In this year of 2024, on the 111th anniversary of the murder of 13-year-old Mary Phagan by Jewish sex killer Leo Frank, we present this article, based on a piece from the alternative media.

by K.A. Strom and Valdis Bell

I BELIEVE IT was the great writer Daniel Concannon who first said that in America, no matter who you vote for you always get Jonathan Greenblatt.

Greenblatt looks like a particularly filthy gunsel from a 1940s gangster movie. He makes Peter Lorre look handsome. He’s the head of the Jewish Anti-Defamation League (or ADL), which is perhaps the foremost anti-Gentile hate operation in America today. It is the ADL who decides what you get to hear or see in the media, and what you are allowed to say in public and on social media. It would be better named the Defamation League, as one of their main activities is defaming and deplatforming and smearing and financially and personally ruining anyone who exposes Jewish crimes or the genocidal nature of the Jewish agenda.

As proof that the ADL gets what it wants, and what it wants is to silence anyone who inhibits the Jewish agenda of a brown America, look at what happened to populist Tucker Carlson last year. The most highly-rated talk show host on the dinosaur media, so well-liked that a recent poll puts his popularity higher than that of the entire Fox News Network where he appeared, Carlson was fired by mega-Zionist and possibly crypto- or part-Jew Rupert Murdoch without reason being given. Jonathan Greenblatt has been pushing for Carlson to be fired for at least two years. Take a look at this softball CNN interview with Greenblatt from 12 April 2021. CNN is owned and run by Jews.

Greenblatt gets all worked up emotionally when he tells Brian Stelter, “Tucker Carlson has got to go!” calling for him to be deplatformed, and literally a few seconds later screeches “This is not cancel culture.” Right. Greenblatt and the ADL goddamned invented cancel culture, for the gods’ sake. It’s the very basis of their existence. Apparently Tucker had mentioned the increasingly obvious fact that there a media agenda to replace the heritage population of the US and Europe and other Western nations. (It’s okay for the controlled media to mention this, they often do, so long as they frame it as a good and inevitable thing. But Tucker hadn’t made the obligatory ritual incantations, and that might stir up the peasants and get them thinking maybe, just maybe, someone is trying to hurt them — something that Greenblatt and his ilk cannot tolerate.)

Now, I’m not a hod carrier for Tucker Carlson. He articulates many of the problems we face well. He informs us about a few parts of the media’s agenda that the rest of the Jewish-controlled media try to downplay or keep hidden. But, like Lucy Van Pelt and her football with Charlie Brown, at the last moment he always pulls away and leaves us without knowing who is behind these things and why they do what they do. In some cases he out-and-out misdirects our people into thinking that Democrats are the real problem — not Jewish power — and that Republicans, some of them anyway, are the real solution. He scrupulously and cleverly and rather disgustingly dances around the issue of Jewish/Zionist power. Sometimes he tells us that it’s some shadowy “woke” conspiracy or airheaded “groupthink” trendiness that’s “behind it all.” (Truth be told, we as people need “groupthink.” All peoples need groupthink — that is, thinking of themselves as a group and committing themselves to their group’s survival — in order to even exist at all. Tucker Carlson says that’s a bad thing, promoting some vaguely libertarian strain of populism — or maybe it’s a populist strain of libertarianism; it doesn’t really matter, either one is death for us. So I am not a big fan of Tucker Carlson.

But Carlson went too far for Jonathan Greenblatt and the ADL. And he was hugely popular. So he had to go. And, going against — insanely against, I might add — their own economic interests, the Murdochs fired him. Pleasing Jews is more important, apparently, than billions in revenue.

And it is this same Greenblatt and same ADL that is allowed to give “training courses” to police officers nationwide, telling the officers just who it is who is “dangerous” and who should get especially intense law enforcement scrutiny. It is this same ADL that meets with social media executives — including Elon Musk — and tells them who it is who should have a voice and who should be stifled or silenced. It is this same ADL that tells our national and state and local legislators what laws should be passed and what speech should be banned.

Speaking of pleasing Jews, witness the shocking behavior of Florida governor Ron DeSantis. For the second time in history — and DeSantis did it the first time, too — an American governor has signed a bill into law while in a foreign country. It was a bill supported by the ADL and specifically crafted to make distribution of fliers criticizing Jews into a felony. And guess which country DeSantis was in when he signed it? If you guessed Israel, you’re right. DeSantis, who, like Tucker Carlson, makes a lot of noise in apparent opposition to certain of the most outrageous parts of the Jewish agenda, knows who he has to please. Don’t fool yourself; DeSantis still has ambitions to be a major elite political player. His signing of this flagrantly immoral and illegal restriction on our speech while in Israel is deeply significant: a symbolic bowing to his masters, in a place sacred to his masters, signaling he wants their approval for a “move up” in status, something that only they really decide.

I’ll embed the tweet from neocon Jew Rep. Andy Fine, who said: “made a secret trip to JERUSALEM (!!!) to deliver @GovRonDeSantis HB 269, the strongest antisemitism bill in the United States. To Florida’s Nazi thugs, I have news: attack Jews on their property and you’re going to prison. Never again means never again.” All of this surmounts a picture of DeSantis signing the sacred bill, with two smirking Jews looking on. Do I have to tell you that the bill has nothing to do with “attacking” Jews, but only with distributing literature that criticizes them or exposes their activities?

Some of you may be wondering what all this has to do with Mary Phagan. And who is she, anyway? Well, you need to understand the murder of Mary Phagan in order to understand how we got from the Land of the Free to the point where a greasy, sleazy item like Greenblatt gets to decide what our laws should be and what you can say without getting fired or going to prison.

It all began when 19th-century Americans, woefully unaware of reality when it came to Jews, mistakenly thought that Jews were just another kind of European and let them stream into our country in huge numbers. Jews, knowing they were a separate race and with fanatical racial loyalty, immediately began to organize and acquire power for themselves, especially power over the press and eventually all mass media as they emerged.

Initially, Jews in the southern US adapted themselves to the reality of Jim Crow and positioned themselves publicly as “White” and supportive of White institutions.

But all that changed at high noon on 26 April, 1913, in Atlanta, Georgia.

It happened on the second floor of the National Pencil Company building on Forsyth Street. It was a sweatshop where child laborers, mostly White girls, spent their youth making pencils for the company’s Jewish owners for 60 hours a week and more, earning only pennies an hour.

13-year-old Mary Phagan was one such girl. She came that day to the office to collect her pathetically meager $1.20 pay. There she met the sweatshop’s Jewish boss and stockholder, Leo Frank, in his office on the second floor. Leo Frank was also the president of the Atlanta chapter of the B’nai B’rith, a Jewish organization that would spawn the ADL later that same year.

It was a holiday and no one else was on that entire floor. Frank paid her, and then took her into the factory’s “metal room,” in the rear part of the second floor, as far as possible from the stairway and elevator, and from prying eyes and ears, on the pretext of checking to see if the metal supplies she needed for her work had come in. He closed the doors behind them as they walked.

Near the rear wall, standing in front of a metal lathe next to the toilet entrance, Leo Frank did to Mary Phagan what he, according to numerous witnesses, had often done with his teenage girl employees: He attempted to take sexual liberties with her. She resisted. Frank knocked her down forcibly, hitting her in the eye and striking her head against the unyielding metal lathe, opening a bloody gash that he may or may not have seen at first. While she was stunned, he pulled her garments up above her waist and raped her right on the red-stained floor in front of the toilet, lying in her own flowing blood.

When he was “done,” seeing the blood and doubtlessly realizing his predicament should Mary tell others of his actions, he found a piece of the twine used to pack supplies in his factory, wound it tightly around Mary’s neck, and strangled her to death. He then tore off a piece of her lace underwear, placed it around her neck as if it were a lace necklet and so it covered the marks of the strangling.

He then summoned the factory’s Black sweeper, Jim Conley, to enlist his aid in the moving and, he hoped, the burning of Mary Phagan’s body. Conley knew that Frank liked to “chat” in private with the prettier of his young White employees, as he had kept watch for Frank on several occasions while such “chatting” took place. And, in fact, he was keeping watch for him near the factory’s first-floor entrance at that very moment. Frank told Conley that he had struck the girl and accidentally killed her. The lace “necklet” might have served to conceal the strangling — at least conceal it from Conley. It could never fool police investigators. But, if Conley had burned the body for Frank as planned (as it turned out, he never did), there might never be any police investigators. Conley and Frank moved Mary’s body to the basement.

Frank and his legal team tried to frame the Black night watchman, Newt Lee, for the murder. Among other things, they forged his time card, and planted a fake bloody shirt at his residence. When that framing attempt failed, they tried to frame Jim Conley — and, 111 years later, they’re still trying to frame him. They planted a fake “bloody club” and pay envelope near the place where Conley kept watch for Frank that day. But that fake was exposed, too. The true evidence kept building up, and the proof was overwhelming that Frank was the killer. He was convicted and sentenced to death.

But Frank had something that ordinary defendants, Black or White, never have. He was not an “ordinary citizen.” He was a Jew, a member of the supposedly “chosen people.” He was also an actual official of the Jewish power structure — the head of Atlanta’s division of the B’nai B’rith. He had the already massive power, money, media ownership, and political influence of the organized Jewish community nationwide behind him. They refused to let the verdict stand. They funded a multimillion-dollar legal and PR campaign to get him a new trial, to make millions of gullible people believe he was innocent and a saintlike “victim of anti-Semitism,” and to get his sentence commuted. They were only partially successful. All his numerous and expensive appeals, which went all the way up to the US Supreme Court, failed. And the death sentence was carried out by an outraged citizenry after a corrupt governor commuted it. The Jews did fool a great number of Americans about Frank, however.

And the Frank case galvanized Jews to see heritage Americans as their enemies. The Leo Frank case was not only the first time the Jewish power structure flexed its muscles so openly to change public opinion and to get what it wanted from the political and legal systems. It was also when they decided that their alliance with White people was at an end. From that day forward, and intensifying greatly after World War 2, the Jews have been ramping up a (slighty) covert war on White people at the very same time that they made overt war on Arabs and others in the Middle East.

Everything else flows from that day. What that Jew pervert did to Mary Phagan on the metal room floor that day 111 years ago this week led directly to Jonathan Greenblatt telling you what you can and cannot say today — led directly, in fact, to the founding of the ADL just a few months after Mary Phagan breathed her last.

And now, as Paul Harvey used to say, you know the rest of the story.

***

Source: based on an article at National Vanguard

Why is it that the family of Mary Phagan, the victim of rapist and murderer Leo Frank, are given no voice at all as the Jewish lobby pressures Georgia to exonerate the killer — who was also a high B’nai B’rith official? The following Phagan Family Position Paper was originally published at littlemaryphagan.com.

MY NAME is Mary Phagan-Kean and I am the great-niece and namesake of “Little Mary Phagan,” the thirteen-year-old girl who was raped and murdered by Leo Max Frank, the president of Atlanta’s B’nai B’rith Lodge No. 144, on April 26, 1913.

Leo Frank was the manager of the National Pencil Company – a sweatshop factory where over a hundred children labored, and where the Sam Nunn federal building stands today. Little Mary Phagan was 12 years old when she started working there in 1912, and Frank admitted he was the last person to see Mary alive.

In fact, the evidence of his guilt was overwhelming and on August 25, 1913, after a month-long trial in the Fulton County Superior Court, Leo Frank was found guilty by a jury of his peers, and on the next day, he was sentenced to hang for the murder of Mary Phagan.

What followed was an unprecedented effort by Leo Frank and his legal team and supporters to pin this horrific crime on everyone but himself. It is an effort that continues to this very day. The Leo Frank case is no “cold case.” It is obvious to anyone who objectively considers the case evidence that Leo Frank was rightly convicted for this heinous crime.

Today, his supporters have targeted a black man named James Conley who worked as a janitor at the factory. Evidence shows that after Frank beat and strangled Mary he was unable to move the body. He called on Conley and ordered him to help him conceal the crime and swore him to secrecy. After initially concealing Frank’s crime Conley ultimately revealed to authorities the true events of that day. The detail he gave was so shocking and so convincing that he became the state’s star witness against Leo Frank. Frank and his legal team’s response was to accuse Conley of the murder, and that has been their story for a century.

But Mary’s killer was not James Conley, and the state of Georgia proved beyond any reasonable doubt that Leo Frank alone murdered Little Mary Phagan.

The Phagan family has no objection to anyone expressing their opinions about the Leo Frank case, but we do insist that organizations and personal campaigns not distort the truth and facts to use this case for their own political purposes. For over 100 years, each passing decade brought with it dubious revelations of “new historical evidence” falsely claiming to exonerate Leo Frank. The Phagan family has stated since 1982 that if there were clear-cut evidence to clear Leo Frank of this heinous crime, we would be the first to ask for an exoneration. However, such historical evidence has never come to light. Rather, there are considerable data, extensive documentation, revealing archival material, and legal, court, and government records that only support and even strengthen the guilty verdict.

Phagan Family’s Statement on the Latest Attempt to Exonerate Leo Frank

It was reported in the Atlanta Journal and Constitution that on April 26, 2019 [ironically 106 years to the day after Mary Phagan’s murder] that the Fulton County District Attorney Paul Howard [defeated by Fani Willis on November 6, 2020] had established a “Conviction Integrity Unit” that he said would review the Leo Frank conviction of 1913. Those named as participants in this move were the following:

• Former Governor Roy Barnes
• Rabbi Steven Lebow
• Attorney Dale Schwartz
• Melissa D. Redmon, director of the University of Georgia Law School
• Former Supreme Court Justice Leah Ward Sears
• Former Court Chief Justice Norman Fletcher
• Former Cobb County Superior Court Chief Judge J. Stephen Schuster
• Assistant District Attorney Van Pearlberg

The Family of Mary Phagan believes that these individuals have colluded since August of 2018 to find a way to vacate the murder conviction. ADL attorney Dale Schwartz was quoted thus: “we’re still trying to get a new trial that would, in effect, exonerate him.” [In 1914, several attempts were made to “exonerate” Leo Frank using “new evidence” that included witness affidavits later found to have been forged or obtained by bribery and other illegal means. See the Atlanta Constitution of May 5, 1914, p. 1.]

