Lethal Passage_ The Story of a Gun - Erik Larson [36]
Wayne Daniel may have felt it a personal affront to work alongside John Leibolt, but he felt no such moral reluctance when in January 1983 he and Sylvia invited two men, Joseph Ledbetter and Travis Motes, to their home to make the men a proposition.
Ledbetter and Motes had installed air-conditioning in the RPB offices and had wired S.W. Daniel’s corporate headquarters. The Daniels suggested that their two visitors diversify into the business of making the outer tubes for silencers. S.W. Daniel would make the interior parts. The two companies would advertise in the same gun publications and travel to the same gun shows. By selling only parts, both would stay on the right side of federal laws requiring registration of completed silencers. Indeed, no law barred the sale of silencer parts. In the eyes of the law, however, any consumer who accepted delivery of both internal parts and tubes would automatically possess a completed silencer—regardless of whether he put them together to produce a working silencer or not. If the consumer had not first acquired the ATF approval and tax stamp necessary to own a silencer, he would be guilty of a felony. But again, as far as S.W. Daniel was concerned, that was the consumer’s worry.
Wayne Daniel went so far as to give Ledbetter and Motes a measuring gauge to guide them in fashioning the tubes, according to government affidavits. He also allowed them to use S.W. Daniel’s slogan, “Silence is golden,” which the Daniels had used to sell a line of completed silencers through Shotgun News, a thick tabloid containing only firearms advertising. Ledbetter and Motes founded L&M Guns and likewise began selling their tubes through Shotgun News and at gun shows around the country. The Daniels, meanwhile, began advertising their internal-parts kits and displaying them at the same gun shows. On at least one occasion, according to a statement by Ledbetter, the two companies found themselves facing each other across an aisle.
Details of this arrangement emerged in February 1984, when ATF agents received a tip from the sheriff’s department in Mono County, California, that its officers had discovered silencers while searching the home of a Bridgeport, California, man named Frank Wedertz. Wedertz, who had not registered his silencers, told ATF he had bought them from a licensed gun dealer in Tehachapi, California. ATF agents then searched the dealer’s home and found records indicating he had bought the components from L&M Guns and S.W. Daniel, had assembled the silencers, and then sold them. The dealer said he had seen ads for the parts in Shotgun News and had been able to assemble the completed silencers in minutes.
The investigation began gaining momentum. On April 27, 1984, ATF special agent Peter Urrea, posing as the president of the Widow Makers Motorcycle Club, telephoned L&M Guns. He first told the company’s order taker that he had received kits containing the internal parts for a silencer from S.W. Daniel, then asked whether or not the parts would fit the L&M tubes. The operator assured him the S.W. Daniel parts would indeed fit. Urrea ordered three tubes. He also ordered machine-gun flats from S.W. Daniel and L&M.
On April 30, Agent Urrea called S.W. Daniel and ordered three sets of internal parts for silencers, one kit containing the operating mechanisms of an S.W. Daniel nine-millimeter machine gun, and one the frame flat. He expressed concern about the kinds of records S.W. Daniel kept, explaining that he was concerned because he had a criminal record. The company assured him it only kept shipping invoices.
Urrea also ordered a machine-gun flat from