Racist Gang Member Draws Lengthy Sentence in Fake Anthrax Attack

A white supremacist and career criminal who sent threatening letters laced with fake anthrax powder to a federal judge and a prosecutor in Arkansas will have a lot of time in the coming decades to think over his many misdeeds.

LeRoy Shawn Selsor, who claims to be a member of the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas (ABT) prison gang, was sentenced last week to 15 years in federal prison without the possibility of parole. But the 36-year with a baseball-size swastika on his neck won’t be able to even start serving that federal prison time until approximately 2025, when he completes a 20-year state prison term in Arkansas for stabbing and robbing a disabled man in a wheelchair.

“This guy clearly has a lengthy criminal record, a violent history,” Conner Eldridge, the U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Arkansas, told Hatewatch today in discussing his office’s successful prosecution of Selsor.

Selsor was convicted in June 2007 on federal charges related to mailing a threatening letter, laced with a white powder, to Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee in 2006. He served a three-year federal prison term for that offense and was on supervised release when he was arrested in June 2010 and convicted on state charges of aggravated first-degree battery for stabbing the wheelchair victim. That conviction led to a revocation of Selsor’s federally supervised release.

Apparently angered that Senior U.S. District Judge James Moody and an assistant U.S. attorney based in Little Rock were intending to send him back to prison, Selsor wrote additional letters, lacing them with what he said was anthrax powder and threatening to use car bombs against his targets.

“He did profess in his letter to be a member of the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas,” said Eldridge, who chairs U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder’s Domestic Terrorism Working Group. “His letter to the judge said, ‘I am an ABT-skinhead-Texas and I wrote everyone in the state of Arkansas and put a hit on you two to get you all killed.’”

Sensor was indicted in August 2012 on five charges related to that incident and pleaded guilty in June to two of those counts – mailing a threatening letter to a federal judge and a prosecutor, and use of a weapon of mass destruction in a mailed letter. Sensor has used the aliases of Michael Shawn Kinlow and David Miles, Arkansas Department of Corrections records show.

The case was transferred to Eldridge’s office in the Western District of Arkansas, based in Fort Smith, because Selsor’s intended victims were all in the Eastern District of Arkansas, based in Little Rock.

“Threats of violence, like the ones made by Leroy Selsor, are something this office takes very seriously, especially in light of recent events,” Eldridge said. “This office will continue to protect an individual’s right to be free from fear, and those who attempt to evoke terror in our communities will be brought to justice.”

Randall C. Coleman, a senior FBI official in Arkansas, said the case brought against Selsor should serve “as a reminder that sending a threatening letter — even if it’s a hoax — is a serious crime.”

“It demands a multi-agency response and causes a drain on resources. We will continue to work with our federal, state, and local partners to aggressively investigate these matters,” he added.