Leo Frank’s Jewish Supporters are His Worst Enemies
Mary Phagan was 13 years-old in 1913 when the Jewish factory manager where she worked named Leo Frank lured her into a back room and made his move to molest her. She resisted, and in the struggle Frank knocked her out and then strangled her to death. The case was cut and dry, but Frank was determined that he—an important Jewish B’nai Birith president—should not pay for the murder if he could help it.
And there strarted one of the most extraordinary efforts to free a guilty man by any means necessary that the nation has ever seen. Frank hired and paid large sums to the two most prominent detective firms in the nation to come to his aid in “solving” the crime, but both of them publicly declared that Frank was the guilty man. From that point on Leo Frank and his Jewish backers engaged in some of the most blatant scorched-earth and profoundly racist illegalities ever seen in American legal history. The result is that 105 years later, Leo Frank has been deified—the innocent Jewish victim of the worst act of anti-Semitism in American history, who paid with his life for a murder committed by a Black man! The historical chutzpah is without precedent and still continues to this day.
The campaign to pin Frank’s century old rape and murder on a Black man has achieved new momentum with the efforts of two Jewish racists from Georgia with the backing of the new COINTELPRO operatives at the Anti-Defamation League. Despite their “client” being dead for 103 years, attorney Dale Schwartz and Rabbi Steven Lebow are right now working behind the scenes to file an extraordinary motion for a new trial for Leo Frank as of 2018. The aim, one supposes, is to try to legally vacate Frank’s murder conviction and death sentence, such that it would appear—or at least they will claim—Frank was never really convicted by a jury of his white peers in the longest and most expensive trial in Georgia’s history up to that time. If they are successful in achieving this A BLACK MAN named James Conley will enter the history books as the murderer of young Mary Phagan.
Schwartz and Lebow are determined to ignore the facts of the case including these ugly and damning truths about their “client:
• The evidence was so strong against Franks that a 23-member grand jury that included five prominent members of the Jewish community voted for his murder indictment.
• Leo Frank openly referred to Blacks as “niggers.” His 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.”
• Frank argued in court that the many Black witnesses that testified should not be believed—simply because they were Black—and that “negro testimony” was by definition inferior and unreliable. Further, Frank argued to the all-white jury of his peers that murder, rape, and robbery were “negro crimes” and thus, he, a white man, could not have committed the murder of Mary Phagan.
• Powerful Jewish leaders rallied to Frank’s defense, but privately they admitted that they could not stand Frank’s personality and that he probably was guilty. Albert Lasker financed Frank’s legal defense. His private view of the B’nai B’rith president was harsh and disturbing: “he impressed us as a sexual pervert. Now, he may not have been, or rather a homeosexual [sic] or something like that.” Lasker 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.”
• Frank supporters tried to hire a Black woman named Annie Maude Carter to slip Conley some poison while he was in jail waiting to testify at Frank’s new-trial hearing. She identified the plotters in open court as prominent members of the Jewish community.
• At his own trial Leo Frank refused to take an oath on the Bible, and then refused to be cross-examined by prosecutors. But James Conley withstood 16 hours of cross-examination—under oath–even as Frank’s attorneys called him “nigger” over and over and over.
• The family of the murder victim Mary Phagan steadfastly maintains that Leo Frank is the murderer of their little girl. The girl’s grand niece and namesake, Mary Phagan-Kean, studied the case intensely and authored a book on it titled The Murder of Little Mary Phagan, and she concludes that the facts lead to one conclusion—Frank is guilty.
How Schwartz and Lebow are able to ignore this flood of facts is only testament to the level of hatred they have for the Black male and the man they insist must pay for Frank’s crime.
