The Dr. Robert J. Goldstein Story

Motive or Madness

Kristi Goldstein

Soon after Goldstein's arrest, both Hardee and Kristi Goldstein began cooperating with federal prosecutors. The way Hardee told the story, he had agreed only to be the wheelman for Goldstein's attack. Hardee claimed that his only role was to "drive Goldstein to the Islamic center, just to damage the buildings but not to hurt anyone."

Hardee insisted that Goldstein had a political motive for his plan. A big part of it, Hardee told authorities, was payback. Goldstein, he said, wanted revenge for the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington. But also, Hardee said, Goldstein, who had never been a particularly observant Jew, had suddenly found himself swept up in a wave of cultural fervor and was prepared to become a soldier of solidarity with the victims of terrorism in Israel. According to the Associated Press, Goldstein "wanted to make a statement for 'his people' because of ongoing hostilities between Israel and the Palestinians in the Middle East."

But Goldstein's lawyer, Myles Malman, saw things differently. To him, the root of Goldstein's rage was more internal than external and had little to do with his Jewishness or lack of it.

As Malman put it in an interview with The Forward, Goldstein's motivation wasn't as much politics as it was madness, the product of a variety of maladies, "obsessive compulsive disorder, bi-polar disorder and... depression," for which Goldstein was taking a "cocktail" of psychiatric drugs that led him to collect a massive arsenal of explosives.

There was, Malman said, no question that Goldstein planned to destroy the mosque and community center the "physical building" as Malman put it. But Malman said he was convinced that the rest of the plan, the detailed plot to gun down or knife victims as they ran for their lives, was all a fantasy. "He never actually planned to do that," Malman insists.

Dr. Bruce Welch

In court, Malman tried to minimize even further the threat Goldstein posed. As Dr. Bruce Welch, a psychiatrist who has examined Goldstein more than a dozen times, testified during a hearing in the case according to published reports at the time, Goldstein's blueprint for the attack was "unrealistic, cartoonish" and "outrageously extensive."

To the psychiatrist, the Associated Press wrote, "that suggested the plan had the makings of a fantasy, though Goldstein at times believed he could carry it out.

All the same, prosecutors insisted that Goldstein's plan was far from simply the product of a fevered imagination. It was a calculated hate-fueled plot to inflict as much carnage as possible.

Goldstein's plan, prosecutors were quoted as saying at the time, involved "real people, real locations, real bombs." His target was not an individual Muslim, but "an entire population of people."