Clearly, the new agency was a blatantly political scheme that had nothing to do with justice. It was set up, it appears, at the behest of the above-mentioned Frank advocates for one purpose only – to help Leo Frank escape culpability for his crime. According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (May 7, 2019), Fulton County D.A. Paul Howard stated, “The Frank Case helped inspire the creation of the new unit” and that former Gov. Roy Barnes “will serve as a consultant.” Barnes admitted that he “had lobbied the district attorney [Howard] to re-examine Frank’s case.”

Let us be clear what that means. Those statements alone convince us that the Conviction Integrity Unit has already determined the outcome of the Leo Frank case. According to the article, “Barnes said he is convinced that this will happen. ‘There is no doubt in my mind, and we’ll [Who is “we?” — Ed.] prove it at the appropriate time, that Frank was not guilty.'”

For years Roy Barnes has been promoting a fraudulent narrative about the Frank case, and in particular that the 1913 trial was illegitimate because it was “mob-dominated.” He said that “there were just mobs of people. And as the jury would go [to] the courthouse every day, the mob would scream, “Hang the Jew or we’ll hang you!”¹

This charge is a blatant lie that has been disproven by the scholars of the case. It was made up long after the trial by an overzealous writer trying to make a name for himself. Only Barnes continues to repeat it.² For this and many other reasons Governor Roy Barnes is simply unfit to participate in any serious inquiry into the Leo Frank case.

Fulton County District Attorney Paul Howard (with former Governor Roy Barnes) announces “Conviction Integrity Unit” to re-open Leo Frank case. Atlanta Journal-Constitution, May 7, 2019. Once again, most advocates and so-called experts who determine Leo Frank is not guilty have relied on blatantly false information and politically biased propaganda. Frank’s conviction was upheld by thirteen separate courts and judges in his thirteen appeals from Fulton County to the United States Supreme Court. Every court affirmed the trial was fair and the jury was not “mob terrorized.”

What’s more, driven by the need to exonerate a Jewish leader, they intend to convict an innocent African American man, James Conley – Frank’s employee that he ordered to help move the body. They ignore the 20 young girls and women who testified under oath that Frank sexually harassed them at the factory. Frank’s attorneys refused to cross-examine ANY of them, and later admitted that they were all telling the truth.³

Nonetheless, Frank’s advocates spread fabrications, propagandize falsehoods, distort the facts and change headlines of original newspapers to promote the hoax of not guilty. The real miscarriage of justice is that in this time of the #MeToo movement, they seek to override a duly convicted child rapist and murderer’s conviction.

The Evidence Points to Leo Frank’s Guilt

Most people are not aware that there was blood and hair evidence at the murder scene, that Frank changed his alibi several times and lied to police, and that he sexually harassed his young girl employees. Most people are unaware that Leo Frank hired private detectives who planted evidence and bribed and intimidated witnesses to change their testimony. They even hatched a plot to murder the African American James Conley who became a key witness against Leo Frank.⁴

Most people are not aware that the two detective firms Leo Frank hired; the Pinkertons’ National Detective Agency and the Burns Detective Agency concluded Leo Frank was guilty of the murder!

At his own trial Leo Frank refused to be sworn on the Bible and be cross-examined. A lot has been covered up about the case, including Leo Frank playing the race card to play to the white jurors’ prejudices about black men.

In 1915 and under intense political pressure Gov. John M. Slaton commuted Frank’s death sentence to life imprisonment. But even as he signed that commutation order he also wrote that the U.S. Supreme Court “found in the trial no error in law” and had “correctly in my judgment [found] that there was sufficient evidence to sustain the verdict.”

The fact is that Leo M. Frank was found guilty under Georgia law with facts and evidence, not with political bullying. The good people of Georgia can make up their own minds about Leo Frank’s innocence or guilt by delving into the historical records themselves. Having researched the Leo Frank/Mary Phagan murder case, including spending thousands of hours examining court records, newspaper reports, and private and public archives, I ask you to please consider the following facts:

Sexual harassment by Leo Frank: the Harvey Weinstein of his era

On Saturday April 26, 1913, Leo Frank used the opportunity of a deserted factory and his power as the company boss to lure Little Mary Phagan to a back area of the factory and attempt to rape her. Mary resisted and, and in the struggle Frank struck her and knocked her unconscious, and then strangled her to death. He left a trail of clues leading to himself, so within a few days of the murder he was arrested.

Evidence showed that the murder was sexually motivated, and many of Leo Frank’s own female employees testified to Leo Frank’s history of sexual harassment. They testified that he “got too familiar,” “put his hands on” them, tried to corner them, and proposed sexual acts to them for money.

These teenagers bravely took the witness stand and spoke of Leo Frank’s lewd behavior. Sixteen-year-old Nellie Wood told the court how Frank had pushed himself against her and touched her breast. Fourteen-year-old Nellie Pettis–a witness for the defense–recounted how Leo Frank had propositioned her for sex. Twenty girls in all gave similar testimony about Frank’s improprieties. Several male employees described how they had witnessed Leo Frank “rub up against” young female workers “a little too much.” The testimony was so explicit that the judge had to clear the courtroom of women.

The defense attorneys did not even attempt to cross-examine any of the girls who testified at trial about Leo Frank’s lewd behavior. Instead, Leo Frank’s lawyers argued that his improper behavior was not wrong–that it was a sign of more liberal times! One even said in his closing argument, “Deliver me from one of these prudish fellows that never looks at a girl and never puts his hands on her…”

In the South the LOVE of Jews reigned supreme – not anti-Semitism!

“Anti-Semitism is absolutely not the reason for this libel that has been framed against me. It isn’t the source nor the result of this sad story.” – Leo M. Frank, interviewed by Abraham Cahan of the Forward newspaper

Most people are unaware that the prosecutor Hugh Dorsey first brought his case against Leo Frank before a 23-member grand jury that included five prominent members of the Jewish community (including at least two from Frank’s own synagogue), and all the grand jurors signed the bill of indictment against Leo Frank.

The trial judge, Leonard Roan, was once a law partner of one of Frank’s defense attorneys, Luther Rosser and, according to a confidential ADL memo: “In general, the rulings of the trial Judge had been favorable to the defense.” Leo Frank’s defense attorney even declared after the trial: “[W]e do not make the least criticism of Judge Roan, who presided [over the trial]. Judge Roan is one of the best men in Georgia and is an able and conscientious judge.”

The false claims of anti-Semitism before, during, and after the trial of Leo Frank are simply unfounded and untrue. The detailed daily accounts by the three Atlanta newspapers – the Constitution, the Georgian, and the Journal, each of which had Jewish editors – reflected no anti-Jewish bias at all. Leo Frank’s religion is only alluded to when it is reported that he is the president of ‘B’nai B’rith, and he is written of with the utmost respect for his prominence in the community. In fact, a University of Georgia study showed that the reportage by Atlanta’s three dailies was openly pro-Leo Frank and exhibited a pronounced pro-Frank bias.

Author Steve Oney, listed by the Anti-Defamation League as an expert on the Leo Frank case, reported: “To the extent that there was bias in the coverage, it was mostly in Frank’s favor…” He goes on to state that Atlanta’s newspapers, “evincing the prejudices of the time, ridiculed the state’s star witness–a black factory janitor named Jim Conley…”

It has been claimed that “anti-Semitism” and the “hatred of Jews” motivated Leo Frank’s conviction and lynching. And yet, incredibly, there was no anti-Semitism expressed by police, detectives, prosecutors, jurors, judge, or reporters! There was no “prejudicial trial” or “mob rule” or anti-Jewish bigotry of any kind.

Mr. Oney refutes the claim that there were anti-Semitic mobs shouting “Hang the Jew!” He told the Jewish Journal:

“[I]t didn’t happen. It was something that someone wrote a couple [of] years after the crime, and then it got stuck into subsequent recountings of the story….Jews were accepted in the city, and the record does not substantiate subsequent reports that the crowd outside the courtroom shouted at the jurors: ‘Hang the Jew or we’ll hang you.'” Though there is no record of “anti-Semitism” on the part of the crowd, the courtroom audience, the press, or the prosecutors, that doesn’t mean it was non-existent. As the evidence of his guilt became overwhelming, Leo Frank and his lawyers tried desperately to insert “anti-Semitism” into the trial as a diversionary tactic. They actually staged a courtroom confrontation with a prosecution witness over his alleged previous “anti-Semitic” statements. This officially brought “anti-Semitism” into the trial for the first time. Turns out that witness was working for the Leo Frank defense and was planted to promote their “anti-Semitism” agenda. It was yet another trick by the Leo Frank defense to undermine the court proceeding and to neutralize the evidence of his guilt.

The ADL has been promoting a lie for over a century!

“HANG THE JEW, HANG THE JEW” is what the Anti-Defamation League says was chanted during the month-long trial, but its own expert Steve Oney says it NEVER OCCURRED!

According to Steve Oney, at the time of Mary Phagan’s murder, “Atlanta was a philo-Semitic city. Its assimilated, German-Jewish elite were part of the financial and legal power structure…” Gov. John Slaton in his commutation order also addressed the false claim of an “anti-Semitic mob” surrounding the courtroom pressing to lynch Leo Frank: “No such attack was made and…none was contemplated.” Gov. John Slaton countered the false claim of an “anti-Semitic” atmosphere by reminding Leo Frank supporters that Jews were highly respected and appreciated in Georgia because they had been “conspicuous” contributors to the history and development of the state.⁵

Frank’s Jewish defenders believed he was guilty

By the time of his lynching in 1915 many people – including his Jewish supporters – not only were repelled by Leo Frank’s abrasive personality but also believed he was in fact the murderer of Mary Phagan. Chicago icon Albert Lasker, a Jewish philanthropist and the “father of modern advertising,” paid millions (in today’s money) for Leo Frank’s defense, but he privately admitted that he was not even convinced that Leo Frank was innocent.

Lasker financed all of Frank’s post-conviction appeals and orchestrated his international public-relations campaign that involved media outlets across the nation, including the New York Times. Albert Lasker recalled the meeting in Frank’s jail cell:

“It was very hard for us to be fair to him, he impressed us as a sexual pervert. Now, he may not have been–or rather a homosexual or something like that…”

According to Lasker’s biographer, the men with him during that encounter took “a violent dislike to him.” Lasker “hated him,” and said, “I hope he [Leo Frank] gets out…and when he gets out I hope he slips on a banana peel and breaks his neck.”

Leo Frank’s Trial Defense was one of the most RACIST in American History

Though “anti-Semitism” was not a factor in his trial, Leo Frank’s racism certainly was: Frank’s defense attorneys used the word “nigger” and other racist slurs dozens of times in court. His main attorney told the jury: “If you put a nigger in a hopper, he’ll drip lies.”

Leo Frank argued in court that the many black witnesses that testified against him should not be believed – simply because they were black – and that “negro testimony” – as they referred to it – was by definition inferior and unreliable. At trial Leo Frank’s attorney castigated the white jurors for even considering the testimony of the black witnesses:

“They would rather believe the negro’s word….Oh, how times have changed. I hope to God I die before they change any worse than this…”

Leo Frank’s lawyers argued to the jury of twelve white men that murder, rape, and robbery were “negro crimes” and thus Leo Frank, “a white man,” could not have committed the murder of Mary Phagan. One defense attorney said that “the murder was the unreasoning crime of a negro,” that “It isn’t a white man’s crime.”

Leo Frank’s own racist thinking is reflected in an Atlanta Constitution front-page headline on May 31, 1913: “Mary Phagan’s Murder Was Work of a Negro Declares Leo M. Frank.” The newspaper quoted Leo Frank:

“Here is a negro [James Conley], not alone with the shiftless and lying habits of an element of his race, that is common to the South….No white man killed Mary Phagan. It’s a negro’s crime, through and through. No man with common sense would even suspect I did it.”

Leo Frank tried to pin his crime on two innocent black men

Leo Frank’s supporters then and now have played the race card and falsely represent an African-American man as the “real killer.” For over 100 years James “Jim” Conley has been scapegoated in nearly all the literature on the case. He was a sweeper in the factory on the day of the murder who was ordered by his boss Leo Frank to help move the dead body of Mary Phagan. When James Conley confessed to his accessory-after-the-fact role, Frank and his supporters tried to pin his crime on Conley. Leo Frank’s supporters continue to this day to smear James Conley as a devious criminal who got away with murder, but Conley’s very detailed statement–corroborated by the physical evidence at the crime scene – was so convincing that it became central to the prosecution’s case. (At trial, Leo Frank refused to be cross-examined by prosecutors, but James Conley withstood 16 hours of cross-examination–under oath.)

In 1914, Leo Frank supporters tried to hire a black woman named Annie Maude Carter to slip James Conley some poison while he was in jail waiting to testify at Frank’s hearing for a new trial. She identified the would-be assassins in open court as prominent members of the Jewish community. The plot was exposed in the May 6, 1914 edition of the New York Times.

Before he accused James Conley of the crime, Leo Frank worked overtime to pin the murder on another factory employee – the African-American night watchman who found Mary Phagan’s body, Newt Lee.Leo Frank hired private detectives who planted a blood-soaked shirt in the innocent black man’s home, and then Leo Frank’s attorney hinted to the police where they might find that damning “evidence.” When the newspapers reported that a bloody shirt was found at Newt Lee’s home, it almost caused an innocent man to be lynched. Luckily for Newt Lee, Leo Frank’s private detectives did such a sloppy job at planting the shirt that the police were not fooled at all, and it only increased their suspicion of Leo Frank. That is the point when the people of Atlanta came to believe–and rightly so–that Leo Frank was the murderer of Little Mary Phagan.

Alonzo Mann – the man that is supposed to have exonerated Frank in 1982 – would have CONVICTED him in 1913.

I, Mary Phagan-Kean, examined in detail the dubious claims of Alonzo Mann, who came forward in 1982 – after 69 years of silence – to say he saw Conley with the body of Mary Phagan. It turns out that his new statements hurt Leo Frank far more than they help him.

– Alonzo Mann (who died in 1985) was Frank’s “office boy” in 1913 and from the very start he gave many conflicting stories that are irreconcilable with the known facts: In May 1913 as a young teenager, Alonzo Mann told detectives 3 different stories in 3 separate interviews and gave yet another story in his sworn testimony at trial in August. In those interviews and in his trial testimony Alonzo Mann never mentioned seeing James Conley at all on the day of the murder. At age 83, in his 1982 videotaped session before the State Board of Pardons and Paroles, he gave still more conflicting versions that contradict the testimony of Leo Frank himself!

