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Speaker 1: Previously on murder in Oregon. Six pm on January the night before he was to present the findings of his investigation, Michael Frankie walked out of the Dome Building, headquarters of the Oregon Department of Corrections. Forty minutes later, Alice Clawson found his car with the driver's side door open. I went out the front steps and the door to his car was open, and I'm hard at him because I couldn't see him, and I had this really creepy feeling. After a four hour search, his body was found outside the office building's north entrance. He had been stabbed in the heart and was lying in a pool of his own blood and the glass he shattered trying to get back inside. He was a public official who discovered corruption in his own department the night before he was to address the Legislative committee on this very object. He was stabbed in the heart in front of the building where he worked. Corrections was made up of literally family members, an ex wife, a wife, a cousin, an uncle, a brother, a sister, and they basically interlocked and protected each other. There had been issues in the prison system that he discovered and wanted to remedy. I think he made a number of people in the department uncomfortable, probably the head of prison Dick Peterson, Scott McAllister, who was the a G lawyer who had for the previous twelve or thirteen years been assigned corrections, and so that's the third member of that collection of the Department of Corrections officers on the outs with Frankie. About a week after the murder, the police held a press conference and announced they were interested in talking with a man who had been seen in the dome build room. He's quickly became known as the man in the pin stripe suit. The pin stripe suit was supposed to this arm him, get him in his office and make it look like a suicide. I went to a psyche and she said that he has somebody in custody right now named John Ky. He says it's c cross. She said he probably didn't do it, but he had some information about it. They didn't like the people his confession would ultimately lead to. That's what it looks like for sure. Murder and Oregon is a production of I Heart Radio by Outward Appearances. At the time of Michael Frankie's murder, then Governor Neil Goldschmidt was Oregon's golden boy. He'd inherited a broken correction system, but hired Michael Frankie and made strides improving the department's reputation, which was tarnished by the six investigation. He seemingly had nothing to lose by pursuing Mike's killer. So why would he resist? Well, that was the big question. I mean, for all, anyone knew he was completely clean. He had been the golden boy of Oregon politics for years since he ran as a very young, handsome candidate for mayor and was even considered a likely candidate for president that people talked about him being the first Jewish president. And here he was governor resisting my requests another requests in the media for more attention to the eight six investigation and the possibility that Michael Frankie was investigating corruption in his department. He was resisting it. And I couldn't figure it out because he was a smart politician besides everything else, and he hadn't come into office until after the eighty six investigation or six cover up, as I think about it now, it didn't make any sense. I couldn't figure out what what's going on? Because he could have easily tacked it on to a mess he already inherited. Oh absolutely, he could have blamed it on his predecessor. Yeah, it happened under the previous administration. But there was no way anybody would have been prepared for the reason why no one thought there was a problem except me, I guess, and then there would be a huge problem. We would learn later that he had a great deal to cover up. I'm Lauren Bright Pacheco, and this is murder and Oregon. If gold Schmid's in action was a mystery, what's clear now is Salem and Oregon were heavily riddled with crime and corruption. Chuck Side served as a state representative in Oregon's legislature from nine. He grew up and into power in Salem's political system, and according to him, corruption has a long colorful history in the area. There's a lot of payoffs, you know. There was just basically the politicians knew who did get who not to get in those days. And it was literally the good old boys system that that worked for many, many, many, many many years. Well, when I came home from college where there was seven people that ran the town, and they came to me as my dad's friendships with him and said, hey, we want you on the school board. Okay, let be happy to that. I was on the school board within two weeks. It was kind of nice. It was just an opportunity for and it learned a lot. Because everything's political, everything's polite. So I learned that. As Chuck talked us through Oregon's checkered past, he gave us a tour of his beautifully restored historical office building. It's in downtown Salem, not far from the Dome building and has been utilized for many purposes over the years. It was once a Masonic lodge and even has a floor that served as a booze friendly ballroom during Prohibition, complete with an antique pump organ, just like the one Salem's elite class would have danced to back in the nineteen thirties. So the bar was up here. The original bar is still there, but this is where the organ was inside this little messanie. And of course that's where the slot machines were. And you had a little stair on the other side of this wall before it was remodeled, where that was where the guard was. So they wouldn't know if they were rated yeah, and you didn't touch him because they were still powerful that everybody belonged to a Masonic lodge. They had a lot of weight when it came to getting people elected on that and Chuck Side's own political career path wasn't too far off from that sort of model. According to Chuck, he didn't choose politics as much as politics chose him. After eight years on the school board, I was asked to run for the House of Representatives. Those same good old boys, the ones who ran the town and so quickly installed Chuck onto the school board. They also pushed for his election to the States House of Representatives. That's where he really started to get a first hand look into the structure of power in Oregon. We had a governor named Neil Goldschmidt. Neil was the type of person like a Bill Clinton, you go into a room and you just could follow him out. In our first episode, we talked a bit about Mike Frankie walked into on the heels of the investigation into corruption with an Oregon's prisons. Chuck Sides actually watched it unfold. The hookers and everybody were out on Portland Road, which is Highway ninety nine, and the truckers were funding the prostitutes and all that stuff, and that was normal. But it was very low key and he didn't And it's not until I started when I got elected. I started writing around with the city police. I learned more about my city than I ever knew in terms of weird things were done and all that other stuff. It was also extremely segregated. Salem did not allow minorities to live here. Even in the fifties. They were told by no un sudden terms, you're gone get out of here by by sundown. So I went to school, and a big, big school, high school. There was two blacks, and uh, you know, it was stuff like that