A Queens man who once busted for threatening to kill former President Ronald Reagan was hauled into court today on charges he staged a bomb scare in an FBI office.
Scott Sasonkin, 42, is charged calling in two phony reports that he’d left a suitcase bomb in the lobby of the Kew Gardens building on Nov. 1, 2008 – a threat that prompted an evacuation and closures of local roads and subway lines.
Police found the suitcase, but no explosive device, and were able to nab Sasonkin on the spot after he admitted he was calling from a pay phone across the street, according to documents filed today in Brooklyn federal court.
Sasonkin had been living at a half-way house under tight supervision since the scare, but today a judge ordered him held without bail on the new charges pending placement by the state’s Office of Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities.
His decades-long rap sheet includes arrests for making menacing phone calls to Reagan and threatening to blow up an air-born Pan Am jet in 1989 and calling in dozens of bogus bomb and fire reports in 1996.