Every case file, interview, and archive tells a piece of the truth. I'm Kylie Lowe, and on my podcast, Dark Down East, original reporting is at the heart of every case I cover. I don't just retell crime stories, I investigate them. I'm speaking with families, searching court records, and piecing together the facts that have been overlooked and forgotten with time. The result? True crime storytelling that digs as deeply into a case as you do. You can listen to Dark Down East wherever you get your podcasts. When an Arizona Republic editor approached investigative reporter Robert Anglin with a lead back in 2015, he didn't exactly bolt out of his chair. In fact, Robert says that he initially had zero interest in the germ of this story that would go on to consume eight years of his life. That lead? That there'd been a lot of closures of the Toby Keith's I Love This Bar and Grill. The Toby Keith's I Love This Bar and Grill, if you're not familiar, is a franchise of country-themed restaurants inspired by the Toby Keith song, I Love This Bar. They were elaborately decorated. Some locations even had bars shaped like guitars. There are currently only two Toby Keith's I Love This Bar and Grills in existence, both in Keith's home state of Oklahoma. But 10 years ago, it was a new and seemingly flourishing chain. We had several around the Phoenix area, and they'd been closing, and she wanted to know why. I thought it was a dumb idea because bars close all the time. My position was, who cares? We have better things to do. Still, Robert did some digging. What happened was I started looking at these restaurants, and it wasn't just Phoenix. In fact, franchise locations of Toby Keith's I Love This Bar and Grill were closing all over the country. Employees at Toby Keith's I Love This Bar and Grill got word that they'd be losing their jobs over the holidays. Customers have been trickling in for the Bar and Grill's final hours, but why Toby Keith's is closing is still a mystery. And even as restaurants were closing, the company was opening new restaurants, or at least announcing and planning and cutting deals to open new ones. So it made very little sense to me. And so that became the central question of the original story, what the hell was going on. Robert spent the next several months delving further. He talked to developers, realtors, contractors, plumbers, basically anyone who might have had general or specific knowledge of what exactly was going on here. What was obvious what was happening was that the developer was going in. Meaning the developer of these specific locations who held the Toby Keith franchise. Cutting deals with real estate developers, property managers, malls, businesses where they were going to locate these restaurants and in some of the big name developments all over the country. It's a little complicated, but here's how it works. Mall and shopping center developers compete for shops and restaurants to put into new locations. thinking being that the hotter and more desirable your retail offerings, the more likely customers are to come. And they'll often pay money up front to developers who have licenses for certain high-profile brands and restaurants, like Toby Keith's I Love This Bar and Grill, to lure them in. This money gets parceled out in stages as the project is built out, often millions of dollars at each stage. And it turns out there wasn't a lot of due diligence done on these guys out of Phoenix who were developing a lot of the Toby Keith locations. It turned out that these restaurants weren't being completed. Or they were being partly completed. Different restaurants had different outcomes. Some of them were empty husks. Some of them were being completed. Some of them were completed and opening with much fanfare, only to close weeks or months later. And in the process, all your contractors, your drywallers, highwaters, your plumbers, your electricians, they were being stiffed on the back end. Everybody on the working end of these restaurants, by the way, that includes waiters and bartenders and managers, they weren't being paid either. And so these restaurants would open and close and collapse. And believe it or not, this pattern wasn't being exposed. The news that some Arizona developer was apparently running a scam that used Toby Keith restaurants to pocket advance money from mall owners without actually delivering the restaurants wasn't spreading across the industry. It's really brilliant if you're into financial scams because mall owners want to covet that relationship with their builder and they don't want other people to know what they're doing or they want to secretly create these deals because they're going to reap the windfall. They don't want your restaurant to go somewhere else. So it creates its own kind of secret sauce. This creates a vacuum for opportunists. There was another factor at play, too, helping to keep this apparent scam under the radar. The developers themselves