Two years ago, Wilson’s 1983 conviction for selling weapons and explosives to Libya was thrown out by an outraged federal judge after he learned that a government affidavit – denying that Wilson was in contact with the CIA – was a lie.
Working with Ms. Bruce, Mr. Barcella spent four years gathering evidence. Aware of the investigation, Mr. Wilson fled to Libya. The plan to lure him back involved authorizing a former Wilson associate to propose a deal purportedly allowing him to return to the United States if he provided support for the clandestine war against the leftist government in Nicaragua. When he stepped off the plane in Santo Domingo, Mr. Wilson was immediately arrested and flown to New York. After trials handled by other federal prosecutors in Virginia, Texas and New York — based on the evidence gathered by Mr. Barcella and Ms. Bruce — Mr. Wilson received a sentence of 52 years in prison. The case was the subject of the 1986 book “Manhunt,” by Peter Maas.
In 2003 a federal judge in Texas threw out Mr. Wilson’s conviction for selling explosives to Libya, ruling that prosecutors had used false testimony to undermine his defense. By then Mr. Wilson had served 20 years. His convictions for attempted murder and illegal export of arms were not overturned, and he was released from prison in 2004. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/18/us/18barcella.html
Ed Wilson stood accused of shipping 42,000 pounds of the plastic explosive C-4 directly to Libyan dictator Moammar Qadaffy in 1977, and then hiring U.S. experts - former U.S. Army Green Berets - to teach Qadaffy's people how to make bombs shaped like lamps, ashtrays and radios. Bombs were actually made, and foes of Qadaffy were actually murdered. This was the ongoing crime that had made Wilson, and his still-missing accomplice, former CIA employee Frank Terpil, the most infamous desperadoes in the world. C-4, according to some experts, is the most powerful non-nuclear explosive made. Two pounds in the right places can bring down a jumbo jet. Hence, 42,000 pounds would be enough to bring down 21,000 jumbo jets. C-4 is highly prized on the world's black markets and is much in demand. It is supposedly very tightly controlled where it is manufactured - in the U.S.
At the time it was shipped from Houston International Airport, in 1977, the 42,000 pounds of C-4 represented almost the entire United States domestic supply. It had been collected for Wilson by one California explosives distributor who collected it from a number of manufacturers around the country. Surprisingly, no one had officially noticed. Wilson had, in earlier and subsequent deals, also sold a number of handguns to Qadaffy, and several had been used in assassinations of Libyan dissidents in a number of countries, including the United States. It was these and other firearms violations by Wilson, including a scheme to ship more than a thousand M16 rifles to Qadaffy, that had put the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (BATF) and Larry Barcella on Wilson's trail back in late 1977.