February was to be Brandon Russell’s moment: facing federal charges of conspiring to blow up a series of power stations around Baltimore and trigger a citywide blackout, the neo-Nazi figurehead decided to take his case to trial and mount an entrapment defense against the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
It did not work. Russell, a 29-year-old native of the Bahamas, had thrown away a promising future involving a college degree at the University of Florida and a national guard position to become a dedicated far-right figurehead previously imprisoned in 2017 over a murderous spat between comrades in the Atomwaffen Division, a neo-Nazi guerrilla group he had founded that was involved in five murders and a number of bomb plots before federal agents dismantled it in 2020.
