<v Speaker 1>I'm Jerry Broadway, and this is Anonymous America where we

<v Speaker 1>take a deep dive into American history to find a

<v Speaker 1>hero that did something amazing and then slipped through the

<v Speaker 1>sands of time. You know, some of the biggest doors

<v Speaker 1>in history, swinging on the smallest of hinges, and on

<v Speaker 1>a June night in nineteen seventy two, the hinge was

<v Speaker 1>a tiny piece of tape and a young man most

<v Speaker 1>of this country has never heard of. The largest political

<v Speaker 1>scandal in American history didn't begin with a senator, a reporter,

<v Speaker 1>or a president. It began with a twenty four year

<v Speaker 1>old security guard alone in a dark building, doing a

<v Speaker 1>thankless job. Frank Wills was born in nineteen forty eight

<v Speaker 1>in Savannah, Georgia. He grew up poor. He dropped out

<v Speaker 1>of high school so he could help support his mom

<v Speaker 1>and ended up moving north looking for work. He spent

<v Speaker 1>time on assembly lines. He worked for Ford, he worked

<v Speaker 1>for a couple of other factories, and then he drifted

<v Speaker 1>back south and into the kind of job a lot

<v Speaker 1>of people take when they're between things and they need

<v Speaker 1>a paycheck. Night security. He was twenty four years old,

<v Speaker 1>earning about eighty dollars a week working the graveyard shift

<v Speaker 1>at a complex of buildings along the Potomac River in Washington,

<v Speaker 1>d C. There were offices, there were apartments, and there

<v Speaker 1>was a hotel, and they all operated under one name,

<v Speaker 1>The Watergate. And on the night of June seventeenth, nineteen

<v Speaker 1>seventy two, Frank Wills was doing exactly what night watchmen do,

<v Speaker 1>walking the building, checking the doors, rattling the handles. It

<v Speaker 1>can be the most boring job in the world, right

<v Speaker 1>up until it's not for Aydad Productions. This is Anonymous America.

<v Speaker 1>On his rounds through the parking garage that night, Frank

<v Speaker 1>noticed something. There was a latch on one of the

<v Speaker 1>doors to the stairwell that had a little piece of

<v Speaker 1>tape stuck over it, placed there so the bolt couldn't

<v Speaker 1>catch and the door would open without a key. Now

<v Speaker 1>Frank had seen this before because maintenance cruise you used

<v Speaker 1>it sometimes to prop doors open while they worked. So

<v Speaker 1>he just peeled it off, tossed it, and kept walking.

<v Speaker 1>But when he came back around a little later, he

<v Speaker 1>noticed something. That piece of tape was back. Someone had

<v Speaker 1>come behind him and retaped the door. And that's the

<v Speaker 1>moment right there, anyone else a tired man, a man

<v Speaker 1>just counting down the hours until his shift ended. That

<v Speaker 1>man might pull the tape off again and just decide,

<v Speaker 1>not my problem, not Frank Wills. That second piece of

<v Speaker 1>tape was a red flag for Frank, and he knew

<v Speaker 1>something was wrong. So he went to a telephone and

<v Speaker 1>he called the police. Now what Frank didn't know, what

<v Speaker 1>nobody knew yet, was that six floors above him, inside

<v Speaker 1>the offices of the Democratic National Committee, five men were

<v Speaker 1>crouched in the dark. They were there to repair wire

<v Speaker 1>taps they had planted several weeks earlier, and to photograph

<v Speaker 1>confidential documents. And they were funded when you followed the

<v Speaker 1>money all the way up by people connected to the

<v Speaker 1>committee to re elect the President of the United States,

<v Speaker 1>Richard Nixon. Plain clothes officers showed up to answer Frank's call,

<v Speaker 1>and they went up and they found the burglars. And

<v Speaker 1>that single thread, when pulled, would not stop unraveling for

<v Speaker 1>the next two years, through the newspapers, the Senate hearings,

<v Speaker 1>the secret White House tapes, until in August of nineteen

<v Speaker 1>seventy four, Richard Nixon became the first and only president

<v Speaker 1>in American history to resign the office. And it all

<v Speaker 1>started because a twenty four year old security guard noticed

<v Speaker 1>a piece of tape for the second time in the night. Now,

<v Speaker 1>for a little while, Frank Wills was famous. He appeared

<v Speaker 1>as himself in the film All the President's Men, He

<v Speaker 1>was interviewed on TV shows, people applauded he was the

<v Speaker 1>toast of the town. Eventually, the applause faded out, and

<v Speaker 1>Frank Wills learned being the man who pretty much single

<v Speaker 1>handedly brought down a sitting American president, well, that doesn't

<v Speaker 1>guarantee you a fruitful future. He was laid off from

<v Speaker 1>the Watergate not long after the events. He later said

<v Speaker 1>that he simply couldn't find steady work after that because

<v Speaker 1>some employers didn't want the attention and others just weren't interested.

<v Speaker 1>He asked more than once for a little recognition, a

<v Speaker 1>little help getting on his feet, but help never came.

<v Speaker 1>He drifted from job to job, and eventually he moved

<v Speaker 1>back home to Georgia to take care of his aging mother,

<v Speaker 1>and when she suffered a stroke, he gave up working

<v Speaker 1>altogether so that he could tend to her full time.

<v Speaker 1>Frank lived on almost nothing. There were stretches when He

<v Speaker 1>couldn't even pay his electric bill. At one point, he

<v Speaker 1>was arrested for shoplifting a pair of shoes. A little

<v Speaker 1>detail about Frank Will's life that is so sad it

<v Speaker 1>barely seems real. And the worst part was that Frank

<v Speaker 1>had to watch from the outside as other people built

<v Speaker 1>entire careers on Watergate. Reporters won Pulitzer Prizes, officials wrote

<v Speaker 1>best selling books, and drew huge speaking fees. But the

<v Speaker 1>man who set the whole thing in motion sat in

<v Speaker 1>a small house in Georgia, largely forgotten, telling anyone who

<v Speaker 1>ever bothered to ask, I just did my job. He

<v Speaker 1>died in September two thousand of a brain tumor at

<v Speaker 1>the age of fifty two. He was alone, and he

<v Speaker 1>was broke. Frank Wills wasn't a powerful man. He didn't

<v Speaker 1>have connections. He was just a poor kid from Savannah, Georgia,

<v Speaker 1>walking a quiet building in the middle of the night

<v Speaker 1>for eighty dollars a week. And when he found something

<v Speaker 1>that didn't sit right, he didn't look away, and he

<v Speaker 1>didn't stop to calculate what it might cost him. He

<v Speaker 1>just picked up the phone, and the whole towering structure

<v Speaker 1>of Watergate the investigations, the resignation, the way an entire

<v Speaker 1>nation was forced to look hard at the difference between

<v Speaker 1>power and the law. All of it rests on the

<v Speaker 1>shoulders of a man who refused to ignore a second

<v Speaker 1>piece of tape. He never got rich, and it never

<v Speaker 1>really got famous. But every honest account of that scandal

<v Speaker 1>has to begin with him. That's Frank Wills, and that's

<v Speaker 1>Anonymous America.