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Speaker 1: You're listening to Law and Order Criminal Justice System, a production of Wolf Entertainment and iHeart podcasts.
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Speaker 2: In the criminal justice System, landmark trials transcend the courtroom to reshape the law. The brave many women who investigate and prosecute these cases are part of a select group that is defined American history. These are their stories. May nineteenth, twenty seventeen, Tampa, Florida.
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Speaker 1: A hostage situation. Police respond to a call of three people being held at gunpoint at a nearby strip mall. The attacker, a twenty four year old by the name of Devon Arthur's, is apprehended. While in police custody, Arthur's was asked if anyone else was hurt. His response was chilling, said, and I quote the people in the apartment, but they aren't hurt, they're dead. Arthur's directed police to a street line with pastel colored condos. Inside one of the apartments, they found two young men Arthur's roommates, dead on the floor. Police walked through the rooms, surveying the scene. Inside the bedroom of a fourth roommate, they found something that had nothing to do with the double murder, but was almost equally disturbing.
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Speaker 3: He had a framed picture of Timothy mcveay in his room. He idolized McVeigh and he wanted to do something similar to what McVeigh did, and he was working on constructing explosive devices.
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Speaker 1: The picture of McVeigh belonged to a man named Brandon Russell, and investigators had just uncovered the first layer of his hidden world. It wouldn't be long until they learned it went even first. There secret chat rooms, stockpilp, explosives, and a blueprint for a deadly attack.
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Speaker 4: I got a call, get out to Lavardia Airport.
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Speaker 5: There's been a bombing.
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Speaker 3: There was a thirty two foot crater in front of what was left of the building.
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Speaker 1: I was trying to figure out, am I dead? Am I alive? Where am I? I'm Anethega Nicolazzi. That's why terrorism works. It doesn't care who you are. From Wolf Entertainment and iHeart Podcasts, this is Lawn Order Criminal Justice System. This season, we've explored cases that change the trajectory of the United States, moments that cost lives and forced law enforcement to respond to the aftermath. Those are the cases that make headlines, the ones that define era. But as we saw in the last episode, there's another side to this fight, one that you almost never hear about, the attacks that didn't happen, the plots that were stopped before they could claim lives. This episode is about those cases, the near misses, the moments where agents stepped in just in time, the plots were thwarted before they could become tragedies. Take the case of twenty one year old Brandon Russell. His shrine to Timothy McVeigh wasn't just extremist theater. He was connected to something larger, something far beyond that Tampa apartment.
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Speaker 3: The reason Brandon Russell and his group Adam Woff and Division are so important is because they became early leaders in the accelerationist movements.
00:03:53
Speaker 1: As Michael Jensen explains, the accelerationist movement believes that terror itself can be the spark to bring down democracy, and Brandon Russell's neo Nazi group, the atam Waffen Division, which means atomic weapons in German, they embraced it.
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Speaker 3: So they got onto a forum that was called Iron March, which was an online forum of white supremacist organizations. Essentially, they got in there, started using Iron March and quickly became kind of the most popular group that was acting there. Brandon Russell was the leader of Adam Waffen Division on Iron March.
00:04:36
Speaker 1: While Russell's network spread internationally, that part of his identity was well masked.
00:04:42
Speaker 3: Russell was also a member of the US National Guard at the time that he was doing all of this. As someone in the military, he was gathering the tactical knowledge and skills that he would need to be potentially quite deadly if he wanted to.
00:04:59
Speaker 1: Inside his garage, investigators uncovered far more than ideology. They found explosive materials, radiation sources, and bomb making components. It was clear Russell wasn't just dabbling in extremism, he was preparing to attack. The threat was taken seriously. Russell was charged with possession of an unregistered destructive device and unlawful storage of explosive material. He was convicted and sent to prison. Even while incarcerated, he was laying the groundwork for what came next.
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Speaker 3: And then he gets released, goes on to federal supervision, and within a year is arrested again. He and a woman that he had started communicating with while he was in prison were plotting a series of attacks to attack the Baltimore power grid.
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Speaker 1: But federal agents were listening. They had inserted a confidential informant tracking the couple's plans as they took form, but before they were put in motion, Russell was arrested a second time. The grid attack never happened. From an online forum to real world violence, both stopped before a disaster. This is just one of many cases that highlight the attacks that have been prevented before extremists succeeded. One of those cases began in Kansas with an FBI agent who found herself in the middle of a deadly plot.
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Speaker 6: My name is Amy Kuhn and I am currently a special Agent in the Garden City resident Agent out of the Kansas City Division. I just had my seventeenth year anniversary.
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Speaker 1: Amy was drawn to the Bureau from a young age, even if it seemed out of reach.
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Speaker 6: I grew up in a really small town, and the FBI was not a job that people where I grew up with had. The FBI was something I was interested in, so I went to law school with the antition of trying to get into the FBI. I worked as a prosecutor for a couple of years, and then I got accepted into the FBI.
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Speaker 1: Her career began in Garden City, a small town in southwest Kansas, filled with wide open prairie and farmland. The office looked very different from the larger field divisions seen elsewhere.
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Speaker 6: The Garden City FBI office is two agents and we don't have any support staff there. The western third of Kansas is our territory, and now there is one DEA agent in Garden City, but kind of for that area, that's the only federal law enforcement presence that's out there.
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Speaker 1: Her post couldn't have been further from the hubs of federal law enforcement.
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Speaker 6: We are probably six and a half hours from Kansas City, six hours to Denver, five hours to Albuquerque, four and a half hours to Oklahoma City. It is a rural area, lots of agriculture, and Garden City is like the big city for the area, centrally located in the middle of nowhere, not what most people would consider a big city.
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Speaker 1: The community she served had been shaped by its industry. Garden City was a meatpacking town. The plants employed thousands, drawing workers from across the region and immigrants who came to the US looking for work.
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Speaker 6: And the plants they have some recruiters that will go to refugee camps and just say, hey, we'll give you housing for a certain amount of time and we'll pay you if you want to come live in wherever the meatpacking plant is.
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Speaker 1: The area became an unlikely melting pot. In Garden City schools alone, children spoke dozens of languages.
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Speaker 6: So in Garden City there's like fifty languages spoken in the school system.
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Speaker 1: Families arrived from Mexico and Cuba, from Somalia and Vietnam, each new wave building on the last, each new group becoming part of the community.
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Speaker 6: They've just accepted who the new refugee is.
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Speaker 1: On the surface, all was calm, but this quiet posting would soon pull her into something she had never faced before.
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Speaker 4: It was my first domestic terrorism.
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Speaker 1: Case, and the investigation had the potential to impact her community forever. In the summer of twoenty fifteen, a story began spreading online.
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Speaker 6: There was a Facebook message that came out that had a picture of a Palestinian flag and it said that Palestinian flag had been hung up in the Garden City library, that there was an ISIS flag there, and there were some Maali's that were recruiting for ISIS in the library. We got several calls regarding that Facebook message.
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Speaker 4: People were concerned about it.
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Speaker 1: The calls kept coming. Amy went to see for herself to try and get answers, but when she got there, the flag was gone.
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Speaker 6: I went to the library and tried to figure out where this information came from. And interviewing people, I discovered who had taken the Palestinian flag down.
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Speaker 4: That was Dan Day. He was just a local citizen.
00:11:00
Speaker 1: Amy located Dan and the two met. She wanted to figure out what had happened and why Dan's explanation cast the rumors in a different light.
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Speaker 6: He said he didn't really see people recruiting for ISIS. There were Somalis in the library that use the library frequently, but he didn't see an ISIS flag. The Palestinian flag had been posted and he took it down because it was supporting Palestine. In talking to people, what I came to the conclusion of was it had gotten blown out of proportion. There was no ISIS recruiting and there was no ISIS flag at the library.
00:11:39
Speaker 1: The rumors had turned out to be a false alarm. But Amy's collaboration with Dan was just beginning because he went on to tell her about a meeting that would soon lead to an investigation of its own.
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Speaker 6: He said he had been to a militia meeting for a security force, and the people were very concerned about the Somali presence in the southwest Kansas, and we're concerned that there were ISIS members. And at the time, this is twenty fifteen, there were a lot of beheading videos that were being shown on YouTube and internet. So it was a time when people were very frightened of ISSIS. And during certain holy days for Muslims, there would be a group of Somalis that would meet on Tennis Court and they would pray all together there on some of the religious holidays, and this group had a particular problem with that.
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Speaker 1: Militias are generally described as an armed force made up of civilian volunteers.
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Speaker 6: In general, it is part of constitution you have a right to have militias and bear arms. And so a lot of these militia groups, the commonalty is that they are patriots, They believe in the United States, and they want to protect the values they deem important in the United States. A lot of the militias want to be armed and they want to not lose that freedom. A lot of the militia groups, we don't have concerns about it because they just meet and do their own thing and there's not ever any issues from them.
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Speaker 1: It wasn't that it was a militia meeting that caught Amy's attention, it was what was being said at the time. There were a lot of online conversations that were being monitored.
00:13:49
Speaker 6: There were a lot of what I would call Facebook warriors. There were a lot of people talking a big game on the internet and posting stuff, but actually doing anything was not as prevalent.
