The content of Dark Arenas includes topics and subject matter that may not be suitable for all audiences. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are solely those of the individuals participating in the podcast and do not represent those of AudioChuck or its employees. Information discussed by the host and interviewees includes content related to crimes against children, abuse, acts of terrorism, and violence. Listener discretion is advised. It's in the safest places, our neighborhoods, and backyards that we think nothing bad will happen. But that's an assumption. One that can blind us because bad things do happen. Something just blew up. That's just too loud. Run. No. Horrible things.

The devices were at or near ground level.

Crimes waiting in the mailbox, sitting at our doorsteps, or waiting for us at the mall. In today's episode, we're entering the dark arena of bombings, taking a close look at how the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives investigates these crimes, and why these destructive acts always leave authorities with more questions than answers about bomb makers. I'm immediately cold as I step into the lobby of a generic-looking office building in Northwest Miami. The structure hovers high above me, and it's tucked between several ones just like it in a commercial business park off of Interstate 75. Rain was just starting to fall outside when I walked in, so the sprinkles of water on my skin only amplify my chill as I stand in the lobby. My shoes squeak on the sleek tile floor that a decal was pressed on, telling me to stand six feet apart from others. But there aren't any others. It's just me. I send off a text to the ATF agent who's supposed to be meeting me here. Then I wait. She quickly replies saying, I'll be down in 10. Somewhere above me is the Miami Field Division of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, also known as the ATF.

I panned my eyes around the empty lobby and realized there are several security cameras peering back at me. I count at least four shiny dark orbs mounted in each corner of the lobby. The only open office suite on the first floor is an ADT security branch. All of the other offices are closed due to COVID-19. It seems like to me, a lot of cameras are here just for one ADT branch. There are even more cameras next to the elevator doors. Yeah, there's definitely a government office watching me from upstairs. I wait another 10 minutes and then the elevator opens. The ATF Public Information Officer invites me in and we go up. After a few introductions to several men in offices on the sixth floor, I sit down at a large conference table across from ATF supervisory special agent, Kevin Bonakowski. Kevin is a clean cut, middle-aged man who has spent the last 20 years investigating acts of arson and bombings in cities across Florida and the United States. He joined the ATF in 1999 and three years later became an explosive specialist. That job is given to someone who can look at a bombing scene and answer the most important questions.

After a bomb goes off, how did the bomb? What was the bomb made of? What were the basics of it? When Kevin.

And a squad of ATF agents show up at a crime scene, a bomb is either just detonated or there's strong suspicion that one is about to. It's scary stuff and super stressful. Kevin says one of the most intense and frequent calls he's dispatched to is that someone has reported a suspicious package. Sometimes it's a book bag left on a street corner, a duffel bag in a parking lot, a suitcase abandoned at a bus stop. In the eyes of the ATF, those are all potential ticking time bombs, literally. Have you ever been to a call where there actually was a live bomb or a bomb that could have been detonated?

There's been a couple of occasions in South Florida where the devices were, let's say maybe they wouldn't have worked exactly the way they were intended, but they were suspicious in nature.

In other words, real bombs, but ones that didn't detonate correctly. Now, we all know law enforcement agents and first responders are often referred to as being the people who run toward danger instead of away from it. But running toward bombs? What Kevin and his colleagues do seems like another level. I mean, I don't know many people signing up for that. It's a dark thing, not knowing if what you're running toward or methodically trying to diffuse is about to blow up in your face. In bomb response situations, how close is too close and how do you establish a perimeter of safety for the people investigating it if you don't even know what you're dealing with yet?

A lot of that will be based on the size of what the item is. If it's just a small briefcase, that may not be as big as, Okay, well, we have a truck. That looks a little suspicious. That perimeter, of course, is going to be larger.

At this point in our interview, Kevin brought up something interesting, something I hadn't thought about, something that, to me, made the scenario we were discussing even darker.

We know in history that there have been people that have targeted law enforcement. There could be a situation where somebody may put a suitcase in one place, and when we arrive on scene and set up a command post, if you will, or an area to work from, somebody could also plant a device there and somebody could target, try and foresee where we're going to be and plant another device there.

