A Vienna man who came under FBI scrutiny for allegedly suggesting a militia make explosives could serve prison time for having a deadly toxin.
Russell Richardson Vane IV, 42, pleaded guilty in federal court yesterday (Wednesday) to possessing ricin — a poison derived from castor beans that can be fatal to people exposed to it — without a registration, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia announced.
Vane pleaded guilty to the least severe charge brought by prosecutors, who had contended that Vane was producing and stockpiling ricin with the intent of using it as a weapon, according to court documents.
The FBI began investigating Vane on April 1 after documentarian Ford Fischer, editor-in-chief of the YouTube channel News2Share, reported that an anti-gun-control, survivalist group, the Virginia Kekoas, had kicked Vane out for comments apparently encouraging them to make homemade explosives.
After joining the Kekoas in April 2022, Vane offered to provide information on how to make explosives, telling members that he works in the intelligence community, an FBI agent said in an affidavit.
He also allegedly shared unclassified government documents that detailed how to obtain chemicals that can be used to manufacture explosives and suggested the group should “explore the use of explosives in order to set traps ‘when the tanks come.'”
“Throughout his interactions with the Kekoas members, VANE made comments indicative of his interest in and knowledge of chemistry and the use of chemistry to manufacture dangerous substances,” the April 11 affidavit said.
Two Kekoas members identified as “ICE” and “Sasquatch” told News2Share that Vane was ousted because they feared he could be either a federal agent attempting to “entrap” members or a potentially violent terrorist, stating that Vane’s proposals went against their group’s values.
ICE, Sasquatch and a third Kekoas member met with FBI officers on April 3 and gave them the government documents they said were shared by Vane. Investigators determined that Vane had accessed them using his work computer in December 2022.
In an unusual twist, an obituary for Vane appeared online the same day that the Kekoas members met with the FBI, claiming that he had died on March 11, the day after he was formally removed from the militia, Fischer reported. The obituary later disappeared, but a man who answered his phone told a Washington Post reporter in early April that Vane had died by suicide.
However, he was still alive when FBI agents searched his home in Vienna on April 10 and found castor beans, laboratory equipment, handwritten recipes and other materials suggesting that he had made ricin, per the affidavit. He was arrested that day.
“At some time in December 2022 or January 2023, Vane obtained castor beans and successfully separated ricin toxin from them in his residence in Vienna,” the U.S. Attorney’s Office said in a press release. “Vane disposed of the byproducts of the production and stored a sample of the ricin in a test tube for further testing but was unable to readily obtain testing equipment. He kept the test tube in a storage box in his home.”
Vane was indicted in federal court on May 8 on four criminal charges: production of ricin for use as a weapon, possession of ricin for a non-peaceful purpose, possession of a toxin by an unregistered person and distribution of information related to making or using explosives with the “intent that the information be used for, and in furtherance of, an activity that constitutes a Federal crime of violence.”
Prosecutors will move to officially dismiss three of the four charges at Vane’s sentencing hearing under a plea agreement entered yesterday.
In an Aug. 19 motion seeking Vane’s release prior to his sentencing, which is set for Nov. 7, his attorney argued that he never planned to harm anyone, noting that the FBI found “a 12-gram test tube container which tested positive for ricin” but no explosive devices when searching Vane’s house.
“Frankly, the reason Mr. Vane made this substance was simply due to a morbid curiosity about whether all of the online recipes he found would work,” Carmichael Ellis & Brock attorney Yancey Ellis wrote. “It was a twisted science experiment and a very bad idea. The substance had likely been there for over a year, undisturbed and forgotten about. But Mr. Vane certainly had no desire to make this substance into any type of weapon and had no ‘non-peaceful purpose’ for possessing it.”
According to the plea agreement, Vane faces a potential sentence of up to five years in prison, a $250,000 fine and up to three years of supervised release.
This isn’t the first time ricin and Vienna have come up in the same context. Boris Korczak, a CIA agent who infiltrated the KGB but later got exposed, claimed that he was shot with a ricin-laced pellet at the local Giant while shopping for groceries in 1981.