– What motivated Alonzo Mann to break his 69-year silence on the Leo Frank case by pinning the crime on James Conley? The answer was disclosed at the videotaped private hearing in 1982: behind Alonzo Mann’s obviously scripted, wavering “testimony” was a book and movie deal executed by the Tennessean newspaper–the same Tennessean that abandoned the truth and the facts of the case and any trace of journalistic ethics just to exonerate Leo Frank. So Alonzo Mann was induced to come forward for fame and fortune.

Alonzo Mann in 1913: Tells 4 different versions, and 2 more in 1982. The Phagan family was consulted by the Board in the run-up to the 1983 pardon decision, since the surviving members of the family had a great deal of personal knowledge of and documentation about the case and would be directly and profoundly affected by any decision. It was our Little Mary who had been strangled and very likely raped, after all. And the Board denied that pardon application.

The Jewish organizations tried again in 1986, but this time the Phagan family was not consulted. They were told about the upcoming pardon decision after the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith (ADL) and its well-heeled allies: Atlanta Jewish Federation and American Jewish Committee had been meeting with and lobbying the Board for six months or more. Why the secrecy? Obviously, the Jewish groups – led by Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith board member and attorney Dale Schwartz – didn’t want the victim’s family to have any say on the matter or any time to alert the public as to what was afoot.

Thus, in 1986 the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles issued a posthumous “pardon” to Leo Frank on the basis of the state’s failure to protect him while in custody, but it did not absolve him of the crime of murdering Mary Phagan and Frank’s conviction remained intact.

The state’s 1986 “pardon” did not overturn the guilty verdict

Believe it or not, there are still documents from the Leo Frank case that are being hidden from the public because they have been classified as “GEORGIA STATE SECRETS”! Our repeated attempts to obtain them from the Georgia State Board of Pardons and Paroles were denied again in December 2020. What could they be hiding? What could be so secret about a case that is 106 years old!? And why aren’t the media pursuing this extraordinary government action?

My book, The Murder of Little Mary Phagan is available free at: http://www.littlemaryphagan.com

Sources Banned and Censored

On the 100th Anniversary (April 26, 2013) of Mary Phagan’s rape and murder, the trial Brief of Evidence and appeals records of the Leo Frank case were digitized as well as the voluminous Atlanta newspaper reports about the crime.

These sources – and many, many more like them – use to be available on the internet until very recently. Indeed, the books, videos, articles, and court documents that provide a balanced view of the case have been systematical­ly removed from the internet SINCE THE Fulton County CONVICTION INTEGRITY UNIT WAS ANNOUNCED!

No Longer Available

• Original articles from the three major dailies covering the day-by-day progress of the case (removed from archive.org)
• Videos from YouTube that challenge the false idea that Leo Frank was “wrongly convicted.
• Official case documents like the Brief of Evidence, the appeals filings, and the pub­lished trial records have been scrubbed from the internet.
• Books that prove Leo Frank’s guilt and provide a serious case analysis have been banned and censored. My 1987 book titled The Murder of Little Mary Phagan has been removed from some websites where it was previ­ously available for years. The Nation of Islam’s recent book Leo Frank: The Lynching of a Guilty Man has been myste­riously banned from sale on Amazon.com.
• Google searches EXCLUDE articles and documents that show evidence of Frank’s guilt.
• When we made an Open Records Request to the Uni­versity of Georgia, they first said 70 records match the request. When we paid to have them mailed to us, all of a sudden, all 70 records vanished with no explanation!

Fortunately for the Fulton County Conviction Integrity Unit, the public and the media will still be able to ac­cess those critical official documents that the Leo Frank crusaders are trying to hide. We have made them available at LittleMaryPhagan.com where we believe they will be safe from the Leo Frank censors and their internet cleansing campaign.

Fulton County District Attorney, Paul Howard was defeated in the last election but the Conviction Integrity Unit he set up is still operating under the new District Attorney Fani Willis. Ms. Fani Willis might do well to ask why the original documents in the case all of a sud­den have been removed from the internet, and who had the power to remove them and why. How can the case be carefully reviewed without them? Indeed, the books, videos, articles, and court documents that provide a full and balanced view of the case have been systematical­ly removed SINCE THE CONVICTION INTEGRITY UNIT WAS ANNOUNCED!!! Obviously, Truth has become offensive or objectionable and has been deemed “hate speech” in order to impose censorship. But FACTS ARE NOT HATEFUL!

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis inherited this corrupt process, but will she bow to the same pressure that was put on her former boss to exonerate a man who raped and murdered our family member?

As of today, no word from Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis on whether her office will finally give long overdue justice to the victim, Mary Phagan. Can we expect that she will stand by her own words?: “Cases won’t be for sale under my administration. Not for an endorsement, not for money, not for anything.” “You have my word, during my tenure as district attorney in Fulton County, we will become a beacon for justice and ethics in Georgia and across the nation.” “[D.A.] Willis vowed to bring ‘transparency and accountability’ to the DA’s office,” reported the Atlanta Journal and Constitution.

She would be the first to do so. We’ll see.

Notes

1 Watch this video at 1:40 mark: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4tgKcqOXyhc

2 See https://littlemaryphagan.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/FINAL-Barnes.pdf

3 https://littlemaryphagan.com/the-murder-trial-testimony-brief-of-evidence/

4 Atlanta Journal, May 5, 1914, 2. Atlanta Constitution May 6, 1914, 1, 5. New York Times, May 6, 1914, 3.

5 https://littlemaryphagan.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Steve-Oney-Says-No-New-Evidence-to-Exonerate-Leo-Frank-for-Murder-of-Little-Mary-Phagan.pdf

* * *

Source: Mary Phagan-Kean

IN his 1981 memoirs, the far right Classics scholar Revilo P. Oliver characterized the ADL as “the formidable organization of Jewish cowboys who ride herd on their American cattle” and this seems a reasonably apt description to me.

Although I had long recognized the power and influence of the ADL, a leading Jewish-activist organization whose leaders were so regularly quoted in my newspapers, until rather recently I had only the vaguest notions of its origins. I’m sure I’d heard the story mentioned at some points, but the account had never stuck in my mind.

Then perhaps a year or two ago, I happened to come across some discussion of the ADL’s 2013 centenary celebration, in which the leadership reaffirmed the principles of its 1913 founding. The initial impetus had been the vain national effort to save the life of Leo Frank, a young Southern Jew unjustly accused of murder and eventually lynched. Not long before, Frank’s name and story would have been equally vague in my mind, with the man half-remembered from my introductory history textbooks as one of the most notable early KKK victims in the fiercely anti-Semitic Deep South of the early twentieth century. However, not long before seeing that piece on the ADL I’d read Albert Lindemann’s highly-regarded study The Jew Accused, and his short chapter on the notorious Frank case had completely exploded all my preconceptions.

First, Lindemann demonstrated that there was no evidence of any anti-Semitism behind Frank’s arrest and conviction, with Jews constituting a highly-valued element of the affluent Atlanta society of the day, and no references to Frank’s Jewish background, negative or otherwise, appearing in the media prior to the trial. Indeed, five of the Grand Jurors who voted to indict Frank for murder were themselves Jewish, and none of them ever voiced regret over their decision. In general, support for Frank seems to have been strongest among Jews from New York and other distant parts of the country and weakest among the Atlanta Jews with best knowledge of the local situation.

Furthermore, although Lindemann followed the secondary sources he relied upon in declaring that Frank was clearly innocent of the charges of rape and murder, the facts he recounted led me to the opposite conclusion, seeming to suggest strong evidence of Frank’s guilt. When I much more recently read Lindemann’s longer and more comprehensive historical study of anti-Semitism, Esau’s Tears, I noticed that his abbreviated treatment of the Frank case no longer made any claim of innocence, perhaps indicating that the author himself might have also had second thoughts about the weight of the evidence.

Based on this material, I voiced that opinion in my recent article on historical anti-Semitism, but my conclusions were necessarily quite tentative since they relied upon Lindermann’s summary of the information provided in the secondary sources he had used, and I had the impression that virtually all those who had closely investigated the Frank case had concluded that Frank was innocent. But after my piece appeared, someone pointed me to a 2016 book from an unexpected source arguing for Frank’s guilt. Now that I have ordered and read that volume, my understanding of the Frank case and its historical significance has been entirely transformed.

Mainstream publishers may often reject books that too sharply conflict with reigning dogma and sales of such works are unlikely to justify the extensive research required to produce the manuscript. Furthermore, both authors and publishers may face widespread vilification from a hostile media for taking such positions. For these reasons, those who publish such controversial material will often be acting from deep ideological motives rather than merely seeking professional advancement or monetary gain. As an example, it took a zealous Trotskyite leftist such as Lenni Brunner to brave the risk of ferocious attacks and invest the time and effort to produce his remarkable study of the crucial Nazi-Zionist partnership of the 1930s. And for similar reasons, we should not be totally surprised that the leading book arguing for the guilt of Leo Frank appeared as a volume in the series on the pernicious aspects of Jewish-Black historical relations produced by Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam (NOI), nor that the text lacked any identified author.

Anonymous works published by heavily-demonized religious-political movements naturally engender considerable caution, but once I began reading the 500 pages of The Leo Frank Case: The Lynching of a Guilty Man I was tremendously impressed by the quality of the historical analysis. I think I have only very rarely encountered a research monograph on a controversial historical event that provided such an enormous wealth of carefully-argued analysis backed by such copious evidence. The authors seemed to display complete mastery of the major secondary literature of the last one hundred years while drawing very heavily upon the various primary sources, including court records, personal correspondence, and contemporaneous publications, with the overwhelming majority of the 1200 footnotes referencing newspaper and magazine articles of that era. The case they made for Frank’s guilt seemed absolutely overwhelming.

The basic outline of events is not disputed. In 1913 Georgia, a 13-year-old pencil company worker named Mary Phagan was last seen alive visiting the office of factory manager Leo Frank on a Saturday morning to collect her weekly paycheck, while her raped and murdered body was found in the basement early the next morning and Frank eventually arrested for the crime. As the wealthy young president of the Atlanta chapter of B’nai B’rith, Frank ranked as one of the most prominent Jewish men in the South, and great resources were deployed in his legal defense, but after the longest and most expensive trial in state history, he was quickly convicted and sentenced to death.

The facts of the case against Frank eventually became a remarkable tangle of complex and often conflicting evidence and eyewitness testimony, with sworn statements regularly being retracted and then counter-retracted. But the crucial point that the NOI authors emphasize for properly deciphering this confusing situation is the enormous scale of the financial resources that were deployed on Frank’s behalf, both prior to the trial and afterward, with virtually all of the funds coming from Jewish sources. Currency conversions are hardly precise, but relative to the American family incomes of the time, the total expenditures by Frank supporters may have been as high as $25 million in present-day dollars, quite possibly more than any other homicide defense in American history before or after, and an almost unimaginable sum for the impoverished Deep South of that period. Years later, a leading donor privately admitted that much of this money was spent on perjury and similar falsifications, something which is very readily apparent to anyone who closely studies the case. When we consider this vast ocean of pro-Frank funding and the sordid means for which it was often deployed, the details of the case become far less mysterious. There exists a mountain of demonstrably fabricated evidence and false testimony in favor of Frank, and no sign of anything similar on the other side.

The police initially suspected the black night watchman who found the girl’s body, and he was quickly arrested and harshly interrogated. Soon afterward, a bloody shirt was found at his home, and Frank made several statements that seemed to implicate his employee in the crime. At one point, this black suspect may have come close to being summarily lynched by a mob, which would have closed the case. But he stuck to his story of innocence with remarkable composure, in sharp contrast to Frank’s extremely nervous and suspicious behavior, and the police soon shifted their scrutiny toward the latter, culminating in his arrest. All researchers now recognize that the night watchman was entirely innocent, and the material against him planted.

The evidence against Frank steadily mounted. He was the last man known to have seen the young victim and he repeatedly changed important aspects of his story. Numerous former female employees reported his long history of sexually aggressive behavior toward them, especially directed towards the murdered girl herself. At the time of the murder, Frank claimed to have been working alone in his office, but a witness who went there reported he had been nowhere to be found. A vast amount of circumstantial evidence implicated Frank.

A black Frank family servant soon came forward with sworn testimony that Frank had confessed the murder to his wife on the morning after the killing, and this claim seemed supported by the latter’s strange refusal to visit her husband in jail for the first two weeks after the day of his arrest.

Two separate firms of experienced private detectives were hired by Frank’s lavishly-funded partisans, and the agents of both eventually came to the reluctant conclusion that Frank was guilty as charged.

As the investigation moved forward, a major break occurred as a certain Jim Conley, Frank’s black janitor, came forward and confessed to having been Frank’s accomplice in concealing the crime. At the trial he testified that Frank had regularly enlisted him as a lookout during his numerous sexual liaisons with his female employees, and after murdering Phagan, had then offered him a huge sum of money to help remove and hide the body in the basement so that the crime could be pinned upon someone else. But with the legal noose tightening around Frank, Conley had begun to fear that he might be made the new scapegoat, and went to the authorities in order to save his own neck. Despite Conley’s damning accusations, Frank repeatedly refused to confront him in the presence of the police, which was widely seen as further proof of Frank’s guilt.

By the time of the trial itself, all sides were agreed that the murderer was either Frank, the wealthy Jewish businessman, or Conley, the semi-literate black janitor with a first-grade education and a long history of public drunkenness and petty crime. Frank’s lawyers exploited this comparison to the fullest, emphasizing Frank’s Jewish background as evidence for his innocence and indulging in the crudest sort of racial invective against his black accuser, whom they claimed was obviously the true rapist and murderer due to his bestial nature.

Those attorneys were the best that money could buy and the lead counsel was known as the one of the most skilled courtroom interrogators in the South. But although he subjected Conley to a grueling sixteen hours of intense cross-examination over three days, the latter never wavered in the major details of his extremely vivid story, which deeply impressed the local media and the jury. Meanwhile, Frank refused to take the stand at his own trial, thereby avoiding any public cross-examination of his often changing account.

Two notes written in crude black English had been discovered alongside Phagan’s body, and everyone soon agreed that these were written by the murderer in hopes of misdirecting suspicion. So they were either written by a semi-literate black such as Conley or by an educated white attempting to imitate that style, and to my mind, the spelling and choice of words strongly suggests the latter, thereby implicating Frank.

