A 48-year-old Salinas man was sentenced to 19 years, four months behind bars Monday for possession of bomb-making materials found in his car during a traffic stop in Brea.
Saleh Ali, who acted as his own attorney, received the maximum sentence, after telling the judge “You’re a cockroach” and directing an anti-Semitic remark at a prosecutor.
In attempting to refute the argument of Orange County Deputy District Attorney Susan Laird, who was urging the judge to impose the maximum sentence, Ali said of Laird, “She seems to be confused … maybe she has a Jewish background, I don’t know.”
Laird is not Jewish. He also called the prosecutor “lopsided and disfigured.”
Ali was convicted March 4 of two counts each of use of a destructive device with the intent to injure, sale and transportation of a destructive device and possession of a destructive device on a public highway, along with one count of intent to unlawfully make a destructive device.
He was arrested Sept. 18, 2018, after a Brea police officer pulled him over about 9 p.m. for having an expired registration tag on his vehicle.
“During the traffic stop, the officer keyed in on a couple of suspicious items in the car he believed to be an explosive device,” Brea Police Lt. Adam Hawley said then. “He detained the driver out of an abundance of caution, locked down a little bit of the area and called out sheriff’s bomb squad deputies.”
The bomb squad destroyed the suspected explosive devices at the scene, Hawley said.
Police also found diagrams and instructions on bomb making in the car, according to Orange County District Attorney Todd Spitzer.
Police alerted the Orange County Intelligence Assessment Center, a coalition of federal, state and local law enforcement agencies, Hawley said.
Ali has two prior convictions in June 2003 in Passaic County, New Jersey, for aggravated assault with serious bodily injury and making terrorist threats, according to court records.
After the sentencing, Spitzer urged state lawmakers to make possession of bomb-making materials a “serious, violent felony,” which would have activated the state’s three-strikes law and made Ali eligible for a sentence of 78 years to life.
Spitzer said it was “completely outrageous” that possession of a bomb was not on the list of serious violent felonies.
Laird told the judge that Ali had an “extremely violent criminal history,” that included shooting at his brother-in-law and another victim in 2001 and slashing the throat of a victim at a Dunkin Donuts with a box cutter that same year in Pasaic County. Ali noted that the box cutter attack happened around the time of 9/11.
He was found guilty of both attacks in 2003, once by a jury and another by pleading guilty, Spitzer said.
In 2013, he got into a dispute about a lack of hot water at a hotel in Nepal, which led him a couple of months later to hurl a jar of acid into the employee’s face, blinding him in the right eye and partially blinding the victim in the left eye, Laird said.
Spitzer compared Ali to a wannabe gang member. There may be no record of the defendant having direct ties to a terrorist group, Spitzer said, before adding, “I absolutely believe he was acting as a wannabe terrorist.”
FBI assistant special agent in charge Joshua Stone said Ali wasn’t on the agency’s radar at the time he was arrested.
“In this case, we got lucky,” Stone said.