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Tuesday, May 22, 2012 7:15 AM UTC

White supremacist to be sentenced in Ariz. bombing

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White supremacist to be sentenced in Ariz. bombingFILE - In this July 16, 1997. file photo, Dennis Mahon, a white supremacist from Tulsa, Okla., talks to reporters before appearing before the Oklahoma County Grand Jury in Oklahoma City. Mahon, who was convicted in a 2004 bombing that injured a black city official, is scheduled to be sentenced Tuesday, May 22, 2012, in federal court. Mahon was found guilty in February of three federal charges and faces between seven and 100 years in prison. (AP Photo/J. Pat Carter, File)(Credit: AP)

PHOENIX (AP) — A white supremacist is set to be sentenced Tuesday in a 2004 bombing that injured a black city official in suburban Phoenix.

A jury in February found Dennis Mahon, 61, guilty of three federal charges stemming from a package bomb that injured Don Logan, who is black and was Scottsdale’s diversity director at the time, and hurt a secretary.

The explosive detonated in Logan’s hands on Feb. 26, 2004, in Scottsdale’s Human Resources Complex.

Mahon faces between seven and 100 years in prison when he is sentenced by U.S. District Judge David Campbell. The jury stopped short of finding him guilty of a hate crime.

Mahon’s twin brother, Daniel, was acquitted of the only charge he faced in the case.

During the six-week trial, prosecutors argued the Mahon brothers bombed Logan on behalf of a group called the White Aryan Resistance, which they said encourages members to act as “lone wolves” and commit violence against non-whites and the government.

Prosecutors showed surveillance tapes of the brothers referring to Logan in racial slurs. They also played a voicemail that Dennis Mahon left at Scottsdale’s diversity office just months before the bombing in which he angrily said: “The white Aryan resistance is growing in Scottsdale. There’s a few white people who are standing up.”

Defense attorneys said Logan’s job made him unpopular and someone working for the city of Scottsdale was likely the perpetrator.

They also heavily criticized the use of 41-year-old Rebecca Williams as an informant, giving her the nickname “trailer park Mata Hari” — a reference to the Dutch exotic dancer who was convicted of working as a spy for Germany during World War I.

Investigators met the former stripper through her brother, an informant himself on the Hells Angels motorcycle gang, and recruited her for the Mahon case, directing her to act like a government separatist and racist. She wore revealing clothes and sent racy photos to the brothers to win their trust.

Williams met the brothers in January 2005 after investigators set her up in a government-provided trailer at a Catoosa, Okla., campground where the brothers were staying at the time. A Confederate flag was placed in her window, and prosecutors say the Mahons introduced themselves within minutes of her arrival.

Dennis Mahon opened up to Williams as their conversations were recorded, telling her how to make bombs after she told him a fictitious story that she wanted to harm a child molester she knew.

In one conversation, she asked Mahon if he ever had a bomb work, to which he replied: “Yeah, diversity officer.”

Logan testified at trial about the unbearable pain he felt after he opened the package, describing the lights going out, the room filling with smoke and debris falling from the ceiling.

Logan, who now works as a diversity administrator in the Phoenix suburb of Glendale, was hospitalized for three days. He needed four surgeries to remove shrapnel from his arm and hand, do a skin graft on his severely damaged forearm and restore some use to one of his fingers that nearly had to be amputated.

Even after Dennis Mahon was convicted, his lawyers say he maintains his innocence.

They also say no evidence shows the bombing was done with the intent to seriously injure or kill Logan. They argued the facts fell far short of a 100-year sentence, noting there were no deaths or life-threatening injuries from the bombing.

Prosecutors, who recommended a sentence of more than 60 years, say Dennis Mahon intended to send a political message in trying to kill Logan.

The Mahons were living in the Phoenix area at the time of the bombing but left days afterward and were arrested in 2009 in Illinois.

Dennis Mahon’s attorneys argued their client “often makes exaggerated self-aggrandizing claims” that aren’t true, that he was an alcoholic who constantly was drinking Everclear, and that his statements to Williams were meant to impress her.

Dennis Mahon was found guilty of conspiracy to damage buildings and property by means of explosives; malicious damage of a building by means of explosives; and distribution of information related to explosives

Daniel Mahon was acquitted of conspiracy to damage buildings and property.

More Jacques Billeaud.

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