00:14:02
Speaker 1: For Amy. What raised red flags was that this group's hostility was pointed, and it raised the question of whether words might turn into action.
00:14:13
Speaker 6: That's what makes domestic terrorism hard is that you are investigating something that a lot of people deem First Amendment right protected. So you have to balance that line. And to me, some of the things that were concerning to me were that they were focusing on the Somali population.
00:14:36
Speaker 4: Just the fact that they were focusing.
00:14:38
Speaker 6: Their energy on one particular group, it gave me concern to at least try to get somebody that could determine if there was even a problem.
00:14:50
Speaker 1: All of which left Amy walking a fine line. The challenge was how to move forward without overstepping her next move was to see whether she could develop a source inside the group.
00:15:03
Speaker 6: We left the meeting and I told my partner Robin Smith, I said, I think I might try to open Dan Day.
00:15:10
Speaker 4: As a source.
00:15:11
Speaker 6: Robin said that guy really, like, You're not going to get anything out of that guy, essentially, and I said, yeah, I think I will. So I called Dan Day and I met with him again, and he described that Kansas Security Force was a militia. A militia is not illegal, but he said that they had talked about doing surveillance of people and that starts getting into kind of a fuzzy area. I told Dan that if he wanted to continue going to Kansas Security Force meetings, I would be interested in anything that you find out about Somali's or any illegal activities that are going on that they think they're discovering.
00:15:56
Speaker 4: He said, okay.
00:15:59
Speaker 1: Stepping into that role wasn't easy.
00:16:03
Speaker 6: Dan was pretty nervous type of guy, and I think initially my partner didn't think he would be very well suited for it. But Dan was very patriotic and he wanted to do something that he felt was right that was protecting his community and his country. And I also think that he enjoyed being part of the team and he felt.
00:16:32
Speaker 4: It was important what he was doing.
00:16:35
Speaker 1: With Dan on board, Amy now had someone on the inside. She quickly realized that the conversations went beyond the in person meetings.
00:16:47
Speaker 6: They met a lot online. They would have a lot of Facebook messaging, and they would have Zello calls. They did not believe it could be monitored by the government. So that's the app that a lot.
00:17:01
Speaker 4: Of these militia groups were using, was this Zello app.
00:17:04
Speaker 6: So they would have these nightly Zello calls and check ins.
00:17:08
Speaker 1: And the tone of those communications started to change.
00:17:13
Speaker 6: They started talking about wanting to do something to one of the Somali businesses. They would talk about throwing pigs in their store or wrapping bacon around the handles, and so they started talking about things that would be a civil rights violation if they followed through with it. And then they also were planning surveillance.
00:17:38
Speaker 1: The words were moving from ideas to actual plans.
00:17:43
Speaker 6: They were going to be in separate vehicles, use this Zello app as walkie talkies, and they were going to follow some of these Somalis to see where they went and what they were doing, like a police surveillance. So at that point we felt that there was enough to open a domestic terrorism investigation.
00:18:07
Speaker 1: And it quickly got internal attention.
00:18:10
Speaker 6: When I did open the case, it had a lot of oversight from our division council. I had to give him updates to make sure that we weren't infringing on anybody's constitutional rights. So I would update him frequently, and I was in frequent contact with the prosecutor, who was also concerned about people's rights.
00:18:34
Speaker 1: Amy wasn't sure where the case would lead.
00:18:38
Speaker 6: I thought, at most maybe some of these militia guys were going to be doing surveillance and do something stupid and you know, pull out a gun and shoot somebody that they shouldn't like.
00:18:49
Speaker 4: I never thought it would end up where it did.
00:18:53
Speaker 1: The group that Amy was monitoring was a small part of a much larger organization that spread across Cans.
00:19:01
Speaker 6: Kansas Security Force was a statewide organization and they had it split up into zones. DAN was a part of was the Southwest Kansas zone. I think there were three zones.
00:19:15
Speaker 1: It wasn't the entirety of Kansas Security Force. Or KSF that was viewed as a potential threat.
00:19:24
Speaker 6: Kansas Security Force in general, there were no issues with there were a few people that ended up being members of Kansas Security Force that were a problem.
00:19:36
Speaker 1: The world Dan Day was navigating was about to take on a more dangerous edge.
00:19:42
Speaker 6: When Patrick Stein comes into the picture. He is who recruits Dan to be a member of KSF. Patrick Stein was a farmer in Ford County, didn't like immigrants, and he's expressed racist idealies.
00:20:01
Speaker 1: His rhetoric quickly escalated beyond talk.
00:20:05
Speaker 6: Patrick Stein called Dan Day and said, can you take me around to these addresses that were going to be surveilling. So Dan took him around. There were a couple African stores and apartment complex and when Dan took him around, he went off, for lack of a better term, on the somalies. He was calling him names and he said he wanted to shoot some of them. So that's when we thought we might have a bigger problem.
00:20:38
Speaker 1: Dan grew uneasy with where Stein was pushing things.
00:20:43
Speaker 6: After Stein met with Dan, Dan called me and he was very concerned and he didn't want to do the surveillance because he was afraid that Patrick Stein was going to shoot somebody or do something.
00:20:57
Speaker 1: Out in rural western Kansas, FBI backup wasn't easy. There were no nearby buildings or vantage points that could keep agents hidden from view. Cover was scarce, and every move risk exposure.
00:21:13
Speaker 6: I said, well, that's why you have to go. I said, I can't come and do surveillance. You need to stick by Patrick Stein's side, and you have to be the voice of reason. You need to try to keep him from doing something stupid.
00:21:28
Speaker 4: Dan was very concerned at that time.
00:21:31
Speaker 1: Dan's warnings made it clear Stein wasn't just talking. His volatility posed a real risk.
00:21:39
Speaker 4: So we opened a case on Patrick Stein.
00:21:42
Speaker 6: We told Dan that whatever Patrick Stein was doing, that's who we wanted to focus on.
00:21:49
Speaker 1: Stein's anger continued to simmer. Then came the shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando two.
00:21:57
Speaker 3: O'clock in the morning. An officer who was working at Paul's nightclub engaged this gunman in a firefight.
00:22:04
Speaker 2: The person I was with or shot in the back.
00:22:06
Speaker 1: I had taken my bandanna off and tied it up, put it in a knockbull hole that was in his.
00:22:11
Speaker 2: Back so that he wasn't lead.
00:22:14
Speaker 1: In June twenty sixteen, a man swearing allegiance to ISIS shot and killed forty nine people and wounded fifty three at the Gay nightclub in Florida.
00:22:25
Speaker 6: The next day, patrick Stein called Dan day and said, we have to do something. We can't let this happen again. We need to take action. He believed that most of the Muslims in southwest Kansas were associated with ISIS, so he felt they needed to do something before Muslims and ISIS took over the United States.
00:22:52
Speaker 1: Stein wasted no time.
00:22:55
Speaker 6: So patrick Stein organized a meeting in a field in a rural area and gathered people that he deemed would be willing to do something.
00:23:11
Speaker 1: Dan went to the meeting to capture what happened.
00:23:14
Speaker 4: He was recording it was a whole thing. His car broke down.
00:23:19
Speaker 6: I had to take him to meet up with Stein, so he had had a stressful day already. I dropped him off and Stein picked him up, and he rode with Stein to the meeting, which was about three hour drive to where they went.
00:23:35
Speaker 4: Stein didn't have air conditioning and Dan.
00:23:38
Speaker 6: Did not take anything to drink, and it was June and it was really hot.
00:23:45
Speaker 1: The FBI couldn't directly keep eyes on the gathering as it was in a wide open field outside of town. Amy was listening on the wire from far away, knowing if something went wrong, Dan was on his own. It was a dangerous assignment for a civilian. Despite being surrounded by armed, angry men in the middle of nowhere, Dan kept the recorder running. The conversation dragged on in the sweltering heat, moving from complaints to violent ideas.
00:24:19
Speaker 6: So they're in this field talking about what they should do, and there's things brought up, like shooting at a mosque.
00:24:30
Speaker 1: Hours dragged on until the strain became too much.
00:24:35
Speaker 6: I was trying to text him and I was getting no response.
00:24:40
Speaker 1: Had Dan's cover been blown? The silence felt like an eternity. With informant Dan day on responsive. The question for the FBI became whether to break cover and intervene.
00:25:05
Speaker 4: So my bosses were like, do we need to go in? What's going on?
00:25:10
Speaker 6: And because of the rule of nature, we had a surveillance team, but they were a long ways away because we did not want to burn Dan, and I felt his safety would be more at issue if we went in.
00:25:28
Speaker 1: As the team considered what to do, Amy's phone suddenly buzzed.
00:25:33
Speaker 6: Dan texted me and said he was in the hospital in Hutchison.
00:25:36
Speaker 4: He had passed out.
00:25:37
Speaker 6: They had called an ambulance, the ambulance had taken him to the hospital. I was like, all right, So Robin and I loaded up to go get him from the hospital in.
00:25:47
Speaker 1: Hutch The heat had taken its toll and he had passed out. Most importantly that Amy Dan was safe. The device he had been carrying also survived, and so did the recording. But would they be able to use it.
00:26:05
Speaker 6: It's clear when he passes out we were consensually recording.
00:26:09
Speaker 4: Not to mention it.
