Disorganized Crime, Pt. 2

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Speaker 4 Just after midnight on March 15th, 1965, Frank Smith was dropping off his girlfriend after a night out in Boston.

Speaker 4 The pair were sitting in his car outside of her apartment. When two men emerged from the shadows, they walked up to the driver's side window and without saying a word, fired eight times into the car.

Speaker 4 Marilyn Marks was, miraculously, unhurt, and she ran for help.

Speaker 4 Frank was not so lucky. He'd been hit five times in the neck, chest, and shoulder.

Speaker 4 His glasses were shattered in the attack, sending shards of glass into his one good eye.

Speaker 4 When the Monday morning edition of the Boston Globe came off the presses a few hours later, it was reported that he'd been rushed into emergency surgery overnight to save his life, and he was now headed back into the operating room where surgeons would attempt to save his eyesight.

Speaker 4 When he woke up in the hospital that afternoon, the chief of the Somerville Police Department was waiting outside his room with a warrant for his arrest.

Speaker 4 They'd found a loaded revolver with one bullet missing in the backseat of his car.

Speaker 4 Something he wasn't supposed to have just five months after his release from prison for blowing up a man's house.

Speaker 4 He told police he had no idea who would want to shoot him, saying only, I've been a good boy since I got out.

Speaker 4 And then he hummed a tune as he ignored their follow-up questions.

Speaker 4 His girlfriend, the same woman who'd provided his alibi on the night of that bombing in 1957, refused to even look at photos of possible suspects in this shooting, telling police she hadn't seen a thing.

Speaker 4 The discovery of Nazi books and pamphlets in his car raised the possibility that the shooting had something to do with Frank's membership in the American Nazi Party.

Speaker 4 And they even sent a detective down to Virginia to question George Lincoln Rockwell about their relationship.

Speaker 4 The more likely explanation, though, was that the shooting had been part of the ongoing gang wars in Boston.

Speaker 4 And one detective speculated to the press that perhaps it was retaliation from the intended target of Frank's bosched bombing in 1957.

Speaker 4 The FBI doesn't seem to have volunteered that they already had a pretty good idea why Frank Smith got shot.

Speaker 4 He just wasn't important enough to anyone for them to be willing to jeopardize their ongoing illegal wiretap on the head of the patriarchal crime family.

Speaker 4 I'm Molly Conger,

Speaker 4 and this is Weird Blue Love Eyes.

Speaker 4 When we left off last week, Frank Smith was on his way to prison.

Speaker 4 He was, by his own account, a boxing promoter. That's what he always told the police when he was getting booked into some jail or another anyway.

Speaker 4 And he spent much of the 1950s doing just that.

Speaker 4 He was arrested for bank robbery at least twice. He was accused of murder for hire in the daylight shooting of an attorney in New York City.

Speaker 4 And by the time he was convicted for bombing a home in the Boston suburbs in 1957, Police strongly suspected that he'd been behind a string of similar bombings.

Speaker 4 The common thread connecting all of the crimes Frank Smith was believed to have been involved in was organized crime.

Speaker 4 He managed to wiggle his way out of a surprising number of criminal charges, but at the end of 1957, he was sentenced to 15 years in prison, and he'd served seven of those before he was paroled in November of 1964.

Speaker 4 After his release, Frank went to live with his sister in Tewkesbury, Massachusetts. He spent the holidays with family, but then it was time to get back to business.

Speaker 4 He wanted to meet the man whose Nazi newsletters he'd been reading in prison.

Speaker 4 In the first few days of the new year in 1965, he drove down to Arlington, Virginia to meet George Lincoln Rockwell.

Speaker 4 He'd had a lot of time to think over the past couple of years, and he had a proposition for the commander of the American Nazi Party.

Speaker 4 He arrived in Arlington on January 3rd, and he was invited to accompany Rockwell and his stormtroopers to Washington, D.C.

Speaker 4 the following morning, where he would witness one of Rockwell's more outrageous publicity stunts.

Speaker 4 Most of the stormtroopers who usually hung around the Nazi Party barracks had gone home to see their families for the holidays, so there wasn't much of an entourage for this trip.

Speaker 4 It looks like it was just Rockwell, John Patler, Robert Lloyd, and Frank.

Speaker 4 Rockwell was no stranger to pulling some ugly little stunt for attention.

Speaker 4 He'd done it in Washington, D.C. so many times that most of the police officers at the Capitol knew him by sight, with or without a Nazi entourage.

Speaker 4 But this one in January of 1965 is particularly egregious.

Speaker 4 January 4th, 1965 was the first day of the congressional session, the day new members of Congress are sworn in.