Taking a broader overview, the theory advanced by Frank’s legion of posthumous advocates seems to defy rationality. These journalists and scholars uniformly argue that Conley, a semi-literate black menial, had brutally raped and murdered a young white girl, and the legal authorities soon became aware of this fact, but conspired to set him free by supporting a complex and risky scheme to instead frame an innocent white businessman. Can we really believe that the police officials and prosecutors of a city in the Old South would have violated their oath of office in order to knowingly protect a black rapist and killer from legal punishment and thereby turn him loose upon their city streets, presumably to prey on future young white girls? This implausible reconstruction is particularly bizarre in that nearly all its advocates across the decades have been the staunchest of Jewish liberals, who endlessly condemned the horrific racism of the Southern authorities of that era, but then unaccountably chose to make a special exception in this one particular case.

In many respects, the more important part of the Frank case began after his conviction and death sentence when many of America’s wealthiest and most influential Jewish leaders began mobilizing to save him from the hangman. They soon established the ADL as a new vehicle for that purpose and succeeded in making the Frank murder case one of the most famous in American history to that date.

Although his role was largely concealed at the time, the most important new backer whom Frank attracted was Albert Lasker of Chicago, the unchallenged monarch of American consumer advertising, which constituted the life’s blood of all of our mainstream newspapers and magazines. Not only did he ultimately provide the lion’s share of the funds for Frank’s defense, but he focused his energies upon shaping the media coverage surrounding the case. Given his dominant business influence in that sector, we should not be surprised that a huge wave of unremitting pro-Frank propaganda soon began appearing across the country in both local and national publications, extending to most of America’s most popular and highly-regarded media outlets, with scarcely a single word told on the other side of the story. This even included all of Atlanta’s own leading newspapers, which suddenly reversed their previous positions and became convinced of Frank’s innocence.

Lasker also enlisted other powerful Jewish figures in the Frank cause, including New York Times owner Adolph Ochs, American Jewish Committee president Louis Marshall, and leading Wall Street financier Jacob Schiff. The Times, in particular, began devoting enormous coverage to this previously-obscure Georgia murder case, and many of its articles were widely republished elsewhere. The NOI authors highlight this extraordinary national media attention: “The Black janitor whose testimony became central to Leo Frank’s conviction became the most quoted Black person in American history up to that time. More of his words appeared in print in the New York Times than those of W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, and Booker T. Washington–combined.“

Back a century ago just as today, our media creates our reality, and with Frank’s innocence being proclaimed nationwide in near-unanimous fashion, a long list of prominent public figures were soon persuaded to demand a new trial for the convicted murderer, including Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and Jane Addams.

Ironically enough, Lasker himself plunged into this crusade despite apparently having very mixed personal feelings about man whose cause he was championing. His later biography reveals that upon his first personal meeting with Frank, he perceived him as “a pervert” and a “disgusting” individual, so much so that he even hoped that after he managed to free Frank, the latter would quickly perish in some accident. Furthermore, in his private correspondence he freely admitted that a large fraction of the massive funding that he and numerous other wealthy Jews from across the country were providing had been spent on perjured testimony and there are also strong hints that he explored bribing various judges. Given these facts, Lasker and Frank’s other major backers were clearly guilty of serious felonies, and could have received lengthy prison terms for their illegal conduct.

With the New York Times and the rest of the liberal Northern media now providing such massive coverage of the case, Frank’s defense team was forced to abandon the racially-inflammatory rhetoric aimed at his black accuser which had previously been the centerpiece of their trial strategy. Instead, they began concocting a tale of rampant local anti-Semitism, previously unnoticed by all observers, and adopted it as a major grounds for their appeal of the verdict.

The unprincipled legal methods pursued by Frank’s backers is illustrated by a single example. Georgia law normally required that a defendant be present in court to hear the reading of the verdict, but given the popular emotions in the case, the judge suggested that this provision be waived, and the prosecution assented only if the defense lawyers promised not to use this small irregularity as grounds for appeal. But after Frank was convicted, AJC President Marshall and his other backers orchestrated numerous unsuccessful state and federal appeals on exactly this minor technicality, merely hiring other lawyers to file the motion.

For almost two years, the nearly limitless funds deployed by Frank’s supporters covered the costs of thirteen separate appeals on the state and federal levels, including to the U.S. Supreme Court, while the national media was used to endlessly vilify Georgia’s system of justice in the harshest possible terms. Naturally, this soon generated a local reaction, and during this period outraged Georgians began denouncing the wealthy Jews who were spending such enormous sums to subvert the local criminal justice system.

One of the very few journalists willing to oppose Frank’s position was Georgia publisher Tom Watson, a populist firebrand, and an editorial he reasonably declared “We cannot have…one law for the Jew, and another for the Gentile” while he also later lamented that “It is a bad state of affairs when the idea gets abroad that the law is too weak to punish a man who has plenty of money.” A former Georgia governor indignantly inquired “Are we to understand that anybody except a Jew can be punished for a crime.” The clear facts indicate that there was indeed a massive miscarriage of justice in Frank’s case, but virtually all of it occurred in Frank’s favor.

All appeals were ultimately rejected and Frank’s execution date for the rape and murder of the young girl finally drew near. But just days before he was scheduled to leave office, Georgia’s outgoing governor commuted Frank’s sentence, provoking an enormous storm of popular protest, especially since he was the legal partner of Frank’s chief defense lawyer, an obvious conflict of interest. Given the enormous funds that Frank’s national supporters had been deploying on his behalf and the widespread past admissions of bribery in the case, there are obviously dark suspicions about what had prompted such a remarkably unpopular decision, which soon forced the former governor to exile himself from the state. A few weeks later, a group of Georgia citizens stormed Frank’s prison farm, abducting and hanging him, with Frank becoming the first and only Jew lynched in American history.

Naturally, Frank’s killing was roundly denounced in the national media that had long promoted his cause. But even in those quarters, there may have been a significant difference between public and private sentiments. No newspaper in the country had more strongly championed Frank’s innocence than the New York Times of Adolph Ochs. Yet according to the personal diary of one of the Times editors, Ochs privately despised Frank, and perhaps even greeted his lynching with a sense of relief. No effort was ever made by Frank’s wealthy supporters to bring any of the lynching party to justice.

Although I have now come to regard the NOI volume as the most persuasive and definitive text on the Frank case, I naturally considered conflicting works before reaching this conclusion.

For nearly a half-century, the leading scholarly account of the incident had probably been Leonard Dinnerstein’s book The Leo Frank Case, first published in 1966, and Dinnerstein, a University of Arizona professor specializing in Jewish history, entirely supported Frank’s innocence. But although the work won a national award, carries glowing blurbs from several prestigious publications, and has surely graced the reading lists of endless college courses, I was not at all impressed. Among other things, the book appears to be the original source of some of the most lurid examples of alleged anti-Semitic public outbursts that apparently have no basis in reality and seem to have been simply fabricated by the author given his lack of any citations; the NOI authors note these stories have been quietly abandoned by all recent researchers. Even leaving aside such likely falsifications, which were widely cited by later writers and heavily contaminated the historical record, I found the short Dinnerstein work rather paltry and even pitiful when compared to that of its NOI counterpart.

A far longer and more substantial recent work was Steve Oney’s 2003 And the Dead Shall Rise, which runs nearly 750 pages and won the National Jewish Book Award, the Southern Book Critics Circle Prize, and the American Bar Association’s Silver Gavel, probably establishing itself as today’s canonical text on the historical incident. Oney had been a longtime Atlanta journalist and I was favorably impressed by his narrative skill, along with the numerous fascinating vignettes he provided to illustrate the Southern history of that general era. He also seemed a cautious researcher, drawing heavily upon the primary sources and avoiding much of the falsified history of the last century, while not entirely suppressing the massive evidence of bribery and perjury employed by the Frank forces.

But although Oney does mention much of this information, he strangely fails to connect the dots. For example, although he occasionally mentions some of the funds spent on Frank’s behalf, he never attempts to convert them into present-day equivalents, leaving a naive reader to assume that such trivial amounts could not possibly have been used to pervert the course of justice. Furthermore, his entire book is written in chronological narrative form, with no footnotes provided in the text, and a large portion of the content being entirely extraneous to any attempt to determine Frank’s guilt or innocence, contrasting very sharply with the more scholarly style of the NOI authors.

To my mind, a central element of the Frank case was the massive financial temptations being offered by Frank’s Jewish backers, and the huge number of Atlanta citizens, both high and low, who apparently shifted their positions on Frank’s guilt in eager hopes of capturing some of that largess. But although this obvious theme was heavily emphasized in the NOI book, Oney seems to mostly avoid this obvious factor, perhaps even for personal reasons. Print publications have suffered massive cutbacks in recent years and I noticed on the book flap that although Oney is described as a longtime Atlanta journalist, he had subsequently relocated to Los Angeles. Once I checked, I immediately discovered that Oney’s book had became the basis for an independent film entitled The People v. Leo Frank, and I wonder whether his hopes of capturing a sliver of Hollywood’s vast lucre may not have encouraged him to so strongly suggest Frank’s innocence. Would an account of Leo Frank as rapist and murderer ever be likely to reach the silver screen? The quiet influence of financial considerations is no different today than they were a century ago, and this factor must be taken into account when evaluating historical events.

The NOI authors devote nearly all of their lengthy book to a careful analysis of the Frank case provided in suitably dispassionate form, but a sense of their justifiable outrage does occasionally poke through. In the years prior to Frank’s killing, many thousands of black men throughout the South had been lynched, often based on a slender thread of suspicion, with few of these incidents receiving more than a few sentences of coverage in a local newspaper, and large numbers of whites had also perished in similar circumstances. Meanwhile, Frank had received benefit of the longest trial in modern Southern history, backed by the finest trial lawyers that money could buy, and based on overwhelming evidence had been sentenced to death for the rape and murder of a young girl. But when Frank’s legal verdict was carried out by extra-judicial means, he immediately became the most famous lynching victim in American history, perhaps even attracting more media attention than all those thousands of other cases combined. Jewish money and Jewish media established him as a Jewish martyr who thereby effectively usurped the victimhood of the enormous number of innocent blacks who were killed both before and after him, none of whom were ever even recognized as individuals.

As Prof. Shahak has effectively demonstrated, traditional Talmudic Judaism regarded all non-Jews as being sub-human, with their lives possessing no value. Given that Frank’s backers were followers of Reform Judaism, it seems quite unlikely that they accepted this doctrine or were even aware of its existence. But religious traditions of a thousand years standing can easily become embedded within a culture, and such unrecognized cultural sentiments may have easily shaped their reaction to Frank’s legal predicament.

Influential historical accounts of the Frank case and its aftermath have contained lurid tales of the rampant public anti-Semitism visited upon Atlanta’s Jewish community in the wake of the trial, even claiming that a substantial portion of the population was forced to flee as a consequence. However, a careful examination of the primary source evidence, including the contemporaneous newspaper coverage, provides absolutely no evidence of this, and it appears to be entirely fictional.

The NOI authors note that prior to Frank’s trial American history had been virtually devoid of any evidence of significant anti-Semitism, with the previous most notable incident being the case of an extremely wealthy Jewish financier who was refused service at a fancy resort hotel. But by totally distorting the Frank case and focusing such massive national media coverage on his plight, Jewish leaders around the country succeeded in fabricating a powerful ideological narrative despite its lack of reality, perhaps intending the story to serve as a bonding experience to foster Jewish community cohesion.

As a further example of the widely promoted but apparently fraudulent history, the Jewish writers who have overwhelmingly dominated accounts of the Frank case have frequently claimed that it sparked the revival of the Ku Klux Klan soon afterward, with the group of citizens responsible for Frank’s 1915 lynching supposedly serving as the inspiration for William Simmons’ reestablishment of that organization a couple of years later. But there seems no evidence for this. Indeed, Simmons strongly emphasized the philo-Semitic nature of his new organization, which attracted considerable Jewish membership.

The primary factor behind the rebirth of the KKK was almost certainly the 1917 release D.W. Griffith’s overwhelmingly popular landmark film Birth of a Nation, which glorified the Klan of the Reconstruction Era. Given that the American film industry was so overwhelmingly Jewish at the time and the film’s financial backers and leading Southern distributors came from that same background, it could be plausibly argued that the Jewish contribution to the creation of the 1920s Klan was a very crucial one, while the revenue from the film’s distribution throughout the South actually financed Samuel Goldwyn’s creation of MGM, Hollywood’s leading studio.

In their introduction, the NOI authors make the fascinating point that the larger historical meaning of the Frank case in American racial history has been entirely lost. Prior to that trial, it was unprecedented for Southern courts to allow black testimony against a white man, let alone against a wealthy man being tried on serious charges; but the horrific nature of the crime and Conley’s role as the sole witness required a break from that longstanding tradition. Thus, the authors argue not unreasonably, that the Frank case may have been as important to the history of black progress in America as such landmark legal verdicts as Plessy vs. Ferguson or Brown vs. Board. But since almost the entire historical narrative has been produced by fervent Jewish advocates, these facts have been completely obscured and the case entirely misrepresented as an example of anti-Semitic persecution and public murder.

Let us summarize what seems to be the solidly established factual history of the Frank case, quite different than the traditional narrative. There is not the slightest evidence that Frank’s Jewish background was a factor behind his arrest and conviction, nor the death sentence he received. The case set a remarkable precedent in Southern courtroom history with the testimony of a black man playing a central role in a white man’s conviction. From the earliest stages of the murder investigation, Frank and his allies continually attempted to implicate a series of different innocent blacks by planting false evidence and using bribes to solicit perjured testimony, while the exceptionally harsh racial rhetoric that Frank and his attorneys directed towards those blacks was presumably intended to provoke their public lynching. Yet despite all these attempts by the Frank forces to play upon the notorious racial sentiments of the white Southerners of that era, the latter saw through these schemes and Frank was the one sentenced to hang for his rape and murder of that young girl.

Now suppose that all the facts of this famous case were exactly unchanged except that Frank had been a white Gentile. Surely the trial would be ranked as one of the greatest racial turning points in American history, perhaps even overshadowing Brown v. Board because of the extent of popular sentiment, and it would have been given a central place in all our modern textbooks. Meanwhile, Frank, his lawyers, and his heavy financial backers would probably be cast as among the vilest racial villains in all of American history for their repeated attempts to foment the lynching of various innocent blacks so that a wealthy white rapist and murderer could walk free. But because Frank was Jewish rather than Christian, this remarkable history has been completely inverted for over one hundred years by our Jewish-dominated media and historiography.

