Original subtitles

The Garden City bomb plot was one of the biggest cases of my career.

[Patrick speaking]

The level of hate was just so horrific and so vile.

They wanted to take out as many Muslims as they could.

This is an Oklahoma City-magnitude attack.

[Brandon] My dad was an undercover informant.

It really, really tore at him- the idea of putting us all in danger.

Dan Day is probably the most courageous person I've ever met.

He knew what was at stake,

but he had the courage to keep going.

The FBI has a mission to look for all threats of terrorism.

It was scary. We had to stop it.

I'm special agent, Amy Kuhn.

[narrator] This isFeds.

[Amy] The FBI was something I was always interested in,

but it's not something that I thought real people did.

I am from Kansas.

I grew up on a ranch. My family raised cattle and horses.

My worst fear is that I have the ability

to stop something evil from happening to people, and I'm not able to do it.

[Tony] Garden City is this jewel in western Kansas.

Many, many cultures that over time have come there primarily because of the jobs,

and they've stayed.

The beef-packing plant, over the years, had drawn in different racial groups.

A Mexican population, and then a Central American population,

And then recently, it's been Somalis.

They were leaving a country that was torn by civil war.

The folks of Garden City, even having had the benefit of the diversity

that that community has had over the years,

the Somalis were different from anything that they've seen.

They're the first Muslim group of immigrants. They stand out.

[Abdirahman] I was born in Mogadishu.

And so, back when I used to live over there, it was really a war zone.

My mom told me that my dad got blowed up

with a bazooka or something.

He was walking towards the house, and he just blowed up. Boom.

Since we got here, my life has been wonderful, amazing.

I met nice people.

Free breath air,

and you don't have to watch over your shoulder or anything.

I found it, like, a place that you could call it a home, you know.

In 2015, we had ISIS in Iraq. We had ISIS in Syria.

The impact in general on people was very much one of inspiring fear.

[speaking foreign language]

A lot of folks were afraid that ISIS was coming to us.

[speaking foreign language]

It was before the election of Donald Trump,

so we were hearing the rhetoric very much every day in the media.

[Amy] It's kind of crazy to think that this is where it all started.

We got several calls about a flyer being posted at the library.

The rumors online were that there was a couple of Somali males

that were trying to get people recruited for ISIS.

If ISIS is recruiting at the Finney County Library.

that's obviously something that I wanna know about.

[Brandon] Around 2015, I was in the habit of going and running,

and my dad would go with me, and we would go by the library.

There was a sign hanging up that was pro-Palestinian and had a Palestinian flag.

My dad decided to show his friend

because being more Conservative around here is very much more pro-Israel.

The friend invited us to a cookout

that was happening a few days later.

When we got invited to the barbeque,

we expected to talk about the pro-Palestine poster.

But it turned out to be something completely different.

There was a bunch of guys in camo with open carry,

which isn't a big deal in this part of town,

but it was a little unexpected.

[Brandon] At first, it was just normal political jargon and stuff,

that they were talking about.

Making somewhat silly arguments for their political beliefs.

But then they brought out the flag that we'd found at the library

and passed it around.

Then they talked more and more about the Muslims

and their fear and concern over them.

That's when he realized that it was a militia meeting.

[Brandon] They thought that the Palestinian flag

was sympathizing with Islamic extremism.

They seemed to know it's ISIS.

and they start ranting and raving about the Muslims.

And they were spreading this idea

that the Somalian community was recruiting for ISIS.

My dad was just shocked that anybody could be absurd enough

to draw those conclusions from absolutely no fact.

The thought of being racist or discriminating against someone

because of where they came from

was, like, completely unreasonable to him.

[Brandon] My dad was born and bred in Kansas.

He's very much more on the Conservative end of the spectrum.

He was very pro-Second Amendment.

He would always go shooting a lot.

But he wasn't the kind of person that would probably join a militia

because of his belief in God-

that everyone had value and dignity,

and his belief in what America is

and that it's a nation of brotherhood and unity.

