Four men from Newburgh, N.Y., were arrested on Wednesday night, charged with trying to carry out what they believed was a bomb attack on two synagogues in the Riverdale section of the Bronx and the simultaneous shooting down of military aircraft in Newburgh.

James Cromitie

Officials identified the leader as James Cromitie, a career criminal born in Brooklyn on Dec. 24, 1964. Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said he had a record of 27 arrests, at least a dozen for drug offenses, beginning in 1987. He spent a total of 12 years in state prison, the most recent stint for a 1998 conviction for selling cocaine to an undercover officer behind a school in the Bronx.

He was paroled in 2004 and moved to Newburgh from the Bronx in March 2005.

His mother, Adele Cromitie, 65, said she had last seen her son three years ago, when he came to her apartment in the Castle Hill neighborhood of the Bronx, where she has lived for 26 years. It was the first time she had seen him in years.

He took her up to Newburgh and introduced her to the woman he was living with and said that he had become a Muslim. He was raised an Episcopalian, she said. In his first jail stint he listed his religion as Baptist; in the second and third ones, as Muslim.