were loathe to talk about it. It's like the victim of any financial scheme. They're embarrassed. They don't want to admit it. Even years later, there were very few that would actually go on the record and talk publicly about what happened. The only way Robert could identify the locations, in some cases, was by the lawsuits that were starting to pile up against the Phoenix-based developer of these locations. Boomtown Entertainment, led by a man named Frank Capri, who absolutely would not talk to Robert, no matter how many times he called or emailed. He won't talk, but management calls me one day and says, we want to have a conversation with you about what's going on. They asked Robert to come to a meeting at one of their restaurants in Phoenix just before dinner. It's about 4.30 in a mall that should be vibrant, and I walk into an empty restaurant. There's nobody there. The restaurant's open, there's servers, and I get escorted back to a VIP room in the back of the restaurant. And it's just me. I'm sitting at a high top when three gentlemen walk in and each take seats around me. And they proceed to talk to me about how I'm on the wrong track and I really shouldn't be reporting this story. Maybe not menacing exactly, but not subtle either. I'm not a small guy. Neither were they. And they're wearing suits. And one of them won't talk. And I have no idea who this is. So I have these two guys, they're talking to me, and they introduce this third gentleman as Phil. And as they start trying to talk me out of these trends, and as I break out files and start talking about their numbers and start talking about the restaurant closures in different cities and their announcement of opening new ones, they tell me that I really shouldn't be doing this. Robert wasn't intimidated. He kept pressing for answers and directed many of them at this guy, Phil, who was just sitting there, silent. I can be kind of a jerk. So I start watching questions at Phil, and I'm like, Phil, does this sound right to you? Phil, are you okay with this? And Phil is grunting at me, and he's getting kind of agitated, and you can tell. So I leave the restaurant about 45 minutes, an hour later, walk out of an empty restaurant at dinnertime in the middle of a commercial area. Weird. and I get in my car and I text my boss and I say, okay, I think I just met with three mobsters. That turned out to be prescient. This is Chameleon, the show about people who hide behind masks. And I'm Josh Dean. This week, the story of a turncoat mobster who wasn't just hiding. He was hidden. Some cases fade from headlines. Some never made it there to begin with. I Ashley Flowers and on my podcast The Deck I tell you the stories of cold cases featured on playing cards distributed in prisons designed to spark new leads and bring long overdue justice. Because these stories deserve to be heard, and the loved ones of these victims still deserve answers. Are you ready to be dealt in? Listen to The Deck now, wherever you get your podcasts. This is Chameleon, the weekly. Robert Anglin published his first series of stories on the Toby Keith restaurant scheme and the lawsuits that piled up in its wake in the Arizona Republic later that year, in 2015. And pretty quickly after that, people started getting in contact. Some of the managers in the restaurants are calling me and saying, okay, you know this is part of something else. And then I started hearing that Frank was a mobster. We get told things like that all the time. usually we don't believe it. It's almost apocryphal. I'm an Occam's razor kind of guy. People calling me and telling me he's a mobster sounds just preposterous. On the other hand, there was that weird encounter in the back of the empty restaurant. I start digging into Frank's background. I start looking for records and court cases. I start talking to more people, not about the restaurant scheme itself, but who Frank Capri is. And what becomes immediately apparent was that he had no real background. Frank Capri was basically a ghost, with no history that Robert, a seasoned investigative reporter, could find anywhere. Frank just emerges in the late 90s. He just arrives on the Phoenix scene. But as I dig into his Social Security number, I start noticing anomalies. There's just nothing there. So now I'm interested. It was a court filing in a custody dispute that provided Robert the break he was looking for. I find references from the lawyer for his former girlfriend, the mother of two of his kids, that he might be a mobster. She accused him of that and accused him of hiding money from her. And there is some very unusual court play. There are filings by Frank's lawyer to try and seal this custody record. There are filings by Frank's lawyer. And one of them, he actually says, if Frank Capri were a mobster, if Frank Capri were in the Witness Protection Program, Frank would have to lie to you about it, Your Honor, because of the rules of the Witness Protection