03.27.14
Posted in Bioterrorism, Culture of Lickspittle, Ricin Kooks at 2:19 pm by George Smith
Yesterday I posted a long analysis on the case of young Danny Milzman of Georgetown U., the first ricin-maker ruled to be sent to for psychiatric treatment at a hospital, then release to his parents after two weeks. The government argued Milzman should be held without bond.
If released to Sybil Memorial Hospital in the nation’s capitol, Milzman would have been a first in the history of Americans arrested for making ricin,
No ricin-makers have ever been granted such treatment. Until this case. They are always held in jail without bail until trial, which can often take years to arrive.
Wednesday, a second judge in the Milzman case slowed the process down, kicking the can down the road until Monday:
Daniel Milzman (COL ‘16), who was charged with possession of a biological toxin last Friday, appeared before District court on Tuesday for his detention hearing. Judge John M. Facciola ordered that Milzman be sent to Sibley Memorial Hospital for a 14 day inpatient psychiatric program.
On Wednesday, following a government appeal of Facciola’s decision, Chief Judge W. Roberts postponed the decision on whether to release Milzman to the inpatient program until next Monday.
Milzman is being held in solitary confinement under suicide watch.
He is not the first ricin-maker to have been judged depressed and potentially suicidal.
In 2011, Jeffrey Levenderis of Ohio was arrested for having ricin.
From yesterday’s analysis, an excerpt from wire news on the story:
Ricin suspect Jeff Boyd Levenderis will continue to be held on suicide watch in Summit County jail at least until a Feb. 15 federal court hearing when his lawyer will resume trying to get him released on bond.
Before his arrest last week, Levenderis was staying in a Tallmadge nursing home where his attorney said he was being treated for mental illness and a thyroid condition …
[His lawyer] said Levenderis’ suicide watch includes being held naked in a cell under constant watch from deputies.
Levenderis’ defense argued his health could deteriorate if he were maintained under such conditions. Nevertheless, a judge ruled that Levenderis could not be released.
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03.25.14
Posted in Bioterrorism, Culture of Lickspittle, Ricin Kooks at 9:18 pm by George Smith
Danny Milzman, the ricin-making student at Georgetown, may be a first in the past decade’s history of castor bean pounders in America. After today’s court appearance, Milzman’s attorney, Danny Onorato, was successful at getting him into an in-house psychiatric evaluation and treatment program at a hospital after which he would be released to home. The government wanted him held in jail without bond. [1]
In ricin cases in the US this just doesn’t happen.
No one cares about ricin-makers. All of them, with one exception, a woman who attempted and failed to poison herself last year, are kept in jail and eventually convicted.
I’ll get to the contrasts with the Milzman case in a moment.
It’s no secret that class, economic status and family have much to do with how one is treated in the US justice system.
But Danny Milzman’s ricin case is now an example of that, too. Because if, eventually, he does not receive a prison sentence, class, the circumstances of his upbringing, his family’s resources and his treatment in the Washington Post will all have played a role.
From the Post, moments ago:
Daniel Milzman, who friends said has a sharp scientific mind, spent days carefully tinkering with castor beans and chemicals, finally producing a lethal amount of a toxin that is seven times as powerful as cobra venom: ricin. The poison has been manufactured by terrorists and can kill with just a small amount of contact …
[Ricin is not a contact poison. Post reporters get it wrong as soon as the second paragraph. However, the Milzman case is now one of human interest and, that, they can sink their teeth into.]
“He was tortured. He was having a hard time in his life. He was a scared 19-year-old kid,??? Onorato said. The ricin was “not intended for anyone other than himself.???
Magistrate Judge John M. Facciola agreed, ordering Milzman released to an in-patient psychiatric program at Sibley Memorial Hospital …
He co-authored articles with his father, David Milzman, who is the research director at the Department of Emergency Medicine at MedStar Georgetown University Hospital.
Magistrate Judge John M. Facciola agreed, ordering Milzman released to an in-patient psychiatric program at Sibley Memorial Hospital.
Milzman was a National Merit Scholar Semi-Finalist at Walt Whitman High in Bethesda, MD, which — you should know — is one of the public schools of choice for the upper middle class servants of the capitol’s political power and wealth brokers.
“Students remember that he raised money for leukemia research and launched several unsuccessful runs for president of the student government association that were punctuated by humorous speeches,” the Post adds.
Milzman had a “glowing” personality and answered science questions “lightning quick.”
You get the picture. The entire piece is here.
Yes, it would be a shame for Danny Milzman to get ten years on a ricin beef. There is no way such an outcome would serve any purpose other than punitive. Milzman is, at best, a petty nuisance with some mental problems.
However, there are a few wrinkles. There have been other ricin men who were no more than petty nuisances with some mental problems. The difference has been that in our system, no one cared about them like the folks care about Danny Milzman.
Take the case of Jeffrey Levenderis.
From this blog’s unsurpassed archives (these are wire news excerpts, with the last item being my words):
[In January of 2011 the] Akron office of the FBI received a tip on Monday about a possible hazardous substance at a house in the 2000 block of South Main Street. The next day, the FBI’s Hazardous Materials Response Unit from Quantico, Virginia and the FBI’s Pittsburgh Hazardous Response Team searched the home.
According to a news release from the FBI on Friday, FBI labs confirm the hazardous substance was ricin, which can be deadly if ingested or inhaled . The toxin is derived from the castor bean.
The FBI said during a news conference Friday that an arrest has made and 54-year-old Jeffery Levenderis, of Coventry Township, will appear in Akron federal court on Friday.
Levenderis used to live at the house and another person was in the process of moving in. He faces one count of having a dangerous or toxic substance. Authorities do not believe this has any connection to terrorism.
Ricin suspect Jeff Boyd Levenderis will continue to be held on suicide watch in Summit County jail at least until a Feb. 15 federal court hearing when his lawyer will resume trying to get him released on bond …
Before his arrest last week, Levenderis was staying in a Tallmadge nursing home where his attorney said he was being treated for mental illness and a thyroid condition. Bryan said Levenderis might go back there if released.
Bryan said Levenderis’ health improved dramatically after being placed in the nursing home in November and he expressed concern it might deteriorate in jail. He said Levenderis’ suicide watch includes being held naked in a cell under constant watch from deputies.