These are the important consequences that derive from control of the narrative and the flow of information, which allows murderers to be transmuted into martyrs and villains into heroes. The ADL was founded just over a century ago with the central goal of preventing a Jewish rapist and killer from being held legally accountable for his crimes, and over the decades, it eventually metastasized into a secret political police force not entirely dissimilar to the widely despised East German Stasi, but with its central goal seeming to be the maintenance of overwhelming Jewish control in a society that is 98% non-Jewish.

We should ask ourselves whether it is appropriate for an organization with such origins and such recent history to be granted enormous influence over the distribution of information across our Internet.

* * *

Source: The Unz Review

Here’s an excerpt from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution‘s take on tomorrow’s event:

Friday makes 103 years since 20 men broke into a prison and hanged a Jewish man in Cobb County.

For the past four years, the Georgia Historical Society marker commemorating the lynching of Leo Frank has safely been in a Georgia Department of Transportation warehouse due to construction along the road where it was located, said Rabbi Steve Lebow of Temple Kol Emeth in Marietta.

The marker is already back on the northwest corner of Roswell and Freys Gin roads, said GDOT spokeswoman Natalie Dale. At 10 a.m. on Aug. 23, there will be a ceremony to rededicate the marker, which was first placed there in 2008.

The AJC flatly states that Frank was “wrongfully accused,” as if it was an established fact — very close to a complete inversion of the truth. Controlled media “journalism” doesn’t get much sleazier than this:

Frank had been wrongfully accused of killing 13-year-old Mary Phagan, who worked at the pencil factory Frank ran. Gov. John M. Slaton commuted Frank two days before the execution. People rioted.

They ran the governor off, and he didn’t return for a decade.

The state’s main witness was Jim Conley, a janitor at the National Pencil Company. He said he helped Frank dispose of the girl’s body. . . .

Lebow, the Marietta rabbi, said the Anti-Defamation League and other Frank scholars will be at the Aug. 23 event.

Let’s have a few of our own scholars there, too.

It will be interesting to see if the wording on the marker has been in any way altered.

Agents of the crime-linked Jewish group, the ADL (“Anti-Defamation League”), which has been known to corrupt law enforcement officers, and other covert operatives, are expected to be in attendance.

TODAY MARKS THE 100th anniversary of the largest and most-well funded hate and defamation group in the history of mankind: the Anti-Defamation League, or “ADL.” The organization was originally called the “Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith” after its parent group, the Jewish fraternal order B’nai B’rith (meaning “Sons of the Covenant,” or, literally, “Sons of the Cut” — referring to circumcision). (ILLUSTRATION: Abraham Foxman, director of the ADL)

The ADL was founded in the immediate aftermath of the conviction of Atlanta B’nai B’rith President Leo Frank for the strangulation and sex murder of a 13-year-old factory girl, Mary Phagan. The international Jewish community did not believe that Frank should have been convicted. They had mounted a huge press, publicity, legal, and lobbying campaign to convince officials and the public that a Black man, James Conley, was the real killer. But the evidence against Frank was so strong — and the evidence against Conley so thin — that the Southern, all White, and doubtless philo-Semitic (like most of the Christian South) jury unanimously convicted Leo Frank and sentenced him to hang. Two months after Frank’s conviction, on October 20, 1913, the ADL was formed. To this day, the ADL and its allies promote the fiction that Frank’s conviction was a result of “anti-Semitism” and use the case a rallying cry to garner support and funding. (“100 Reasons Leo Frank is Guilty,” The American Mercury, 26 April 2013)

The ADL operates as a private intelligence agency, sending spies, infiltrators, disruptors, and agents provocateurs into the camps — both Jewish and non-Jewish — of those who disagree with its radically pro-Israel and Jewish supremacist agenda. Also like an intelligence agency, it maintains a huge database containing personal information on politicians, writers, dissidents, activists, publishers, bloggers, and even unaffiliated private citizens so that — should any of these people “get out of line,” in the opinion of the ADL — they can be threatened, “exposed,” blackmailed, and thus silenced with maximum effectiveness.

In 1993, an ADL operative, Roy Bullock, was caught corrupting police officials and illegally obtaining police files to add to the ADL’s dossiers on “thought criminals” Left and Right. Despite this, the ADL audaciously uses its money and influence to “educate” law enforcement officials through a subsidiary called the “Law Enforcement Agency Resource Network” (LEARN), which uses persuasive techniques to convince police authorities that individuals and groups that the ADL dislikes are dangerous criminals — and that the ADL and its allies are public-spirited, beneficial groups.

Ironically, considering its name, one of the main techniques used by the ADL, and for which its massive intelligence archive is most useful, is public defamation of those who the ADL has declared are its enemies.

The ADL is headquartered in New York City and has 29 offices in major cities in the United States, one in Israel, and two known offices in other countries. Abraham Foxman has been “national director” of the group since 1987. It has an admitted annual U.S. budget of $55 million, with listed assets in 2011 of $171 million.

The Bullock Case

In 1993, an ADL agent named Roy Bullock, a San Francisco art dealer and fairly well-known in the homosexual community there, whose specialty was the infiltration of patriotic, Arab-American, and other organizations on behalf of the League, was found to have in his possession illegally obtained and highly private and personal data on his targets — data which could only have been obtained from police and other confidential government files; data that was also discovered in the files of the ADL itself when police raided ADL headquarters in San Francisco and Los Angeles as result of Bullock’s exposure.

According to the Los Angeles Times of 9th April, 1993, “Police on Thursday served search warrants on the Anti-Defamation League here and in Los Angeles, seizing evidence of a nationwide intelligence network accused of keeping files on more than 950 political groups, newspapers, and labor unions and as many as 12,000 people.

“Describing the spy operations in great detail, San Francisco authorities simultaneously released voluminous documents telling how operatives of the Anti-Defamation League searched through trash and infiltrated organizations to gather intelligence an Arab-American, right-wing, and what they called “pinko” organizations….

“…Police allege that the organization maintains undercover operatives to gather political intelligence in at least seven cities, including Los Angeles and San Francisco.

“Groups that were the focus of the spy operation span the political spectrum, including such groups as the Ku Klux Klan, the White Aryan Resistance, Greenpeace, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the United Farm Workers, and the Jewish Defense League. Also on the list were Mills College, the board of directors of San Francisco public television station KQED, and the San Francisco Bay Guardian newspaper.

“People who were subjects of the spy operation included former Republican Representative Pete McCloskey, jailed political extremist Lyndon LaRouche and Los Angeles Times correspondent Scott Kraft, who is based in South Africa….

“…In addition to allegations of obtaining confidential information from police, the Anti-Defamation League could face a total of 48 felony counts for not properly reporting the employment of its chief West Coast spy, Roy Bullock, according to the affidavit filed to justify the search warrant.” (“ADL Vows to Cooperate With Spy Investigation,” Los Angeles Times, 9 April, 1993)

I’ll interrupt the article to inform you that those 48 felony counts were somehow suppressed and the ADL was never prosecuted. A sweetheart deal was worked out in 2000 under which the ADL admitted no wrongdoing, paid an out-of-court settlement — of under $200,000 — part of it for legal fees and the rest to “charitable groups” which “fight hate” (in other words, the kind of groups the ADL would support anyway — one such group was the “Hate Crimes Reward Fund”), issued a weak apology for dealing with “fact finders” who had violated the law, supposedly without the knowledge of the ADL, and then had the unbelievable audacity to reaffirm their “right” to spy on any group and anyone just as they always have!

Continuing:

“The Anti-Defamation League disguised payments to Bullock for more than 25 years by funneling $550 a week to Beverly Hills attorney Bruce I. Hochman, who then paid Bullock, according to the documents released in San Francisco. Hochman, a former president of the Jewish Federation Council of Greater Los Angeles and one of the state’s leading tax attorneys, will be out of the city until late next week and could not be reached for comment, his office said.

“Until 1990, Hochman, a former U.S. prosecutor, also was a member of a panel appointed by then-Senator Pete Wilson to secretly make initial recommendations on new federal judges in California. Hochman is a former regional president of the Anti-Defamation League….

“David Lehrer, executive director of the Los Angeles ADL office, said the organization has not violated the law….

“…But in an affidavit filed to obtain warrants for Thursday’s searches, San Francisco police allege that ‘ADL employees were apparently less than truthful’ in providing information in an earlier search conducted without a warrant….

“…The police affidavit contends that Lehrer had sole control of a secret fund used to pay for ‘fact-finding operations.’ Lehrer, according to the documents, signed checks from the account under the name ‘L. Patterson.’…

“…League officials will not confirm or deny whether Bullock was an employee and have said they simply traded information with police departments about people who might be involved in hate crimes.”

I’ll add here that the category of crime called “hate crimes” was virtually invented by the ADL. The purpose of such laws is to add extra penalties for acts which are already crimes under existing statutes — like murder, assault, etc. — if the perpetrator can be shown to have held prejudiced or “hateful” views which might have motivated his actions. Under “hate crime” laws, American citizens would receive different sentences for the same crime, depending on whether or not their thoughts are “Politically Correct” on issues relating to homosexuality, race, nationality, and politics. That such laws might have a chilling effect on free speech — for a thoughtful person would now realize that his every utterance on “sensitive” topics might someday be used against him in a court of law, should he be required to defend himself with force someday or even have an argument with a member of a “protected class” — was probably the ADL’s intention all along.

Enter Tom Gerard

From the Los Angeles Times, 13th April, 1993:

” To the outside world, Roy Bullock was a small-time art dealer who operated from his house in the Castro District. In reality, he was an undercover spy who picked through garbage and amassed secret files for the Anti-Defamation League for nearly 40 years.

“His code name at the prominent Jewish organization was Cal, and he was so successful at infiltrating political groups that he was once chosen to head an Arab-American delegation that visited Representative Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) in her Washington, D.C. office.

“For a time, ‘Cal’ tapped into the phone message system of White Aryan Resistance… …From police sources, he obtained privileged, personal information on at least 1,394 people. And he met surreptitiously with agents of the South African government to trade his knowledge for crisp, new $100 bills.

“These are among the secrets that Bullock and David Gurvitz, a former Los Angeles-based [ADL] operative, divulged in extensive interviews with police and the FBI in a growing scandal over the nationwide intelligence network operated by the Anti-Defamation League….

“Transcripts of the interviews — among nearly 700 pages of documents released by San Francisco prosecutors last week — offer new details of the private spy operation that authorities allege crossed the line into illegal territory.

“At times, the intelligence activities took on a cloak-and-dagger air with laundered payments, shredded documents, hotel rendezvous with foreign agents and code names….

“On one occasion, Gurvitz recounts, he received a tip that a pro-Palestinian activist was about to board a plane bound for Haifa, Israel. Although the Anti-Defamation League publicly denies any ties to Israel, Gurvitz phoned an Israeli consular official to warn them. Shortly thereafter, another [Israeli government] official called Gurvitz back and debriefed him.

“The court papers also added to the mystery of Tom Gerard, a former CIA agent and San Francisco police officer accused of providing confidential material from police files to the Anti-Defamation League… …Bullock said it was Gerard who sold official police intelligence. Bullock said he split about $16,000… evenly with Gerard, telling him at one point, ‘I may be gay, but I’m a straight arrow.’…

“Gerard fled to the Philippines last fall after he was interviewed by the FBI, but left behind a briefcase in his police locker. Its contents included passports, driver’s licenses, and identification cards in 10 different names; identification cards in his own name for four different embassies in Central America; and a collection of blank birth certificates, Army discharge papers, and official stationery from various agencies.

“Also in the briefcase were extensive information on death squads, a black hood, apparently for use in interrogations, and photos of blindfolded and chained men.

“Investigators suspect that Gerard and other police sources gave the ADL confidential driver’s license or vehicle registration information on a vast number of people, including as many as 4,500 members of one target group, the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee.

“Each case of obtaining such data from a law enforcement officer could constitute a felony, San Francisco Police Inspector Ron Roth noted in an affidavit for a search warrant.” (“New Details of Extensive ADL Spy Operation Emerge,” Los Angeles Times, 13 April, 1993)

Now we’re up to 4,500 felonies. Was the ADL brought to justice for even one of them? No. And what was revealed in the Gerard case was just the work of one ADL operative — and one group which the ADL had targeted! Evidence seized from Bullock’s computer indicate that the ADL was using him to compile data on individuals belonging to over 950 groups – and Bullock is just one agent. The rest of that iceberg must be most impressive.

As for Gerard himself — whom the ADL had sent on an all-expenses-paid trip to Israel two years before his arrest — he pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor charge of unauthorized use of a police computer and was sentenced to three years’ probation, 45 days in jail, and a $2,500 fine.

The New York Daily News for 9th April, 1993 informs us that these were no “rogue” agents — the illegal spying was controlled directly from the ADL’s central office in New York City:

“Police in San Francisco and Los Angeles yesterday seized documents from a prominent Jewish-American organization accused of amassing confidential information — sometimes illegally — on thousands of people in the United States.

“The alleged operation was directed from the New York City offices of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, ABC News reported last night.

“The ADL has long been one of the most respected civil rights organizations in the country, tracking hate crimes and exposing prejudice.

“But ABC said that for several decades the spying operation has snooped into the records and activities of more than 10,000 people in the United States, including many who simply opposed the policies of Israel and South Africa….

“The report identified the leader of the intelligence ring as Irwin Suall.

“Sources told the Daily News that Suall is one of about 15 people in the ADL’s research department in Manhattan. Neither Suall or other ADL officials could be reached for comment.

“‘We’re talking about the use of information from Department of Motor Vehicles files, other confidential files of state and local agencies, illegally furnished and illegally received by private agencies,’ San Francisco District Attorney Arlo Smith told ABC.” ( Mark Mooney, New York Daily News, 9 April, 1993)

Irwin Suall, the former National Secretary of the Socialist Party of America, was the chief of the “fact-finding” (that is, espoionage) division of the ADL from 1967 to 1997. According to the Baltimore Sentinel for September, 1993 “In a memo dated July, 1992, Suall praised Roy Bullock as “our number one investigator” — just months before Bullock’s illegal activities were exposed. (“Is the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith Spying on You?”, Bill Hughes, Baltimore Sentinel, September 1993)

According to the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, the ADL offered money to corrupt law enforcement officers and officials in return for illegally-obtained personal information that was supposed to have been destroyed. How many of these corrupt officials were never prosecuted, and how many were recruited during the “educational” conferences, and trips to Israel, arranged for them by the ADL’s law enforcement liaison division? The Report states:

“After COINTELPRO, a still-controversial FBI operation to destabilize black nationalist and other groups in the ’60s and ’70s, the FBI, state and local law enforcement authorities were ordered out of the business of gathering information about legitimate political activity by American citizens. But in some major American cities, law enforcement files relating to legitimate and Constitutionally protected political activities that had been ordered destroyed instead found their way to the offices of the ADL, which quickly became a clearinghouse for such illegally obtained and illegally retained information.