Program. And this kind of knocks me off my seat. If this was true, it explained everything. The Mobster Act, the lack of a history. Frank was in the Federal Witness Protection Program. him. I'm thinking this guy really might be a mobster, but how deep is that? And how do I prove it? If he is in the witness protection program, that means the federal government had this guy on a string while he was committing fraud all over the country. And that's a different kind of animal altogether. So I start trying to formulate a plan to figure out how I can prove Frank Capri might not be Frank Capri. Investigative journalism is slow work, and it took more than a year, a year in which Robert was reaching out to anyone who might have known Frank Capri in his former life. Ultimately, a private investigator he knew had a tip that the man now calling himself Frank Capri at the center of the Toby Keith saga was in fact Frank Gioia, a member of the Lucchese crime family from New York City, a made man who was turned by the feds and placed in the witness protection program after putting a long list of mobsters behind bars. But Robert had to find a way to confirm this. There were no pictures of Frank on the internet either. You couldn't find a candid shot of Frank Capri. He didn't attend these grand openings. His face never appeared in the openings of his restaurant. I formulated this plan. If I could take and find a picture of Frank Capri today, and I went back to who Frank Capri was in the 80s and 90s, I might be able to show that our Frank Capri here was somebody else there. Specifically, Frank Gioia, the turncoat Lucchese soldier. That's where I'm driving at, and that's when I convince one of Frank's associates to give me pictures of Frank. Robert proposed a plan to his editor and the paper's lawyers. If we can get people from Frank Joya's day to identify this photo of Frank Capri without any prompting from me, we can make the correlation between Frank Joya Jr. and Frank Capri. Robert worked the phones. He went to mob lawyers, retired prosecutors, former cops, basically anyone he could think of who might have run into Frank Joya back in the day. And as I did that, I actually started getting calls from former mobsters. And they would say, you have a picture of Frank Joya Jr. Now, we didn't tell him who Frank Capri was. We just provided the picture and said, do you know who this is? And then I started getting these calls. We need to know where this guy is. Who is this? You're a reporter. Can you tell us where he is? My line was like, no, I can't. But if you wait, I might be able to write it. A mob historian named Jerry Capiche was also helpful. He's an encyclopedia of New York mob. And he looked at the photo and said, yeah, that's Frank Joya Jr. And so I was able to use these people as sources. A mob prosecutor from the day, a mob lawyer currently, conversations with mobsters, and historians about the mob. Then I started taking it to federal prosecutors. They all confirmed that the man in this photo, Frank Capri, was actually Frank Joya Jr. And he had an illustrious history as a con man, and a mob enforcer. He helped kill people. He plotted murders. He ran drugs. He ran guns. And he was a made man in the Lucasey crime family. Robert's story is confirming this connection and laying out Capri's true story didn't run until 2017 two years after the first tip it took that long to truly confirm the hunch report Capri's backstory and assure lawyers that it was all true we shored up every avenue that we could think of and by the way I offered Frank a chance to talk about this stuff we went back at his associates we went back at his family his current girlfriend. All of that, as I, built these stories to tell the world that the guy who was behind the Toby Keith failures was actually a mobster in the Witness Protection Program and was being protected by the government. Also, this happened. As we moved to publish, though, lo and behold, the federal government, the Department of Justice, decided to give us a A nice, polite call and ask us to please not run that story. Which felt like another kind of confirmation. It was, what does Woodward and Bernstein call it? The non-confirmation confirmation? Yeah. There was one wrinkle. One thing Robert and his editors just had to have the faith to run with. Federal law enforcement officials could not officially confirm the existence of someone in the Witness Protection Program. It's actually a violation of law for them to do that. Confirming that Capri was Joya, a seasoned mobster, gave Robert a fresh perspective on the restaurant scheme, too. It all got into very, very sharp focus. The Toby Keith situation was nothing more than a bust-out scheme, which in mob parlance is basically what you do is you take all the assets of a business out, and then you gut the business and drive the owners out of business. But this is a variation on that in which Frank took the money, didn't develop the restaurants, and