that was happening that I never saw. But it was controlled by six having people, and things were put up with. But there were some situations that were beyond that system's power to contain. If gold Schmidt, as I thought at the time, was clean, then it was obvious even then that Marion County, the state government and the county government was anything but I mean, the two previous d A's had had been pushed out of office, one had gone to prison for dipping into public funds and giving out large amounts of confiscated weapons to his buddies, and the second one was pushed out of office in mid term over a domestic assault report. Here's Chuck Side's take, if you want to get into it. Dick Van Dyke's son, Chris was the d A in town and he was an up and comer and basically was going to be the next governor because he had that chrisma a lot like Goldsmith, all that stuff. Risk beat up his girlfriend and she filed police charges and instantly copies of that got out because the Republicans didn't want him running for governor. He was too good at Kennedy, but it knocked him out because of that whole scandal. We have a copy of that police report. And while the charges against Van Dyke were later dropped, the political damage was done. Here's Phil and so he left an eight three in Each of these changes in the d a's office were sort of Palace Cou's in a way, and Dale Penn ended up as a d A in about five Remember Dale Penn, he was the district attorney who oversaw that lb D investigation into corruption within Corrections, as well as the investigation into Michael Frankie's murder both during a time when the social atmosphere in Salem could be characterized as rather steamy and cd. The entire scene down there was overheated. It was the eighties. It was coke for the professional class, meth for the rest of the population, and the rest of the population included lots and lots of ex cons and cons on prol Salem, by law at that time, had all the prisons, and so that naturally drew all the families there when when they got out on parl they would often stay in that area. So it was a strange culture that included all the public officials and bureaucrats on one hand, and a large criminal population on the other. So that kind of culture, that kind of environment where you had X cons mingling, you know, side by side with the people who are supposed to be policing them. That sounds like the perfect recipe for corruption. Well, it certainly made it much easier, especially if you if you understand corruption as a part of the system. Salem in the nineties didn't exactly sound like Mayberry. Multiple people we interviewed referenced variations of a sex, drug and hot tub fueled atmosphere. Here's Chuck sides again. Down the block was a company called Key Title I no longer exists, but Key Title added beautiful women working for him and they got into a partnership for fun parties and that type of thing. This guy named Scott McAllister, who ever heard of worked for the Attorney General's office, had photos of those. It was the naked hot tub stuff that was good. But it was really relieving tensions after work. And obviously there was the relationships and everything, but I was totally naive until Michael. And then all of a sudden, this stuff came out and the cons knew it. And these subcultures and communities even formed inside the prisons where corruption like water also found its way and likely with even less resistance. There's a culture community inside the prisons, both sides, staff and the cons in that type of thing. I used to find it fascinating. As you met everybody this serial killer called the I five bandit you met Diane Downs. Diane Downs is the notorious Oregon postal worker who murdered her young daughter and attempted to kill her two other children in the nineteen nineties. At first, she claimed the kids were shot during an attempted carjacking. Then she showed up to trial shockingly noticeably pregnant. You met these people live sitting like this close. But it's just characters like that you find in a prison, and Chuck says, prisons at the time didn't exactly put the cell in celibate. There was a lot of sexts going on, and you would take your walkie talkies in those days or whatever you want to call them. And there was a couple of beep sounds that went out and that met there was a supervisor in the area coming straighten up. Let's get back to someone. Chuck Sides mentioned Scott McAllister. That's the assistant A. G. Michael was having trouble removing and his name will keep coming up. And these girls in hot tubs. McAllister apparently had photos. He took them as my gas. But there was a number of people there, I mean, but he was a part of the Attourney General's office. That was what they were doing. And so there was that little cold out there that in every large um community, both private and public, you'll find there's sin because we're all centers. But you'll find fighting and you'll find sex. After moving to Salem in nineteen seventy four. Jim Hill built an impressive career in law and politics. Before serving two terms as the state's treasurer, he was an assistant attorney general, a state representative, and a state senator. He also filled LB Day's vacant seat, who passed after the eighty six investigation. And Hill would have heard from the same prison guards, the same inmates, and the same officials who reported corruption the first time. And I remember when one of the conclusions out of the investigation was that the corrections institutions, each and one of them, was run like a fiefdom. And so that was always something that that was out there. Again. You know when you talk about corrections, whenever you're in close proximity to unlawful people, you're always concerned about that. Hill says, a stubborn naivete was firmly ingrained in the state. And see, this was a time when people felt that all the bad things that happened everywhere else in the country that can't happen in Oregon. You know, we're above and we're better than that. But once Michael uh Was was murdered, obviously that changed everything. But Hill was well aware of an ongoing pattern of corruption, particularly in corrections, including the Asian fire, which was arson for insurance purposes. Well, we knew about the fire, and I'm going far back in my memory banks now, but I remember there was a discussion that some people had now for example, donated things to Corrections for the inmates, and that the inmates aren't getting them, and that Corrections personnel was taking them those things for themselves or selling them or whatever. As time went on, as I started to put things together, and this is just my impression, this is my opinion, that there were prominent people in the community that were involved in illegal activity and that that had to go into the prisons. That's what makes sense. I mean, can't be so naive as to think that drugs don't get into prison. And I just started to get the impression that for people to want to take the risk of killing the head of Corrections, there was something very big that was being hidden, and it could have included a variety of people from a variety of social classes who had long profited from illegal activities. You know, in a lot of communities you find that when you have the usual things of prostitution, gambling, those kinds of things, sometimes there are prominent people in the community who have a