00:26:11
Speaker 6: Also, when he passes out, we no longer have a consenting party. It becomes an illegal title iree because our consenting party is not there.
00:26:21
Speaker 1: That meant every second of audio after Dan collapsed couldn't be used.
00:26:27
Speaker 6: They did not find the recording device on him, neither the people in the field nor the hospital people. When Robin and I got to the hospital, we turned off the recording device. Also, I sent the recording and I said, hey, we got to have somebody review this before we can listen to it, because it's tainted. We had a taint review team that figured out when he passed out in the field and spliced that out.
00:26:57
Speaker 1: The agent assembled the remaining pieces of the meetings, recording what happened that night served as an important reminder the fine line between the success of a case and personal harm, especially when it comes to a civilian informant. But what was left of the usable tape from Dan's recorder would become essential.
00:27:20
Speaker 6: That meeting in the field became the beginning of our conspiracy for court.
00:27:28
Speaker 1: But the case was still evolving.
00:27:31
Speaker 6: Patrick Stein was a true believer. I think he genuinely believed that basically all Somali's were Muslim and all the Muslims wanted to do harm to United States citizens.
00:27:48
Speaker 1: There was a small group of men that also shared his ideology.
00:27:53
Speaker 6: Patrick Stein, Curtis Allen, Gavin Wright, and Dan all become part of this group called the Crusaders.
00:28:02
Speaker 1: Even the name Crusaders was telling a throwback to religious wars. It framed them as patriotic religious avengers. Alan and Wright would become Stein's keyco conspirators, joining him in a plan that was beginning to take shape.
00:28:19
Speaker 6: They set up a new group on Signal and they named the group Crusaders.
00:28:26
Speaker 4: Two point zero.
00:28:28
Speaker 1: Signal is a privacy focused messaging app with end to end encryption for the FBI. It raised the question were these men simply exercising our right to privacy or working to cover their tracks. Their encrypted chats gave them a private space to push each other further, and Patrick.
00:28:48
Speaker 6: Stein frequently talked about that they were essentially the new Crusaders and that they were getting the Muslims out again, much like the original Crusaders.
00:29:00
Speaker 1: And inside that echo chamber, the talk evolved from vague anger to concrete plotting.
00:29:06
Speaker 6: They talked to some other members of KSF that they thought would be down for their cause. Ultimately, the people that they approached said, look, we are willing to respond if something happens, but we don't want to initiate anything. Whereas Curtis, Patrick and Gavin were talking about initiating something, there was one member that had his wife not been there, would have probably been on board, but she said, yeah, we're not doing that.
00:29:46
Speaker 4: We have kids.
00:29:48
Speaker 1: They split from the larger group, leaving Stein, Alan and Wright on their own, isolated but committed.
00:29:56
Speaker 6: They would have meetings and these meetings would last a hours, six hours a long time. They were all very paranoid about government listening in so They would make everybody put their cell phones in a room and they would turn the music up so the government couldn't listen to them.
00:30:16
Speaker 1: It soon became clear why they didn't want to be heard.
00:30:20
Speaker 6: They would talk about a lot of different conspiracy theories. They would also talk about what they wanted to do. They talked about blowing stuff up. They talked about shooting landlords because the landlords were allowing these Muslims to rent from them, going in and shooting.
00:30:38
Speaker 4: Up a bunch apartments.
00:30:40
Speaker 6: They talked about trying to put a bomb at a parade. There were a lot of different ideas, but ultimately they decided that they wanted to do something At three h five West Mary. It's an apartment complex. There's a large Somali population and Muslim population, and one of the apartments had been turned into a mosque.
00:31:05
Speaker 1: And the something they wanted to do was deadly.
00:31:09
Speaker 6: Ultimately, they decided on some sort of bomb to blow up the mosque, and they started working on their own homemade explosives. They wanted to do trash can bombs or car bombs, park them in the parking lot and blow up the apartment complex. They also talked about trying to drop some kind of bomb through the air ducks.
00:31:42
Speaker 1: The scope of their plot was unmistakable. What had started as talk had evolved into a plan for mass casualties. As the plan grew more specific, Amy Enter team faced a problem. Dan Day was their only source. Stein and his group were asking for others and safety and the investigation were at risk.
00:32:04
Speaker 6: They thought that they might need help with their explosive devices. So this is about the time that we introduced an undercover because we were concerned that they were moving very quickly. Patrick Sin was using drugs at this time too, so sometimes his behavior was kind of erratic, and there was always a concern that Dan Day might get cut out. And he was the only eyes and ears that we had into this. They didn't really use cell phones a lot. They met in person. Also, when going to court, undercovers generally are more reliable.
00:32:46
Speaker 1: And that is basically because an undercover agent is a member of law enforcement, whereas with a civilian like Dan there's always the risk that they get scared and cut and run and won't be willing to testify. Dan was true trusted by Stein and his pals, so agents wanted to use that to their advantage.
00:33:06
Speaker 6: From the beginning, Dan had told them some of his relatives were involved in some illegal activities. He told them he had a family member that ran guns, like he's a guy that can get stuff and they were friends.
00:33:24
Speaker 1: That family member was fiction, but it was the cover story for an FBI operative.
00:33:31
Speaker 6: Dan was like, Hey, do you want to meet up with this guy? And as a group, they decided that they did want to meet up, but Gavin and Curtis did not want to go meet in person because they were concerned that it was a government agent. But they still wanted to know what the guy had to say, so patrick Stein decided he was going to go talk to him.
00:33:58
Speaker 1: The meeting went according to plan, the FBI's plan.
00:34:03
Speaker 6: They came up with a list of things that was like grenades, debt, cord, there are four items. We have multiple undercovers there, and Dan dropped a package off with them.
00:34:17
Speaker 4: They paid him.
00:34:18
Speaker 6: Then he introduces the undercover to patrick Stein.
00:34:23
Speaker 1: Stein's reaction left little doubt that this was the right match.
00:34:28
Speaker 6: They have a conversation and patrick Stein basically has a man crush on.
00:34:36
Speaker 4: The undercover from the beginning.
00:34:38
Speaker 6: He likes everything that the undercover says and he is fully supportive After the conversation, Stein believed that he could make explosives and he knew what he was doing. The name that the undercover used with these guys was Brian.
00:34:54
Speaker 1: With that first meeting complete, Brian, the FBI undercover became embedded, and it didn't take long before Stein began confiding in him.
00:35:04
Speaker 6: All of this is actually in text communications between Patrick Stein and Brian. Patrick Stein's like, well, here's our plan. We want to have bombs set up at the apartment complex to completely wipe out the complex. We want to do it during prayer time to kill the most people that we can because everybody will be there at prayer time.
00:35:29
Speaker 4: He said.
00:35:29
Speaker 6: We were thinking trash can bombs or car bombs. Then the undercover says, well, I can provide you a car bomb that would be able to take out the complex, and patrick Stein says, oh, and I have fertilizer because he works on a farm.
00:35:48
Speaker 1: Even as undercover, Brian offered to supply materials. The others kept experimenting on their own in.
00:35:56
Speaker 6: Case they couldn't figure out how to make it work. Curtis Allen and Gavin Wright continued.
00:36:04
Speaker 4: To make explosives to the point where they made HMTD.
00:36:11
Speaker 1: For amateur bomb makers. HMTD is a go to ingredient.
00:36:16
Speaker 6: The hardest part of making explosives is that initial explosive that sets the larger explosive off. So they were successful in making HMTD, and we have a recording where they're talking to Dan about how they made it and they almost blew up the sink in the bathroom, and that they had made a couple batches. At the time, Gavin Wright and his brother owned a company called GMNG Mobile Homes and they had made this HMTD at GNG Mobile Homes, which was also a business that people came into. So then we had concerns about people's safety.
00:36:57
Speaker 1: They had also decided when the attack would take place.
00:37:02
Speaker 6: They wanted to do it the day after the election. This is in October of twenty sixteen, when Hillary Clinton and Trump are running against each other. They didn't want to do anything that would cause Hillary to be elected, and so they were planning it for.
00:37:19
Speaker 4: The day after the election. In November.
00:37:23
Speaker 1: Actual preparation began.
00:37:26
Speaker 6: At the same time, We're trying to set up a second meeting with Brian and they were going to shoot fully automatic weapons in a field. Curtis Allen and Gavin Wright were still kind of on the fence, but it looked positive that they were going to be coming to the meeting. Patrick Stein was all in and Dan was going to be there with Patrick. We had several undercovers to try to make the shooting as safe as possible, because, as you can imagine, if you have a group of people that you're investigating shooting automatic weapons, and there's a lot that goes into getting approvals for that.
00:38:04
Speaker 1: The operation was ready to go, but then it hit a snack.
00:38:09
Speaker 6: It was Columbus Day. We had set up the shooting in the field. We practiced how to run through with all of the personnel that we were using. We finished rehearsing and Dan Day gets a call saying Curtis Allen has been arrested for domestic violence against his girlfriend. And about the same time, Robin got a call from a Liberal PD detective saying they might need the FBI's help because they had just arrested in an individual who had a lot of militia stuff and his girlfriend was saying that Curtis Allen was part of a group that was planning on doing something. So we leave the field and we're like okay, So this is a new turn. Now, what are we going to do?