[Amy] We were just trying to find somebody that we could talk to

who saw this flyer to determine whether it was factual or not factual.

Through, like, looking through Facebook

and kind of trying to figure out how it originated,

we came across somebody who said, well, his friend had told him

that he had seen this.

And I said, "Okay, well, could we talk to your friend?"

My dad got a call from his friend saying,

"Hey, I need you to come over right away."

[Amy] When he walked in, we introduced ourselves

and said, "Hey. We're with the FBI,

and we heard that you had some information

about what had happened at the library."

And he said, "Yes," that it was not an ISIS flag.

And then he told us that there was this Three Percent militia that was going on.

A militia in and of itself isn't particularly concerning.

When the militia starts talking about using violence to effect political change,

that's when it becomes very concerning.

[Amy] The militia was concerned about ISIS and the Somali population.

In general, you know, if people highlight one group,

it can... There is a potential for something to go bad.

[Robin] The FBI knew that The Three Percent

existed as a national militia organization.

And because of the library flyer

and the investigation that we did there,

we knew that Three Percent patriots of southwest Kansas

had formed a branch in our region.

I told Robin I may talk to Dan

about potentially becoming a source in the militia group.

[Brandon] My dad came home

and said that the FBI had suggested

that it might be a good thing for him to join the militia

and let them know if there was something suspicious going on.

We just thought it was kind of cool.

It was something that we kind of felt

that he would probably be good at.

[Robin] Dan is very unassuming.

He's not a threatening character in any way.

You read him for being a participant and a friend.

He made contact, again, with the people from the militia.

He started going to their meetings.

Just gradually became friends with them.

In the Kansas Three Percenters,

probably about 20 people were in there.

They began to develop plans to conduct surveillance on private Somali refugees.

Dan went to a firearms training exercise

with the Three Percent militia.

And we learned of another individual

that really spooked Dan.

Patrick Stein showed up at this training.

He said that Patrick was very, very passionate

and very angry about Muslims.

And he described those Muslims, in his words, as cockroaches.

From there, we began to understand,

"Okay. Well, maybe we need to look at this Patrick Stein guy."

We learned that Patrick Stein grew up on a farm in Kansas.

A conservative, hard-working American is what he seemed.

[Alyssa] My dad was able to kind of figure out

that 9/11 had been the turning point for Stein-

of directing his hatred at Muslims.

The FBI wanted my dad

to become Patrick Stein's best friend.

Someone that Patrick Stein could and would

tell basically everything to.

Patrick Stein wanted to see some of the Somali community places

and get a feel for where things were prior to doing surveillance.

So he had talked to Dan about showing him around town.

As they went around, Patrick Stein got more and more irate,

as they see more and more Somalian people just doing their business,

living their daily lives.

He pulls up to an intersection,

and two Somalian women are walking by.

Patrick sees these women. He becomes absolutely ballistic.

Patrick Stein was saying, "Look at all these [bleep] cockroaches.

This is disgusting. I can't believe they'd allow these cockroaches here."

My dad genuinely could see that Patrick Stein

was about to pull his gun on these women.

So he told him, like, "Man, you're gonna get the cops called on us.

You don't want it to go down like this."

[Brandon] My dad started to reach for his gun, too,

because he realized how close Patrick was to actually pulling the trigger.

But he was able to calm him down.

That was something that really, really shook him to his core.

[Amy] While Dan was riding around with Patrick Stein,

Patrick Stein informed Dan that he was part of another militia,

called Kansas Security Force,

and he was looking to recruit members away from Three Percent

that he thought would actually do something.

He asked Dan to join.

When he came home, he was visibly shaken,

just almost like he was going to cry because it was terrifying.

That's when he realized that it was gonna be dangerous.

He was very seriously considering stopping being an informant.

[Amy] It was a gut check for me

in that if Dan decides he doesn't wanna do this anymore,

then there is potential that something bad is gonna happen.

That made me feel terrified.

Dan- he was considering just bailing on the whole thing.

