Girded to the Extreme
Gaithersburg Man Preps Regular Joes to Kill or Be Killed
By Paul Duggan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 26, 2006; C01
Say you wanted to learn knife fighting from an expert, and you checked the ads in Soldier of Fortune magazine or Inside Kung-Fu. Chances are you’d come across Sammy Franco, a self-described master of lethal, close-quarter combat.
Through years of study and practice, Franco said, he has refined his own “unique,” kill-or-be-killed system of hand-to-hand self-defense, a bone-snapping, eye-gouging, ear-ripping “real world” discipline not taught in strip mall martial arts schools. His how-to books, including “1,001 Street Fighting Secrets,” and instructional DVDs, such as “Batter Up: Defending Against Baseball Bat Attacks,” have been lauded by his followers – many of them suburbanites girded for battle if crime strikes.
You can order his survival-of-the-fittest merchandise via the Web or a post office box and can even chat with Franco by calling a toll-free number. Or you could drive to Gaithersburg, to the cozy Westleigh subdivision where the crab apple trees have begun to flower, and ring the doorbell of his tidy, brick-front rancher. " H eeey! " A neighborly smile. “C’mon in!” Such a pleasant fellow. A bachelor, alone with his playful German shepherds.
“You want a soda? Some water?”
Except for the body art – he’s a “full-sleever,” each arm a swirl of tattoos, shoulder to wrist (a demonic clown; a roaring beast; a wicked jester holding aces-and-eights, the “dead man’s hand”) – nothing about Franco seems menacing at a glance. He’s 40, a former yeshiva student from Silver Spring – a pudgy kid in a yarmulke back then, an Orthodox Jew bullied by anti-Semitic playground punks until he turned to martial arts at 12. One of the tattoos is a black Star of David over his bulging left bicep: his Holocaust armband, he calls it. “I’m a normal guy in a lot of ways,” Franco said, then chuckled. “Wait until tonight, though. Tonight you’ll see a different person.” This was a few hours before he was due in Rockville for an introductory class. There, over three consecutive Wednesday nights at a gun club, new students (adults only) were given a free crash course in some of Franco’s extreme self-defense techniques. Afterward, for $100 a month, they could pursue intensive, long-term training at his private studio in Montgomery County, where he works with about 20 “hard-core” students.
You figure: barroom brawlers, doomsday survivalists, would-be action heroes. But no. “Mister Milquetoasts; that’s the name we give them,” Franco said of his beginners. “Your typical run-of-the-mill suburban guys. They’ve probably never been in a fight before. Or many times they’ve had to back down, and they don’t like that.” At his kitchen table, he pulled out a manila folder stuffed with registration forms and liability waivers signed the previous week by 11 men and three women at the first Wednesday session. Their jobs: office manager, lawyer, sales rep, researcher, mortgage banker, teacher, engineer. Although only two had been crime victims, all the students wrote that they worry about predators on the street – and not just vaguely, the way most people do, in the backs of their minds.
“Sometimes I’ll walk with a cane that I can use as a club, because a stick is a very good weapon,” said Errol Krass, 54, chatting after a Wednesday class. He’s an administrative patent judge with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. “The law says, look, you can’t use deadly force against someone who’s just trying to take your possessions. But it would be very hard for me, if someone was taking my possession, to stand there and do nothing. I couldn’t do it.” He said he also occasionally carries a folding knife for self-defense, believing in the credo of John Bernard Books, the fictional Old West gunfighter played by John Wayne in his final film, “The Shootist.” Krass knows the line by heart: I won’t be wronged. I won’t be insulted. I won’t be laid a hand on. I don’t do these things to other people, and I require the same from them.
Thinning the Class
“Well, well, well,” said Franco, as the beginners, most of them middle-aged, convened the second Wednesday. With the gun club’s spacious classroom cleared of furniture, eight men stood ready for training, down from 14 registered students a week earlier. “The weeding out process has started,” Franco declared. “Which is a good thing! Less dilettantes to deal with.” The drop in attendance probably had to do with the grisly overview Franco gave of his ruthless self-defense system at the first session. “If you’re fighting for your life, and you’re using my program,” he told the class that night, “then you’ll be raking the criminal’s eyes, and hard, penetrating the eye socket.” And so on. Suffice to say, your fingers will wind up sticky with aqueous humor fluid. You want fancy flying kicks? You want tournaments and trophies, colored belts and lots of bowing? Try the martial arts academy at the shopping center. Franco’s system isn’t about fair play or respecting your opponent. It’s about what to do when you find yourself cornered in an alley by a methed-up Hell’s Angel wielding a bicycle chain.
