'Tractor Man' sentenced for bomb threat in D.C.

WASHINGTON (AP) — A tobacco farmer dubbed "Tractor Man" was sentenced Wednesday to six years in prison in connection with a March 2003 incident that brought traffic in the nation's capital to a standstill.

Dwight Ware Watson, 51, of Whitakers, N.C., was handed the prison time for his conviction on charges of making a false threat to detonate explosives and destruction of federal property.

"The city regarded you as a one-man weapon of mass destruction. You did terrify this city," U.S. District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson told Watson.

On March 17, 2003, Watson drove his tractor into a shallow just west of the Washington Monument. For the next 47 hours he sat there, claiming to have "organophosphate bombs" in a metal box attached to a flatbed trailer that he towed to the scene.