shootout in washington holocaust museum

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- An 88-year-old Maryland man with a long history of ties to white supremacist groups is the suspect in Wednesday's shooting at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, two law enforcement officials told CNN.

James von Brunn served six years in prison for trying to make what he called a "legal, non-violent citizens arrest" of Federal Reserve board members in 1981 -- a sentence he blamed on "a Negro jury, Jew/Negro attorneys" and "a Jew judge," he said on his Web site, "Holy Western Empire."

"He is in our files going back way into the 1980s," said Heidi Beirich, a researcher for the Montgomery, Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center. "He has an extremely long history with neo-Nazis and white supremacists. He's written extremely incendiary publications raging about Jews, blacks and the like."

Von Brunn is a native of St. Louis, Missouri, and a 1943 graduate of Washington University there. According to his online biography, he served as a Navy officer in World War II and became an advertising artist and executive after the war.

But by the late 1970s, Beirich told CNN, he had become a "hardcore neo-Nazi" and an associate of William Pierce -- the white supremacist leader whose 1978 book, "The Turner Diaries," is blamed for inspiring Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. Watch more about von Brunn's history with neo-Nazis »

In December 1981, angered by what he called the "treacherous and unconstitutional" acts of the Federal Reserve, von Brunn entered the central bank's Washington headquarters armed with a pistol, a shotgun, a knife, and a mock bomb, according to court records. He claimed to be a photographer who wanted to shoot pictures of the boardroom, and bolted up the stairs when security guards told him to wait.

While being subdued, he claimed to have planted a bomb, forcing the building's evacuation, court records state. He told officers he was upset over high interest rates -- then well into double digits -- and the state of the economy, which was in a recession.

Von Brunn, then 62, was sentenced to six years in prison on attempted kidnapping, second-degree burglary, assault and weapons charges. In a December 1984 appeal, his attorney, John Hogrogian, asked the court to release the defendant on bail, saying his client had "renounced his actions of December 7, 1981, and expressed remorse in a letter addressed to this court."

Von Brunn has "a young son and aches to see him again," his lawyer wrote.

Von Brunn's trial dealt extensively with his "attitudes about black and Jewish people," which his lawyer said were irrelevant to the charges he was facing.

Documents were read at trial in which von Brunn wrote, "Goal: to deport all Jews and blacks from the white nations," among other racist statements.

In his testimony he also said "the basic plan was to wind up where I am now," meaning in court to raise publicity for his campaign against the Federal Reserve.

His appeal was denied.

Von Brunn's Web site proclaims itself "a new, hard-hitting expose of the Jew conspiracy to destroy the white gene-pool." Watch more about von Brunn's Web site »

Postings attributed to von Brunn have appeared on numerous other sites, including ones that call the Holocaust and "The Diary of Anne Frank" hoaxes and bemoan the decline of the "Aryan gene pool."

"Bit by bit Liberalism ascended. Bit by bit the Constitution was re-interpreted. Bit by bit government institutions and Congressmen fell into JEW hands --then U.S. diplomacy, businesses, resources and manpower came under JEW control," one such message reads. "Whitemen sat on their collective asses and did NOTHING -- NOTHING BUT TALK."

More recently, messages attributed to von Brunn question the authenticity of President Obama's birth certificate, the subject of numerous conspiracy theories. Advocates of those theories imply that Obama was born overseas and therefore would be constitutionally ineligible to hold office.

Von Brunn was in critical condition Wednesday afternoon after being shot by a security guard at the museum. Another guard, Stephen Tyrone Johns, was killed in the shooting, museum officials said Wednesday afternoon. Watch witness describe shooting »

Washington police and the FBI said the shooting appeared to have been the work of a single gunman and there was no prior indication of the attack.