A judge refused bail to Jeffrey B. Levenderis, jailed when a container containing castor powder was found in what had been his refrigerator by a new tenant …
The judge in this case ruled that attorney’s had not shown the community would be safe if Levenderis was remitted to the nursing home he’d been in.
To my knowledge, Jeffrey Levenderis is still in jail awaiting trial.
Or take the case of Roger von Bergendorff.
From the Register, by me, in 2008:
It takes a special kind of American to be fascinated by ricin, and last week the latest, Roger Von Bergendorff, was indicted in the District Court of Nevada. Bergendorff possibly qualifies for an award in failed Darwinism, being the only person in recent times to have seemingly accidentally poisoned himself with the protein toxin, but not quite effectively enough for the FBI to have nothing to do except attend his funeral.
The US government’s complaint against Bergendorff, filed on April 15 paints a common picture: loser dude on the fringes of society, indigent but with still enough money to have two unregistered guns with silencers, castor seeds, a standard collection of anarchist poisons literature and castor powder – or “crude” ricin as the FBI puts it.
Bergendorff told the FBI his production of ricin was an “exotic idea.” He’d been puttering away at powdering castor seeds as something of a hobby since 2005 while living in poverty in Utah and Nevada. He’d pounded them in the basement of a cousin (who has also been charged in connection with the case) and, most recently, possibly in an Extended Stay America hotel room in Las Vegas.
Bergendorff had “researched” the Internet for his ricin recipe, downloading the Anarchist’s Cookbook. He babbled his method to the FBI, which duly reported he had conducted “a series of ‘mashings’ of the castor seeds with acetone and drying out the mash to remove the oil.” While Bergendorff admitted to doing this, he professed to not always remember precisely where he’d done the work or if he’d performed it on castor seeds bought from a garden shop, the receipt for which the FBI recovered in its searches. “Bergendorff admitted [that there had been people] who made him mad over the years and he had thoughts about causing them harm to the point of making some plans but he maintained he had never acted on those thoughts or plans,” reads the indictment.
Bergendorff had been hospitalized, possibly from his powder although this was never proven conclusively, and that is how the case came to light.
There was no sympathy or mercy. Bergendorff was convicted.
Said the judge: “You not only proved a material threat to yourself, you proved a material threat to everyone around you when you possessed this stuff.”
And, last, we arrive at the story of Casey Cutler, someone who never even made ricin. He wanted to but could not find castor seeds. Instead, he tried to make it from castor oil, which does not contain ricin.
From the Register, again — by me — in 2006:
But the biggest travesty is the story of Casey Cutler, an addled young man caught by very bad luck and drug use gone wrong, pathetically trying to make ricin from an intestinal lubricant.
As GlobalSecurity.Org Senior Fellow, I chatted with Jon Sands, Cutler’s federal public defender at the beginning of summer. He laughed dryly and described the case as “terrorism lite” before sending over the files on the case.
Cutler, according to Sands, suffered from a variety of mental problems and had been “self-medicating” with marijuana and other drugs which he purchased from bad elements, the kind apparently quick to teach you a physical lesson should you renege on payment.
Cutler was subsequently rolled by his suppliers on April 28 of 2005, causing him to hatch a self-defense plan, one in which he would use ricin to poison his tormentors should they return. He would offer it as free drugs …
[Cutler] found he had no idea how to get the beans. So he went to a store and bought castor oil, which – of course – contains no ricin.
No worries, Cutler boiled down the castor oil “to reduce it and utilized acetone (as indicated by the recipe) to extract the ricin from the mixture,” reads the finding of fact in his federal plea agreement with the US. But since castor oil contains no ricin, the federal court document is stuck, finding it awkward to admit that the defendant could not possibly have had the toxin. Instead it reads, “Defendant Casey Cutler did something that was a substantial step toward the production of a biological toxin.”
Cutler, unfortunately, had a roommate just as easily confused as he. The man contracted bronchitis – “flu like symptoms” according to an FBI agent’s report – but because he knew of Cutler’s intent, thought he had been poisoned, and went to a local emergency room for treatment.
According to Sands, while local medical personnel were not overly concerned that ricin poisoning was afoot rather than bronchitis, once the word ricin was uttered, it had to be reported to the federal network.
What happened next was exactly what happened in the cases of Danny Milzman and Nicholas Helman last week. The mailed fist of US counter-terror came to town.
Adding confusion was a false positive for ricin lab test on a locket containing part of Casey Cutler’s marijuana stash.
While the test was shown to be in error, and Cutler never made ricin, nor could he have, he was convicted anyway. And in subsequent years he wound up being counted in government statistics on terrorism.
Contrast this with Danny Milzman, who actually did grind castor seeds and extract the result.
Readers can see the picture emerge.
These three men, like Danny Milzman, were really nothing more than petty nuisances. No one was hurt by any of them. And no one could have possibly been hurt in the Cutler incident. There was never any real danger to the public.
But these men received no sympathy. Certainly no one came forward in a big newspaper to speak to their character or what they once might have been. And they received little to no mercy in court.
Jeffrey Levenderis, arrested in 2011, has yet to be even granted a trial.
Danny Milzman, on the other hand, was highly regarded in his high school. At Georgetown he was fast with science answers. He wrote articles with his accomplished father, made ricin only when he knew his roommate was away, carefully and responsibly disposed of some it and confessed in tears to his ex-boyfriend.
Milzman was depressed, emotionally tortured in some way. It would be a waste for his case to turn out as badly as it could.
Just like the men who went to jail, for which things turned out very badly, anyway.
And this analysis is why one reads DD’s blog.
UPDATE, Wednesday: Another judge delays Milzman’s release for a few days pending further cogitation.
Notes:
1. From the wires, March 25:
After the judge ruled Milzman should be released to home confinement, upon which his parents would immediately take him to Sibley Memorial Hospital for two weeks of psychiatric care. Then, Milzman was ordered to be taken home and not left alone.
Prosecutors immediately requested a 24-hour stay to appeal the decision…
The misery jar.
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Posted in Bioterrorism, Culture of Lickspittle, Ricin Kooks at 11:16 am by George Smith
Danny Milzman, of Georgetown, in better days.