“The absence of the FBI, state, and local police investigators in the field therefore created a void the ADL rushed to fill, with remarkable success, by increasing its in-house ‘fact-finding’ assets and capabilities and developing enhanced working relationships with ‘official friends” — government officials, investigators, and intelligence officers. Some of these were the officials who had not destroyed files of illegally obtained materials, or had made private copies of the official files before they were destroyed in compliance with the court order.

“The ADL favored many of its ‘official friends’ with expense-paid trips to Israel, where they met with and were entertained by friendly officers of Israel’s espionage and counter-intelligence organizations, Mossad and Shin Bet, thus creating a major conduit for the flow of sensitive and useful U.S. domestic political intelligence to Israel’s spymasters in Tel Aviv.” (“Los Angeles Court Hands Down Final Judgment in Anti-Defamation League Illegal Surveillance Case,” Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, December 1999)

Despite its obvious — and admitted — ties with the state of Israel, and its agenda of advancing Israel’s policy objectives, and gaining power to blackmail or otherwise intimidate perceived enemies of Israel, the ADL has never been required to register as a foreign agent as other, far more benign, organizations have been required to do.

ADL’s former National Director Benjamin Epstein, in an internal letter disclosed during discovery proceedings in a lawsuit against the ADL in 1970, spoke with pride about the close cooperation that existed between the ADL and Israel’s intelligence apparatus. In his 1988 autobiography, ADL general counsel Arnold Forster specifically named the Mossad as as having a close connection with the League . The Mossad routinely engages in political assassinations of those it deems to be “Israel’s enemies” around the world. (Square One, Arnold Forster. New York: Donald I. Fine, 1988)

More Than Just Spying?

According to investigator William Norman Grigg, Bullock did much more than spy for his ADL bosses: “In 1993, it was discovered that Roy Bullock had been attempting to arrange a political marriage between the Institute for Historical Review, a holocaust revisionist organization, and the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (AADC) so the ADL could ‘out’ [AADC] members as neo-Nazis.” (William Norman Grigg, “ADL Campaign Against Tolerance,” New American, September 19, 1994)

But it wasn’t just Bullock, and it wasn’t just setting victims up for bigger and better smears. One ADL agent provocateur had a role as a leader and speaker for groups targeted by the ADL — doubtlessly steering the clueless radicals in directions helpful to the ADL agenda and against their own interests. And he also staged completely phony “extremist incidents” for the media to inflame fears of “racism” and “anti-Semitic” violence.

Investigative journalist Laird Wilcox tells us: “James Mitchell Rosenberg, a career infiltrator for the Anti-Defamation League, regularly attended and was a speaker at Ku Klux Klan rallies and meetings of the Mountain Church in Cohoctah, MI, considered a gathering place for neo-Nazis of all kinds. For the benefit of television reporters, Rosenberg also posed as a leader of a para-military group called the ‘Christian Patriot’s Defense League’ which was the subject of a breathless exposé entitled ‘Armies of the Right.’ In 1981, Rosenberg and an associate were arrested on a New York City rooftop and charged with carrying an unregistered rifle. The two were posing as paramilitary extremists for a photographic fabrication exaggerating the threat from the far right. The charges were subsequently dropped at the request [of] the ADL’s Irwin Suall, Rosenberg’s direct supervisor.” (The Watchdogs, Laird Wilcox, Editorial Research Service, Olathe, Kansas, 1998)

And these are just the ADL agents who have come to public attention and been exposed in the newspapers. Do you really believe that they were rare, exceptional cases? Or were they part of a much, much larger coordinated operation? With its multimillion-dollar budget and cozy relationship with corrupt law enforcement officials — and with murderous intelligence agencies and their unfathomably deep pockets — how many undiscovered agents does the ADL employ, and what might their functions be?

Seeing Anti-Semitism Where There Is None

In Denver, Colorado in 1994, an argument over pets and garden plants betweeen two couples — next door neighbors — became the focus of ADL public relations and legal action because of the alleged “anti-Semitism” of one of the couples toward the other, who were Jewish.

Candace and Mitchell Aronson were the Jewish neighbors of William and Dorothy Quigley.

The Aronsons used a VHF scanner radio to listen in on the cordless telephone conversations of the Quigleys. They heard Mrs. Quigley discuss with a friend — it turns out, in joking tones — a possible campaign to drive the Aronsons from the neighborhood by frightening them with “pictures of ovens” and throwing gas at one of the Aronson’s children. Mrs. Quigley was also heard “wishing that the Aronsons would be killed in a suicide bombing.” Although the conversations were obviously facetious, and at one point Mrs. Quigley even said she was saying some “sick” things, the Aronsons decided to contact the Denver office of the ADL.

Upon the advice of the ADL, the Aronsons began recording the Quigleys’ private telephone conversations — an illegal act. Astoundingly, ADL attorneys then advised the Aronsons to use the illegal recordings as the basis for a federal civil lawsuit against the Quigleys for “ethnic intimidation.” Meanwhile, the ADL defamation and PR machine geared up to “expose” yet another “anti-Semitic incident” and, not coincidentally, totally ruin the Quigleys’ lives.

Saul Rosenthal, Regional Director of the ADL, appeared at a news conference describing the Quigleys as engaging in “a vicious anti-Semitic campaign.” Rosenthal also appeared in local media making the same claims, and succesfully urged local prosecutors to use the tape recordings in filing criminal charges against the Quigleys.

The Quigleys became pariahs in their own community, receiving so many threats that they felt compelled to hire security guards. Animal feces was sent to their home. Mr. Quigley’s lost his job at United Artists. The family had to drive long distances to shop in stores where they would not be recognized.

However, the cases against them quickly began to fall apart. The local prosecutor dropped the charges upon hearing the obviously non-threatening nature of the conversations. He even apologized to the Quigleys and publicly stated that the accusations against them were untrue. The federal case was dead because the recordings were themselves illegal and therefore inadmissible,

The Quigleys countersued the ADL, Rosenthal, the Aronsons, and two ADL volunteer attorneys. Ultimately the Quigleys received a judgement of some $12 million, including interest, in their favor for the devastation that the Aronsons and the ADL had caused in their lives. (By the way, the Quigleys employed a Jewish lawyer, Jay Horowitz, to argue their case.)

The ADL probably lost this one case only because they were not fully conversant with wiretap law. Had they not tripped up on that technicality, they, their well-funded attorneys, and their massive PR machine (aided by an ADL-friendly media) would have prevailed and the Quigleys would have been forgotten, impoverished, possibly imprisoned, and without recourse. How many other cases have there been? — how many unsung victims of the ADL have suffered that fate — or worse?

Crime Connections

The ADL operates much like an organized crime gang, as their intimidation and in-your-face life-ruining tactics make clear. And that’s not just a result of “overzealousness” or an unreasoning fear of persecution. The ADL has direct connections to numerous notorious crime figures:

Meyer Lansky, one of the architects of modern organized crime in the United States and connected woth “Murder, Incorporated,” was a strong supporter of and donor to the ADL. His granddaughter, Mira Lansky Boland, was an ADL official — ironically, her position is listed as “liaison to law enforcement.” She arranged expense-paid luxury tours to Israel, the world capital of sex trafficking, for certain key law enforcement officials who had “something to offer” the ADL in return — among them Tom Gerard.

Moe Dalitz, organized crime boss of Las Vegas, was a long-time supporter of the ADL and a close friend of Meyer Lansky. In 1982, Dalitz received the “Torch of Liberty” award from the ADL.

Theodore Silbert, mafia front man worked simultaneously for the ADL and the Sterling National Bank (a mafia operation controlled by the Lansky syndicate).

Michael Milken, convicted financial criminal of “junk bond” fame, was a major contributor to the ADL.

Marc Rich, international fugitive and financial criminal was hiding out in Switzerland to avoid prosecution for his crimes when he wrote a check for $100,000 to the ADL, who then proceeded to pull the necessary strings. He was then pardoned by President Bill Clinton on his last day in office. Rich later admitted he had worked with the ADL-linked Mossad for years, and Israeli officials also intervened on his behalf with Clinton.

Jewish Critiques

The ADL routinely smears those who have criticized its goals and methods by calling them “anti-Semites” — an amazing, invented word, by the way: No other ethnicity, so far as I know, has created a comparable neologism to demonize, isolate, and ostracize its critics. But so outrageous has been the behavior of the ADL that it has garnered much criticism from Jewish writers, activists, and dissenters from the “mainstream” Jewish establishment.

Noam Chomsky, leftist Jewish activist and Professor of Linguistics at MIT on the ADL: “[O]ne of the ugliest, most powerful pressure groups in the U.S… Its primary commitment is to use any technique, however dishonest and disgraceful, in order to defame and silence and destroy anybody who dares to criticize the Holy State (‘Israel’)…” “[The ADL is] engaged in surveillance, blacklisting, compilation of FBI-style files circulated to adherents for the purpose of defamation, angry public responses to criticism of Israeli actions, and so on. These efforts, buttressed by insinuations of anti-Semitism or direct accusations, are intended to deflect or undermine opposition to Israeli policies…”

Robert Friedman, liberal Jewish journalist, says of the ADL: “[T]he largest private spy agency in America… Through its 31 offices across the country, the ADL monitors school curricula, library acquisition lists, and public conferences and symposiums, working behind the scenes to stifle intellectual freedom.” (Robert I. Friedman, “The Jewish Thought Police”, Village Voice, July 27, 1993)

Norman Finkelstein, Jewish author and academic, says of the ADL’s long-time director Abraham Foxman that he is “a hoodlum and a thug.” (Defamation, video documentary, 1999 — see link in references)

Monty Warner, conservative Jewish writer and director of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, says that “the ADL has devolved into an opportunistic, intolerant, grief-grubbing stench” and says of ADL boss Abraham Foxman that he is “a disgrace to my religion.”

Rabbi Daniel Lapin, president of Toward Tradition, a Jewish religious group called ADL leader Abraham Foxman “Our own worst enemy.” Toward Tradition said it picked Foxman “from among other representatives of the Anti-Semitism industry” because of his pivotal role in former president Clinton’s pardon of fugitive Jewish financial criminal Marc Rich: “After the ADL received a $100,000 check from the Rich Foundation, Foxman wrote to Bill Clinton urging the pardon.”

Midge Decter, Dennis Prager, and 75 prominent Jewish writers and leaders issued a public statement in 1994 charging the ADL with “engaging in defamation” in the ADL’s attacks on rightists and Christians, routinely using “such discreditable techniques as insinuation and guilt by association” by finding and publicizing “links” between its targets and allegedly more radical (read: already smeared) figures in its voluminous dossiers of personal information obtained largely through espionage.

Steve Zeltzer, Jewish labor activist and himself a victim of ADL spying, states of the ADL: “They have always had enemies lists, and they have always wanted to control the flow of information.”

The ADL and the post-9/11 National Security State

Post-9/11 hysteria led Americans into illegal and unjustified wars in the Middle East and has brought us such unconstitutional erosions of our rights as the misnamed Patriot Act and its secret laws, secret courts, secret trials, and secret prisons; the massive illegal spying operations of the NSA and other agencies; and the maintenance of a “kill list” under which anyone on Earth can be marked for death by the President. Within months after the attacks, the ADL had already organized conferences to “help” the secret police take advantage of their new ill-gotten powers — as this ADL press release makes clear:

ADL Press Release – June 6, 2002

More than 500 representatives of federal, state and local law enforcement agencies were briefed on extremist and terrorist threats during a daylong conference co-sponsored by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The May 31 program, held at the FBI Academy in Quantico, VA, was an outgrowth of ADL’s longtime involvement in providing information and training to law enforcement on threats posed by extremists. The conference, “Extremist and Terrorist Threats: Protecting America After 9/11? included presentations from ADL, FBI and other nationally recognized experts on extremist groups, investigative techniques, counterterrorism strategies, domestic security and threat assessment.

“Now more than ever, law enforcement must have the resources and know-how to prevent future acts of terrorism,” said Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director. “In order to assess threats against the United States, law enforcement must have credible information about domestic and foreign extremists whose rhetoric promotes violence. Through our network of regional offices and our experts in the field, ADL is uniquely suited to aid in the war against terrorism. This conference was an opportunity for law enforcement and extremism watchdogs to compare notes and forge alliances.”

Somehow I doubt that Roy Bullock’s name was brought up at the meeting.

Rabbi Spitz’s Vision

It seems that the “Anti-Defamation League” has taken to heart the words of Rabbi Leon Spitz, writing in The American Hebrew of March 1, 1946: “American Jews too must come to grips with our contemporary anti-Semites. We must fill our jails with anti-Semitic gangsters, we must fill our insane asylums with anti-Semitic lunatics, we must combat every alien Jew-hater, we must harass and prosecute our Jew baiters to the extreme limits of the laws, we must humble and shame our anti-Semitic hoodlums to such an extent that none will wish to dare to become ‘fellow-travelers’.” (“Glamorous Purim Formula,” Rabbi Leon Spitz, The American Hebrew, March 1, 1946)

Spitz is speaking in coded language, but the veil is rather thin. He’s not talking about prosecuting criminals per se, for the whole force of law enforcement was already doing that when he spoke.

He’s calling for for especially intense scrutiny of perceived “anti-Semites” by law enforcement, and the use of any and all technical violations that might be discovered to prosecute them. In our law-happy society, it’s doubtful that anyone could escape such close scrutiny unscathed — Google the Internet meme “three felonies a day” if you don’t believe me.

He doesn’t actually believe that gangsters are disproportionately “anti-Semitic” — in fact, no one has ever alleged that. What he’s saying is that the perceived enemies of the Jewish people should be criminalized in the public mind and in the minds of law enforcement officers so that they will be treated like gangsters. And that, in fact, is what the ADL has done, with their close liaisons with police (and secret police) authorities, alerting them to the “dangers” of patriot militia “hate groups,” traditionalist religious groups, alleged “neo-Nazis,” and the like — those whom the ADL sees as vociferous critics of Israel or Jewish power. In fact, few of these groups have any desire to harm Jews in any way, though they may criticize the ADL, Israel, or other parts of the Jewish establishment.