connection to that. However, when you start talking about drugs, the antiques up tremendously because number one, you're talking about a lot of money, and you are also starting to get connected with some erry dangerous people who will do what's necessary to protect themselves. And then there were the law officers themselves, the people on the ground. J. Boutwell was a detective in the Marion County Sheriff's Department with more than two decades of experience and firsthand knowledge of rampant corruption. Well, I know, after I got into investigations, I determined and found out that it was more corruption in this town than people knew. We were understaffed, some of the people were not qualified. We had dirty carps, some I wouldn't hire for damned ug kitchen, dirty cops, dirty town about Well says many of his fellow police officers were more interested in women than in doing police work. They did middle with the girls in the office, other clerks in the office. He didn't matter if they were married, didn't make a damn to them. They do it anyway. I don't think there's one damn one of them that I would allow my wife to ever right, because I know what they talk, I know what they do. But there was that kind of stuff on, and we had the prostitution going on just right under your nose. You didn't want to do anything with it. Then we had the gamble at the same thing. One of the guys we tore out there was a former Organs State Police officer fact Confusion organ State. It must have been curiated you. Oh yeah, because like I told people, you know, I didn't come here for money. I came here because I hate crooks. I just got bet up in person. Boutwell has a wiry, restrained energy that crackles with intensity even now. He's the sort of guy you don't want to cross, and the type of guy you want on your side. That's why I was known. He don't screw with him because us your head. It's easy to understand how he got his nickname. That's why I got the name mad Dog, and nothing made him matter in corruption. We took on the gambling, and then we took on the prostitution, and that prostitution was something else. For years, uh there was a network of prostitute house ever and known as uh rub Shops, massage parlors, and uh word was they had worked it for many years trying to make a prostitution case, but for some reason couldn't do it well. In about six weeks we cleaned the whole county out of I think there was ten twelve, maybe fourteen massage parlors that we got. And the man I was after he was the king. Penny owned most of the four corners and was the inside actual owner, insulating himself by hiring all these other people. So the person we took down was the French quarter. And then there we arrested members of Salem's Ethics can maybe, So that's kind of how that went down, and it went down with meticulous surveillance. They put a guard inside which was for us as an undercover, and he was a former army intelligence officer, so he was taking notes. So we got politicians, we got attorneys, we got doctors, lawyers, big shots, people from Oregon state or even here. We even got police officers that were transport officers from other cities here doing things of this nature. It was out and out prostitution. The bad thing what it was is because of who we had in there is it goes to Dale Penn for prosecution. He was a district attorney and because of who was in there, he didn't take it. So he shoves over to St. Gees office. And this is where it gets really interesting, because the case was never prosecuted. It was we say it was swept on the carpet, and that's what they basically did. But we had judge in there. Even the name go out a Sloper Bala sloper signing circuit cart. Yet whoever we got in there with people you did not believe. Boutwell says, in addition to the high level, bold faced names they ensnared, it was also an air tight slam dunk case. We had out and out RICO. We could have did a RICO on it because of what was going on. Who these big people were. RICO stands for racketeer, influenced and corrupt Organizations, a federal law that provides for extended criminal penalties for acts performed as part of an ongoing criminal organization. All kinds of criminal activity was going on, drugs, you name, it was there. We had paper trails, eyewitness confessions by the jobs, and fashions by the prostitutes, policified needs with no way in hack he could have lost that case. They gave it over the A G. S Office. BAMS just kind of like under the dirt. Nobody wants to talking about it. Did you ever question that I did well. They were told that they were going to take take it pro prosecution because they were going to work it. Penn, he was kind of closed the mouth. Everybody was closed mouth about it, you know. Dang well, it was something that they didn't want out in the news. And the more stories about Well shared, the more I was reminded of something Phil once told me. Salem was like a big sweater and the thread of yarns had pop loose, and they couldn't afford to pull on it because the whole thing might come apart back to about well, there's a string of Arson's that I worked that I know has the same people in it, and every one of those things were the same thing. And that was at the time that Chris Van Dyck left and left Michael Brown as the district attorney, acting total election. I'd arrested a guy, the former Bailos Supreme Court and I took him of her several counts of juvenile right right in sex crime donald eleven year old girl over serious of the month. If these people all all got the same same thing, all tied together, just like a sweater. And apparently doing drugs also bonded the social levels of Salem at the time. Everyone was doing it. The drug bars in the city, the big coke bars were Jonathan's in the Black Angles. The large enters there would have talked to me about how they preferred to be tipped with little bundles of cocaine. And there were the lobbyists, the politicians, all the lawyers hanging out of these places. Everyone was into it. Kevin even told me that in the bathroom there was a special area set up just to do coke and Jonathan's. Yeah, there was a mirror and everyone knew it. Yeah, it was an open secret. And I've talked to people who did coke with judges, with politicians. Of course it was accepted and it was immediately compromising. That's the problem here, that's the problem. A man we will only refer to by his first name, Robert, had a front row seat to those compromised. He was a teen when he was hired to basically show for a guy named Ron Spears, who managed an auto repair shop and Salem that provided more than just auto service. Started off driving him to work. Sometimes he'd say, I come back about noon. Sometimes I'd show up pick him up, and I'd have to wait an hour, sometimes an hour and a half. I'd stand around and see what was going on, and I didn't really say much. They're working on a lot of state and county vehicles, and they had parking on the roof. So it started off a couple of weeks of that, and then in the evening we'd drive around and he'd make pickups. As he put it, he'd be picking up cash. Ron was very proud of his welding skills, and he'd had me look at a car and some of the old county and state cars they had back. Then you go see if you can find the compartment. Yeah, I go where he goes, Okay, look at look in the back. So I look in the back. I tried pulling carpet back and everything. Then