Lethal Passage: The Story of a Gun

by Erik Larson

  ATF got the message. First came Congress’s punitive $10-million budget cut, then ATF’s brush with dissolution, and finally McClure-Volkmer. “I don’t know what kind of syndrome it is when you get batted over the head repeatedly,” Rex Davis told me, “but it certainly turns your attention away from the direction you were going.”

  In following years, ATF used its mandate as the nation’s firearms cop to concentrate more and more resources on mainstream investigations of narcotics gangs, terrorist groups, and motorcycle gangs. From 1988 through 1992, ATF’s law-enforcement divisions ranked narcotics crime as their top priority, followed by violent crime committed with firearms. “These are safe activities, and sexy activities in terms of public perception,” Davis said. “With dealers, they’ve had their hands slapped several different ways. So it’s a natural reaction.”

  ATF remains less than enthusiastic about policing the vast dealer network. From 1975 through 1990, ATF revoked an average of ten licenses a year. The low was in 1978, with none, the high in 1986, with twenty-seven. This rate seems downright skimpy given the sheer numbers of licenses and the rate of violations discovered whenever ATF’s skeleton crew of inspectors does its routine compliance audits. In 1990, for example, inspectors conducted 8,471 of these routine inspections; they found violations in 90 percent of them.

  But revocation can be a tortuous process, as ATF found when in 1989 it at last moved to revoke the license of a Michigan dealer doing business as Al’s Loan Office. In arresting and prosecuting Curtis Williams, the man who accompanied Nicholas Elliot to Guns Unlimited, the bureau acted with breathtaking speed; in contrast, its dealings with Al’s Loan show remarkable forbearance.

  In ten inspections, beginning in 1976, ATF inspectors found repeated violations of ATF record-keeping regulations, many of them serious and the kind that could have put guns into the hands of felons and traffickers. Al’s Loan had failed to keep accurate records in a separate bound book of all its firearm acquisitions and sales. It had failed to make sure that customers properly completed form 4473. Moreover, the inspectors found, Al’s Loan had sold guns to people prohibited by federal law from buying them.

  Far from whisking officials of Al’s Loan off to jail, ATF inspectors patiently sat down with them to instruct them in the proper recordkeeping procedures, as they did following inspections in 1976, 1978, 1979, 1980, and 1981. After a 1982 inspection, the bureau at last flexed some muscle. It wrote the pawnshop an admonitory letter, setting out the dealer’s violations. The letter, the first phase in the carefully choreographed dance ATF must go through in trying to revoke a dealer’s license, warned Al’s Loan that “your license is contingent on your compliance with law and regulations and that continued violations may lead to revocation of your license.”

  ATF agents inspected Al’s records again in 1983 and again found the same kinds of violations. Again ATF wrote an admonitory letter.

  The violations continued. Three more inspections took place, in 1985, 1987, and 1988, each followed by another admonitory letter.

  At last ATF lost patience. On March 31, 1989, thirteen years after inspectors first discovered violations at Al’s Loan, the bureau revoked its license.

  The dealer protested. Under provisions governing the revocation process, the dealer requested a hearing before an ATF hearing officer. An attorney for Al’s Loan argued the dealer should be allowed to keep his license because he had cleaned up his records. The attorney then presented a sample. During a recess, however, ATF inspectors examined these records and immediately found violations.

  One of the inspectors testified, however, that the records did show signs of an effort to improve; he seemed more than willing to shrug off more than a decade’s worth of violations. Al’s Loan had testified that it had set up a new computer system to help manage its records and had fired employees who failed to keep good records of firearms transactions. “So there are some problems,” the inspector testified, “but the records as presented today do show a decent and sincere attempt by the licensee to try and change his record-keeping system to meet the regulatory requirements.”

  The hearing officer was not moved, however, and recommended revocation, concluding: “The licensee was plainly indifferent to the regulatory requirement for conducting his firearms license operations and therefore willfully violated the regulations.”

  This recommendation was then passed along for the required review by the ATF regional director responsible for Michigan. The director agreed. The bureau revoked the license effective September 18, 1989.

