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David Cole’s Leo Frank Theory Turns the Trial Record Into a Fable

By Becky Davis, student of the Phagan case and contributor to the MPK Legacy Project

June 1, 2026

Atlanta, Georgia

David Cole, formerly known as David Cole stein and David Stein, is an American writer, journalist, author, documentary filmmaker, and videographer whose public career has moved through several dramatic reinventions. Born in 1968 at Los Angeles to liberal, secular Jewish parents, Cole first became publicly known in the early 1990s as a Jewish Holocaust revisionist whose documentary work challenged established Holocaust scholarship, especially disputed claims involving Auschwitz and Nazi gas chambers. His most discussed production during that period was David Cole Interviews Dr. Franciszek Piper, a 1992 Auschwitz documentary that questioned the authenticity of the Auschwitz gas chamber and associated mainstream postwar atrocity narratives.

Cole’s later life complicates the picture. After years of public controversy, a death threat attributed to the Jewish Defense League, and an appeasing Holocaust denial recantation letter, he reportedly later said was false and did not reflect his actual views, Cole changed identities in January 1998 and began writing and working under the name David Stein. Cole later claimed in his January 14, 2015 Taki’s Magazine article, Hate Speech Derby: Mohammed vs. Auschwitz, that he had been beaten up three times by JDL members and that the group had placed a $25,000 bounty on him. He repeated similar claims in later Taki’s articles, including Tucker’s MAGA Millstone and Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolfberg? 

According to The Guardian, he later made conventional Holocaust documentaries for mainstream audiences, but in 2013 he told the newspaper that his earlier recantation had been fake and that he had not changed his views. For that reason, it might be more accurate to describe him as a former public Holocaust revisionist who later reinvented himself under the Stein name, rather than as a fully reformed figure who unequivocally repudiated his 1992 Auschwitz documentary and Holocaust revisionist work. His present position is difficult to pin down with certainty, but as a believer of the good in all people, I would give him the benefit of the doubt that he is likely more sober in his assessments.   

In his April 18, 2023 article, “Thank You for Your Disservice,” he breaks his identities into periods: “David Cole the Holocaust ‘revisionist’ (1989–1998)” and “‘David Stein’ the GOP operative (1999–2013).” Today he uses the name David Cole. 

The JDL and Jewish American Terrorism

The Jewish Defense League detail is not incidental. The FBI’s official Terrorism 2000/2001 report identified Irving David Rubin and Earl Leslie Krugel as members of the extremist Jewish Defense League and stated that they were arrested in December 2001, while in the final stages of planning incendiary attacks against the King Fahd Mosque in Culver City, California, and the local office of Congressman Darrell Issa. The same FBI report described the JDL as a violent extremist Jewish organization and attested that the group had been deemed a right-wing terrorist group. 

Federal prosecutors later stated that Krugel pleaded guilty to conspiring to bomb the King Fahd Mosque and to carrying an explosive in relation to a conspiracy to bomb a field office of Congressman Issa. Irving David Rubin, who was awaiting trial in the JDL bomb-plot case, was gravely injured on November 4, 2002, after what federal authorities described as a suicide attempt at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Los Angeles. Officials said he cut his throat with a jail-issued razor and then fell or jumped about eighteen feet over a railing. He died nine days later, on November 13, 2002, at Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center, though his family disputed the official account. Krugel, who received a twenty-year federal prison sentence, was killed in federal prison on November 4, 2005. According to the FBI, U.S. authorities documented JDL-linked extremist violence and classified at least some JDL-linked activity as domestic terrorism.

The Stein Makeover, Taki's Magazine and Brief Foray in the Jim Conley Dispute Over Leo Frank's case

That extraordinary background does not explain Cole’s Leo Frank case analysis by itself. It does, however, reveal something about the pressures, threats, reinventions, and public silences that shaped his later persona. It might also help to explain why his public identity became so complicated before he turned briefly to the Leo Frank case in Taki’s Magazine.

Under the David Stein rebrand of 15 years (1998 - 2013), Cole became active in California and Hollywood right-wing political circles, including Republican Party Animals and the closed-door world of Hollywood conservatives.

