Lethal Passage_ The Story of a Gun - Erik Larson [38]
In Ohio, agents arrested a convicted felon named Joe Canatelli, who had also sold machine guns and silencers to an ATF undercover agent. Canatelli had purchased silencer tubes and internal components directly from L&M and S.W. Daniel, and from a federally licensed firearms dealer in Youngstown, Ohio, who had agreed to order the silencer kits and machine-gun kits for Canatelli. The dealer, in a formal affidavit, stated that Canatelli “had previously told me that you can make a buck by putting the kits together, and that he knew some guys that wanted to buy some M11s with silencers for the mob. He further explained that they ‘would be used only once for hits.’ ” Agents seized three machine guns made from “flats,” and three silencers. Canatelli and an associate were convicted and sentenced to prison.
The growing list of arrested S.W. Daniel customers included a San Jose man who made machine guns and silencers and distributed them in Mexico; an Aurora, Illinois, man found during a search to possess an arsenal of more than thirty weapons and a large supply of cocaine, marijuana, and amphetamines; two Tucson narcotics dealers who had sold two machine guns and three silencers to an ATF agent posing as a Mexican narcotics smuggler; and a federally licensed firearms dealer in Florida found during a search to possess one and a half pounds of uncut cocaine and ninety-four blank Granadian passports. The dealer told the ATF agents a child had found the passports “in the road.” When the agents asked the dealer to open a safe in his closet, he hesitated and asked, “What if there’s something in here other than guns that I don’t want you to find?”
Agents found the cocaine.
“There are literally thousands of persons now in the United States and probably outside the United States who have a fully operable silencer which is not registered to them and which is possessed unlawfully,” wrote Brian C. Leighton, the assistant U.S. attorney assigned to prosecute the Daniels, in a pretrial statement. “It was incredibly easy for these people to receive the silencer; they merely had to order the internal-parts kit from SWD and order a tube from one of the many tube distributors—all of whom advertised in Shotgun News.” These were “assassin-type weapons,” he said, and posed “a definite danger to the community.”
As the case approached the trial phase, however, the government found itself compelled to abandon its conspiracy strategy and admit that no law forbade the sale of silencer components or the machine-gun parts as sold by S.W. Daniel. Indeed, federal law expressly excluded silencer parts from ATF regulation. The Daniels pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor for failing to pay taxes in the sale of two firearms. They were sentenced to six months’ probation and forced to pay $900 in taxes and fines, but because they had escaped felony charges, they were allowed to retain their Federal Firearms License.
The investigation had not cowed the Daniels. On May 1, 1985, Shotgun News ran an ad placed by Wayne Daniel titled, “Now It’s Happening in AMERICA,” and featuring a large photograph of Hitler and Mussolini. The ad recounted the ATF raid on S.W. Daniel and listed the names and home cities of the agents involved. Wayne referred to them as the “Gestapo” and likened their search to a Nazi search for Polish gun owners in 1939. “The uniforms of this new ‘Gestapo’ may not be taylored [sic] and bear the eagle and swastika on the sleeve, rather they choose to wear a business suit or sport jacket and slacks from the racks of a cut-rate department store—but their purpose is the same, they want total control and YOU, as an American citizen, DISARMED!”
The agents named in the ad, among them Earl Taylor, demanded that Daniel retract the advertisement. He refused.
In a handwritten letter he replied: “I am at a complete loss of words perhaps from bending over laughing. No malice was intended by the ad.… It is my opinion