Lethal Passage: The Story of a Gun

by Erik Larson

  What no federal authority ever bothered to ask, however, is what would possess Guns Unlimited to allow this sale to be made, given the apparent level of Nicholas’s involvement.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  THE DEALER

  ON A BRILLIANT MORNING IN JUNE 1992, I paid a visit to Guns Unlimited. I had arranged to meet its manager, Mike Dick, at the store at nine. His full name was J. Michael Dick and he was the son of the store’s founder and owner, James S. Dick, who by then had limited his gun-dealing to sales at weekend gun shows.

  My drive had begun an hour earlier in Virginia Beach, on an expressway that took me past metropolitan Norfolk, then plunged under the Elizabeth River. From the highway Norfolk looked prosperous, with a perimeter of high glass buildings, a brand-new hotel, and a festive riverside development similar to Baltimore’s Harborplace. But I had been downtown several times before and knew that urban pressures had turned this portion of Norfolk into a Potemkin village. Two blocks in from the city’s gleaming rim, life seemed to stop. Abandoned buildings, some boarded, some just empty, lined block after block. The streets were clean, however. There were no piles of litter, no plumes of broken glass, and no people, just a clean desolation like that of a city awaiting a hurricane.

  As I traveled, the landscape gradually softened. Brittle urban architecture gave way to suburbs, then to cool green countryside. From time to time I spotted the giant cranes of shipyards and cargo wharves along the distant blue band of the Roads. I had expected Carrollton to be a neat little Southern town of stores and a church or two arrayed along a clearly demarcated central avenue. The Carrollton I found, however, consisted primarily of a small shopping plaza on the north side of Route 17.

  Guns Unlimited occupied one of the plaza’s seven retail establishments, which were arrayed along a cinder-block rectangle fronted with a hot, white-gravel parking lot. A BP gas station and convenience store occupied the western end of the lot. A poster in the window of the video store immediately to the right of Guns Unlimited advertised a movie called Mobsters; the poster consisted mainly of eight stylized bullet holes. The only other car in the parking lot was a black-and-white Ford Mustang belonging to the local sheriff’s department. The deputy glanced my way now and then, before wandering into the convenience store. As it happens, he too was waiting for Guns Unlimited to open. He had heard about a new kind of ammunition and wanted to ask about it. He was a frequent browser at the store, the clerks would later tell me—one of that class of shooter who finds guns and everything about them infinitely compelling. He was welcome, they said; it was always nice to have a patrol car parked outside as a deterrent against the daylight gun-shop robberies that as of 1992 had become a frequent and often lethal fact of life in the gun trade.

  Mike Dick and his father held two of the nation’s 245,000 firearms-dealer licenses, and two of the 7,500 licenses issued to residents of Virginia alone, where at the time of our meeting gun controls outside the major cities were virtually nonexistent. The lack of regulation probably traced its roots to 1776 when Virginia became the first colony to adopt a bill of rights, which included the declaration that a “well regulated Militia, composed of the body of the People, trained to Arms, is the proper, natural, and safe Defense of a free state.” By the time Nicholas acquired his gun, Virginia’s enthusiasm for firearms had turned the state into a massive shopping mall for gun traffickers from the North. A Baltimore police detective described Virginia to me this way: “It’s the only place I know where you can go get gas, diapers, and a gun at the same time.” As one Guns Unlimited clerk put it, during a court deposition, Virginia was “Second Amendment” country.

  A thick printout of Virginia’s licensed firearms dealers, which I bought from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms’ disclosure branch, captured this penchant for mixing gun peddling with other pursuits. The list included Capt. Mike’s Seafood, Ray’s Used Cars, Dale’s Exxon & Grocery, Miss Molly’s Inn, Miracle Chimney Sweep, the Capitol Cafe, Forbes Window Co., Stallard’s Shoe Shop, Jenning’s Music Co., Bucks Barber Shop, Glasgow Video, the Portsmouth-Norfolk chapter of the Izaak Walton League, and Camp Sequoya for Girls in Abingdon. Some of the business names listed in the printout were tantalizing in and of themselves, such as Boys Noisy Toys, The Gunrunner, Gut Pile Guns, and, my favorite, Life Support Systems of Norfolk.

