Catolic fans, Welcome to episode eighteen.

I'm super glad you're here.

Our Catolic Lie finale is coming soon.

Don't forget it's March the fourteenth.

The event is already sixty three percent sold out, so be sure to get your tickets to both the live finale and our Catolic Walking tours at catlic dot com.

Also, I'm going to reveal our first special guest joining us at the finale.

Just stick around to the end of this episode to hear who it is.

All right, that's it.

Enjoy Episode eighteen.

This episode references historical moments that are violent and at times sexual.

Listener discretion is advised.

On the morning of August first, nineteen eighty four, sixteen year old David Samples slides into a phone booth at the corner of Boulevard and Memorial Drive.

Memorial Drive is a busy road that marks the southern boundary of Atlanta's Cabbage Town neighborhood.

This early in the morning, the streets of Atlanta are still dark and mostly empty.

It's August in the South, so it's also hot and humid even at four am.

David pulls a quarter out of his pocket.

He has to make an important phone call.

He's crying.

That phone booth at Boulevard and Memorial is, of course no longer there.

I walk or drive by this intersection almost every day.

It's just a couple of blocks south of my place in Cabbage Town.

By nineteen eighty four, Cabbagetown had fallen into near anarchy.

The cotton mill that had anchored the neighborhood's economy for a century had closed back in the seventies.

For the white working class people of Cabbage Town, the shuttering of the mill was an economic catastrophe.

These generations of Cabbagetown families had worked at that mill, and when it closed, many of the residents, already dirt floor poor, had few other options.

Mass unemployment led to mass poverty, and the poverty swept in like a plague.

The data show that around this time, Cabbage Town's annual income by household was about seven thousand bucks.

As a point of comparison, that was about half of what other households around Atlanta brought in each year.

The crime statistics were also pretty shocking by Atlanta standards.

Cabbage Town is a tiny neighborhood with a really small geographic footprint, only sixteen hundred people lived there.

In the nineteen eighties, the neighborhood's crime rate was a staggering one point seven crimes for every ten residents.

At the time, that was twice the average for the rest of Atlanta.

I suppose lots of people would assume nineteen eighties Atlanta crime would be mostly the work of black gangs, but the reality is one of the most lawless neighborhoods in Atlanta back then was purely white.

The unique thing about Cabbagetown's crime epidemic of the nineteen eighties was that it was driven mostly by children.

Back then, local reporters would journey into the neighborhood and write detailed stories on Cabbage Town, often likening it to the Lord of the Flies, with barefoot gangs of four foot tall, pudgy faced renegades wreaking havoc in the streets.

One of those reporters was the brilliant journalist Susan Faludi, who at the time worked for the Atlanta Journal Constitution.

I'm drawing heavily here from an article she wrote in nineteen eighty four titled Children of Crisis, with lots of adults unemployed, sick, addicted, or incarcerated.

The kids of Cabbage Town took over the streets.

The stories from back then are pretty bad.

One kid, fed up with his mom's drunk livin boyfriend, smashed his head with a brick.

Another fifteen year old reported seeing one of his friends beat his own mother with a belt up reverse spanking if you will.

Street fights with guns and knives were common.

In nineteen seventy eight, the Atlanta Swat Team swarmed into Cabbage Town after reports of a double fisting seventeen year old walking down Burian Avenue with a rifle in one hand and a shotgun in the other.

One resident said he looked like wyat herb.

Substance abuse was rampant as well.

One kid reported that he'd been drinking beer with his dad since quote I was a baby and none.

Surprisingly, lots of kids were hooked on drugs.

Model airplane glue was the neighborhood nectar.

It was inexpensive, easy to get, and huffing it gave a quick high.

Tragically, There was also widespread child prostitution, which surprisingly attracted more boys than girls.

Men slowly cruising through Cabbagetown looking for sex with kids had been a thing for as long as anyone could remember.

An older lady named Lewis wrote a letter to the editor of the Constitution back in the eighties.

She remembered seeing men cruising the neighborhood for sex when she was a Cabbagetown kid way back in the nineteen thirties and forties.

Predators are always drawn to pockets of downtrodden people, and for as long as anyone could remember, Cabbagetown had been veried downtrodden.

In the eighties, most of the boys drawn into prostitution just did it for the money, a quick buck for kids with a few other options.

They'd also travel beyond the borders of Cabbagetown to meet men to well known cruising hot spots like Grant Park or over in Midtown off Crescent Street.

Police back then called these kids hustlers, and it was well known that the youngest ones always came from Cabbage Town.

Boys as young as eight were often seen getting into the cars of older men.

David Samples our crying sixteen year old kid in the phone booth at four am.

He was one of those hustlers.

By the time he was sixteen, David had been meeting men for years.

