Man gets 40 years in FBI sting
White supremacist sentenced in murder for hire
When a self-described white supremacist turned up in South Florida and confided that he had murdered several people, including a man known as “Machete Bob,” it wasn’t long before one of his new pals ratted him out.
Adrian Apodaca was living in a trailer behind the clubhouse of the Dirty White Boys motorcycle club in Davie when the FBI launched a secret operation to figure out if he was making up stories or if he was a potential danger to the public.
The case soon morphed into a full-on sting with undercover agents offering Apodaca opportunities to take part in a series of increasingly more serious crimes but also giving him the opportunity to back out. Each time, Apodaca, who was secretly being recorded, enthusiastically participated.
He was eventually arrested in late 2016 in Georgia after driving 400 miles in the belief
that he was about to carry out a murder-for-hire in exchange for $5,000 and a new identity that would help him hide from law enforcement. It was all part of the FBI sting.
Some of the “tools of his trade” that he brought with him included a 54-inch metal garotte or thick wire that is used to strangle people, gas masks and bear repellent spray. He had also requested a semiautomatic pistol, with a silencer, which agents provided just before he was arrested.
On Friday, Apodaca was sentenced to 40 years in federal prison. Jurors convicted him last year of multiple charges related to the sting and the murder plot. He is now 45.
Though he has not been charged with the August 2015 crossbow shooting death of Robert “Machete Bob” McGuire in New Mexico, federal prosecutors Lawrence LaVecchio and Paul Schwartz told the judge Apodaca is still the main suspect in that murder.
Apodaca testified in his trial in federal court in West Palm Beach last year that he was telling “tall tales and legends” when he told the undercover informant that he had killed McGuire.
But the prosecutors said Apodaca told the informant in November 2015 that he had killed McGuire with a crossbow and that he and his girlfriend buried the body in a shallow grave in the desert near Las Lunas, New Mexico.
Apodaca knew that key detail about three months before McGuire’s body was found, buried in a shallow grave in the desert east of Las Lunas, authorities said. Albuquerque police did not reveal any information about the discovery of McGuire’s body until September 2016, some 10 months after Apodaca’s revelations.
McGuire’s parents, Geraldine and Allen, said Friday they got some measure of comfort knowing that Apodaca is imprisoned. But they said they hope that Apodaca will spend the rest of his life in prison and that prosecutors in New Mexico will eventually file murder charges against him for their son’s death.
“Bob was shot with a crossbow and he was heard screaming so we know he suffered,” Allen McGuire told the Sun Sentinel in an interview this week. “Our son was attacked, It was a stealth attack in the dark of night, and then his body was dumped in the desert for months.”
Their son acquired his colorful nickname in the 1970s when he got into a fight with several men and one of them attacked him with a machete, they said. McGuire’s hand was sliced open from the ring finger to the wrist, leaving him unable to use it for the rest of his life.
Apodaca’s defense attorney Assistant Federal Public Defender Neison Marks told the judge that Apodaca, who is nicknamed “Skitz,” had a very difficult and tragic life, plagued by mental illness that led to his first lengthy hospitalization when he was just 13. He was hospitalized again when he was 18.
Marks accused federal authorities of piling on more and more serious charges to ensure that Apodaca would serve an unnecessarily lengthy prison term. He said Apodaca is “regretful” about many of the things that happened in the case and in his life.
The defense had argued during the trial that Apodaca was a victim of entrapment by the agents but jurors rejected that defense.
Steven Watt, the paid informant in the case, testified in the trial that he too was a member of racist groups and indicated he was still committed to those beliefs. He said he informed on Apodaca because he thought that “unprovoked violence” undermined his white supremacist cause.