Today’s #MeToo activists can’t ignore that Leo Frank was the Harvey Weinstein of his time. A dozen adolescent girls gave such powerful testimony about Leo Frank’s sexual harassment at the factory that none of his bevy of highly paid attorneys dared to cross-examine them—not one. They spoke of Frank’s touching them, of opening their dressing room door and leering at them, of propositioning them, of using their payday to pressure them into sexual trysts. A cop told of seeing Frank in an automobile with a young girl driving to a remote area of a park, and a brothel owner said Frank was a regular customer.
In 1913 Frank came to court with more than a dozen attorneys but they were no match for the evidence. But at least they KNEW the facts before concocting their losing legal strategy which was designed to appeal entirely to white racial unity. Today, the ADL attorney Dale Schwartz didn’t even feel the need to learn the facts of the murder and is poised to become his case’s own worst enemy. Indeed, Frank’s top legal advocate actually provides the best evidence of Frank’s guilt.
Back in 1982, Dale Schwartz and the ADL decided to make one last mighty appeal for a “pardon” for Leo Frank. They dredged up an elderly man named Alonzo Mann who, they claimed, worked as an office boy in the factory and was at work on the day of the murder. He took off for a break and then returned to see the Black man—James Conley—carrying the limp body of Mary Phagan! He never told anyone at the time, and lied under oath at Frank’s trial, claiming to be ignorant of the events of that day. To much fanfare and rejoicing Mann emerged decades later to “clear his conscience” under the guiding hand of the Schwartz and his ADL cohorts to finally provide the “proof” that exonerates Leo Frank.
Even if one believes Alonzo Mann’s new and ridiculous claim that he witnessed the Black man Jim Conley carrying the body of Mary Phagan—both Alonzo Mann and his ADL lawyer Dale Schwartz claim that Conley was descending the stairway with the body from the second floor to the first floor. Well, at the very top of the stairway on that day and in that fateful moment was Leo Frank’s second-floor office with Leo Frank inside it, in the otherwise quiet and deserted factory. This means that Conley attacked, raped, and strangled this girl on the 2nd floor before picking her up to carry her down the front stairs to be seen by the entering 14-year-old Alonzo Mann. In Mann’s own words he says that Conley “must have brought her down the steps,” and his attorney Schwartz confirms and reiterates Mann’s account in Howard Simons’ book Jewish Times: “Lonnie Mann…saw Jim Conley carrying the limp body…down the steps and into the main part of the factory, walking toward the chute to the basement.”
Neither appears to realize that this detail is its own fatal flaw. Unfortunately for Mann and his ill-prepared attorney, Frank’s 1913 defense case depended on their claim that a stealthy, ninja-like Conley pounced upon the girl ON THE FIRST FLOOR as far away from Frank’s presence as possible, initiating the apparently noiseless drunken assault where Frank could not have heard it. His 1913 lawyers spent much of the two-week trial trying desperately to show that nothing happened where Frank was on the SECOND floor–despite the presence of the victims blood, hair, and an eyewitness—the Black man Conley.
Mann and his Keystone Kop attorney Schwartz do more than any previous witness to implicate Leo Frank as the murderer. Alonzo Mann’s testimony in the 1913 trial would have sealed the fate of Leo Frank as the murderer—or at least put him just feet away from a life-or-death struggle to which he claimed to be totally oblivious. Either he—a white man in Jim Crow Georgia—witnessed “the negro Conley” murdering AND RAPING the child and then concealed that knowledge(!); or he (Leo Frank) committed the murder and sexual assault himself and then had his employee Conley help him remove the body. The idea that it could be the former scenario is as ridiculous today as it was a century ago.
The all-white male jury understood that Frank HAD TO BE THE MURDERER, and Alonzo Mann’s testimony would have only confirmed this. So, could this be why Alonzo Mann [was] kept quiet at the original trial?
Alonzo Mann’s 1986 testimony—that which Schwartz and Lebow are relying on to exonerate Frank—would have been iron-clad eyewitness proof of Frank’s guilt.
For more on this topic see the Nation of Islam book series The Secret Relationship Between Blacks & Jews. Download the free guide by clicking here.
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