he'd showed me in thirty seconds he'd have a compartment open. So he'd custom fit these cars with hidden compartments. Yeah, and a lot of the cars had the little cage in the back. So these were corrections vehicles that were used to transport inmates. I assume one of the times when he's mixing his beer with his queyludes and he'd he'd talk a lot. That's how you get him in the prison. They have their own auto shop in there. They know when it's coming, the guards know when it's coming. Yeah, So they were transporting drugs into the prison official vehicles, including the District Attorney's office. Uh, there's one lady that he was having a thing with. She'd always have her car down there and he would place round cylinder. Thing, why didn't she stick out in your head? Because she was down there a lot, especially for their after hours. You know, they'd kiss and all that. She was hooked. I think she was doing the same thing he was speed in the morning, queludes and night, and she worked at the district attorneys es. Sure, all these CD stories sound salacious, but Phil who has written four books on corruption, says these sort of situations are as American as apple pie. Well, I think it's probably fairly typical of a lot of cities at the time. My first book, Portland Confidential, was about Portland's back in the fifties when the old style payoff system was in force. It was actually part of city government in Portland in most major cities across the country, at the end of the month, the police captains and the head of the vice squad would go out to the major vice operators and collect what was due based on the number of card tables, number of prostitutes and so forth, and then divving it up to the city council, the mayor, and other certain high ranking police officials. My last it was about a suppressed vice scandal in Portland in the seventies, which is more like what was going on in Salem at the time. At that time, in Portland, the narcotics squad was actually putting drug dealers to work for them. They bust them, but they wouldn't take them in and arrest them. They just put them to work time and time again, and uh they would take large percentage of the deal. They would take drugs off the street from other drug dealers and give them to their favorite drug dealers. They put them back on the street. So that's the sort of thing that was going on in Salem. It wasn't that unusual. The drug money is so big it is hard to resist, and inevitably you're going to have narcotics cops who fall into it, and there are a number of dirty narcotics cops in Salem there, but beyond that, even those who don't become corrupt are compromised just because of the very nature of drug enforcement. The only way they can do it, since it's basically a cary that neither side is going to report the other four, is to team up with half the drug dealers, usually after they busted them, and get them to turn in their competition. It's instantly compromising and very often leads to corruption. Was there an organized drug dealing group or gang in Salem? There? There were several. It's a big businesses a major part of the economy in Salem any place else, And so you had a number of people cooking math. They had to have their distribution systems, people bringing in cocaine, heroin, and of course then marijuana was illegal. That was a big part of it too. And one of them, of course, was what we call the Kaiser Mafia, a bunch of guys who had grown up together in the attached suburb of Kaiser, started in high school, dealing drugs, breaking into places, getting into all sorts of trouble, but then figuring out how to stay out of it. That strategy apparently included paying off the local cops, some of whom they'd grown up and gone to school with, and cultivating business connections that reached behind bars. Vince Taylor ran with the Kaiser Mafia. It's just a bunch of group of guys that consider themselves untouchable, you know, with a lot of money and a lot of stuff. And they were running Kaiser in a sense where you know, if you didn't buy from them, then you better have an excuse why you don't buy them from them. They or asked them if it's okay to get it somewhere else, you know, stuff like that, and their drug dealing territory also included the prisons. Yeah, oh definitely. One of the members of the Kaiser Mafia was Taylor's childhood friend, a guy named Tim Natividad, who was also known as Rooster. He's someone whole heavily figure into multiple facets and theories about Mike Frankie's murder. A good looking guy with dark hair, dark eyes, and symmetrical features, but even as a kid, Natividad came with a past. I met Tim two days after he got here. I think he came here on with the witness protection program type thing with his mom became instantly friends with him. I mean, I don't know when the exact was, but I mean, like in the eighties and then Tim started using drugs, major personality changed. He was one person is that I can think of that should have never ever got involved in that kind of thing because he was a totally different person. Going to people's house and you know, they owe money, and he would get crazy, you know, I mean, God, for twenty dollars, twenty dollars, you're gonna beat him to death, you know, I mean, it's kind of ridiculous. He was violent, very violent. I mean, he probably full of gun on me at least in my lifetime ten times, and two of the times pulled the trigger, but there was misfired you know, I didn't shoot. So Tim got a reputation and many in fluting officials and corrections knew he was violent. Do you think that it's possible that Tim killed Michael Frankie? I do. I do. Yeah, I almost guarantee it that on it. Why. I just believe he did because he did a lot of crazy stuff didn't know one knew about, and then would have a huge amount of money, you know, and then what I heard, but you know, I can't tell you this for sure, but that he was paid to do that, you know, by prison. People didn't were involved, and we're stressing Frankie coming out with some crazy stuff. You know, it would have ended their job, career and everything. You know, Tim, he was capable of doing that. And I'm funny how he got killed with a knife, and that was Tim's main thing. He always had multiple knives on him, always had one in his hand with a blade out, always, always, always. I can't ever say for sure, but I would say he has. Anybody in this whole world would be the one responsible for that. On the next episode of Murder and Oregon, Corruption and Drugs Shatter Families, that was at home taking care of the baby, being a good girl while he was out selling drugs instigating violence. I was terrified. I knew he was going to kill me and grab that damn good and evil he had shot and killed him as her boyfriend, her husband, and she just started screaming. All tied to the same man and possibly to the murder of Michael Frankie. Murder and Oregan is hosted by Lauren Bright Peco and Phil Stanford. Executive producers are Noel Brown, Lauren Bright Pacheco, and Phil Stanford. Supervising producer and lead editor is Taylor shi Cone. Sound designed by Tristan McNeil, Story editing by Matt Riddle, Written by Phil Stanford, Matt Riddle and Lauren Bright Pacheco. Music written and performed by The Diamond Street Players and mixed by Taylor Chocoyne with music supervision by Noel Brown, additional music by Tristan McNeil. Murder and Oregon is a production of I Heart Radio
