Federal prison for neo-Nazis who plotted electric grid attack and race war

A neo-Nazi former porn actor who fantasized about launching a white supremacist “ground war” against the U.S. government, destroying electrical substations and assassinating political enemies was sentenced to six years in prison on Thursday.

Paul Kryscuk, 38, had pleaded guilty to conspiracy to damage an energy facility.

Justin Hermanson, a 25-year-old Marine Corps veteran and Kryscuk’s co-defendant who pleaded guilty to conspiracy to manufacture firearms and ship interstate, received a sentence of one year and nine months in prison.

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The two men appeared before Chief Judge Richard E. Myers II for sentencing in a federal courtroom in Wilmington, N.C., some 70 miles from Camp Lejeune, the Marine Corps base where Hermanson and co-defendant Liam Collins were stationed at one time.

Collins, like Hermanson and Kryscuk, was scheduled to be sentenced on Thursday, but the length of his sentence was not immediately known. The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of North Carolina, which prosecuted the cases, could not be reached for comment.

Kryscuk and Hermanson will serve significantly less prison time than the maximum amount allowable under sentencing guidelines. Kryscuk could have received up to 20 years, while Hermanson faced up to five years.

The maximum sentence for Collins, who founded the neo-Nazi terror cell that came to be known as “BSN,” fell in the middle. He faced up to 10 years in prison after pleading guilty to aiding and abetting the interstate transportation of unregistered firearms.

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.

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.

Navy Criminal Investigative Service Special Agent John Christopher 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 similarly found its way from Duncan’s hard drive to Maurino’s phone.

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 protesters in New Jersey as he drove by in his car.

When the FBI raided Kryscuk’s home in Boise, where he, Collins and Duncan had relocated, in October 2020, agents recovered a handwritten list of intersections that correlated with electrical substations in Oregon, Washington state and California, according to the government. A separate list was written on the flipside of the paper 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 L Brands founder Les Wexner.