He learned the lucrative ritual from his older brothers, Mike and Ronnie.

However, by now both Mike and Ronnie were serving time in jail.

Mike, the middle brother, was incarcerated on charges of kidnapping.

In her article, Susan Faludi tells a really disturbing story.

When Mike was a kid, Ronnie taught him how to torture a chicken by holding a flame to its beak.

Of the three boys, Ronnie was the roughest.

In nineteen eighty one, Ronnie was sentenced to life in prison for murder.

As the story goes, he'd been picked up by a lawyer in Atlanta one night.

For whatever reason, Ronnie decided to rob the guy instead, so he beat him unconscious and kept beating him.

When Ronnie realized the guy was dead, he threw his body into a pond in South Atlanta.

For his effort, he got eleven bucks from the guy's wallet.

So by the time David Samples stepped into that phone booth in August of nineteen eighty four, his mother, Barbara Jackson, had endured more heartbreak than any person should have to bear with two sons already behind bars for serious offenses.

Sixteen year old David was her last hope that one of her kids might get out of cabbage Town and make something of himself.

On this particular night, Barbara Jackson has jolted out of a sound sleep.

She sends his trouble no good phone calls are made at four am.

It's David, her sixteen year old son.

She can tell he's sobbing.

In an interview, Barbara later recounted the conversation, Mama, I just called to say I love you.

David's voice is a bit slurred.

David.

Are you messed up on any drugs?

She asks, No, Mama, I'm just drinking some beer and hanging out.

She doesn't know it, but he's lying.

He continues, Mama, I want to get locked up so I can be with Ronnie.

Barbara leaps out of bed and frantically begins getting dressed.

She tells him to hang on and that she's on her way.

Dave.

It hangs up the phone as David sets down the receiver.

Atlanta Police officer John Oglesby is driving by that very same phone booth.

Someone had called in to report that a young white man was walking down Memorial Drive shouting obcinities.

Oglesby had been dispatched to investigate, according to the officer.

As he approached the phone booth, he observed a person inside, moving and motioning erratically.

He rolls down his window to check on him.

He's promptly greeted by a flurry of curses.

David Samples is not here for a friendly chat.

Oglesby parks his car in a nearby lot, opens the door, and gets out.

David stumbles out of the phone booth, and as he does, he struggles to take off his shirt.

He's now walking towards Officer Oglesby, shirtless and shouting curses and nonsense.

David pauses.

He looks down and sees a bottle on the sidewalk.

He bends over to pick it up and launches it in the direction of the officer.

The boy keeps advancing, the situation escalating with each step.

David Samples made several bad decisions that night, but his next one would be the costliest.

As the bare chested sixteen year old staggers towards Officer Oglesby, he reaches behind his back.

Ogleby's training had conditioned him for moments just like this, his hand goes to his holster.

When David Sample's hand reappears from behind his back, he's clutching a pocket knife.

He begins opening it, but before he can, Officer John Oglesby draws his weapon and fires five rounds rip through David's thin frame.

He falls to the pavement streams of red.

David Samples takes his last breath.

Moments later, Barbara Jackson tops a hill on Memorial Drive, and as she does, she sees the blue and red flashes of police lights.

By now her instincts about her boys are rarely wrong.

She knows David, her youngest son, is dead.

The David Sample's death made the local news.

There was a major outcry amongst the Cabbage Town locals accusations of police brutality.

Local law enforcement released statements saying that John Oglesby responded appropriately.

An officer being advanced upon by an armed combatant has the right to use lethal force.

They said the officer would later be officially exonerated of any wrongdoing.

In her writing, journalist Susan Faludi said that Cabbage Town was under a dark cloud of quote pervasive fatalism.

Fatalism defined as the belief that all events are predetermined and therefore inevitable.

Predetermined events inevitable events.

How does a tiny neighborhood in the heart of a prosperous city fall into such despair that the people just give up, resigning themselves to utter hopelessness.

How do children in an American city become glue sniffing, gun wielding child prostitutes?

And how does a mother lose three sons viciously devoured by a single neighborhood.

Well, it certainly doesn't happen overnight, Oh No.

Pervasive fatalism creeps like a mold.

It slithers like a snake across the decades and under the floorboards, suffocating light and laying new eggs in the dark.

When people disdain people, evil begets evil, greed begets greed, hate begets hate, and if no one steps in the darkness hatches anew with each generation.

You're listening to episode eighteen of Catlic Trouble in the Cotton Empire Welcome Back.

It's January of nineteen fourteen, Month thirty seven of our story.

Leo Frank is imprisoned at the Fulton Tower as his legal team continues the appeals process.

Meanwhile, our focus has shifted a mile or so east of downtown Atlanta to an area we call cabbage Town.

Now, for the sake of historical accuracy, I must acknowledge here that Cabbagetown wasn't always called Cabbagetown.

