Lethal Passage_ The Story of a Gun - Erik Larson [34]
Taylor is a tall, lean man whose courtly manner and slow, easy way of speaking suggest quiet authority. Over the years he came to know RPB and its successor, S.W. Daniel, intimately, first as resident agent-in-charge of ATF’s Rome, Georgia, office, later as supervisor of criminal investigation in the agency’s Atlanta office. He deployed undercover agents to order the guns from illegal suppliers. Demand was so high, they had to wait for delivery, Taylor recalled. “It was a hot item.”
What made the gun particularly popular was its internal design, a delight to anyone interested in skirting federal restrictions on ownership of machine guns. “ATF was concerned because those damn weapons were so easily converted to full-automatic fire,” Taylor said. “An individual could convert one in a minute or two, or maybe even less time than that.” (“In seconds,” said another retired ATF agent familiar with the guns.)
All a buyer had to do was file down a small metal catch—the “trip”—that caught the bolt after each shot, thereby leaving the bolt free to spring forward and fire machine-gun style. Demand for the guns soared nationwide, and black markets formed as middlemen, including one Georgia policeman, bought large quantities, converted the guns, and resold them to the drug underworld. These weapons triggered the arms race that today confronts law-enforcement officers across the nation.
In October 1981, Wayne Daniel married a striking Alabama woman named Sylvia Williams. In November, Sylvia, and Wayne’s son from a previous marriage, Wayne “Buddy” Daniel, became members of RPB’s board of directors. Sylvia would soon prove a feisty, outspoken opponent of ATF, bent on pushing the limits of the law in the name of the Second Amendment and free enterprise, at no small cost to society at large. She and Wayne made no secret of their loyalties. At one point, they produced little plastic badges that read BATF SUCKS.
By the autumn of 1981, Wayne Daniel found himself struggling against increasing pressure from the FBI, ATF, and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, as all three agencies investigated the activities of John Leibolt, by now one of RPB’s three shareholders. (The other two shareholders were Wayne Daniel and Leibolt’s son.) ATF threatened to pull the federal license that allowed RPB to make and sell guns—its Federal Firearms License—because of Leibolt’s suspected criminal activities. Minutes of RPB’s board meetings show that Leibolt’s legal troubles had made it difficult for RPB to secure credit and, moreover, had left the company exposed to the threat of criminal charges.
In a special board meeting held December 14, 1981, Wayne, according to the minutes, denounced “the general irrepute that the association of Mr. Leibolt” had brought to the company. Because of John Leibolt’s dabbling in the narcotics trade, Wayne said, he “personally did not want to be in business with either one of the Lei-bolts.”
Two weeks later the board met again and resolved to buy back Leibolt’s stock and thus sever his ties to the company. Leibolt, however, had fled Georgia. The minutes of RPB’s January 20, 1982, board meeting noted that Leibolt “refuses to come to Atlanta and has stated he will not step foot in the State of Georgia due to fear of being arrested.” The board resolved to liquidate the company.
ATF, meanwhile, classified RPB’s semiautomatic Ingram as a machine gun, arguing it was so easy to convert that even in semiautomatic form it should fall under the far stricter regulations that governed the sale of automatic weapons.