Speaker 4 The Mississippi Democratic Freedom Party had announced ahead of time that they intended to challenge the seating of the all-white delegation from Mississippi because the state had unconstitutionally disenfranchised black voters.

Speaker 4 Just to sort of position us in history here, the Voting Rights Act wasn't signed until later in 1965.

Speaker 4 So in 1964, the year these white congressmen were elected in Mississippi, the state still levied a poll tax and used literacy tests to selectively deny people the right to vote.

Speaker 4 As I was writing this, I thought to actually try to find a copy of a literacy test, one that was actually in use in Mississippi in the 1960s.

Speaker 4 I mean, I understand the concept.

Speaker 4 I learned about it in school.

Speaker 4 And it doesn't really matter, in the end, what the questions were because it's unfair and unconstitutional for it to exist at all.

Speaker 4 And even if you got all the questions right, the Klansman at the registrar's office could just say you didn't.

Speaker 4 But I found one.

Speaker 4 And honestly, I was kind of surprised. I think...
Most people would struggle with this.

Speaker 4 The test I found required the voter to copy down a section of the state constitution,

Speaker 4 followed by the instruction to quote, write in the space below a reasonable interpretation of the section of the Mississippi State Constitution which you have just copied.

Speaker 4 The next question asks the voter to write in the space below a statement setting forth your understanding of the duties and obligations of citizenship under a constitutional form of government.

Speaker 4 And there's not really very much room to write anything at all.

Speaker 4 And then, of course, to even get to the polls on election day, to then be subjected to an illegal tax and an unconstitutional written exam,

Speaker 4 you had to register to vote.

Speaker 4 In the summer of 1964, in the lead up to this contested election, James Cheney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were brutally murdered by a gang of Klansmen that included the local sheriff and his deputies.

Speaker 4 The cops and the Klan beat, shot, and mutilated those men to stop them from registering black voters in Mississippi.

Speaker 4 So the surface level narrative of what happened on January 4th, 1965 is a group of black women showed up at the Capitol to say that these white men weren't elected legitimately.

Speaker 4 And I don't think that does it justice.

Speaker 4 There was no free and fair election in Mississippi in 1964.

Speaker 4 In August of 1964, not two months after those murders, members of the Mississippi Democratic Freedom Party held their own state convention to elect delegates to send to the Democratic National Convention.

Speaker 4 And when they got to the DNC, the Democratic Party challenged their credentials.

Speaker 4 They didn't refuse outright to seat the delegation, but a hearing was held before the Credentials Committee.

Speaker 4 And at this televised hearing, Fannie Lou Hamer testified about her own struggle to register to vote in Mississippi and the violence she'd faced trying to register other Black voters.

Speaker 4 She'd been forced to take literacy tests. She was retaliated against by the plantation owner whose land she worked as a sharecropper.

Speaker 4 She was threatened, harassed, and shot at.

Speaker 4 And during this hearing, her voice is strong and clear as she testified about the four days she spent in a Mississippi jail, where she was beaten almost to death.

Speaker 4 She did not falter as she described listening helplessly to the screams of a 15-year-old girl who'd been stripped naked and was being beaten in an adjacent cell.

Speaker 4 She sat in front of that committee, in front of this nation, and described the way those white police officers had groped her during those beatings.

Speaker 4 And her voice was still strong, even as the tears ran down her face when she concluded her remarks with this question:

Speaker 12 I question America.

Speaker 12 Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave

Speaker 12 where we have to speak with our telephones off of the hook

Speaker 12 because our lives be threatened daily? Because we want to live as decent human beings in America. Thank you.

Speaker 4 President Johnson called an emergency press conference while she was speaking.

Speaker 4 Not to announce that he was doing something about this absolute outrage in Mississippi,

Speaker 4 but because he feared the impact her words would have on the nation. And a presidential press conference would preempt anything else that was on TV.

Speaker 4 Most accounts of President Johnson's thought process here is that he was between a rock and a hard place.

Speaker 4 He had only just signed the Civil Rights Act.

Speaker 4 He knew damn well that Mississippi was flouting that law.

Speaker 4 But he couldn't afford to risk southern states walking out of the convention and losing southern support in the upcoming presidential election.

Speaker 4 So he proposed an ugly, half-assed, insulting compromise.

Speaker 4 Two of the group's 64 delegates could be seated.

Speaker 4 They responded by saying, all 64 of them spent way too long on that bus from Mississippi for only two of them to get seats.

Speaker 4 If they couldn't run as Democrats in Mississippi, they would run as Independents.

Speaker 4 But Mississippi Democratic Freedom Party candidates Fannie Lou Hamer, Victoria Gray, and Annie Devine were all denied ballot access in the 1964 election.