After years of experience and teaching case studies on explosives and bombs, Kevin says it is absolutely within a bomber's psychology to bait law enforcement or public crowds to a decoy device just to have another device waiting to blow them up. That is an extremely dark thought. I wanted to stop the interview right there and just focus on that element of a bombmaker's twisted psychology, but there was more Kevin and I had to get to first. He went on to explain that a secondary bomb intentionally planted at a scene in order to harm the police or citizens is a worst-case scenario, and it is not common at all. But an example of this is the Boston Marathon bombing attack in April 2013. In that act of terrorism, the Cernayov Brothers planted improvised explosive devices, also known as IEDs, in crowds of hundreds of spectators, runners, and event staff near the marathon's finish line. According to the FBI's investigation, 26-year-old Tamrlin Sarnaev and his 19-year-old brother, Yeohar Cernayov, planted and detonated the devices with the intent to kill as many people as possible. According to the FBI, the bombs were placed about 100 yards apart and went off in succession, roughly 8-12 seconds apart.

The brothers made the devices at home by stuffed pressure cookers with nails, baby pellets, and other shrapnel. Three people died in those explosions. One, a boy who was just eight years old. Hundreds of others were injured in the attack and during the brothers' rampage across Boston as they tried to evade capture. Tamaritan was killed by police and Johar was arrested, tried, and convicted of federal crimes. Kevin says, in general, what the Cernayah brothers did takes a lot of planning and know-how, and it's just not something the ATF sees very often, which is good because if every suspicious package call was like that, we'd be living in a very scary world, dangerous for us and definitely dangerous for first responders. Thankfully, with the help of modern technology like remote operable robots and scope cameras, inspecting suspicious packages has gotten much more sophisticated and safer. With these tools in hand, Kevin says the perimeter of a suspicious package call is now much, much larger than it used to be, which protects everyone involved. Kevin isn't the human being waddling up in body armor to potential bombs anymore. A computerized robot is. Most of us have probably seen these devices depicted in a movie or seen one in news reports.

The robots to me look like miniature versions of the rovers that NASA sends to Mars. These bomb robots come with a hefty price tag, but in the end, they're dispensible. Kevin says the robots see more action than he does these days just because of the way they're designed and they're easier to control. With this technology now in place on a regular basis, defusing or disassembling potential bombs is a lot safer. But just because Kevin and his team have this fancy equipment that in many aspects replaces a human being, it's not like the ATF just lets its guard down. According to Kevin, across the country, every suspicious package call is treated as a high priority. But he admits that a lot of the time, the item in question usually turns out to be nothing. It's just a misplaced piece of mail, a handbag, or a forgotten suitcase. Every now and then, though, throughout his career, Kevin has been to a handful of calls where a suspicious item was the real thing. In some of those cases, he says the call he gets is reporting that a bomb has already detonated. It went off because it was designed in such a way that by the time a victim or victims noticed it, something triggered the explosion.

Those incidents almost always have fatalities or some serious injury, as was the case in March 2018, when a serial bomber in Austin, Texas, got Kevin's team and the world's attention in one of the worst domestic bombing attacks in recent US history.

I don't know what's going on, my neighbor.

Something exploded or something.

There's blood everywhere.

Austin, Texas police received an alarming 911 call on March second, 2018. It was from a man who lived next door to 39-year-old Anthony Stephan House. The panicked caller was making an audible plea for immediate help. I don't know.

What's going on, my neighbor. Something exploded or something.

There's.

Blood everywhere. As you.

Clearly heard, this guy was in complete shock as to what had just happened to his neighbor. The city of Austin police chief later revealed that Anthony had picked up a package that someone left on his front porch. As soon as he lifted it, it blew up in his face, fatally wounding him. For the next 19 days, bombing attacks, just like the one that killed Anthony, happened all across the city of Austin. According to CNN, two people were killed. This included Anthony Stephan House and teenager, Draylyn Mason. The explosions also injured at least five other people. All were said to be victims of the same serial bomber on the loose in the city. Police are looking at similarities between this.

Incident and the one on.

March second in.

North.