It didn't pick up that name until about the nineteen forties.

There are two competing stories for where the name came from.

The first is that one time a truck full of cabbages overturned in the neighborhood.

The locals flooded the streets, gathered them up, and retreated back to their homes before being caught.

The second, which is the story that I sort of prefer, is that the people of Cabbagetown were so poor most of them could only afford cabbage for dinner, and so when other Atlantins would pass by at dusk, their noses would be greeted by the unmistakable pungent odor of cabbage boiling in all the homes.

Before it was called Cabbagetown, most people around the city referred to it as factory Town or just the mill village.

But for the sake of simplicity, I'll just be calling at Cabbagetown.

In the last episode, I introduced you to Jacob Elsis, an orphaned Jewish immigrant who moved to Atlanta after the Civil War with the goal of starting a business.

Based on what we know about him, Jacob Elsis was a brilliant entrepreneur.

He started multiple businesses with various partners in the eighteen seventies, and by eighteen eighty one he'd raised enough money from investors to buy some land east of downtown, the area we now call Cabbage Town.

In eighteen eighty one, the first bricks were laid for the Fulton Cotton Spinning Company.

The main product of this new cotton mill would be fabric bags.

Before the widespread use of plastic and cardboard boxes, most things were stored, carried, or shipped in large cotton bags.

Elsi's spotted a gap in the market and knew the demand was there.

Atlanta could use a bag manufacturer of its own.

Despite the opportunity, Elsis had one major hurdle to overcome labor In a pre robotics world, Staffing these giant factories was a pain in the ass.

Hundreds and hundreds of bodies were needed to operate the mill and avoid interruptions in production.

Other manufacturing facilities around Atlanta had been crippled by labor shortages in the late eighteen hundreds, so Jacob Elsis hatched a plan.

He'd syndrome recruiters far north, beyond forsythe County into the Misty Mountains of North Georgia.

The Southern Appalachian Mountain Range loosely begins in North Georgia and then stretches up the eastern coast of the US all the way to Maine.

The Mills recruiters landed in what's called the Piedmont region of the Appalachians.

This is a rugged, densely forested area today, so you can imagine what it was like in the late eighteen hundreds.

The Piedmont was an economically depressed area, so when recruiters from Fulton Bag showed up promising steady jobs in the big city, people listened.

Of course, this wasn't an isolated thing.

This was happening all over as the industrial revolutions swept across America, people uprooting their lives on rural farmsteads and relocating to cities and urban factories.

Well, the recruitment plan was successful and entire families began migrating to Atlanta to begin their new lives.

Elsis arranged for simple wood framed houses to be built on the land around the factory.

Back then, it was fairly common for large industrial operations to provide on site housing for their workers, and when you drive through Cabbage Town today, you'll see some of these same shotgun style houses that were built more than a hundred years ago.

By eighteen eighty one, the factory was fully staffed and open for business, and within several years it was booming.

By the eighteen nineties, Elsis was adding more buildings to expand his production capacity.

Around this time, they also renamed the facility.

It was now the Fulton Bag and Cotton Mill.

With the proven process and place, Fulton Bag began expanding to other cities, opening up more mills in New Orleans, Saint Louis, and beyond.

All of this growth in the eighteen nineties and into the nineteen hundreds began to make Jacob Elsis one of the wealthiest men in all of Atlanta, and he often used that wealth for good.

He dispatched his wealth to make Atlanta better, making sizable donations to help establish the Grand Opera House, the Hebrew Orphans Home, as well as Grady Hospital in the Georgia Institute of Technology to landmark Atlanta institutions that are still around today.

By nineteen ten, the Fulton Bag and Cotton Mill in Atlanta was a massive operation.

By revenue, it had become one of the top five hundred corporations in all of America.

Around twelve hundred people packed into the mill each day, moving, cutting, spinning, sewing, and processing cotton into bags and a variety of other products.

By nineteen thirteen, Jacob Elsis had been at the helm of the mill for more than thirty years, and he was planning his retirement.

By then, he'd already decided on his successor, his son, Oscar.

The oldest of eight children, the son of a millionaire, Oscar Elsis attended some of the finest schools in Europe.

His dad was helping start Georgia Tech, so he came back to Atlanta to finish university as part of Tech's first graduating class in eighteen ninety one.

After finishing school, he worked for his dad at the Fulton Bag in Cotton Mill.

By the time of his father's retirement, Oscar was a vice president and the seasoned executive in the textile industry, so by nineteen fourteen, he was the natural choice as Jacob's successor and heir to his cotton empire.

Oscar officially took over as president in January of that year.

Now Oscar lived a grand life, rolling into the office every day in a shiny black automobile driven by a personal chauffeur.