Speaker 1: Previously on murder in Oregon. Six pm on January the night before he was to present the findings of his investigation, Michael Frankie walked out of the Dome Building, headquarters of the Oregon Department of Corrections. Forty minutes later, Alice Clawson found his car with the driver's side door open. I went out the front steps and the door to his car was open, and I'm hard at him because I couldn't see him, and I had this really creepy feeling. After a four hour search, his body was found outside the office building's north entrance. He had been stabbed in the heart and was lying in a pool of his own blood and the glass he shattered trying to get back inside. He was a public official who discovered corruption in his own department the night before he was to address the Legislative committee on this very object. He was stabbed in the heart in front of the building where he worked. Corrections was made up of literally family members, an ex wife, a wife, a cousin, an uncle, a brother, a sister, and they basically interlocked and protected each other. There had been issues in the prison system that he discovered and wanted to remedy. I think he made a number of people in the department uncomfortable, probably the head of prison Dick Peterson, Scott McAllister, who was the a G lawyer who had for the previous twelve or thirteen years been assigned corrections, and so that's the third member of that collection of the Department of Corrections officers on the outs with Frankie. About a week after the murder, the police held a press conference and announced they were interested in talking with a man who had been seen in the dome build room. He's quickly became known as the man in the pin stripe suit. The pin stripe suit was supposed to this arm him, get him in his office and make it look like a suicide. I went to a psyche and she said that he has somebody in custody right now named John Ky. He says it's c cross. She said he probably didn't do it, but he had some information about it. They didn't like the people his confession would ultimately lead to. That's what it looks like for sure. Murder and Oregon is a production of I Heart Radio by Outward Appearances. At the time of Michael Frankie's murder, then Governor Neil Goldschmidt was Oregon's golden boy. He'd inherited a broken correction system, but hired Michael Frankie and made strides improving the department's reputation, which was tarnished by the six investigation. He seemingly had nothing to lose by pursuing Mike's killer. So why would he resist? Well, that was the big question. I mean, for all, anyone knew he was completely clean. He had been the golden boy of Oregon politics for years since he ran as a very young, handsome candidate for mayor and was even considered a likely candidate for president that people talked about him being the first Jewish president. And here he was governor resisting my requests another requests in the media for more attention to the eight six investigation and the possibility that Michael Frankie was investigating corruption in his department. He was resisting it. And I couldn't figure it out because he was a smart politician besides everything else, and he hadn't come into office until after the eighty six investigation or six cover up, as I think about it now, it didn't make any sense. I couldn't figure out what what's going on? Because he could have easily tacked it on to a mess he already inherited. Oh absolutely, he could have blamed it on his predecessor. Yeah, it happened under the previous administration. But there was no way anybody would have been prepared for the reason why no one thought there was a problem except me, I guess, and then there would be a huge problem. We would learn later that he had a great deal to cover up. I'm Lauren Bright Pacheco, and this is murder and Oregon. If gold Schmid's in action was a mystery, what's clear now is Salem and Oregon were heavily riddled with crime and corruption. Chuck Side served as a state representative in Oregon's legislature from nine. He grew up and into power in Salem's political system, and according to him, corruption has a long colorful history in the area. There's a lot of payoffs, you know. There was just basically the politicians knew who did get who not to get in those days. And it was literally the good old boys system that that worked for many, many, many, many many years. Well, when I came home from college where there was seven people that ran the town, and they came to me as my dad's friendships with him and said, hey, we want you on the school board. Okay, let be happy to that. I was on the school board within two weeks. It was kind of nice. It was just an opportunity for and it learned a lot. Because everything's political, everything's polite. So I learned that. As Chuck talked us through Oregon's checkered past, he gave us a tour of his beautifully restored historical office building. It's in downtown Salem, not far from the Dome building and has been utilized for many purposes over the years. It was once a Masonic lodge and even has a floor that served as a booze friendly ballroom during Prohibition, complete with an antique pump organ, just like the one Salem's elite class would have danced to back in the nineteen thirties. So the bar was up here. The original bar is still there, but this is where the organ was inside this little messanie. And of course that's where the slot machines were. And you had a little stair on the other side of this wall before it was remodeled, where that was where the guard was. So they wouldn't know if they were rated yeah, and you didn't touch him because they were still powerful that everybody belonged to a Masonic lodge. They had a lot of weight when it came to getting people elected on that and Chuck Side's own political career path wasn't too far off from that sort of model. According to Chuck, he didn't choose politics as much as politics chose him. After eight years on the school board, I was asked to run for the House of Representatives. Those same good old boys, the ones who ran the town and so quickly installed Chuck onto the school board. They also pushed for his election to the States House of Representatives. That's where he really started to get a first hand look into the structure of power in Oregon. We had a governor named Neil Goldschmidt. Neil was the type of person like a Bill Clinton, you go into a room and you just could follow him out. In our first episode, we talked a bit about Mike Frankie walked into on the heels of the investigation into corruption with an Oregon's prisons. Chuck Sides actually watched it unfold. The hookers and everybody were out on Portland Road, which is Highway ninety nine, and the truckers were funding the prostitutes and all that stuff, and that was normal. But it was very low key and he didn't And it's not until I started when I got elected. I started writing around with the city police. I learned more about my city than I ever knew in terms of weird things were done and all that other stuff. It was also extremely segregated. Salem did not allow minorities to live here. Even in the fifties. They were told by no un sudden terms, you're gone get out of here by by sundown. So I went to school, and a big, big school, high school. There was two blacks, and uh, you know, it was stuff like that that was happening that I