A Semmes, Alabama, man who pleaded guilty last week to charges stemming from his behavior on an international Continental Airlines flight loudly called a federal air marshal by the N-word after being handcuffed, according to testimony from a previous detention hearing.

The air marshal, Johnathan Gash, testified on Feb. 18, 2010, that Robert Wade Prince continued to be disruptive even after Gash intervened and handcuffed him on the flight from Amsterdam to Houston. Gash said Prince called Gash by the N-word.

"He come back, and he said no black man should be able to put handcuffs on a white man from Alabama, 'I'm an Alabama cowboy,'" Gash said. "Then he starts talking about, 'If anybody say that I didn't hit this marshal, I'll give you $10,000.' He said that several times."

Neither Prince nor his court-appointed attorney, Jack Bainum, could be reached by the Press-Register for comment.

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According to testimony from a federal air marshal, before approaching Robert Wade Prince of Semmes, Ala., on a transcontinental flight from Amsterdam to Houston, Prince was heard repeatedly yelling "Yahoo!" He was also witnessed to be grabbing the seat in front of him and slingshoting it forward. Read that and more details from Prince's detention hearing in the

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Testimony at the detention hearing sheds new light on the case that resulted in Prince's negotiated guilty plea deal on Friday that resulted in a 6-month sentence on charges that Prince assaulted a female flight attendant and a passenger. At the hearing, Bainum suggested that his client's behavior may have resulted from bipolar disorder.

Bainum pointed to testimony that his client registered a .13 blood-alcohol level after the plane landed -- more than 6 hours since he had had his last drink. A person with a blood-alcohol level of .10 generally is considered to be legally drunk, though some states consider a person of .08 or above to be too impaired to drive.

Prince's wife, Danita Prince, testified that her husband normally does not mix alcohol with his bipolar medication and that she never had seen him behave the way witnesses described that day. She also said she does not know him to be a racist.

Gash testified that he became involved after learning that Prince had reached through the crew rest area and grabbed a flight attendant's arm hard enough to hurt her.

"I noticed 2 females sitting in the crew jump seat, and that's highly unusual, and I inquired why were they sitting there, and I was told that Mr. Prince was harassing one of the females that was sitting beside him," he testified.

Gash testified that the female passenger told him that Prince was feeling her legs, elbowing her and trying to touch her breasts. When he agreed to switch seats with her, he testified, Prince tried to block the seat.

"Mr. Prince stated that I couldn't sit there because he didn't want my kind sitting beside him and I — he said that his girlfriend was sitting there," he testified.

U.S. air marshals try not to blow their cover

Gash testified that it's policy for air marshals to try to remain undercover as long as possible, presumably so that terrorists planning action aren't able to flush them out and neutralize them. Yet when Prince continued to be unruly, Gash said he felt compelled to identify himself.

"Mr. Prince had sat up and as he sat up I slid into the seat. So once I sat there he started to try to push me out of the seat with his left hand, saying, 'You can't sit here,'" Gash testified. "As he was pushing me I grabbed his hand and I placed his hand back into his lap and at that point in time I told Mr. Prince I was a federal air marshal and if he continued what he was doing he would be in serious trouble.

"At that point in time I released his hand and Mr. Prince come back around with an elbow and elbowed me in my upper torso twice."

"Is he a big guy or a little guy?" federal prosecutor Joe Magliolo asked.

"He's a very huge man," Gash answered.

Through his testimony, it became clear the difficulty air marshals face. Not only do they have to be careful about identifying themselves, if they take action to subdue an unruly passenger, they must make clear to everyone on the plane that they are, in fact, federal officers. Because if the situation is not clear, the passengers could see a man appearing to attack a passenger and attack the air marshal, thinking he could be a terrorist.

"I've been trained to -- we yell 'police, police, police,'" Gash explained to the court. "Then I yelled for my partner and then I started yelling 'police' again."

"What was the purpose of that?" Magliolo asked.

"To notify the passengers around who I was and to try to get my partner, that's what we've been trained to do, and trying to get compliance from the rest of the passengers not to attack us."

Air marshals called to find out if Prince should take medicine

Gash explained that because Prince is so much bigger than himself and because he continued to resist, Gash had to use special control techniques he'd learned in his training in order to subdue Prince. Those techniques included twisting the handcuffs on Prince's wrists, according to the testimony.

Gash said he literally had to drag Prince back to a galley area, where he was to be seated away from the other passengers for the remainder of the flight. At the point of the disturbance, the plane was estimated to be near the Irish coast, with hours of flight time remaining before the plane landed in Houston.

Despite having been handcuffed and dragged to the back of the plane, Prince continued to be disobedient, Gash testified.

"What did he do to indicate to you that he wasn't -- still wasn't compliant?" Magliolo asked.

"He started -- we had pulled the curtain for privacy, so he could have some privacy," Gash answered. "You know, he kept pulling the curtain back and he started yelling a bunch of racial slurs towards me."

The air marshals also had to decide if Gash should be allowed to take medication he had with him, including pills for high blood pressure and for treatment of bipolar disorder. On the one hand, Prince was asking for the medication and it might help calm him. But if it was contraindicated to take the medicine with alcohol in Prince's system, the air marshals could be liable for the consequences.

So the air marshals contacted the MedLink service for a determination. They were told to allow Prince to take the medicine.

Prince oversaw employees at global engineering firm

At the conclusion of the testimony, Bainum told the judge that Prince should be allowed to return to Alabama and be able to travel for his job while he awaited adjudication of his case. "You know, from what was heard today the alcohol and the medication caused him to behave in a way that he normally doesn't behave. He just basically freaked out in an inadmirable way and, respectfully, that's normally how bipolarism goes," Bainum said.

According to testimony from Prince's wife, despite having bipolar disorder and a criminal record that includes a robbery conviction and DUI arrest, Prince was able to land a job working for the Fluor Corp., where he worked as a manager. That's the job that had him flying back from Bahrain, a small a small island country in the Persian Gulf, east of Saudi Arabia.

Fluor describes itself as "a Fortune 500 company that delivers engineering, procurement, construction, maintenance (EPCM), and project management to governments and clients in diverse industries around the world." Danita Prince testified that her husband then left his job at Fluor to work for Bechtel, which bills itself, like Fluor, as a global engineering services company. When he's not working for such companies, Prince works at a refinery in Pascagoula, Miss., she testified.

"As long as he's on his medication, he's demonstrated that he's not only fine at taking care of himself, but fine at supervising employees," Bainum told the court in arguing for Prince's release.

Prince was released, with the judge indicating that she would allow leeway for him to leave Alabama and travel to Pascagoula for work purposes should he need to.