Around the time of his transition, he moved his family into a penthouse that the newly opened Ponts Delion Apartments.

The Ponts Apartments were unlike any other residences in the city, Rising twelve stories over Atlanta's posh thoroughfare Peachtree Street.

They included all the latest amenities elevators, heating, maid service, mechanical refrigeration, sleeping porches, and even a European style cafe on the first floor.

By nineteen fourteen, the building's tenant list read like a who's who of Atlanta's elites, familiar names like the Inmans, the Elsises, and even a candler.

Oscar Elsis joined his gentile elites as one of the first Atlanta jews with a coveted Peachtree Street address.

FYI.

This building miraculously is still standing and is in great shape.

It looks just like it did when it opened more than one hundred years ago.

It sits directly Caddy corner to the Fox Theater in Midtown, so be sure to check it out if you ever visit the area.

One of the most celebrated features of the Pontsteleon apartments was its rooftop gardens.

Fancy galas were often held on the rooftop, and I can imagine Oscar standing with friends, looking south and proudly pointing to the smoke stacks of the Fulton Bag and Cotton Mill in the distance.

However, while the Elsi's family was settling into their new luxury lifestyle in Midtown, a very different story was playing out underneath those smokestacks back in Cabbagetown.

In the thirty years since it had been opened, the mill village had been gradually degrading into what could only be described as a slum.

Through decades of poverty and neglect, Cabbagetown had become a full blown public health crisis.

Children as young as six were hooked on tobacco.

There was no trash collection, there was no plumbing, so the smell of feces filled the streets.

Diseases like typhoid, fever, malaria, tuberculosis, and smallpox were common in the overcrowded houses.

One section of houses was known as chinch Row because they were all infested with bedbugs.

When the sun went down in Cabbagetown, an army of moonshiners and prostitutes invaded the streets, eager to make a buck off the factory's desperate workers.

Multiple brothels operated in Cabbagetown, and STDs spread like wildfire.

Over time, a cottage industry of saloons, bars, and brothels set up shop along the neighborhood's northern border along present day Decatur Street.

Over the years, the mill had become the anchor of Atlanta's red light district, and its people were its best clients.

The harsh reality was that, even after thirty years, these workers recruited from the Appalachian Mountains, they just hadn't adapted to city life that well.

This was a community of proud mountaineers in downtown Atlanta, working in harsh factory conditions for very little pay.

This social experiment was starting to look very very bad.

One of those mountaineer men of Cabbage Town was a guy by the name of John Carson.

When Carson moved to Atlanta, he brought his Appalachian music with him, and the key ingredient to Appalachian music a fiddle.

Back then, they actually had fiddling championships, and Carson was declared the Grand Fiddling Champion of Georgia on seven different occasion.

This eventually earned him the moniker Fiddland John Carson.

Most people think country music got its start in Nashville, Tennessee.

However, that's not exactly true.

Country music really got its start in Cabbage Town when Fiddland John Carson recorded what many believed to be the first ever recording of country folk music.

Now that all happened in the nineteen twenties.

In nineteen fourteen, John Carson was just another worker at the Fulton Bag and Cotton Mill, though he'd entertained with his fiddle in the alleyways and saloons whenever he could.

It's worth mentioning here that Fiddland John Carson could be a real asshole.

He had at least one super racist song as well as a song called It's a Shame to whip your wife On Sunday why you may be wondering, was it a shame to whip your wife on Sunday?

Just listen a game your wife Sonday?

If the game your wife Sunday, when you got Monday, body that in your game?

Wife?

Yeah, so there's that.

Around this same time, we know that Fiddland, John Carson wrote another song about a certain murder mystery in Atlanta.

Man.

This is the Ballad of Little Mary Fagan, written by John Carson, vocals by his daughter Rosa Lee.

Leo Frank's about to get called out.

Listen Leo the lyrics.

Leo Frank met her with a brutely heart.

We know.

He smiled and said, little Mary, you'll go home no more.

Sneaked along behind her till she reached the metal room.

He laughed and said, little Mary, you have met your fatal doom.

Now.

I'm pointing this out to highlight a major social disconnect in Cabbage Town, the tension between the mill's poor Appalachian workers and it's wealthy Jewish owner managers.

The economic rift between low paid wage workers and wealthy elites isn't exactly unique.

That happens in lots of big companies, But what was unique then was the added layer of anti Semitism floating around Atlanta that made it even worse.

As the Atlanta papers continually demonized Leo Frank His Jewish faith and heritage was often mentioned, and these correlations fed into a lot of stereotypes.

That anti Jewish bias eventually crept into Cabbage Town and was easily transferred over to the factory's Jewish ownership, who many of the workers already despised.

It seems likely that there was some unwarranted tension there.

However, there was some warranted tension as well, and that seemed to be caused by one person, Oscar Elsis.