Speaker 4 So when Congress convened in January of 1965, they planned to be present in person to make their case to Congress that they were the rightful representatives of the people of Mississippi.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 George Lincoln Rockwell planned to be there too.

Speaker 4 Those three black women from Mississippi were not even allowed to enter the Capitol building. let alone the house chambers.

Speaker 4 They were stopped at the door by the chief of the Capitol Police.

Speaker 4 They left quietly and stood outside with their hundreds of supporters who were lining the sidewalks.

Speaker 4 But for some reason, this crack security team at the Capitol building couldn't explain how somebody else did manage to get inside.

Speaker 4 During the roll call vote for the election of the Speaker of the House, A man in black face, a rumpled top hat, a furry loincloth, and no pants came crashing onto the House floor, pushing Congressman out of his way as he sprinted to the center of the room.

Speaker 4 And he was shouting something that I don't care to repeat in the way that he said it.

Speaker 4 What he was saying was,

Speaker 4 I'm the Mississippi delegation, and I want to be seated, but He was using an extremely exaggerated affect that was meant to mock black southern vernacular.

Speaker 4 As the police dragged him from the congressional chambers, he yelled, long live Rockwell.

Speaker 4 It should have been impossible for Robert Lloyd to gain entry into the Capitol building on January 4th, 1965.

Speaker 4 The president was about to arrive to address Congress.

Speaker 4 Security at that building was as tight as the United States government can get it.

Speaker 4 But somehow, a Nazi in black face with no pants on managed to make it past multiple locked doors and entrances guarded by police officers.

Speaker 4 He was charged only with disorderly conduct, and he was released that same day on a $20 bond.

Speaker 4 This was Frank Smith's introduction to the American Nazi Party.

Speaker 4 And he loved it.

Speaker 13 I got a kick out of this now. This is becoming very interesting.

Speaker 13 This first meeting with the commander, I had met him the night before and talked briefly with him, but now this little escapade became very interesting.

Speaker 13 And I had to chuckle.

Speaker 4 The stunt had been fun and exciting. And Rockwell's cool demeanor throughout had really impressed him.

Speaker 4 But this wasn't why he drove all the way down to Virginia from Massachusetts.

Speaker 4 He was really only on this racist field trip to the Capitol by coincidence.

Speaker 4 He'd come down to Virginia to talk business.

Speaker 13 Well, we did have the night before this demonstration, we had a lengthy discussion. We talked various topics.
One of them was the need for a church.

Speaker 13 The Muslims were creating a successful movement on the black,

Speaker 13 strictly the black separate from the white. And they had their church.

Speaker 13 And there was a need, because of the integration of schools and something.

Speaker 13 There seemed to be a need for the whites, for a church that could be formed where the whites could, because of religious conviction.

Speaker 4 Back in the 1950s,

Speaker 4 around the time he managed to escape conviction for those two separate bank robberies,

Speaker 4 Frank Smith bought some land.

Speaker 4 He bought a lot of land, actually. He bought close to 600 acres of mostly undeveloped land in a small town in coastal Maine.

Speaker 4 Now, 600 acres sounds big, and it is, but I don't actually know how big because I don't totally know what an acre is.

Speaker 4 So if you're in the same boat, you're not alone.

Speaker 4 A football field minus the end zones is just a little bit more than one acre.

Speaker 4 And one square mile is 640 acres.

Speaker 4 So

Speaker 4 he's got 550 football fields. or about 94% of a square mile, if that helps.

Speaker 4 I tried to find some examples that would be easier for me to visualize, but one of the top Google results for this is an article that had to have been written by AI.

Speaker 4 It helpfully offers examples like: 10 acres is 15,840 potatoes.

Speaker 4 Potatoes in what direction?

Speaker 4 I think this is a garbled regurgitation of an old meme claiming that 1,584 potatoes lined up end-to-end would span the width of one acre?

Speaker 4 But this claim requires you to believe that the average potato is five inches long. And according to Dr.

Speaker 4 Potato, the cartoon scientist mascot on the QA section of the Idaho Potato Commission's website, there is no standard measurement for any potato.

Speaker 4 Anyway, if you're an American trying to imagine what 600 acres looks like, just visualize a parking lot with room for 90,000 cars.

Speaker 4 This one's not actually AI. I found a paper written by the director of the Center for Profitable Agriculture at the University of Tennessee's Institute of Agriculture.
So this one's real.

Speaker 4 There's math.

Speaker 4 Either way, that's a lot of land for a guy who's never had a legitimate form of income.

Speaker 4 I guess robbing banks leaves you with a lot of cash and you have to offload it somewhere, and buying land isn't the worst idea.

Speaker 4 So he's been sitting on 600 acres of undeveloped land up in Maine for a decade already.

