Hunting the President: Threats, Plots and Assassination Attempts - From FDR to Obama by Mel Ayton

Author:Mel Ayton [Ayton, Mel]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Published: 2016-01-11T16:00:00+00:00

When Mahonski was arraigned before a judge, he insisted that he had been drugged by President Reagan, the CIA, the FBI, and the Air Force. He also said government agents “had put a bug” in his head that transmitted “everything I think across the country. I don’t need another nut ward. The president has had me in three already. The President of the United States and certain elements of the society fill me with drugs and ruin my life, like the communists would. I have had just about enough.” He added that he had been “down to the White House to ask the president to order the FBI to take that bug out of my ear.”

In September 1984, a federal jury found Mahonski guilty of assault on a federal officer and carrying a sawed-off shotgun outside the White House. He was committed to St. Elizabeth’s Hospital until ruled competent. He was diagnosed with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder and spent nine months in the hospital before he was released.⁴²

Two years later, the Secret Service investigated two mentally unbalanced men. James Neavill was a thirty-year-old man who had been hospitalized for mental problems thirty-eight times over the preceding ten years. The Social Security Administration had determined he was unfit for work due to his mental impairments. In 1982, he had been investigated for making threats to kill Reagan but no action had been taken.

On April 28, 1987, eight days after discharging himself from the Missouri State Hospital, an intoxicated Neavill walked into the Festus, Missouri, police station and told police officers he had been paid $35,000 to assassinate the president with an Uzi submachine gun. The purported assassination plan was to take place sometime in May. The local police reported Neavill to the Secret Service. When he was interviewed at the Festus jail, he repeated his threats. When he was asked what he would do if he were released from custody, he replied, “put a bullet in the President’s head.”

Neavill was indicted by a grand jury on the charge of threatening the president. He was found competent to stand trial. Neavill pleaded insanity, but the jury returned a guilty verdict and Neavill was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment. In lieu of incarceration in a federal prison, he was committed to a psychiatric facility.⁴³

Reagan was the recipient of numerous lethal devices during his eight years in office. On August 31, 1981, Earl S. Bruton, a fifty-four-year-old man from Detroit, sent Reagan a threatening letter wrapped around six sticks of dynamite. He was angry at being denied loans through the federal Small Business Administration. Bruton had sent similar devices to local Detroit newspapers. He was arrested and sentenced to twelve years in prison.⁴⁴

In 1986, Reagan visited Spokane, Washington, to campaign for Republican senator Slade Gorton. Before the visit Secret Service agents had been informed that notes found in an elevator of a local motel gave details about security personnel around the Spokane Coliseum where Reagan was due to give a speech. The notes included

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