A Chicago man accused of threatening to blow up a train overpass during the NATO summit may have been drunk and just running his mouth, his attorney said today.

Prosecutors have charged Sebastian Senakiewicz, 24, with falsely making a terrorist threat. A purported member of the anarchist group Black Bloc, Senakiewicz allegedly boasted that he had a carload of explosives that could destroy half of a train overpass and that he was determined to use them during the summit.



He also told associates he had two homemade explosives hidden in his home in a hollowed-out Harry Potter book, prosecutors said. But a police search of his Chicago home turned up no bombs, authorities said.

After a brief court hearing today, Senakiewicz’s attorney, Melinda Power, said if he said anything about explosives it was likely just drunken bluster.

“We don’t want people who maybe had a little bit too much to drink to be arrested for something they maybe said,” Power said. “Maybe people say stupid things when they’re drunk. That is not a basis for arresting them.”

Senakiewicz, a native of Poland who had been staying on the Northwest Side, is being held on a $750,000 bail. He appeared in court this morning dressed in a tan jail outfit and said nothing as Judge Adam Bourgeois Jr. set a next court date of June 13.

His mother, Urszula Mounts, flew to Chicago from Florida today to see her son and attempted to visit him in jail, where he was being held in solitary confinement. In a brief tearful statement outside court, Mounts said she’d been told nothing specific about the case but believed her son to be innocent.

“Like every mother would say, he is good boy,” she said in a heavy accent.

Also appearing for a brief hearing today was Mark Neiweem, 28, accused of plotting to construct a pipe bomb out of parts bought at a hobby shop to use during the NATO summit.

Neiweem is being held on $500,000 bail on charges of solicitation for possession of explosives, not a terrorism-related offense.

Lawyers for both men reiterated today that they believed the same two undercover officers or informants had infiltrated protest groups and were responsible for the arrests.

Prosecutors have said Senakiewicz and Neiweem were not connected to three other people arrested in a raid in Bridgeport last week and charged with plotting to firebomb political targets during the summit. In that case, prosecutors claim that four Molotov cocktails were found already assembled.

Neiweem’s attorney, Steven Saltzman, said they are eager to learn what the informants were saying to activists and whether they were entrapping their clients into criminal statements.

“What were they saying to folks and what kinds of responses were they trying to get?” Saltzman told reporters. “What violence were they talking about trying to encourage?”