Speaker 4 And in January of 1965, Frank Smith proposed to George Lincoln Rockwell that they could use this property that he had up in Maine as the home base for a church.

Speaker 4 A new religion that he envisioned as a sort of whites-only Nazi version, I guess, of the Nation of Islam. I think that's what he's describing.

Speaker 4 It would provide them with some kind of institutional legitimacy to do things like fight school integration.

Speaker 4 And it's easy to imagine that this is probably very cynical.

Speaker 4 But I'm always saying, you can't know what's in a man's heart. Maybe he does have some kind of hideous, warped religious conviction.

Speaker 4 He doesn't. He helpfully explained the whole idea in an interview he did with a reporter in 1968.

Speaker 4 He wasn't bothering with any kind of complicated, reverse-engineered religious justification for racism.

Speaker 4 He just wanted to take advantage of the legal and social benefits of being a church. By making racism itself his religion.

Speaker 13 Now, when you say religion, we're not talking about dogma or any particular creed, but it depends on your interpretation of the word religion. But a church, that one of the

Speaker 13 beliefs of the church would be that

Speaker 13 you would have to be of the white race.

Speaker 13 And then other than that,

Speaker 13 we were keeping it open.

Speaker 4 I couldn't find any primary source documentation that sheds light on how Rockwell responded to Frank's proposal specifically.

Speaker 4 But there is a lot of evidence that this is something Rockwell had been thinking about for years.

Speaker 4 Rockwell was not religious at all, but he'd been toying with the idea of using Christianity as a sort of front for the movement since the late 50s.

Speaker 4 In the early 60s, he met Richard Butler, the man whose passion for this warped Nazi religion of Christian identity led him to found the Aryan Nations, although that came later.

Speaker 4 And around that same time, in the early 1960s, Rockwell was corresponding with a friend of his, a German Nazi named Bruno Lutke.

Speaker 4 Ludke had recently translated Rockwell's memoir into German, and he suggested that Rockwell should rewrite some of the passages to tone down the anti-Christian rhetoric a little bit.

Speaker 4 Not because he was offended by that, absolutely not. Both men shared the belief that Christianity was Jewish and communist.

Speaker 4 Jesus was, after all, a Jewish man.

Speaker 4 And if your worldview centers around destroying your enemies and exterminating the weak,

Speaker 4 It's hard to get much out of the Gospels.

Speaker 4 In their private correspondence, they agreed that Christianity was merely a useful wrapper.

Speaker 4 There would be no Christ in this Christian church.

Speaker 4 Just a man trying to, as Lutke put it, speak with the political authority of the Führer and the moral authority of the Pope.

Speaker 4 In their letters, Rockwell was very open about his intentions.

Speaker 4 His commitment to Hitler was his only religion.

Speaker 4 But Americans, with their, quote, peanut brains, would be lured in by this set dressing of Christianity.

Speaker 4 In correspondence with British Nazi Colin Jordan, he argued that there is a clear tactical advantage to siding with Christians on political matters like prayer and school.

Speaker 4 You don't have to mean it for it to be an effective recruitment and propaganda tool.

Speaker 4 By 1964, Rockwell had a close working relationship with Wesley Swift, the father of the Christian identity movement.

Speaker 4 He wouldn't live to see it come to fruition, but the groundwork he laid in the years before his death paved the way for this complete fusion of Christian identity theology and militant neo-Nazi activism.

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Speaker 4 So, forming a Nazi church is something he'd already been thinking about for a decade when Frank Smith approached him in 1965.

Speaker 4 And I have to believe Frank knew that,

Speaker 4 right? I don't know how he would have known it, but it's a strange thing to say to someone if you didn't know they were already considering it.

Speaker 4 I couldn't track down anything concrete that would point to who would have made that introduction, though.

Speaker 4 After his meeting with Rockwell, Frank drove back to New England.

Speaker 4 News of his trip to Virginia got home before he did.

Speaker 4 On January 4th, the day after Frank arrived at the American Nazi Party barracks in Virginia, the head of the New England mafia already knew about it.

Speaker 4 And so did J. Edgar Hoover.

Speaker 4 The illegal recording device the FBI had installed in Raymond Patriarcha's office in 1962 recorded several conversations that day.

Speaker 4 There was some idle chat about some recent hits, some vague talk about a stolen diamond.

Speaker 4 And on the topic of Frank Smith, Patriarcha was told that Frank had gone down to Virginia to visit George Lincoln Rockwell, having become an avowed follower while he was in prison.

Speaker 4 A few days later, on January 7th, Frank Smith arrived in Providence, Rhode Island for a face-to-face meeting with Raymond Patriarcha.