He later, as David Cole, contributed to Taki’s Magazine during a decade-long run as a columnist, with articles appearing there between January 14, 2015, and April 15, 2025. His April 12, 2017 article on Jim Conley is the piece under examination here.

From page 2 of David Cole's April 2017 Taki's Magazine article, The Negro Jim Conley’s Baadasssss Song (http://www.takimag.com/article/the_negro_jim_conleys_baadasssss_song_david_cole/2/)
 
Quote, "This month is the 104th anniversary of the murder of Mary Phagan. For the few of you who might not be familiar with the story, here’s the short version: A 13-year-old white girl was murdered in an Atlanta pencil factory. The Jewish factory manager, Leo Frank, was immediately suspected. Two notes found by the body were written by the black janitor; all parties involved agreed that the placement of the notes proved that the janitor had been in contact with the corpse. The black janitor claimed that the Jew manager had forced him to write the notes in order to deflect the blame from himself. The Jew was put on trial, the Jew was convicted, the Jew’s death sentence was commuted to life, the Jew was lynched.
 
I'm not here to debate whether the Jew or the janitor committed the crime. Scores of people have spent years studying the Phagan case, only to come to diametrically opposed conclusions. My interest is only in pointing out one aspect of the story. Detectives became certain that the janitor, a man often referred to in contemporary press accounts as “the Negro Jim Conley,” had been forced to write the notes because Conley, an illiterate, didn't have the English language skills to have written the notes his’self. In particular, big-brained detectives and prosecutors pointed out that the notes had used the word “did,” as in, “he did it,” whereas the small-brained Conley knew only to use the word “done“ in such a context (“he done it”). The notes, therefore, had to have been dictated by the big-but-evil-brained Leo Frank.
 

Case closed. Except no, Conley had fooled everyone. He was quite literate for a black person at the time (he'd even attended one of Atlanta’s best black public schools). Whether Frank was guilty, or whether Conley was, can be debated forever. What is not up for debate is that Conley totally tricked the white detectives and prosecutors (Conley’s own attorney admitted after the trial that his client had fooled everyone regarding his literacy). Here’s the hubris: The whites involved in the case never believed for an instant that a negro could fool them. It had to be the Jew! The mesmerizing Jew and his witchcraft. The detectives and prosecutors were so certain that they could only be misled by a Jew, that only a Jew would have the temerity to even attempt to outmaneuver them, that they may have allowed a guilty man to walk free (and, by extension, an innocent man to be lynched)." 

The Shape of the Argument

Cole makes one reasonable point early in his article: reducing every historical question to sectarian or identity politics is intellectually lazy and corrupts the record. That observation is fair enough. The problem is that his own reading of the Leo Frank case ends up doing something similar, only in another direction. That is the irony. Or what others have called it: hypocrisy. 

His theory compresses the entire case into a single premise of ignorance: that white Atlanta investigators in 1913 were so blinded by racial arrogance that they could not imagine Jim Conley, a Black factory sweeper with limited formal schooling, composing the two death notes found beside Mary Phagan’s body on his own. Because investigators underestimated him, Conley supposedly escaped real scrutiny. Because he escaped scrutiny, Leo Frank was convicted of a murder he did not commit.

That is the subtext of Stein’s argument. In his version of reality, and for his theory to work, Conley would have had to deceive the Atlanta Police Department, trick the Pinkerton detectives, gull Fulton County prosecutors, fool the trial jury, hoodwink Judge Leonard Strickland Roan, flimflam the Georgia Supreme Court, and finally outmaneuver the United States Supreme Court when it declined to disturb Frank’s conviction.

One factory janitor with limited formal education, under intense police interrogation and prosecutorial scrutiny, supposedly manipulated every legal institution that handled the case throughout the process. That is essentially the load-bearing premise of Stein’s rhetoric. Without it, the theory does not stand, but collapses like a poorly built house of cards.