never saw. But it was controlled by six having people, and things were put up with. But there were some situations that were beyond that system's power to contain. If gold Schmidt, as I thought at the time, was clean, then it was obvious even then that Marion County, the state government and the county government was anything but I mean, the two previous d A's had had been pushed out of office, one had gone to prison for dipping into public funds and giving out large amounts of confiscated weapons to his buddies, and the second one was pushed out of office in mid term over a domestic assault report. Here's Chuck Side's take, if you want to get into it. Dick Van Dyke's son, Chris was the d A in town and he was an up and comer and basically was going to be the next governor because he had that chrisma a lot like Goldsmith, all that stuff. Risk beat up his girlfriend and she filed police charges and instantly copies of that got out because the Republicans didn't want him running for governor. He was too good at Kennedy, but it knocked him out because of that whole scandal. We have a copy of that police report. And while the charges against Van Dyke were later dropped, the political damage was done. Here's Phil and so he left an eight three in Each of these changes in the d a's office were sort of Palace Cou's in a way, and Dale Penn ended up as a d A in about five Remember Dale Penn, he was the district attorney who oversaw that lb D investigation into corruption within Corrections, as well as the investigation into Michael Frankie's murder both during a time when the social atmosphere in Salem could be characterized as rather steamy and cd. The entire scene down there was overheated. It was the eighties. It was coke for the professional class, meth for the rest of the population, and the rest of the population included lots and lots of ex cons and cons on prol Salem, by law at that time, had all the prisons, and so that naturally drew all the families there when when they got out on parl they would often stay in that area. So it was a strange culture that included all the public officials and bureaucrats on one hand, and a large criminal population on the other. So that kind of culture, that kind of environment where you had X cons mingling, you know, side by side with the people who are supposed to be policing them. That sounds like the perfect recipe for corruption. Well, it certainly made it much easier, especially if you if you understand corruption as a part of the system. Salem in the nineties didn't exactly sound like Mayberry. Multiple people we interviewed referenced variations of a sex, drug and hot tub fueled atmosphere. Here's Chuck sides again. Down the block was a company called Key Title I no longer exists, but Key Title added beautiful women working for him and they got into a partnership for fun parties and that type of thing. This guy named Scott McAllister, who ever heard of worked for the Attorney General's office, had photos of those. It was the naked hot tub stuff that was good. But it was really relieving tensions after work. And obviously there was the relationships and everything, but I was totally naive until Michael. And then all of a sudden, this stuff came out and the cons knew it. And these subcultures and communities even formed inside the prisons where corruption like water also found its way and likely with even less resistance. There's a culture community inside the prisons, both sides, staff and the cons in that type of thing. I used to find it fascinating. As you met everybody this serial killer called the I five bandit you met Diane Downs. Diane Downs is the notorious Oregon postal worker who murdered her young daughter and attempted to kill her two other children in the nineteen nineties. At first, she claimed the kids were shot during an attempted carjacking. Then she showed up to trial shockingly noticeably pregnant. You met these people live sitting like this close. But it's just characters like that you find in a prison, and Chuck says, prisons at the time didn't exactly put the cell in celibate. There was a lot of sexts going on, and you would take your walkie talkies in those days or whatever you want to call them. And there was a couple of beep sounds that went out and that met there was a supervisor in the area coming straighten up. Let's get back to someone. Chuck Sides mentioned Scott McAllister. That's the assistant A. G. Michael was having trouble removing and his name will keep coming up. And these girls in hot tubs. McAllister apparently had photos. He took them as my gas. But there was a number of people there, I mean, but he was a part of the Attourney General's office. That was what they were doing. And so there was that little cold out there that in every large um community, both private and public, you'll find there's sin because we're all centers. But you'll find fighting and you'll find sex. After moving to Salem in nineteen seventy four. Jim Hill built an impressive career in law and politics. Before serving two terms as the state's treasurer, he was an assistant attorney general, a state representative, and a state senator. He also filled LB Day's vacant seat, who passed after the eighty six investigation. And Hill would have heard from the same prison guards, the same inmates, and the same officials who reported corruption the first time. And I remember when one of the conclusions out of the investigation was that the corrections institutions, each and one of them, was run like a fiefdom. And so that was always something that that was out there. Again. You know when you talk about corrections, whenever you're in close proximity to unlawful people, you're always concerned about that. Hill says, a stubborn naivete was firmly ingrained in the state. And see, this was a time when people felt that all the bad things that happened everywhere else in the country that can't happen in Oregon. You know, we're above and we're better than that. But once Michael uh Was was murdered, obviously that changed everything. But Hill was well aware of an ongoing pattern of corruption, particularly in corrections, including the Asian fire, which was arson for insurance purposes. Well, we knew about the fire, and I'm going far back in my memory banks now, but I remember there was a discussion that some people had now for example, donated things to Corrections for the inmates, and that the inmates aren't getting them, and that Corrections personnel was taking them those things for themselves or selling them or whatever. As time went on, as I started to put things together, and this is just my impression, this is my opinion, that there were prominent people in the community that were involved in illegal activity and that that had to go into the prisons. That's what makes sense. I mean, can't be so naive as to think that drugs don't get into prison. And I just started to get the impression that for people to want to take the risk of killing the head of Corrections, there was something very big that was being hidden, and it could have included a variety of people from a variety of social classes who had long profited from illegal activities. You know, in a lot of communities you find that when you have the usual things of prostitution, gambling, those kinds of things, sometimes there are prominent people in the community who have a connection to that. However, when