Biography
Irish-American radar engineer at Mitre Corporation in Bedford, Massachusetts who held the firm's highest security clearance. On August 20, 1990 he was convicted in U.S. District Court in Boston of conspiracy to develop a missile guidance system to shoot down British helicopters in Northern Ireland, along with co-defendants Christina Reid and Martin Quigley. No weapon or missile system was ever produced as evidence at trial — the case rested on the testimony of FBI informants and the seizure of hand-drawn diagrams and electronic components from his parents' Allentown, Pennsylvania basement workshop. Judge A. David Mazzone called the case 'terrorism, pure and simple' and doubled his sentence from five to ten years. The prosecution made novel use of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) wiretaps in a criminal trial.
