Hale was convicted of soliciting the murder of a federal judge in Chicago. In 2005, a court sentenced him to 40 years in prison. White was convicted of soliciting a hit online against a juror in Hale’s murder trial and was sentenced in 2013 to 42 months behind bars. He had time added to his sentence after being convicted of an attempt to extort money from his ex-wife and making threats against Florida officials.
Cantwell’s association with Hale and White was previously mentioned in a Raw Story report, citing public court documents filed by the plaintiffs in the Charlottesville case. But it was through Smith and other public court documents that BuzzFeed News has learned more about his legal studies while incarcerated.
Smith said he was housed with Cantwell, several other white supremacists, and a whole host of people whom he described as the “who’s who of people the US government didn’t like.” They included Cesar Sayoc, the Florida man who sent explosives to Trump critics and prominent Democrats and received a 20-year prison sentence, and
Viktor Bout, the notorious Russian arms dealer known as the “merchant of death” who’s serving a 25-year term for conspiring to sell weapons to terrorists internationally.
Smith was a US Army soldier stationed at Fort Riley and associated with an international neo-Nazi group in September 2019 when he was arrested and charged with distributing instructions on how to make bombs and improvised napalm. Prosecutors also accused him of plotting attacks on journalists and politicians, but later dropped the charges. He later pleaded guilty to the explosives charges and spent two years in federal prison, much of that time at Marion. He was released on Oct. 13, 2021, and ordered to spend a month in a halfway house in South Carolina.