For me, it was very important to talk to Dan and say,

"Look, I understand that what we're asking you is hard,

but we need you to make sure that you're with Stein on surveillance.

And that you're there- so if he is talking about doing something crazy,

that you're there to talk him out of it.

After that, my dad prayed on it, and he consulted us.

He told us that this was the kind of guy

that he might just show up at our house one night and start shooting.

He didn't want to put his family at risk.

What I remember is just us as a family,

telling him that he needed to keep going.

A couple of days later, my dad told Patrick Stein

that he would be willing to join his group.

[Robin] The southwest region of the Kansas Security Force was led by Curtis Allen,

and it was made up of about a dozen individuals.

[Alyssa] The Kansas Security Force met on nightly phone calls.

We did give Dan a recorder,

and he tried to record the calls.

[Alyssa] My dad would go into his bedroom,

and I would be able to hear through the wall

Curtis Allen and Gavin Wright, as well as Patrick Stein,

were definitely the three most vocal.

[Alyssa] It's unimaginable seeing how much hate

these people can hold for an innocent group of people

that they've literally never had anything to do with other than hating them.

[Tony] At this point, the level of hatred was a step above

any of the other militia folks that we had been looking at.

But they're still just talking.

And one of the concerns that I had with the investigation was:

we're spending hundreds of man-hours investigating this group,

but will they ever move beyond the talk?

And then, in June of 2016, everything in this investigation changed.

[radio chatter]

[newsreader] Breaking news in Orange County tonight.

Confirmation of a shooting in downtown Orlando at the Pulse nightclub.

Let me see your hands now!

[gunshots firing]

[man shouts]

[newsreader] A lone gunman, who in the middle of that massacre,

called 9-1-1 to pledge allegiance to ISIS.

Stein reached out to Dan after the Pulse nightclub shooting.

He was focused on reacting. "We've gotta do something. This is just too much."

[Robin] For him, a switch had been flicked.

He believed that Kansas Security Force needed to act,

and they needed to act now.

Patrick specifically targeted a location for the meeting in a field,

out east of Garden City by quite aways.

Stein specifically said, "We're gonna have this meeting in a field

so that the FBI cannot record us."

So I told Dan, "Well, you need to be a part of the meeting."

We agreed that Dan would have a recording device on him

because it seems to be criminal in nature.

[Robin] We knew that this was gonna be the inception

of criminal activity

and probably a conspiracy to commit that criminal activity.

That is the essence of what the FBI seeks to define

when you're gonna charge someone in a plot. We needed that.

[Brandon] It was a very hot day that day.

My dad was pretty anxious, as well. Pretty nervous wearing a wire.

We had a surveillance team that was in the area.

But when I say in the area, I mean they were within, like, 20 miles.

So Dan was ultimately on his own.

We had set up a plan that he would text me periodically

to make sure that he was okay.

He texted us when he arrived.

And he texted me one time during the meeting.

And then I didn't hear anything.

I talked to our surveillance guys.

I said, "Hey, can you see anything?"

But where the meeting was, there wasn't a way for them to drive by and see anything.

There's certainly an "Oh, crap" moment,

and the worst thought was that somebody had found out

that he was working with us and had killed him because of it.

And I did nothing, right. He's in the middle of a field by himself dead,

and I'm rolling up on a dead body.

The group was prone to talking a lot.

I had an expectation that it was gonna be probably a couple hours.

But the longer that I didn't hear from him...

I got more and more concerned, as the time clicked on.

[monitor beeps]

[Amy] About the time that we're thinking,

"Well, maybe we need to do something"

is when Dan reached out to me and said, "I'm okay, but I'm in the hospital."

And I was like, "Wait, you're in the hospital? What... What happened?"

Dan told me that he got to the meeting.

He wasn't feeling well, but he still participated

until eventually he passed out 'cause he was dehydrated.

As he was passing out, his thoughts were,

"Oh, they're gonna find the recorder." He was concerned.

He didn't know what would happen once he passed out.

Ultimately, they called an ambulance,

and his recording device was not discovered.

