Tech bomber set for sentencing
By ED WHITE, Associated Press Writer POSTED: March 20, 2009
DETROIT - Ian Wallace is a graduate student in anthropology in New York who has studied fossils in Kenya, combed excavations in Syria and France and written about his research in scholarly journals.
But Monday afternoon, he will be sentenced to federal prison for trying to blow up two buildings at Michigan Technological University in 2001 when he was a radical eco-saboteur.
It is another case of federal agents catching up to people who formerly were passionate members of the Earth Liberation Front, known as ELF.
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Wallace, a graduate student at Stony Brook University in Stony Brook, N.Y., qualifies for 10 years in prison when he appears Monday in U.S. District Court in Marquette.
But Frank is recommending a significant drop in the sentencing guidelines to as low as 70 months, or just under six years, because of Wallace's help in solving a case in Rhinelander, Wis., where 500 research trees were destroyed or badly damaged in ELF's name in 2000.
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Frank's filing reveals details of how authorities snagged Wallace years later.
The FBI contacted him in January 2007 after a tip in an ELF-related case in Oregon. Three months later, Wallace spilled his past to the government, admitting the Michigan Tech crimes and providing critical information about the attack on trees in Wisconsin, which caused $1 million in damage.
Three people subsequently were indicted and pleaded guilty in federal court in Wisconsin, Frank said.
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