Neo-Nazis accused of plotting power grid attack face sentencing

Three neo-Nazis alleged to have planned an attack on the energy grid as part of a plot to launch a race war are set to go before a federal judge on Thursday for sentencing.

Liam Montgomery Collins, a one-time Marine who allegedly led the neo-Nazi terror cell known as “BSN”; Paul Kryscuk, a former porn actor; and Justin Hermanson, who also served in the Marine Corps, are expected to appear before Judge Richard E. Myers in federal court in Wilmington, N.C.

Kryscuk pleaded guilty to conspiracy to damage an energy facility, while Collins and Hermanson respectively pleaded guilty to aiding and abetting the interstate transportation of unregistered firearms, and conspiracy to manufacture firearms and ship interstate.

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Of the three, Kryscuk faces the highest maximum sentence — 20 years in prison. Collins and Hermanson respectively face up to 10 and five years.

Two other co-defendants — Jordan Duncan, 29, and Joseph Maurino, 25 — have also pleaded guilty to federal firearms charges, and will be sentenced at a later date.

Collins and Hermanson, both 25, were stationed at Camp Lejeune, roughly 70 miles up the Atlantic coast from Wilmington, N.C., during the period when they were active in the neo-Nazi group. Kryscuk, 38, relocated from New York to Boise, Idaho to establish a base of operations for the group.

‘This will be a ground war’

While none of the defendants will go to trial, the government has already laid out much of its case in chilling detail.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Barbara Kocher described a manifesto posted by Kryscuk in 2017 on the now-defunct Nazi online forum Iron March during a detention hearing for one of the defendants.

“‘The first order of business,’ according to Kryscuk, was to knock down the system, mounting it and smashing its face, until it has been beaten to death,” Kocher told the court. “‘Second order of business is seizing the territory and the Balkanization of North America,’ essentially laying a framework for a guerilla organization and takeover of local government and industry. ‘As we build,’ Kryscuk went on to say, ‘our forces and our numbers, we will move into the urban areas and clear them out. This will be a ground war, very reminiscent of Iraq, as we will essentially be facing an insurgent force made up of criminals and gang members.’”

In July 2020, Kryscuk, Duncan, Maurino and two other individuals who have not been charged participated in a live-fire training exercise in the desert outside of Boise, according to the government. The group used live footage from the training to make a propaganda video that showed them wearing skull masks and giving Hitler salutes.

BSN’s emergence as a neo-Nazi terror cell coincided with the wave of racial justice protests sweeping the country in response to the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Evidence presented in open court by Navy Criminal Investigative Service Special Agent John Christopher Little shows that Kryscuk stalked Black Lives Matter protesters in Boise, while Maurino similarly filmed racial justice protesters in New Jersey as he drove by in his car.

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In October 2020, when the FBI raided Kryscuk’s home in Boise, where he, Collins and Duncan had relocated, agents recovered a handwritten list of street intersections that correlated with electrical substations in Oregon, Washington state and California, according to the government.

On the flipside, the paper contained a separate list of names that included politicians such as California state Sen. Scott Wiener and then-Oregon Gov. Kate Brown; Black Lives Matter co-founder Alicia Garza; journalist James LaPorta; and Bath & Body Works co-founder Les Wexner.

Collins enlisted a third man, who has not been charged, to deliver body armor stolen from Camp Lejeune to Maurino, Little testified during Maurino’s detention hearing. Maurino was a member of the New Jersey National Guard at the time.

Collins and his co-defendants “discussed acquiring capabilities like this, like body armor and other military equipment,” Collins testified, “for what they saw as an inevitable confrontation with federal law enforcement, with federal tactical units.”

Military roots

Collins met Hermanson while the two were stationed at Camp Lejeune in 2018, Assistant U.S. Attorney Barbara Kocher previously told a federal magistrate judge.

She described Hermanson as a “go-between” for Collins and Kryscuk in providing them with handguns without serial numbers and homemade muzzle noise suppressors.

Between July 2020 and October 2020, according to an indictment against the five defendants, Collins asked Hermanson to buy 50 pounds of tannerite, an explosive component that can be used to make thermite, which is an incendiary mixture.

Duncan, a Marine Corps veteran and former federal contractor, has been the focus of extensive coverage by Raw Story following the disclosure that the FBI found classified materials on his hard drive during the FBI raid in October 2020. The government has not charged Duncan with any violations related to the classified materials, and Judge Myers has ordered the parties to maintain tight control of the materials.

Some hints of the types of sensitive material Duncan might have obtained from the government and passed along to his fellow would-be insurgents have emerged during court hearings, however.

Little testified in Maurino’s detention hearing that Duncan’s external hard drive contained a “vast amount of explosives schematics” that also turned up on Kryscuk’s electronic devices. Similarly, the agent testified that a manual on how to build homemade silencers that found its way from Duncan’s hard drive to Maurino’s phone.

While the government has aired ample details about the alleged terror plot through detention hearings for the defendants over the past three years, it’s less clear what prosecutors will argue when the scheduled sentencings get underway on Thursday.

Based on a standing order from the court, the government filed sentencing memoranda for the three defendants under seal, which means they are not available for public review. And on Monday, Judge Myers granted motions by Hermanson’s lawyer to file his defendant sentencing memorandum and a motion to reduce his sentence under seal.

A spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of North Carolina said sentencing memoranda are always filed under seal, based on a local standing order, and the office does not comment in advance of sentencing.