The tax fraud cost the government $700,000 in erroneous payments. For his work, Raymond Leo Jarlik Bell received a 10 percent cut of the refunds paid to others and a flat fee for each bogus return he filed. He also received a fraudulent refund on his own taxes of approximately $35,000.

“Your scheme … is fraud at its core,” U.S. District Judge Ronald B. Leighton told Bell. “You are hurting people intentionally, regardless of your adherence to [your beliefs].”

The judge also had another message for Bell at the hearing last Friday: He ordered him to spend 97 months in federal prison to be followed by three years of supervised released and to pay $705,276 in restitution.

Bell assisted at least eight people in seeking fraudulent tax refunds of more than $3 million. The scheme relied on a bogus use of 1099-OID forms to claim refunds to which the taxpayer was not entitled.

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The federal investigation and prosecution of Joseph Jefferey Brice shines a spotlight on the antigovernment, anti-Semitic links shared between Islamic jihadists and white supremacists.

“Tim’s characteristics are nearly the same as myself, physically (and) politically,” Brice, 23, wrote in an Internet message posted on Jan. 14, 2010.

But the former “self-declared, conservative, right-wing Christian,” appeared to undergo a rapid radicalization to Islam after he nearly died on April 18, 2010, when an acetone peroxide ammonium nitrate bomb he built prematurely exploded near his rural home in eastern Washington.

Local sheriff’s deputies wrote that case off as a teenage prank and didn’t seek criminal charges, but federal investigators later became interested and launched an investigation after a backpack bomb attempt in Spokane in 2011.

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Even the steel doors and isolation of a federal prison can’t seem to stop some antigovernment “sovereign citizens” from continuing to file frivolous legal documents and liens against government officials and judges.

But, as a recent case in Seattle shows, a relatively new federal law is being used by prosecutors to punish inmates and other conspirators who believe they don’t answer to authority and continue to flood the legal system with spurious documents.

David Carroll Stephenson, 57, formerly of Tacoma, Wash., was sentenced last week in Seattle after being convicted by a jury of filing false liens against the director of the federal Bureau of Prisons and the warden at the Federal Correctional Institution in Phoenix.

“He is, in my mind, a very dangerous man,’’ U.S. District Judge Ronald B. Leighton said of Stephenson,  exceeding the recommended guideline range and sentencing the long-time antigovernment activist to 10 more years in prison.

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John Stortstrom, a mechanical engineer who works for the Army at its Edgewood Chemical Biological Center (ECBC), was among 150 white nationalists, many of them young, who attended the American Renaissance conference held in early April in Tennessee. American Renaissance is a journal dedicated to race and intelligence, with a heavy focus on the “psychopathology” of black people. Its editor has written that black people are incapable of sustaining any kind of civilization.

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James L. Gilkerson had a library of antigovernment, homemade munitions and firearms books in his vehicle — along with an AK-47 assault rifle, five loaded 40-round magazines for the weapon, knives, five pounds of gunpowder and a black mask and gloves, authorities say. He was unemployed, spent his time caring for his ill mother, and apparently had no history of mental illness.

One of his books, Resistance to Tyranny, espouses a lone-wolf  “underground movement of secret freedom fighters, each acting individually and independently to ignore, evade, resist and thwart the increasingly heavy hand of government power.”

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Christopher Lacy’s ideological ties to the sovereign citizen movement, whose adherents generally believe they are immune to federal tax and many criminal laws, were documented with more than 100 interviews and search warrants. But the seven-month investigation failed to determine why he shot CHP Trooper Kenyon Youngstrom on Sept. 4.

The trooper was fatally shot at close range moments after stopping Lacy’s vehicle, which had an “obstructed license plate” as it traveled on busy Interstate 680 near Alamo, Calif., the sheriff’s office said in a just-released summary statement. That was only the latest murder of a law enforcement official during a traffic stop by a sovereign citizen, most of whom believe the government has no right to regulate their driving. On May 20, 2010, two West Memphis, Ark., police officers were slain by a father-son team of sovereigns during a routine traffic stop.

