Lethal Passage_ The Story of a Gun - Erik Larson [50]
ATF will investigate high-volume purchases, provided it learns of them. If a purchase takes place on a Saturday night, however, ATF will not see the multiple-purchase form for several days. Meanwhile, the guns will begin their rapid migration through the illicit-arms network. Guns trafficked from Norfolk, Virginia, for example, typically wind up in the hands of crooks in Washington, Philadelphia, and New York, half a day’s drive up Interstate 95—nicknamed the Iron Road for all the illicit weapons that make the trip. In 1992, ATF conducted a massive tracing project to find out where the guns recovered from crime scenes in New York City had begun their travels. The agency discovered that Virginia alone accounted for 26 percent of the guns, more than any other individual state. Florida came in second, supplying 19 percent; Texas third with 11 percent; Georgia, home of S.W. Daniel, was fourth at 9 percent. Even Batman, in a December 1992 comic book, noted how easily the crooks could buy guns in Virginia. In the early 1970s most crime guns seized in New York came from South Carolina, but in 1975 the state passed a law allowing consumers to purchase only one gun per month. Although the law included a huge loophole—for inexplicable reasons it exempted purchases made at gun shows, a common source of crime guns throughout the country—it succeeded in sharply reducing the number of South Carolina guns found at New York crime scenes. South Carolina contributed only 2 percent of the New York crime guns traced by ATF in 1992. Virginia, deeply embarrassed by its role as crime-gun distributor of the Eastern Seaboard, passed a similar law in 1993. Before it took effect, however, ATF found that gun buyers in Virginia made 3,400 multiple purchases a year, or nearly ten a day. That the notification of such purchases takes place by mail in an age when virtually every ordinary consumer transaction involves some immediate form of computer verification is but one of the peculiar ironies that characterize arms commerce in America.
Mike Dick managed the first sale to Faraz and was immediately suspicious, enough so that he telephoned the ATF field office in Norfolk to alert the bureau to Faraz’s purchases. (Dick also filed the multiple-purchase form.) Over the next two weeks Faraz returned three more times and bought twenty-nine more guns, selling twenty-five to Jones, according to court documents. On the last of these shopping trips Faraz placed an order for thirteen more handguns, all Glock pistols, the same guns now adopted by police departments around the country. Mike Dick telephoned ATF while Faraz was still in the store and helped choreograph an undercover operation against Faraz. Dick allowed the bureau to choose the day on which Guns Unlimited would notify Faraz that the guns he had ordered were ready for pickup. The agency chose September 17, 1991, a Tuesday.
Agents took up positions inside and outside the store and waited. At about five-fifteen that evening, a 1987 Pontiac Grand Am, registered to Faraz, pulled into the Guns Unlimited parking lot. Faraz stepped up to the counter and presented Brant Requizo’s driver’s license, which gave an address in Norfolk, Virginia. As an ATF agent watched, Faraz signed the required form 4473 with Requizo’s name. Faraz left the store carrying the guns, then drove home, where agents kept him in sight while others contacted first Brant Requizo’s mother and then Brant himself to confirm that his license had been lost.
At eight-forty, the agents arrested Faraz at his home. Faraz admitted buying the guns for Matthew Jones—Jones, he said, had agreed to pay him $6,000 for ten of the Glocks, or roughly $1,000 more than Faraz had paid to Guns Unlimited. The agents persuaded Faraz