NEW YORK -- Edwin Wilson, the former CIA agent twice convicted of illegally running guns, sought help from a prison murder gang called the 'Aryan Brotherhood' to kill his wife and government witnesses, a prisoner testified Monday.
The witness, John Randolph, 30, a bank robber serving a 16-year sentence at the federal prison in Otisville, N.Y., said Wilson, 55, thought Randolph was a member of the murder-for-hire gang.
Randolph said he allowed the mistake to continue 'for his own protection in jail,' and he reported the scheme to federal authorities 'out of concern for the targets of the plot.'
Randolph testified he did not qualify for membership in the Aryan Brotherhood because he never had killed anyone, the key membership requirement. Members also must be white, he said.
Randolph said the group had contract killers outside prison, and claimed Wilson had given him instructions 'on how to locate his wife so that she could be murdered.
'If I had been a member of the brotherhood the target of the assassination plot would be dead,' Randolph said.
Randolph testified in U.S. District Court in Manhattan on Wilson's motion to bar him and another Otisville prisoner from testifying at Wilson's assassination-plot trial, scheduled to begin Tuesday. Judge Edward Weinfeld, who will preside at the trial, rejected the motion.
Wilson, a former CIA agent, was indicted in August on charges he sought to arrange at the Otisville prison the murder of four key government witnesses and his ex-wife, Barbara. He is serving 32 years in prison for his convictions in Virginia and Texas on charges of smuggling firearms ad explosives to Libya.
