Francho Bradley, 59, and Adrianne Jennings, 40, were arrested in Tewksbury, Massachusetts with a large cache of weapons including large-capacity guns, a grenade launcher, and a silencer. Bradley told police that he was on a secret mission and he owns a company called Ensyma Engineering, but he didn’t want to elaborate about what his company does. He said he was in the area working for a government agency that is “dealing with a virus,” Lowell Sun reported. It appears that Ensyma Engineering is a real business, and Francho “Frank” Bradley has actually worked on virus projects before with government agencies. Bradley and Jennings appeared in Lowell District Court for a “dangerousness hearing,” and Judge Stacey Fortes ordered that they continue to be held without bail at least until April 26, when they return to court for a probable cause hearing for the possession of their weapons, Boston Globe reported. They are being investigated by the Joint Terrorism Task Force and are being held without bail for up to four months, The Boston Herald reported. Neither entered a guilty plea.
The couple first caught law enforcement attention when Bradley called the police because a surveillance camera he had attached to the door of his room at the Residence Inn had gone out. He was worried he had been burglarized and the perpetrator would take his gun. But when police arrived to check, they found several long guns, wrapped in a flight suit, sitting in the middle of the room. They called Bradley and asked for his consent to secure the firearms in the hotel room, which he gave.
The items police found, according to the report, included: A Texas license to carry (but not a Massachusetts license, or a military or police ID), an AK-47, an AR-15 with a grenade launcher and silencer (but no grenades), a .22-caliber rifle and silencer, two .308-caliber rifles with three loaded large-capacity magazines, a 9mm gun with two large-capacity magazines, a .45-caliber gun with two speed loaders, a shotgun, ammunition, and smoke grenades. The cache also included several military-style tactical vests with flash bangs, military-style smoke machines, tactical helmets, multiple cell phones, a DOD concealed carry badge, and six laptops. Both defendants have entered “not guilty” pleas. You can read the full police report, including all the items that were found, here.
Here’s what you need to know about Francho “Frank” Bradley’s work and his company, Ensyma Engineering.
1. Ensyma’s Website Prominently Displays Trademarks for the CDC, Department of Energy, Medical Countermeasures Systems, & CERN
Bradley owns the Ensyma.us website, whose “About Us” page proudly displays badges for a number of agencies, including the CDC, the Department of Energy, ITER, Medical Countermeasures Systems, CERN, and Soldier Sensors and Lasers. The website doesn’t detail what work they do for these companies (or if they work for them.)
The website’s home page focuses on offering engineering services and managed services. Under engineering services, it reads: “Custom communications solutions for commercial companies and international organizations of any size. Ask our clients what made them choose ENSYMA and you’re likely to get many different answers, but one consistent theme; FLEXABILITY!” (sic) Under Managed Services it reads: “We provide custom technology solutions and infrastructure for both individual and organizational requirements. To help maximize your company’s performance. Schedule a consultation appointment with one of our technical solution architects so that we can understand your personal and business needs.” (sic)
Overall, the website is a little vague on what exactly the company does. It talks about providing a “solid foundation and operational strategy” for business owners, “cost effective and practical turnkey technical solutions” and “solutions that combine innovative thinking with proven technology.”
The website has archives on The Wayback Machine dating to 2013. The original version from 2013 was also owned by a person in Coppell, but it was called United American Consumer and focused on letting people know about American-made products, especially veteran-owned businesses. Bradley’s attorney has said that his client is an Army veteran. Here’s what the website’s homepage looked like back then:
The website saw drastic changes in 2017. However, WhoIs data seems to indicate that it’s been owned by the same people since 2007.
According to Ensyma’s website, it has a Washington D.C. address at 1101 Pennsylvania Ave. NW. There is office space at this address, but a suite number would also be needed for the exact location. The SEC Historical Society is in the office suite, along with law offices, Envision education, and Fogo de Chao Steakhouse, among others. We were not able to determine if this was an actual mailing address or a virtual address. The company’s phone number listed on the website is 202-621-0979.
The WhoIs registration data indicates that Ensyma also has an address in Coppell, which is actually a UPS Store. This is likely a mailing address for a mailbox within the UPS store.
2. Bradley Didn’t Want to Tell Police What Ensyma Does, But His Lawyer Later Said He Sells Comms Devices to the Military & Other Clients
When police talked with Bradley and Jennings, he was very mysterious about what his company Ensyma does. He said he owned Ensyma Engineering but wouldn’t elaborate on what the business does. According to police reports and court records, Bradley said that he works for a secret government agency and needed the cache of weapons they found in his Marriott hotel room for “his mission,” Boston Globe reported. The report noted that he said he could store them at the Tewskbury Police Department, but might need to get them back if he was called for a mission.
The report said: “He stated that he couldn’t tell us and that if we found out what he was doing, we would have to be writing reports for a long time, due to the fact it is classified. Francho came off very odd, it appeared he was trying to hide something and he was not forthcoming at all.”