then washed his hands of it and said, oh, it's just a business problem. You know, businesses fail all the time. Well, this is failure by orchestration. The fraud was clear. Surely Frank Capri's years of avoiding prison were now over. Well, not exactly. We get into that story after the break Some cases fade from headlines Some never made it there to begin with. I'm Ashley Flowers, and on my podcast, The Deck, I tell you the stories of cold cases featured on playing cards distributed in prisons designed to spark new leads and bring long overdue justice. Because these stories deserve to be heard, and the loved ones of these victims still deserve answers. Are you ready to be dealt in? Listen to The Deck now, wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back to Chameleon. Robert Anglin was able to paint a pretty clear picture of criminal wrongdoing on the part of Frank Capri and his company, Boomtown Entertainment. Robert identified at least 48 lawsuits in 31 cities, including more than $60 million awarded to plaintiffs by judges who found Capri and his company liable. Then he and his readers waited for some sort of criminal investigation. Instead, silence. No state, local, or federal investigation sprung up in the wake of these very damning allegations. Let's face it, I don't have any special insight into why there wasn't a criminal prosecution, but when we asked over and over if they planned on prosecuting, Nobody would say anything. And again, that's one of those pieces of circumstantial evidence. The federal government is refusing to prosecute someone and we can lay out the scheme. I mean, I had flow charts and nobody would file an indictment. Nobody was getting prosecuted. And business owners were claiming fraud over and over and over again in their lawsuits. So the failure by authorities to even apparently investigate, if they were, but to make a case against Frank Capri further showed us that we were on the right track. Robert could never prove what was behind this inaction from law enforcement, but he didn't have to think hard to come up with explanations. One of the stories I wrote is about the impunity of people in the witness protection program to commit crimes. And by the way, if you're a local prosecutor or a local U.S. attorney, the U.S. attorney for Arizona was upfront about this. They have no idea who's residing in their state that might be in the witness protection program or might be a criminal. So in case after case, we were finding out that murderers and con artists and people with extraordinarily violent histories who had been enrolled into or entered into the Witness Protection Program were unleashed into these communities with no state, local, or federal law enforcement in those states knowing what was going on. It's scary as hell. The Witness Protection Program was created because of the New York City mob. Prosecutors just couldn't crack the code of silence and make cases against key figures without providing immunity and promising protection for witnesses who feared, rightly, being killed before they could even testify. These days, the program is used in all kinds of cases, including ones involving violent and chaotic groups, like the Mexican cartels or MS-13, truly dangerous people who happen to be willing to rat on their colleagues. What happens today is that you've got some really violent people who get secret identities, and they're put into communities where the community has no idea. And these have ended famously in many cases. One guy beheaded his neighbor in a fit of rage. Another one on a cross-country crime spree. Robert just accepted that Frank Joya was now part of this hallowed tradition of men placed in witness protection who used its long and impenetrable shadow to commit crimes. This is where it gets weird. We ran a multi-part series dissecting who Frank Capri really was, the Frank Joya. We talked about his early days in the mob. I was able to build a biography based on interviews and court records. I talked about how the witness protection worked or doesn't work in this case, why it was set up. We talked about how the fraud worked. We walked through the fraud scheme again, and we thought, this is it. Somebody's going to have to prosecute crickets. There seems to be no action by law enforcement. Some contacts I have in law enforcement, federal contacts, called me and said, man, you've embarrassed the crap out of these guys, but nobody's going to do anything. That turned out to be true. Nobody did anything. There was one result, I guess. Frank Capri's Toby Keith restaurant scheme was at least foiled. Then about six months later, I found out he was doing it again. With some added flourishes. Frank is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a dumb person. He's a criminal genius. He was using proxies now, including his girlfriend, business partner, others, to run the same scheme on yet another country music icon or using them as the lure for