Subject: [NEXTEL-1] Feds work locally to stop firearms trafficking

From: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 20 May 2003 00:36:14 -0400

Feds work locally to stop firearms trafficking

05/05/03

By JOE DANBORN
Staff Reporter

A pair of New York City police undercover detectives were shot dead in
March while trying to buy a submachine gun from firearms traffickers,
prompting fellow officers to solemnly call such stings the most dangerous
job in law enforcement.

Authorities have yet to reveal the origins of the Tec-9 semiautomatic pistol
that the officers were trying to buy for $1,200 cash. Nor have they said
how or where a 16-year-old already convicted in the case got his hands on
the .44-caliber handgun he provided to the 20-year-old accused of pulling
the trigger.

But chances are, given New York's strict gun laws, neither gun came
straight from a licensed firearms dealer in that state. Given the
consistently high gun ownership rates and comparatively lax laws in Sun
Belt states like Alabama -- which a recent study showed has a higher gun
theft rate than any state, save Alaska -- odds are decent that one of those
New York guns was first sold by a dealer in a warmer climate.

Sun Belt states supply many of the guns used in crimes elsewhere in the
United States, Mexico and Canada, federal officials say. That established
pattern has authorities keeping a closer eye on low-level offenders, with
promises to prosecute everyone discovered with an illegal gun, in an effort
to gain the upper hand on gun trafficking.

Federal and local authorities also have begun placing unprecedented
emphasis on tracking the guns themselves, and -- with a barrage of
advertisements launched locally in late February on TV, and on radio a
week later -- trying to spread the word to would-be felons that even minor
gun violations can mean prison.

Officials consider those efforts particularly crucial in the country's
southern half, especially Alabama. Six weeks ago, a federal jury in
Florence, Ala., found a convicted robber from Brooklyn, N.Y., guilty of
conspiring with three other men to buy at least seven 9 mm pistols in
Alabama and send them to New York for resale on the street.

Good for both sides:

When Southern investigators break up a gun-trafficking ring, they may find
a connection with some crime elsewhere in the country. "Basically, what
you're doing is eliminating (violent) crime in New York and house break-ins
here," said Assistant U.S. Attorney Greg Bordenkircher, a veteran
prosecutor of federal firearms cases in Mobile.

In areas with tighter gun laws, "the guns on the market become worth
more and more," said Billy Blair, resident agent in charge of the Mobile
field office of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

A typical South-to-North trafficking case involves someone illegally
acquiring and quickly trying to get rid of a gun -- say, a .40-caliber Glock
pistol, worth $500 or $600 "in the box," which is fed-speak for new. The
thief's eagerness to move his merchandise means he's willing to sell
cheap. It's the person willing to take the Glock to Chicago, or
Washington, D.C., or New York City who makes the bigger score.

"If I steal it and want to unload it, I can't get that much for it, maybe $100,"
Bordenkircher said. "But the next sale could go for $300, or maybe even
the original price of the gun."

As an example, Blair said he knows of people who set out from
Minnesota, buy a gun in the Carolinas, sell it in south Florida and repeat
the process in reverse on their way back. "They pay for their trips that
way," he said.

"People make good money reselling them here, too. They resell them
here or they get on a bus or an Amtrak and sell them somewhere else."

In south Alabama and elsewhere, the ATF has started working more
closely with local agencies to trace firearms. Agents believe the more
widespread tracing becomes, the more it will help them spot and catch
traffickers, the people who turn legal guns into illegal ones.

Treat all guns the same:

Four years ago, the Mobile Police Department was tracing only those
guns that were critical to a case. Gradually, though, the department has
started working toward the point where it will trace virtually every gun an
officer comes across.

"Out on patrol, they know how to treat the guns that 'matter,' the ones that
have killed someone or something like that," said Mobile Cpl. Laura
Soulier, who is charged with instructing her colleagues on fed eral firearms
guidelines. Now, she said, "We're emphasizing, 'Treat all firearms as
evidence.'"

As part of the new approach, Mobile police are using an ATF software
program that enables local agencies to more efficiently request gun traces
through the ATF's National Tracing Center, according to Blair. He said
south Alabama's four largest law enforcement agencies -- the Mobile and
Prichard police departments and the Mobile County and Baldwin County
sheriff's departments -- all have been offered the software, but only the
Mobile Police Department uses it.

When the Mobile Register asked in February why the other agencies
weren't using the software, Mobile County Sheriff's Department officials
contacted the ATF and agreed to put it into practice as soon as possible,
according to department spokesman Shane McBryde.

Larry Milstid, chief deputy for the Baldwin County Sheriff's Department,
said his agency did not have the manpower at the moment to incorporate
the new software setup. The department's coordinator for firearms
investigations, Cpl. John Murphy, recently was called up from the military
reserves and will be gone indefinitely, along with about seven other
deputies, Milstid said.

"It's not that we're not interested," he said, adding that he believes the
software eventually would improve efficiency. For the time being, though,
the department will continue to submit its trace requests through the local
ATF office.

Prichard police did not respond to the Register's inquiries.

Not universally routine:

Smaller agencies still fax in their trace requests, Blair said. The ATF
doesn't really care how agencies submit trace requests, as long as they
do it, he said. Despite the potential for unearthing traffickers and solving
other crimes, tracing firearms is still a far cry from standard operating
procedure.

"That's one of the biggest disconnects in law enforcement," said David
York, the U.S. attorney in Mobile.

Blair, who's been in law enforcement for 30 years, said that when he
started out, a criminal could go from arrest to trial to prison without ever
having his fingerprints taken. These days, officers take prints from
everyone arrested, and the FBI has more than 41 million criminal sets on
file for use by agencies worldwide.

"I see tracing firearms the same way," Blair said. "It's something that, as
time goes on, more and more police departments will use."

Addressing a Justice Department conference Feb. 7 in Philadelphia,
Attorney General John Ashcroft reiterated his standing order to federal
prosecutors across the country to target people who lie on forms they
have to fill out when they go to buy a gun.

"I said, 'Whew! That's one area where we're ahead,'" York said. His office
was already working more than a dozen such cases, he said,
representing a relatively new focus in ferreting out gun runners.

Safe Neighborhoods:

In cracking down on crooks falsifying firearms applications, Ashcroft has
stuck with the tough-on-guns theme of Project Safe Neighborhoods, a
Justice Department initiative the Bush administration announced two
years ago. The attorney general's most recent directive came as the ATF
transferred from the Treasury Department to the Justice Department as
part of the Homeland Security Act.

In Alabama, Safe Neighborhoods has been most visible in the form of
Project ICE, for Isolating the Criminal Element, which is designed to teach
local agencies to turn routine gun offenses into federal cases. The
program started in Birmingham and gained steam in south Alabama last
year when Mobile police got on board, designating Soulier as the
department's ICE coordinator. York said his office handled 31 percent
more handgun prosecutions in fiscal year 2001-02 than it did the previous
year.

According to data compiled by the ATF's National Tracing Center, less
than 12 percent of the nearly 5,000 trace requests from Alabama last year
came from the Mobile area. All but 24 of those 568 locally requested
traces were initiated by Mobile police or the local ATF office.

In Birmingham, which has had the ICE program in full swing for nearly
three years, the Police Department submitted nearly 1,200 traces last
year, or about one-fourth of the state's total. Montgomery police
accounted for about half as many requests, with Mobile submitting a little
more than one-third as many as Birmingham.

ATF officials want to see the number of trace requests increase and
eventually hope to incorporate smaller agencies into the effort, for the
simple reason that the data makes traffickers easier to spot.

Flea markets, gun shows:

The 1993 Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act mandated a national
background check system, making it tougher for prohibited people to get
guns through licensed dealers, and has consequently pushed such
buyers to less formal environs. ATF agents in Knoxville, Tenn., for
instance, recently seized 1,400 guns from flea market vendors in a single
year, Blair said.

"The more these laws are enforced, the more people are gonna go to the
flea market" and gun show parking lots, he said. "So you go from trying to
enforce the Brady Act on individuals to working firearms trafficking cases
at gun shows."

Agents in Mobile recently warned a handful of people selling firearms at
shows and flea markets, Blair said. Sometimes, to take advantage of gun
law loopholes, unlicensed vendors slap a sticker on their booths claiming
their merchandise is from their personal collection, a gambit to which
agents have grown wise.

"We'll go and buy one from him and run a trace and find out he bought it a
few days earlier," Blair said. "Then we know he's probably a trafficker."

Similarly, "If you've got one guy reporting his house burglarized seven
times in a year, and each time a gun is stolen, he's probably a trafficker,"
York said.

Information on a gun's movement becomes even more valuable once the
point of sale moves into the shadows, authorities said. When a pistol
turned up at a crime scene in Canada two years ago, investigators started
at the shop where it was first sold and eventually tracked it to an
over-the-road driver who'd dealt it at a truck stop in Demopolis. Turned out
the man had blown his gas money at the casinos in Biloxi, then sold the
gun out of desperation to a total stranger.