First: “Pre-contact dialogue and de-escalation skills are very important.” He preaches this to every class, along with the importance of knowing when and when not to use lethal force. In years of work as a bouncer in Washington area nightclubs, Franco said, he put his skills to use in scores of fights, with no fatalities. “But you have to remember, the streets are deadly,” he told the students. “You have to focus on that.” Edged-weapon techniques topped the agenda on this second Wednesday, including efficient ways to dice up an armed attacker with your Crawford/Kasper folding knife (it’s a good idea to carry one routinely, Franco said) and how to fillet the assailant with his own blade if yours is at home. Also on the agenda: Suppose a mugger jams a pistol under your chin. There’s a surprisingly simple way to get hold of his gun without being shot, plus leave him with a subdural hematoma.
With realistic mock knives and guns, the men practiced on one another again and again, Franco strolling among them, critiquing. “No, no, you want to hit with the serrated portion first. Then you pull the blade through the rest of the tissue, see? This way you get enough of a wound channel to create incapacitation.” Franco, who has no military training, calls his program “Contemporary Fighting Arts” and describes it as intricate and primal – an arsenal of deft, lightning-quick moves that are difficult to master, all in the service of brutal “head butts, elbows, knees, foot stomps, biting, tearing, gouging and crushing tactics.” He said it’s “the culmination of years of research, analysis, experimentation, methodical innovation and real-life experiences.” The experiences began in the late 1970s, with those anti-Semitic young toughs in Silver Spring’s Kemp Mill section. “It was enough to destroy my self-esteem,” Franco said. He said he asked his father what he should do, and his father, a Sicilian Jew, told him, “You should kick their teeth in.” So he gave it a try.
“It shaped who I am now,” said Franco, who is 5 foot 11 and chiseled.
For about 10 years – as a yeshiva kid and later as a student at the University of Maryland, where he received a criminal justice degree – he immersed himself in traditional and esoteric Asian martial arts. “I took my bar mitzvah money . . . and blew it on lessons.” He trained with an expert in Filipino stick fighting; he took boxing classes; he learned an ancient form of no-holds-barred wrestling; he studied a self-defense program developed for the Israeli military. But most of those skills turned out to be “impractical for street combat,” he said. So he has refined his system over the past two decades. You can read about it in “Street Lethal,” his first book (published in 1989) for Paladin Press, a Colorado-based publisher of controversial how-to manuals, including an assassin’s guide once used by a triple murderer in Montgomery County.
There are nine Franco books. You can study his self-defense concepts in “First Strike” and “Killer Instinct,” in “War Machine” and “When Seconds Count.” Among his how-to DVDs, Franco said, he is proudest of “The Widowmaker Program,” an advanced form of hand-to-hand combat meant to inflict injuries not suitable for description in a family newspaper. As for Judaism, he’s no longer observant. “I consider myself more of a spiritual person than a religious person,” he said.
‘Always on the Lookout’
The class: No bullies here, only everyday people, men you might pass on the street and not glance at twice, although it’s possible you’d get the once-over from them if you looked at all suspicious. It’s the way some of them are by nature and the way others have become. “I tend to watch everything,” said a 58-year-old music teacher who didn’t want his name published. “What’s out of place? What’s not right? . . . A lot of people will just go along their way, talking on their cellphones, completely oblivious to what’s around them. . . . I’m always on the lookout. I don’t even listen to the radio when I’m driving. I don’t want the distraction.” He said he’ll be joining Franco’s “hard-core” group, which includes a veterinarian and a Web site designer, a psychiatrist and a network TV executive.
Terry Thames’s reason for being here is simple. “Chick, Dave, Ken, Jennifer, Michele and Renee,” he said. They were good friends of his, the crew of American Airlines Flight 77 when it hit the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001. Thames, an American captain, had piloted Flight 77, Washington to Los Angeles, the day before, and was due to fly it Sept. 12. “Box cutters and knives are the primary weapons [terrorists] used before,” said Thames, 52. “It’s my business to keep them out of the cockpit.” He went home from the class with “The Widowmaker Program,” a $75 book-and-DVD set, calling it “good information.”
And Krass, the judge – he bought “Widowmaker,” too, "because I know something could always happen, and I keep that in mind all the time.
Something could always happen. . . . Consider an incident decades ago, late at night in a Manhattan park, after a class at City College of New York, a harrowing moment that Krass recalls vividly: "I kept hearing steps behind me. And I’m walking faster and faster. And it’s dark. You can’t see anything. So I used to carry a knife then, strapped to my ankle, one of those boning knives that a butcher would use. . . . All of a sudden, whoever this person is, he’s right in back of me. I turned around. I thought I saw a gun. I smacked it out. I pulled the knife. I knocked him to the ground. I put the knife right to his throat, ready to slice.
“Turns out it was a friend of mine, a guy named Steve. . . . And the gun? It wasn’t a gun. Turns out it was a pretzel he just bought from Raymond the bagel man.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/25/AR2006032501052_pf.html