[Robin] We went directly to the hospital.

What we learned was that we really did need to be at this meeting.

That Stein had flipped a switch.

That recording absolutely gave us the foundation

on which to build a criminal case.

Some of the people that were involved in the meeting stepped back.

[Tony] Most of the people that believe in militias

don't believe in using the militias

to go out and target people because of their religious beliefs.

There became a core group of four individuals:

Patrick Stein, Gavin Wright,

Curtis Allen, and Dan Day.

Gavin Wright had lived in the Garden City community

for pretty much most of his life. He was an electrician.

Curtis Allen had served in the military.

He was a lieutenant in the army.

[Alyssa] Even though they were from the area,

their isolation was definitely a bond for them

because they all were able to blame what was happening to them

on Muslims.

[Brandon] After the meeting where my dad passed out,

they established their own channel

to talk together on, which they named crusaders 2.0.

In Patrick's mind, the first Crusades didn't go far enough.

He wanted to have a second set of Crusades

where they would completely exterminate all the Muslims.

So this new core group met in August of 2016.

And they decided that they needed to pick a target.

And ultimately, the target that was decided upon

were the apartments on Mary Street in Garden City.

[Amy] The people that were living in the Mary Street apartments-

most of the were Somalis.

And also, there was a mosque in the Mary Street apartments.

So they believed that that was ideal.

They could kill a bunch of Muslims

and do it while they were praying to their god.

[Abdirahman] We really didn't know anything about it

because we were just doing our daily life.

We just work, go home, eat. That's it.

And we don't bother anybody, so why would someone think

that we have done something to hurt their loved ones or anything?

The irony is that most of the Somali people here

flew from the gun violence and from ISIS, from all that stuff.

So it's crazy that people think us-

we're connected to ISIS or anything.

[Tony] Over the next several months, it became very clear

that they wanted to use explosives.

They wanted to focus on the Mary Street apartment complex.

And they wanted to commit the attack

immediately after the election

because they didn't want their actions to, in any way, swing the election.

Patrick Stein, by virtue of his working with his family farming operation,

had access to fertilizer products. Ready access, in quantity.

And that gave him the opportunity

to then think in terms of building a much larger explosive device.

[Alyssa] That's about the time that my dad started jumping up

dead asleep because he thought he was tackling someone

or running away.

One of the most reoccurring nightmares was that he had failed.

And he would see a Somalian woman

and her little girl turn around,

and their faces would be blown off.

[Tony] Late September of 2016.

The election is November of 2016.

Curtis and Gavin announced to Patrick and Dan

that they've created a primary explosive

that can detonate a very large bomb and kill a lot of people.

Candidly, that was our, "Oh, [bleep]" moment.

That's the point at which I started losing sleep at night

because we know now these guys absolutely can detonate

an ANFO bomb on their own.

We now have to be on top of this every minute of every day

until we put these guys in custody.

[Tony] Investigations 101 is:

at some point, you replace that informant with an undercover.

That's something that we had been considering for many, many months.

[Amy] In the course of our investigation,

Dan had brought up to these guys that he had family members

that were involved in criminal activity.

And it was a perfect segue for Dan to say,

"Well, actually, you remember I told you I had a cousin?

He actually works for, pretty much, an organization."

[Amy] So the undercover was presented as a guy that could get stuff

and had a lot of knowledge about explosives.

[Amy] The plan was to get Patrick Stein,

Curtis Allen, and Gavin Wright to meet with our undercover

to get him to create the explosive device for them.

The control at this point in the investigation was no longer just desirous.

It was a must.

Ultimately, our goal was to reduce the risk

of them making their own explosive device.

[Amy] Curtis was very untrusting.

There was this concern that this was a setup.

[Curtis] I understand.

The worst case scenario is they don't meet the undercover,

they no longer trust Dan and cut him out of the picture.

And then they choose to go forward with making an explosive,

and we don't know what their plan is.

[Amy] The result of the meeting

was the crusaders militia members agreed

that Stein would go meet with the undercover as sort of a representative,

but the others would not.

