Welcome to Arrest Stories. A man in his seventies who spent decades evading capture after being named to the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list for domestic terrorism in the nineteen seventies has been arrested during a routine drug investigation at a Palm Beach Gardens motel. Heres what may have happened.
Richard Picariello's nearly fifty-year run from federal authorities came to an abrupt end on September twenty-first, twenty twenty-five, when Palm Beach Gardens Police executed a search warrant on room two zero four at the Inn of America motel on Northlake Boulevard. What began as a routine narcotics investigation targeting multiple suspects would uncover one of the FBI's longest-standing fugitives.
Picariello had been number three four three on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list since July nineteen seventy-six, when he led the Fred Hampton Unit of the People's Forces, a militant revolutionary group responsible for a devastating bombing campaign across New England. The organization targeted government buildings and infrastructure in protest of what they called systemic injustice and police violence.
The timeline of terror began in early May nineteen seventy-six when approximately one thousand two hundred pounds of explosives and between one hundred fifty and two hundred pounds of electric blasting caps were stolen from a firm in New Boston, New Hampshire. On July first, nineteen seventy-six, bombs exploded simultaneously at Logan Airport, Dorchester National Guard Armory, and Newburyport Superior Courthouse. The next day, the Post Office Building in Seabrook, New Hampshire was bombed. On May eleventh, nineteen seventy-six, Central Maine Power Company in Augusta, Maine suffered a devastating explosion.
One law enforcement official described the arrest by saying they had "never seen anything like it," referring to the decades-long manhunt that finally concluded in a routine drug bust. Picariello was found guilty of interstate transportation of explosives on February third, nineteen seventy-seven, but had failed to appear for his court date, resulting in the warrant that led to his capture.
All suspects presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Do not take this report as factual, always verify facts. Thanks for watching Arrest Stories.