  This time Al’s Loan protested to federal court, where it tried to win an injunction to stop the revocation. The judge, however, argued that Al’s Loan may indeed have improved its records, but for the twelve years preceding the supposed improvement had “displayed flagrant, willful indifference” to the ATF rules. In his May 7, 1990, opinion affirming the revocation, the judge wrote: “Selling and pawning firearms is a privilege granted by the federal government and is not a right of any person.… Furthermore, the Court notes that we live in a very violent society where careless and violent individuals use guns to kill and maim innocent people. Those who distribute guns must be held accountable as they are the first step in preventing lawless individuals from obtaining guns.”

  At last Al’s Loan was out of the firearms business—but the process had taken fifteen years.

  ATF publicly argues that the vast majority of its FFLs are honest, law-abiding citizens, and that only “one or two” go bad. Even if true, the bureau’s argument would hardly be comforting given the speed with which guns migrate. A single illicit dealer can put hundreds, perhaps thousands, of weapons into the hands of would-be killers before the guns are detected by the ATF tracing network.

  The fact is, many dealers do operate illegally. In fiscal 1991, ATF considered licensees to be suspects in 139 law-enforcement investigations.

  The case of one Baltimore dealer demonstrates both how much damage a single maverick dealer can do, and how little time it takes for guns diverted from the legitimate distribution network to be used in crime.

  On July 1, 1989, ATF issued a federal firearms license to Carroll L. Brown, then a twenty-eight-year-old postal worker and father of three kids. Initially, at least, Brown seemed intent on operating a formal, commercial gun store, going so far as to rent commercial space in an office building in Reisterstown, Maryland. A few months later, however, he stopped paying rent and broke his lease. By April the following year he had begun selling high-powered handguns from his home and from his car, without asking buyers to fill out required state and federal documentation. He advertised his wares in at least six classified ads in the Baltimore Sun. (In 1993, the Sun, recognizing the dangers of undocumented private sales of handguns, stopped accepting classified ads for firearms.)

  The guns of Carroll Brown quickly fell into the wrong hands. Beginning September 20, 1990, Baltimore police began discovering Brown’s guns in the course of routine calls and investigations of homicides and drug trafficking. On October 26, Baltimore officers arrested a man wearing a bulletproof vest and carrying an unregistered Astra .380 pistol. Det. Richard Young, then a member of Baltimore’s Handgun Enforcement Arrest Team (HEAT), first traced the vest and learned it had been shipped to Brown from an Orlando, Florida, distributor only the day before by the United Parcel Service. The distributor also told Detective Young that it had shipped Brown two guns. The detective next checked with the distributor’s parent company, RSR North of Rochester, New York, and learned it too had shipped guns to Brown—fifteen in all between July and November.

  Soon afterward, Baltimore’s HEAT squad and the local ATF office began a joint investigation. An ATF agent compared serial numbers from the RSR shipping invoices with records of guns confiscated during arrests made by Baltimore police. He discovered that one month earlier, on September 20, officers had confiscated a nine-millimeter pistol that had been shipped to Carroll Brown in July. Two weeks later, he found, Baltimore police had seized two
more of Brown’s guns, from two suspects arrested for illegal possession of handguns. One suspect, according to a federal affidavit, was a three-time felon.

  On November 16, Baltimore detectives investigating a homicide conducted a search of one suspect’s home and recovered a Cobray M-11/9 made by S.W. Daniel and sold by Brown. Five days later, police arrested four other suspects on handgun charges and found three more guns that had been sold by Brown, including another Cobray pistol. One of the guns, a Glock nine-millimeter automatic, had been shipped to Brown by a distributor just five days before. Another arrest one week later yielded another Cobray, this with its serial number obliterated. Technicians were able to restore the number, and police traced this gun also to Brown. It had been shipped to him about six weeks earlier.