00:39:09
Speaker 1: Local police had stumbled onto the very plot that the FBI had been watching for months. Amy and her partner needed to improvise.
00:39:18
Speaker 6: Local law enforcement still did not know about our investigation at this point, so we came up with a plan that Robin and I were going to go down to Liberal PD and see what they had, and we were still going to go forward with shooting the automatic weapons. Curtis Allen is in jail, but the hope was to still get Patrick Stein and Gavin.
00:39:41
Speaker 1: Wright at the station. Amy and her partner sat down with Alan's girlfriend.
00:39:47
Speaker 6: We go down to go speak with Curtis's girlfriend. I interviewed her and she is claiming that Curtis Allen is part of a group that is planning on doing something to Somali's She didn't no for sure what it was, but she knew that involved killing Muslims and that they had been making explosives.
00:40:09
Speaker 1: Her motive may have been tied to their relationship impossible revenge, but her information corroborated some of what the FBI already knew.
00:40:19
Speaker 6: She and Curtis had gotten into a fight and he had grabbed her arm and she was out for vengeance, so she gave up all the information she knew about Curtis and him being part of a militia group. She also said he's making silencers and he has a bunch of weapons. So Liberal PD did a search warrant at their trailer and took all of his guns. They also found potential bomb making stuff, militia stuff, and they found a manifesto for the group explaining why they were doing this.
00:40:58
Speaker 1: The writings laid out ambitions that went far beyond Garden City.
00:41:02
Speaker 6: Ultimately, they wanted to start a chain reaction of militia groups taking action against Muslims across the country.
00:41:12
Speaker 1: The investigation had reached a tipping point. The conspirators were no longer just talking. They were plotting a campaign for nationwide violence. And with Curtis Allen behind bars, the question was no longer whether to act, but when.
00:41:41
Speaker 6: After the search warrants, we talked to the AUSA and grand jury was the next week. So Wednesday night, leaving we thought, well, indict these guys next week. About ten minutes after I got home that night, I get a call from the ASAC saying the decision has been made that we are arresting these guys on Friday.
00:42:11
Speaker 1: The timeline changed overnight.
00:42:14
Speaker 6: We started working on everything that had to be done in order to get these guys arrested. Friday. At six o'clock in the morning, we reached back out to Stein and Stein was going to deliver four bags of fertilizer to the undercover Friday morning.
00:42:34
Speaker 1: Fertilizer may sound ordinary, but in the wrong hands it's anything but. Mixed with fuel and a detonator, it becomes a powerful bomb, the same kind that was used in the Oklahoma City bombing. Stopping Stein before he could make that handoff became the priority.
00:42:53
Speaker 6: We also worked on a plan to arrest Gavin and do search warrants at Gavin house, patrick Stein's house, Gavin's vehicle, patrick Stein's vehicle.
00:43:07
Speaker 1: Patrick Stein never made it past the parking.
00:43:10
Speaker 6: Lot, so patrick Stein gets arrested Friday morning at the McDonald's in Dodge City by the Kansas City swat team. He pulls up and walks inside to meet with the undercover. They have a short conversation and then they're walking out to move the fertilizer from one vehicle to the other.
00:43:32
Speaker 4: And they arrest him in the parking lot. When he comes out.
00:43:35
Speaker 6: The SWAT team handed him over to Robin and I and we took him to the Sheriff's office and interviewed him.
00:43:42
Speaker 1: Did he seem surprised?
00:43:43
Speaker 4: He was very surprised. He was shocked.
00:43:47
Speaker 6: He basically says, how could you do this? I had a cross on and he saw my cross and he was like, how can you allow them to arrest me when we are protecting you.
00:44:02
Speaker 4: You should be in my corner.
00:44:05
Speaker 1: His accomplices soon followed.
00:44:08
Speaker 6: Curtis aund was transferred into federal custody. And I had tried to interview him and he asked for an attorney, so he didn't talk to us. Gavin Wright was arrested and he also didn't talk to anybody.
00:44:24
Speaker 1: By that Friday morning, the plot to bomb three h five West Mary Street and kill as many as they could was over. The three men who called themselves the Crusaders were behind bars.
00:44:37
Speaker 5: At THEI agents say that this investigation took them into a hidden culture of both hate and violence. Thoriti to say. Curtis Wayne, Allen Patrick, Eugene Stein, and Gavin Wayne Wright were all arrested after they planned to bomb an apartment complex in Garden City, in Southwest Kansas. The Council on American Islamic Relations issued a statement after the arrest that says state and federal authority should offer or stepped up protection to local communities. If convicted, all three men could face life in prison.
00:45:07
Speaker 6: They were charged with conspiracy to make a weapon of mass destruction WMD.
00:45:14
Speaker 1: They were all tried together at trial. The defense strategy was clear from the start.
00:45:21
Speaker 6: They tried to use an entrapment case. They did the openings in court, and one of the defense councils opening was that we had conspired to put cases on these guys when they were just law abiding citizens and part of a militia group. Basically, they tried to argue that these guys were just misunderstood and they were militia members trying to protect themselves and they weren't actually going to do anything, but the government pushed them to do it. But the judge ruled that there wasn't entrapment.
00:46:00
Speaker 1: The recordings the FBI had gathered left little room for doubt.
00:46:04
Speaker 6: The other thing that happened is they got charged with a hate crime. We worked with Civil Rights Division out a headquarters to do a hate crime because in the recordings.
00:46:16
Speaker 4: They talked about.
00:46:18
Speaker 6: Doing this because they were Muslim and because they were Somali, and Patrick Stein called them cockroaches, and he said he was the Orcan man and.
00:46:27
Speaker 4: He was going to exterminate all of them.
00:46:29
Speaker 6: And they had put a map up and labeled all the places that Somali's lived and their stores.
00:46:38
Speaker 1: The jury heard the evidence, and their verdicts spoke volumes.
00:46:42
Speaker 6: They were all found guilty of conspiracy for Weabino mass destruction. They were all found guilty of hate crimes.
00:46:51
Speaker 1: When the case went to sentencing, prosecutors recommended life in prison. Patrick Stein, the ringleader, was sentenced to thirty years. Curtis Allen was given twenty five. Gavin Wright, who was also convicted of lying to federal agents, received twenty six. Looking back, Amy as quick to share the credit.
00:47:16
Speaker 6: Clearly, it made a difference in a lot of people's lives, which I'm grateful for, but.
00:47:21
Speaker 4: I can't take the credit for that.
00:47:23
Speaker 6: I often tell people it's better to be lucky than good. I mean, obviously I put a lot of work into the investigation, but ultimately I think the right people were around at the right time, and it was maybe faded. I think God had a hand in it, So you know, I just did my small part.
00:47:46
Speaker 1: The FBI's investigation and the resulting trial saved countless lives. But for Amy, the real hero is Dan Day.
00:47:56
Speaker 6: Had it not been for him, I think that Garden City would be a significantly different place today than it was back then.
00:48:05
Speaker 1: So interesting, like he comes to your attention because he takes down a Palestinian flag in a library, right, and by the end of it, he really single handedly, obviously with the help of a lot of people afterwards, saved so many people.
00:48:20
Speaker 6: Yes, I consider Dan Day a hero, and I think everybody that is involved in this case would say that Dan Day was a hero.
00:48:30
Speaker 4: But then he had a heart condition and passed away a couple years ago.
00:48:35
Speaker 1: Dan's loss was felt deeply by those who knew him. Over the years, threats have multiplied, terrorism has changed, and the dangers now are more extreme than they once were. But the tools to fight back are sharper and those working to keep us safe are as determined as ever.
00:49:06
Speaker 2: Next time, on Law and Order criminal justice system.
00:49:10
Speaker 6: We are following reports of a mass shooting at Tops supermarket in Buffalo, New York.
00:49:16
Speaker 4: I decided to see if my mother's cart was there. I got another detective asked him to go in. When he didn't come.
00:49:22
Speaker 3: Back, I knew and they actually used a shopping cart to load the store manager and push that card out and got them evacuated from the store. It's someone with an easily acquired assault rifle walking into a public place that has no security deterrence and opening fire.
00:49:43
Speaker 2: Law and Order Criminal Justice System is the production of Wolf Entertainment and iHeart Podcasts. Our host is Anna Sega Nicolazzi. The show was written by Cooper Mall, Executive produced by Dick Wolf, Elliot Wolf, and Steven Michael at Wolf Entertainment on behalf of iHeart Podcasts. Executive producers Trevor Young and Matt Frederick, with supervising producer Chandler Mays and producer Jesse Funk. This season is executive produced by Anna Sega Nicolazzi. Our researchers are Luke Stantz and Carolyn Tolmage. Editing and sound designed by Trevor Young and Jesse Funk. Original music by John O'Hara, Original theme by Mike Post with additional music by Steve Moore and additional voice over by me Steve Zernkelton Special. Thanks to Fox five in New York for providing archival material for the show. For more podcasts from iHeart in Wolf Entertainment, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your favorite shows. Thanks for listening.
Speaker 1: You're listening to Law and Order Criminal Justice System, a production of Wolf Entertainment and iHeart podcasts.
