TULSA--Two former Tulsans, one of whom became caught up in the conspiracy theories swirling around the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, have been indicted in a 2004 Arizona bombing. Twin brothers Dennis Mahon and Daniel Mahon were arrested last week in Davis Junction, Ill., on charges alleging that they built and sent a mail bomb that injured the Scottsdale, Ariz., diversity director and a co-worker on Feb. 26, 2004.
The indictment, handed down by an Arizona grand jury, also alleges that the bombing was part of a wider conspiracy “to promote racial discord by destroying buildings, facilities and real property of both the government and businesses whose activities defendants believed conflicted with their goals.”
It does not identify any other targets or say whether any other buildings were attacked.
The pair lived in the Tulsa area for more than a decade, from the late 1980s until about 2001, with Dennis Mahon identifying himself first as a Grand Dragon of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and later as state coordinator of the White Aryan Resistance.
For a while, he operated a “Dial-A-Racist” hot line.
Dennis Mahon twice ran for mayor in Tulsa.
He finished 12th among 54 candidates in a 1992 special election won by Susan Savage and finished last in a four-way 1998 Republican primary.
The 1998 election prompted just about all of the state’s leading Republicans, including Gov. Frank Keating and U.S. Sens. Jim Inhofe and Don Nickles, to speak out against that candidate.
Dennis Mahon traveled in the early 1990’s to Germany, where he praised Adolf Hitler, and he was deported by Canada when he tried to enter that country in 1993.
After the Oklahoma City bombing, Tulsan Carol Howe, a neo Nazi-turned-informant, said Dennis Mahon had talked to her about bombing federal buildings.
Federal authorities discounted her testimony, but Dennis Mahon became a key figure in the many bombing conspiracy theories and was called to testify before an Oklahoma City grand jury investigating those theories.
Dennis Mahon steadfastly maintained his innocence to reporters and others, but invoked his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself before the grand jury.
He, eventually, moved to Arizona and seems to have lived in California briefly before settling two years ago in Davis Junction, a small town south of Rockford, Ill.
Although less vocal than his brother, Daniel Mahon was fired by American Airlines for distributing white- supremacist literature at an employee diversity fair.
He and his brother, apparently, were living together at the time of their arrests.
According to the indictment, the Mahons “conspired to teach the tactics of terrorism,” including bomb-making.
To that end, the indictment states, the brothers traveled to the Tulsa area in February 2005 “for the purpose of purchasing periodicals and components related to bomb-making, including books, gun powder, an electrical match, and a fuse” at a local gun show.
The indictment alleges that Dennis Mahon sent through the U.S. mail books with titles such as “Creative Revenge at its Best” and “A Manual of Urban Guerilla Warfare.”
The two are expected to be transported to Arizona later this week.
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