An 88-year-old Maryland man with a long history of ties to white supremacist groups is the suspect in Wednesday’s shooting at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, two law enforcement officials told CNN.

James W. von Brunn served six years in prison for trying to make what he called a “legal, non-violent citizens arrest” of Federal Reserve board members in 1981 — a prison term he blamed on “a Negro jury, Jew/Negro attorneys” and “a Jew judge,” he said on his Web site, “Holy Western Empire.”

“He is in our files going back way into the 1980s,” said Heidi Beirich, a researcher for the Southern Poverty Law Center, based in Montgomery, Alabama. “He has an extremely long history with neo-Nazis and white supremacists. He’s written extremely incendiary publications, raging about Jews, blacks and the like.”

Von Brunn is a native of St. Louis, Missouri, and a 1943 graduate of Washington University there. According to his online biography, he served as a Navy officer in World War II and became an advertising artist and executive after the war.

But by the late 1970s, Beirich told CNN, he had become a “hardcore neo-Nazi” and an associate of William Pierce — the white supremacist leader whose 1978 book, “The Turner Diaries,” is blamed for inspiring Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh.

In December 1981, angered by what he called the “treacherous and unconstitutional” acts of the Federal Reserve, von Brunn entered the central bank’s Washington headquarters armed with a pistol, a shotgun, a knife and a mock bomb, according to court records. He claimed to be a photographer who wanted to shoot pictures of the boardroom, and bolted up the stairs when security guards told him to wait.

While being subdued, he claimed to have planted a bomb, forcing the building’s evacuation, court records state. He told officers he was upset over high interest rates — then well into double digits — and the state of the economy, which was in a recession.

Von Brunn, then 62, was sentenced to 11 years in prison on attempted kidnapping, second-degree burglary, assault and weapons charges.

In a December 1984 appeal, his court-appointed attorney, John Hogrogian, asked the court to release the defendant on bail, saying his client had “renounced his actions of December 7, 1981, and expressed remorse in a letter addressed to this court.” Von Brunn has “a young son and aches to see him again,” his lawyer wrote.

His trial dealt extensively with Von Brunn’s “attitudes about black and Jewish people,” which his lawyer said were irrelevant to the charges he was facing.

Documents were read at trial in which von Brunn wrote, “Goal: to deport all Jews and blacks from the white nations,” among other racist statements. In his testimony, he also said “the basic plan was to wind up where I am now,” meaning in court to raise publicity for his campaign against the Federal Reserve.

Von Brunn was in critical condition Wednesday after being shot by a security guard at the museum. Another guard, Stephen Tyrone Johns, was killed in the shooting, museum officials said.

Washington police and the FBI said the shooting appeared to have been the work of a single gunman, and there was no prior indication of the attack.

(Source: CNN)