00:00:12
Speaker 2: In the criminal justice System, landmark trials transcend the courtroom to reshape the law. The brave many women who investigate and prosecute these cases are part of a select group that is defined American history. These are their stories. May nineteenth, twenty seventeen, Tampa, Florida.
00:00:38
Speaker 1: A hostage situation. Police respond to a call of three people being held at gunpoint at a nearby strip mall. The attacker, a twenty four year old by the name of Devon Arthur's, is apprehended. While in police custody, Arthur's was asked if anyone else was hurt. His response was chilling, said, and I quote the people in the apartment, but they aren't hurt, they're dead. Arthur's directed police to a street line with pastel colored condos. Inside one of the apartments, they found two young men Arthur's roommates, dead on the floor. Police walked through the rooms, surveying the scene. Inside the bedroom of a fourth roommate, they found something that had nothing to do with the double murder, but was almost equally disturbing.
00:01:35
Speaker 3: He had a framed picture of Timothy mcveay in his room. He idolized McVeigh and he wanted to do something similar to what McVeigh did, and he was working on constructing explosive devices.
00:01:46
Speaker 1: The picture of McVeigh belonged to a man named Brandon Russell, and investigators had just uncovered the first layer of his hidden world. It wouldn't be long until they learned it went even first. There secret chat rooms, stockpilp, explosives, and a blueprint for a deadly attack.
00:02:15
Speaker 4: I got a call, get out to Lavardia Airport.
00:02:18
Speaker 5: There's been a bombing.
00:02:19
Speaker 3: There was a thirty two foot crater in front of what was left of the building.
00:02:22
Speaker 1: I was trying to figure out, am I dead? Am I alive? Where am I? I'm Anethega Nicolazzi. That's why terrorism works. It doesn't care who you are. From Wolf Entertainment and iHeart Podcasts, this is Lawn Order Criminal Justice System. This season, we've explored cases that change the trajectory of the United States, moments that cost lives and forced law enforcement to respond to the aftermath. Those are the cases that make headlines, the ones that define era. But as we saw in the last episode, there's another side to this fight, one that you almost never hear about, the attacks that didn't happen, the plots that were stopped before they could claim lives. This episode is about those cases, the near misses, the moments where agents stepped in just in time, the plots were thwarted before they could become tragedies. Take the case of twenty one year old Brandon Russell. His shrine to Timothy McVeigh wasn't just extremist theater. He was connected to something larger, something far beyond that Tampa apartment.
00:03:43
Speaker 3: The reason Brandon Russell and his group Adam Woff and Division are so important is because they became early leaders in the accelerationist movements.
00:03:53
Speaker 1: As Michael Jensen explains, the accelerationist movement believes that terror itself can be the spark to bring down democracy, and Brandon Russell's neo Nazi group, the atam Waffen Division, which means atomic weapons in German, they embraced it.
00:04:13
Speaker 3: So they got onto a forum that was called Iron March, which was an online forum of white supremacist organizations. Essentially, they got in there, started using Iron March and quickly became kind of the most popular group that was acting there. Brandon Russell was the leader of Adam Waffen Division on Iron March.
00:04:36
Speaker 1: While Russell's network spread internationally, that part of his identity was well masked.
00:04:42
Speaker 3: Russell was also a member of the US National Guard at the time that he was doing all of this. As someone in the military, he was gathering the tactical knowledge and skills that he would need to be potentially quite deadly if he wanted to.
00:04:59
Speaker 1: Inside his garage, investigators uncovered far more than ideology. They found explosive materials, radiation sources, and bomb making components. It was clear Russell wasn't just dabbling in extremism, he was preparing to attack. The threat was taken seriously. Russell was charged with possession of an unregistered destructive device and unlawful storage of explosive material. He was convicted and sent to prison. Even while incarcerated, he was laying the groundwork for what came next.
00:05:38
Speaker 3: And then he gets released, goes on to federal supervision, and within a year is arrested again. He and a woman that he had started communicating with while he was in prison were plotting a series of attacks to attack the Baltimore power grid.
00:05:55
Speaker 1: But federal agents were listening. They had inserted a confidential informant tracking the couple's plans as they took form, but before they were put in motion, Russell was arrested a second time. The grid attack never happened. From an online forum to real world violence, both stopped before a disaster. This is just one of many cases that highlight the attacks that have been prevented before extremists succeeded. One of those cases began in Kansas with an FBI agent who found herself in the middle of a deadly plot.
00:06:37
Speaker 6: My name is Amy Kuhn and I am currently a special Agent in the Garden City resident Agent out of the Kansas City Division. I just had my seventeenth year anniversary.
00:06:51
Speaker 1: Amy was drawn to the Bureau from a young age, even if it seemed out of reach.
00:06:57
Speaker 6: I grew up in a really small town, and the FBI was not a job that people where I grew up with had. The FBI was something I was interested in, so I went to law school with the antition of trying to get into the FBI. I worked as a prosecutor for a couple of years, and then I got accepted into the FBI.
00:07:23
Speaker 1: Her career began in Garden City, a small town in southwest Kansas, filled with wide open prairie and farmland. The office looked very different from the larger field divisions seen elsewhere.
00:07:37
Speaker 6: The Garden City FBI office is two agents and we don't have any support staff there. The western third of Kansas is our territory, and now there is one DEA agent in Garden City, but kind of for that area, that's the only federal law enforcement presence that's out there.
00:07:59
Speaker 1: Her post couldn't have been further from the hubs of federal law enforcement.
00:08:04
Speaker 6: We are probably six and a half hours from Kansas City, six hours to Denver, five hours to Albuquerque, four and a half hours to Oklahoma City. It is a rural area, lots of agriculture, and Garden City is like the big city for the area, centrally located in the middle of nowhere, not what most people would consider a big city.
00:08:34
Speaker 1: The community she served had been shaped by its industry. Garden City was a meatpacking town. The plants employed thousands, drawing workers from across the region and immigrants who came to the US looking for work.
00:08:50
Speaker 6: And the plants they have some recruiters that will go to refugee camps and just say, hey, we'll give you housing for a certain amount of time and we'll pay you if you want to come live in wherever the meatpacking plant is.
00:09:05
Speaker 1: The area became an unlikely melting pot. In Garden City schools alone, children spoke dozens of languages.
00:09:14
Speaker 6: So in Garden City there's like fifty languages spoken in the school system.
00:09:21
Speaker 1: Families arrived from Mexico and Cuba, from Somalia and Vietnam, each new wave building on the last, each new group becoming part of the community.
00:09:32
Speaker 6: They've just accepted who the new refugee is.
00:09:37
Speaker 1: On the surface, all was calm, but this quiet posting would soon pull her into something she had never faced before.
00:09:47
Speaker 4: It was my first domestic terrorism.
00:09:50
Speaker 1: Case, and the investigation had the potential to impact her community forever. In the summer of twoenty fifteen, a story began spreading online.
00:10:04
Speaker 6: There was a Facebook message that came out that had a picture of a Palestinian flag and it said that Palestinian flag had been hung up in the Garden City library, that there was an ISIS flag there, and there were some Maali's that were recruiting for ISIS in the library. We got several calls regarding that Facebook message.
00:10:30
Speaker 4: People were concerned about it.
00:10:33
Speaker 1: The calls kept coming. Amy went to see for herself to try and get answers, but when she got there, the flag was gone.
00:10:42
Speaker 6: I went to the library and tried to figure out where this information came from. And interviewing people, I discovered who had taken the Palestinian flag down.
00:10:56
Speaker 4: That was Dan Day. He was just a local citizen.
00:11:00
Speaker 1: Amy located Dan and the two met. She wanted to figure out what had happened and why Dan's explanation cast the rumors in a different light.
00:11:11
Speaker 6: He said he didn't really see people recruiting for ISIS. There were Somalis in the library that use the library frequently, but he didn't see an ISIS flag. The Palestinian flag had been posted and he took it down because it was supporting Palestine. In talking to people, what I came to the conclusion of was it had gotten blown out of proportion. There was no ISIS recruiting and there was no ISIS flag at the library.
00:11:39
Speaker 1: The rumors had turned out to be a false alarm. But Amy's collaboration with Dan was just beginning because he went on to tell her about a meeting that would soon lead to an investigation of its own.
00:11:53
Speaker 6: He said he had been to a militia meeting for a security force, and the people were very concerned about the Somali presence in the southwest Kansas, and we're concerned that there were ISIS members. And at the time, this is twenty fifteen, there were a lot of beheading videos that were being shown on YouTube and internet. So it was a time when people were very frightened of ISSIS. And during certain holy days for Muslims, there would be a group of Somalis that would meet on Tennis Court and they would pray all together there on some of the religious holidays, and this group had a particular problem with that.
00:12:51
Speaker 1: Militias are generally described as an armed force made up of civilian volunteers.
00:12:57
Speaker 6: In general, it is part of constitution you have a right to have militias and bear arms. And so a lot of these militia groups, the commonalty is that they are patriots, They believe in the United States, and they want to protect the values they deem important in the United States. A lot of the militias want to be armed and they want to not lose that freedom. A lot of the militia groups, we don't have concerns about it because they just meet and do their own thing and there's not ever any issues from them.
00:13:36
Speaker 1: It wasn't that it was a militia meeting that caught Amy's attention, it was what was being said at the time. There were a lot of online conversations that were being monitored.