Speaker 4 Later that evening, a memo was sent directly to J. Edgar Hoover, summarizing the recordings of the conversation in Patriarcha's office that day.

Speaker 4 And it says that Frank's primary reason for making contact with Patriarcha that day was to get his blessing to do a little loan sharking.

Speaker 4 He's fresh out of prison and trying to get back to work.

Speaker 4 Patriarcha gave him permission to put a few thousand dollars out on the street in Boston, as long as it didn't interfere with any existing business.

Speaker 4 But with that out of the way,

Speaker 4 Frank kept talking.

Speaker 4 He's the one who brought up George Lincoln Rockwell, telling the mob boss that they were close associates.

Speaker 4 And that does end up being true in the future.

Speaker 4 But when he's saying this on a Thursday,

Speaker 4 he just met Rockwell for the first time on Sunday.

Speaker 4 And then he rambles for a little bit about how the army has too many black people in it, and if black people outnumber white people in the army, they'll take over the country.

Speaker 4 He doesn't say black people, he uses different words. And he told Patriarcha that he just returned from a visit to the Nazi Party headquarters.

Speaker 4 And the memo is just a narrative. It's not actually a transcription of the recording.

Speaker 4 But it says he described the physical layout of the property, including how many stormtroopers were there and how they were dressed.

Speaker 4 He shares his upcoming travel plans, which includes trips to Dallas and Los Angeles to meet with more members of the American Nazi Party.

Speaker 4 And then he let Patriarcha in on his big plan.

Speaker 4 He wanted to pour a bunch of money into Rockwell's operation.

Speaker 4 And the best way to do that without causing any legal or tax issues for anyone involved would be to make a Nazi church on that land he has up in Maine.

Speaker 4 At some point during the meeting, he shows off his machine gun to one of the underbosses who's also there, and he says the church would be called the White Church of America of Maine.

Speaker 4 He also told Patriarcha that Rockwell was planning to run for governor of Virginia in the election later that year.

Speaker 4 Later in this same memo, there's a brief mention that Frank told Patriarcha that once the Nazis are established in New England, presumably at this Nazi church in Maine, they'll be in a good position to infiltrate Massachusetts when Ed Brooke runs for governor.

Speaker 4 Ed Brooke never ran for governor of Massachusetts, but he did become the first black senator since Reconstruction when he was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1966.

Speaker 4 In 1965, though, he was the Massachusetts State Attorney General.

Speaker 4 And as Attorney General, he had opened an investigation into the Massachusetts State Racing Commission.

Speaker 4 The Racing Commission allocates what are called racing days. There's only a certain number of days per year where horse racing can occur and bets can be placed.

Speaker 4 So the Racing Commission decides which tracks have horse races on which days.

Speaker 4 Shortly after he took office in 1963, Brooke opened an investigation into this allocation process.

Speaker 4 The process generally, but specifically at this significant number of extra days that had been allocated to the Hancock Raceway.

Speaker 4 And this happened to be a racetrack that Raymond Patriarcha had a significant financial interest in.

Speaker 4 George Lincoln Rockwell had a special hatred for Ed Brooke, too.

Speaker 4 His name actually comes up more than a few times in issues of the Rockwell Report and it's always very nasty.

Speaker 4 Not because Rockwell also had a financial interest in horse racing in Massachusetts, not as far as I know, he just hated black people.

Speaker 4 So Frank's mention of Brooke in this memo is very brief and it kind of feels out of place in the conversation. There's no explanation provided in the memo.

Speaker 4 You're just supposed to know what that means.

Speaker 4 But I think in this broader context, it feels like a heavy implication, right?

Speaker 4 If we do business with the Nazis,

Speaker 4 we all win.

Speaker 4 If we invest in bringing Nazis to New England, If we pay to put them up in Maine, they'll be around.

Speaker 4 They'll be available to do something

Speaker 4 about the possibility of a black governor.

Speaker 4 The memo doesn't include any mention of Patriarcha's response to any of this, if he had one.

Speaker 4 But Frank had his permission to get back to loan sharking, so he went back home to Boston happy in January of 1965.

Speaker 4 A lot had changed. while Frank was away.

Speaker 4 The world moved on without him while he was sitting in prison in Walpole, Massachusetts from 1957 until the end of 1964.

Speaker 4 The Soviets launched a dog into outer space. Catholics got a new pope.
Alaska and Hawaii became states. John F.
Kennedy was elected president. There was another new pope.
JFK was assassinated.

Speaker 4 The Beatles put out their first record. The Berlin Wall went up.
The Civil Rights Act was signed. The war in Vietnam was really heating up.
I mean, it was a busy couple of years for the world.

Speaker 4 And I don't know how much Frank cared about any of that.

