Risky Assessments
Let’s see, gasoline and propane tanks are a terrorist problem, even if they are in Britain, but apparently finding tons of stuff on Staten Island is not a problem: N.Y. chemicals were to be resold on Internet, police say
NEW YORK (CNN) — A man who stored nearly 1,500 pounds of potassium nitrate and other chemicals in his Staten Island home and a nearby storage facility was charged with reckless endangerment Friday, according to the New York City Police Department.
Police said Miguel Serrano, 57, had bought the chemicals in bulk from an Ohio-based dealer and was intending to resell them in smaller quantities on the Internet. It was the dealer who tipped off the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives after Serrano had ordered 5,000 pounds of potassium nitrate, according to a police report.
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The NYPD’s Paul Brown said there is no indication the chemicals were being used for bomb-making or anything terror-related. According to Brown, the man was buying the chemicals in bulk and reselling them on the Internet.
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ATF officials said no violations of federal explosives laws were discovered, but added that chemical-storage rules may have been violated.
Small quantities of hydrogen peroxide, potassium permanganate, elemental mercury, iodine, sulfur, ammonium dichromate, and aluminum powder were also recovered during the raid, police said.
Now, making explosives or drugs is not the only thing you can do with these chemicals, but if you need them for other purposes you can buy them in small amounts in appropriate containers from a hardware store. When you are buying potassium nitrate [saltpeter] by the ton, it should raise some concerns. When you have such a varied collection of oxidizers and are going to make them available via the Internet to no one knows who, this should be a concern.
I see a lot of things that are used to make substances that produce very loud noises in this chemistry set. I would want a serious look at this individual’s customer list, but that isn’t going to happen after the statements released by NYPD and BATF agents.
It’s almost as if they don’t believe that anyone but Muslims and Eco-activists are a possible threat.
13 comments
whiten your teeth
wash your floors
or just blow stuff up.
This guy may not be the problem, but who in hell is buying this stuff over the ‘Net?
Saltpeter, sulfur, and charcoal is a rather old formula. Mercury is certainly useful in a motion detection circuit. Maybe someone needs fuel for their Soviet era torpedo, like the ones that sank the Kursk.
This is some nasty stuff in very large quantities. Much of it requires special labeling for transport.
Damn. Bryan and hipparchia, could I please have you two in charge of counterterrorism, instead of the dubiously competent gang we have at the moment?
As July 4 approaches, I remember a Fourth of July about 15 years ago, going to the fireworks display in Berkeley, CA, with a friend who was an MD. She described her experience a decade before that, attempting to treat the eye of a child who had a close encounter with a firecracker… except that there was really no eye left to treat. The materials you describe have the potential to harm a lot more than one child, and destroy a lot more than one eye. I don’t mean to be excessively paranoid, but shouldn’t somebody be monitoring the sale of such stuff, on the internet or elsewhere?
I’d hate to be this guy’s mail carrier or FedEx driver….
Steve, we need more chemists working for BATF, you know, people who actually know what in hell this stuff is. You don’t buy it by the ton to sell it by the ounce, the storage costs and repackaging eat all of the profit.
Аня, a lot of this stuff is illegal to send through the mail, but I’ll bet that the Postal Service and UPS/Fed Ex guys are checking their route sheets after this came out.
Serrano only had 1500 lbs of KNO3 in his possession, but he had ordered 5000 lbs, according to the article. I had to look it up, but I thought that number sounded familiar: 5000 lbs ammonium nitrate in the Oklahoma City truck bomb. Not that the two different nitrates would be equally explosive, but that’s enough to make it a very bad day for a lot of people.
I wonder if Serrano, or anyone in his general vicinity, has recently acquired 1000 lbs or so of charcoal, or several hundred lbs of sulfur.
There are a lot of people who heat with fuel oil or coal in the Northeast, powdered aluminum has a tendency to show up in some nasty cocktails, there are just so many possibilities with that collection.
Who were his customers?
Well, good golly, Miss Molly! People really do sell it over the internet, and apparently that’s a legitimate use, for the stuff.
Those are cheap enough containers [in the photo] to make repackaging feasible, though they don’t look like IATA-approved shipping containers to me, and possibly they’re not even approved for ground shipment. Also, on eBay, the buyers frequently pay shipping costs, so that might not be a consideration that the reseller would worry about either. Proper storage for huge quantities of an oxidizer would cost an arm and a leg [!] though.
Even with all that legitimacy, it’s worth noting that none of those other chemicals play nicely with each other, or with KNO3.
KNO3 is mailable, in 1-lb packages, up to 25 lbs per mailpiece.
The basic point is, you are running up huge storage bills, especially in the NYC area, while supposedly selling small quantities over the ‘Net. Ordering 5,000 pounds of KNO3 is out of whack, especially when you have 1,500 pounds in storage.
I get a feeling that this was a drop shipment that was already sold to someone who didn’t want it traced, which happens when you buy large quantities from a reputable supplier.
That many oxidizers just set off bells and whistles for me.
if he really was buying in bulk [for cheap] and re-selling it in small quantities for legitimate purposes, the only way he could afford to store it would be illegally, especially in nyc. but you’re right, the rest of the items make the whole thing very suspect.
they all set off bells and whistles for me too, likely for different reasons from yours. [how do i put one of those emoticon thingies in here?]
Does work 😉 ? Okay, so you do the text equivalent and the smilies appear, it’s not like I designed this program. It seems to want a hyphen nose 🙁
😉