Past Bioterrorism Arrests Have Relied Mostly on Luck

In a Wisconsin courtroom a few years ago, a federal judge and two lawyers faced a bearded, long-haired figure known as the “Mad Scientist,” confronting then what now worries millions of Americans--the threat of biological terrorism.

Thomas C. Leahy was about to be sentenced to prison. In the basement of his Janesville, Wis., home he had stored “boxes and boxes and boxes” of chemistry experiments. On his shelves he kept pickle jars and petri dishes, and he had learned to make ricin, one of the deadliest known toxins, mainly by opening his chemistry and math books and ordering castor beans, the source of the poison.

He was trying to cultivate anthrax as well, the deadly bacteria now being used to terrorize parts of the United States.

Leahy toiled in his home wearing a white plastic gown and a gas mask. He developed his own “Enemies List.” He warned his wife that he was going to mail out the ricin, and maybe even include ricin-laced razor blades in the packages. He bragged to his stepson about his scheme to poison Lake Michigan.

At his sentencing hearing in January 1998, U.S. District Judge John C. Shabaz said he was deeply concerned about the “mass destruction” that might have taken place had Leahy not been apprehended.

Because ricin can be easily converted to aerosol form, it is a potential weapon of mass destruction.

Yet it was just a fluke that the FBI found Leahy’s basement laboratory at all, and then only because he had shot and wounded his stepson in the cellar in 1996.

In other cases of bioterrorism, even in the mail-bomb campaign of Theodore Kaczynski, it has been luck--more than anything else--that averted greater calamity. A long federal manhunt failed to turn up Kaczynski, the so-called Unabomber. It was only after newspapers published his “manifesto” that his brother noted the similarities to his writing and contacted authorities.

Leahy’s case and others illustrate some of the challenges facing authorities as they search for the senders of anthrax letters that have killed three people and infected at least 13 others.

The anthrax incidents in Florida, New York, New Jersey and Washington also have led authorities to tell more than 15,000 people to take protective antibiotics and disrupted mail service and the business of Congress.

Some law enforcement officials believe they too will need a lucky break or a tip from an alert citizen to find those behind the current bioterrorism campaign. One top-ranking FBI official, who asked not to be identified, was blunt about the present danger.

“I don’t think the American public should expect we’re going to automatically stop an isolated case of anthrax in the mail, any more than we can stop someone from taking a gunshot wound,” he said. “The ability to stop such things is beyond our grasp.”

The Leahy case also illustrates another aspect of law enforcement’s efforts to stop biowarfare in the United States. In the few cases where bioterror suspects have been arrested, they have seldom received substantial prison time. While that is likely to change in the courtrooms of post-Sept. 11 America, previous efforts to keep such criminals behind bars for long periods have largely failed.

Leahy was originally sentenced to 12 years and seven months. But an appeals court cut the sentence in half. If not for the state prison sentence he received for wounding his stepson, Leahy--who openly spoke of his devotion to Adolf Hitler and who embraced the cause of Arab extremists--might be about to leave prison.

Bioterrorism Close to Home

And there have been others who apparently were bent on waging bioterrorism:

* In 1993, Canadian customs officials stopped white supremacist Thomas Lavy as he came into their country from Alaska. He was carrying guns, $98,000 in cash and a small container of ricin. The Canadians confiscated the powder but inexplicably released Lavy.

Two years later, FBI agents and U.S. Army chemical warfare specialists raided Lavy’s cabin in the Arkansas Ozarks and discovered a large quantity of castor beans.

He was arrested. A few days later, he hanged himself in his jail cell.

* Four members of a Patriots Council in Minnesota, a tax-protest group, were arrested in 1995 for plotting to kill a federal marshal. They had produced ricin in a home lab and planned to smear it on the door handles of the marshal’s vehicle.

Yet they were given relatively minor prison terms. Their leader, Douglas Baker, received just three years.

* Also in 1995, white supremacist Larry Wayne Harris of Lancaster, Ohio, received a mail-order shipment of the bacterium that causes bubonic plague. Authorities learned of the order only because officials at a Rockville, Md., lab reported him because they believed Harris was overly anxious about obtaining the material.

