A North Fort Myers man who once sold deadly toxins on the dark web was sentenced to 24 years in federal prison after a 911 hang-up call at his home turned into a hostage standoff where officers found a live pipe bomb in his pocket. Jesse William Korff, 32, was sentenced by U.S. District Judge Sheri Polster Chappell after pleading guilty to four felony counts tied to the May 2025 incident.
Korff's sentencing, handed down today, closes out a case that began when Fort Myers Police officers responded to a hang-up 911 call and declared a hostage situation after finding Korff actively struggling with a woman inside the home, according to the United States Attorney's Office for the Middle District of Florida. During the scuffle, a handgun fitted with a silencer broke loose, and officers spotted a live pipe bomb protruding from Korff's pocket, according to WFTV. The Lee County Sheriff's Office Bomb Squad deployed a specialized robot to safely extract the explosive from his clothing before deputies took him into custody, the station reported.
North Fort Myers felon sentenced to 24 yrs for explosives & firearms-related offenses. #PSNMDFL @fortmyerspolice @SheriffLeeFL @ATF_Tampa https://t.co/baFsT3AzA9 pic.twitter.com/1QXviLNazq
— USAO Middle Florida (@USAO_MDFL) August 20, 2026
Forensic Testing Confirms Attempted Detonation
Forensic testing conducted afterward by the Lee County Sheriff's Office Bomb Squad and the ATF confirmed that Korff had actively attempted to detonate the pipe bomb during the encounter, per the Justice Department's account. That finding underpinned one of the four counts he ultimately pleaded guilty to: attempted malicious use of an explosive while on federal supervised release. The other three counts covered possession of firearms and ammunition by a convicted felon, possession of unregistered silencers, and possession of an unregistered destructive device.
Searches of Korff's vehicle and residence turned up an AR-style firearm, a second silencer, ammunition, a tactical vest, and raw materials used for assembling explosives, according to a separate Justice Department release detailing the charges filed after his arrest. The court ordered Korff to forfeit all weapons, silencers, and explosive components tied to the case as part of Thursday's sentence.
A Return to Federal Custody After a 2015 Toxin Case
This is not Korff's first run-in with federal prosecutors over weapons of mass destruction. In February 2015, he was sentenced in New Jersey federal court to 110 months in prison after pleading guilty to producing, smuggling, and selling deadly biological toxins — ricin and abrin — on a dark web marketplace, and to conspiring to assist an overseas buyer in a murder plot, according to the FBI. Court records described how he sold the toxins on the site Black Market Reloaded and provided instructions on how to poison victims.
That earlier case traced back to a January 2014 arrest, when Korff met an undercover federal agent at an Interstate 75 rest stop outside Fort Myers and accepted $1,500 in exchange for two vials of abrin concealed inside candles in a fast-food bag, as reported by the Tampa Bay Times. Federal agents had built the case through an undercover probe before making that arrest.
Supervised Release Violation Compounds the Charges
Under 18 U.S.C. § 922(g), convicted felons are strictly barred from possessing firearms or ammunition, and prosecutors noted that Korff committed his May 2025 offenses while actively serving federal supervised release stemming from his 2015 toxin conviction. That status turned what could have been a standalone weapons case into a violation carrying additional weight at sentencing.
The case was investigated jointly by the Fort Myers Police Department, the Lee County Sheriff's Office, and the ATF, and was prosecuted under Project Safe Neighborhoods and Operation Take Back America, both federal initiatives aimed at repeat violent offenders. Several key questions remain unanswered in the public record, including what sparked the domestic scuffle that triggered the hostage call, what Korff intended to do with the pipe bomb and the bomb-making materials found at his home, and how a felon already under federal supervision managed to acquire multiple firearms, silencers, and explosive precursors.
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