Leo Frank
Wrongfully convicted factory superintendent lynched in 1915.
Leo Max Frank (April 17, 1884 – August 17, 1915) was a Jewish American factory superintendent in Atlanta, Georgia, who was wrongly convicted of murdering 13-year-old employee Mary Phagan. He was later kidnapped from prison and lynched. The case drew national attention and highlighted issues of antisemitism, regional tensions, and racial politics. Modern historians agree Frank was innocent.
Frank was born to a German-Jewish family in Cuero, Texas, and raised in Brooklyn, New York. He earned a mechanical engineering degree from Cornell University in 1906. In 1908, he moved to Atlanta to work at the National Pencil Company, where his uncle was a major shareholder. He married Lucille Selig in 1910 and became active in the city’s Jewish community, serving as president of the Atlanta chapter of B’nai B’rith by 1912. At the time, child labor in factories was a growing concern. Mary Phagan, one such child worker, was strangled on April 26, 1913, and her body was found in the factory cellar the next morning. Two notes, later shown to be forgeries, were left beside her, implicating night watchman Newt Lee. Police arrested several men, including Lee, Frank, and janitor Jim Conley.
Frank was indicted on May 24, 1913, and his trial began at Fulton County Superior Court on July 28. The prosecution’s case relied heavily on Conley’s testimony, in which he claimed to have helped cover up the murder. The defense argued Conley was the actual killer—a view now widely accepted by historians. The jury returned a guilty verdict on August 25. Frank and his lawyers filed multiple unsuccessful appeals, including a final one to the U.S. Supreme Court in April 1915. After reviewing new evidence, Georgia Governor John M. Slaton commuted Frank’s sentence from death to life imprisonment.
The case received intense national press coverage, with many reporters calling the conviction a miscarriage of justice. Outside criticism fueled antisemitism in Georgia. On August 16, 1915, a group of armed men, including prominent Marietta citizens, kidnapped Frank from prison. He was lynched the next morning in Marietta, Mary Phagan’s hometown. The new governor promised to punish the lynchers, but no one was ever charged.
- Born
- April 17, 1884, Cuero, Texas
- Died
- August 17, 1915, Marietta, Georgia
- Field
- Factory management, mechanical engineering
- Nationality
- American
- Known for
- Wrongful conviction and lynching in the Mary Phagan murder case
Lore & Background
Leo Frank was born to a Jewish family in Texas, raised in New York, and earned a degree in mechanical engineering from Cornell University in 1906. He moved to Atlanta in 1908 to work at the National Pencil Company, becoming superintendent. He married Lucille Selig in 1910 and was elected president of the Atlanta chapter of B'nai B'rith in 1912. On April 26, 1913, 13-year-old employee Mary Phagan was strangled and found dead in the factory's cellar. Two notes made to look as if she had written them were found beside her body. Police arrested several men, including night watchman Newt Lee, Frank, and janitor Jim Conley.
Reader's Guide
Frank's case spurred the creation of the Anti-Defamation League and the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan. The trial and lynching highlighted deep social tensions in early 20th-century Atlanta, including antisemitism, child labor concerns, and racial prejudice. The prosecution relied heavily on testimony from Jim Conley, a black janitor, whom many historians and researchers now believe was the actual murderer. Governor John M. Slaton commuted Frank's sentence from death to life imprisonment in 1915, but Frank was kidnapped from prison and lynched the next day. In 1986, the Georgia State Board of Pardons and Paroles issued a pardon recognizing the state's failures but took no stance on guilt or innocence. The case has inspired books, movies, a play, a musical, and a TV miniseries.
Did You Know?
- Frank was born in Cuero, Texas, but raised in Brooklyn, New York.
- The case spurred the creation of the Anti-Defamation League, which was founded in 1913, before Frank's lynching.
