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\u2019nai B\u2019rith, 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.<\/span><\/p>\nThe 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\u2019s 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.<\/span><\/p>\nThe police initially suspected the black night watchman who found the girl\u2019s 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\u2019s 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 evidence against him planted.<\/span><\/p>\nThe case 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.<\/span><\/p>\nA 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\u2019s strange refusal to visit her husband in jail for the first two weeks after the day of his arrest.<\/span><\/p>\nTwo separate firms of experienced private detectives were hired by Frank\u2019s lavishly-funded partisans, and the agents of both eventually came to the reluctant conclusion that Frank was guilty as charged.<\/span><\/p>\nAs the investigation moved forward, a major break occurred as a certain Jim Conley, Frank\u2019s black janitor, came forward and confessed to having been Frank\u2019s 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, Frank 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\u2019s damning accusations, Frank repeatedly refused to confront him in the presence of the police, which was widely seen as further proof of Frank\u2019s guilt.<\/span><\/p>\nBy 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\u2019s lawyers exploited this comparison to the fullest, emphasizing Frank\u2019s 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.<\/span><\/p>\nThose 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.<\/span><\/p>\nTwo notes written in crude black English had been discovered alongside Phagan\u2019s 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.<\/span><\/p>\nTaking a broader overview, the theory advanced by Frank\u2019s 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 have 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.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n
In many respects, the more important part of the Frank case began after his conviction and death sentence when many of America\u2019s 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.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\nRead More @ Unz.com<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"by Ron Unz, The Unz Review: About a week ago both the\u00a0New York Times\u00a0and the\u00a0Wall Street Journal\u00a0devoted considerable space to the coverage of \u201cParade,\u201d the revival of a 1998 Broadway musical on the 1915 killing of Leo Frank, a Jewish factory manager in Atlanta, Georgia, arguably the most famous lynching in American history.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[151419],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sgtreport.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/346417"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sgtreport.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sgtreport.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sgtreport.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sgtreport.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=346417"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.sgtreport.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/346417\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sgtreport.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=346417"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sgtreport.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=346417"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sgtreport.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=346417"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}