Crooker had pleaded guilty to 1 charge of mailing a letter containing a threat to injure an officer or employee of the United States and 1 charge of possession of the biological toxin ricin.
BOSTON – A former Agawam man on Monday was sentenced to 15 years in prison, with credit for time served, on charges of possessing a biological toxin and threatening a federal prosecutor.
In U.S. District Court, Judge Douglas P. Woodlock said that Michael A. Crooker, 57, would receive credit for time served in prison since June 2004.
Michael CrookerIn March, Crooker pleaded guilty to one charge of mailing a letter containing a threat to injure an officer or employee of the United States and one charge of possession of the biological toxin ricin without the required registration. Woodlock accepted the sentence recommended as part of a plea agreement.
William D. Weinreb, an assistant U.S. attorney, said the sentence was a fair and just resolution to the case, given Crooker’s willingness to plead guilty.
Woodlock also noted that Crooker served about six years in jail on a charge that ended up being a wrongful conviction. Crooker was charged in 2004 with illegally possessing a firearm as a convicted felon, but the U.S. 1st Circuit Court of Appeals last year threw out a 2006 conviction on the charge.
Crooker had sent a silencer for an air gun in the mail, but the federal Court of Appeals said the silencer was designed for an air gun, not a firearm, and did not fit the definition of a firearm. At the time of his arrest, Crooker believed that he was charged under a law that did not apply.
Crooker was arrested on June 23, 2004 on the firearms charge. When agents searched his Agawam apartment that day, they discovered what appeared to be a weapons lab along with castor seeds, the source of ricin, according to a press release in March from the office of U.S. Attorney Carmen M. Ortiz.
While in jail, Crooker sent a letter to an assistant U.S. attorney prosecuting the firearms case and invoked the name of Timothy McVeigh, the person responsible for the 1995 bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma, the press release said. Crooker was angered about his arrest and various searches, including one of his parents’ residence, according to the press release from Ortiz.
Also while he was in jail, Crooker told two fellow inmates that he knew how to make ricin and had made it in the past, the release said.
Woodlock also agreed to recommend that Crooker receive residential drug treatment while in prison, saying it was positive that Crooker asked for such help. Crooker’s lawyer, assistant federal defender Timothy G. Watkins, said Crooker sought the treatment even though his record and the nature of the charges make him ineligible for a year off a sentence that could go to an inmate in drug treatment. Watkins said Crooker is a changed man.
The judge said he would also recommend that Crooker be allowed to enter a pre-release center in Hartford, Conn., near the end of his sentence. Crooker asked for the Hartford location because it is closer to his home in Western Massachusetts.