By Steve Neavling
ticklethewire.com

A self-described white supremacist was convicted of multiple charges related to a plot to kill a drug deal with outstanding debts in Georgia.

The case broke open after an FBI informant and admitted white nationalist alerted the bureau to Adrian Apodaca, saying the Florida man had admitted to murdering several people in New Mexico and Arizona, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel reports. 

The FBI dispatched a team of undercover agents posing as white supremacists who were owed money by an Atlanta drug dealer, who also was an FBI plant.

Recordings played at the trial indicate Apodaca offered to kill the “dealer” in exchange for $5,000 and a false identity to avoid investigators who wanted to question him in at least one murder.

Jurors took just three hours to convict Apodaca, 45. He faces up to life in prison when he is sentenced Dec. 8.

Benjamin McDowell

By Steve Neavling
ticklethewire.com

A South Carolina man who was a known white supremacist planned to carry out a violent attack “in the spirit of Dylann Roof,” the FBI wrote in a complaint Thursday.

Benjamin Thomas Samuel McDowell, 29, caught the attention of the FBI after a series of Facebook posts in which he made threats and declared violent white supremacist ideologies, NBC News reports. 

McDowell was arrested after meting with an undercover FBI agent to purchase a gun in the parking lot of a Myrtle Beach hotel. He was charged with possessing a firearm because of his preexisting status as a felon.

On Facebook, McDowell unleashed rants about Jews.

McDowell told the undercover agent that more needed to be done because “screaming ‘white power’ was not getting the job done,” according to the FBI complaint.

“I seen what Dylann Roof did and in my heart I reckon I got a little bit of hatred … I want to do that sh*t,” McDowell allegedly told the agent.

Steve Neavling

FBI agents made disturbing discoveries while searching the home of an avowed white supremacist accused of killing three people outside two Kansas Jewish facilities in April.

The Associated Press reports that agents found directions to synagogues and kosher places to eat, a copy of “Mein Kampf” and a T-shirt with a swastika symbol inside the Missouri home of Frazier Glenn Cross.

Cross is charged with killing 69-year-old William Corporon, his 14-year-old grandson, Reat Griffin Underwood, and 53-year-old Terri LaManno outside the Jewish Community Center in Overland Park and a nearby senior care facility.

An FBI sting snared a white supremacist in Virginia who posted threats about President Obama on a hate-website.

Douglas Story tried buying an illegal fully automatic machine gun from an undercover agent, Fox 5 reported.

Story alleged paid the agent to convert a rifle into a machine gun.

To read more click here.

Shoshanna Utchenik

White supremacist and border vigilante J.T. Ready was already being investigated for domestic terrorism by the feds when he allegedly went on a killing spree in his Gilbert, Arizona home, just outside of Pheonix, last Wednesday, reports The Arizona Republic.

Feds seized the opportunity of the tragedy to join Gilbert police at the crime scene, James Turgal, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Phoenix office, told The Arizona Republic. Agents were able to access multiple computers and munitions from the murder scene, the home Ready shared with his girlfriend, her daughter, and the daughter’s family who all perished at Ready’s hand.

To read more click here.

OTHER STORIES OF INTEREST

• Barbara Robbins: A Slain CIA Secretary’s Life and Death (Washington Post)
• Afghanistan: Taliban Spring Offensive ‘Cowardly and Un-Islamic’ (Huff Post)
• Alleged Secret Service Escort, Calls Agents ‘Stupid Brutes’ (Huff Post)
• Penn State Trustee: 400 Interviewed in Inquiry (Fox Sports)
• After War Room, Heading Ivy League Classroom (NY Times)
• Surveillance Cameras so Strong They can Zoom in to Read Text Messages (UK Daily Mail)

By Danny Fenster

An Aryan Nations leader of  fleeting TV fame was sentenced Wednesday for taking more money than he was legally entitled to from a government he despised, the Associated Press reports.

August Kreis III, who appeared multiple times on the Jerry Springer show and in a 2005 interview on CNN called al-Qaeda fellow freedom fighters in the war against Jews and the American government, was sentenced to six months in prison that he’d already served,  plus six months of home arrest and two years of probation in a Columbia, S.C. U.S.  District Court on Wednesday. Kreis was also ordered to pay back the nearly $193,000 he was said to have improperly received in veteran benefits.

Kreis served nine months with the Navy in Vietnam before being discharged for not being fit for service, which made him eligible for benefits, according to AP.

Kreis was a High School dropout who  joined the Ku Klux Klan in New Jersey in the late 70s before working his way up the ranks of several white supremacist groups and gaining media attention through the years. “Your relatives — weren’t they all turned into soap or lampshades?” he told the Jewish television host Jerry Springer during a 1995 show. “I’m looking for one of those lampshades,” he said.

At sentencing he appeared similarly hateful. “I don’t preach to hurt anybody, except the Jews, and I’ll keep doing that,” he said in court. “But that’s my First Amendment rights. As long as I obey God’s laws, I don’t care about anything else.”

To read more click here.

Andrew Gumbel, a Los Angeles-based journalist, is writing a book about the Oklahoma City bombing, due out from William Morrow next April.

America’s violent far right would have no difficulty recognizing the tell-tale signatures of Friday’s killing spree in Norway — and not just because they would see the confessed perpetrator, Anders Behring Breivik, as an ideological soul mate who, like their own heroes, thought he could trigger a white-supremacist revolution with bombs and bullets.

Breivik appears to have been more than simply inspired by American predecessors such as Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber: The materials he used, the way he planned and carried out his attacks, and his own writings all suggest he was deeply familiar with the actions of some notorious political killers on this side of the Atlantic.

Breivik possessed a Glock semiautomatic, the same weapon McVeigh was carrying when he was arrested by a hawk-eyed Highway Patrol officer 90 minutes after the April 1995 bombing in Oklahoma. Breivik also possessed a .223-caliber Ruger assault rifle, just like McVeigh.

To read the full column click here.