Phoenix -- A federal judge on Tuesday sentenced a white supremacist to 40 years in prison for a 2004 bombing that wounded a black city official in suburban Phoenix.
A jury earlier this year found Dennis Mahon, 61, guilty of three federal charges stemming from the package bomb that injured Don Logan, who is black and was Scottsdale's diversity director at the time, and hurt a secretary.
The jury stopped short of finding Mahon guilty of a hate crime after a six-week trial that included dramatic testimony from Logan and a female government informant.
In handing down the sentence, U.S. District Judge David Campbell said the bombing was an "act of domestic terrorism" that was done to promote an agenda of hate and racism.
Mahon, meanwhile, maintained his innocence, telling the judge: "I didn't do this bombing." He said he felt bad for the victims, "but I can't apologize for something I didn't do."
Mahon had faced between seven and 100 years in prison. His twin brother, Daniel, also was accused in the case but was acquitted of the only charge he faced.
The package bomb detonated in Logan's hands on Feb. 26, 2004, in a Scottsdale city building.
Prosecutors argued at trial that the Mahon brothers bombed Logan on behalf of a group called the White Aryan Resistance, which they said encourages members to act as "lone wolves" and commit violence against nonwhites and the government.
They showed surveillance tapes of the brothers referring to Logan in racial slurs. They also played a voice mail that Dennis Mahon left at Scottsdale's diversity office just months before the bombing in which he angrily said: "The white Aryan resistance is growing in Scottsdale. There's a few white people who are standing up."
Defense attorneys said that someone working for the City of Scottsdale was likely the perpetrator because Logan's job made him unpopular.
They also heavily criticized the use of Rebecca Williams, 41, as an informant, giving her the nickname "trailer park Mata Hari" - a reference to the Dutch exotic dancer who was convicted of working as a spy for Germany during World War I.
Investigators met the former stripper through her brother, an informant himself on the Hells Angels motorcycle gang, and recruited her for the Mahon case, directing her to act like a government separatist and racist. She wore revealing clothes and sent racy photos to the brothers to win their trust.
Williams met the brothers in January 2005 after investigators set her up in a government-provided trailer at a Catoosa, Okla., campground where the brothers were staying. A Confederate flag was placed in her window, and prosecutors say the Mahons introduced themselves within minutes of her arrival.
Dennis Mahon opened up to Williams as their conversations were recorded, telling her how to make bombs after she told him a fictitious story that she wanted to harm a child molester she knew.
Logan testified at trial about the unbearable pain he felt after he opened the package, describing the lights going out, the room filling with smoke and debris falling from the ceiling.
Logan, who now works as a diversity administrator in the Phoenix suburb of Glendale, was hospitalized for three days. He needed four surgeries to remove shrapnel from an arm and hand, do a skin graft on his severely damaged forearm, and restore some use to one of his fingers that nearly had to be amputated.
