LITTLE ROCK — Randeep Mann is heard advising his wife to retrieve documents from his medical clinic and acknowledging registration problems with some of the guns in his collection in a series of jailhouse phone calls made to his wife and played back Thursday during his trial in U.S. District Court.
Mann, a Russellville physician, is accused of plotting a Feb. 4, 2009, bombing attack in West Memphis that severely injured the chairman of the Arkansas State Medical Board.
The March 2009 recordings, however, were made after Mann's initial arrest on federal weapons charges and about nine months before he was indicted in the bombing.
Mann speaks softly and quickly on most of the recordings and sometimes refers to his wife, Sangeeta Mann, as "bunny."
In the first call played for the jury, Sangeeta Mann tells her husband his lawyer believes a search of his medical clinic is forthcoming. Mann then asks her to get documents from a locked drawer and to give them to "Tim or Riley."
"Why don't you do that now and I will talk to you tomorrow," Mann says on the March 6, 2009, recording. "I just don't want it to be a problem."
At the end of the call, Sangeeta Mann tells Randeep Mann to "hang in there."
"You too," he replies. "I'm sorry for the bulls**t mess I've made."
In a phone call a day later, Mann tells his wife he's been looking through his "gun stuff" and says he has one firearm that was sent to him by mistake and not registered in his name.
He also references a law change in 1994 that required a machine gun he owned to be registered when it previously did not have to be documented. A seven-year grace period followed that change and Mann, a federally licensed firearms dealer, says in the call he was told to register the gun whenever he sold it.
But he never did even as the grace period expired.
"So one way or the other, I am buggered," Mann says.
"You still have to fight it," Sangeeta Mann tells him.
Mann talks about the grace period and acknowledges not registering the gun again in a March 11 call.
"I'm sorry, man," he says at the end of that excerpt. "It's an addiction. It's like cocaine ... I couldn't walk away."
In a March 9 call, Mann tells his wife to get items from the office and to put them in the garage or gun room at home.
In a March 10 recording, Mann asks his wife to "tidy up" his office and take out "Dan's ownership papers."
"A lot of s**t's going to go down," Mann says at the beginning of that excerpt, which also includes a reference to a grand jury. "Pretend I'm dead. Just pretend I"m dead. It does not matter."
A March 10 call appears to reference the bombing attack as Mann says the government doesn't "even know the full charges" against him and has taken "nuts" from a car to try and find a "link to Memphis."
In a March 11 call, Sangeeta Mann tells her husband officials searched his office for several hours the night before. He asks her if she took anything out.
"Yeah, yeah, all that stuff," Sangeeta Mann says. "We did good."
Sangeeta Mann is accused of obstructing the investigation and is on trial with her husband.
The excerpts represented just a fraction of the recorded calls between Mann and his wife while he was being held in Pulaski County, prosecutors said. They were picked because they feature the couple "talking about upcoming search warrants, evidence and things of that nature," said John Norris, a special agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
The calls, which were made between the jail and either Mann's home or Sangeeta Mann's cell phone, all began with an automated message telling both participants they were being recorded, prosecutors said.