Keith Gilbert, a former Aryan Nations member, was convicted on September 11, 2006 on 11 counts of conspiracy, machine gun possession, possession of unregistered firearms, and being a felon in possession of a firearm.

Gilbert and two other men were arrested in Washington in three separate raids conducted by federal agents in Febriary 2005.  An unsealed federal complaint accused Gilbert of selling weapons, including machine guns, to an ATF informant. 

A former aide to deceased Aryan Nations leader Richard Butler, Gilbert, 66, was arrested at his home in north Seattle, where authorities also found more than 70 weapons.  

Gilbert's long criminal record includes a five year prison term for plotting to blow up a B'nai B'rith event honoring Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in the 1960s; police found 1,400 pounds of dynamite in Gilbert's possession at that time.  "I was planning to blow up Martin Luther King when he was speaking to 5,000 Jews at the Palladium in LA," Gilbert later said.         

Gilbert became involved with Richard Butler when he moved to Idaho in the early 1970s.  By the late 1970s, however, Gilbert had a falling out with Butler and formed an Aryan Nations splinter group called the Social Nationalist Aryan People's Party in 1979.       

In the 1980s Gilbert was convicted of assaulting a mentally retarded black teenager from a racially mixed family.  He has also served time for welfare fraud and tax evasion. 

Gilbert's sentencing is scheduled for December 15, 2006.