Friend of McVeigh Proved Key for FBI, Papers Reveal

Carl Lebron is the man who turned in Timothy J. McVeigh.

He was the first to recognize the FBI’s composite drawing of McVeigh, the first to tell authorities that his former co-worker has strong anti-government views, the first to claim that McVeigh holds far-out beliefs in flying saucers and miniature submarines that sneak illegal drugs into this country.

But in the year and a half since the truck-bomb attack on the Oklahoma City federal building, the identity of Carl Edward Lebron Jr. has been kept confidential. He has steadfastly refused to talk publicly about the man who worked alongside him at an upstate New York security company and who stands accused of the bombing.

Now, in FBI interview transcripts unsealed Friday in U.S. District Court in Denver, where McVeigh goes on trial this year, the 30-year-old Lebron lays out in graphic, emotional detail his recollection of McVeigh’s distrust of liberals, his quirky turns of behavior and his growing hatred of the national government.

Lebron was crucial to the FBI in its initial investigation of the bombing. He was one of their first chief witnesses. And he provided instant insight into the central figure in the investigation of the worst terrorist attack in the United States.

Lebron, for example, told the FBI that one of the last times he talked to his friend, McVeigh told him, in effect: “I can’t stay out of trouble,” or “Trouble will find me.”

He said McVeigh bragged that he wasn’t anti-government, he was “anti-big government.”

And McVeigh sometimes would criticize Lebron for not completely embracing the anti-Washington vitriol found in books, magazines and other correspondence he passed around at work.

“This is just a hobby for you, reading these books,” McVeigh once challenged him, Lebron said. “You’re stomping your feet and not doing anything about it.”

Lebron’s statements are part of nearly 100 pages of new material made public Friday by Judge Richard P. Matsch. The documents were unsealed after media attorneys argued that too much material in the case against McVeigh and his former Army buddy and co-defendant Terry L. Nichols is hidden under seal.

With McVeigh to be tried beginning March 31, and with Nichols’ trial to follow, prosecutors and defense attorneys have filed tens of thousands of pages of documents regarding the April 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. The blast killed 168 people and injured 850 others.

Next week, lawyers on both sides will meet in closed court conferences with Matsch to discuss more trial maneuvering, including plans by federal prosecutors to comply with defense demands to introduce statements of other “unidentified co-conspirators” who are believed to have some role in the bombing but have eluded justice.

In addition to the Lebron revelations, other FBI transcripts unsealed Friday say that:

* Dave Shafer, a Lafayette, Ind., seed dealer, once was told by Nichols’ brother, James D. Nichols of Decker, Mich., about plans to destroy the federal building.

James Nichols told Shafer that “his brother and an Army buddy had a newspaper clipping of an artist’s rendition of a federal building . . . in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma,” the document says.

“Nichols continued by telling that a person could get close enough with a bomb to blow up the new Oklahoma City federal building.”

James Nichols was jailed as a material witness in the bombing but was released when a federal judge ruled that the government did not have enough evidence to tie him to the crime.

* Tom Manning, a Junction City, Kan., tire dealer, sold McVeigh a 1977 Mercury Marquis that he allegedly used as a getaway car. McVeigh paid $250 in cash and listed James Nichols’ address in Michigan on the bottom of the bill of sale.

McVeigh told Manning he was off to visit James Nichols. “He was going to junk the Mercury out when he got to Michigan,” Manning said.

Also released were documents alleging that McVeigh, while buying the car, slipped away and made two critical telephone calls--one to Terry Nichols’ home in nearby Herington, Kan.; the other to the Junction City company that rented the truck believed used to carry the bomb to Oklahoma City.

Lebron, who immediately called authorities after recognizing McVeigh’s face in the wanted poster for John Doe No. 1, was a significant witness in the early hours of the investigation. Federal prosecutors have jealously guarded his identity and role in putting their case together.

The FBI credited his help in cracking the case when they first filed an affidavit leading to McVeigh’s arrest, but even then they did not reveal his name.

Lebron was the source who gave the FBI McVeigh’s new address in Kingman, Ariz.

“Mr. Lebron provided important corroboration for identifying Timothy McVeigh,” Leesa Brown, spokeswoman for the prosecution team, said Friday. “And corroboration is important at any stage of any investigation. So from that perspective, his contribution was important.”

But Stephen Jones, an attorney for McVeigh, downplayed Lebron’s significance and doubted whether prosecutors would even call him to testify at the trial.

“He comes off like a self-appointed private investigator,” Jones said. “He doesn’t add anything to the government’s case.”

Nevertheless, the recollections of Lebron were indeed colorful when he first began telling the FBI what he knew of McVeigh. They had worked together as private security guards in the Buffalo, N.Y., area two years before the bombing.

Lebron told the FBI that McVeigh was always “relating to politics, secret societies, religion and the conspiracy theory. Specifically, McVeigh felt that concerning police actions, the federal government had too much power.”

Lebron said McVeigh espoused “right-wing views,” was angry about the government raid on religious cultists near Waco, Texas, and had made his own pilgrimage to the Texas site.

McVeigh would come to work with literature from right-wing groups, cults and secret organizations like the Ku Klux Klan.

He expressed a kinship with Randy Weaver, the Idaho backwoodsman whose wife and son were shot to death during an FBI siege there in 1992 that also claimed the life of a federal marshal. Once, Lebron said, McVeigh showed him photographs of Weaver with long hair, then later short hair. “McVeigh said that the government cut his hair that way to make him look like a neo-Nazi,” Lebron told the FBI.

McVeigh also talked about “unidentified flying objects, specifically regarding their existence and origins.” At one point, he said he recalled “McVeigh expressing the belief that such vehicles were from another dimension.”

McVeigh thought that the company work site they were guarding in the Buffalo area was involved in illegal narcotics traffic, proving that the government was behind the drug problems in the United States, Lebron said.

“The government was bringing drugs into the country,” he allegedly told Lebron. “Shipments were being brought in through a river on a miniature submarine.”

When McVeigh eventually quit the security job and moved west, Lebron said, he told him that “people were coming after him.”

They continued to correspond, and at one point McVeigh said “he was doing something that he had wanted to do,” Lebron stated. He could not tell him about it, then added:

“But maybe later.”