  On December 10, a man named Melvin King telephoned Brown and, identifying himself as a resident of Richmond, Virginia, asked to buy a Glock. King called Brown twice more over the next two days. On December 13, Brown agreed to meet him and sell him the pistol. Brown told King to come to a shopping plaza located about a mile from Brown’s home.

  When King arrived, he found Brown sitting in his 1989 Dodge, listening to a radio scanner capable of picking up police communications. Brown told King to sign what he called a “requisition blank” but told him not to write down that he was from Virginia. Brown agreed to sell King two more Glocks at another meeting they set for one week later.

  Melvin King was an ATF agent. On December 20, he arrested Brown on felony charges of violating federal firearms laws. The next day Baltimore police arrested Brown again, this time on state charges. Brown pleaded guilty on March 7, 1991, and on May 31 was sentenced to twenty-one months in federal prison, later reduced to nineteen months.

  The guns Brown had sold, however, continued their travels. As of January 1991 police had recovered only a tenth of the 268 handguns he had received from distributors.

  Just over a week after his sentencing, at about two A.M. on a lovely spring night, another of Brown’s guns made an appearance on the streets of Baltimore. A drug dealer named Ronnie Hunt had acquired a Glock .40-caliber pistol that Brown had sold to a convicted felon the previous October. Hunt and an associate cornered Sheldean Simon, a member of a local rap group called Murder Inc., and opened fire. Simon drew two nine-millimeter pistols of his own, but faced an onslaught like something from the tommy-gun massacres of the 1920s. Within seconds his opponents fired some seventy rounds of ammunition. Simon fired only once. He died after being struck by two of the forty-four rounds fired from Hunt’s Glock .40.

  Brown’s nine-year-old daughter wrote a letter to the court to help her father: “Dear Judge: My daddy is not a bad man. He has been very good to all of us. He does his best to take care of us.” Rev. James Ross, pastor of Nicodemus Baptist Church in Baltimore, wrote to the judge as well, pleading that Brown “was not intentionally trying to break the law, but that he ran his business somewhat haphazardly. He did not commit a crime of violence; he was only trying to provide a secure financial position for his children and wife.”

  Soon after the murder of Sheldean Simon, however, Baltimore detective Harry Edgerton told a Sun reporter, “As we speak, people who are out there right now, who are killed or wounded, could be the responsibility of Carroll Brown. In the end, all this gun stuff comes down to one guy who says, ‘I don’t want to follow the rules.’ ”

  Among the guns Brown sold were twenty-seven Cobray pistols of the kind carried by Nicholas Elliot.

  On those occasions where ATF does take a proactive rather than merely reactive approach to policing America’s gun dealers, it invariably discovers crooked dealers responsible for diverting thousands of weapons into criminal hands. A classic example of such enforcement, and the kind that ought to be pursued as a matter of routine, is Project Detroit, an ongoing effort by ATF and the Detroit police to trace as many guns as possible.

  ATF began the first Project Detroit study with a pool of 2,342 weapons entered into the property room at Detroit police headquarters between January 1989 and April 1990. Common wisdom nurtured by an endless series of TV crime shows and detective novels holds that all weapons can be traced readily, but that is not the case. ATF agents were able to trace only half the weapons in the initial pool. The remainder of the guns had been incorrectly identified by investigators, were too old to be traced (any weapon sold before the Gun Control Act of 1968 is essentially untraceable), had obliterated serial numbers that could not be restored, or could not be traced because of inadvertently or deliberately sloppy record-keeping among licensed dealers.

  In its report on this first phase of Project Detroit, the bureau—gun-shy ever since its near demise under Ronald Reagan—was careful to note that high-volume dealers would necessarily experience more traces. It is a truism, indeed, that the bigger the gun dealer’s volume of sales, the more often the guns he sells will be used in homicide, suicide, rape, robbery, assault, and gang warfare. The report said, “Just because an FFL has sold a large number of weapons that were subsequently used in crimes does not necessarily indicate the FFL is intentionally diverting weapons to the criminal element.”