Remember Oscar's dad, Jacob, was an orphan immigrant who came from nothing.

He knew what it was like to be dirt poor, so when he walked the floors of the Fulton Bag and Cotton mill, he likely felt some kinship with his poor Appalachian workers.

He could see himself in them, simple hard working people just trying to get by.

But his son, Oscar, yeah, he was different.

Remember he was the son of a millionaire.

He couldn't relate at all with these mill workers, nor did he try.

He often called them the help and viewed them as just generally shiftless, irresponsible, and inherently immoral.

He had nothing in common with them, so he didn't really care to get to know him.

Oscar also employed the largest office staff of any mill in the South, and they sort of served as a buffer between him and his blue collar workforce.

Oscar's management style was also very different than his father's.

He was a heavy handed autocrat known for belligerent fits of rage.

He had a short fuse with the workers who viewed as low class simpletons.

Descriptions of work inside the mill under Oscar sound like a living hill.

I'm drawing here from the work of Clifford Coon and Gary Fink, two historians who've done amazing research on the mill.

Oscar authorized a sixty hour workweek, which kept workers on their feet for eleven to twelve hours straight.

He was obsessed with efficiency, so lunch breaks were limited to thirty minutes or less.

Fink describes the Fulton Bag and Cotton Mill as a fortress surrounded by tall walls studded at the top with spikes and broken glass.

The windows of the mill were made of smoked glass.

That way workers didn't waste time by looking outside.

Conditions inside the mill were just generally toxic, so workers got sick a lot.

Some said working in the mill was like working in an oven, and they suffered from chronic pain, fatigue, and migraine headaches.

Workers also reported that managers spoke to them like they were dogs.

Women claimed sexual harassment was a common occurrence.

Now, maybe all of this would be bearable if the pay was good, right well, pay records show workers in the card room made about eight bucks per week when adjusted for inflation and sort of spread out over the year.

This equates to a modern day salary of about nine thousand dollars annually.

But even that wasn't guaranteed.

Due to Oscar's crazy finding system.

At Fulton Bag and Cotton Mill, you could be fined for anything, breaking equipment, showing up late, or even taking an unauthorized water break.

Of course, you could have your fines forgiven simply by reporting fellow employee ease for shoddy work.

Oscar rewarded tattling, knowing that this would keep workers suspicious of each other, a slide tactic designed to undermine employee unity.

One of the most hated aspects of working at Fulton Bag was the dreaded contract that employees were forced to sign for one.

Employees could be fired for any reason, had any time.

Furthermore, after working you had to wait a week to receive your pay.

You were also required to give a week's notice before quitting, and if you didn't, you forfeited that week's worth of pay.

Now this might not sound like a big deal, but for very poor people with no savings and no other means to provide, this could be financially devastating.

It could mean that your kids don't eat for an entire week.

This last point, the one about withholding worker's pay, was quite unusual, because no other mill in Georgia had a clause like that.

Over time, Oscar was criticized for it, and some even questioned whether it was legal for him to enforce it.

His response a direct quote, I have made up my mind on the subject, and I will not change the contract system until hell freezes over.

I would sooner shut down these mills and keep them so until moss and any other kind of vegetation would grow over their windows than agree to change my attitude upon that question.

Yeah, Oscar not one for mincing words.

Perhaps Oscar's greatest shame lied in his use of child labor.

This was the mill's dirty little secret.

Company records show that about twelve percent of the workforce was between the ages of ten and sixteen.

These children worked the same sixty hour week as everybody else, and it reaked havoc on their health.

One mom reported that her young daughter had breathing problems, constant headaches, and walked with a stoop.

Over time, the mills oppressive work environment took its toll.

How bad was it well, in one year, ten thousand people worked in a factory that only had twelve hundred jobs.

That's ten thousand people for twelve hundred jobs.

That's a turnover rate of more than eight hundred percent.

As a matter of comparisons, similar mills around Georgia reported turnover around twenty five percent.

When confronted with that stat Oscar said that the other mill owners, yeah, they're just cooking the numbers to make themselves look better.

This.

All of this was building as the anger grew, As the desperation grew, Rumors began to spread through the back alleys of Cabbage Town and in the pubs over onto Cater Street frequented by Fulton bag workers.

A storm was coming, and even in his Ivory tower on Peachtree Street, Oscar Elsis would not be able to avoid it.

By February of nineteen fourteen, Leo Frank had settled into his cell at the Fulton Tower, having resigned himself to make the best of a bad situation.

He kept his cell neat and tidy.

He exercised daily and received visits from friends and family who'd bring him food, coffee, and newspapers.

When the Constitution caught wind of this, they published a story about it shocker headline, Cell now like living room.