Jennings told police that the two of them “always bring guns with us in case he gets deployed,” according to the report.
Bradley did say some things about his work, but it’s not known how much was true. According to the police report and the Boston Globe, he said he had done the following:
- Served as a Los Angeles police officer for five years, sometime in 1984 near the time of the Olympics. (When the police called to confirm, the LAPD told them to call back on Monday.)
- Worked in “science support oncology”
- Served as a military bomb tech
- Knew details about the O.J. Simpson case that the public shouldn’t know
- Had a prominent role in Barack Obama’s presidential election campaign. (Records show that in 2012, he donated $25 to the Obama Victory Fund.)
- Had a prominent role with the German government as a plainclothes officer in the DST-K44 Unit. (Records from the University of Maryland show he may have been a German exchange student from 1976-1980.)
- Worked for a “secret government agency”
- “Saved a one-star general who was kidnapped a few years ago”
Bradley also had a badge that read: “Department of Defense, United States of America.” In the next section, you’ll see that he has done work for the DOD, according to a transparency database. However, he was caught by police being dishonest in some of his statements. According to the police report, his said that first wife was 60 and “died of old age,” which was why he married someone 20 years younger. But investigators spoke with a Virginia man who said he’s married to Bradley’s ex-wife, who is still very much alive. He said his ex-wife was in Morocco and couldn’t speak to police. She had said Bradley had talked about working for the government for years. But, the man added, “No one knows if it is true or not.”
Bradley’s lawyer, Robert Normandin, later expanded on Bradley’s work. He said that Bradley uses firearms and accessories as props, and he sells communications devices and accessories to clients that include the military. Normandin said the accessories weren’t functional.
3. Frank Bradley Is Included in a WikiLeaks Database of Government Intelligence Workers
According to Francho Bradley’s LinkedIn profile, he also goes by Frank Bradley and lives in Coppell, Texas. These two facts help connect him to a series of WikiLeaks releases. Frank Bradley and his Ensyma email address (Frank.Bradley@Ensyma.us) show up on a WikiLeaks file called “Lifetime Value Report.” This is part of a series of releases by WikiLeaks on its Global Intelligence Files from a 2012 Stratfor release. WikiLeaks’ explanation of the report is: “They reveal the inner workings of a company that fronts as an intelligence publisher, but provides confidential intelligence services to large corporations, such as Bhopal’s Dow Chemical Co., Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and government agencies, including the US Department of Homeland Security, the US Marines and the US Defence Intelligence Agency. The emails show Stratfor’s web of informers, pay-off structure, payment laundering techniques and psychological methods.”
It’s not known if the listing itself is significant. It appears to simply be a list of people who signed up for a monthly subscription of some sort. Bradley’s listing indicates a signup date of September 2, 2008, ordering a $39.95 monthly subscription and then a $79.90 monthly subscription. The file is tilted “140228_MoFeb-Oct272008LV.” His email appears several other times in WikiLeaks, all in connection with signing up for similar subscriptions.
But that’s not the only connection found in WikiLeaks’ databases. A “Frank Bradley” from Coppell, Texas has multiple entries in the ICWATCH database, hosted on WikiLeaks’ website. This is a public database of mostly LinkedIn profiles for people in the United States Intelligence Community, according to Vice.com. The database was created by Transparency Toolkit, a group who collected the profiles to help people “better understand mass surveillance programs and research trends in the intelligence community.” According to Vice, at one point many people actually listed the code names of secret surveillance programs on their public LinkedIn profiles. This allowed the database creators to run a Google search to discover these listings and compile them into the database. Bradley’s information was among the profiles included in ICWATCH.
ICWATCH has two pages of information on Frank Bradley. These appear to match with Francho Bradley for multiple reasons. On his LinkedIn page, Francho Bradley lists his name as “Frank (Francho) Bradley” with ENSYMA Engineering, a graduate of The George Washington University School of Business, from Coppell, Texas. He describes himself as having extensive IT experience, including: “Experienced Solution Architect and Project Delivery Manager with a demonstrated history of working in the information technology and services industry. Skilled in Budgeting, Operations Management, Requirements Analysis, Government, and Emergency Management. Strong business development professional with International Experience and a Master of Science / Business and Public Management focused in Program Management from The George Washington University – School of Business.” Since 1992, he’s worked as an independent consultant with Ensyma, and he speaks four languages.
ICWATCH’s listing seems to be a match. It lists information for a Frank Bradley from Coppell, Texas. It is possible that not all 43 entries are the same Frank Bradley, but they all focus on the same type of work and are listed under the same ICWATCH name. You can also find many of these same listings on an Indeed.com resume here.
You can view all the listings for yourself on ICWATCH here. The listings include projects with the Army Reserve, Walt Disney World, Wachovia, SBC, Wells Fargo, HP, Department of Defense, Atos, Motorola, PG&E Energy Corporation, American Airlines, City of Fort Worth, Honeywell, Capital One, Cisco, Aether Systems, and more. The Department of Defense work includes working on machine language translation to translate spoken Arabic into English, within NSA guidelines.
