Posted on 04/18/2008 11:34:46 PM PDT by Deo volente
LAS VEGAS - A loner who long had struggled financially, Roger Bergendorff told investigators that he found making ricin an "exotic idea."
So he researched the deadly toxin online. He bought "The Anarchists Cookbook." He ordered castor bean seeds -- ricin comes from the processed beans' waste -- apparently posing as a fictitious customer: "Roger's Patio and Garden."
He donned a mask and gloves, mashed the beans with acetone, dried out the oil and stored the light-colored powder in a polypropylene container.
According to a six-page federal complaint released Wednesday, Bergendorff fell ill while keeping a "crude" form of the poison at the Extended Stay America hotel in Las Vegas, where he lived with his cats and German shepherd.
(Excerpt) Read more at baltimoresun.com ...
He claims he was just having fun.
SURE he was!
He IS an idiot, though, who put others in harm’s way. Brilliant of them to publish the recipe.
This guy was one sick mother. An accident just waiting to happen. This could have turned out a lot worse than just him getting poisoned, a lot worse.
His cousin Mr. Tholen now believes this guy was making ricin in Tholen’s basement....Mr. Tholen is one lucky fella.
This guy needs to be put away for a really, really long time.
from another article:
Nearly two weeks after he was admitted to the hospital, Extended Stay employees entered Bergendorff’s room and discovered two .25-caliber semi-automatic pistols, a .22-caliber Ruger rifle and a .22-caliber Browning pistol. Each had a homemade silencer attached.
Las Vegas police summoned to the motel room found an “Anarchist’s Cookbook” with recipes for deadly poisons. A page describing how to make ricin had been marked.
A total of 4 grams of the deadly substance later were discovered in a vial and a beaker stored in a bag in Bergendorff’s room.
http://www.lvrj.com/news/17842429.html
Roger Bergendorff in court telling the judge he was just having some “fun” cooking up ricin.
The judge wasn’t impressed.
I’m still trying to find a photo of the guy.
For some reason...I’m not buying into this story that the guy says at all. Why show up in Vegas? Why mess with ricin anyway? If you know the consequences...what is the enticement to make the stuff? This guy had alot on his plate and probably was going to market or sell the stuff to someone.
WHY would a normal human being find it necessary to “experiment” with a substance that could kill LOTS of people very quickly and very stealthily? I think the short answer is: A NORMAL person wouldn’t.
I don’t care what this idiots motives may have been. They should lock him up and lose the key. Anyone with a mindset that irresponsible should not be mingling with the general public!
http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/europe/01/07/terror.poison.bulgarian/
And Bergendorff had a drawing of some kind of injection device disguised as a pen...makes you wonder what he was planning.
Is it my imagination, or did that article just tell me how to make ricin?
Amazing that they can go into such detail with that, but they still can’t explain how Hillary Clinton made $100,000 in the cattle futures market, or how Saddam Hussein was corrupting the United Nations with the Oil For Food program.
EXCERPT:
The man arrested Wednesday for possession of ricin, a poison considered to be a weapon of mass destruction, had enough of the illegal toxin tucked inside his Las Vegas motel room to kill about 522 people, federal authorities said.
http://www.lvrj.com/news/17842429.html
it takes a little more than vague hints to make ricin (although if you eat the beans, it makes you sick)...the bad news is that I’ve seen the cookbook on p2p and torrant sites.
Perhaps a curious question...but just how many folks die in Vegas in a normal week...and does that compare to cities of the same size?
It’d be a mighty simple act for a guy to bring his wife out to Vegas...to sit at the slots....and then have a guy come by and jab her. The gal dies at the machine and the medical folks proclaim this a simple heart attack. The guy goes home and collects on her insurance policy...buries the wife...and buys a new pontoon boat.
This is a more mundane question, but how did he afford the $1200/month for the Extended Stay hotel room if he was unemployed and broke? Not to mention his other living expenses.
And he was on the move for several years. Utah, then Southern California, then Las Vegas. Who was supporting him?
From the article it seems he made Ricin before. It seems he never used it. What may have started out an inquisitive man’s hobby, could very easily have turned at some point to something much more sinister. Once you have something, there’s a tendency to want to use it.
The silencers on the guns is worrysome. It seems to me that he may have been thinking blackmail of a casino.
On the other hand, he may have been an excentric.
The problem is, the authorites will never know, and this guy isn’t going to see the light of day for a while IMO.
I don’t know where to go to check those kind of stats.
But your hypothetical sounds like a great plot for a CSI episode.
The “injection device disguised as a pen” worries me, too.
Although it looks like he was only at the drawing board stage on that one.
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