Businessman accused of Super Bowl plot

PHOENIX - A would-be bar owner angry at being denied a liquor license threatened to shoot people at the Super Bowl and drove to within sight of the stadium with a rifle and 200 rounds of ammunition before changing his mind, federal authorities said.

Kurt William Havelock, who ultimately turned himself in, had vowed to "shed the blood of the innocent" in a manifesto mailed Sunday to media outlets, according to court documents. "No one destroys my dream," he wrote.

The documents say he was armed with an AR-15 assault-style rifle Sunday when he reached a parking lot near University of Phoenix Stadium in Glendale, where pre-game activities were happening.

"He waited about a minute and decided he couldn't do this," FBI agent Philip Thorlin testified at a detention hearing for Havelock on Tuesday.

Havelock's father testified that his son then called his fiancee and met his parents at his condominium in Tempe, like Glendale a Phoenix suburb.

"He was very upset; he was sobbing hysterically," Frank Havelock said. "He said, 'I've done something terribly, terribly wrong.'"

Kurt Havelock, 35, was charged Monday with mailing threatening communications. He is being held without bail, and additional hearings have yet to be scheduled.

Havelock's lawyer, Jeffrey Allen Williams, did not immediately return a call seeking comment.

Federal authorities say Havelock was upset over being denied a liquor license.

A few months ago, Tempe officials denied Havelock's application for a liquor license for a Halloween-themed bar called The Haunted Castle, city spokeswoman Shelley Hearn said.

Tempe officials never recommended the license to the state liquor board, Hearn said.

"There were some neighbors who came forward and said it wasn't the right business for their part of Tempe," she said. "They'd heard he wanted to call his place 'Drunkenstein's.'"

The FBI said in the complaint that Havelock had planned to attack Super Bowl fans at the stadium in what he called an "econopolitical confrontation."

"I will not be bullied by the financial institutions and their puppet politicians," Havelock wrote in the eight-page manifesto, according to the complaint.

"I will test the theory that bullets speak louder than words. Perhaps the blood of the inculpable will cause a paradigm shift. ... Someone has to start the revolution but no one wants to be first."

Authorities said in the complaint that Havelock first thought of targeting a shopping center in north Phoenix before planning to attack the Super Bowl.

"How many dollars will you lose? And all because you took my right to own a business from me," the manifesto said.