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"Several Thousand Dollars." But Julian Frank had serious problems—and they were closing in on him even as he boarded the Miami-bound National plane that took him to his death. He was being harassed by a bevy of businessmen who claimed he had swindled them. Among the claims: 1) that Frank had operated behind a phony company named J. & P. Factors Inc., whose only address was a mail drop; 2) that he had pocketed $8,025 in fees from a Phoenix firm, then reneged on his promise to raise mortgage money; 3) that he had bilked associates in real-estate deals out of some $40,000; 4) that he had gypped "several thousand dollars" out of businessmen who had retained him to help raise money for some Missouri hospitals. At the time he died, Frank was under investigation by the FBI and the New York District Attorney, and the New York Bar Association was considering disbarment procedures against him.
Lawyer Frank took aboard the National Airlines plane a small blue bag of the sort later found near the crash. His body, washed ashore from the Atlantic at a point about 16 miles from the actual crash scene, was missing a leg and a foot and had been pierced by pieces of metal which, investigators said, did not seem to have been part of the plane itself. Insane as it seemed, if Julian Frank did commit suicide by blowing up himself and his fellow passengers, he had at least a sort of reason: only by making it appear that he had died in an accident and not by suicide could he have hoped that his widow would ever get her insurance money.
"For $500." In the second case under investigation last week, Federal Bureau of Investigation officials, while revealing few details, said they were working on a theory about the crash of a National Airlines DC-7B that went down with 42 aboard in the Gulf of Mexico last November. The theory: that a Dallas naturopath named Robert Spears, 64, possessor of a long police record that included forgery, fraud, armed robbery and a penitentiary term, may have been involved in the crash. Most interesting fact about Spears, whose name appeared on the flight's passenger manifest: the FBI reported that he had once said "that for $500 he would blow up a hospital."