Austin. One final detonation killed the bombmaker, 23-year-old Mark Anthony Kandah. Police caught up to him on a highway near the hotel outside of Austin where he was hiding out. Got an explosion. Got an explosion inside the vehicle. A federal and local investigation determined that young Mark had built all of the bombs by hand. The first three, he delivered by hand to his victim's doorsteps. Then, as a part of his fourth device, he devised a tripwire on a residential sidewalk and injured two men walking. After that, he began shipping devices via FedEx. One package went off in a FedEx San Antonio processing plant, injuring a worker and another device was intercepted before it was able to detonate. Back in Florida at the time, Kevin Bonakowski watched the attacks unfold. Early on, word got around the ATF community after the second bomb went off that the attacks were the work of a potential serial bomber. That's when Kevin put his crew into action.

Well, the Austin case a couple of years ago was the first one that comes to mind. That was the one that the gentleman, the guy was putting devices randomly and mailing them through FedEx. We stood up a command post. We sent agents there. I think they were even sent K9, explosives canines there, detection canines there to help.

So something like Austin, that's a pretty rare case.

Across the board. Yeah.

Kevin calls Austin a rare case because by all standards, it is. Even though he didn't personally work the bombings, Kevin began to study the case closely. He often goes over the ins and outs of it in training seminars with new explosives of specialists. For Kevin, what's most interesting about Austin is how Mark Kandett built the bombs and the mechanisms that caused the packages to explode. The formal investigation found that Mark had done research online. After studying the case, Kevin knew that that was true.

It's just on the Internet. And back in the '70s, '60s and early '80s and before computers, there were books for these kinds of things that you could buy, and now it's just the Internet.

Kevin says it's so unfortunate, but the truth is that it's not hard to build a bomb thanks to the Internet. A lot of the time, the blueprints bombers use can be traced back to video tutorials or step-by-step downloadable literature.

We're going to look on the Internet and see if any of this looks familiar or similar to what's on the Internet and gage our investigation. That guy's used it as a tool. We're going to use it as a tool, too. That's where the information is coming from.

I asked Kevin, Wouldn't it just be better if online videos of how to build bombs were taken down?

I mean, yeah, I guess. I mean, it does make it our job a little tougher, but I know that's not realistic. We don't worry about things that we can't control. So yeah, it would be nice if it didn't exist, but we know that's not realistic.

He's right. It's not realistic, at least not with the Internet. I typed in how to make a bomb. It is something that you can search online, and I'm probably going to have my web history flagged for researching that. I didn't click on any of the results because I'm not trying to get arrested. But we all know the Internet is a dark place. And Kevin's right. Even if popular video upload sites and websites ban this content, another one is likely to just pop up in its place. It's a dark arena, whack-amole, if you will. Plus, bomb makers are actively seeking out this content, and they'll find it one way or the other. Because the vast black hole that is the internet is rampant with videos and tutorials on how to make bombs, Kevin says his investigations have to embrace the fact that explicit material is going to fall into the wrong hands. He says it's to the ATF's advantage to use videos and materials online to identify bomb-maker strategies, see what their source material is, and track the signatures of their crimes that way. He says any amateur can attempt to build an explosive device, but many are not smart enough to know how to plan and plot a detonation or a series of bombings, and evade law enforcement agencies at the same time.

Also, the materials required to assemble a bomb are so dangerous that the maker is always at risk of blowing themselves up. What is the impact of someone plotting and planning and trying to carry out those crimes?

Well, what's dangerous for the citizens, obviously, is explosives can be, especially homemade explosives, can be unpredictable. So what you think or what the bomber thinks it's going to do, it may not react that way. And then if we end up being in somebody's house or office business where they've been building, then that's even takes it, makes it more dangerous because we don't know what they've been using. Those items, again, can be unpredictable and volatile. There's household materials and items that people can purchase to make bombs. I don't really want to get into giving the how-tos or whatever, but there's things there that, unfortunately, household products that you can combine certain chemicals or certain powders that could make a bomb. And you don't have to be a scientist or anything. It's much like following a recipe, unfortunately. And if they take certain ingredients, again, very unpredictable because you don't know how things are going to react based on temperature and humidity. It's very unsafe, obviously. But there's things out there that are commonly available that can be used.

