RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — A violent gang leader will spend his remaining years in the country’s highest-security prison for orchestrating a botched kidnapping in which his underlings mistakenly grabbed the father of the North Carolina prosecutor who helped convict him.
In this undated photo provided by Raleigh/Wake City-County Bureau of Identification Kelvin Melton is shown. Frank Arthur Janssen was rescued by an elite FBI team after he was kidnapped and terrorized for five days. John Strong, the FBI’s agent in charge for North Carolina, said the kidnapping was related to Janssen’s daughter’s prosecution of Melton, who is serving a life sentence for ordering the shooting of a man in 2011. (AP Photo/Raleigh/Wake City-County Bureau of Identification)
U.S. District Judge James Dever on Thursday sentenced Kelvin Melton to life plus seven years in the federal “super-max” penitentiary in Florence, Colorado.
Melton was already serving a life sentence in a North Carolina prison as a violent habitual felon after a 2011 shooting. Evidence showed that while imprisoned, Melton directed Bloods gang members to kidnap the prosecutor who put him there. But the criminals goofed and kidnapped her father instead.
Melton used a smuggled cellphone to direct how to kill Frank Janssen, dispose of his body and clean up the crime scene.