more developers in another country restaurant scheme or as i called it a country restaurant theme scheme and that would have been the rascal flats barn grill We are just days away from what was supposed to be the opening date of the Rascal Flatts restaurant in the Flatts East Bank. But the project appears to be stalled and no one knows when it will open. I want to make clear, neither Toby Keith nor Rascal Flatts had any idea who Frank was. Neither Toby Keith nor Rascal Flatts was part of the scheme. Green Elias has been digging for answers and has uncovered a bizarre business connection with none other than a former mafia turncoat. This time around, Frank knew that he had to keep a low profile. He used his girlfriend and a business partner as the fronts of a new company that developed these Rascal Flats-themed restaurants. He would hold court in the back of these restaurants and order the new failures of the next iteration of his scheme. Basically, though, it was the same plan. It was Toby Keith Redux. And if anything, it was even more bold. The same people that he ripped off in malls on the Toby Keith scheme, he went back at them through his proxies and got them to sign new licensing agreements for the exact mall where Toby Keith had failed for the new Rascal Flatts failures. And the developers ate it up. Until Robert started working on a second set of stories. but the moment that I said you do understand that Frank Capri or Frank Joya Jr. is running this just like he did the Toby Keith thing you could see the light bulbs go on in the eyes of developers at this point some of the developers were willing to talk about it and very guarded very general but they were they were willing to say we had no idea we were dealing with this guy and as we explored that second scheme i think the thing that made those stories work so well was we got frank on audio we got frank capri being frank joya in phone conversations all over the country that were secretly recorded by one of his employees and let's just say those recordings remove any doubt about who Frank is or what his deal is or what he wants done because it is mobster 101 it is Sopranos right off the script is Frank threatening abusing screaming in vitriol that would make a nun blush you're trying to do that to me? Fuck you. You go get a motherfucking contract. Robert's second set of stories was published in 2019, four years after that first tip from his editor. At that point, there was no way for the government to deny what was going on. And they finally opened an investigation, I'm told, somewhere in the late part of 2019. This time, the program couldn shield Frank Capri In February 2020 Frank Capri was indicted on fraud charges for both the Rascal Flatts and the Toby Keith schemes Not just wire fraud there were also money laundering and conspiracy charges Frank pleaded not guilty. Not only did he plead not guilty, his lawyers started arguing that they needed to seal the courtroom. And this plays out for about a year and a half. A period in which Robert had some curious interactions with folks in Frank's orbit, especially with his girlfriend, Tani Costa. Frank tried to use his girlfriend to call me posing as different people and try to get information about who was providing me details early on. And I called her out on it and, again, recorded conversations, and she would admit to it. So Tani at one point threatened to sue us. There's a great exchange by lawyers about, you might want to go listen to recordings by your own client. Perhaps that'll change your mind. I mean, the stories were buttoned down hard, and all of Frank's little mechanics couldn't derail them. There was also this. She was opening restaurants as the Rascal Flatts thing was imploding. And she opened a restaurant in downtown Phoenix, again, with Frank's backing, and she agreed to an interview with our dining reporter at the time, and this would have been around 2019. And she met with our reporter who I had talked to in advance and had armed her with a series of questions she should ask about Tawny's operation. And this interview occurred in a about-to-open restaurant, and there were only a couple of people in it, but Tawny lost her collective stuff and actually assaulted our reporter when the questions started getting heavy, stole the reporter's recorder and phone, and ran out the back door where she apparently called Frank and came to get her. And she ditched the phone, and I think there were two phones. She ditched them, and she was later prosecuted for assault, and she got a diversion sentence. That's the only threat we ever experienced at the newspaper. Frank, Robert says, never threatened him, nor did any of his associates, though he did check underneath his daughter's cars every time they left the driveway. I was, as they like to say, watching my six constantly, because I was cognizant that, If nothing else, we had lost a story to investigate a reporter in Arizona due to a car bomb