00:13:49
Speaker 6: There were a lot of what I would call Facebook warriors. There were a lot of people talking a big game on the internet and posting stuff, but actually doing anything was not as prevalent.
00:14:02
Speaker 1: For Amy. What raised red flags was that this group's hostility was pointed, and it raised the question of whether words might turn into action.
00:14:13
Speaker 6: That's what makes domestic terrorism hard is that you are investigating something that a lot of people deem First Amendment right protected. So you have to balance that line. And to me, some of the things that were concerning to me were that they were focusing on the Somali population.
00:14:36
Speaker 4: Just the fact that they were focusing.
00:14:38
Speaker 6: Their energy on one particular group, it gave me concern to at least try to get somebody that could determine if there was even a problem.
00:14:50
Speaker 1: All of which left Amy walking a fine line. The challenge was how to move forward without overstepping her next move was to see whether she could develop a source inside the group.
00:15:03
Speaker 6: We left the meeting and I told my partner Robin Smith, I said, I think I might try to open Dan Day.
00:15:10
Speaker 4: As a source.
00:15:11
Speaker 6: Robin said that guy really, like, You're not going to get anything out of that guy, essentially, and I said, yeah, I think I will. So I called Dan Day and I met with him again, and he described that Kansas Security Force was a militia. A militia is not illegal, but he said that they had talked about doing surveillance of people and that starts getting into kind of a fuzzy area. I told Dan that if he wanted to continue going to Kansas Security Force meetings, I would be interested in anything that you find out about Somali's or any illegal activities that are going on that they think they're discovering.
00:15:56
Speaker 4: He said, okay.
00:15:59
Speaker 1: Stepping into that role wasn't easy.
00:16:03
Speaker 6: Dan was pretty nervous type of guy, and I think initially my partner didn't think he would be very well suited for it. But Dan was very patriotic and he wanted to do something that he felt was right that was protecting his community and his country. And I also think that he enjoyed being part of the team and he felt.
00:16:32
Speaker 4: It was important what he was doing.
00:16:35
Speaker 1: With Dan on board, Amy now had someone on the inside. She quickly realized that the conversations went beyond the in person meetings.
00:16:47
Speaker 6: They met a lot online. They would have a lot of Facebook messaging, and they would have Zello calls. They did not believe it could be monitored by the government. So that's the app that a lot.
00:17:01
Speaker 4: Of these militia groups were using, was this Zello app.
00:17:04
Speaker 6: So they would have these nightly Zello calls and check ins.
00:17:08
Speaker 1: And the tone of those communications started to change.
00:17:13
Speaker 6: They started talking about wanting to do something to one of the Somali businesses. They would talk about throwing pigs in their store or wrapping bacon around the handles, and so they started talking about things that would be a civil rights violation if they followed through with it. And then they also were planning surveillance.
00:17:38
Speaker 1: The words were moving from ideas to actual plans.
00:17:43
Speaker 6: They were going to be in separate vehicles, use this Zello app as walkie talkies, and they were going to follow some of these Somalis to see where they went and what they were doing, like a police surveillance. So at that point we felt that there was enough to open a domestic terrorism investigation.
00:18:07
Speaker 1: And it quickly got internal attention.
00:18:10
Speaker 6: When I did open the case, it had a lot of oversight from our division council. I had to give him updates to make sure that we weren't infringing on anybody's constitutional rights. So I would update him frequently, and I was in frequent contact with the prosecutor, who was also concerned about people's rights.
00:18:34
Speaker 1: Amy wasn't sure where the case would lead.
00:18:38
Speaker 6: I thought, at most maybe some of these militia guys were going to be doing surveillance and do something stupid and you know, pull out a gun and shoot somebody that they shouldn't like.
00:18:49
Speaker 4: I never thought it would end up where it did.
00:18:53
Speaker 1: The group that Amy was monitoring was a small part of a much larger organization that spread across Cans.
00:19:01
Speaker 6: Kansas Security Force was a statewide organization and they had it split up into zones. DAN was a part of was the Southwest Kansas zone. I think there were three zones.
00:19:15
Speaker 1: It wasn't the entirety of Kansas Security Force. Or KSF that was viewed as a potential threat.
00:19:24
Speaker 6: Kansas Security Force in general, there were no issues with there were a few people that ended up being members of Kansas Security Force that were a problem.
00:19:36
Speaker 1: The world Dan Day was navigating was about to take on a more dangerous edge.
00:19:42
Speaker 6: When Patrick Stein comes into the picture. He is who recruits Dan to be a member of KSF. Patrick Stein was a farmer in Ford County, didn't like immigrants, and he's expressed racist idealies.
00:20:01
Speaker 1: His rhetoric quickly escalated beyond talk.
00:20:05
Speaker 6: Patrick Stein called Dan Day and said, can you take me around to these addresses that were going to be surveilling. So Dan took him around. There were a couple African stores and apartment complex and when Dan took him around, he went off, for lack of a better term, on the somalies. He was calling him names and he said he wanted to shoot some of them. So that's when we thought we might have a bigger problem.
00:20:38
Speaker 1: Dan grew uneasy with where Stein was pushing things.
00:20:43
Speaker 6: After Stein met with Dan, Dan called me and he was very concerned and he didn't want to do the surveillance because he was afraid that Patrick Stein was going to shoot somebody or do something.
00:20:57
Speaker 1: Out in rural western Kansas, FBI backup wasn't easy. There were no nearby buildings or vantage points that could keep agents hidden from view. Cover was scarce, and every move risk exposure.
00:21:13
Speaker 6: I said, well, that's why you have to go. I said, I can't come and do surveillance. You need to stick by Patrick Stein's side, and you have to be the voice of reason. You need to try to keep him from doing something stupid.
00:21:28
Speaker 4: Dan was very concerned at that time.
00:21:31
Speaker 1: Dan's warnings made it clear Stein wasn't just talking. His volatility posed a real risk.
00:21:39
Speaker 4: So we opened a case on Patrick Stein.
00:21:42
Speaker 6: We told Dan that whatever Patrick Stein was doing, that's who we wanted to focus on.
00:21:49
Speaker 1: Stein's anger continued to simmer. Then came the shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando two.
00:21:57
Speaker 3: O'clock in the morning. An officer who was working at Paul's nightclub engaged this gunman in a firefight.
00:22:04
Speaker 2: The person I was with or shot in the back.
00:22:06
Speaker 1: I had taken my bandanna off and tied it up, put it in a knockbull hole that was in his.
00:22:11
Speaker 2: Back so that he wasn't lead.
00:22:14
Speaker 1: In June twenty sixteen, a man swearing allegiance to ISIS shot and killed forty nine people and wounded fifty three at the Gay nightclub in Florida.
00:22:25
Speaker 6: The next day, patrick Stein called Dan day and said, we have to do something. We can't let this happen again. We need to take action. He believed that most of the Muslims in southwest Kansas were associated with ISIS, so he felt they needed to do something before Muslims and ISIS took over the United States.
00:22:52
Speaker 1: Stein wasted no time.
00:22:55
Speaker 6: So patrick Stein organized a meeting in a field in a rural area and gathered people that he deemed would be willing to do something.
00:23:11
Speaker 1: Dan went to the meeting to capture what happened.
00:23:14
Speaker 4: He was recording it was a whole thing. His car broke down.
00:23:19
Speaker 6: I had to take him to meet up with Stein, so he had had a stressful day already. I dropped him off and Stein picked him up, and he rode with Stein to the meeting, which was about three hour drive to where they went.
00:23:35
Speaker 4: Stein didn't have air conditioning and Dan.
00:23:38
Speaker 6: Did not take anything to drink, and it was June and it was really hot.
00:23:45
Speaker 1: The FBI couldn't directly keep eyes on the gathering as it was in a wide open field outside of town. Amy was listening on the wire from far away, knowing if something went wrong, Dan was on his own. It was a dangerous assignment for a civilian. Despite being surrounded by armed, angry men in the middle of nowhere, Dan kept the recorder running. The conversation dragged on in the sweltering heat, moving from complaints to violent ideas.
00:24:19
Speaker 6: So they're in this field talking about what they should do, and there's things brought up, like shooting at a mosque.
00:24:30
Speaker 1: Hours dragged on until the strain became too much.
00:24:35
Speaker 6: I was trying to text him and I was getting no response.
00:24:40
Speaker 1: Had Dan's cover been blown? The silence felt like an eternity. With informant Dan day on responsive. The question for the FBI became whether to break cover and intervene.
00:25:05
Speaker 4: So my bosses were like, do we need to go in? What's going on?
00:25:10
Speaker 6: And because of the rule of nature, we had a surveillance team, but they were a long ways away because we did not want to burn Dan, and I felt his safety would be more at issue if we went in.
00:25:28
Speaker 1: As the team considered what to do, Amy's phone suddenly buzzed.
00:25:33
Speaker 6: Dan texted me and said he was in the hospital in Hutchison.
00:25:36
Speaker 4: He had passed out.
00:25:37
Speaker 6: They had called an ambulance, the ambulance had taken him to the hospital. I was like, all right, So Robin and I loaded up to go get him from the hospital in.
00:25:47
Speaker 1: Hutch The heat had taken its toll and he had passed out. Most importantly that Amy Dan was safe. The device he had been carrying also survived, and so did the recording. But would they be able to use it.
