Ronald Beasley Chaney III didn’t have a good feeling about a planned meeting to discuss weapons purchases with an illegal arms dealer.
“It just sounds like, it sounds like ATF to me. It sounds like a fucking Fed operation…infiltrate the fucking, you know, our fucking people…” Chaney was recorded saying on Oct. 25, according to a criminal complaint.
He couldn’t know it at the time, but Chaney was right.
Chaney and Robert Curtis Doyle, both convicted felons, were charged Monday in U.S. District Court in Richmond with conspiring to possess a firearm. Criminal complaints alleged the men wanted to start a “race war” and had plotted to bomb black churches and synagogues. Another associate, Charles Daniel Halberman, was charged with conspiracy to commit robbery.
The complaints state federal authorities were tipped off that Doyle was holding a meeting with associates on Sept. 27 to discuss “shooting or bombing the occupants of black churches and Jewish synagogues, conducting acts of violence against persons of the Jewish faith, and doing harm to a gun store owner in the state of Oklahoma.”
Doyle and Chaney then met with an undercover FBI agent on Oct. 25 to discuss weapons purchases, according to the complaint. Despite Chaney’s prior reservations, the two men arranged to purchase firearms and explosives Sunday from undercover agents posing as illegal arms dealers. Chaney was arrested at the meeting and Doyle was arrested later that day.
Doyle also had been recorded sometime in October outlining plans to rob a local jeweler and then “use the proceeds from the illegal acts to purchase land, stockpile weapons, and train for the coming race war,” according to a complaint. Doyle said in that recorded meeting that Chaney and Halberman were involved in the plan to rob the jeweler.
Doyle and Cheney are described in criminal complaints as ascribing to a “white supremacy extremist version of the Asatru faith.” Asatru is a pagan religion that has its roots in Viking mythology.
All three men have prior felony convictions, according to the complaints. Lawyers for the men did not respond to local news outlets’ requests for comment.
As for Doyle’s plan to start a “race war,” an anonymous law enforcement official told CNN that the men “were a long way from actually pulling off an attack.”
Read the complaints below:
