Gang leader gets life in kidnapping of prosecutor’s father

RALEIGH, N.C. – A violent gang leader will spend his remaining years in the country’s highest-security prison after directing a botched kidnapping in which his underlings mistakenly grabbed the father of the North Carolina prosecutor who helped convict him, a federal judge said Thursday.

Kelvin Melton, 51, was sentenced by U.S. District Judge James Dever to life plus seven years in the federal Supermax penitentiary in Florence, Colorado.

The prison houses some of the country’s most violent, high-profile or high-security criminals, including Atlanta Olympics bomber Eric Rudolph, 9-11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui, Mafia bosses and former FBI agent and Soviet spy Robert Hanssen.

Melton deserved a life sentence in the prison because he had repeatedly recruited other inmates to gang activities and showed his “skill in running outside criminal enterprises while under the most restrictive of conditions,” government prosecutors wrote in a report last week.

Melton had previously spent 13 years in New York prisons. While behind bars, he helped create the United Blood Nation and was nicknamed “Godfather” and “Old Man,” authorities said.

He was serving a life sentence in a North Carolina prison as a violent habitual felon after a 2011 shooting when he used a smuggled cellphone to direct Blood gang members to commit shootings and robberies in North Carolina and Georgia, prosecutors said.

Melton then turned to vengeance against Colleen Janssen, the North Carolina assistant district attorney who put him in prison. Evidence showed he directed gang members to kidnap two of her female relatives — kidnappings that weren’t carried out — before turning to Janssen herself. Melton ordered gangsters to kidnap her, but the criminals goofed and kidnapped her father instead. Co-conspirators in the plot also sent threats to Frank Janssen’s wife.

Again using a smuggled cellphone, Melton instructed the kidnappers how to kill Frank Janssen, dispose of his body and clean up the crime scene. FBI agents monitored Melton’s cellphone and tracked Janssen to an Atlanta apartment four days after he was taken from his Wake Forest home.

The FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team stormed the apartment as Janssen’s captors were finalizing details to kill him, authorities said.

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