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8
If it is true that Sgt. Swanson did not personally discover the dynamite, then he committed perjury at the trial when
he said he did. Perhaps that is why he neglected to write in his police report that he found the dynamite, because
he did not find it. At the same federal hearing, Sgt. Pfeffer gave the judge a detailed description of his activities in
the basement with Sgt. Swanson!! At the trial, Sgt. Pfeffer said he never went in the basement, so Sgt. Pfeffer
committed perjury at the trial, too.
Another discrepancy is that one of the police reports says that the dynamite was found hidden under a door, or
some boards .Subsequently, the officers testified that it was in plain view. What's the truth? Was it hidden under a
door or was it in plain view?
Officer Marvin McClarty was on duty the night they searched Mondo's house. He was suspicious because they
closed off the entire street from 29th to 30th on Parker and wouldn't let vehicles or pedestrians through the area. He
states publicly to this day that he believes the dynamite was planted in Mondo's basement.
Although none of this proves that the police planted dynamite in Mondo's basement, the shoddy police report and
the changing testimony surrounding the search raise doubts about the credibility of that assertion.
ATF WARRANT
To make matters worse, Mondo's first attorney never believed that the police planted dynamite in his basement. A
1978 Washington Post article, "Are These America's Political Prisoners?" says the following:
"Rice's first attorney, David Herzog of Omaha, said Rice is innocent but not a political prisoner. He dismissed
the claim that police could have planted the evidence, saying no one ever brought that to his attention during his
investigation."
Mondo claims he did tell his attorney he thought the police planted the dynamite in his basement however, he first
thought there was a possibility that somebody else might have put it there. This ATF warrant initially made Mondo's
suspicious that someone in the NCCF might have possessed dynamite.
The warrant was applied for on July 20, 1970. The informant was identified as the "sister of a girlfriend of Ed
Poindexter." According to Agent Sledge, this informant said she was present
when five members of the NCCF
made a suitcase bomb out of dynamite at the headquarters. She said they had bundles of dynamite stored there.
She drew a picture of a machine gun that was so accurate, Agent Sledge recognized it as a machine gun of
Russian manufacture. She is reported to have said she saw 10 boxes of these weapons.
The Justice Department in Washington asked Agent Sledge to provide some information on his informant. When he
complied, they told him to call the raid off. According to a World Herald
article, the Justice Department felt the
warrant was based on "questionable information."
At first, NCCF members heard the informant on the warrant was someone who had been picked up for prostitution.
This informant was actually a girl who was 14-years old. She had been a runaway, but it cannot yet be confirmed
if the police ever arrested her on suspicion of prostitution.
Mondo eventually decided the information in the ATF warrant was nonsense. He had never seen ten cases of
Russian machine guns at NCCF headquarters. There had never been any dynamite stored there. Although it has
not been determined at what point the identity of the informant became known to NCCF members, Mondo agreed
with the Justice Department that this warrant was based on questionable information. Unfortunately, his lawyer
decided that the warrant must be based on fact. His lawyer assumed it was likely that one of the men named in this
warrant had stashed the dynamite in Mondo's basement. He did not believe his client's assertion that the police had
planted it there. Evidently, he never attempted to contact the informant to corroborate the information contained in
the warrant. As late as 1993, this attorney wrote in an editorial to the World Herald,
"...there is a reason why Officer Larry Minard did not have to die. There was a search warrant to seize dynamite
from an address on North 24th Street before the explosion that took the officer's life and injured others. Competition
between the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms brought about the quashing of the warrant by
an assistant U.S. attorney. Police knew before the explosion where the dynamite came from and how it got to
Omaha."
The adolescent named as the informant disappeared one night that same year. Her body was never discovered
and her parents declared her dead. The informant's older sister indicated that the police who investigated the girl's
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