This article was reported in partnership with Type Investigations with support from the nonpartisan nonprofit Fund for Constitutional Government.
Brandon Russell’s letters were detailed: first a how-to diagram for building a functional explosive device. Then instructions for dropping propaganda leaflets by air. In another, an ominous warning: “As soon as I get out, I will go right back to fight for my White Race and my America!”
He was already incarcerated when he wrote those letters from the Pinellas County Jail in Clearwater, Florida, hoping they would land in the hands of a fellow neo-Nazi. His 2018 conviction for possession of explosive materials had done nothing to dissuade his neo-accelerationist dreams: He wanted the social order to collapse, giving way to ethnic cleansing and the eventual rise of a National Socialist order. But the letters were intercepted and turned over to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Prosecutors cited Russell’s jailhouse correspondence as the basis for a heavier sentence than the five years he ultimately received.
“Russell is not someone whose arrest and incarceration has caused him to reflect on his conduct or feel remorse. His conduct in this case posed a grave danger to human life, and he has shown that he will continue to be dangerous once released from incarceration,” the feds wrote in a January 2018 motion. And over the course of Russell’s five-year imprisonment, he continued to radicalize.
The Atomwaffen Division (from the German word for atomic weapons), which Russell founded with his friend Devon Arthurs in 2015, was still embryonic in mid-2017, with a handful of cells around the United States. At the time, the neofascist youth revival known colloquially as the alt-right was ascendant, spewing hatred freely online and clashing with anti-fascist counterprotesters at rallies across the country. The arrest and imprisonment of the Atomwaffen Division’s founders did not kneecap the group’s rise. To the contrary, it helped fuel its growth.
Russell had rented an apartment in Tampa, where he lived with three other AWD members: Arthurs, Andrew Oneschuk, and Jeremy Himmelman—the latter two young fascists who’d moved south from Massachusetts into an apartment filled with firearms, fascist flags, and memorabilia, such as a framed photograph of Timothy McVeigh. In their spare time the young men would hike, go on Airsoft shooting missions, and push recruitment. Russell had the group’s insignia inked on his right shoulder.
On May 19, 2017, Arthurs murdered Himmelman and Oneschuk with an assault rifle in a fit of rage. When police searched the apartment, they discovered the arsenal, reams of propaganda, and a cooler full of highly unstable homemade explosives belonging to Russell. Arthurs was arrested immediately; Russell was arrested two days later. Local law enforcement had allowed Russell to leave the scene of Arthurs’s massacre despite the presence of homemade explosives. (In 2023, Arthurs pleaded guilty to two counts of murder and three counts of kidnapping and was sentenced to 45 years in state prison.)
When Russell was first charged with explosives offenses in 2017, a federal judge released him on bond, claiming there was no “clear and convincing evidence” that he posed a danger to the public. Russell was in possession of rifles, ammunition, homemade body armor, binoculars, and a skull mask when he was arrested. During his interrogation, Arthurs had told police that Russell wanted to attack a nuclear plant south of Miami, prompting a judge to revoke Russell’s bail before his trial.