Speaker 4 But when he got home to Boston in November of 1964,

Speaker 4 he found himself in the middle of a different kind of war.

Speaker 4 He was released from prison during the bloodiest year of the First Boston Gang War.

Speaker 4 I don't know a lot about the mafia.

Speaker 4 Like I said last week, that's a totally different kind of horrible guy than the ones I'm usually looking at.

Speaker 4 But now that I've spent the better part of a week squinting at grainy photocopies of Raymond Patriarcha's 8,000-page FBI file,

Speaker 4 I guess there are certain similarities between the mafia and a Nazi group. You know, it's a group of violent men who only barely get along in pursuit of their shared goals.

Speaker 4 There's constant splintering and infighting and jockeying for power and shifting alliances. There's heavy infiltration by the FBI.
Half the gang is snitching, whether for fun or for profit.

Speaker 4 I can see how a man who has long been at home in one of those worlds wouldn't have much trouble stepping into the other.

Speaker 4 The details of the stories are obviously quite different.

Speaker 4 When I'm reading old FBI memos about a guy whose life story I know half by heart, I can fill in a lot of the blanks based on context when every other line is half redacted.

Speaker 4 That doesn't work as well when I'm wading into new territory. I don't know what's behind those redactions.
So I'm working with more blanks than usual.

Speaker 4 So for this part of the story, I relied much more heavily than I normally would on secondary sources, rather than trying to become enough of an expert on something outside my wheelhouse that I can analyze and decipher these primary sources in the way that that I'm comfortable with.

Speaker 4 To get my bearings on the gang war, I read a summary written by the New England Historical Society and some more detailed write-ups on a blog written by Matthew Connolly, a retired attorney in Massachusetts who's been writing about the history of Boston organized crime for more than a decade.

Speaker 4 I also read some interesting congressional testimony about the FBI's role in all of this, and part of a hitman's memoir, but it wasn't very good.

Speaker 4 I did read as much as I physically could of that 8,000-page FBI file on New England mob boss Raymond Patriarcha.

Speaker 4 But I just want to say how grateful I am to an outlet called Go Local in Providence, Rhode Island.

Speaker 4 They not only successfully secured the release of that file from the FBI, but they digitized the entire thing. and then spent more than a year writing about it.

Speaker 4 So many outlets hoard their primary source documents and force you to rely on their analysis without letting you look at them.

Speaker 4 So I just love to see a reporter making their documents available to the public.

Speaker 4 So with that out of the way,

Speaker 4 the gang war.

Speaker 7 This is Tanya Radd from Scrubbing In with Becca Tilly and Tanya Radd. Airtasker is the platform that helps people get anything done.

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Speaker 10 What's up, y'all? It's Big Lone from It's Up Death Podcast.

Speaker 10 In this powerful episode, we're breaking down the danger of silence and how way too many of us are taught to protect the vibe instead of protecting ourselves.

Speaker 10 We spend more time researching cars, microphones, sneakers than we will researching on how to protect our bodies and our partners.

Speaker 10 If you have an honest conversation, one uncomfortable minute can save you a lifetime of regret. The CDC says nearly one in five people carry an STI and most don't even know it.

Speaker 10 Real intimy isn't built in the dark. It's built in the disclosure.
Condoms, testing, transparency. Those aren't passion killers.
They're peace builders. It's too much risk in our silence.

Speaker 9 Speak up.

Speaker 10 You can listen to this special episode of It's Up There Podcast with Loon, brought to you by Healthy Sexual from Gilead Sciences on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcast.

Speaker 24 Get into the spirit with Visio's MyHub, a new, simpler way to find everything you love on Vizio TV this holiday season.

Speaker 24 MyHub is your destination to discover new movies and shows tailored to you, find exclusive deals and discounts, and keep your favorites organized in one convenient place.

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Speaker 24 Visit Visio.com slash iHeart and experience entertainment made easy today.

Speaker 14 10 athletes will face the toughest job interview in fitness that will push past physical and mental breaking points.

Speaker 18 You are the fittest of the fit.

Speaker 19 Only one of you will leave here with an IFIT contract for $250,000.

Speaker 21 This is when mindset comes in.

Speaker 22 Someone will be eliminated.

Speaker 23 Pressure is coming down.

Speaker 11 Trainer Games on Prime Video, January 8th. Watch the trailer on TrainerGames.com.

Speaker 4 In 1960, the Irish gangs in the Boston area more or less coexisted pretty amicably.

Speaker 4 There was the Winter Hill gang in Somerville, led by Buddy McLean,

Speaker 4 and the McLaughlin gang in the Charlestown neighborhood of Boston, led by brothers Bernie, Georgie, and Punchy McLaughlin.