Roots in Chicago's Underworld
Frank John Cullotta entered the world on December 14, 1938, in Chicago, the son of Josephine Montedore and Joseph Raymond Cullotta. His father was already a man of the criminal world, though he operated independently of the Chicago Outfit. Young Frank left Steinmetz High School after just the ninth grade and threw himself into a life of crime alongside his boyhood companion Tony Spilotro, the two of them moving through a landscape of theft, burglary, and ultimately murder. The darkest chapter of that early period arrived in May 1962, when two men—William McCarthy and James Miraglia—were discovered lifeless inside the trunk of a car. McCarthy's head had been crushed in a vise and his throat cut; Miraglia had been strangled. Cullotta's role was indirect, but he was later connected to the killings. By 1968 he was convicted of burglary and handed an eight-year prison sentence. Paroled in 1972, he was shuffled to the federal facility at Terre Haute, then to a halfway house, and finally walked free in 1974.
The Hole in the Wall Gang
In early 1979, Cullotta relocated to Las Vegas to rejoin Spilotro, who had been running a crew of seasoned thieves, safecrackers, and killers there since 1971. The group earned its colorful media moniker—the "Hole in the Wall Gang"—from its signature technique of breaching homes and businesses by drilling straight through exterior walls and ceilings. In the desert city, Cullotta picked up the nickname "Frank Seville," a nod to the Cadillac Seville he drove. The gang's work, however, extended beyond property crimes. On October 10, 1979, acting on Spilotro's direct order, Cullotta killed Sherwin "Jerry" Lisner, a former friend suspected of tipping off a grand jury about a money-exchange scheme. The crew's luck ran out on July 4, 1981, when they attempted to hit Bertha's Gifts & Home Furnishings on East Sahara Avenue. An FBI and Las Vegas Metro police informant named Sal Romano had already fed information to law enforcement, and the entire crew—Cullotta, ex-Metro officer Joe Blasko, Leo Guardino, Ernest Davino, Lawrence Neumann, and Wayne Matecki—was rounded up and charged with burglary, conspiracy, attempted grand larceny, and possession of burglary tools.
Turning State's Evidence
In 1982, while serving time again, Cullotta was approached by the FBI. They played him a wiretap of Spilotro speaking with an unknown party about "having to clean our dirty laundry"—language Cullotta read as a veiled contract on his life. That fear sealed the deal: by July 1982, he had finalized a cooperation agreement with prosecutors. The payoff came in fall 1983. Spilotro was indicted for conspiracy and obstruction of justice in the Lisner murder and posted a $100,000 bond. At the October trial, Cullotta took the stand and confessed to involvement in more than three hundred crimes, including four murders, perjury, robberies, and burglaries. He also testified that Spilotro ordered him to place a telephone call luring one of the 1962 victims, William McCarthy, to a fast-food restaurant. Spilotro was ultimately acquitted. Cullotta received immunity for previously uncharged offenses but was sentenced to ten years, later reduced to eight after an outburst in court. He served two years at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in San Diego before being paroled into the witness protection program in 1984. For two years he lived under an assumed name, bouncing between Texas, Estes Park, Colorado, Biloxi and Gulfport, Mississippi, and Mobile, Alabama.
From Mobster to Storyteller
After leaving the witness protection program, Cullotta reinvented himself as a public figure and author. He supplied firsthand material for Nicholas Pileggi's 1995 book *Casino: Love and Honor in Las Vegas*, which Martin Scorsese adapted into the 1995 film of the same name. Cullotta's experiences inspired the character Frank Marino, portrayed by Frank Vincent, and he served as a technical advisor on the production while also appearing onscreen in a role as a hitman. He went on to co-author two books with Dennis N. Griffin—*Cullotta: The Life of a Chicago Criminal, Las Vegas Mobster, Government Witness* (2007, also with Dennis Arnoldy) and *The Rise and Fall of a "Casino" Mobster: The Tony Spilotro Story Through a Hitman's Eyes* (2017)—and participated in several documentaries. He found a steady niche as a tour guide and speaker at The Mob Museum in Las Vegas. In January 2020, he launched a YouTube channel called "Coffee with Cullotta," sharing his stories with a new audience. Just seven months later, on August 20, 2020, Cullotta died at age 81 in a Las Vegas hospital from complications related to COVID-19 and other medical issues. His passing was announced on that very channel.
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