Contrast Danny Milzman’s media story and background with that of Nicholas Todd Helman, the same week.
Both were 19-year-old men/boys. Danny Milzman made ricin at the posh school, Georgetown. He was a National Merit Scholar semi-finalist at Walt Whitman high in Bethesda, a public school for the upper middle class servants of the wealthy in the nation’s capitol. Nicholas Helman wasn’t going to a posh school. He worked at Target, made ricin in his Hatboro neighborhood and held Homeland Security, SWAT and the Hazmat teams off for a couple hours when they arrived.
Danny Milzman was distraught and, perhaps, wanted to hurt someone else or himself and show the world, or acquaintances, at least. Nicholas Helman was upset over being thrown over and, perhaps, wanted to hurt someone else and show the world, or acquaintances, at least. And he sent a scratch-and-sniff ricin letter to his rival.
The Washington Post is on the job:
Prosecutors said Tuesday there is evidence that a Georgetown University student charged last week with possessing the biological toxin ricin may have wanted to poison someone with the powdery substance he learned about from the television show “Breaking Bad??? …
Court papers filed Tuesday describe Milzman as an emotional college student who struggled with depression, and vacillated between wanting to hurt himself – and someone else …
During their half hour talk, Milzman told his [Georgetown friend Thomas Lloyd] through tears that he was feeling anxious and unfulfilled by his school work and relationships, according to prosecutors. Milzman told the friend …that he was engaging in “risky behavior.???
Milzman, a member of his high school quiz bowl team who also played ice hockey, told Lloyd that he “scared himself by having ricin??? and that he was confiding in his friend because “part of Milzman wanted to be dared to use it and the other part of Milzman wanted to avoid using it,??? according to the court filing.
The Washington Post informs Milzman waited for his roommate to be away on the weekend before pounding and extracting his castor seeds.
“Investigators said Milzman first learned about ricin from quiz bowl, online sources and his favorite television show that in its final season includes a plot line involving a ricin poisoning,” reads the newspaper article.
Milzman apparently did not read this blog or any of the many other things I’ve written on ricin over the last ten years. All delivered by online sources, absolutely free.
The internet let Danny Milzman down. It let Nicholas Helman down. It lets everyone down.
It should have sent the message that ricin isn’t easy to make but that turning castor seeds into a powder was an easy way to get in big trouble and there’s not anything particularly special, exotic and fascinating about it.
Instead of that, it gives you:
Plus an ocean of like-minded clickbait and fantasy.
What’s the difference between Danny Milzman and Nicholas Helman?
Not much. Certainly there’s little difference in brain power. They’re both likely to suffer one shit ton of ruin and heartbreak for momentary lapses in judgment and getting caught up in America’s singular fascination with ricin.
However, Milzman is getting a more sympathetic reading because of class and positioning.
Nicholas Helman, of Hatboro, in better days.
Meta: Yes, dear readers, I am now writing post titles every bit the equal of the work turned out by the web portal of imbeciles known as Upworthy! Do you like it?
Due to the environment of lickspittle accidentally designed and imposed by the genius of Google algorithms in Mountain View, the publishing model that is the most successful today is one that delivers clickbait, troll pieces, ridiculous titling designed to poison search and bait & switch titling optimized to poison/rig search.
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03.24.14
Posted in Bioterrorism, Culture of Lickspittle, Ricin Kooks at 4:08 pm by George Smith
A petty nuisance at a posh school, just before the mailed fist of emergency response showed up at the dorm.
The news yesterday was that authorities had recovered 0.12 gram of castor powder/ricin sample from Georgetown student Danny Milzman.
Of that, a smaller amount is ricin.
In the lab in the old days you could do a rough determination of protein, which is what ricin is, in a sample by redissolving a portion and looking at simple photometric absorbance at an ultraviolet wavelength. This returns a very gross estimate.
And ricin would hardly be the only protein in the sample so it’s impossible to say without a lot more information how relatively toxic Milzman’s stash was.
However, no kid in a dorm with an old electronic copy of Saxon [1] can make much of anything, though, except that which will send him to jail.
From the wire:
A Georgetown University student who was charged Friday with possessing the biological toxin ricin made aggressive comments online toward another student earlier this year, according to a recent Georgetown graduate who said she alerted the school’s administration to the messages and believed the second student might be in danger.
Daniel Milzman, 19, is facing federal charges for allegedly making the deadly toxin and keeping it in his dorm room, according to court papers …
Milzman’s friends said immediately after his arrest that he has a “good heart and a good conscience.???
The recent Georgetown graduate said she was alarmed when she found messages that Milzman had apparently posted on Facebook attacking another Georgetown student. The messages, which the graduate saved as images and sent to the university’s Office of Student Conduct on Jan. 29, call the male student a “useless waste of space??? and suggest that Milzman would be happy if the other student killed himself.
The graduate, who is 23, spoke to The Washington Post on the condition of anonymity because of fears of retribution. The graduate, who does not know Milzman, served as an orientation adviser to the other student and was concerned about the bullying nature of the comments when that student made them public on Facebook…
In an interview Saturday, [a Georgetown U. friend of Milzman’s, Thomas Lloyd told the Washington Post] that the conversation [in which Milzman told him of his ricin] was “ambiguous??? about whether or not Milzman would use the poison on another person and “there was certainly no mention of a specific person.???
Here’s an abstract on the subject of the clinical toxicology of castor seed ingestion in Kansas over ten years.
Summarizing, doctors and researchers found 84 cases over a decade, 50 of which were accidental, 34 — intentional. Children and the witless probably account for the accidental cases.
There may be an attempted poisoning or two in the 34 unintentional, although I’m betting some were attempted suicides and some curious stupidity or belief in wive’s tales about the value of a castor seed as folk medicine. (There is such belief in foreign countries.)
“One patient developed hematochezia and vomiting after reportedly ingesting and intravenously injecting castor bean seeds,” report the doctors.
This would apparently seem to be a clear attempt at suicide. Or, more remotely, someone looking for a high.
No deaths were reported. Unintentional consumption averaged eight and a half seeds per dose. Intentional, ten seeds.