The ICWATCH listings include tags that indicate security clearance and other secret government projects. The listings that match Francho Bradley the best are the ones from Coppell (which cite work with the Army Reserve), and a listing from Ensyma involving work with the FDA. These two listings by themselves include tags for Security Clearance, Signals Intelligence, SIGNIT, SAIC, PRISM, Stratfor, Palantir, OPSEC NSA, Pinwale, SURREY, CLOUD, Disaster Recovery, and more. The nature of the FDA listing will be explained in the next section.
Outside of ICWATCH, Bradley’s government connections also include being an official attendee for a January 2018 DARPA Subterranean Challenge Proposers Day. The Subterranean Challenge invited teams to develop technologies to augment underground operations, such as creating new ways to map, navigate, and search underground environments. Teams from around the world could come and propose novel methods of mapping subsurface networks too hazardous for human first responders. Proposers Day was designed to provide information to potential proposers about DARPA’s objectives. The day was a closed event, open only to registered potential proposers.
4. Bradley Has Worked in Disaster Preparedness and His Resume Lists Helping the FDA on Virus Response Teams
When Bradley was questioned in Massachusetts, he mentioned that he was doing government work involving viruses, but didn’t elaborate. There’s no way to verify this or not, until more information is released from official sources. However, according to a listing on ICWATCH, Bradley worked with the FDA via his Enysma business. According to ICWATCH, in 2009 Bradley worked as a Program Manager on a project with the FDA. His duties involved creating a “Professional Services offering of the portable VPN connected DNA/RNA Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) device GeneStat.”
The listing goes on to read: “including business analysis, Quality Assurance and development of operational methodology, recruitment, section and training of personnel as well as selection of mobile First Contact Team communications, bio-hazard protective equipment and CLOUD computing solution. This program is designed to create the capability to forward deploy personnel into areas of pathogenic (namely Influenza virus) activity and conduct onsite, real-time PCR analysis against a database of known pathogens. The program is on hold pending FDA Emergency Use Authorization of the GeneStat device and UN-WHO certification of the company.”
Bradley has also done extensive work in disaster preparation. On the ICWATCH pages, a number of Bradley’s jobs included helping companies prepare their data and servers for Y2K. Interestingly, there’s a bulletin board chat from 1998 where someone asks about an Ensyma Consulting in Texas that offered to help people plan for Y2K. The person wrote: “A couple of months back, a web want ad caught my eye from an outfit called Ensyma Consulting in Texas. They were looking to hire several people (80 I believe was the number) who had extensive military experience in many different areas: logistics, firearms, tactical, computers, medical, etc. Wages ranged from $30-$50/hr. The purpose was to consult with metropolitan areas regarding Y2K disruptions…” Someone commented that their website appeared to be part of a Y2K preparedness ring, but not much else.
Y2K isn’t the only disaster preparedness Ensyma has worked with. In 2012, Jennings attended a public meeting, as an Ensyma representative, that discussed “radiological emergency response plans and preparedness in support of nuclear power plants.”
Ensyma Engineering is also listed as the owner of ThinkEnsyma.com, a group focused on creating contingency plans for Continuity of Society in the case of disaster recovery or business continuity during worst-case scenarios that might impact the structure of society.
5. WhoIs Lists Ensyma as the Owner of a Website that Discusses Race Issues
Ensyma is listed on WhoIs as owning at least three websites, Ensyma.us, ThinkEnysma.com, and Myagora.us. It’s not known if the third site was created by Ensyma for personal reasons or as a project for a client. This rather simple website, called Myagora.us, appears to be focused mostly bringing awareness to issues involving racism. There are four sections at the top. One is called “Know Thyself/The Message” and shares links that include a video about the history of black slavery in the United States, a video about the opening of a Smithsonian museum on African American history, and a story about Heather Heyer, who was killed in Charlottesville. The “Vigilance – SPLC” section shares links to stories about white supremacists and right wing extremists in the United States. (SPLC is short for Southern Poverty Law Center.) One of the links is a montage video showing clips of neo-Nazi rallies and is labeled “German Neo Nazi.” This may be from a 2011 YouTube video that was later taken off the site. There’s also a section about Harriet Tubman, a section on funding, and a section that links to the USBC.
Law enforcement officials expressed concern in the police report that Bradley might have been surveilling an area near the Boston March for Our Lives event. He had received parking tickets on two consecutive days in an area of Cambridge near the demonstration, Boston Globe reported. Bradley is not recorded in the police report as saying anything about March For Our Lives.
There’s little else about Ensyma on social media. Bradley has a Facebook page with little on it, and connections to very few people. On Twitter, there’s an account @EnsymaEnsyma under the name Adrianne Ensyma. This might be connected to Bradley’s wife, Adrianne Jennings. The Twitter account was created in 2014 and only has 10 tweets, mostly supporting Wendy Davis and one retweeting a question to the CDC about medical workers being infected by patients.