(Ken Silva, Headline USA) Adam Fox hasn’t been heard from since last Wednesday, when he was unexpectedly transferred to one of the world’s most notorious prisons in Florence, Colorado.
Fox, the alleged “ringleader” of a plot to kidnap Michigan’s governor, had been incarcerated in a county jail, where he was communicating with an independent journalist for a documentary about his case.
Fox and the other man convicted in the kidnapping conspiracy, Barry Croft, also recently recorded video statements intended for the House Weaponization Subcommittee, which was formed to investigate FBI malfeasance. Fox and Croft are calling for the congressional body to subpoena sealed discovery material from the case, promising it will reveal that the FBI’s 12-plus undercover informants and agents incited the plot and entrapped them.
Headline USA published Croft’s statement last Monday. The next day, the two men were sent to other facilities, and haven’t been heard from since Wednesday.
Headline USA understands that Fox has been sent to ADX Florence supermax prison, while Croft is at an Oklahoma facility waiting to be transferred again—possibly to the high-security prison in Terre Haute, though his family hasn’t confirmed that yet and the Bureau of Prisons declined to comment.
Fox and Croft’s family think that the transfers are retaliation for them talking to the documentarian, and for issuing statements for the Weaponization Subcommittee.
“[The government] wants to shut them up because they don’t want the truth to be exposed,” said Fox’s mom, Christina Fox—she has a different last name now, but Headline USA is using her previous name at her request for privacy reasons.
After government secured a conviction against Fox in his second trial conviction last year, Christina said she expected her son to eventually be transferred to another facility.
But with Fox being a non-violent offender with no prior convictions, the mother thought he’d be placed in a medium-security prison, where he could undergo substance-abuse and mental-health therapy. Fox was the recently divorced homeless man with diagnosed depression living in the basement of a vacuum repair shop in 2020—which critics say made him a prime target for FBI informants to manipulate.
So it came to Christina’s shock and horror when Fox called last Wednesday to say he was being transferred to Florence supermax, the home of inmates such as drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, Oklahoma City bombing accomplice Terry Nichols and 1993 World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef.
Christina said her son and Croft were transferred Tuesday morning. Both were transported in individual cages inside of separate vans, she said.
“He said he was put in a cage when they transported him,” said Fox’s mother. “I don’t know if it was just for the trip to Detroit, or also on the flight.”
Croft’s mother, Rosemarie Battaglia-McGuire, told Headline USA similar information. Battaglia-McGuire has been receiving status updates on her son via his girlfriend.
“They’re treating them like genocidal maniacs, transporting them in cages,” she told Headline USA.
Christina further said that when she spoke with Fox on Wednesday from Oklahoma, he hadn’t received his prescribed Zoloft and Buspar medication for depression and anxiety.
“Those are medications that you just can’t stop abruptly,” she said. “My concern is that his anxiety is going to get the best of him.”
Christina said she’s terrified for her son’s safety. Fox apparently told his sister multiple times during his criminal proceedings that he was worried about being killed if convicted.
“It’s a nightmare because I don’t know what’s happening to him. I don’t know if he’s safe. This prison has a lot of violence in it. There are inmates stabbed there every week; constant assaults,” she said.
“And I don’t understand why our government took someone who isn’t violent—and didn’t even do anything—and they take someone with his history and put him in with the worst of the worst.”
Indeed, the supermax at Florence is often where the Bureau of Prisons houses inmates with histories of violent behavior in other prison facilities. Human rights watchdogs have repeatedly criticized Florence for its abuses, including force-feeding inmates and keeping them in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day—a practice mental health experts say amounts to psychological torture.
Florence is also known as a facility that prevents inmates from speaking to the media. Some inmates are put under what are known as “special administrative measures”—only being allowed one phone call a month, having all letters read and redacted by the FBI, having no access to media and having their lawyers prohibited from sharing what they are told by clients.
The inability of potential whistleblowers to contact the public was detailed in a book by Kathy Wilburn-Sanders, who lost her two grandchildren in the Oklahoma City bombing. Wilburn-Sanders, one of the “Oklahoma City dissidents” who believes that the U.S. government didn’t catch everyone involved in the bombing, was attempting to interview Nichols about his other co-conspirators.
However, then-supermax warden Robert Hood denied Wilburn-Sanders her interview because it “could pose a risk to the internal security of this institution,” he said in a letter.
Wilburn-Sanders suspected at the time that “somewhere, some agency with power wanted to keep Nichols quiet.”
“What were they hiding?” Wilburn-Sanders wondered. “Could identifying additional [accomplices] reveal the identity of government agents who were involved in the failed sting operation?”
Wilburn-Sanders again tried to interview Nichols over the phone in 2006—this time live on CBS’s 60 Minutes—but was unsuccessful. She later learned from Nichols’s mother that he was blocked from calling her.
“He said that officials notified him, on the day he was to make the call, that my name had been removed from his calling list—permanently … Nichols had found out about the permanent ban as he prepared to dial my phone to start the 60 Minutes interview,” she wrote. “My conversations with Nichols were officially and forever terminated in 2006.”
The Terre Haute prison Croft could be headed to has similar restrictions on communications. Terre Haute is home to one of the country’s two “communications management units,” which are prison facilities designed to prevent terrorists and organized crime figures from communicating with their networks outside. Headline USA published a story about CMUs last week, detailing the saga of a man who says he’s being held there in retaliation for refusing to be a government informant in a gun-walking operation similar to Operation Fast and Furious.
Fox and Croft both have appeals pending in their cases. Meanwhile, their families are still urging the Weaponization Committee to obtain the sealed case records—before it’s too late.
“I’d encourage people to write the committee, write Chairman Jim Jordan—have them subpoena the discovery material in that case. Because if they want to learn the truth about the FBI, it’s right there in black and white,” said Fox’s mother.
“Once that discovery is made public, this whole thing gets blown wide open.”
Ken Silva is a staff writer at Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/jd_cashless.