Of note:
“No delayed symptoms, serious outcomes, or deaths were reported. Discussion. Due to the presence of ricin, there is concern for serious outcomes after ingestions of the seeds of the castor bean plant. In this study GI symptoms were most commonly reported but serious morbidity or mortality was not present. The true risk of castor bean plant seed ingestions should continue to be re-evaluated.
This is real science. What the mythology of ricin is in America is not.
What the national security expert apparatus also works on has little to do with using the science of a matter to make evaluations.
The latter was born out of caution after 9/11, and then exploitation when many realized that there was free money that was going to be flowing to defend against the stuff.
So when some dumb shit of a kid, or two, “make ricin??? and armored cars filled with army men masked by respirators and hazmat men in scuba tanks descend on their neighborhoods you can only be impressed/astonished/horrified/[fill in the blank] at the bizarre affairs.
Frankly, at this point I’m surprised such things have not yet been included in sketch comedy.
It is a demonstration, too, in this case as to how — on the internet and courtesy of Google — the excrement of “information??? rises to the top, crowding out and making useless the rational and considered.
No matter what is put on the web, regardless of refereed science on the matter, what happens is dictated by belief that has been made and twisted from the course and nature of the war on terror and, absurdly, the narratives of the news media and entertainment industries.
All the stupid find is the concocted and the fantastic, suitable only for entertainment. Which it has been for a long time, for anyone who watches movies, television, internet video and on and on.
DD’s law remains in effect:
The probability that any predicted national security catastrophe, or doomsday scenario, will occur is inversely proportional to its appearance in entertainments, movies, television dramas and series, novels, non-fiction books, magazines and news …
Danny Milzmans are one of the results of the circumstances covered under DD’s Law.
The Culture of Lickspittle, groupthink and the internet, all as they pertain to ricin, plus youthful very bad judgment are at the root of the story.
[1]. The words of Kurt Saxon, from The Poor Man’s James Bond, the original source of Danny Milzman’s ricin recipe, now retrievable by iPhone:
“It is bad to poison your fellow man, blow him up or even shoot him or otherwise disturb his tranquility. It is also uncouth to counterfeit your nation’s currency and it is tacky to destroy property as instructed in [the chapter] Arson and Electronics …
“But some people are just naturally crude … It is your responsibility, then, to be aware of the many ways bad people can be harmful …
“Also, in the event that our nation is invaded by Foreign Devils, it is up to you to destroy them with speed and vigor. Or — and perish the thought — if our Capitol should fall to the enemy within, I expect you to do your duty.
“It is right to share with your enemies, the knowledge in this wonderful book …???
The world of digital sharing: Often not what it’s cracked up to be.
Share! It’s edutainment!
Way better than:
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03.22.14
Posted in Bioterrorism, Culture of Lickspittle, Ricin Kooks at 12:24 pm by George Smith
Just before the mailed fist of US anti-terrorism arrived in his dorm.
Through the confluence of the never-ending war on terror, the internet, old American neo-Nazis and stupid new American men and women, we have ricin kooks. During the last two years, they’ve come in clusters.
And today from the wire, continuing the riff from earlier this week, the story of 19-year-old Danny Milzman, much like Nicholas Herman of Hatboro, only with more money, courtesy of well-off parents:
A Georgetown University student who made the deadly chemical ricin in his dorm room was arrested in Washington, D.C. on Friday for illegal possession of a biological toxin, an FBI spokeswoman said.
The student, Daniel Harry Milzman, made the white powder with materials he bought at local stores, including The Home Depot and American Plant Company, according to an affidavit filed in court on Thursday. He found the recipe for making it by doing a search on his iPhone, investigators said.
Wearing goggles and a dust mask for protection, Milzman used Epsom salts and castor beans, among other materials, to make the ricin in his dorm room about a month ago, according to the affidavit …
On Tuesday evening, for reasons that are unclear, Milzman showed some of his ricin to his residential adviser …
From Escape from WhiteManistan, Thursday:
I suspect that in certain cases, not all, there is a juvenile hacker mentality at work, one you see in BitCoin altar boys, the old culture of virus-writers, and some hackers:
I’m going to do it because I must prove to acquaintances, and by extension — the world, that it can be done! I’ll show everybody!
A little more than twenty years ago I saw the first recipes for ricin in cyberspace, on the nascent internet and also on bulletin board systems run off computers in the bedrooms of young boys and men in America.
In the intervening time a couple things have changed. Now you download them with iJunk, if you like. But the combination of electronic recipes for ricin (all simple castor bean pounding and minor treatments with either a degreasing agent or precipitation after dissolving in water), the mythology on the subject and its dispersal to fingertip retrieval from the net, the rapid reaction force of the US national security apparatus have made a unique American phenomenon: the ricin kook.
Said more succinctly, ricin makes stupid.
Nineteen year-old-boys are no more capable of making weapons of mass destruction from internet recipes and crap bought at local stores than the opossum in your backyard.
Nevertheless, where we are as a nation dictates they must be dealt with.
So dealt with they are because what good is it, how smart and skillful you are in making ricin, with this week’s cases, if you don’t tell someone about it?
And Daniel and Nicholas were apparently just busting to do so.
When this happens a detachment from the American joint anti-terrorism force arrives in your neighborhood or right up close to your dorm in the form of a mailed fist of special agents, SWAT teams in full battle gear and respirators, HAZMAT men, fire trucks and armored cars.
In Georgetown.
Daniel Melzman’s ricin recipe, so handily captured on his iPhone, is descended from an original published by neo-Nazi/survivalist Kurt Saxon in the late Eighties, first in a self-published pamphlet called The Weaponeer, and later in The Poor Man’s James Bond.
You can tell by its description in the Reuters piece.
Make no mistake, ricin boys, men and women are almost purely American. While you sometimes see a couple in England, it’s ours. It could only have happened here.
I was a young man when Kurt Saxon first started publishing his ricin recipes. However, the United States was not peppered every year with a few task force investitures of neighborhoods for the arrest of ricin kooks and their leavings.
Why?
A number of reasons, and they all come in the development of the Culture of Lickspittle during the last couple of decades:
No internet, no war on terror, no years of fantastical television stories about the nefarious toxicity of ricin in the hands of bad people, no army of national security experts in all media spinning stories about it, no interest because of the groupthink/idiot’s belief you can make something really dangerous, something you must tell others about …by buying a pack of seeds and twiddling your fingers.
