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Tag: ATF

  • DEVELOPING STORY: Buford Rogers Arrested In Alleged Localized Terror Plot In Minnesota, FBI Says

    Buford Braden Rogers: Source: Chippewa County Sheriff's Office.
    Buford Braden Rogers: Source: Chippewa County Sheriff’s Office.

    FBI agents and other members of law enforcement have arrested 24-year-old Buford Rogers in Montevideo, Minn., after executing a search warrant Friday and finding “explosive devices” and “several guns,” the FBI said today.

    “The FBI believes that a terror attack was disrupted by law enforcement personnel and that the lives of several local residents were potentially saved,” the agency said.

    The alleged plot was “discovered and subsequently thwarted through the timely analysis of intelligence and through the cooperation and coordination” among federal, state and local agencies, the FBI said.

    How long the probe had been under way was not immediately clear. Also unclear is whether the alleged plot was targeted at specific individuals or posed a general local threat.

    Montevideo is a small town in Chippewa County, about 140 miles west of Minneapolis. Rogers is being held on a charge of possessing a firearm as a convicted felon.

    The Star Tribune of Minneapolis/St. Paul is reporting that agents found “Molotov cocktails, suspected pipe bombs and a Romanian AKM assault rifle among the firearms.”

    Agencies participating in the probe include the Montevideo Police Department; the Chippewa County Sheriff’s Office; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives; the Minnesota State Highway Patrol; the Bloomington Police Department; the Minnehaha County Sheriff’s Office (South Dakota); the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources; and members of CEE-VI (Cooperative Enforcement Effort), the FBI said.

    Rogers turned 24 in December, according to his booking sheet at the Sheriff’s Office.

  • Man Who Posed As Fraud Investigator And Blew Up His Own Mailbox Convicted In Bizarre Bid To Extort Ponzi Scheme Victims To Pay Him For Information

    A Washington state man has been convicted of nine federal felonies in a bizarre case in which he attempted to fleece Ponzi scheme victims by blowing up his own mailbox and taking guns and bomb-making components to Atlanta.

    Kevin W. Williams, 45, of Chehalis, was found guilty of three counts of wire fraud, extortion, possession of a firearm without a serial number, destruction of a letter box, making a false official statement and two counts of possession of an unregistered firearm. The unregistered firearms included a pipe bomb and a zip gun, federal prosecutors said.

    Williams’ plot began in 2007 and featured a claim that he was an investigator who knew where the loot from a $90 million Ponzi scheme in Greater Atlanta had been hidden, prosecutors said.

    In a bid to make his claims sound credible, Williams, an unemployed logger, blew up his mailbox with a homemade bomb. He apparently reasoned that Ponzi victims and attorneys involved in the case would give him money if they came to believe his information was so valuable that someone tried to maim him to make him turn silent, prosecutors said.

    Williams was slightly injured in the mailbox detonation that he arranged with an accomplice, prosecutors said. After the mailbox exploded, emergency responders were summoned to make the story more plausible.

    The trouble with the story, prosecutors said, was that the “blast was so powerful that Williams would have been badly injured if it had occurred as he described. He was checked at the hospital and released the same day having suffered only a few minor scratches on his forehead and ringing in his ears as injuries.”

    With no one willing to pay him for his purported information, Williams dialed up the scheme, prosecutors said.

    First, he sent emails “with a threatening tone,” prosecutors said.

    And then Williams traveled to Atlanta for the Ponzi trial.

    “He was arrested by law enforcement with a variety of guns, ammunition and explosive components in his car,” prosecutors said. “Following that arrest, one of Williams’ cohorts contacted law enforcement, and admitted lying to the police about Williams being the victim of the mail box bomb.

    Assisting in the probe were the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms & Explosives (ATF) and the Lewis County Sheriff’s Department.

    The case was prosecuted by the office of U.S. Attorney Jenny A. Durkan of the Western District of Washington.

    Williams’ step-mother was a victim of the Atlanta-area scheme, prosecutors said.