in the 70s, Don Bowles. I didn't want my picture on the wall where his is. Eventually, there's just too much evidence. Frank takes a plea deal. He pleads guilty to white-collar fraud and accepts the deal with the U.S. Attorney's Office in Arizona in exchange for a five-year sentence, plus $19 million in restitution to victims, $1.5 million of which was to go to the IRS. Those court proceedings, by the way, were sealed. Robert was kicked out of the courtroom at various points. We could tell right away that it was revolving around the Witness Protection Program and Frank's real identity as a mobster. Capri got some time served, and his five-year sentence was completed in 2025. Frank continued to deny who he was throughout all of this. He never once publicly admitted to being Frank Joya, and went by Frank Capri throughout the legal proceedings and into his prison term. Then Frank got out and started a new hustle. That's right, he's podcasting now, and he's telling all. His show, Made Man, debuted in March of last year. Okay, episode one, the Frank Joya Jr. Show. Frank Joya, Frankie Joya, also known as Frank Capri. Frank is spinning tales, quite proudly, about himself and his pals. I hit him a six-inch. I walk over to him, I say, Cuba, come here, I want to talk to you. He said, I got him up against the wall. Bang. Hit him a short right hand. Right? And then I was going to hit him with the left, but it was enough. You know, I just hit him one shot. Yeah, you're trying to teach him a lesson. For the record, I reached out to Frank, asking if he'd like to be interviewed. He never wrote back. He's trying to turn a new leaf. He's telling everything about his past, the mafia stuff. He's claiming that these were legitimate business operations, the Toby Keith and Rascal Flatts bar and grill schemes, even though he pleaded guilty and took a deal on a five-year jolt. Talking about how his dad and his grandfather were made men in the mob and his familial ties. Robert has no ill will toward Frank. This, he says, is legitimately interesting stuff. He's a fascinating character. And as mob historians and mob lawyers said, he became one of the pivotal witnesses as the mob collapsed in the late 90s. His testimony helped put dozens of mobsters in prison. Some for unsolved homicides, drugs, guns, the whole panoply of mob activity. he helped close cases, including the murder of an off-duty police officer. He gave authorities enough to be able to close that case and prosecute on it. At one point, Frank Capri actually taught FBI guys on mob activity. He was actually teaching classes to the Federal Bureau of Investigation on, I don't know, how to be a mobster and how these things worked. Frank, unfortunately, He doesn't want to talk to me. But in his podcast, he says, I wanted to be out front. They offered to put me in protective custody, but I'm here to be me now. And he says he's withdrawn from the witness protection program. And as far as Robert can tell, he's keeping his nose clean for now. Although when he got out of prison, one of his requests, he wanted to sell used cars. He wanted to go into the car dealing business. And, you know, there are certain industries that could raise an eyebrow. Bars, car dealerships, car washes. You just got to wonder sometimes. Before we get to the credits, I hope you can indulge me with a little bit of additional self-promotion. If you like Chameleon and what we're doing here, I think you might like another show that I'm making. In this case, as a co-host. It's called Crimeless, and it's a weekly show that takes a lighter look at true crime. Every week, the comedian Rory Scovel and I tackle some of the most hilarious stories in global crime. Having some good old-fashioned fun as we probe some of the weirdest and wildest tales from the criminal frontier. As we say in the tagline, it's a celebration of the amazing creativity of the world's dumbest criminals. If it sounds like something you might like, search Crimeless wherever you get your podcasts. And with that, I'll see you next week. Chameleon is a production of Campside Media and AudioChuck. It's hosted by me, Josh Dean, and was written and reported by me. Our producer is Joe Barrett. Our associate producer is Emma Simenhoff. Sound design and mix by Tiffany Dimmack. Theme by Ewan Leitremuen and Mark McAdam. Our production manager is Ashley Warren. Campside's executive producers are Vanessa Gregoriadis, Matt Scherr, and me, Josh Dean. And finally, if I can ask a few favors before sending you on your way today, please rate, follow, and review Chameleon on your favorite podcast platforms to help spread the word. I know everyone says this, but it's true. Ratings and reviews really do help. And if you have any feedback, tips, or story ideas, you can email us at chameleonpod at campsidemedia.com or leave us a message at a special number we've set up. 201-743-8368. Add a plus one if you're outside North America. I think Chuck would approve.
