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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.


The Web site Holy Western Empire includes writings by James von Brunn and a biography.

1 of 3  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.