Kevin says he can tell just by looking at an explosive device whether or not the bomb maker was an amateur tutorial watcher or a person who has advanced engineering knowledge. The latter are the most dangerous. During a post-blast investigation or if a bomb is intercepted and defused, Kevin says devices from individuals with advanced skills will often reveal they have a higher expertise when it comes to bomb making, particularly when it comes to the bomb's trigger.

Something that would use electronics like a cell phone. I think that would be lower in number. I don't know that we see that a lot because it would be more complicated. You would have to have some knowledge of electronic circuitry, whereas there's other ways to, as one could see on the Internet, there's other things that are easier to use other materials that are easier to use and build to make a bomb than using something like that. Yeah, some of the things on the Internet, you could see they work.

Now that I knew a lot about how bomb makers operate and the tactics that the ATF uses to try and identify their work, I was at the point in the interview where I wanted to focus on the why. Why did bombers strike? Why did they target people in such a violent way? In the case of Austin bomber, Mark Kondet, authorities in his family to this day say they still don't know what his reason was. He left a 25-minute manifesto recorded on his cell phone after he took his own life, but in it, he never mentioned why he did what he did or expressed any remorse. Kevin says, Many times, that's the case. There is no understandable reason for someone like Mark Kondant wanting to blow up random people. At least with defined acts of terrorism like the Boston Marathon bombing, the motivation of the bombers was a little bit clearer. It's weird, but the fact that FBI investigators determined the Cernayah brothers had clear ideological motivations for doing what they did to a crowd of American families and kids somehow gives us the ability to wrap our minds around their act. Kevin says trying to understand bombers, though, is tricky, but a lot of them, in most cases, have the same psychological connections to their crimes that arsonists do.

They fall into specific categories. Some bombers are revenge seekers who want to make a violent declaration to whoever or whatever it is they hate. These are your scorned lovers or a terrorist, etc. Other bombers just want to see the world burn and prove they're smarter than the cops. These are your narcissists and the psychopaths. Then there are the bombers who want to be heroes, so they create crisis scenarios that allow them to swoop into the rescue. These are your sociopaths. Lastly, there are people who simply want to reap a personal or financial benefit from loss. These are your greed-seekers. Is there anything dark about what these cases reveal in criminals?

I think maybe greed is maybe the thing is that we see a lot with the fires as people get greedy. I guess the financial gain, that would be the darkest thing I see. I think in bombings, we see, I guess the darker side would be revenge, I guess. We had a bombing in 2000, and actually, it was after 9/11. We had a car bomb in marathon that came to mind where it was a boyfriend that was angry. I think it was a financial... I think they were common law, husband and wife. And so there were some monies that he didn't get, and he placed a bomb in his partner's car. And so that was probably partly financially motivated, but also revenge-motivated. I think when the bomb means you see it can get personal, I guess is the best way to put it. We see husbands versus wives, or wives versus husbands who will really do something like that. We've seen people for the thrill of it or the excitement will set fires to see the reaction of the fire department and the activity and the commotion. We've seen that several times. That would be another category where somebody will set the fire and actually be in the...

We've seen that people in the crowd watching the fire response and the police response. That's pretty dark. Yeah, that's dark. And we've had, unfortunately, we've had, and I'm not saying this is a general rule, but we had volunteer firefighters that in some of the rural, slower, smaller towns that would have set fires because they want to be the hero syndrome, or they want to be the ones to say, I put this fire out, or I discovered it, but they're actually the ones that are the suspects.

There's no doubt about it. Carrying out a bombing takes a certain level of depravity. A person has to reach down into a dark part of their inner being to conceive the idea of mass slaughter, act on it, and then live with the aftermath of their crimes. If they choose not to live and take their own life along with their victims, then according to Kevin, the bomber knows they're going to do that probably before they even execute their plan to avoid capture. Understanding these kinds of criminals is really dark, and there's so much more related to this I want to talk about. I'm bringing you a part two of Things That Go Boom. I'll be leaving our sit down with Kevin and hearing from a very different ATF agent. Don't miss out on that and be sure to check out Things That Go Boom Part Two. This episode of Dark Arenas was written and produced by Delia D'Ambra. With writing assistants from executive producer, Ashley Floars. You can find pictures and source material for this episode on our website, darkarenas. Com. Dark Arenas is an audio Chuck original show. So what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve?