Lethal Passage (23 page)

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 accepts 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.

In his introduction to the report, La Forest asked: “
What would the results indicate if we had the capability of successfully tracing 10,000 to 15,000 weapons seized by all law enforcement agencies in this metropolitan area?”

What the report also demonstrates is the great value of
cumulative
information on the guns used in crime and the dealers who sold them. But such information is hard to come by. Until 1989, ATF couldn’t even do a computer search to detail which guns were traced most.
Early in 1989, two reporters from the Cox Newspaper chain found that the ATF tracing center in Landover, Maryland, possessed all the information necessary to produce such an analysis, but in hard copy. The reporters gained access to this rich seam of data under the Freedom of Information Act, then hired their own team of clerks, armed them with computers, and moved them into the center where the reporters built their own database. ATF allowed such access on the condition the team use a special computer template that prohibited its hired clerks from punching in the names and addresses of the consumers who owned the guns.

The database provided immediate revelations. For one thing, it put the lie to the NRA claim that assault weapons were not often used in crime. The study revealed a startling increase in the use of assault guns from 1986 to 1989 and found that for traces made between January 1, 1988, and March 27, 1989, assault weapons accounted for 8.1 percent of homicide traces and 30 percent of traces stemming from organized crime investigations (including arrests involving drug cartels, arms traffickers, and terrorist groups). The fourth most commonly traced assault weapon was the S.W. Daniel Cobray.

ATF wasn’t able to provide such information on its own until late in 1989, when its own automated trace system began operating; as of June 1992 the agency was still struggling to rid the system of kinks.

No matter how efficient ATF’s database becomes, however, it will offer only limited help in understanding the use and migration of weapons nationwide. The bureau traces only about 10 percent of guns used in crime.
In fiscal 1990 and 1991 the Los Angeles police department and Los Angeles County sheriff asked ATF to conduct only 117 traces, even though in 1991 alone the city had 2,062 homicides. In most investigations involving a crime committed with a
gun, police simply do not request a trace. “
If they’ve got an armed robber and they’ve also got the gun, they don’t care about the gun,” La Forest said. “When they go to court, they say, ‘This is the gun the guy had.’ The question we want to ask is, ‘Where’d he get the gun?’ ”

When police or even ATF’s own agents do request gun traces, they often fail to provide the Landover tracing center with precise information. Inaccurate descriptions of seized weapons are common. The problem is especially acute for the Cobray and its look-alike ancestors, the MAC, RPB, and Ingram; it’s not uncommon for a police department to list a seized Cobray as a MAC-10 or even an Uzi. Moreover, the agency requesting the trace often fails to provide accurate information about the crime in which the gun was used. Detroit’s La Forest, for example, believes that easily half the Detroit guns identified as having been confiscated for “weapons violations” were actually seized during narcotics arrests. The weapons charges, he said, are merely the quickest and easiest to record in the bureaucratic process of logging evidence that immediately follows an arrest.

Taken together, the lack of comprehensive data about crime guns, ATF’s ticklish political position, and explicit restrictions on the bureau’s inspections and investigations, all help maintain the unimpeded diversion of guns from legitimate channels to the bad guys. Each in its own way nudged Nicholas Elliot’s Cobray along its deadly path.

Raymond Rowley, an agent in ATF’s Norfolk office, initiated the bureau’s search for the source of Nicholas’s gun. He heard about the shooting on the news and quickly volunteered his help to Det. Donald Adams, the Virginia Beach homicide detective in charge of the case. Rowley ordered an “Urgent” trace, the highest of three request levels and one that typically yields a response within a matter of hours.
The ATF’s Urgent trace of the revolver used by John Hinckley to shoot Ronald Reagan took all of sixteen minutes.

The serial number from Nicholas’s Cobray was relayed to the special agent in charge in Atlanta, Tom Stokes, who then telephoned S.W. Daniel. No one answered. It was Friday; the company operated only Monday through Thursday.
But Stokes eventually managed to speak by phone with Sylvia Daniel, who, in a departure from the usual frosty relations between her company and the bureau, agreed to stop by her office on the way to the S.W. Daniel Christmas party and search the serial number herself.

The number led to a distributor, who in turn said he had shipped the pistol to Guns Unlimited. By eleven o’clock that night, Rowley, another agent, and Detective Adams were at Curtis Williams’s door.

Williams went to jail. As far as federal law was concerned, however, Guns Unlimited did nothing wrong when it sold the Cobray to Williams, even under such obviously suspicious circumstances. Williams had shown the appropriate identification and had filled out form 4473 properly, dutifully writing “no” after every background question on the form.

No one thought to investigate Guns Unlimited, not even after the negligence suit filed by the family of Karen Farley yielded a judgment against the dealership early in 1992.