Granite City Man Sentenced for Solicitation to Commit Crime of Violence
Scheme Involved Plan to Commit Murder

A Granite City, Illinois man was sentenced in federal court to serve 20 years in prison (the maximum statutory sentence) after pleading guilty to the crime of solicitation of a crime of violence on December 4, 2012, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of Illinois, Stephen R. Wigginton, announced today.

“This was a harsh but fair and deserved sentence for what could only be described as a crime involving bizarre circumstances and extreme violence.” said United States Attorney Wigginton.

In addition to the 20 years in prison, Brett Nash, 46, was sentenced to three years of supervised release following imprisonment, a $500 fine, and a $100 special assessment. There is no parole in the federal system. Nash had been charged with soliciting his wife to abduct, seize, and confine a person and to hold that person in order to obtain money from him.

Previous court proceedings revealed that the charge arose from incidents occurring in late 2011 and January 2012, in which Nash sought the help of his wife (TN) and another person in abducting a Granite City lawyer and obtaining money from him. A factual stipulation filed with the court explained the scheme in great detail.

At the sentencing hearing today, Nash argued that he did not have the intent to murder. In response, the prosecution played several recorded conversations between Nash and TN, and between Nash and the confidential witness (CW), leading the judge to conclude that the intention to murder the victim was clear. The judge cited the earnestness with which Nash explained his plans for the victim to the CW as the reason for finding that Nash had the intention to murder the victim.

The recordings indicated that Nash wanted his wife to lure the victim from his home, whereupon Nash and the CW would seize the victim and take him back to his house. There, they would rig him with a fake explosive device; then Nash planned to take the victim to his bank and force him to withdraw all his money under the threat that Nash would detonate the explosive if the victim did not cooperate.

The recordings indicated that Nash’s initial plan was to electrocute the victim by putting the victim in a hot tub and electrocuting him by throwing in a radio. He would then throw in a cat and electrocute the cat to make it look like the cat had accidentally knocked the radio into the hot tub. However, one of the recordings indicated that on the day Nash was arrested, he told the CW that he wanted two guns for the robbery. He told the CW that it didn’t make any difference what caliber the gun was because the victim was going “to commit suicide,” implying that he and the CW would shoot the victim and make it look like a suicide. “Dead men don’t talk,” said Nash in one of the recordings.

The case was investigated by members of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Illinois State Police, the Granite City Police Department, the Metropolitan Enforcement Group of Southwestern Illinois, and the Madison County Sheriff’s Department. The case was prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephen B. Clark.