EVERETT, Wash. -- Multimillionaire Russell Maguire, freed after a federal jury acquitted him by reason of insanity on charges of molesting a young girl last year, was arrested on a Florida warrant on another morals charge.
The 58-year-old eccentric heir to the Thompson submachine gun fortune was booked into the Snohomish County Jail Wednesday night on a $15,000 fugitive warrant issued in Pinelias County, Fla.
He was arrested when he stopped at a convenience store near Silver Lake to purchase buttermilk, said James Kempton, Maguire's attorney.
The Florida warrant accused Maguire of handling and fondling a child under the age of 14, Snohomish County Sheriff's Sgt.Tom Pszonkia said.
Kempton said he believed the warrant charged Maquire with sexual molestation and dealt with an old 'contact' who sued Maguire 'and tried to get money out of him and failed.'
Maguire, who owns a mansion in Seattle's exclusive Broadmoor residential area, called his attorney soon after he was booked into jail, Kempton said.
'He sounded as good as I've heard him in a long while,' the attorney said. 'He was very calm and very deliberate. He was not at all flighty or upset.'
Maguire's travels with young children have brought him into previous scrapes with the law over the years.
He was arrested in 1982 and charged with taking indecent liberties with an 8-year-old Salt Lake City girl at an ocean-front lodge on the Washington Coast.
A jury aquitted him by reason of insanity in 1983, and Maquire was allowed to go free because of a loophole in the federal statutes that prevented the court from restraining him in any way.
Doctors testifying at Maguire's recent trial said he suffered from manic-depressive syndrome, and Maguire said he took lithium to help control his behaviin.
Other testimony, including that of his housekeeper, disclosed Maquire's mansion was badly in need of repair and that he had a long-standing passion for buttermilk, sometimes drinking up to six quarts a day and then stacking the empty or partially empty cartons in his home.
Maguire was stopped in March by police after leaving Victoria, British Columbia, with a 9-year-old boy whose parents asked police to locate their son when they learned of Maquire's past. The boy was sent home after traveling with Maquire for about a day.
In the mid 1970s the millionaire, who has a history of befriending low-income families and convincing them to allow their children to accompany him on trips for their cultural and educational benefit, was aquitted of morals charges in New England.
