Larry Miller FBI file cites Delta Center bomb threat
As the Utah Jazz prepared for the sixth game of the 1997 NBA Finals, a man mailed a threat to team owner Larry H. Miller
“If you don’t want the Delta Center to to [sic] look like the Oklahoma Federal Building,” the letter said,” then do as we tell you….”
The writer wanted Miller to pay $150,000.
The extortion attempt is recounted in an 86-page FBI file on Miller released following his death in February. The documents offer new details of the threat, including a copy of the extortion letter.
The FBI captured the extortionist, Richard Lewis Christiansen, then a 42-year-old Tremonton resident, and he received home confinement and probation. The Delta Center, today called EnergySolutions Arena, and fans were unharmed.
Much like Miller years earlier, Christiansen had tried to start a car-sales business. But Christiansen tallied a $90,000 debt and had two children and an ailing wife.
Christiansen wrote the unsigned extortion letter to Miller and included a map and instructions to deliver the money the following week to a field in Woods Cross.
“If we see any one that looks out of place the deals off. Boom. Good by,” Christiansen wrote.
He also wrote “Go Jazz” in the center of the map. Christiansen mailed Miller a letter to his car dealership in Midvale and one to his dealership in Murray.
The letters arrived at the dealerships on June 13, 1997, the same day the Chicago Bulls eliminated the Jazz in Game 6 of the NBA Finals.
Miller did not read the letters until June 16, according to the FBI documents. He called Salt Lake City police, who called postal inspectors and the FBI.
Law enforcement decided to capture Christiansen at the meeting place. Instead of cash, agents packaged a tracking device and placed the meeting location under surveillance. An FBI agent posed as Miller and delivered the package.
In an interview last week, Thomas Kubic, the special agent in charge of the FBI in Utah in 1997, laughed as he recalled how the agent possessed a stature and hairline similar to Miller’s.
“For someone who didn’t know Larry or only saw him in the papers, [the agent] was a guy who could pass,” Kubic said.
Miller was briefed on the plan, documents say. An FBI report says Christiansen drove past the meeting place at least twice in his Cadillac Eldorado. When he stopped and picked up the package, placed between a dead tree and a stump, police and federal agents arrested him.
Christiansen quickly admitted, “I did it. I really did it,” according to documents.
In federal court, Christiansen pled guilty to one count of sending a threatening communication, but Christiansen argued he never intended to execute the bombing and did not know how to make a bomb.
The judge called Christiansen’s circumstances “a pathetic situation” and did not impose prison. Christiansen could not be reached this week and his attorney was unavailable for comment.
The FBI file does not indicate, and Kubic did not know, whether the Jazz playing in the NBA Finals influenced the timing of the threat.
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