Guilty: Neo-Nazi leader whose group targeted power grid takes a plea deal

Liam Collins, a Marine Corps veteran who helped found a neo-Nazi terror cell accused of planning a terrorist attack on the nation’s power grid, has pleaded guilty to a felony charge of interstate transportation of an unregistered firearm.

While pleading guilty to transporting an illegal firearm, Collins pleaded not guilty to more serious charges of conspiracy to manufacture firearms and ship interstate, and conspiracy to damage an energy facility.

Collins’ plea deal — made Tuesday in federal court in Wilmington, N.C. — was not publicly available on PACER, the federal court website, and Don Connelly, a spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of North Carolina, declined to provide a copy of it to Raw Story.

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Left unclear is whether Collins’ plea deal includes an agreement to cooperate with the government and how much time he might serve in prison.

Collins’ guilty plea leaves only Jordan Duncan, a fellow Marine Corps veteran and avowed neo-Nazi, among five original alleged power grid plot co-defendants as the sole defendant still planning to go to trial.

Duncan is scheduled to go on trial in March, and if convicted, could face up to 25 years in prison.

Paul Kryscuk, an adult film actor with firearms and martial arts training, has already reached a plea agreement with federal prosecutors, along with Justin Wade Hermanson, a Marine who was a member of the same unit as Collins at Camp LeJeune, and Joseph Maurino, a member of the New Jersey Army National Guard.

'Modern-day SS'

Collins’ guilty plea applies to a limited segment of the larger case built by federal prosecutors against the group that he helped found. The charge to which he pleaded addresses only a single shipment of an illegal firearm from Idaho to Pennsylvania that was allegedly handled by Collins and Kryscuk.

In 2020, the federal government accused the group of young, white men of plotting to attack the nation’s power grid as part of a grandiose plan to launch a race war. The plan was allegedly concocted more than three years earlier through a meeting between Collins and his co-defendant Paul Kryscuk on Iron March, a global online forum for Nazis from 2011 to 2017. An adult film actor with firearms and martial arts training, Kryscuk struck up a conversation with Collins on Iron March in February 2017, according to leaked texts reviewed by Raw Story.

Collins outlined his plans for the group, which would come to be known as “BSN,” on Iron March in August 2017. It was the same month he joined the Marine Corps.

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Collins wrote that he was recruiting for “a modern-day SS,” alluding to the paramilitary organization responsible for security surveillance and state terrorism in Nazi Germany. Collins said he had “a tightknit crew of ex-Mil and Security I train with. We do hikes, gym sessions, live firing exercises, and we eventually plan to buy a lot of land. Can’t really specify the name or details because it’s an inner-circle thing, but it will serve its purpose when the time comes.”

While Collins completed his service with the Marine Corps at Camp LeJeune in North Carolina, Kryscuk moved to Boise, Idaho. Kryscuk established a base of operations there, and the group conducted a live-fire training in the nearby desert and created a propaganda video depicting themselves wearing skull masks and giving straight-arm Nazi salutes in July 2020. Collins and Duncan joined Kryscuk in Boise later that year, following Collins’ discharge from the Marine Corps, before the three were arrested in October 2020.

Much of the evidence presented by the government so far has focused on Kryscuk’s activities in Boise during the summer of 2020 while Collins was completing his military service at Camp LeJeune. And while much of the evidence doesn’t directly implicate Collins, the members of his group clearly viewed him as a leader.

“Disc has definitely sacrificed the most and contributed the most for the cause,” wrote Kryscuk — referring to Collins by the shortened version of his codename “Disciple” — in Instagram chats uncovered by the government. “Added three leathernecks and got us tons of gear and training while suffering in the Corps for years.”

Collins affirmed the compliment, responding, “This is the way.”

The government alleges that while stationed at Camp LeJeune from 2017 to 2020, Collins “stole military gear, to include body armor and magazines for assault-type rifles, and had them delivered to other members of the group.”

Unanswered questions about 'classified material'

Collins’ guilty plea — co-defendants Kryscuk, Hermanson and Maurino have already pleaded guilty — leaves Duncan, who worked as a defense contractor after his Marines service, as the sole remaining defendant facing trial in the case.

As part of their plea deals, Kryscuk and Hermanson both agreed to cooperate with the government’s investigation and testify against co-defendants at trial in exchange for reduced sentences.

The indictment alleges that while serving in the Marine Corps and assigned to the 2nd Radio Battalion at Camp LeJeune, Duncan “gathered a library of information, some military-owned and some publicly available, regarding various weaponry, to include firearms, explosives, and even nerve toxins,” which he then shared with Duncan.

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As previously reported by Raw Story, following Duncan’s October 2020 arrest, federal authorities raided Duncan’s apartment in Boise and seized computer hard drives. Three months later, in January 2021, a federal prosecutor informed a judge that investigators had uncovered what “appeared to be classified material.”

Later, the prosecutor reported to the court that investigators were reviewing the hard drives to determine whether Duncan’s alleged possession of classified materials violated any federal laws.