I’ll probably post more this weekend.
Remember, after twenty years of writing in cyberspace, that’s why you read about this stuff here.
Pass the Ricin Kooks link around.
And here’s the misery jar.
From last year, ricin-making machine at 2:11.
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03.20.14
Posted in Bioterrorism, Ricin Kooks, WhiteManistan at 1:42 pm by George Smith
Spring is coming and a fresh bunch of America’s ricin kooks are stirring in the neighborhoods:
A Hatboro man was arrested Wednesday night for allegedly sending a scratch-and-sniff birthday card laced with ricin to a man now dating his ex-girlfriend, authorities said.
Nicholas Todd Helman, 19, was charged with attempted murder and risking catastrophe after lab tests allegedly showed that the card he placed in the man’s family mailbox March 6 was discovered this week to have contained traces of the toxic substance, Bucks County District Attorney David Heckler said …
Helman had bragged of the toxic card to a coworker at Target in Warrington on March 6, according to a probable cause affidavit. The coworker then notified police, the affidavit says …
When Helman was first questioned about the incident, on March 7, he told police that he had only coated the card with sodium hydroxide, the affidavit says, which he chose because it resembled the toxin anthrax.
Helman also admitted to sending threatening messages to the man via Facebook, according to the affidavit, and police seized from him what appeared to be sodium hydroxide and a notebook with a ricin recipe after questioning.
When a ricin mailing is found, everyone comes: the FBI, the local police, the Department of Homeland Security, the state and local hazmat and SWAT teams.
It must have been a thrilling day in the neighborhood.
And from the WaPost (no link), still another young bean pounder:
A white powder found Tuesday in a Georgetown University dorm room tested positive for ricin, school officials said Wednesday, and a D.C. police report indicates that a 19-year-old man told authorities he had produced the substance.
The “expert” who should have kept her mouth shut is deployed, emitting a comment that really has no relevance to what’s going on in America when ricin kooks are at work:
Amy E. Smithson, a senior fellow with the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies who studies biological weapons, said that when ricin is produced with military precision, the substance can be highly lethal. “Ricin is one of the deadliest substances on the face of the planet, no ifs, ands or buts about it,??? she said.
The substance can be highly lethal. Military precision. It’s laughable, a factoid delivered entirely stripped of context. Nobody has died in the US from ricin poisoning in the last twenty years.
As in Hatboro, the Department of Homeland Security, the police, the firemen, everybody, came.
Why couldn’t I get a job like that? That’s real employment security.
The coincidence that, in these cases, both perpetrators are nineteen-year-old boys certainly leaves good work for graduate students in criminal psychology.
Surely both, as have others, have read enough about ricin on the internet to know they are just smashing castor seeds. But if they are caught with the result, which inevitably happens because they are compelled to — ahem — spill the beans, summoning a detachment from the full apparatus of the war on terror to their door, they will go to jail.
I suspect that in certain cases, not all, there is a juvenile hacker mentality at work, one you see in BitCoin altar boys, the old culture of virus-writers, and some hackers: I’m going to do it because I must prove to acquaintances, and by extension — the world, that it can be done! I’ll show everybody!
Addition: Why do ricin kooks seem to come in clusters in ‘Merica? Coincidences? Seasonal? This is the best time to get castor seeds?
Some underlying psychic network, connecting strands of bright, electric, vibrating mental illness?
I’ll probably never know the answer.
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03.02.14
Posted in Bioterrorism, Culture of Lickspittle, Ricin Kooks at 1:06 pm by George Smith
Today, more indirect news evidence the Dept. of Homeland Security and FBI are heavily engaged in surveillance of Internet web sites on the Internet and/or on the Tor network. In this instance, a fascinating tidbit in the United Kingdom, a collateral arrest linked to the investigation of Black Market Reloaded and Jesse Korff.
From a small English newspaper:
A banker accused of trying to kill her magistrate mother at their Stratford home by lacing her Diet Coke with a poison more deadly than ricin is to stand trial in July after appearing at Southwark Crown Court today where she was further remanded in custody.
Kuntal Patel,36, is alledged to have plotted to kill Meena Patel,54, using abrin-a rare poison extracted from the seeds of a Peruvian plant.
She was arrested by counter terrrorism officers at the £450,000 home they share in Park Road earlier this month after US homeland security is believed to have tipped off Scotland Yard’s Counter Terrorism Command about a website based in the US which specialised in selling lethal toxins.
She is not facing terrorist charges, but is accused of attempted murder between December 10 2013 and January 26.
The Mirror also informs: “Their home has been subject to a four-day fingertip search by police wearing masks and protective suits.”
Three raids in London were conducted in connection with the case.
And last week, one kook in New York:
City cops are using facial recognition software and leaning on the FBI and Interpol to learn more about the unhinged Swedish man who showed up at a Bronx police station with cyanide.
Jonathan Norling, 22, had more of the toxin and a suicide note in his Cadillac. Another poison, abrin, was found in his Cruger Ave. apartment, cops said. Officers also recovered 9-mm. pistol and an AR-15 assault rifle in his rented U-Haul truck …
[Norling] claimed to have a background in chemistry and an expertise in computer hacking, though detectives doubt his claim that he hacked into Citibank when he was 14.
[Norling] told police he tried to make cyanide himself, failed to do so, then hacked into [Black Market Reloaded], an Internet black market that he accessed using [the TOR network], which is free software that provides online anonymity and hides the user’s location. He then purchased the cyanide online.
What’s with the baby-faced kook pretending he’s a hacker spreading anarchy 25 years after the fact?
“Precatory bean plants may be purchased at nurseries nationwide.
“Some years ago, a few very stupid people came up with the idea of using the attractive scarlet and sable beans for rosary beads… If your target is strongly religious, then these beads can easily be modified to kill.???
[Hutchkinson continues with the advice to scarify the rosary peas so that the abrin might leak out and poison anyone who handles them. Since abrin is a protein, it can’t be much of a contact poison, any more than you can eat a piece of meat by putting it on your skin, but Hutchkinson, of course, does not know this. He is more interested in poisoning the Pope.]
