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Posted: September 17, 2003
White supremacist Donald Bruce McAninch was sentenced to 41 months in federal prison on September 12, 2003, for sending racist and anti-Semitic letters to hundreds of people and for mailing a grainy substance to a multiracial couple at the height of the anthrax scare in 2001.
McAninch, 47, a pizza delivery man from Issaquah, Washington State, was arrested in December 2001 after police matched his fingerprints to letters filled with racist leaflets and to pornographic material left at Pine Lake Middle School. His fingerprints were also found on an envelope sent to the home of a multiracial couple in Seattle; the letter contained baker's yeast and white supremacist propaganda.
McAninch was charged with threatening to use weapons of mass destruction, mail theft, and mail fraud.
The local Jewish Community Center and the local chapter of the NAACP were among hundreds of recipients of McAninch's anti-Semitic and racist letters. One of McAninch's harassing tactics was to send unwanted pornographic materials to civil-rights advocates, noting that they were gifts from Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. He also signed other people's names to the racist letters he sent. According to court papers, some of McAninch's victims were selected from the letters to the editor sections of the Seattle Times and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
The Postal Service and FBI received more than 500 complaints about racist and threatening mailings, according to federal prosecutors.
Under a plea agreement reached with federal prosecutors in April, McAninch will be placed under five years of supervised release after his prison sentence is completed. According to court documents, McAninch also admitted sending mail to "threaten, intimidate and harass the recipients because of their ethnicity, race, their involvement in an interracial relationship or because they spoke out against racism and prejudice."
In 1991, McAninch was sentenced to 30 months in prison for sending death threats to President George Bush and other similar activities.
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