Would be international soldier of fortune Craig Austin Lang, 34, of Surprise, Arizona had his first court appearance in Fort Myers, Florida this week. A former soldier in the U.S. Army, he will face a litany of charges across multiple states in three federal courts.
Lang met his co-defendant Alex Jared Zwiefelhofer in 2017 in Ukraine fighting Russians in a Ukrainian volunteer battalion called Right Sector which operates in the Donetsk region.
"The pair allegedly also traveled to Kenya, where Zwiefelhofer claimed they intended to fight against terrorists, before attempting to enter South Sudan. They were allegedly detained by authorities in South Sudan and deported back to the United States, where they met up in Florida in April 2018," according to the Department of Justice press release.
That was when Lang and Zwiefelhofer are alleged to have conducted a home invasion in Florida where they committed a double homicide. "Lang and Zwiefelhofer allegedly robbed the victims to pay for travel to Venezuela, where the defendants planned to fight the Venezuelan regime," the Dept. of Justice says. Zwiefelhofer was convicted of those charges back in March and will be sentenced in August.
In North Carolina, Lang is facing charges related to committing passport fraud in an attempt to travel under an alias. Meanwhile, in Arizona, he is being charged with misuse of a passport to obtain a visa from the Mexican government.
According to Lang's father, he served in the U.S. Army as an infantryman from 2008 to 2014 and was deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan before deserting from the military while at Fort Bliss, Texas.
In interviews with Vice News and Buzzfeed years prior, Lang described his 2013 divorce from his wife in which is drove non-stop across the country in a vehicle full of military equipment, including claymore mines, to kill his wife.
That murder attempt was unsuccessful, and Lang was dishonorably discharged from the Army.