- February, 1990: Truck loaded with 2000 pounds of explosives was placed outside of Los Angeles IRS service center. Truck did not explode, but assistant U.S. attorney who later tried the case said that "the scene would have resembled Beirut," if it had.
- April 1, 1990: Thirteen pipe bombs launched from a nearby field landed on the roof of an IRS office and in its parking lot, resulting in minimal damage.
California resident Dean Harvey Hicks, angry over a deduction denied him by the U.S. Internal Revenue Service in his 1981 income tax return, used terrorist tactics to draw attention to the perceived injustice. In fact, Hicks displayed classic characteristics of terrorists by seeking to maximize spectacle rather than injury. At his trial, he told the court that the timing of his attacks was "intended to cause the greatest amount of display with minimal injury to anyone around it" (New York Times, August 17, 1991).
Read more: What is Terrorism?
Dean Harvey Hicks, described as a "soft-spoken" aerospace engineer for Ford Aerospace, grew angry when the IRS dismissed his deduction taken for a 1981 donation of about $8,500 to a mail order church. In response, he bombed several IRS service offices in the Southern California area over the course of the 1980s, using materials that had been rejected by Ford Aerospace. He was arrested in his Costa Mesa home in the summer of 1991, at the age of 45, and sentenced to 20 years in prison following trial. He was also fined $45,000 and ordered to pay $335,805 in restitution to the IRS.