What the Record Actually Contains

The Leo Frank trial record is not a simple document. The Brief of Evidence filed before the Georgia Supreme Court runs to hundreds of pages. It includes Frank’s own statements, their inconsistencies, and incriminating details. The twenty-five-day trial included critical testimony about Frank’s behavior and movements on April 26, 1913, Confederate Memorial Day in Atlanta. It covered Mary Phagan’s final movements inside the National Pencil Company building, the physical evidence recovered there, the death notes, circumstantial factory witness testimony, Conley’s four written affidavits, and his extensive trial testimony and cross-examination. It also included Monteen Stover’s testimony, exhibits involving hair found on the lathe and blood on the metal-room floor, a highly disputed reconstructed time slip, and a blood-stained shirt planted at the residence of factory nightwatchman Newt Lee.

To reduce the Frank trial to “Jim Conley duped everyone, therefore Leo Frank is automatically innocent” is not history. It is special pleading. It is advocacy in drag, dressed up as analysis. That oversimplified rhetoric represents the credibility of a polemic written by someone who never seriously studied the Atlanta newspaper accounts that printed the lawyers’ questions and the witnesses’ answers, or the official trial brief itself, which was reviewed and ratified by the defense, the prosecution, and the presiding judge Leonard S. Roan. A serious reading of the case has to begin with the record, not with a slogan built to make all the legal records disappear into irrelevance.

David Cole (2017): "The notes, therefore, had to have been dictated by the big-but-evil-brained Leo Frank. Case closed. Except no, Conley had fooled everyone."

Conley’s account was not accepted uncritically. He was questioned again and again, caught in contradictions, and pressed hard by Frank’s defense team, which included some of the most capable criminal lawyers in Georgia. The jury heard those inconsistencies. It also heard testimony from other factory witnesses whose accounts intersected with Conley’s in ways that were difficult to dismiss as one man’s invention, particularly when placed beside the trial exhibits: the blood-soaked shirt, the disputed time card that was almost certainly a forgery, and, of course, the death notes.

The jury deliberated for several hours and convicted Leo Frank based on the evidence, not because the jurors were terrorized, nor because of accusations about mob pressure or Jew hatred. The Georgia Supreme Court reviewed the record and upheld the verdict. The case then moved through the federal courts and reached the United States Supreme Court, which declined to disturb the conviction in Frank v. Mangum in 1915. At no stage did a reviewing court find that Conley’s testimony was so obviously fabricated that the verdict could not stand.

David Cole wrote in 2017: “The detectives and prosecutors were so certain that they could only be misled by a Jew, that only a Jew would have the temerity to even attempt to outmaneuver them, that they may have allowed a guilty man to walk free (and, by extension, an innocent man to be lynched).”

But neither the detectives nor the prosecutors framed the case that way. They did not argue that Leo Frank must be guilty because he was a scheming Jew, nor did they claim that Jim Conley was incapable of manipulation because he was a semi-literate or supposedly low-IQ Black man. Cole’s response to the trial record is therefore to impose a later identity-politics narrative onto the case, treating a racial and ethnic reading as if it explains the verdict.

What he is really asking the reader to believe is sweeping: that the police, Pinkerton detectives, Fulton County prosecutors, the trial jury, Judge Leonard Strickland Roan, the Georgia Supreme Court, and the United States Supreme Court all failed because they did not properly appreciate Conley’s intelligence. What Cole presents is not historical analysis. It is a preposterous claim offered in place of evidence.

Cole asks the reader to believe that nearly every legal authority involved in the case misunderstood Conley’s three and a half weeks of intransigence, denial, and reticence in a capital murder investigation, where death by hanging remained a real possibility. Meanwhile, this modern commentator, standing safely at a century’s distance and using racial and ethnic identity politics to rehabilitate the convicted man, claims he can explain the entire prosecution with one clever interpretive move. That is the weakness in Cole’s theory, it's rooted in identity politics, where he claims the whole case boils down to antisemitism. He references Jew and all its variations 2 dozen times in the article, 'The Negro Jim Conley’s Baadasssss Song - Taki's Magazine.' Across the two-page histrionic article, Cole uses Jew-root language thirty-nine times: “Jew” thirteen times, “Jews” twenty-one times, and “Jewish” four times.