“As the abrin slowly kills your target, an interesting cycle will begin. The worse your target gets, the more he will pray with his rosary beads, which will only make him worse… ???
“These items make wonderful presents for the religious target. We’d send one to the Pope, but he already has nineteen hundred years of Christian spoils to adorn himself with.???
— Maxwell Hutchkinson, The Poisoner’s Handbook
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02.24.14
Posted in Bioterrorism, Crazy Weapons, Ricin Kooks, WhiteManistan at 5:22 pm by George Smith
From last week:
Well over a quarter of a century ago I was always able to find Hutckinson’s recipe for abrin [and ricin] at the end of a telephone line. With the squeal of a US Robotics modem you would find it archived, along with lots of other alleged means to easy mayhem and malice, on bulletin board systems run off PCs in the bedrooms of young men.
With regards to the poison and other informations from the computer underground, what it was called back then, not much has changed.
Keep it in mind, it will have some relevance later.
In the last few years anti-terror training has moved from drills centered around Muslims to those involving domestic terrorists.
One such drill was briefly mentioned in the news last year, from Ohio:
A dead science teacher, weapons of mass destruction, first responders in hazmat suits and the Ohio Army National Guard all near the Municipal Stadium in Portsmouth, Thursday. There’s no cause for alarm — this is just a drill!
The mock disaster training exercise is being done with Scioto County first responders and the Ohio Army National Guard 52nd Civil Support Unit.
“It’s the reality of the world we live in,” says Portsmouth Police Chief Bill Raisin. “Don’t forget there is such a thing as domestic terrorism. This helps us all be prepared.”
The make-believe scenario is timely. Two school employees who are disgruntled over the government’s interpretation of the Second Amendment, plot to use chemical, biological and radiological agents against members of the local community.
On hair-trigger over being potentially painted as domestic terrorists, gun rights supporters used the Freedom of Information Act to pry loose training documents on the incident.
They are here.
The papers show a theoretical plot in which a disgruntled janitor in the Portsmouth School District cooks up some sulfur mustard and ricin, dispersing the former in a plot which caused minor burns. Ricin was put into the school lunches of children, sending many to the hospital with “flu-like” symptoms.
The scenario shows the janitor inspired by William Pierce, a famous American neo-Nazi known as the author of “The Turner Diaries,” America’s foremost example of race hate and government overthrow fiction. Pierce died a number of years ago but his book was a bestseller within the neo-Nazi violent right underground. Timothy McVeigh was one infamous domestic terrorist influenced by it.
The ricin recipe was also reproduced in the documents. It is illustrated as originating from the “Second” Temple of the Screaming Electron 2 website.
I could not find it on TOTSE2, so it is possible that for the drill, something was put together that looked like the chat board.
The original Temple of the Screaming Electron, although it no longer seems to exist, is archived in more than one place on the web and the mirror includes its old ricin recipe. The ricin recipe was a procedure bowdler-ized from far right kook Kurt Saxon’s Weaponeer and The Poor Man’s James Bond where it was attributed to someone named Punk Rock Girl.
Or maybe it is there at TOTSE2 and my search-fu was not strong enough. Or perhaps it was taken down.
On the Temple of the Screaming Electron, by me at the Register, in 2007:
During the [anti-terror] sweep which netted the alleged ricin cell, one young man was arrested with a copy of the ricin recipe downloaded from the Temple of the Screaming Electron, which is where Google will take you if you punch in “how to make ricin” and then click the “I’m Feeling Lucky” tab. He was subsequently released.
The person apprehended turned out to be a researcher with the wrong kind of name.
Over a quarter of a century ago, The Temple of the Screaming Electron was a bulletin board system hosted on a PC at the end of a telephone line. It archived computer virus source code, hacking files and, of course, things like the ricin recipe from self-published pamphlets authored by the violent right, then called anarchy files.
It was later migrated to the world wide web where it lasted, I’m guessing, for about a decade.
In the anti-terror exercise in Portsmouth, Ohio, the perpetrator was
drawn as someone striking back in retaliation against perceived effort to change or eliminate the 2nd Amendment.
However, in terms of motivation, how poisoning young children with ricin at lunchtime would symbolically be seen as having something logical to do with 2nd Amendment rights escapes me. If recent history is a guide, domestic terrorists have planned to attack government workers and installations.
Continuing, domestic right-wingers were recently been convicted in a ricin plot.
One such group was puckishly referred to as the Georgia Ricin Beans Gang in 2011.
Two members of that group were recently convicted by a jury in 90 minutes for conspiring to attack the government with ricin. Two others had previously taken guilty pleas on weapons offenses.
And a few days ago the FBI arrested three more men who were allegedly conspiring to attack the government with pipe bombs.
They were observed and engaged by the FBI and two confidential informants while on Facebook:
Three Georgia men tried to buy pipe bombs and other explosives and discussed attacking power grids, water treatment plants and other infrastructure in a plot to incite other militias to fight the federal government, authorities said.
Brian Edward Cannon, 36, and Cory Robert Williamson, 28, appeared in federal court Friday in Rome and were denied bond. Terry Eugene Peace, 45, is due for his first court appearance Monday. A criminal complaint charges them with conspiring to receive and possess firearms, specifically pipe bombs and thermite grenades. Thermite grenades are military-grade weapons typically used to destroy vehicles, weapons systems and other equipment …
Between Jan. 23 and Feb. 15, the three men participated in online chat discussions about carrying out an operation against the government in February, according to a written statement from an FBI agent. The online chats were monitored by the FBI.
‘‘Peace encouraged members of the militia to review guerrilla warfare tactics, small unit tactics, accumulate supplies and prepare family,’’ the agent’s statement says.
In a recorded phone call on Feb. 8, an FBI source told Peace he had a contact who could provide the materials the men sought. Peace said during the conversation, ‘‘… if he can hook us up with say 12 pipe bombs that will be sweet,’’ according to the agent’s statement.
A second FBI source told agents he had a conversation with Cannon on Feb. 8 during which Cannon said the group planned to ‘‘start the fight’’ with the government by sabotaging power grids, transfer stations and water treatment facilities to create mass hysteria, the agent’s statement says. That would push the government to declare martial law, which would push other militias to join the fight.