  Dick was late, but two of his clerks arrived and invited me and the sheriff’s deputy inside. The shop was small, no larger than a suburban living room, with display cases arranged in a U shape and a central table containing miscellaneous accessories and special “safety” ammunition for use in home defense, including the Glaser “safety” round, a bullet that ruptures on impact and scatters a multitude of tiny steel balls through whomever it strikes. One medical examiner, writing in the Journal of Forensic Sciences, reported on the mysterious X ray he had made of the skull of a suicide victim. Instead of finding one or two bits of metal, he saw dozens scattered through the dead man’s brain like stars. The manufacturer calls the bullet a safety round in the belief that its pellets are less likely to pass through bodies and walls to injure bystanders on the other side. At up to $3 a cartridge, Glaser safety rounds are not for practice.

  The store was a fortress. The Dicks had embedded steel “tank traps” in the sidewalk out front, this to prevent the recurrence of what has now become a fairly routine, if hardly subtle, means of burglarizing the gun stores of America: the use of trucks to crash through the front wall of the store. The Dicks learned the value of tank traps a few years ago when a thief backed a dump truck into the display windows of Guns Unlimited, then climbed out and stole dozens of handguns. An alarm system now guarded the place at night. The front door had been reinforced with steel. Steel herringbone grates covered the inside surfaces of the two large plate-glass windows. A big Pepsi machine stood against the grate just inside the door as a barrier to anyone hoping to cut through the glass to reach the door locks. As a last defense, the two clerks wore large-bore handguns strapped to their hips, one a revolver, the other a black auto-loading pistol. One clerk, dressed in black and wearing tinted glasses, told me he and his partner were careful to stand at different points in the shop so that no one could get the drop on them simultaneously. He untacked a brief news clipping from the bulletin board behind him and proudly handed it to me. The item reported how just that week a Portsmouth gun-shop owner had shot and killed a would-be robber. No charges were filed.

  Mike Dick arrived in jeans and a T-shirt. He was a young man, a bit round at the corners, whose prior career was in the hospitality industry. He joined Guns Unlimited to help his father salvage the business, which had suffered badly not only from the recession but from the sudden decampment of so many military men from the Hampton Roads area during the Gulf War. The domestic gun industry as a whole had likewise experienced declining sales over the previous few years, and that March one of the country’s highest-profile arms makers, Colt’s Manufacturing, had filed for protection from creditors under Chapter 11. At the time of the shootings at Atlantic Shores, however, the industry was enjoying a robust surge in sales, and Guns Unlimited was thriving. As of 1990, James Dick owned three Guns Unlimited stores, including branches in Virginia Beach and Portsmouth. But he too had been forced to file for bankruptcy under Chapter 11. By the time I met his son, Guns Unlimited had scaled back to just the Carrollton store.

  The company was hardly a big-time arms dealer. Financial statements filed with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Norfolk show that in April 1992 it had sales of $30,000, which produced a net profit after wages, taxes, and other operating costs of only $503. The best month of the preceding dozen had been April 1991, when Guns Unlimited’s revenue of $51,000 yielded a net profit of $1,752, the kind of money a big arms dealer like Interarms of Alexandria, Virginia, probably spends on lunch when wooing a major customer.

  At its peak, the company advertised aggressively on television and with huge fourteen-by-forty-eight-foot billboards that featured a giant handgun and proclaime
d NO PERMITS, a reference to the fact that in Isle of Wight County as in most of the rest of Virginia you didn’t need a permit to buy handguns. Regulations were much stiffer in individual cities in Hampton Roads. Portsmouth, for example, required that buyers first had to get a city police permit. Guns Unlimited used the placement of its three stores to defeat these laws. In a deposition, Christopher Hartwig, a clerk until May 1991, said that if a customer at the Portsmouth store needed a gun right away, a clerk would drive the gun to the Carrollton store and meet the buyer there.

  The practice came to light in a deposition given by Hartwig during the negligence suit against Guns Unlimited.

  “Is that something the salesclerk would suggest or the customer?” asked Randy Singer, the Norfolk attorney who brought the suit on behalf of the murdered teacher’s family. A bright, soft-spoken young man, Singer had been driving back from Disney World on December 16, 1988, with his own children safely in the car—they were Atlantic Shores students also, but had gotten permission for the trip—when he heard a news broadcast about Nicholas Elliot’s shooting spree.