The question of Jim Conley’s literacy did not remain a matter of guesswork. When Conley first came under suspicion, he tried to distance himself from the death notes by claiming he could not write. That claim began to collapse when investigators produced writing tied to him through pawn-shop paperwork, including a pawn contract connected to a pocket watch that bore Conley’s signature. The point mattered because Conley was not some unknown outsider whose literacy had never crossed Leo Frank’s path. Conley later testified that Frank had known for a year that he could write, that he had written pencil-stock names and work orders for Frank, and that he had also written orders allowing money to be taken out of his wages for his pawnshop contracts. In other words, the discovery of the pawn-shop signature did not simply show that Conley could sign his name. It opened the door to a larger problem for Frank: Conley’s literacy, however rough and semi-phonetic, was already known inside the National Pencil Company and had practical connections to Frank himself. Leo Frank kept the fact that Jim Conley could read or write a secret from the police for weeks, so we might rhetorically ask why he was protecting Jim Conley.

This is the perennial problem with so many modern retellings of the Mary Phagan case by Leo Frank supporters (even when they pretend not to be): they do not wrestle with the evidence. They do not put the trial record on the table. They take one theme or two, polish it into a talking point, and then use it to push aside the inconvenient parts of the case. This is not serious inquiry, but a tawdry evasion of the case’s complexity.

Another Specific Problem with Cole's Death Note Theory

One could reasonably argue the death notes were one of the key tests of the case. Cole argues that investigators wrongly assumed Conley could not have composed them independently, and that this assumption locked them into concluding Frank dictated the notes. He presents Conley’s authorship of the notes as the simpler explanation and by shoehorning that assertion into the case retroactively a century later, it, in Cole's view, means that an innocent man was lynched. 

But the trial debate over the notes was not just about whether Conley could write. It was about what the notes said, how they related to the physical circumstances at the crime scene, how Conley’s written statements about them evolved over time, and what their language suggested about the relationship between the writer, the victim, and the attempted direction of suspicion. Those are separate questions. Stein compresses them into one and answers only the one that helps his theory.

Stein does not understand that the notes were just one piece of a puzzle in a plot to frame the innocent nightwatchman Newt Lee. He does not mention the time-card episode that ran from Sunday, April 27, to Monday, April 28, in the immediate aftermath of Phagan’s body being discovered by Lee. He does not ponder how a blood-soaked shirt could be found at Newt Lee’s home on Tuesday, April 29, if the nightwatchman had been arrested at four o’clock a.m. on Sunday, April 27, 1913. That is the record Cole does not adequately confront with regard to Conley’s part in writing the notes. The notes were meant to steer suspicion to Newt Lee, not just any unknown Black assailant. 

Why the Retelling Fails

The Leo Frank case has attracted more than a century of revisionist writing. Some of it is serious, while much of it produces superficial grievance, apologetics, and rehabilitation narratives about Frank as the victim of trial by persecution, not prosecution. The better examples engage the record at length. They work through the testimony witness by witness. They acknowledge evidence they cannot easily explain away. They are honest about the limits of their reconstructions.

Cole’s article does not do that. It seizes one oversimplified premise, repeats it with rhetorical force, and asks the reader to accept it as sufficient to overturn a jury verdict, multiple appellate decisions, and a long record of legal review that continued after the courts left Leo Frank's verdict undisturbed. But a criminal conviction is not overturned by rhetorical slogans or catchphrases. A star witness is not discredited because a later writer, who did not even read, let alone study Conley's affidavits and testimony, finds him inconvenient. A trial record does not suddenly disappear because it complicates a preferred narrative that Frank was falsely accused and wrongfully convicted.

The illegal lynching of Leo Max Frank on August 17, 1915, by the group that called itself the Vigilance Committee, was a brutal act that no honest account of the case should minimize or excuse. But it did not erase the evidence that led to his conviction, the record that multiple courts examined, or the testimony that a jury weighed and credited.

Turning Jim Conley into a mythical criminal mastermind clever enough to defeat the Atlanta police, mislead the Pinkertons, gull Fulton County prosecutors, outflank Judge Roan, swindle the trial jury, slip through the Georgia Supreme Court and United States Supreme Court, and fool generations of legal readers does not honor Mary Phagan’s memory. It does not honor the trial record. It is not serious history.