Speaker 4 They both had their own territories and their own operations. They did a little loan sharking, a little bookmaking, the occasional truck hijacking, the usual.

Speaker 4 And both of these Irish gangs paid tribute to the same Italian mafia family.

Speaker 4 Raymond Patriarcha, head of the Patriarcha crime family out of Rhode Island, had agreements with the New York families that everything east of the Connecticut River was patriarchal territory.

Speaker 4 The Genovese could keep Hartford, Connecticut, and Springfield, Massachusetts, but he controlled Rhode Island, Maine, and most of Massachusetts and Connecticut.

Speaker 4 In Boston, these Irish gangs did a lot of the street-level work. They stayed out of each other's way, and they paid the patriarchas for the privilege of doing crime in Boston

Speaker 4 until Labor Day of 1961.

Speaker 4 There are a lot of variations of what happened here, exactly.

Speaker 4 But they all boil down to the same basic idea.

Speaker 4 Georgie McLaughlin, a member of the McLaughlin gang from Charlestown,

Speaker 4 disrespected somebody's girl.

Speaker 4 Whose girl exactly varies in the retellings.

Speaker 4 But it's always the girlfriend of a member of the Winter Hill gang from Somerville.

Speaker 4 The nature of the offense is different depending on who you ask.

Speaker 4 Some versions just say, He hit on her and this led to an argument between the men.

Speaker 4 A more elaborate version of the tale says Georgie McLaughlin slapped this woman across the face after she refused his advances.

Speaker 4 In one very weird version of this story, he bit the woman.

Speaker 4 But I can't find any information that makes that make any more sense.

Speaker 4 But in every version of the story, Georgie McLaughlin got the shit kicked out of him for making a pass at a woman who was spoken for by a member of the other gang.

Speaker 4 While Georgie was recovering in the hospital, his two brothers went to Buddy McLean, head of the Winter Hill gang, and they asked him to turn over the names of the men who'd put Georgie in the hospital.

Speaker 4 But he refused.

Speaker 4 So they wired dynamite to the ignition switch on his wife's car.

Speaker 4 The bomb was faulty and no one got hurt. But now everybody's pretty upset.

Speaker 4 So Buddy McClain responded to this attempted assassination by murdering Bernie McLaughlin, Georgie's older brother.

Speaker 4 And just as a strange little side note here, when Buddy McClain shot Bernie McLaughlin, he had a getaway driver, a man named Alexander Petricone.

Speaker 4 Both men were arrested for this murder. I mean, it happened in broad daylight in front of a ton of witnesses.

Speaker 4 But when they got the case in front of a grand jury, they couldn't get an indictment.

Speaker 4 Nobody wants to testify in the middle of a gang war.

Speaker 4 Once he was out, Petricone saw the writing on the wall. Things are getting too hot here, and the smart move is to get out of town for good.

Speaker 4 So he did.

Speaker 4 He moved to California, changed his name to Alex Rocco.

Speaker 4 He signed up for acting lessons with Leonard Nimoy.

Speaker 4 And in 1972, he was cast in The Godfather for the role of Mo Green, the Las Vegas casino owner.

Speaker 4 After the Winter Hill boys murdered one of the McLaughlin brothers in the fall of 1961,

Speaker 4 things spiraled out of control.

Speaker 4 What started out as a moment of drunken rudeness at a Labor Day beach party had escalated into a full-blown war that lasted years and killed dozens of people, some of them in horrific ways.

Speaker 4 I don't think Raymond Patriarcha particularly cared if a bunch of Irishmen in Boston killed each other, but it was bad for business. Both of these ganks had been working for and paying him,

Speaker 4 but now they're too busy fighting each other to to do either of those things.

Speaker 4 It was hurting revenue, and it was attracting a lot of unwanted attention from law enforcement.

Speaker 4 The killing started in the fall of 1961,

Speaker 4 and between March of 64 and January of 65 alone in that nine-month period, there were at least 18 successful hits in Boston.

Speaker 4 An FBI memo dated January 26, 1965 describes a conversation that took place in Patriarcha's office about the escalation of violence in recent months.

Speaker 4 People were scared. They were staying off the streets.
And guys who aren't out on the streets aren't collecting payments.

Speaker 4 This conversation was recorded just a day after someone shot Joe Francone in the head inside of his own apartment.

Speaker 4 Patriarcha said, if the killings don't stop, I'll declare martial law.

Speaker 4 Six weeks later, on March 10th, 1965, Frank Smith was back in Providence to meet with Patriarcha again.

Speaker 4 This time he was looking for permission to run a gambling operation out of the back of a restaurant in East Boston.

