LOS ANGELES -- A man authorities say was denied $9,000 in tax deductions during an audit several years ago was arrested Thursday on charges of bombing Internal Revenue Service offices in Los Angeles and Fresno.
Dean Harvey Hicks, 45, an aerospace engineer from Costa Mesa, was charged with two bombings of a West Los Angeles building containing IRS offices in September 1988 and February 1990, and remains a suspect in several other bombings dating from 1986.
Hicks allegedly had been denied $9,000 in charitable contribution deductions in the early 1980s, FBI spokeswoman Karen Gardner said.
In September 1988, five bombs exploded in a stolen car parked in a an underground garage of an office building housing IRS offices in Los Angeles.
In February 1990, a powerful chemical bomb that experts said could have leveled two blocks was found in a pickup truck parked across the street from a West Los Angeles building housing IRS offices after mortar-launched pipe bombs had been fired at the building.
That incident was followed by a letter signed by Up the IRS Inc. to a newspaper complaining of 'high, unfair and ambiguous taxes.'
Authorities said they traced Hicks through the truck used in the February 1990 bombing. Police circulated a composite sketch at Ford Aerospace, where they learned of Hicks' tax difficulties, and discovered his handwriting matched that on envelopes containing Up the IRS Inc. letters.
Hicks is also suspected in other, uncharged incidents, Gardner said.
In the latest attack, on April 1, 13 bombs were fired from a homemade mortar-type launcher at the IRS center in Fresno, where 5,000 employees process tax returns for California and much of the Western United States, a federal Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms bureau spokesman said.
Nine of the bombs exploded, and the duds helped authorities discover how they were manufactured.
Someone using the name Up the IRS Inc. claimed credit for that attack in a typed letter mailed to a Fresno newspaper April 4.
'The evidence we saw from Los Angeles and the evidence we saw from here (in Fresno) led us to conclude it was highly likely they were related,' said William Vizzard, agent in charge of the Fresno office of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.
Despite the number of attacks and the power of some of the explosives, nobody was injured in any of the bombings.