Cole’s Taki’s Magazine article makes some reasonable points about the danger of reducing everything to identity politics. Yet when he turns to the Leo Frank case, he commits his own reduction. He compresses a complicated murder prosecution into a neat apologetic fable: Conley was smarter than white investigators believed, so the prosecution must have been wrong about Frank. Leo Frank was innocent all along. But the Leo Frank trial was never decided on that point alone.

Repetition is not proof. A clever theory is not a verdict. And reducing the Leo Frank case to “Jim Conley tricked everyone” is not history. It is David Cole’s courtroom fairy tale dressed up as historical insight.

Bibliography

Carroll, R. (2013, May 3). Hollywood conservative unmasked as notorious Holocaust revisionist. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/may/03/david-stein-cole-holocaust-revisionist

Cole, D. (2015, January 14). Hate Speech Derby: Mohammed vs. Auschwitz. Taki’s Magazine. https://www.takimag.com/article/hate_speech_derby_mohammed_vs_auschwitz_david_cole/

Cole, D. (2022, November 8). Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolfberg? Taki’s Magazine.
https://www.takimag.com/article/whos-afraid-of-the-big-bad-wolfberg/

Cole, D. (2025, April 15). L.A. Bueno? Taki’s Magazine. https://www.takimag.com/article/l-a-bueno/

Federal Bureau of Investigation. (2004). Terrorism 2000/2001. U.S. Department of Justice.

Analysis of David Cole: Was Jim Conley a Diabolic Genius, or Does the Leo Frank Rehabilitation Cult Mutate Reality? Part 1 of a 2 Part Series. PDF

Download PDF

Former JDL activist slain in federal prison. (2005, November 6). Los Angeles Times. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2005-nov-06-me-krugel6-story.html

Frank v. Mangum, 237 U.S. 309. (1915). Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/237/309/

Rosenzweig, D. (2003, February 1). Ex-JDL official to plead guilty in bombing plot. Los Angeles Times. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2003-feb-01-me-jdl1-story.html

Taki’s Magazine. (n.d.). David Cole contributor archive. https://www.takimag.com/contributor/David%20Cole/328/

U.S. Attorney’s Office, Central District of California. (2005, September 22). Jewish Defense League officer sentenced to 20 years in federal prison for involvement in two bomb plots. U.S. Department of Justice. https://www.justice.gov/archive/usao/cac/Pressroom/pr2005/136.html

WorldCat. (n.d.). David Cole interviews Dr. Franciszek Piper. https://search.worldcat.org/title/David-Cole-interviews-Dr.-Franciszek-Piper/oclc/31686068

World Jewish Congress. (2005, November 7). Jewish activist who plotted to bomb LA mosque murdered in prison. https://www.worldjewishcongress.org/en/news/jewish-activist-who-plotted-to-bomb-la-mosque-murdered-in-prison

Notes:

David Cole uses the Leo Frank case in more than one way. In his April 12, 2017 Taki’s Magazine article, The Negro Jim Conley’s Baadasssss Song, the case is the central subject. There, he argues that white Atlanta investigators underestimated Jim Conley’s intelligence and literacy, especially in relation to the death notes found near Mary Phagan’s body. His theory depends on the idea that Conley could have composed the notes himself, manipulated the investigation, and helped send Leo Frank to the gallows for a crime Frank did not commit.

By contrast, Cole’s later references to Leo Frank are much less detailed. In his September 3, 2024 Taki’s Magazine article, White Saviors Go Judas Over Jews, he uses Frank as a passing example in a broader criticism of right-wing figures who, in his view, redirect modern crime arguments into older Jewish controversies. In his March 16, 2026 Substack essay, Dave’s Substack: White People Edition, he invokes the case indirectly through an H. L. Mencken quotation about Georgia, mob violence, and Southern justice.

Taken together, these references show that Cole does not consistently treat Leo Frank as a case requiring full evidentiary reconstruction. More often, he uses Frank as a symbol, a racial argument, or a cultural weapon. His 2017 article is the only one that attempts a direct theory of the case, and even there, the theory rests heavily on a single premise: that Jim Conley was underestimated so badly that he fooled nearly every institution that examined the case.