Behind the scenes, efforts were made to build a coalition of wealthy and influential Jewish supporters from across the nation to help fund and promote Frank's cause.

However, even amongst these Jewish leaders, this effort was met with skepticism.

Some worried that if they interfered too much in the case, there could be a big public backlash anger that Jewish outsiders, or worse yet, Jewish Northerners were meddling with justice in the South.

Nevertheless, several big names through their hat in the ring, deciding that the pr risk was worth trying to save Leo Frank from the gallows.

Having been denied a new trial by Judge Rone, Frank's legal team escalated their appeal to the Georgia Supreme Court.

They restated their case and yet again attempted to fix the blame on the factory sweeper Jim Conley.

After listening to the arguments and then weeks of reviewing the trial's transcripts, the Georgia Supreme Court rendered their decision in a fourd to two vote.

They declined to grant Leo Frank a new trial, another devastating loss.

However, in the wake of this disappointing ruling, Frank's legal team chalked up a handful of winds, at least with public perception.

It was revealed that the strands of hair found on the machinery in the middle room did not in fact match the hair of Mary Fagan.

Furthermore, some cried scandal when it was revealed that Solicitor Hugh Dorsey, Yeah, he knew about this the entire time during the trial and never said anything about it.

There were also several notable retractions.

In early nineteen fourteen, a handful of witnesses who testified against Leo Frank came forward and said that they either flat out lied about it, or they were coerced to lie.

One particular madam was one of them.

Nina Formby had claimed that leoh Frank was a regular of hers at her house of ill repute.

She said that on the day of the murder, he called her looking for a place to store Mary Fagan's body.

However, Madame Formby later retracted her statement, saying she didn't even know Leo Frank and that she'd been coerced to say that by some Atlanta detectives.

Another one, George Epps.

This was the kid who allegedly rode the street call with Mary on the day she died.

Well.

He admitted that his story was also made up and that Detective John Black put him up to it.

The defense was feeling better by the day, and they had a right to be, especially when they found out that one of the biggest names in American journalism would be unofficially joining team Frank.

Adolph Oakes was the powerful publisher of the New York Times.

He was also a Jewish Man who'd been raised in the South.

In February of nineteen fourteen, the Times ran multiple front page articles about the Leo Frank case and appeals process, and all of them were favorable towards Frank.

At one point they interviewed Luther Rosser, one of Frank's attorneys.

They asked him why Frank was convicted in the first place.

Here's Rosser's response, The Jewish population of Atlanta is not large.

Frank came to Atlanta a stranger and engaged in a new enterprise.

He knew hardly anybody who was not of his own religion, being closely occupied with his business, and this fact rather counted against him.

I really believe if Frank had been the son of a reputable gentile, he would never have been arrested.

What had been during the trial a mostly regional story was now becoming a national story.

Around this same time, another influential Jewish man came to Frank's defense.

Albert Lasker was a wealthy and seasoned advertising maven from Chicago.

Though he attempted to remain off the radar, it's no secret why Lasker came to Atlanta to help reshape the public opinion of Leo Frank, and over time it seemed to work.

More papers around the country began covering the story, and most of them were pretty positive.

Towards Leo Frank.

Two of the biggest names in American history even lent their names to the cause.

Thomas Edison and Henry Ford publicly stated their belief that the Frank trial was rotten and that he deserved a new one.

Now.

Albert Lasker did more than just lead a pr effort, He also quietly hired the most famous private eye in the world, William Burns.

Burns was a larger than life character with international fame.

He was mythical, almost like a real life Sherlock Holmes.

He traveled the world investigating famous burglaries, salacious murders, and unbelief vabal heists.

When the press found out Burns was taking up the Frank case, they lost their minds with excitement.

A celebrity investigator was coming to Atlanta to once and for all solve the Merry Fagan murder mystery.

When William Burns arrived at Atlanta's terminal station, he was besieged by reporters and photographers.

In the following weeks, they followed him everywhere he went around the city.

Burns boasted several times that, unlike the others, he would be able to crack the case.

Burns and his team got to work.

Despite a few positive developments in the case, Frank's legal team was running out of legal options.

Days after the Georgia Supreme Court ruling, Frank appeared back in court.

It was time to once again schedule the execution.

The judge made his pronouncement Frank would now die on April seventeenth, nineteen fourteen.

Coincidentally, or perhaps not, this date was Leo Frank's birthday, his thirtieth birthday.

In February, there was also news with Jim Conley.

On the twenty fourth of that month, Conley was sentenced to one year on the Georgia State Chain Gang for his role as an accomplice in the murder of Mary Fagin.

However, that wasn't all.

After a few weeks on the job, Detective William Burns made a bombshell of an announcement.

He had acquired a series of love letters written between Jim Conley and his jailhouse lover, a lady named Anna maud Carter.