  “I can’t lie,” Hartwig said. “We would do it.”

  But other shops did it too, he said. “Most people don’t want to wait.… It would be like waiting two weeks to buy a nice car. You would want it today if you got the money. So they’d send the gun … to the other store and then all the paperwork, everything would be done right there.”

  This bit of gun-law arbitrage was legal. In the ethos of the gun trade, legal meant acceptable.

  “Guns Unlimited is very well respected,” Mike Dick assured me over coffee at the convenience store at the end of the little mall. He told me he’d been invited to join the state police firearms advisory board and had assisted ATF in numerous investigations, often calling the regional office after—or even during—suspicious transactions. “In fact, I would venture to say if you talked to the local regional office of ATF, you would find that no one in this region assists them as much as we do.”

  At the same time, Guns Unlimited was more than willing to sell an especially lethal weapon to an adolescent—a weapon, moreover, that its own staff had derided as serving no useful purpose. At one point in the deposition process, Randy Singer asked another former Guns Unlimited clerk what anyone would use a Cobray M-11/9 for.

  “Whatever you want to use it for,” the clerk answered. “Off the record, personally I wouldn’t use the damn thing for crab bait.”

  The clerk went on to say that he would never recommend the gun for target shooting, hunting, or self-defense.

  Was there anything he could recommend it for, Singer asked?

  “Boat anchor.”

  Hartwig was equally disparaging: “It’s good for nothing.” He allowed, however, that one class of customer did seem drawn to the weapon. “Your blacks are real impressed with them. We usually joke around about it because that’s the first thing they want to look at when they come in, or we get phone calls—’Do you have an Uzi? Do you have an M-11?’—because they see it on TV. They feel pretty powerful having one of those.”

  Nonetheless, he said, “the gun is a piece of junk.”

  As to whether the Cobray was any more deadly than other guns, Mike Dick, James Dick, and their clerks were in agreement. They cited one of the fundamental tenets of America’s gun culture and a cherished dictum of the National Rifle Association: all guns were created equal. At bottom an AK-47 is no more dangerous than a High Standard .22; a hundred-round Caleco semiautomatic pistol no more deadly than a Smith & Wesson .38.

  Mike Dick also gave the Cobray a poor appraisal. “I hate to use this particular term, but it’s a toy,” he told me. “It’s a fun gun for a person who wants to go out and line up a bunch of cans on a log, or to shoot at a target at very close range.” He took a drag on his cigarette. “What I have a problem with is the implication that this particular gun because of what it costs or what it looks like or how many bullets it holds is inherently bad. With very little effort at all, cosmetically, that gun could be any other gun.”

  And yet it is cosmetics that account for some of the Cobray’s appeal, as even he acknowledged.

  “The Cobray is bought, I think, mainly because of its looks. It does in fact look kind of evil. And it does carry an awful lot of rounds.” He was careful, however, to hew to yet another gun-camp theme: the large-capacity magazine had a sporting purpose. “Many people like to get multiple magazines or larger-capacity magazines simply to save time on reloading while they’re at the range. When you’re paying by the hour for range time, a lot of people do feel the need to stock up as much as possible.”

  Just as Nicholas Elliot knew he wanted to buy his gun at Guns Unlimited, so too have other traffickers, gang members, and killers chosen Guns Unlimited as their dealer of choice, a fact that had given Guns Unlimited something of a notorious reputation in Virginia’s Tidewater region—unjustly, perhaps, but also unavoidably, given the peculiar nature of firearms retailing.

  In two cases in the 1990s gun traffickers recruited straw-man buyers to shop at Guns Unlimited and purchase large numbers of guns, from high-quality Glocks to cheap Davis pistols. In both cases, according to documents in Norfolk federal court, the traffickers specifically directed their recruits to Guns Unlimited; in both cases Guns Unlimited did indeed act as an exemplary corporate citizen.