Speaker 4 Patriarcha didn't give him a final answer on the matter. But he said he'd make a decision after he'd talked to one of his guys in Boston.

Speaker 4 But again, you know, while he's here, while he's got the boss's ear, Frank starts talking. And he's going on about Rockwell again.
He's ranting about the Jews and about black people.

Speaker 4 And he says that this plan to open a Nazi church in Maine is starting to move forward. And it'll be a good, clean way to fund the American Nazi Party.

Speaker 4 He's optimistic about Rockwell's chances of winning the upcoming election for governor in Virginia.

Speaker 4 And he tells Patriarcha that if Rockwell does win, he's already promised Frank that he can run all the illegal activity down in the Norfolk, Virginia area.

Speaker 4 And of course, Frank's willing to cut Patriarch in on that in exchange for a little assistance.

Speaker 4 Maybe Raymond Patriarcha really did intend to talk to the guy who ran the gambling in East Boston before he gave Frank a yes or no answer.

Speaker 4 Or maybe he didn't think Frank's craps games in the back of a restaurant was going to be anybody's problem anymore.

Speaker 4 In memos dated just days before Frank shows up in Providence in March, Patriarcha tells close associates that he's frustrated with Frank.

Speaker 4 Frank talks too much. Frank moves too fast.
And he's out of line.

Speaker 4 The week before Frank Smith got shot, an FBI memo describes Raymond Patriarcha as enraged when he found out that hit in January had been done on Frank's orders.

Speaker 4 The wiretap then recorded him making arrangements to meet with Jimmy Fleming and Joe Barboza later

Speaker 4 in the garage.

Speaker 4 Whatever it was that he had to say to two of the most prolific murderers on his payroll,

Speaker 4 he didn't say it near that FBI microphone.

Speaker 4 Next week, we'll talk about the two years Frank Smith spent as George Lincoln Rockwell's best friend.

Speaker 4 The woman half his age he married after meeting her at a Nazi campaign office, the brief, tragic life of Rockwell's secret baby, and more than a decade after Rockwell's death,

Speaker 4 Frank finally gets around to starting that fake church.

Speaker 4 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 4 The show is edited by the wildly talented Ray Gagan. The theme music was composed by Brad Dickert.
You can email me at WeirdLittleGuyspodcast at gmail.com.

Speaker 4 I will definitely read it, but I probably won't answer it. It's nothing personal.
You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other listeners or the Weird Little Guy subreddit.

Speaker 4 Just don't post anything you wouldn't say into the FBI Wiretap.

Speaker 7 This is Tanya Radd from Scrubbing In with Becca Tilly and Tanya Radd. Airtasker is the platform that helps people get anything done.

Speaker 7 Furniture assembly, cleaning, repairs, errands, organizing, even those, can someone please handle this jobs. And during the holidays, it's a lifesaver.

Speaker 7 Holiday lights, gift wrapping, toy builds, waiting in line for viral cookie drops, even gingerbread houses, elf drop-ins, or full holiday photo setups.

Speaker 7 Year-round, it's perfect for moving help, yard work, decluttering, pet care, tutoring, event help, anything.

Speaker 7 Just go on Airtasker, describe what you need, set a budget, and choose the best tasker for the job. Airtasker, get anything done.
Download the app or go to airtasker.com.

Speaker 5 Honestly, honestly,

Speaker 25 no one wants to think about HIV, but there are things that everyone can do to help prevent it. Things like PrEP.

Speaker 25 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 25 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 5 Ask a healthcare provider about all your prevention options and visit findoutaboutprep.com to learn more. Sponsored by Gilead.

Speaker 24 Get into the spirit with Vizio's MyHub, a new, simpler way to find everything you love on Vizio TV this holiday season.

Speaker 24 MyHub is your destination to discover new movies and shows tailored to you, find exclusive deals and discounts, and keep your favorites organized in one convenient place.

Speaker 24 Plus, Vizio TVs have all your favorite apps built in, like iHeartRadio, so you can stream that festive music playlist. MyHub makes it simpler to find what you want want when you want it.

Speaker 24 Visit visio.com slash iHeart and Experience Entertainment Made Easy Today.

Speaker 14 10 athletes will face the toughest job interview in fitness that will push past physical and mental breaking points.

Speaker 18 You are the fittest of the fit.

Speaker 19 Only one of you will leave here with an iFit contract for $250,000.

Speaker 21 This is when mindset comes in.

Speaker 22 Someone will be eliminated.

Speaker 23 Pressure is coming down.

Speaker 11 Trainer Games on Prime Video, January 8th.

Speaker 17 Watch the trailer on TrainerGames.com.

Speaker 2 This is an iHeart Podcast.

Speaker 4 Guaranteed human.