It was something like forty pages of handwritten letters.

Now, the papers refused to print the content of these letters because they were just so vulgar.

By the way I've read some of these letters, and I can confirm they're pretty saucy, even by today's standards, So I can imagine what someone in nineteen fourteen must have thought.

What did these letters prove?

Burns explains, they show, beyond apparent adventure of a death, that Conley is an abnormal man, just the vile, degenerate creature that I have heretofore pictured him.

Burns believed that this was proof that Conley was a monster, a twisted sexual pervert fully capable of killing Mary Fagan.

Detective Burns also hired men to analyze the handwriting and syntax of the letters.

He claimed that it was an identical match to the murder notes found near Mary's body, but then the real zinger This from the New York Times.

Detective Burns also said that he believed he would be able to prove that Conley is the Jack the Ripper who murdered about twenty Negro girls in the last three years.

Each of these women was mutilated, and by the body of each the murderer left a note.

Some of the notes bear marked resemblance in words and handwriting to those found by Mary Fagan's body.

This was a spectacular accusation a potential bridge between two of the biggest news stories in Atlanta's history.

Could it be that Jim Conley was not only the killer of Mary Fagan, but also the killer of all those young black women from a few years earlier?

Could it be that Jim Conley was the Atlanta Ripper.

Well, I'll say this one red flag concerning the accuracy of this article is that Atlanta police did not in fact find a murder note by all the bodies of the Ripper victims.

For my research, I only found a couple of instances where a note was left.

So unless Atlanta Police had been withholding this knowledge from the media, I'd seriously question that claim.

So I'm not sure where the New York Times got that from.

I will say, like many of the other women, Mary was murdered on a Saturday night, but that circumstantial at best.

Now I'll go ahead and spoil this by telling you that nothing else really came from the William Burns conly as the Ripper accusation slash conspiracy theory.

I've spent considerable time looking into this, and I can't really find much beyond this initial report that he sort of made that claim After all this, the Anna Maud Carter letters, Oh, they would be discussed much more, and Dorsey would claim that Burns had forged them.

They were fakes, he said, well, Burns would counter that it wasn't a fake.

At one point, Carter Conley's jailhouse lover claimed that Conley had privately confessed to her that he had killed Mary Faken, but then she later retracted her statements, saying that someone had told her to say that.

It's all really exhausting when you dig, really start digging into this case.

All the claims and counterclaims and retractions are really just a huge cluster of confusion.

It'll make your head spin.

By the beginning of April, it was crunch time for Leo Frank's attorneys.

They filed a new motion in the Fulton Superior Court that was well received.

Frank's execution was pushed back yet again, this time to January of nineteen fifteen.

This bought Frank and his attorneys several more precious months to continue building their case towards his innocence.

However, with more time comes more costs.

By April, the costs associated with Frank's defense had become enormous.

The fees of the lawyers, the private investigators, and others were north of fifty thousand dollars.

At this point, a push was made to raise funds, and several wealthy men, mostly Jewish, came to Frank's aid with sizable donations, and one of those men president of the Fulton Bag and Cotton Mill, Oscar Elsis.

While Oscar Elsis was certainly keeping an eye on the Leo Frank drama, that was the least of his worries.

By the spring of nineteen fourteen, room of a strike at the Fulton Bag and Cotton Mill were out of control.

For the previous few months, Oscar hadn't been dealing with all kinds of worker drama, and most worrisome of all, the U word was being tossed around for a wannabe robber.

Barred in the nineteen tens, there was no dirty your word then.

Union employees at Fulton Bag were strictly forbidden from unionizing, and even talking about it could get them fired.

From the end of nineteen thirteen through the beginning of nineteen fourteen, Elsis had been on a quiet hunt, routing out anyone known to be a union sympathizer.

He fired dozens of people he suspected of stirring up union talk.

As the rumors of the discontent and Cabbage Town swirled, word somehow reached officials with United Textile Workers UTW for short.

UTW was a trade union that advocated on behalf of workers in the textile industry.

Over the years, they'd been very successful in helping low wage workers organize into unions that could apply pressure on factory owners.

However, their efforts had been successful mostly in the North.

Previous attempts to organize labor unions in the South had been met with fierce opposition.

Charles Miles had organized several of those successful pro union movements and cities in the North.

However, he'd been recently tapped as the utw's new Southern organizer.

Miles attempted to organize at other mills around the South, but they all fell flat.

After that, he shifted his focus to the Fulton Bag and Cotton Mill in Atlanta.

He hoped to tap into the unrest that already existed amongst the workers.

That spring, he organized a local chapter of United Textile Workers.

It would be called Local eight six.

Through March and April, Local eight eight six enlisted as many Fulton Bag workers as possible.

Charles Miles knew that the only hope they had of making change was in recruiting more members to the union.