To date, Duncan has not been charged with any crimes related to the alleged classified materials, and in August, the government agreed to not bring up those allegations during Duncan’s trial next year.

Raw Story is suing the U.S. Department of Defense and Department of the Navy for access to documents related to the Naval Criminal Investigative Service’s investigation into Duncan’s alleged possession of classified documents.

Stalking Black Lives Matter

Kryscuk, Hermanson and Maurino all pleaded guilty to charges involving conspiracies to commit racist violence, in contrast with Collins’ the group’s co-founder, who has only admitted to a discrete firearms violation.

Hermanson and Maurino pleaded guilty to conspiracy to manufacture firearms and ship interstate. The indictment describes the purpose of that conspiracy as “furtherance of civil disorder” while describing neo-Nazi BSN members stalking Black Lives Matter rallies in Boise and discussing plans to shoot protesters.

Instagram chats obtained by the government show Kryscuk instructing Duncan to “follow BLM Boise,” adding, “I’m getting a lot of intel from their social media.”

In July 2020, the government alleges that Kryscuk sat in his vehicle near a Black Lives Matter rally at Boise State University and then slowly drove around the rally for about 20 minutes.

White supremacists have long set their sights on the Pacific Northwest as a beachhead for a future whites-only homeland.

In Boise, the state capital and Idaho’s largest city, Black people make up only 1.2 percent of the population, according to the 2020 Census. The small population of people of color likely makes demands for racial justice all the more galling to white supremacists who lay special claim to the region, said Terry Wilson II, the founder of Black Lives Matter Boise.

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“How dare someone speak up like that in our white utopia — this Idaho white nativism, that’s what’s fueling this,” Wilson told Raw Story on Tuesday. “I think what we have been up against — the white nationalists, the Nazis — is that this is where people are coming to live in a more white space.”

In one exchange between Kryscuk and Duncan that was cited by the government, Kryscuk allegedly fantasized about a “death squad,” while rhapsodizing about “assassins creed hoodies and suppressed 22 pistols.”

“People freaking [the f---] out,” Duncan rejoined.

Wilson told Raw Story that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security reached out to Black Lives Matter Boise and urged them to not protest during the summer of 2020, adding that they refused to engage with the federal agency due to fear that they might be setting themselves up for government repression.

The charge of conspiracy to damage an energy facility, to which Kryscuk is the sole defendant to enter a guilty plea, uniquely covers BSN’s more grandiose plans.

The indictment contends that Collins and his co-defendants planned “to attack the power grid for the purpose of creating general chaos and to provide cover and ease of escape in those areas in which they planned to undertake assassinations and other desired operations to further their goal of creating a white ethno-state.”

On Oct. 8, 2020, according to a motion filed by the government last month, Kryscuk’s wife called the FBI National Threat Operations Center to report her husband.

She allegedly told the FBI that her husband “carried around a paper in an envelope in his wallet, that had the names of politicians and their addresses on it.”

According to the government, Kryscuk’s wife reported that he “was becoming more extreme and erratic and was concerned for herself and her daughter.”

When the government reviewed Kryscuk’s Instagram account, including direct messages with his wife, they found evidence that his racial hatred had become intertwined with anti-government animus.

In a message to an unindicted co-conspirator in August 2020, Kryscuk allegedly said, “I’m mentally fried from watching these n---ers and jews have a field day at our expense.

“I hate cops so much man,” he added. “They’re literally letting this happen. Like the government has sent police to enforce anti-white riots across the country. They need to die.”

As part of a plot to instigate a race war, the government alleges that Kryscuk, Collins, Duncan and Maurino “researched, discussed and critically reviewed at length a previous attack on the power grid.”

When the FBI arrested Kryscuk on Oct. 20, 2020, they allegedly found a handwritten list about a dozen locations across the Pacific Northwest that coincided with a transformer, substation or other component of the power grid.

During a detention hearing for Maurino, Naval Criminal Investigative Service Special Agent Christopher Little testified that on one side of the envelope Kryscuk had written a list of addresses for infrastructure targets.

On the other side, as his wife had warned, there was a list of individuals. The list included the governor of Oregon — who was Kate Brown at the time of the alleged terror plot — and the national leadership of Black Lives Matter, Little testified. Journalist James LaPorta has also said his name was on the list.

Little testified that Kryscuk and Hermanson discussed the use of car bombs to carry out assassinations, and that attacks on the power grid “would be creating an outage that diverts the police, causes chaos from the outage itself, causes damage to equipment, takes a long time to replace and causes an outage of significant length; and then using that to create a favorable operating environment to conduct an assassination or murder of a specific person.”

Wilson told Raw Story that as abolitionists against prisons and the criminal justice system as a whole, Black Lives Matter activists are generally skeptical of incarceration as a tool of justice. But the system being what it is, he said he’s glad the BSN members are being prosecuted and that they’re off the street.

“We support the process that they’re engaging in at this point, because something has to be done to send a message,” Wilson said. “That message is that Black and brown people matter, too. If that message gets lost in the system of mass incarceration and blurred lines of punishment and deterrence, that’s okay, because the system is broken. We’ll take our wins.”