00:26:05
Speaker 6: It's clear when he passes out we were consensually recording.
00:26:09
Speaker 4: Not to mention it.
00:26:11
Speaker 6: Also, when he passes out, we no longer have a consenting party. It becomes an illegal title iree because our consenting party is not there.
00:26:21
Speaker 1: That meant every second of audio after Dan collapsed couldn't be used.
00:26:27
Speaker 6: They did not find the recording device on him, neither the people in the field nor the hospital people. When Robin and I got to the hospital, we turned off the recording device. Also, I sent the recording and I said, hey, we got to have somebody review this before we can listen to it, because it's tainted. We had a taint review team that figured out when he passed out in the field and spliced that out.
00:26:57
Speaker 1: The agent assembled the remaining pieces of the meetings, recording what happened that night served as an important reminder the fine line between the success of a case and personal harm, especially when it comes to a civilian informant. But what was left of the usable tape from Dan's recorder would become essential.
00:27:20
Speaker 6: That meeting in the field became the beginning of our conspiracy for court.
00:27:28
Speaker 1: But the case was still evolving.
00:27:31
Speaker 6: Patrick Stein was a true believer. I think he genuinely believed that basically all Somali's were Muslim and all the Muslims wanted to do harm to United States citizens.
00:27:48
Speaker 1: There was a small group of men that also shared his ideology.
00:27:53
Speaker 6: Patrick Stein, Curtis Allen, Gavin Wright, and Dan all become part of this group called the Crusaders.
00:28:02
Speaker 1: Even the name Crusaders was telling a throwback to religious wars. It framed them as patriotic religious avengers. Alan and Wright would become Stein's keyco conspirators, joining him in a plan that was beginning to take shape.
00:28:19
Speaker 6: They set up a new group on Signal and they named the group Crusaders.
00:28:26
Speaker 4: Two point zero.
00:28:28
Speaker 1: Signal is a privacy focused messaging app with end to end encryption for the FBI. It raised the question were these men simply exercising our right to privacy or working to cover their tracks. Their encrypted chats gave them a private space to push each other further, and Patrick.
00:28:48
Speaker 6: Stein frequently talked about that they were essentially the new Crusaders and that they were getting the Muslims out again, much like the original Crusaders.
00:29:00
Speaker 1: And inside that echo chamber, the talk evolved from vague anger to concrete plotting.
00:29:06
Speaker 6: They talked to some other members of KSF that they thought would be down for their cause. Ultimately, the people that they approached said, look, we are willing to respond if something happens, but we don't want to initiate anything. Whereas Curtis, Patrick and Gavin were talking about initiating something, there was one member that had his wife not been there, would have probably been on board, but she said, yeah, we're not doing that.
00:29:46
Speaker 4: We have kids.
00:29:48
Speaker 1: They split from the larger group, leaving Stein, Alan and Wright on their own, isolated but committed.
00:29:56
Speaker 6: They would have meetings and these meetings would last a hours, six hours a long time. They were all very paranoid about government listening in so They would make everybody put their cell phones in a room and they would turn the music up so the government couldn't listen to them.
00:30:16
Speaker 1: It soon became clear why they didn't want to be heard.
00:30:20
Speaker 6: They would talk about a lot of different conspiracy theories. They would also talk about what they wanted to do. They talked about blowing stuff up. They talked about shooting landlords because the landlords were allowing these Muslims to rent from them, going in and shooting.
00:30:38
Speaker 4: Up a bunch apartments.
00:30:40
Speaker 6: They talked about trying to put a bomb at a parade. There were a lot of different ideas, but ultimately they decided that they wanted to do something At three h five West Mary. It's an apartment complex. There's a large Somali population and Muslim population, and one of the apartments had been turned into a mosque.
00:31:05
Speaker 1: And the something they wanted to do was deadly.
00:31:09
Speaker 6: Ultimately, they decided on some sort of bomb to blow up the mosque, and they started working on their own homemade explosives. They wanted to do trash can bombs or car bombs, park them in the parking lot and blow up the apartment complex. They also talked about trying to drop some kind of bomb through the air ducks.
00:31:42
Speaker 1: The scope of their plot was unmistakable. What had started as talk had evolved into a plan for mass casualties. As the plan grew more specific, Amy Enter team faced a problem. Dan Day was their only source. Stein and his group were asking for others and safety and the investigation were at risk.
00:32:04
Speaker 6: They thought that they might need help with their explosive devices. So this is about the time that we introduced an undercover because we were concerned that they were moving very quickly. Patrick Sin was using drugs at this time too, so sometimes his behavior was kind of erratic, and there was always a concern that Dan Day might get cut out. And he was the only eyes and ears that we had into this. They didn't really use cell phones a lot. They met in person. Also, when going to court, undercovers generally are more reliable.
00:32:46
Speaker 1: And that is basically because an undercover agent is a member of law enforcement, whereas with a civilian like Dan there's always the risk that they get scared and cut and run and won't be willing to testify. Dan was true trusted by Stein and his pals, so agents wanted to use that to their advantage.
00:33:06
Speaker 6: From the beginning, Dan had told them some of his relatives were involved in some illegal activities. He told them he had a family member that ran guns, like he's a guy that can get stuff and they were friends.
00:33:24
Speaker 1: That family member was fiction, but it was the cover story for an FBI operative.
00:33:31
Speaker 6: Dan was like, Hey, do you want to meet up with this guy? And as a group, they decided that they did want to meet up, but Gavin and Curtis did not want to go meet in person because they were concerned that it was a government agent. But they still wanted to know what the guy had to say, so patrick Stein decided he was going to go talk to him.
00:33:58
Speaker 1: The meeting went according to plan, the FBI's plan.
00:34:03
Speaker 6: They came up with a list of things that was like grenades, debt, cord, there are four items. We have multiple undercovers there, and Dan dropped a package off with them.
00:34:17
Speaker 4: They paid him.
00:34:18
Speaker 6: Then he introduces the undercover to patrick Stein.
00:34:23
Speaker 1: Stein's reaction left little doubt that this was the right match.
00:34:28
Speaker 6: They have a conversation and patrick Stein basically has a man crush on.
00:34:36
Speaker 4: The undercover from the beginning.
00:34:38
Speaker 6: He likes everything that the undercover says and he is fully supportive After the conversation, Stein believed that he could make explosives and he knew what he was doing. The name that the undercover used with these guys was Brian.
00:34:54
Speaker 1: With that first meeting complete, Brian, the FBI undercover became embedded, and it didn't take long before Stein began confiding in him.
00:35:04
Speaker 6: All of this is actually in text communications between Patrick Stein and Brian. Patrick Stein's like, well, here's our plan. We want to have bombs set up at the apartment complex to completely wipe out the complex. We want to do it during prayer time to kill the most people that we can because everybody will be there at prayer time.
00:35:29
Speaker 4: He said.
00:35:29
Speaker 6: We were thinking trash can bombs or car bombs. Then the undercover says, well, I can provide you a car bomb that would be able to take out the complex, and patrick Stein says, oh, and I have fertilizer because he works on a farm.
00:35:48
Speaker 1: Even as undercover, Brian offered to supply materials. The others kept experimenting on their own in.
00:35:56
Speaker 6: Case they couldn't figure out how to make it work. Curtis Allen and Gavin Wright continued.
00:36:04
Speaker 4: To make explosives to the point where they made HMTD.
00:36:11
Speaker 1: For amateur bomb makers. HMTD is a go to ingredient.
00:36:16
Speaker 6: The hardest part of making explosives is that initial explosive that sets the larger explosive off. So they were successful in making HMTD, and we have a recording where they're talking to Dan about how they made it and they almost blew up the sink in the bathroom, and that they had made a couple batches. At the time, Gavin Wright and his brother owned a company called GMNG Mobile Homes and they had made this HMTD at GNG Mobile Homes, which was also a business that people came into. So then we had concerns about people's safety.
00:36:57
Speaker 1: They had also decided when the attack would take place.
00:37:02
Speaker 6: They wanted to do it the day after the election. This is in October of twenty sixteen, when Hillary Clinton and Trump are running against each other. They didn't want to do anything that would cause Hillary to be elected, and so they were planning it for.
00:37:19
Speaker 4: The day after the election. In November.
00:37:23
Speaker 1: Actual preparation began.
00:37:26
Speaker 6: At the same time, We're trying to set up a second meeting with Brian and they were going to shoot fully automatic weapons in a field. Curtis Allen and Gavin Wright were still kind of on the fence, but it looked positive that they were going to be coming to the meeting. Patrick Stein was all in and Dan was going to be there with Patrick. We had several undercovers to try to make the shooting as safe as possible, because, as you can imagine, if you have a group of people that you're investigating shooting automatic weapons, and there's a lot that goes into getting approvals for that.
00:38:04
Speaker 1: The operation was ready to go, but then it hit a snack.
00:38:09
Speaker 6: It was Columbus Day. We had set up the shooting in the field. We practiced how to run through with all of the personnel that we were using. We finished rehearsing and Dan Day gets a call saying Curtis Allen has been arrested for domestic violence against his girlfriend. And about the same time, Robin got a call from a Liberal PD detective saying they might need the FBI's help because they had just arrested in an individual who had a lot of militia stuff and his girlfriend was saying that Curtis Allen was part of a group that was planning on doing something. So we leave the field and we're like okay, So this is a new turn. Now, what are we going to do?