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For decades, iconoclastic Seattle artist Charles Krafft has made references to Nazis in his highly acclaimed, sometimes shocking pieces of art that most critics and art lovers brand as simple, ironic satire pushing the boundaries.

He crafted a ceramic Hitler-bust teapot now in a San Francisco art museum, and put swastikas on other pieces of art, even on a ceramic wedding cake. He made a ceramic Uzi assault rifle, hand grenades and an “assassin’s kit” – a gun and dagger.

Now, the 65-year-old hippie-turned-artist is at the center of a growing controversy following a published report detailing evidence — including his own words — that suggests he is a white nationalist who believes the Holocaust is a myth.

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Charles Robert “Junior” Barefoot Jr., 50, of Benson, N.C., was sentenced Wednesday in Raleigh by U.S. District Judge Terrence Boyle. Barefoot, who headed a klavern of the Church of the National Knights of the KKK, was convicted in September on six counts of weapons and explosives violations.

The federal charges were related to a plan – its roots going back to 2001 – to kill Johnston County Sheriff Steve Bizzell. The federal charges were filed after a state judge ruled in 2007 that Barefoot was mentally incompetent to stand trial for his involvement in the 2001 murder of a fellow Klan member.

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Just down the road from the scene of the December school massacre in Newtown, Conn., police in Stamford have discovered a home filled with bomb-making materials, assorted firearms and white supremacist and anti-police propaganda.

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Potshots, indeed, are flying at III Arms Co. and its sister land development company, Citadel Land Development, the firms behind a proposed 2,000- to 3,000-acre III Citadel complex for as many as 7,000 “Patriot” families near St. Maries, in Idaho’s sparsely populated Benewah County.

The criticism is sparked by the fact that one of the key players linked to the unlikely-sounding venture is three-time convicted felon Christian Allen Kerodin, a Maryland contractor who has apparently used various aliases and whose birth name was Christian Hyman. His wife or partner, Holly Ann Kerodin, has been involved in questionable charity, counseling, publishing and other ventures that have failed, various critics say.

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The 28-year-old defendant, who became a modern-day poster boy of sorts for the militia movement, was convicted by an Alaska jury last June of nine federal charges – seven of them illegal firearms counts — related to a conspiracy to kill a judge and law enforcement officers. He was acquitted of charges of carrying a handgun while conspiring to purchase destructive devices and possession of a handgun while discussing the murder conspiracy.

“Well, I, uh, I put myself here, with my words,” Cox told the court yesterday before he was sentenced by U.S. District Judge Robert Bryan, the Anchorage Daily News reported in today’s editions.

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Two of his former friends say that Shrout – sometimes wearing his Junior ROTC U.S. Army-issued uniform – repeatedly performed stiff-arm sieg-heil salutes and shouted “white power” at Russell County High School in Seale, Ala., where he apparently intended to carry out the attacks. The community is some 20 miles from the U.S. Army’s sprawling Fort Benning, Ga., compound, where the suspect’s father is stationed.

Some of the suspect’s hateful antics apparently were captured on the school’s security cameras, and authorities may now be reviewing that video, if it still exists.

David Lee White, an 18-year-old senior at the high school, told Hatewatch last night that he repeatedly saw Shrout and a group of other white students – ranging in numbers from seven to 12, most of them boys – conduct impromptu Nazi-style salutes in the school’s hallways, at breakfast in the cafeteria and in a school bus parking lot. Many times, he said, this occurred in full view of teachers and other staff.

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Joseph Paul Dominick, 21, of Brandon, Miss., faces a maximum of five years in prison after pleading guilty yesterday to conspiracy to commit federal hate crimes. He pleaded guilty to a criminal information, waiving grand jury indictment and striking a plea deal with federal prosecutors, just a month after The Clarion-Ledger in Jackson published an editorial blasting the Justice Department for a  “thick cloud of secrecy” surrounding the protracted investigation.

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Details made public at the plea hearing also revealed that the arsonist, Randolph Linn, was carrying a pistol when he entered the Islamic Center of Greater Toledo on September 30, only minutes after several worshippers had left, and that he had more guns in his car.