you start talking about drugs, the antiques up tremendously because number one, you're talking about a lot of money, and you are also starting to get connected with some erry dangerous people who will do what's necessary to protect themselves. And then there were the law officers themselves, the people on the ground. J. Boutwell was a detective in the Marion County Sheriff's Department with more than two decades of experience and firsthand knowledge of rampant corruption. Well, I know, after I got into investigations, I determined and found out that it was more corruption in this town than people knew. We were understaffed, some of the people were not qualified. We had dirty carps, some I wouldn't hire for damned ug kitchen, dirty cops, dirty town about Well says many of his fellow police officers were more interested in women than in doing police work. They did middle with the girls in the office, other clerks in the office. He didn't matter if they were married, didn't make a damn to them. They do it anyway. I don't think there's one damn one of them that I would allow my wife to ever right, because I know what they talk, I know what they do. But there was that kind of stuff on, and we had the prostitution going on just right under your nose. You didn't want to do anything with it. Then we had the gamble at the same thing. One of the guys we tore out there was a former Organs State Police officer fact Confusion organ State. It must have been curiated you. Oh yeah, because like I told people, you know, I didn't come here for money. I came here because I hate crooks. I just got bet up in person. Boutwell has a wiry, restrained energy that crackles with intensity even now. He's the sort of guy you don't want to cross, and the type of guy you want on your side. That's why I was known. He don't screw with him because us your head. It's easy to understand how he got his nickname. That's why I got the name mad Dog, and nothing made him matter in corruption. We took on the gambling, and then we took on the prostitution, and that prostitution was something else. For years, uh there was a network of prostitute house ever and known as uh rub Shops, massage parlors, and uh word was they had worked it for many years trying to make a prostitution case, but for some reason couldn't do it well. In about six weeks we cleaned the whole county out of I think there was ten twelve, maybe fourteen massage parlors that we got. And the man I was after he was the king. Penny owned most of the four corners and was the inside actual owner, insulating himself by hiring all these other people. So the person we took down was the French quarter. And then there we arrested members of Salem's Ethics can maybe, So that's kind of how that went down, and it went down with meticulous surveillance. They put a guard inside which was for us as an undercover, and he was a former army intelligence officer, so he was taking notes. So we got politicians, we got attorneys, we got doctors, lawyers, big shots, people from Oregon state or even here. We even got police officers that were transport officers from other cities here doing things of this nature. It was out and out prostitution. The bad thing what it was is because of who we had in there is it goes to Dale Penn for prosecution. He was a district attorney and because of who was in there, he didn't take it. So he shoves over to St. Gees office. And this is where it gets really interesting, because the case was never prosecuted. It was we say it was swept on the carpet, and that's what they basically did. But we had judge in there. Even the name go out a Sloper Bala sloper signing circuit cart. Yet whoever we got in there with people you did not believe. Boutwell says, in addition to the high level, bold faced names they ensnared, it was also an air tight slam dunk case. We had out and out RICO. We could have did a RICO on it because of what was going on. Who these big people were. RICO stands for racketeer, influenced and corrupt Organizations, a federal law that provides for extended criminal penalties for acts performed as part of an ongoing criminal organization. All kinds of criminal activity was going on, drugs, you name, it was there. We had paper trails, eyewitness confessions by the jobs, and fashions by the prostitutes, policified needs with no way in hack he could have lost that case. They gave it over the A G. S Office. BAMS just kind of like under the dirt. Nobody wants to talking about it. Did you ever question that I did well. They were told that they were going to take take it pro prosecution because they were going to work it. Penn, he was kind of closed the mouth. Everybody was closed mouth about it, you know. Dang well, it was something that they didn't want out in the news. And the more stories about Well shared, the more I was reminded of something Phil once told me. Salem was like a big sweater and the thread of yarns had pop loose, and they couldn't afford to pull on it because the whole thing might come apart back to about well, there's a string of Arson's that I worked that I know has the same people in it, and every one of those things were the same thing. And that was at the time that Chris Van Dyck left and left Michael Brown as the district attorney, acting total election. I'd arrested a guy, the former Bailos Supreme Court and I took him of her several counts of juvenile right right in sex crime donald eleven year old girl over serious of the month. If these people all all got the same same thing, all tied together, just like a sweater. And apparently doing drugs also bonded the social levels of Salem at the time. Everyone was doing it. The drug bars in the city, the big coke bars were Jonathan's in the Black Angles. The large enters there would have talked to me about how they preferred to be tipped with little bundles of cocaine. And there were the lobbyists, the politicians, all the lawyers hanging out of these places. Everyone was into it. Kevin even told me that in the bathroom there was a special area set up just to do coke and Jonathan's. Yeah, there was a mirror and everyone knew it. Yeah, it was an open secret. And I've talked to people who did coke with judges, with politicians. Of course it was accepted and it was immediately compromising. That's the problem here, that's the problem. A man we will only refer to by his first name, Robert, had a front row seat to those compromised. He was a teen when he was hired to basically show for a guy named Ron Spears, who managed an auto repair shop and Salem that provided more than just auto service. Started off driving him to work. Sometimes he'd say, I come back about noon. Sometimes I'd show up pick him up, and I'd have to wait an hour, sometimes an hour and a half. I'd stand around and see what was going on, and I didn't really say much. They're working on a lot of state and county vehicles, and they had parking on the roof. So it started off a couple of weeks of that, and then in the evening we'd drive around and he'd make pickups. As he put it, he'd be picking up cash. Ron was very proud of his welding skills, and he'd had me look at a car and some of the old county and state cars they had back. Then you go see if you can find the compartment. Yeah, I go where he goes, Okay, look at look in the back. So I look in the back. I tried pulling carpet back and everything. Then he'd showed me in thirty