00:39:09
Speaker 1: Local police had stumbled onto the very plot that the FBI had been watching for months. Amy and her partner needed to improvise.
00:39:18
Speaker 6: Local law enforcement still did not know about our investigation at this point, so we came up with a plan that Robin and I were going to go down to Liberal PD and see what they had, and we were still going to go forward with shooting the automatic weapons. Curtis Allen is in jail, but the hope was to still get Patrick Stein and Gavin.
00:39:41
Speaker 1: Wright at the station. Amy and her partner sat down with Alan's girlfriend.
00:39:47
Speaker 6: We go down to go speak with Curtis's girlfriend. I interviewed her and she is claiming that Curtis Allen is part of a group that is planning on doing something to Somali's She didn't no for sure what it was, but she knew that involved killing Muslims and that they had been making explosives.
00:40:09
Speaker 1: Her motive may have been tied to their relationship impossible revenge, but her information corroborated some of what the FBI already knew.
00:40:19
Speaker 6: She and Curtis had gotten into a fight and he had grabbed her arm and she was out for vengeance, so she gave up all the information she knew about Curtis and him being part of a militia group. She also said he's making silencers and he has a bunch of weapons. So Liberal PD did a search warrant at their trailer and took all of his guns. They also found potential bomb making stuff, militia stuff, and they found a manifesto for the group explaining why they were doing this.
00:40:58
Speaker 1: The writings laid out ambitions that went far beyond Garden City.
00:41:02
Speaker 6: Ultimately, they wanted to start a chain reaction of militia groups taking action against Muslims across the country.
00:41:12
Speaker 1: The investigation had reached a tipping point. The conspirators were no longer just talking. They were plotting a campaign for nationwide violence. And with Curtis Allen behind bars, the question was no longer whether to act, but when.
00:41:41
Speaker 6: After the search warrants, we talked to the AUSA and grand jury was the next week. So Wednesday night, leaving we thought, well, indict these guys next week. About ten minutes after I got home that night, I get a call from the ASAC saying the decision has been made that we are arresting these guys on Friday.
00:42:11
Speaker 1: The timeline changed overnight.
00:42:14
Speaker 6: We started working on everything that had to be done in order to get these guys arrested. Friday. At six o'clock in the morning, we reached back out to Stein and Stein was going to deliver four bags of fertilizer to the undercover Friday morning.
00:42:34
Speaker 1: Fertilizer may sound ordinary, but in the wrong hands it's anything but. Mixed with fuel and a detonator, it becomes a powerful bomb, the same kind that was used in the Oklahoma City bombing. Stopping Stein before he could make that handoff became the priority.
00:42:53
Speaker 6: We also worked on a plan to arrest Gavin and do search warrants at Gavin house, patrick Stein's house, Gavin's vehicle, patrick Stein's vehicle.
00:43:07
Speaker 1: Patrick Stein never made it past the parking.
00:43:10
Speaker 6: Lot, so patrick Stein gets arrested Friday morning at the McDonald's in Dodge City by the Kansas City swat team. He pulls up and walks inside to meet with the undercover. They have a short conversation and then they're walking out to move the fertilizer from one vehicle to the other.
00:43:32
Speaker 4: And they arrest him in the parking lot. When he comes out.
00:43:35
Speaker 6: The SWAT team handed him over to Robin and I and we took him to the Sheriff's office and interviewed him.
00:43:42
Speaker 1: Did he seem surprised?
00:43:43
Speaker 4: He was very surprised. He was shocked.
00:43:47
Speaker 6: He basically says, how could you do this? I had a cross on and he saw my cross and he was like, how can you allow them to arrest me when we are protecting you.
00:44:02
Speaker 4: You should be in my corner.
00:44:05
Speaker 1: His accomplices soon followed.
00:44:08
Speaker 6: Curtis aund was transferred into federal custody. And I had tried to interview him and he asked for an attorney, so he didn't talk to us. Gavin Wright was arrested and he also didn't talk to anybody.
00:44:24
Speaker 1: By that Friday morning, the plot to bomb three h five West Mary Street and kill as many as they could was over. The three men who called themselves the Crusaders were behind bars.
00:44:37
Speaker 5: At THEI agents say that this investigation took them into a hidden culture of both hate and violence. Thoriti to say. Curtis Wayne, Allen Patrick, Eugene Stein, and Gavin Wayne Wright were all arrested after they planned to bomb an apartment complex in Garden City, in Southwest Kansas. The Council on American Islamic Relations issued a statement after the arrest that says state and federal authority should offer or stepped up protection to local communities. If convicted, all three men could face life in prison.
00:45:07
Speaker 6: They were charged with conspiracy to make a weapon of mass destruction WMD.
00:45:14
Speaker 1: They were all tried together at trial. The defense strategy was clear from the start.
00:45:21
Speaker 6: They tried to use an entrapment case. They did the openings in court, and one of the defense councils opening was that we had conspired to put cases on these guys when they were just law abiding citizens and part of a militia group. Basically, they tried to argue that these guys were just misunderstood and they were militia members trying to protect themselves and they weren't actually going to do anything, but the government pushed them to do it. But the judge ruled that there wasn't entrapment.
00:46:00
Speaker 1: The recordings the FBI had gathered left little room for doubt.
00:46:04
Speaker 6: The other thing that happened is they got charged with a hate crime. We worked with Civil Rights Division out a headquarters to do a hate crime because in the recordings.
00:46:16
Speaker 4: They talked about.
00:46:18
Speaker 6: Doing this because they were Muslim and because they were Somali, and Patrick Stein called them cockroaches, and he said he was the Orcan man and.
00:46:27
Speaker 4: He was going to exterminate all of them.
00:46:29
Speaker 6: And they had put a map up and labeled all the places that Somali's lived and their stores.
00:46:38
Speaker 1: The jury heard the evidence, and their verdicts spoke volumes.
00:46:42
Speaker 6: They were all found guilty of conspiracy for Weabino mass destruction. They were all found guilty of hate crimes.
00:46:51
Speaker 1: When the case went to sentencing, prosecutors recommended life in prison. Patrick Stein, the ringleader, was sentenced to thirty years. Curtis Allen was given twenty five. Gavin Wright, who was also convicted of lying to federal agents, received twenty six. Looking back, Amy as quick to share the credit.
00:47:16
Speaker 6: Clearly, it made a difference in a lot of people's lives, which I'm grateful for, but.
00:47:21
Speaker 4: I can't take the credit for that.
00:47:23
Speaker 6: I often tell people it's better to be lucky than good. I mean, obviously I put a lot of work into the investigation, but ultimately I think the right people were around at the right time, and it was maybe faded. I think God had a hand in it, So you know, I just did my small part.
00:47:46
Speaker 1: The FBI's investigation and the resulting trial saved countless lives. But for Amy, the real hero is Dan Day.
00:47:56
Speaker 6: Had it not been for him, I think that Garden City would be a significantly different place today than it was back then.
00:48:05
Speaker 1: So interesting, like he comes to your attention because he takes down a Palestinian flag in a library, right, and by the end of it, he really single handedly, obviously with the help of a lot of people afterwards, saved so many people.
00:48:20
Speaker 6: Yes, I consider Dan Day a hero, and I think everybody that is involved in this case would say that Dan Day was a hero.
00:48:30
Speaker 4: But then he had a heart condition and passed away a couple years ago.
00:48:35
Speaker 1: Dan's loss was felt deeply by those who knew him. Over the years, threats have multiplied, terrorism has changed, and the dangers now are more extreme than they once were. But the tools to fight back are sharper and those working to keep us safe are as determined as ever.
00:49:06
Speaker 2: Next time, on Law and Order criminal justice system.
00:49:10
Speaker 6: We are following reports of a mass shooting at Tops supermarket in Buffalo, New York.
00:49:16
Speaker 4: I decided to see if my mother's cart was there. I got another detective asked him to go in. When he didn't come.
00:49:22
Speaker 3: Back, I knew and they actually used a shopping cart to load the store manager and push that card out and got them evacuated from the store. It's someone with an easily acquired assault rifle walking into a public place that has no security deterrence and opening fire.
00:49:43
Speaker 2: Law and Order Criminal Justice System is the production of Wolf Entertainment and iHeart Podcasts. Our host is Anna Sega Nicolazzi. The show was written by Cooper Mall, Executive produced by Dick Wolf, Elliot Wolf, and Steven Michael at Wolf Entertainment on behalf of iHeart Podcasts. Executive producers Trevor Young and Matt Frederick, with supervising producer Chandler Mays and producer Jesse Funk. This season is executive produced by Anna Sega Nicolazzi. Our researchers are Luke Stantz and Carolyn Tolmage. Editing and sound designed by Trevor Young and Jesse Funk. Original music by John O'Hara, Original theme by Mike Post with additional music by Steve Moore and additional voice over by me Steve Zernkelton Special. Thanks to Fox five in New York for providing archival material for the show. For more podcasts from iHeart in Wolf Entertainment, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your favorite shows. Thanks for listening.
