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By Root 1061 0

L&M Guns and persuaded Travis Motes to bend the frame for him. Motes mailed the shaped frame to Urrea. In the process, according to ATF documents, Motes violated provisions of the Gun Control Act of 1968 prohibiting any company from manufacturing a lower receiver without an ATF license. ATF charged, moreover, that by mailing the frame to California, moreover, Motes violated the act’s provisions against shipping firearms across state lines directly to consumers. (Companies can sell guns to out-of-state residents by mail but must ship them first to a licensed dealer in the buyer’s home state.) Urrea also asked Motes whether he could provide twenty-five more machine-gun kits with already-shaped flats so that he could make twenty-five machine guns and sell them to friends in South America. Motes said he might be able to accommodate him.

Urrea continued buying silencer parts and machine-gun kits from S.W. Daniel, L&M, and a third company, La Vista Armaments of Louisville, Kentucky, gradually building enough evidence to convince a federal judge to grant search warrants to allow ATF agents to search the companies. On July 19, 1984, ATF agents raided L&M and S.W. Daniel, seizing firearms, firearm parts, and, most important, customer lists and shipping records. Urrea and a colleague spent a month examining these records and found that in California alone some twenty-four consumers had received all the components necessary to build a silencer—and thus possessed the equivalent of completed silencers—but none had bothered to register the device.

The bureau used the seized records to launch some four hundred individual criminal investigations relating to arms trafficking and illegal possession of restricted weapons. In June 1985, ATF agents arrested Sylvia and Wayne and, using an experimental tactic, charged them with conspiracy to sell illegal silencers. (By now Sylvia and Wayne had divorced but continued a close working relationship.) In formal court arguments, they claimed they were simply trying to fill a valid need for replacement parts for silencers owned by legitimate users.

The ATF investigators found a rather different story.

All in all from November 1983 to July 1984, the government charged, S.W. Daniel had mailed six thousand silencer kits and machine-gun kits. Only four buyers had bothered to register the devices. When ATF checked the customer lists through the FBI’s National Crime Information Center, it found that more than fifty customers had prior criminal records or were believed to be involved in drug peddling and other forms of organized crime. Posing as IRA gunrunners, Mexican narcotics smugglers, and assorted ne’er-do-wells, undercover ATF agents were welcomed by international arms traffickers, narcotics smugglers, and assorted ne’er-do-wells.

An ATF agent posing as a member of the Irish Republican Army ordered $15.6 million of silencer-equipped machine guns, hand grenades, and rocket-propelled grenades from a group of New York arms traffickers who, according to Treasury documents, illegally manufactured and sold firearms and explosives to countries forbidden by U.S. law from receiving domestically produced weapons. A Treasury case report noted that the leaders of the group “were dealing directly with Sylvia and Wayne Daniel … for the purchase of the machine guns and silencer kits, which were then sold to the ATF undercover agent.” The leaders were convicted of violating federal firearms laws.

Agents also arrested an Oregon man who sold machine-gun lower receivers to the Neo-Nazi Order, the group whose members assassinated Alan Berg in Denver and allegedly murdered a Missouri state trooper. After his initial arrest, the man bragged to friends that ATF had failed to find his real stash of weapons hidden underneath his water bed. A tipster leaked the secret to ATF. Agents returned to the man’s house, drained the bed, and found two S.W. Daniel machine guns and five silencers, all made from kits.

Another investigation captured a Texas man after he sold seven S.W. Daniel machine guns, with silencers, to an ATF undercover