Two years later, he pleaded guilty to a single count of wire fraud and was placed on 18 months probation.

Then in 1998, Harris was charged in Las Vegas with possessing anthrax. The arrest came after the FBI had received a tip from a research scientist who said Harris wanted to buy equipment for working with anthrax.

But the charges against Harris were dropped days later after the material turned out to be a harmless anthrax-based veterinary vaccine.

In Leahy’s case, his basement laboratory had gone undetected for years. So too did a storage locker just over the state line in Harvard, Ill., and his mother’s home nearby, places where he stashed additional chemical supplies.

According to court documents and interviews with his lawyers, Leahy had only a high school diploma and never kept a real job. But he immersed himself in his chemistry and math textbooks, in political treatises and works on biochemical weapons. His favorites were “The Anarchist’s Cookbook” and “Deadly Substances,” books that are readily available through the Internet or from extremist publishing houses.

He was a loner, with the appearance of a thin, aging hippie, noticed mainly by others as the odd-looking man in his 40s who meandered around the neighborhood.

Self-Taught ‘Mad Scientist’

Inside his home he often drank until he passed out. He ordered medicine for migraines, but often forgot to take the pills. When he was sober, or when the headaches eased up, he loved a challenging game of chess. But his heart pounded hardest when he was at play in his basement lab.

“Tom mostly was just fascinated by this stuff,” his lawyer, David Mandell, said in an interview. “He had every kind of poison and insecticide and was trying to come up with new poisons. He had boxes and boxes and boxes.

“He was down there being a mad scientist. That’s what he called himself. He made the ricin just from castor beans. There was also found down there a petri dish that had evidence of an attempt to grow anthrax. It looked like he had at least tried to do it and it failed.”

Mandell said Leahy wanted to use the poisons to rid the neighborhood of rodents. But, the lawyer conceded, Leahy also “could have killed a lot of people.”

Federal prosecutor John Vaudreuil said Leahy had enough of the poison--a mere .69 gram of 4% pure ricin--to kill at least 125 people. He noted that Leahy also had pure forms of other lethal toxins that could have been used to kill.

Ricin, once inhaled or touched, can kill within a day or two. After a victim dies, there is no obvious evidence of ricin poisoning.

Because ricin is so toxic, “Mr. Leahy struck us, even before the present climate with anthrax, as someone who is extremely dangerous,” said Vaudreuil, the prosecutor. “He wasn’t just some raving guy on the street corner.”

Police came to Leahy’s door in November 1996 after he wounded his 13-year-old stepson, Dillon, with a gunshot. “He was playing William Tell in the basement and the kid got shot in the face,” Mandell said.

Allen Bates, another defense attorney, described the shooting as accidental.

Still, Leahy pleaded guilty to the shooting charge and was sentenced to seven years and nine months in state prison. He also pleaded guilty in federal court to one count of making the ricin.

(Attempts to interview Leahy, now 47, at the prison in Oshkosh, Wis., were turned down by prison officials, who cited unrelated anthrax scares there and at several Wisconsin post offices.)

At Leahy’s sentencing hearing on the ricin charge, the prosecutor said Leahy had told his wife, Debra, that he was going to develop an “airborne type of bacteria that when it was in an envelope and opened it would go up in the air and kill people.”

According to a letter Leahy’s stepson wrote the judge, Leahy told the boy that he wanted to kill people because they were “corrupt.” The boy said Leahy had plans to poison Lake Michigan with a solution of rotten pork and beans.

The boy’s letter said, “Tom will kill us if he ever gets out. . . . He has never shown any remorse or told me he was sorry” for the shooting.

When Shabaz sent Leahy to prison, he said the punishment “must also serve as a deterrent to others who consider making these toxins. . . . He is dangerous and must be incapacitated.”

But a federal appeals court ruled that the term of 12 years and seven months was excessive, saying that Leahy was addled enough to believe he was developing the toxins as defensive weapons against outside intruders and had never “engaged in an actual act or attempted act of terrorism.”

His new sentence was just over six years, which he will serve after completing his state sentence for the shooting. He will likely be released from prison in about 10 years.