Linn, a 52-year-old truck driver from St. Joe, Ind., expressed no remorse when he admitted trying to burn down the third largest mosque in the United States. Under the terms of a plea agreement, prosecutors and Linn’s defense attorney will recommend a prison term of 20 years when he is sentenced early next year.

Accounts of the federal court hearing were provided to Hatewatch by Mahjabeen Islam, president of the mosque, who was present along with 10 other members of the mosque.

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Christopher Ising, 31, a reported member of the Atlantic City Skins from Waretown, N.J., was arrested today by FBI agents on an indictment charging him with conspiracy and commission of a hate crime assault. Those laws are contained in the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, passed by Congress in 2009.

Michal Gunar, 27, of East Windsor, N.J., also faces the same federal charges. He is an alleged member of another New Jersey-based white supremacist group known as the Aryan Terror Brigade, the FBI said in announcing the arrests.

The arrests grew out of a New Year’s Eve party last year in East Brunswick, N.J., where Ising hosted a “meet and greet” gathering for white supremacists, FBI officials said.

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Before killing himself, the 34-year-old man, who was exposed to Christian Identity white supremacy beliefs and a survivalist lifestyle as a teenager, confessed to killing an Anchorage barista, a Vermont couple and five others he coyly didn’t identify.

The 18-year-old barista was abducted at gunpoint last February, raped and strangled by Keyes, who later dismembered her body and disposed of it in a frozen Alaska lake. Those remains were recovered after Keyes’ arrest in Texas in March.

Now, with some urgency, the FBI is piecing together a timeline of Keyes’ life while various law enforcement investigators throughout the United States are dusting off old homicide cases to see if Keyes, who traveled extensively over the past decade, may be responsible. Those cold cases which have foreign DNA evidence could be the key to identifying Keyes’ as the killer.

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Anthony M. Hayne, 35, of Cleveland, the first to plead guilty and the last of the four to be sentenced, received a six-year term Friday after apologizing in U.S. District Court in Cleveland, Ohio, public radio station WKSU reported. A fifth defendant, Joshua S. Stafford, 23, is undergoing a psychiatric examination.

Earlier, U.S. District Court Judge David Dowd sentenced 26-year-old Douglas L. Wright to 11½ years; 20-year-old Brandon L. Baxter to 10 years, and 20-year-old Connor C. Stevens to eight years.

The men had ties to the Occupy Movement but decided it wasn’t proactive enough,  so they secretly formed an anarchist group — calling itself the Revolutionary People’s Party — and took steps to blow up a highway bridge near Cleveland after discussing bombing other targets, including a Ku Klux Klan gathering spot and a Federal Reserve Bank, court documents allege.

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Israel Keyes, 34, now linked to at least eight murders throughout the United States in the past 11 years, was a childhood friend and neighbor in Stevens County, Wash., of terrorists Chevie and Cheyne Kehoe — two racist brothers now serving lengthy prison sentences for murder and attempted murder.

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Rubin, an alleged member of a group that called itself “The Family,” is to be taken to Oregon to face trial on federal arson, destructive device and conspiracy charges, federal authorities said in announcing her arrest. She was one of three remaining fugitives in the group, another 10 members of which were sentenced to terms ranging from three to 13 years in 2007. Collectively, the group is accused of 20 acts of arson carried out between 1996 and 2001 in five Western states on behalf of the Earth Liberation Front (ELF) and the Animal Liberation Front (ALF).

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All three victims were shot with the same .22 caliber handgun, all three were immigrants from the Middle East, all three worked alone without security cameras and all three businesses have the number 8 in their address, authorities say.

The latest victim, Rahmatollah Vahidipour, 78, a Jewish immigrant from Iran, was fatally shot Friday in his business, She She Boutique on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn. That homicide followed the Aug. 6 killing of Isaac Kadare, 59, a Jewish immigrant from Egypt, who was fatally shot in his Bensonhurst store, Amazing 99 Cent Deal.

The spree began with the July 6 killing of Mohammed Gebeli, 65, an Egyptian immigrant and a Muslim, found murdered in his business, Valentino Fashion Inc., in Bay Ridge. Detectives are “exploring a few similarities among the three murders,” The New York Times reported in Sunday’s editions.

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