Has Oscar Elsis heard of these efforts to unionize, he retaliated with even more firings.

Anyone who showed interest or attended local meetings was instantly terminated.

The remaining workers at the mill were furious as they saw one friend after another fired not for poor performance, but for possibly being affiliated with the union.

Charles Miles and as fellow leaders at Local eight eight six planned their CounterPunch.

They decided to organize a citywide meeting for Atlanta's textile workers, those at both Fulton Bag as well as the other large cotton mill in town Exposition.

They printed flyer and distribute them all throughout the mill village.

You can see the actual flyer in the vault.

Here's a snapshot of what the flyer said.

Big bold text workers Attention.

A special meeting of the loom fixers, weavers, spinners, carters and other operatives will be held in Chastain Hall Friday evening eight pm.

Get together, unite, organize.

The time is at hand when the cotton mill operatives must organize and secure for themselves and their families a larger share in the prosperity and progress of the age.

A decent number of workers from both mills showed up to the meeting.

Charles Miles led the proceedings, and the focus of conversation quickly turned to the possibility of a strike at the crown jewel of the Southern textile trade, the Fulton Bag and Cotton Mill.

Just a few days later, a second meeting was held, this one in the odd Fellows Building down on Decatur Street.

This meeting, the union enlisted even more members, and once the meeting started, the primary topic of conversation a strike at Fulton Bag.

The pieces were falling into place.

By May the nineteenth, the boiling point had been reached.

You might even say that a sense of pervasive fatalism had set in.

Workers met in a secretive meeting that night to air their grievances and plan their next move.

They expressed deep resentment over the firing of their coworkers for being associated with the union.

They criticized the dreaded labor contract.

They decried the institution of child labor.

They scoffed at their pitiful wages, and they cursed the filth and squalor of the mill village.

When the dust settled, a decision had to be made.

Would they continue with business as usual or would they go on strife.

It was put to a vote submitted by secret ballot.

After tabulating their results it was nearly unanimous, three fifty votes for and just three votes against.

It was official.

They would walk off the job.

The next morning, the people of Atlanta's humble Appalachian Mill village were about to stage a revolt against one of the largest manufacturers in the American South.

This was no small matter, certainly not to the hot tempered president of the Fulton Bag and Cotton Mill.

Oh No, to him, this was no tepid offense.

This wasn't just a little hiccup that would be placated through amicable negotiations.

No, no, this was a unified movement of resistance against his cotton empire, and to him, it was nothing less than a declaration of war.

Oscar Else's was not the type of man to be caught unprepared.

In fact, he already had a plan in place and near unlimited resources.

How would he respond?

We'll find out next time on Catlic.

I teased it at the top of the episode, but I'm excited to announce our first guest at our catlic Live finale, Atlanta comic David Purdue will be joining us as our host in MC for the night, and I'm super pumped.

David is a friend of mine and recognized as one of the top comics in all of Atlanta.

He's formed on Comedy Central, Fuse and at comedy festivals all over the country.

Join me and David and the rest of our Catolic Live Finale lineup at Polywood Place here in Atlanta on March fourteenth.

We've got an unbelievable night planned, plus a kick ass after party at Monday Night Garage.

Go get your tickets today before they sell out at catlick dot com.

And while you're there, you can also get tickets to our Catlick Walking tours happening that same weekend.

Once again, you can find all that information at catlick dot com.

Cheers.

Catlick is recorded in Atlanta's historic Cabbagetown neighborhood.

Executive producer walnut Ridge Harmon original music by Doucel cover art by Rachel Eleanor Catlick store manager Bret Harmon Special Thing thanks to the staff at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Library, Archives and Special Collections.

Catolic Instagram Follower of the Week Mandy Goodwin, Catlick Instagrams Story Stars of the Week Sham Breezy and Cat Wilder.

Thanks for sharing, guys.

Catolic Instagram Commenter of the Week Major Nate eleven, who says, my wife is usually the crime aficionado in our house, but you have me hooked.

Keep up the phenomenal work.

Thank you, Major Nate eleven.

Only four episodes left, but I'll keep it up at least till then.

Catlick Twitter Follower of the Week Andrew Field.

Our Vault subscribers have been loving the visual artifacts we've been posting lately.

We're up to more than three hundred images and we're adding new stuff every week.

As we continue talking about Cabbage Town, I'm going to be posting lots of photos from around the neighborhood today and I'm even hoping to do a video tour of the cotton mill what it looks like today.

If you haven't done it yet, you can subscribe to the Vault at Catolic dot com.

Just click on vault and finally, Catolic is independently written and produced by me bt Harmon.

Signing off, I'd like to remind you to save old buildings, build bike lanes, and vote for public transit.

We'll see you in the next episode.