The FBI arranged for one of the informants to supply the men with a dozen dummy thermite bombs, at which point they were arrested.
As mentioned last week, it’s quite clear Homeland Security and the FBI monitor networks for this kind of thing.
And the right is a bit perturbed about the Oho anti-terrorism drill.
Permalink
02.18.14
Posted in Bioterrorism, Fiat money fear and loathers, Ricin Kooks at 12:06 pm by George Smith
A 19-year-old boy in south Florida is set to be imprisoned, possibly for life, as the result of a federal investigation of the Black Market Reloaded website, a replacement for the infamous Silk Road, where there were “numerous offerings for the sale of illegal and harmful goods, including but not limited to biological agents, toxins, firearms, ammunition, explosives, controlled substances, counterfeit goods and fraudulent documents,” according to an FBI document here.
Jesse Korff of Labelle, Florida, was arrested by agents of the FBI and Homeland Security Investigations when he delivered two vials of liquid containing a small but detectable amount of the poison abrin to them. It was the final part of a transaction started on the Black Market Reloaded site when one of the undercover men contacted Korff, inquired about buying the poison and advanced him 1.608 Bitcoin for it.
Like the Silk Road, Black Market Reloaded was hosted on the encrypted Tor network where many people seem to still believe federal agents cannot get at them. Black Market Reloaded was subsequently taken down and the sting shows that Homeland Security and the FBI are well into operations aimed at keeping similar websites and Bitcoin markets for crime under heavy surveillance.
From the Department of Justice website:
“HSI has worked tirelessly with the FBI and other law enforcement partners to combat underground websites such as BMR,??? said Andrew McLees, Special Agent in Charge of HSI Newark. “Anyone who can sell abrin, a potential agent for chemical terrorism, must be stopped. The arrest of Korff shows HSI’s commitment to protecting the public from individuals who show a callous disregard for their safety in the interest of making a buck.???
Beginning in April 2013, HSI special agents conducted an investigation of illicit sales activity on BMR. The website provides a platform for vendors and buyers to conduct anonymous online transactions involving the sale of a variety of illegal goods, including biological agents, toxins, firearms, ammunition, explosives, narcotics and counterfeit items. Unlike mainstream e-commerce websites, BMR is only accessible via the Tor network – a special computer network designed to enable users to conceal their identities and locations. Transactions on BMR are conducted using Bitcoin, a decentralized form of electronic currency that only exists online.
Korff maintained a seller’s profile on BMR, through which he negotiated the sale of two liquid doses of abrin to the undercover agent. During their online conversations, Korff told the buyer about his delivery methods – concealing vials in a carved-out and re-melted candle – and discussed how much abrin was needed to kill a person of a particular weight and how best to administer the toxin.
Korff and the buyer agreed on a total purchase price of $2,500 for two doses of the poison. The undercover transferred a deposit – the equivalent of $1,500 in Bitcoin – from a bank account in New Jersey to Korff on Jan. 6, 2014.
A federal task force then raided the house where Jesse Korff was living. A local news report reads:
Investigators tell WINK News they found a pipe bomb, firearms, ricin and meth labs at Jesse Korff’s home in Muse. After hearing of the evidence, the judge said Korff should stay behind bars.
The photo of the task force raid is from this blog.
Abrin, a poison extracted from the fairly common Precatorius, or rosary pea plant, has, to my knowledge, never killed anyone in the US during my time. It doesn’t happen. It’s not a hazard, even accidentally.
Seeds and the plant can be easily purchased on-line. It is even common in the woods of south Florida.
Nevertheless, abrin is a poison, related to and more toxic than ricin.
And well over 20 years ago, before Jesse Korff was born, young men began copying the poison and bomb-making self-published pamphlets by America’s survivalist right into cyberspace. From there, they traveled around the world.
So one reads in the FBI document:
Abrin can be extracted from the seed. The extraction of the abrin from the seeds is relatively easy and does not require technical expertise. Procedures and methods for extracting abrin are available from open sources on the Internet.
With regards to abrin recipes and the poison’s lure as an efficient and untraceable way to put someone to death, Maxwell Hutchkinson’s pamphlet, The Poisoner’s Handbook, published by Loompanics in 1988, is the main source.
Many readers are familiar with my comment on it, which can be reviewed here.
Terrorists have never used abrin as a weapon of mass destruction although the FBI and Homeland Security special agents mention their expertise in WMDs in the Korff document.
Nevertheless, eight years ago at the height of the war on terror Homeland Security conducted exercises imagining they could.
This was part of the national security megaplex belief that everything deadly that could be dreamed up or theorized was “easy for terrorists” to do.
From Steve Aftergood’s Secrecy Bulletin in 2005:
The notion of a hyper-competent terrorist who can easily overcome the physical and technical obstacles that perplex and detain ordinary mortals has become a common rhetorical trope in public discussions of terrorism.
George Smith of GlobalSecurity.org conducted a Nexis search for the phrase “easy for a terrorist” (and similar formulations) and found about one hundred mainstream media citations over the past two years.
Judging from press reports, nearly everything comes “easy” to terrorists:
“From food terror, to manipulating the flu virus, to blowing up chemical plants, to getting driver’s licenses, to coming across the Mexican border, to buying large caliber guns, to shooting down planes with ground-to-air missiles, to spreading hoof-and-mouth disease and destroying the cattle industry, to paralyzing Los Angeles by attacking power stations, to causing major blackouts, to putting anthrax in bagged rice,” Smith found. “There really is no end to it. It’s stupefying in its universality.”
Such glib assessments of terrorist capabilities are worse than simply wrong. They spread fear and a sense of helplessness, doing the work of the terrorists, and they threaten to dissipate limited security and financial resources in a hundred different directions.
I wrote about the Homeland Security exercise positing abrin as a terrorist weapon on the blog around the same time.
It was also published at The Register and here are parts, excerpted:
Did you know you can buy a WMD on eBay? It’s true …
[It’s] rosary peas, seeds of the Crab’s Eye weed, which is commonplace in Florida and known as ratti in India. It also contains the protein abrin, which is more toxic than ricin, another similar enzyme.