Criticism of Jews as Jews, or public doubt of their tales of suffering in World War 2, is a prosecutable offense in some countries today, in part due to the lobbying activities of the ADL and its allies.

Spitz doesn’t actually believe that his perceived enemies are insane, and therefore belong in asylums. (Elsewhere in his article he credits them with only with avarice, jealousy, and hatred.) He is intimating, though, that they will by some means be redefined as insane and literally fill the asylums. The mass media, heavily influenced by the ADL and disproportionately staffed with Jews, do present caricatured portraits of “conspiracy theorists” and “racists” who dislike Jews, and it is often implied that they are lunatics, “evil geniuses,” or some dangerous mix of the two. Critics of Jewish power today are never, to my knowledge, ever presented in a sympathetic manner by the media.

When Rabbi Spitz tells his fellows that “we must harass and prosecute our Jew baiters to the extreme limits of the laws, we must humble and shame our anti-Semitic hoodlums to such an extent that none will wish to dare to become ‘fellow-travelers’,” he is telling us that the laws must be stretched to their “extreme limits” to prosecute — and harass! — those who criticize Jews in order to “humble” them and shame them — that is, ruin their reputations — so that no one will dare to join them, publicly share their opinions, or value their friendship. This has nothing to do with enforcing the laws equally for all — and everything to do with destroying lives and suppressing the freedom to speak and organize through pure intimidation. Though The American Hebrew was not an ADL publication, and I don’t know if the good rabbi supported the ADL, I think it’s fair to say that his view represented a significant and influential strain in American Jewish thought in the aftermath of World War 2, a strain eagerly taken up by the ADL. Spitz’s hatefully poetic words are in the League’s spirit, and, considering the League’s ongoing, lavishly-funded, and largely successful defamation of those they label “anti-Semites,” perhaps Rabbi Spitz should be regarded as a kind of latter-day prophet, with the ADL his Heavenly Host of Hate.

References

“100 Reasons Leo Frank is Guilty,” The American Mercury, 26 April 2013

“ADL Vows to Cooperate With Spy Investigation,” Los Angeles Times, 9 April, 1993

“New Details of Extensive ADL Spy Operation Emerge,” Los Angeles Times, 13 April, 1993

“Police Seize Documents from Jewish Group,” Mark Mooney, New York Daily News, 9 April, 1993

“Is the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith Spying on You?”, Bill Hughes, Baltimore Sentinel, September 1993

“Los Angeles Court Hands Down Final Judgment in Anti-Defamation League Illegal Surveillance Case,” Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, December 1999

Square One, Arnold Forster. New York: Donald I. Fine, 1988

“ADL Campaign Against Tolerance,” William Norman Grigg, New American, September 19, 1994

The Watchdogs, Laird Wilcox, Editorial Research Service, Olathe, Kansas, 1998

“The Jewish Thought Police,” Robert I. Friedman, Village Voice, July 27, 1993

“Glamorous Purim Formula,” Rabbi Leon Spitz, The American Hebrew, March 1, 1946

* * *

MAKE SURE to check out the FULL American Mercury series on the Leo Frank case by clicking here.

Resources

Annual Report of the ADL

“Defamation”: A Jewish filmmaker’s interesting study of “anti-Semitism” and the ADL (video, 90 minutes)

by Mark Cohen

THE CENTURY-OLD “cold case” Mary Phagan murder mystery — the violent rape and murder of teenager Mary Phagan and the subsequent lynching of the convicted killer, Jewish businessman Leo Frank — has now been conclusively solved by scholars using the extensive 1913 official investigation and trial records. In this once-in-a-lifetime event, the publishing, mass media, and academic establishments — who have for decades promoted the conspiracy theory that anti-Semites framed Frank for the crime because he was Jewish — have been proven to be wrong by the statements of Leo Frank himself.

In addition to being an executive of Atlanta’s National Pencil Company, Leo Frank was also a B’nai B’rith official — president of the 500-member Gate City Lodge in 1912 — and even after his conviction and incarceration Frank was elected lodge president again in 1913. As a direct result of the Leo Frank conviction, the B’nai B’rith founded their well-known and politically powerful “Anti-Defamation League,” or ADL.

At the climax of the Leo Frank trial, an admission was made by the defendant that amounted to a confession during trial. How many times in the annals of US legal history has this happened? Something very unusual happened during the month-long People v. Leo M. Frank murder trial, held within Georgia’s Fulton County Superior Courthouse in the Summer of 1913. I’m going to show you evidence that Mr. Leo Max Frank inadvertently revealed the solution to the Mary Phagan murder mystery.

When Leo Frank mounted the witness stand on Monday afternoon, August 18, 1913, at 2:15 pm, he orally delivered an unsworn, four-hour, pre-written statement to the 250 people present.

Epic Trial of 20th Century Southern History

The audience sat in the grandstand seats of the most spectacular murder trial in the annals of Georgia history. Nestled deep within the pews of the Fulton County Superior Court were the luckiest of public spectators, defense and prosecution witnesses, journalists, officials, and courtroom staff.

Like gladiators in an arena, in the center of it all, with their backs to the audience, seated in ladder-back chairs, were the most important principals. They were the State of Georgia’s prosecution team, made up of three members, led by Solicitor General Hugh M. Dorsey and Frank Arthur Hooper. Arrayed against them were eight Leo Frank defense counselors, led by Luther Z. Rosser and Reuben Rose Arnold. The presiding judge, the Honorable Leonard Strickland Roan, sitting in a high-backed leather chair, was separated by the witness stand from the jury of 12 white men who were sworn to justly decide the fate of Leo Frank.

Crouched and sandwiched between the judge’s bench and the witness chair, sitting on the lip of the bench’s foot rail, was a stenographer capturing the examinations. Stenographers clicked away throughout the trial and were changed regularly in relays.

Surrounding the four major defense and prosecution counselors were an entourage of uniformed police, plainclothes detectives, undercover armed security men, government staff, and magistrates.

The first day of the Leo Frank trial began on Monday morning, July 28, 1913, and led to many days of successively more horrifying revelations. But the most interesting day of the trial occurred three weeks later when Leo Frank sat down in the witness stand on Monday afternoon, August 18, 1913.

The Moment Everyone Was Waiting For

What Leo Frank had to say to the court became the spine-tingling climax of the most notorious criminal trial in US history, and it was the moment everyone in all of Georgia, especially Atlanta, had waited for.

Judge Roan explained to the jury the unique circumstances and rules concerning the unsworn statement Leo M. Frank was to make. Then, at 2:14 pm, Leo Frank was called to speak. When he mounted the stand, a hush fell as 250 spellbound people closed ranks and leaned forward expectantly. They were more than just speechless: They were literally breathless, transfixed, sitting on the edges of their seats, waiting with great anticipation for every sentence, every word, that came forth from the mouth of Leo Frank.

But listening to his long speech became challenging at times. He had a reputation as a “gas jet” from his college days (see his college yearbook entry), and he lived up to it now with dense, mind-numbing verbiage.

Three Out of Nearly Four Hours: Distractions and Endless Pencil Calculations

To bring his major points home during his almost four-hour speech, Leo Frank presented original pages of his accounting books to the jury. For three hours he went over, in detail, the accounting computations he had made on the afternoon of April 26, 1913. This was meant to show the court that he had been far too busy to have murdered Mary Phagan on that day nearly 15 weeks before.

One point emphasized by the defense was how long it took Frank to do the accounting books: Was it an hour and a half as some said, or three hours? Can either answer ever be definitive, though? No matter how quickly one accountant works, is it beyond belief that another could be twice as fast?

The Ultimate Question Waiting to be Answered

The most important unanswered question in the minds of everyone at the trial was this: Where had Leo Frank gone between 12:05 pm and 12:10 pm on Saturday, April 26, 1913? This was the crucial question because Monteen Stover had testified she found Leo Frank’s office empty during this five-minute time segment — and Leo Frank had told police he never left his office during that time. And the evidence had already shown that Mary Phagan was murdered sometime between 12:05 and 12:15 pm in the Metal Room of the same factory where Leo Frank was present.

There weren’t a plethora of suspects in the building: April 26, 1913, was a state holiday in Georgia — Confederate Memorial Day — and the factory and offices were closed down, except for a few employees coming in to collect their pay and two men doing construction work on an upper floor.

Two investigators had testified that Leo Frank gave them the alibi that he had never left his office from noon until after 12:45. If Leo Frank’s alibi held up, then he couldn’t have killed Mary Phagan.

Everyone wanted to know how Leo Frank would respond to the contradictory testimony clashing with his alibi. And, after rambling about near-irrelevancies for hours, he did: Frank stated — in complete contradiction to his numerous earlier statements that he’d never left his office — that he might have “unconsciously” gone to the bathroom during that time — placing him in the only bathroom on that floor of the building, the Metal Room bathroom, which is where Jim Conley stated he had first found the lifeless body of little Mary Phagan, and immediately adjacent to the Metal Room proper, where Mary Phagan’s blood was found, and where the prosecution had spent weeks proving that the murder had actually taken place.

This was doubly amazing because weeks earlier Leo Frank had emphatically told the seven-man panel led by Coroner Paul Donehoo at the Coroners Inquest, that he (Leo Frank) did not use the bathroom all day long — not that he (Leo Frank) had forgotten, but that he had not gone to the bathroom at all. The visually-blind but prodigious savant Coroner Paul Donehoo — with his highly-refined “B.S. detector” was incredulous as might be expected. Who doesn’t use the bathroom all day long? It was as if Leo Frank was mentally and physically, albeit crudely and unbelievably, trying to distance himself from the bathroom where Jim Conley said he found the body.

Furthermore, Leo Frank had told detective Harry Scott — witnessed by a police officer named Black — that he (Leo Frank) was in his office every minute from noon to half past noon, and in State’s Exhibit B (Frank’s stenographed statement to the police), Leo Frank never mentions a bathroom visit all day.

And now he had reversed himself!

Why would Leo Max Frank make such a startling admission, after spending months trying to distance himself from that part of the building at that precise time? That is a difficult question to answer, but there are clues. 1) The testimony of Monteen Stover (who liked Frank and who was actually a supportive character witness for him) that Frank was missing from his office for those crucial five minutes was convincing. Few could believe that Stover — looking to pick up her paycheck, and waiting five minutes in the office for an opportunity to do so — would have been satisfied with a cursory glance at the room and therefore somehow missed Frank behind the open safe door as he had alleged. 2) The evidence suggests that Frank did not always make rational decisions when under stress: Under questioning from investigators, he repeatedly changed the time at which Mary Phagan supposedly came to see him in his office (and State’s Exhibit B shows that Frank, in the presence of his lawyers, told police that Mary Phagan was in his office with him alone between 12:05 and 12:10 pm); he reportedly confessed his guilt to his wife the day of the murder; he, if guilty, reacted out of all proportion and reason to being spurned by his teenage employee; and he maintained the utterly unbelievable position throughout the case that he did not know Mary Phagan by name, despite indisputably knowing her initials (he wrote them on the company books by hand) and interacting with her hundreds of times.

Frank had also said (to paraphrase his statement before the racial angle had been brought forward by his defense team) that to the best of his recollection when he was in his second floor office from 12:00 to 12:45 pm, aside from temporary visitors, the only other people continuously in the building he was aware of were Mr. White and Mr. Denham on the fourth floor, banging away and doing construction as they tore down a partition. That’s it, three people. One can understand investigators, after hearing Frank’s statement that there were only three people in the building, asking the question: If there are three people in the factory, and two of them didn’t do it, who is left?

Even if only one of these lapses is true as described, it is enough to show a pronounced lack of judgement on Frank’s part. A man with such impaired judgement may actually have been unable to see that by explaining away his previous untenable (and now exposed as false) position of “never leaving the office” with an “unconscious” bathroom visit, he was placing himself at the scene of the murder at the precise time of the murder. Thus are men who tell tales undone, even as they fall back upon a partial truth.

Georgia: Right to Refuse Oaths and Examination

Under the Georgia Code, Section 1036, the accused has the right to make an unsworn statement and, furthermore, to refuse to be examined or cross-examined at his trial. Leo Frank made the decision to make an unsworn statement and not allow examination or cross examination.

The law also did not permit Solicitor General Hugh M. Dorsey or his legal team to orally interpret or comment on the fact that Leo Frank was not making a statement sworn under oath at his own murder trial. The prosecution respected this rule.

The jury knew that Leo Frank had had months to carefully prepare his statement. But what was perhaps most damaging to Leo Frank’s credibility was the fact that every witness at the trial, regardless of whether they were testifying for the defense or prosecution, had been sworn, and therefore spoke under oath, and had been subject to cross-examination by the other side — except for Leo Frank. Thus it didn’t matter if the law prevented the prosecution from commenting on the fact Leo Frank had refused cross examination, opting instead to make an unsworn statement, because the jury could see that anyway. Making an unsworn statement and refusing to be examined does not prove that one is guilty, but it certainly raises eyebrows of doubt.

The South an “Honor Bound” Society

Could a sworn jury upholding its sacred duty question Leo Frank’s honor and integrity as a result of what Southerners likely perceived as his cowardly decision under Georgia Code, Section 1036? If so, greater weight would naturally be given to those witnesses who were sworn under oath and who contradicted Leo Frank’s unsworn alibis, allegations, and claims. It put the case under a new lens of the sworn versus the unsworn.

The average Southerner in 1913 was naturally asking the question: What white man would make an unsworn statement and not allow himself to be cross-examined at his own murder trial if he were truly innocent? Especially in light of the fact that the South was culturally white separatist — and two of the major material witnesses who spoke against Leo Frank were African-Americans, one claiming to be an accomplice after the fact turned accuser. In the Atlanta of 1913, African-Americans were perceived as second class citizens and less reliable than whites in terms of their capacity for telling the truth.