"He said he had no idea who the guy was," Blair said.

Inevitably, agents encounter large-scale instances of outright gun theft and
trafficking, frequently involving teams of burglars hitting gun shops and
pawn brokers and making off with numerous weapons. In those instances,
the perpetrators usually want to swap their haul for cash as quickly as
possible. Local law enforcement officers typically are the first to recover
one of the stolen guns, and tracing through the ATF lets detectives link
the individual gun to the larger case.

Burglars and crooked gun shop owners account for a big chunk of the
trafficking cases the ATF works, but a much more common scenario is
that of the straw purchase, wherein someone with a clean record buys a
gun for a convicted felon.

The Brady Act made straw purchasers easier to spot since it requires
background checks, Blair said. The law, which went into effect more than
four years ago, gives contractors with the FBI's National Instant Check
System, or NICS, three days to complete the check.

Alabama is one of 25 states -- including the other four most prone to gun
theft -- where gun dealers send all applications to the FBI for background
checks. Sixteen states handle the checks themselves, while the other
nine do some checks themselves and let the FBI process the rest.

'Lyin' and buyin'':

In the hierarchy of gun traffickers, people who fib on forms -- agents call it
"lyin' and buyin'" -- tend not to cause much concern.

Often some truthful detail they provide snares them in the background
check system, and they're denied a gun on the spot, which the ATF terms
a standard denial. Other times the fraudulent customer might get the gun,
but get caught shortly thereafter.

Either way, the FBI or the state agency sends the failed applicant's
information to the ATF, which must cross-check the names in standard
denials and track down and retrieve guns in delayed denial cases, a
time-consuming and often fruitless task. By the time the agents find the
buyer, the gun often has already been transferred to a brother, a boyfriend
or someone else.

"If a person gets a standard denial, you can say, 'Well, the law is working.
The man didn't get a gun. Why put him in jail?' But he has broken a law,"
Blair said.

The five-agent ATF office in Mobile -- which recently was allotted a sixth
agent -- has handled about 700 denials in four years, Blair said. At any
given time, each agent is trying to track down about 40 delayed denials,
he said.

The push for prosecuting felons who lie while trying to purchase a gun
could further hinder the ATF's ability to work trafficking cases, which are
more complex but can have a greater impact on violent crime, Blair said.

"Trafficking cases require a lot of time. One agent can't do one by
himself," he said. "If we have a push for NICS cases, that comes at the
expense of trafficking cases. And they're all important."

Even if the emphasis on people faking the forms puts more of them in jail,
Bordenkircher warned, the results could be fleeting at best.

"Everyone wants those lyin' and buyin' cases, but the criminal mind, they
morph to what we do," said Bordenkircher, who has prosecuted firearms
cases since he arrived at the U.S. attorney's office 12 years ago.

In that time, Bordenkircher has witnessed the advent of the Brady Act and
the subsequent responses of felons to the mandatory background checks.

"They'll test the shops, see if they're really gonna (run the check) or if
they'll deal on the side," Bordenkircher said.

The PR campaign:

Still, officials say enforcement isn't the sole aspect of Project Safe
Neighborhoods, pointing out that federal grants will pay public relations
firms to produce nationwide ad campaigns. Billboards will feature some
version of the message, "You do the crime, your mama does the time," a
thrust at the damage convicts do to their own families, according to a
spokeswoman for the National Crime Prevention Council, an organization
working with the Justice Department on the program.

Late last year in Mobile, a series of billboards around the city warned of
federal prison terms for routine gun violations. On Feb. 24, TV spots
featuring Mobile Police Chief Sam Cochran and celebrity defense lawyer
Johnnie Cochran started airing on local stations. A similar radio blitz
began a week later.

Blair wants to post mug shots of gun convicts on telephone poles and in
community centers in the neighborhoods they came from, where everyone
will know who they are and how long they'll be away. "That makes it more
personal," he said.

Bordenkircher compared Project ICE to a local crackdown on carjacking a
couple of years ago. The crime became somewhat popular here,
prompting authorities to respond with heavy prison time for those
convicted. Occurrences dropped off. The same thing can happen with gun
crimes, he said.

"You start throwing out 30-, 35-year sentences, and word gets out on the
street, you don't wanna be carjacking people," Bordenkircher said. "It took
about a year around here" for the crackdown to take effect.

"I think that if we're consistent, if it's not just a passing thing, that we'll
see a reduction in violent crime committed with firearms," Blair said.

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