Latest Terror Plot Suspects Had Checkered Pasts
Yesterday’s arrests were not the first brush with the law for four men accused of plotting to bomb two Bronx synagogues and shoot down military planes.
The Associated Press describes the men, who lived in Newburgh, N.Y., “as down-and-out ex-convicts living on the margins in a faded industrial city” while the New York Times notes their “checkered life stories.”
“The arrests follow a long line of homegrown, headline-making terror plots since Sept. 11 that never came close to reality because the FBI inserted itself in early stages,” AP reports. The Times describes surveillance of the men.
“Remarkably, vast passages of the conspiracy the federal authorities described—the talk of killing Jews, the testing of the men’s would-be weaponry—played out on a veritable soundstage of hidden cameras and secret microphones, and involved material provided by the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” the Times says. “A house in Newburgh, a storage facility in Stamford, the planting of the would-be bombs in the Bronx neighborhood of Riverdale—everything was recorded, according to the complaint.”
One man, Laguerre Payen, spent time in prison for a one-day crime spree in which he fired a BB gun out of an SUV window, hitting two people in the head, and stole purses from two women, the Associated Press reports. He took medication for schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, the Times says, and lived in an apartment that contained bottles of urine and raw chicken on the stovetop, a friend who visited on Thursday told the Times. His lawyer said Payen had ”a very low borderline” IQ, according to AP.
David Williams worked at a steakhouse, where he began reading the Koran on slow nights, and had served time in prison on drug and weapons charges, the Times says. Prosecutors described him as particularly violent.
A third suspect, Onta Williams, was addicted to cocaine, his lawyer said. A fourth, James Cromitie, served 12 years in prison, including a stint for selling drugs to an undercover agent behind a school, the Times reports.
The government said the men were all Muslims, but the imam at the mosque where the men hooked up with a confidential informant told the Times that none of the men were very active there.
