The Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights organization that tracks hate groups nationwide, published a detailed history on Friday of Dennis Mahon, one of two men arrested the day before on suspicion of bombing Scottdale’s diversity office in 2004.
The history, based on the organization’s decades of work tracking extremist groups, shows a long pattern of Mahon’s involvement in racist organizations and tells what caused him some eight years ago to move to Arizona, where he called home for several years afterward.
“In 2001, Mahon announced his intention to move to Kingman, Ariz., where (Timothy) McVeigh lived while he plotted the Oklahoma City bombing,” the center says. Citing news reports from the time, it continues: “Mahon liked Kingman because of the prevalence of anti-government types and wanted to develop links with white supremacist organizations in Phoenix.”
The SPLC says Mahon’s brother, Daniel, who was also arrested on Thursday, was involved in white supremacist movements, including memberships in the Ku Klux Klan and White Aryan Resistance.
What else the center says about Dennis Mahon:
- 1991 – He went to Germany, where he recruited neo-Nazis.
- 1991 – During the Gulf War, he organized a rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma in support of Saddam Hussein. “He later claimed to have received a couple of hundred dollars in an unmarked envelope from the Iraqi government.”
- 1994 – An informant tells federal investigators “that Mahon wanted to bomb power lines in Oklahoma City to trigger a race war and that his group seemed to be amassing weapons.”
- 2004 – At a white supremacist rally in the Phoenix area, Mahon talked about bombing Washington, D.C., saying, “terrorism works.”
The center also provides detailed information about some of the other people the Mahons associated with, including a man named Robert Joos, who was arrested yesterday in Missouri. His arrest by federal agents came about because of the investigation of the Scottsdale bombing, but he has not been named a suspect in it.