Somehow mankind has muddled through, managing not to exterminate itself with rosary peas, which have been used in ornamental jewelry and ripped out of lawns by annoyed gardeners.
That is, until the US-led war on terror, a war in which the incompetent concoct terror scenarios about weapons of mass destruction, scenarios which toss common sense and critical-thinking out the window. With GlobalSecurity.Org Senior Fellow T-shirt on, it has been determined that this is done so that “readiness” may be practiced and the public convinced the tax dollars going to the Dept. of Homeland Security are well spent.
By-lined FORT INDIANTOWN GAP (a dilapidated Pennsy US army post where Cuban refugees were once held and DD rode in an armored personnel carrier as a Boy Scout), the Lebanon Daily News reported a week or so ago:
“With the early morning frost still coating the grass, the men raised their guns and slowly moved in.
“Clad in white-and-blue HazMat suits, bulletproof vests and gas masks, the men split into three groups and waited for the signal. Then, with the sudden crash of battering rams smashing into doors, they sped into action.
“The raid at the Gap was part of ‘Exercise Wide Vigilance,’ a bigger training simulation held yesterday by the South Central Pennsylvania Regional Counter-Terrorism Task . . . ”
And what was the terror plot that was being broken up? A lab said to be using rosary peas to make a weapon of mass destruction.
Terrorists planned to explode bombs at the two sites, sending the [abrin] into the air. [One man who designed the exercise] said that, according to his calculations and the size of the lab, enough of the chemical was made to kill 2,500 people.”
But abrin has never been used as a WMD.
Without getting into the technical details, it’s not possible to make rosary peas into a WMD. Technically speaking, it is possible to envision people being individually poisoned by abrin, if they were a target of a single assassination, or somehow mistakenly chewed and ate a couple rosary peas. Because of the latter, the FDA has been doing a small bit of work aimed at examining how to look for abrin in food.
But the US government has gone well beyond this, constructing a public belief system in which demonic menace is said to lurk everywhere and where death by exotic means is easy to achieve. It’s a system in which terror advisors and consultants simply make things up on a frequent basis. And they make such useless exercises up because it is a way in which to get paid by the government for aiding in alleged terror preparedness.
“Yesterday’s exercise, the biggest of its kind in the region, was funded through the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency and the Department of Homeland Security” wrote the Lebanon newspaper.
Readers of this blog may suspect that the addled concept of rosary peas as a WMD has filtered down from sources it has read of previously. Like the benighted chemical warfare recipes in the Afghan Manual of Jihad or Maxwell Hutchkinson’s Poisoner’s Handbook.
And they’re right!
The Hutchkinson book, which has been responsible for so much trash belief re the capabilities of terrorists and their chemical dreams of mass death, does not disappoint. It furnishes the usual “wisdom” – wisdom in this case meaning the lack of it – on the subject.
On abrin, from page 8, in a section entitled “precatory beans:”
“Precatory bean plants may be purchased at nurseries nationwide.
“Some years ago, a few very stupid people came up with the idea of using the attractive scarlet and sable beans for rosary beads… If your target is strongly religious, then these beads can easily be modified to kill.”
Hutchkinson continues with the advice to scarify the rosary peas so that the abrin might leak out and poison anyone who handles them. Since abrin is a protein, it can’t be much of a contact poison, any more than you can eat a piece of meat by putting it on your skin, but Hutchkinson, of course, does not know this. He is more interested in poisoning the Pope.
“As the abrin slowly kills your target, an interesting cycle will begin,” he writes. “The worse your target gets, the more he will pray with his rosary beads, which will only make him worse… ”
“These items make wonderful presents for the religious target. We’d send one to the Pope, but he already has nineteen hundred years of Christian spoils to adorn himself with.”
So what is to be thought when a local government carries out a terror exercise in which the threat is based upon such wretched mythology? To paraphrase Hutchkinson, “Some days ago, a few very stupid people came up with the idea . . .”
“[When] you handle the abrin you should were [sic] gloves,” Jesse Korff writes to an undercover agent at one point, indicating the lore of Hutchkinson, that you can poison someone with it through their fingers, has passed down through the terror age.
Well over a quarter of a century ago I was always able to find Hutckinson’s recipe for abrin at the end of a telephone line. With the squeal of a US Robotics modem you’d find it archived, along with lots of other alleged means to easy mayhem and malice, on bulletin board systems run off PCs in the bedrooms of young men.
With regards to the poison and other informations from the computer underground, what it was called back then, not much has changed.
You can do it cheaper and faster, and find a black market for it on the Tor network. You can even pay in Bitcoin!
But selling vials of a solution containing the grinding of rosary peas is a terribly awful way to earn money.
Why, yes! This blog now accepts BitCoin!
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11.23.13
Posted in Bioterrorism, Ricin Kooks, War On Terror at 11:12 am by George Smith
Shannon Richardson, the Texas woman and sometime television extra who tried to frame her husband on a ricin beef by sending castor powder letters to the president and others, has entered a plea agreement with the government.
No terms have been announced. While in jail, Richardson gave birth to a child. She was originally charged with two counts of threats by mail.
Elsewhere, the two defendants at the center of the case of the Georgia Ricin Beans Gang have been in jail since the end of 2011. They still have not come to trial.
And Jeffery Levenderis, a destitute Ohio man, arrested when a jar with some castor mush was found in the refrigerator of a house he’d rented but no longer lived in, has been in jail, awaiting trial, since January 2011.
In trivial news earlier this month, an official from the Department of Homeland Security told Congress that one of the three ricin suspects arrested during the summer fad of letter-mailing, had also set up to sell something — that something undisclosed — on the closed Silkroute drug trading site. The name of the person was not given.
This was done as part of testimony that terrorists were availing themselves of the black drug site.
Using the three individuals (or at least one of them) arrested for castor-powder mailing this summer to demonstrate terrorist use on the Silkroute drug site is a really big stretch. But that’s how we roll.
Want an MP3 of “Ricin Mama” for your device? Click here. Be the first on your block to have the only blues rock tune about ricin mailing, ever!
Also featuring the only satirical use of video of Lee Atwater playing guitar with Steve Cropper (of Booker T. and the MG’s) and others.
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