A federal jury has convicted three would-be terrorists of plotting to bomb various targets, including the Anti-Defamation League’s Houston office.
Prosecutors in the Muskogee, Okla., trial said that self-proclaimed prophet Willie Ray Lampley, his wife, Cecilia, and John Dare Baird believed in an imminent foreign invasion, and thought that bombing civil rights centers, welfare offices, gay bars and abortion clinics would somehow ward off the attack.
No bombs were ever detonated by the three.
Lampley, 65, is the leader of the Oklahoma Constitutional Militia and an organization called the Universal Church of God.
Last November Lampley told the Muskogee Phoenix newspaper that he and his followers discussed blowing up ADL’s Houston office because Jews and international bankers have “robbed this country until the money has no value whatsoever.”
Lampley, according to the ADL, has written letters to public figures prophesying their deaths as divine retribution for what he claims to be their corrupt ways.
In one such letter to the governor of Idaho in 1994, Lampley wrote, “According to the plan of Almighty God, each State in this Union was supposed to have been a mini-republic under the GOVERNMENT OF GOD, not under Jewish international bankers,” adding, “this whole national governmental system will now be destroyed.”
Welcoming the jury’s recent verdict, ADL said in a statement, “The conviction of these anti-government, anti-Semitic and bigoted individuals demonstrates that extremist threats of violence aimed at institutions and citizens of this country will not be tolerated.”
The government based much of its case on conversations secretly recorded by FBI informant Richard Schrum after he joined Lampley’s militia group last summer.
Defense attorneys argued that the three were entrapped by Schrum and sought to portray them as simple country folk – a preacher, a homemaker and a family man down on his luck.
Lampley testified that he began cooking ingredients for a bomb under Schrum’s orders. His wife, 49, said she was unaware of the plot, and Baird, 54, testified that he was simply with the couple because he was behind in his rent and they had offered him a free place to live.
The three were arrested last November when they were found in possession of 210 pounds of fertilizer, a gallon of nitromethane and part of a toaster to be used as a detonator.
Lampley faces a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. His wife could receive five years, and Baird faces 10 years.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
