I say off him now, before he causes any more trouble. It's not like we're running short of Hispanic vermin; there are plenty more where he came from.
Also known as Abdullah al-Muhajir, Jose Padilla had a number of run-ins with the authorities before achieving fame - or infamy - as the dirty bomb suspect.
He was arrested in Florida in 1991 over a road-rage shooting incident and spent a year in a Florida jail.
He completed his probation for aggravated assault and firing a weapon in August 1993.
Prior to that, Mr Padilla, a US citizen of Puerto Rican origin, had a number of gang-related encounters with police in Chicago - where his family had moved from New York City when he was four years old.
Neighbours quoted in the US press remember Brooklyn-born Mr Padilla as "a nice kid who always helped his mother". Right!
She was scared for him
Former family landlady on Padilla's mother
His juvenile record is sealed, but US media reported that as a teenager he started to get into trouble when he joined the Latin Kings, a Chicago street gang.
He is also alleged to have been implicated in a gangland murder when he was 13 and was confined as a juvenile offender in Illinois in 1985.
The young Jose was brought up as a Roman Catholic, and some reports say he converted to Islam while in jail.
Others say that he did so sometime in the mid-1990s, when he was living near Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
He is believed to have married an Egyptian woman.
Al-Qaeda link
He apparently dropped out of view after leaving the US in 1998. This, US officials said, was when he first visited Afghanistan.
Norma Leon, the Padilla family's former landlady, told the Chicago Sun-Times that Mr Padilla's mother was worried because her son had left the country and become a member of a cult.
"She was scared for him," Ms Leon told the newspaper.
In 2001, officials said, he made contact with Abu Zubaydah, a senior al-Qaeda commander who is in American custody and apparently co-operating with the FBI.
The US authorities alleged that al-Qaeda asked Mr Padilla to go to Lahore in Pakistan, where he learnt how to make a dirty bomb and allegedly met several other al-Qaeda members.
There was no word on whether these meetings took place before or after the 11 September attacks on the US.
He was 31 at the time of his arrest on 8 May 2002.
He's a piece of shit. Who cares?