The crusaders came up with a list

that, potentially, the undercover might be able to get for them.

And included on the shopping list was C-4 and blasting caps.

They were confident that they could do it on their own,

but it was quicker if they could get it from somebody else.

It was definitely one of those realization moments

of there are a lot of things that could go wrong.

It's not a comfortable feeling, certainly.

I mean, we're dealing with Patrick Stein, who was a volatile person.

We had Dan drive into a rural area, and Stein followed him in.

The main undercover, Brian,

had a crew of individuals that worked for him.

Dan introduced Stein, and then Dan left,

and Stein met with Brian inside one of the vehicles.

[Patrick] Sure.

At the end of the meeting, Brian left it with,

"I'll think about it and decide whether I want to help you guys out."

So a couple of days after the original undercover meeting,

Brian reaches out to Patrick Stein and says,

"Hey, I'm the guy from the field.

I'm gonna help you 'cause I like what you stand for."

Stein went back to the crusaders. They had a meeting.

[Robin] Ultimately, what they decided upon

was for Patrick Stein to go back and meet with Brian.

And the plan was for Stein to drive Brian by the apartment buildings

and to talk to him about what specifically the crusaders group wanted.

This second meeting is incredibly important

to the development of the case.

We had a good amount of evidence, but we needed more.

We wanted agreement from Patrick

that he's going to provide the raw materials for the device to Brian

so that Brian can finish the device and hand a dummy device,

but a completed device, back to Patrick.

So we're fairly comfortable with where we're at.

And then all of a sudden, we get a phone call.

The day before the meeting between Brian and Stein was supposed to happen,

Curtis Allen's girlfriend called 9-1-1

and said that Curtis Allen had intentionally not allowed her to leave her apartment

and had grabbed her, and she was concerned for her safety.

During the arrest, Curtis' girlfriend had mentioned

that Curtis was part of a militia

and that he had been making explosives.

It was one of those "Oh, crap" moments.

Like, we were moving in a very organized fashion,

and then that threw a wrench in the plans, and you're like,

"What do we do?"

We don't know what impact this is gonna have on the others.

We don't know whether it's gonna make them scatter,

or whether it's gonna make them more resolute

to move up the timeframe of the attack.

We had to work with the local authorities.

They called the FBI and said, "Hey, we have something that we can't deal with

we need your help with."

We had to try to keep a lid on the information.

And we had to try to keep it from getting disseminated too widely,

which, in a rural community like that, is very, very difficult to do

just because everybody's related, everybody's friends.

We asked the local authorities who had arrested Curtis

to not let him have contact with anybody outside of the jail

so that he couldn't spread word of what was going on.

[Brandon] The FBI wanted my dad to make absolutely certain

that he knew how this was affecting Gavin Wright and Patrick Stein,

especially because they're... You know, they're the unhinged ones.

They're the ones that are willing to go off and murder someone.

[Amy] It was the craziest time, I would say,

in the investigation.

Is Gavin gonna flee? Is Stein gonna do something on his own?

I am feverishly having conversation after conversation

with our leadership and our prosecutors.

Obviously, the plan has changed.

"Are we gonna go forward with the undercover meeting tomorrow?"

Everybody agrees. "Yes, we think we can do that safely," so that's on.

[Amy] The plan was for Stein

to drive Brian by the apartment buildings

and elaborate on the plan

and what specifically the crusaders group wanted.

[Tony] I believed that there was no way

Patrick Stein was gonna show up for that next meeting.

I believed he was gonna have been completely spooked off

and the case was gonna fall apart.

[Robin] The morning of the second undercover meeting,

we're getting ready to follow our plan

and set up, prepared, for that meeting

as if Stein would arrive just as we expected.

We all knew that this was a wild card.

When he turned up, I couldn't believe it.

But we didn't really have time to feel relief

because now we just have the job ahead of us that we needed to do.

Patrick hopped in with the undercovers,

showed them around Garden City.

