Weird Little Guys subreddit.

Speaker 12 Just don't post anything that's going to make you one of my Weird Little Guys...

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