The Blotter
Updates on extremists and their legal troubles.
SEPT. 11
Terry Jones, a violently anti-Muslim pastor at the Dove World Outreach Center in Bradenton, Fla., was charged with unlawful conveyance of fuel, a felony, after being stopped towing a large barbecue-style grill filled with kerosene-soaked copies of the Koran. Jones toldPolk County, Fla., sheriff’s deputies he was planning to burn 2,998 Korans — one for every victim of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
SEPT. 19
Floyd Corkins II, who shot and wounded a staffer in the lobby of the Washington, D.C., headquarters of the anti-LGBT Family Research Council on Aug. 15, 2012, was sentenced to 25 years in prison after pleading guilty to charges including terrorism. Corkins, who had worked as a volunteer at a local LGBT center, told his victim words to the effect of “I don’t like your politics” before firing.
OCT. 24
A federal appeals court rejected an appeal from Edgar Steele, the anti-Semitic “attorney for the damned” from north Idaho who once defended Aryan Nations founder Richard Butler in a civil suit brought by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Steele is serving a 50-year sentence for the attempted 2010 murder-for-hire of his wife. He claimed improper jury instructions and other errors led to his conviction.
OCT. 31
Yousef al-Khattab, a U.S.-born former Jew (original name Joseph Leonard Cohen) from Atlantic City, N.J., who converted to radical Islam and co-founded the Revolution Muslim website, pleaded guilty to issuing online threats against Jewish leaders and institutions, who the site urged viewers to “deal with directly … in their homes.” The group was also known for threatening the creators of “South Park” over an episode depicting the prophet Muhammed wearing a bear suit.
OCT. 31
A California judge sentenced a 13-year-old boy, who was 10 when he shot and killed his sleeping father in their home, to spend up to 10 years in a state-run juvenile justice facility. The victim, Jeff Hall, was a key West Coast leader of the National Socialist Movement, the country’s largest neo-Nazi group.
NOV. 1
Bill White, the one-time Roanoke, Va., real estate czar who founded the American National Socialist Workers Party, was found guilty of three federal counts of making threats with the intent to extort and a fourth of sending a threatening E-mail. The case related to communications the belligerent neo-Nazi leader sent to his ex-wife in 2012, after she quit mailing him monthly $400 payments while he was a federal fugitive in Mexico, on the run from other threat charges.
DEC. 10
A bit-part TV actress entered a plea agreement in federal court in Texarkana, Texas, that could bring her an 18-year sentence for sending ricin-laced letters protesting gun control to President Obama and then — New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Officials said Shannon Guess Richardson, 36, sent the letters in a plot to implicate her estranged husband after he filed for divorce.
DEC. 18
Seven members of the white supremacist Silent Aryan Warriors prison gang were charged with aggravated assault after they allegedly tied down a member in a Salt Lake City, Utah, apartment, stripped her, and forcibly tattooed her abdomen with the word “rat.” The woman, who goes by “Youngster,” was accused of working as an informant for the FBI.
DEC. 18
Steven Matthew Fernandes, 19, was sentenced to 18 months in federal prison in a plea bargain after police found explosives in his Las Vegas home. Fernandes claimed to be the leader of a small antigovernment militia in Nevada and boasted of a killing spree to come. Discussing the 2012 mass shooting in Aurora, Colo., which left 12 people dead, Fernandes bragged, “I’ll beat that record.”