NYT : 3 Men Draw 25-Year Terms In Synagogue Bomb Plot

3 Men Draw 25-Year Terms In Synagogue Bomb Plot

By BENJAMIN WEISER | June 29, 2011

Three of the four men convicted in a plot to bomb synagogues in Riverdale in the Bronx were sentenced to 25 years in prison on Wednesday by a judge in Manhattan, who rejected the government’s request for life sentences.

In doing so, the judge, Colleen McMahon of United States District Court, imposed the minimum sentence. She also reiterated concerns that the government’s investigation had raised troubling questions about its tactics and its use of a cooperating witness who posed as a terrorist.

But the judge, who had refused to dismiss charges on grounds of government misconduct, said the men were “prepared to do real violence,” even though the plot had been a government-created sting operation that resulted in no injuries or deaths.

“What you attempted to do was beyond despicable,” she said. There was no doubt in her mind, she added, that whatever religious or political intent they had had was minor compared with their desire for money.

“You were not religious or political martyrs,” she said. “You were thugs for hire, pure and simple.”

The three defendants who were sentenced were James Cromitie, 45; Onta Williams, 35; and David Williams IV, 30, all of Newburgh, N.Y.

The sentencing of a fourth defendant, Laguerre Payen, has been postponed pending the result of a psychiatric review.

All four men were convicted in October 2010 in a case that relied on a government informer who, posing as a Pakistani terrorist, spent months recording discussions with the defendants about placing bombs outside synagogues in the Riverdale neighborhood, and firing Stinger missiles at military transport planes at Stewart International Airport near Newburgh.

The charges related to the missiles carried the 25-year mandatory minimum prison term. Other counts, including conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction within the United States, carried maximum life sentences.

Mr. Cromitie first met the informer, Shahed Hussain, in June 2008 outside a mosque in Newburgh; at some point, Mr. Cromitie made anti-Semitic remarks, and indicated he wanted to do “something” to America, prosecutors have said. Mr. Cromitie, they said, later recruited the other defendants to assist in the plot.

The men were arrested on May 20, 2009, after Mr. Cromitie, with the others acting as lookouts, placed what they thought were bombs — they were fakes — outside two Riverdale synagogues.

In asking that Judge McMahon impose life sentences, a federal prosecutor, David Raskin, cited evidence that the defendants believed ball bearings would be used in the bombs to make them more lethal.

“These defendants held those ball bearings in their hands and marveled at them,” Mr. Raskin said in court, calling their crimes “as serious a set of offenses as is imaginable.”

Judge McMahon, in her May ruling, found that Mr. Cromitie ultimately “became an enthusiastic jihadist” who, while not wanting to blow himself up, “showed no compunction” about placing bombs at the synagogues.

Mr. Cromitie apologized to the judge on Wednesday for “letting myself be caught up in a sting like this one.”

“I’ve never been a terrorist and I never will be a terrorist,” he said.

The two other men also apologized. “I’m sorry I ruined my life,” Onta Williams said.

Lawyers for all three men, who had claimed entrapment, said they would file appeals. Mr. Cromitie’s lawyers had portrayed him as an impoverished, disaffected, unsophisticated man who had a long criminal record and “a big mouth.” They contended he was incapable of carrying out such a crime, and had been motivated by the informer’s promises of financial reward.

Judge McMahon called Mr. Cromitie “utterly inept” before she sentenced him.

“Only the government could have made a ‘terrorist’ out of Mr. Cromitie, whose buffoonery is positively Shakespearean in its scope,” she said. At one point, she also referred to Mr. Cromitie’s “fantasy terror operation.”

The judge refused defense requests that she ask the Federal Bureau of Prisons not to imprison the men in the same kind of extremely restrictive setting that is typically used for terrorists, as in the so-called Supermax prison in Florence, Colo.

Judge McMahon said that the nature of the men’s crimes and the length of their sentences “virtually guarantee” that they would be imprisoned under the harshest possible conditions.

“I imagine that you will be far from here, and quite isolated,” she said. “I doubt that you will receive any training or rehabilitative treatment of any sort. Your crimes were terrible. Your punishment will indeed be severe.”

Moreover, she added, “25 years in the sort of conditions I anticipate you are facing is easily the equivalent of life in other conditions.”