Lafayette man caught with cache of weapons, drugs sentenced to prison

A Lafayette man accused of having an alarming cache of weapons, drugs and white supremacy materials in his van and Route 15 home was sentenced on Tuesday to five years and two months in prison, under a ruling from federal judge in Newark.

The sentence came after Joseph Rubino, 59, pleaded guilty in August to owning over a dozen firearms, several high-capacity magazines, silencers and scopes, a ballistics vest and a grenade launcher, the U.S. Attorney's Office of New Jersey said in a statement.

Rubino, who also pleaded guilty to possessing about 2.5 kilograms of marijuana, will be supervised for three years after his release from federal prison.

Rubino's arrest came by happenstance on July 24, 2019, when state police troopers found numerous weapons, hollow-point bullets and brass knuckles in his van after he lost control and crashed into a tree on Route 517 in Allamuchy in Warren County. Rubino and his passenger were seriously injured in the crash.

Authorities later, with search warrant in hand, raided his home and seized more than a dozen other weapons, methamphetamine and boxes of white supremacist literature and racist propaganda, court records said. Police said among the items seized were an instruction manual for owning a slave and bumper stickers and clothing with S.S. Bolts — a common white supremacist/neo-Nazi symbol derived from the paramilitary organization Schutzstaffel under Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party in Germany.

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Rubino was initially facing much more serious charges, including the most significant for possession of a firearm in furtherance of a drug-trafficking crime, which carried a sentence of up to life in prison.

Not long after his arrest, Rubino's then-attorney told the New Jersey Herald he had a personal connection to his client dating back many years and assured that he had "never been a white supremacist or a racist."

He had called out prosecutors and a federal judge for labeling his client a "white supremacist," calling it opportunistic given the climate at the time of Rubino's arrest. There was a spate of gun violence in the United States in August 2019, with The New York Times reporting 53 deaths in mass shootings in that single month.

Lori Comstock can be reached on Twitter: @LoriComstockNJH, on Facebook: www.Facebook.com/LoriComstockNJH or by phone: 973-383-1194.

This article originally appeared on New Jersey Herald: Lafayette NJ man caught with weapons, drugs sentenced