A South Carolina man was arrested in connection with planning a violent white supremacist attack "in the spirit of Dylann Roof," the FBI said in a complaint Thursday. 
 
 Benjamin Thomas Samuel McDowell, 29, became known to federal agents after a series of Facebook posts were flagged in which he made threats and professed violent white supremacist ideologies, said Special Agent Grant Lowe of the FBI's office in Columbia. 
 
 Benjamin McDowell is charged with being a felon in possession of a firearm. Horry County Sheriff's Office via AP 
 
 McDowell, also known as Benji, met with an undercover FBI agent on Wednesday to purchase a gun at the parking lot of a Myrtle Beach Hampton Inn. He was arrested and charged with possession of a firearm, which is illegal due to his pre-existing status as a felon on unrelated charges. 
 
 The arrest came after several weeks of tracking and interacting with McDowell, the FBI said. 
 
 McDowell began posting on Facebook about a Myrtle Beach synagogue in late December, the complaint said. On Jan. 5, the feds say, he wrote a long, misspelled rant about Jews, the "white race" and Roof, who was found guilty in December of murdering nine black worshipers at a Charleston church in 2015. 
 
 McDowell also appeared to reference an early January video that showed four young black people beating a disabled white teen that was streamed on Facebook Live. 
 
 Related: Huge Growth in Anti-Muslim Hate Groups During 2016: SPLC Report 
 
 Soon after his post, Lowe said, McDowell contacted an undercover FBI agent that he believed “handled problems for the Aryan Nations.” In an instant message on Facebook, McDowell requested an “iron,” a code word for a firearm, the complaint against him said. 
 
 The agent, who is not identified by name in the testimony, said that McDowell complained about other white supremacists, “stating that screaming ‘white power’ was not getting the job done.’” 
 
 He allegedly expressed a desire to commit a terrorist act, telling the undercover agent: “I seen what Dylann Roof did and in my heart I reckon I got a little bit of hatred ... I want to do that sh*t.” 
 
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 During ongoing communication with the undercover agent, the testimony said, it was revealed that McDowell was talking on his mother’s landline and cellphone. The agent also allegedly agreed to pick McDowell up at his mother’s house, then drive to his grandfather’s home where he planned to borrow money to buy the gun. 
 
 McDowell was a known white supremacy extremist who had connected with white power gangs while serving time in prison, and had tattoos that indicated the affiliation, according to the Horry County Police Department. 
 
 NBC affiliate WFMB reported Thursday that McDowell’s police records show he has been arrested seven times in the past decade in South Carolina alone. The charges included malicious injury to animals, assault, violent second-degree burglary, littering, possession of marijuana, and a third-degree burglary for which McDowell served three years in prison, according to the station. 
 
 McDowell's next court date was set for Tuesday. ||||| These crawls are part of an effort to archive pages as they are created and archive the pages that they refer to. That way, as the pages that are referenced are changed or taken from the web, a link to the version that was live when the page was written will be preserved.Then the Internet Archive hopes that references to these archived pages will be put in place of a link that would be otherwise be broken, or a companion link to allow people to see what was originally intended by a page's authors.The goal is to fix all broken links on the web . Crawls of supported "No More 404" sites. ||||| MYRTLE BEACH, SC (WMBF) – The Conway man arrested after an undercover FBI investigation revealed he was allegedly planning an attack in Myrtle Beach “in the style of Dylann Roof” has an extensive criminal background. 
 
 Benjamin Thomas Samuel McDowell, 29, has been arrested at least seven times in South Carolina since 2007, and has spent multiple years in prison, according to records obtained by WMBF News. 
 
 McDowell’s arrest record includes: 
 
 -10/9/2007: Malicious injury to animals, personal property, injury value $1,000 or less 
 
 -3/10/2009: Second-degree burglary (violent) 
 
 -3/10/2009: Third-degree burglary, first offense. He received a six-year sentence that was suspended to three years. 
 
 -6/21/2011: Larceny / petit or simple larceny, $2,000 or less 
 
 -9/19/2011 – Drugs / possession of 28g or less of marijuana or 10g or less of hashish – first offense 
 
 -9/24/2013: Malicious injury to animals, personal property, injury value $2,000 or less 
 
 -9/24/2013: Assault and battery, third degree. He spent 30 days in jail for this offense. 
 
 -2/25/2015: Littering / littering less than 15 pounds in volume, first or second offense. 
 
 He was then arrested by the FBI on February 15, 2017 and booked into the J. Reuben Long Detention Center. He was released the next morning, presumably to appear in federal court in Florence. 
 
 Read more about McDowell’s arrest for the Dylann Roof copycat attack he allegedly planned to execute here: 
 
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– The FBI busted a South Carolina man after he bought a gun with the alleged intent to pull off a massacre "in the spirit of Dylann Roof." Agents arrested Benjamin McDowell, 29, at a sting in which he thought he was getting a weapon from someone affiliated with the white supremacist Aryan Nations, reports NBC News. McDowell had come to the attention of the feds after a series of online posts in which he ranted against Jews and minorities. Before the arrest, he allegedly professed his admiration for Roof to an undercover agent. "I seen what Dylann Roof did and in my heart I reckon I got a little bit of hatred and ... I want to do that s---," McDowell said, per the federal complaint He added that he wanted to do a "big-scale" attack and then write his ode to Roof's spirit on the wall. He didn't seem to have settled on any specifics for where and when, however. For now, he faces felony charges for possession of a firearm—a previous string of arrests for burglary and other crimes, detailed at WMBF, bar him from owning a gun. The Daily News has examples of his online rants, often riddled with misspellings: "All they wanne do is stay loaded on drugs the Jews put here to destory white man and they fest on the drugs," he wrote on Jan. 5, per the FBI complaint.