seconds he'd have a compartment open. So he'd custom fit these cars with hidden compartments. Yeah, and a lot of the cars had the little cage in the back. So these were corrections vehicles that were used to transport inmates. I assume one of the times when he's mixing his beer with his queyludes and he'd he'd talk a lot. That's how you get him in the prison. They have their own auto shop in there. They know when it's coming, the guards know when it's coming. Yeah, So they were transporting drugs into the prison official vehicles, including the District Attorney's office. Uh, there's one lady that he was having a thing with. She'd always have her car down there and he would place round cylinder. Thing, why didn't she stick out in your head? Because she was down there a lot, especially for their after hours. You know, they'd kiss and all that. She was hooked. I think she was doing the same thing he was speed in the morning, queludes and night, and she worked at the district attorneys es. Sure, all these CD stories sound salacious, but Phil who has written four books on corruption, says these sort of situations are as American as apple pie. Well, I think it's probably fairly typical of a lot of cities at the time. My first book, Portland Confidential, was about Portland's back in the fifties when the old style payoff system was in force. It was actually part of city government in Portland in most major cities across the country, at the end of the month, the police captains and the head of the vice squad would go out to the major vice operators and collect what was due based on the number of card tables, number of prostitutes and so forth, and then divving it up to the city council, the mayor, and other certain high ranking police officials. My last it was about a suppressed vice scandal in Portland in the seventies, which is more like what was going on in Salem at the time. At that time, in Portland, the narcotics squad was actually putting drug dealers to work for them. They bust them, but they wouldn't take them in and arrest them. They just put them to work time and time again, and uh they would take large percentage of the deal. They would take drugs off the street from other drug dealers and give them to their favorite drug dealers. They put them back on the street. So that's the sort of thing that was going on in Salem. It wasn't that unusual. The drug money is so big it is hard to resist, and inevitably you're going to have narcotics cops who fall into it, and there are a number of dirty narcotics cops in Salem there, but beyond that, even those who don't become corrupt are compromised just because of the very nature of drug enforcement. The only way they can do it, since it's basically a cary that neither side is going to report the other four, is to team up with half the drug dealers, usually after they busted them, and get them to turn in their competition. It's instantly compromising and very often leads to corruption. Was there an organized drug dealing group or gang in Salem? There? There were several. It's a big businesses a major part of the economy in Salem any place else, And so you had a number of people cooking math. They had to have their distribution systems, people bringing in cocaine, heroin, and of course then marijuana was illegal. That was a big part of it too. And one of them, of course, was what we call the Kaiser Mafia, a bunch of guys who had grown up together in the attached suburb of Kaiser, started in high school, dealing drugs, breaking into places, getting into all sorts of trouble, but then figuring out how to stay out of it. That strategy apparently included paying off the local cops, some of whom they'd grown up and gone to school with, and cultivating business connections that reached behind bars. Vince Taylor ran with the Kaiser Mafia. It's just a bunch of group of guys that consider themselves untouchable, you know, with a lot of money and a lot of stuff. And they were running Kaiser in a sense where you know, if you didn't buy from them, then you better have an excuse why you don't buy them from them. They or asked them if it's okay to get it somewhere else, you know, stuff like that, and their drug dealing territory also included the prisons. Yeah, oh definitely. One of the members of the Kaiser Mafia was Taylor's childhood friend, a guy named Tim Natividad, who was also known as Rooster. He's someone whole heavily figure into multiple facets and theories about Mike Frankie's murder. A good looking guy with dark hair, dark eyes, and symmetrical features, but even as a kid, Natividad came with a past. I met Tim two days after he got here. I think he came here on with the witness protection program type thing with his mom became instantly friends with him. I mean, I don't know when the exact was, but I mean, like in the eighties and then Tim started using drugs, major personality changed. He was one person is that I can think of that should have never ever got involved in that kind of thing because he was a totally different person. Going to people's house and you know, they owe money, and he would get crazy, you know, I mean, God, for twenty dollars, twenty dollars, you're gonna beat him to death, you know, I mean, it's kind of ridiculous. He was violent, very violent. I mean, he probably full of gun on me at least in my lifetime ten times, and two of the times pulled the trigger, but there was misfired you know, I didn't shoot. So Tim got a reputation and many in fluting officials and corrections knew he was violent. Do you think that it's possible that Tim killed Michael Frankie? I do. I do. Yeah, I almost guarantee it that on it. Why. I just believe he did because he did a lot of crazy stuff didn't know one knew about, and then would have a huge amount of money, you know, and then what I heard, but you know, I can't tell you this for sure, but that he was paid to do that, you know, by prison. People didn't were involved, and we're stressing Frankie coming out with some crazy stuff. You know, it would have ended their job, career and everything. You know, Tim, he was capable of doing that. And I'm funny how he got killed with a knife, and that was Tim's main thing. He always had multiple knives on him, always had one in his hand with a blade out, always, always, always. I can't ever say for sure, but I would say he has. Anybody in this whole world would be the one responsible for that. On the next episode of Murder and Oregon, Corruption and Drugs Shatter Families, that was at home taking care of the baby, being a good girl while he was out selling drugs instigating violence. I was terrified. I knew he was going to kill me and grab that damn good and evil he had shot and killed him as her boyfriend, her husband, and she just started screaming. All tied to the same man and possibly to the murder of Michael Frankie. Murder and Oregan is hosted by Lauren Bright Peco and Phil Stanford. Executive producers are Noel Brown, Lauren Bright Pacheco, and Phil Stanford. Supervising producer and lead editor is Taylor shi Cone. Sound designed by Tristan McNeil, Story editing by Matt Riddle, Written by Phil Stanford, Matt Riddle and Lauren Bright Pacheco. Music written and performed by The Diamond Street Players and mixed by Taylor Chocoyne with music supervision by Noel Brown, additional music by Tristan McNeil. Murder and Oregon is a production of I Heart Radio