  But a closer look at the two trafficking cases shows that Guns Unlimited and gun dealers in general operate in a world where profit and morality bear an inverse relationship to each other—where a truly moral dealer who followed his best social instincts at every turn would more than likely wind up on a bread line. What does it mean that even a “good” dealer can wind up promoting crime? Has gun retailing become simply too costly a pursuit for our society to tolerate?

  In August 1991, Amir Ali Faraz, a twenty-two-year-old student at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, asked a friend of his, Matthew Jones, about buying “a couple of firearms.” Faraz couldn’t buy the guns on his own, he knew, because his permanent residence was in Pennsylvania and he had only a Pennsylvania driver’s license.

  This posed no great problem in Jones’s eyes. About two weeks later, on August 30, 1991, Faraz met with Jones. Jones gave Faraz a Virginia driver’s license belonging to a twenty-one-year-old Virginia resident, Brant Gomez Requizo, who had lost his driver’s license earlier that year. Jones took Faraz to Guns Unlimited, where Faraz bought six high-caliber handguns—four for himself, and one each for Jones and a friend of Jones’s who had accompanied them to the store. A week later Faraz sold three of his guns to Jones for $1,200. Faraz would later tell ATF agents that Jones had bragged he could sell the guns “for a ‘big profit’ in the Tidewater area to people who would take them up north and make even a bigger profit from them.”

  In the gun trade, buying more than one gun at a time automatically raises a warning flag; in fact, ATF requires dealers to mail in a multiple-purchase form anytime a customer buys two or more handguns within a period of five working days. Nonetheless, in the absence of specific local regulations, anyone in America can walk into a gunstore and buy a hundred handguns. The dealer is under no obligation to telephone ATF, or even to inquire why anyone would want so many guns. All the dealer must do is mail the form by the close of business on the day of the purchase. The buyer, meanwhile, is free to scoop up his hundred handguns and start selling.

  ATF will investigate high-volume purchases, provided it learns of them. If a purchase takes place on a Saturday night, however, ATF will not see the multiple-purchase form for several days. Meanwhile, the guns will begin their rapid migration through the illicit-arms network. Guns trafficked from Norfolk, Virginia, for example, typically wind up in the hands of crooks in Washington, Philadelphia, and New York, half a day’s drive up Interstate 95—nicknamed the Iron Road for all the illicit weapons that make the trip. In 1992, ATF conducted a massive tracing project to find out where the guns recovered from crime scenes in New York City had begun their travels. The a
gency discovered that Virginia alone accounted for 26 percent of the guns, more than any other individual state. Florida came in second, supplying 19 percent; Texas third with 11 percent; Georgia, home of S.W. Daniel, was fourth at 9 percent. Even Batman, in a December 1992 comic book, noted how easily the crooks could buy guns in Virginia. In the early 1970s most crime guns seized in New York came from South Carolina, but in 1975 the state passed a law allowing consumers to purchase only one gun per month. Although the law included a huge loophole—for inexplicable reasons it exempted purchases made at gun shows, a common source of crime guns throughout the country—it succeeded in sharply reducing the number of South Carolina guns found at New York crime scenes. South Carolina contributed only 2 percent of the New York crime guns traced by ATF in 1992. Virginia, deeply embarrassed by its role as crime-gun distributor of the Eastern Seaboard, passed a similar law in 1993. Before it took effect, however, ATF found that gun buyers in Virginia made 3,400 multiple purchases a year, or nearly ten a day. That the notification of such purchases takes place by mail in an age when virtually every ordinary consumer transaction involves some immediate form of computer verification is but one of the peculiar ironies that characterize arms commerce in America.

  Mike Dick managed the first sale to Faraz and was immediately suspicious, enough so that he telephoned the ATF field office in Norfolk to alert the bureau to Faraz’s purchases. (Dick also filed the multiple-purchase form.) Over the next two weeks Faraz returned three more times and bought twenty-nine more guns, selling twenty-five to Jones, according to court documents. On the last of these shopping trips Faraz placed an order for thirteen more handguns, all Glock pistols, the same guns now adopted by police departments around the country. Mike Dick telephoned ATF while Faraz was still in the store and helped choreograph an undercover operation against Faraz. Dick allowed the bureau to choose the day on which Guns Unlimited would notify Faraz that the guns he had ordered were ready for pickup. The agency chose September 17, 1991, a Tuesday.