[Patrick laughs]

[laughter]

[Robin] It was really just kind of an encapsulated moment

that these men were very serious and intending harm.

[Tony] We went, in the span of a few minutes,

from thinking that our case was going to crumble and fall apart around us

to absolutely making our case.

I mean, it was euphoric.

[Amy] After the meeting, we worked through the night,

preparing search warrants and trying to establish what the next moves were.

[Robin] We had people in play that had access to explosives.

We needed to arrest these individuals immediately.

The morning of the takedown, there were a lot of nerves.

The most important thing was making sure that everybody was safe

because there were a lot of moving parts.

Ultimately, we made the choice to arrest Patrick Stein

in a parking lot at a restaurant.

The plan was for Stein to bring fertilizer

to Brian, our undercover, to make a bomb.

And then we were going to go ahead and do a takedown of Patrick Stein.

Brian and two or three other undercovers were waiting in the parking lot

for Stein to pull in.

When Stein came in, they unloaded the fertilizer from his pickup

to the undercover vehicle.

[Brian] Mmm-hmm.

[Amy] There was a predetermined phrase that Brian said,

and that's when the SWAT team moved in,

and they arrested Stein, and they arrested Brian.

[man] The hell, man? What [bleep] is this?

[Tony] It was an indescribably immense feeling of relief

to know that Patrick had been arrested

and then a few minutes later, to hear that Gavin had been arrested.

We don't need to worry about them blowing people up.

Now I know that the danger has passed.

[Alyssa] When we heard about the takedown,

there was definitely a moment of celebration,

but it didn't last long.

We were very scared of retribution.

Pretty quickly after that, we got a pit bull. We got...

We started being a lot more cautious.

[FBI representative] Three southwest-Kansas men:

Curtis Allen, Patrick Stein, Gavin Wright

were charged in federal court here today on domestic terrorism charges.

These charges are based on eight months of investigation by the FBI.

[Robin] The Somali community was very shocked.

It was not just a gut punch but maybe a double gut punch.

[Abdirahman] Some of the community were angry,

but more of them were heartbroken and tears.

And just having that thought- someone wanted to take our lives

was just overwhelming.

It really changed it in the community, to be honest

because a lot of people moved.

There was a lot of talk about what would have been.

As we prepared for trial, one of the things that I asked the agents to do

was to create a device

of the size that these guys wanted to use

so that we could show what the damage would have been.

If that bomb had successfully detonated,

we would have been staring over the edge of a smoking black hole

that used to be the 312 west Mary Street apartment complex.

And we would unquestionably have been looking at the bodies

of more than 100 dead refugees in that hole.

I have no doubt in my mind that the FBI investigation here

prevented another Oklahoma City.

All three of them were charged with attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction,

conspiracy to commit a hate crime.

And all three of them were convicted of those charges.

Curtis Allen received 25 years,

Gavin Wright received 26 years,

and Patrick Stein received a 30-year-sentence.

[Robin] When it comes to the investigation,

there's really only one hero.

That hero is Dan Day.

All he really wanted was to make sure

that his town and the people in it were safe.

[Amy] We could not have done this case without Dan Day.

And it was the epitome of doing the right thing,

even though it may be a detriment to you.

My dad isn't here to tell this story because he passed away

[sniffs] a couple months ago.

[Brandon] It was probably heart related.

At least in part because of the depression and stuff

that going through all this caused.

Every part of what made him him made him a hero.

His faith and determination

and going through all of this pain

to save people that he didn't know.

But saving these people was worth putting himself on the line.

[Abdirahman] For a person just to do that to make us walk freely,

there is no word to describe that for that emotion.

But hey, I gotta say, we're really grateful to you, man.

[Amy] What makes me most pleased is the fact that we were successful.

We found out about a plot.

There were people that were trying to kill innocents,

and we were able to keep that from happening.

So to me, that is success.

She liked the money. She liked the rush.

She went into the stores and held a gun to people's heads.

Looking at her,

you would not think she would do something like that.

Six robberies in five states.

Where would she be going next?