  Yet of the five licensed dealers identified most often in the Project Detroit traces, four—including the top three—became the targets of full-scale ATF investigations. The worst offender, according to the report, was Sherman Butler of Sterling Heights, Michigan, near Detroit, whose Sherm’s Guns accounted for twenty-nine traces stemming from a range of crimes that included at least two homicides. Butler’s specialty was the sale of S.W. Daniel Cobrays modified to include a sixteen-inch barrel and shoulder stock, thus qualifying them as long rifles and allowing purchasers to buy them without first having to comply with stricter federal and local handgun regulations. For $125 extra, however, Butler threw in a pistol-length barrel and enough of a pistol frame—a pistol “upper receiver”—to allow buyers to quickly turn their carbines back into semiautomatic pistols.

  Next in line, with twenty-seven traces, was Steven Durham, whose All Gun Cleaning Service in Detroit “provided hundreds of firearms to the most visible and most violent narcotics organizations in the Detroit metropolitan area.” Durham persuaded acquaintances to fill out the form 4473s for specific handgun purchases even though these associates never actually bought the guns. Instead Durham simply filed their records and sold the guns to illegal buyers.

  Three other federally licensed dealers, as a routine business practice, obliterated the serial numbers on every gun they received from wholesalers. The report estimated that together the three had sold more than three thousand firearms “and that law-enforcement officers will be recovering them in various crimes for years to come.”

  In all, Project Detroit led to investigations of thirteen licensed dealers—including six of the top ten in traces—and successful prosecutions against all but three. Two of the three died (one blew himself up while manufacturing hand grenades); the third, whose case was still pending at the time of the report, was a Toledo, Ohio, dealer who allegedly sold cheap .25-caliber Raven pistols to anyone, regardless of age and background. That investigation began after weapons sweeps in Detroit’s public schools turned up an inordinate number of guns traced to him.

  Project Detroit also turned up a new and troubling wrinkle in firearms trafficking: the use of counterfeit licenses. To order weapons from a distributor, all the law requires a dealer to do is send a photocopy of his license, freshly signed in ink. The law does not require that the dealer first have his signature notarized or otherwise validated. Nor does it require the firearms distributors who receive these copies to verify the license numbers. Distributors, driven by the profit imperative to seek as many retail outlets as possible, tend to be lax about making sure their customers are bona fide, commercial dealerships. Major manufacturers are far more picky. The same profit imperative drives them to seek out the biggest distributors with the widest reach, characteristics a fly-by-night company is not likely to possess. Smith & Wesson, for example, told me it only ac
cepts new distributors into the fold after dispatching a sales representative to visit their operations and evaluate the quality of their records. At the same time, a company spokesman disavowed any responsibility for the customary practices of the industry. “We’re not in the business of policing the laws or enforcing the laws,” he told me, “other than seeing that we ourselves follow the laws.”

  According to Bernard La Forest, the Detroit special agent in charge and author of the Project Detroit report, one licensed dealer altered his license number several times, each time making photocopies. He gave these to associates who used them to order guns for themselves at wholesale prices. “The wholesalers thought they were dealing with eight individual dealers, when in fact it was one guy’s license,” La Forest said.

  Any distributor who did find himself moved to check a dealer’s license number would quickly find that once again the age of automation has passed the firearms industry by. No easy mechanism—no 800 telephone line, no computer-accessed data bank—exists to allow quick verification of a dealer’s license number and identity. Likewise, La Forest said, ATF has no effective means of distributing an alert to dealers to watch for licenses known to be counterfeit.

  The Project Detroit report failed to note what ought to be the most troubling finding of its underlying investigations: that apparently honest dealers accounted for the remaining one thousand traces, a fact that testifies again to the high costs imposed on the rest of us by even legitimate gun shops. Indeed, of the top ten dealers as ranked by ATF traces, the four who were not investigated by ATF nonetheless accounted for ten to twenty traces each, including traces involving at least four homicides. In all, Project Detroit traced guns sold by legitimate dealers from New York to Alaska and used subsequently in at least two kidnappings, thirty-four homicides, and hundreds of narcotics offenses—this again from only 1,226 seized weapons.