Today, we might ask: Why wouldn’t Leo Frank allow himself to be cross examined when he was trained in the art and science of debating during his high school senior year and all through his years in college, where he earned the rank of Cornell Congress Debate Team coach? (Pratt Institute Monthly, June, 1902; Cornellian, 1902 through 1906; Cornell Senior Class Book, 1906; Cornell University Alumni Dossier File on Leo Frank, retrieved 2012)

Odd Discrepancies

Most Leo Frank partisan authors omit significant parts of the trial testimony of Newt Lee and Jim Conley from their retelling of the Leo Frank Case. Both of these black men, former National Pencil Company employees, made clearly damaging statements against Frank.

The evidence Newt Lee brought forward was circumstantial, but intriguing — and never quite adequately explained by Leo Frank then, or by his defenders now.

He stated that on Friday Evening, April 25, 1913, Frank made a request to him, Lee, that he report to work an hour early at 4:00 pm on Confederate Memorial Day, the next day. The stated reason was that Leo Frank had made a baseball game appointment with his brother-in-law, Mr. Ursenbach, a Gentile who was married to one of Frank’s wife Lucille’s older sisters. Leo Frank would eventually give two different reasons at different times as to why he canceled that appointment: 1) he had too much work to do, and 2) he was afraid of catching a cold.

Newt Lee’s normal expected time at the National Pencil Company factory on Saturdays was 5:00 pm sharp. Lee stated that when he arrived an hour early that fateful Saturday, Leo Frank had forgotten the change because he was in an excited state. Frank, he said, was unlike his normal calm, cool and collected “boss-man” self. Normally, if anything was out of order, Frank would command him, saying “Newt, step in here a minute” or the like. Instead, Frank burst out of his office, bustling frenetically towards Lee, who had arrived at the second floor lobby at 3:56 pm. Upon greeting each other, Frank requested that Lee go out on the town and “have a good time” for two hours and come back at 6:00 pm.

Because Leo Frank asked Newt Lee to come to work one hour early, Lee had lost that last nourishing hour of sleep one needs before waking up fully rejuvenated, so Lee requested of Frank that he allow him to take a nap in the Packing Room (adjacent to Leo Frank’s front office). But Frank re-asserted that Lee needed to go out and have a good time. Finally, Newt Lee acquiesced and left for two hours.

At trial, Frank would state that he sent Newt Lee out for two hours because he had work to do. When Lee came back, the double doors halfway up the staircase were locked — very unusual, as they had never had been locked before on Saturday afternoons. When Newt Lee unlocked the doors and went into Leo Frank’s office he witnessed his boss bungling and nearly fumbling the time sheet when trying to put a new one in the punch clock for the night watchman — Lee — to register.

It came out before the trial that Newt Lee had earlier been told by Leo Frank that it was a National Pencil Company policy that once the night watchman arrived at the factory — as Lee had the day of the murder at 4:00 pm — he was not permitted to leave the building under any circumstances until he handed over the reigns of security to the day watchman. Company security necessitated being cautious — poverty, and therefore theft, was rife in the South; there were fire risk hazards; and the critical factory machinery was worth a small fortune. Security was a matter of survival.

The two hour timetable rescheduling — the canceled ball game — the inexplicable sudden security rule waiver — the bumbling with a new time sheet — the locked double doors — and Frank’s suspiciously excited behavior: All were highlighted as suspicious by the prosecution, especially in light of the fact that the “murder notes” — found next to Mary Phagan’s head — physically described Newt Lee, even calling him “the night witch.” And, the prosecutor asked, why did Leo Frank later telephone Newt Lee, not once but two or more times, that evening at the factory?

A “Racist” Subplot?

The substance of what happened between Newt Lee (and janitor James “Jim” Conley — see below) and Leo Frank from April 26, 1913 onward is most often downplayed, censored, or distorted by partisans of Leo Frank.

From the testimony of these two African-American witnesses, we learn of an almost diabolic intrigue calculated to entrap the innocent night watchman Newt Lee. It would have been easy to convict a black man in the white separatist South of that time, where the ultimate crime was a black man having interracial sex with a white woman — to say nothing of committing battery, rape, strangulation, and mutilation upon her in a scenario right out of Psychopathia Sexualis.

The plot was exquisitely formulated for its intended audience, the twelve white men who would decide Leo Frank’s fate. It created two layers of African-Americans between Frank and the murder of Mary Phagan. It wouldn’t take the police long to realize Newt Lee didn’t commit the murder, and, since the death notes were written in dialect, it would leave the police hunting for another black murderer. As long as Jim Conley kept his mouth shut, he wouldn’t hang. So the whole plot rested on Jim Conley — and it took the police three weeks to crack him.

The ugly racial element of this defense ploy is rarely mentioned today. The fact that it was Leo Frank, a Jew (and generally considered white in the racial separatist Old South), who first tried to pin the rape and murder of Mary Phagan on the elderly, balding, and married African-American Newt Lee (who had no criminal record to boot) is not something that Frank partisans want to highlight. The Leo Frank cheering section also downplays the racial considerations that made Frank, when his first racially-tinged defense move failed and was abandoned, change course for the last time and formulate a new subplot to pin the crime on Jim Conley, the “accomplice after the fact.”

If events had played out as intended, there would have likely been one or two dead black men in the wake of the defense team’s intrigue.

Jim Conley knew too much. He admitted he had helped the real murderer, Leo Frank, clean up after the fact. To prevent Conley, through extreme fear, from revealing any more about the real solution to the crime, and to discredit him no matter what he did, a new theory was needed. Jim Conley certainly was scared beyond comprehension, knowing what white society did to black men who beat, raped, and strangled white girls.

The Accuser Becomes the Accused

The new murder theory posited by the Leo Frank defense was that Jim Conley assaulted Mary Phagan as she walked down the stairs from Leo Frank’s office. Once Phagan descended to the first floor lobby, they said, she was robbed, then thrown down 14 feet to the basement through the two-foot by two-foot scuttle hole at the side of the elevator. Conley then supposedly went through the scuttle hole himself, climbing down the ladder, dragged the unconscious Mary Phagan to the garbage dumping ground in front of the cellar incinerator (known as the “furnace”), where he then raped and strangled her.

But this grotesque racially-tinged framing was to fail in the end — in part because because physicians noticed that the scratch marks on Mary Phagan’s face — she had been dragged face down in the basement — did not bleed, strongly suggesting she was already quite dead when the dragging took place.

Investigators arranged for a conversation to take place between Leo Frank and Newt Lee, who were intentionally put alone together in a police interrogation room at the Atlanta Police Station. The experiment was to see how Frank would interact with Lee and determine if any new information could be obtained.

Once they thought they were alone, Leo Frank scolded Newt Lee for trying to talk about the murder of Mary Phagan, and said that if Lee kept up that kind of talk, Frank and he would go straight to hell.

Star Witnesses

The Jewish community has crystallized around the notion that Jim Conley was the star witness at the trial, and not 14-year-old Monteen Stover who defended Leo Frank’s character — and then inadvertently broke his alibi.

Leo Frank partisans downplay the significance of Monteen Stover’s trial testimony and Leo Frank’s attempted rebuttal of her testimony on August 18, 1913. Governor John M. Slaton also ignored the Stover-Frank incident in his 29-page commutation order of June 21, 1915.

Many Frank partisans have chosen to obscure the significance of Monteen Stover by putting all the focus on Jim Conley, and then claiming that without Jim Conley there would have been no conviction of Leo Frank.

Could they be right? Or could Leo Frank have been convicted on the testimony of Monteen Stover, without the testimony of Jim Conley?

It is a question left for speculation only, because no one ever anticipated the significance of Jim Conley telling the jury that he had found Mary Phagan dead in the Metal Room bathroom.

It was not until Leo Frank gave his response to Monteen Stover’s testimony — his explanation of why his second floor business office was empty on April 26, 1913 between 12:05 pm and 12:10 pm — that everything came together tight and narrow.

Tom Watson resolved the “no conviction without Conley” controversy in the September 1915 number of his Watson’s Magazine, but perhaps it is time for a 21st century explanation to make it clear why even the Georgia Supreme Court ruled that the evidence and testimony of the trial sustained Frank’s conviction.

August 18, 1913: You Are the Jury

The four-hour-long unsworn statement of Leo Frank was the crescendo of the trial. (Later, just before closing arguments, Frank himself was allowed the last word. He spoke once more on his own behalf, unsworn this time also, for five minutes, denying the testimony of others that he had known Mary Phagan by name and that he had gone into the dressing room for presumably immoral purposes with one of the company’s other employees.)

Three Confessions

It is important to understand that Leo Frank’s startling admission of his presence in the death room at the critical moment did not stand alone in the jury’s eyes. Conclusive as it was, it was not Frank’s only confession.

The official record shows Leo Frank confessed to murdering Mary Phagan three times, though he would deny all three.

– Confession Number One — April 26, 1913: Leo Frank’s murder confession number one was made to Jim Conley when Leo Frank told him he had tried to “be with her” (have sexual intercourse with Mary Phagan) and she refused him. According to Conley, Frank then stated he had hit her, knocking her down, then adding “I guess I struck her too hard and she fell and hit her head against something.” Some of Mary Phagan’s bloody hair was discovered on Monday, April 28, 1913, by Robert P. Barret on the handle of a lathe in the second floor Metal Room.

– Confession Number Two — April 26, 1913: According to the McKnight family, Leo Frank confessed to murdering Mary Phagan to his wife Lucille Selig Frank on the evening of April 26, 1913, at around 10:30 pm, saying to his wife that he didn’t know why he would murder — and asking his wife for his pistol so he could shoot himself. Lucille reportedly told her family, and her household cook and cleaning lady Minola McKnight, about what happened that evening. Minola McKnight told her husband Albert McKnight, and full documentation can be found in State’s Exhibit J (see the Appendix to this article). Decades later, Lucille Selig Frank refused to be buried in the Frank family plot next to her husband, leaving explicit instructions to the contrary.

– Leo Frank Murder Confession Number Three — August 18, 1913: This is the “unconscious bathroom visit” statement delivered by Frank to the court in his unsworn statement, placing him unequivocally at the murder scene at the critical time. Frank would also reaffirm this admission in a newspaper interview published by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution on March 9th, 1914.

With Mercy — or Without?

Judge Leonard Strickland Roan gave the jury two options if they found Leo Frank guilty of the crime of murder: ‘With Mercy’ or ‘Without Mercy.’ If there was any doubt of Leo M. Frank’s guilt, the judge and jury could have sentenced him to life in prison instead of sentencing him to death by hanging. When the jury unanimously sentenced Leo Frank to death by hanging after deciding on a verdict of guilt, Judge Roan had the legal option to downgrade the jury’s death sentence, and only give Leo Frank life in prison — that is, if Roan disagreed with the judgement. But Judge Roan agreed with their collective verdict and recommendation.

Many in the Jewish community, and other Leo Frank partisans, have suggested that Judge Roan doubted the verdict because of one of his apparently appeasing comments made orally to his former law partner, Luther Rosser. But if Roan actually doubted the verdict, he could have exercised his power many times to prevent Frank’s execution, and even given him a new trial if that would have served the cause of justice. But he did none of these things.

You are Hereby Sentenced to Hang on April 17, 1914; Happy Birthday

Certainty of Leo Frank’s guilt was so strong that — after reviewing his trial testimony for months, and after the Georgia Supreme Court’s majority decision upheld Leo Frank’s conviction and the fairness of his trial — Judge Benjamin Hill, on March 7, 1914, sentenced him to die on his 30th birthday: April 17, 1914.

Only absolute mathematical certainty of guilt warrants such a cruel sentencing date by a judge.

* * *

MAKE SURE to check out the FULL American Mercury series on the Leo Frank case by clicking here.

Appendix: Essential Reading

To gain a full understanding of the Leo Frank case, and the tissue-thin “anti-Semitic conspiracy” theories advanced by the media today, it is necessary to read the official record without censorship or selective editing by partisans. Here are the resources which will enable you to do just that.

– Leo M. Frank Brief of Evidence, Murder Trial Testimony and Affidavits, 1913

– Leo M. Frank unsworn trial statement (BOE, Leo Frank Trial Statement, August 18, 1913)

– Leo Frank trial, State’s Exhibit B

Original State’s Exhibit B:

Part 1 — http://www.leofrank.org/images/georgia-supreme-court-case-files/2/0061.jpg

Part 2 — http://www.leofrank.org/images/georgia-supreme-court-case-files/2/0062.jpg

Complete Analysis of State’s Exhibit B (required reading): The full review of State’s Exhibit B

– Leo Frank Case files from the Georgia Supreme Court, Adobe PDF format: http://www.leofrank.org/library/georgia-archives/

– Atlanta Constitution issue of March 9, 1914 (Leo Frank Answers List of Questions Bearing on Points Made Against Him, March 9, 1914)

– Compare the analysis of the bathroom statement by reading: Argument of Hugh M. Dorsey, followed by Argument of Mr. Frank Hooper — also compare with Tom Watson’s version

– Minola McKnight statement (Minola Mcknight, State’s Exhibit J, June 3, 1913) and cremation request in the 1954 Notarized Last Will and Testament of Lucille Selig Frank

– 2D and 3D National Pencil Company floor diagrams

The National Pencil Company in 3 Dimensions

3-Dimensional Floor Plan of the National Pencil Company in 1913: http://www.leofrank.org/images/georgia-supreme-court-case-files/2/0060.jpg.

The Defendant Leo Frank’s Factory Diagrams Made on His Behalf:

2-Dimensional Floor Plan of the National Pencil Company in 1913. Defendants Exhibit 61, Ground Floor and Second Floor 2D Birds Eye View Maps of the National Pencil Company: http://www.leofrank.org/images/georgia-supreme-court-case-files/2/0125.jpg. Plat of the First and Second Floor of the National Pencil Company.

1. State’s Exhibit A (Small Image) or State’s Exhibit A (Large Image).

2. Different Version: Side view of the factory diagram showing the front half of the factory

3. Bert Green Diagram of the National Pencil Company

– James “Jim” Conley’s testimony (James Conley, Brief of Evidence, August, 4, 5, 6, 1913)

– Staged late defense version of events

– The Jeffersonian Newspaper 1914-1917 and Watson’s Magazine (August and September, 1915) series on the case

– Defense and prosecution both ratify the original Brief of Evidence: Leo M. Frank, Plaintiff in Error, vs. State of Georgia, Defendant in Error. In Error from Fulton Superior Court at the July Term 1913. Brief of Evidence

– John Davison Lawson’s American State Trials 1918, Volume X

– Mary Phagan Kean’s analysis of the Leo Frank Case: The Murder of Little Mary Phagan

– State’s Exhibit A