Lethal Passage_ The Story of a Gun - Erik Larson [51]
Jones in turn told the agents that he had arranged to sell the guns to two New Yorkers and was to be paid $500 for his services.
Both Faraz and Jones were convicted of violating federal firearms laws. At Faraz’s sentencing hearing on January 9, 1992, his attorney, John Cooper, complained to the judge that the clerks at Guns Unlimited should have been able to tell from the picture on Brant Requizo’s driver’s license that Faraz was not Requizo. Requizo, the license showed, stood five foot five and weighed 131 pounds; Faraz was a 215-pound weight lifter. Cooper said, “There’s something fundamentally strange about our society allowing somebody to go in and buy forty-eight guns within the course of a month on an ID that doesn’t look anything like him.” The judge, however, sentenced Faraz to seven months in prison, with two years’ supervised release.
Mike Dick was proud of his role in the investigation. “I don’t just send the forms in and hope it takes six months for ATF to get around to them,” Dick told me. “If there is something that’s obviously a problem—and this obviously was—my opinion is the best way to correct the problem from a society standpoint is to get these people off the street. If I just refuse to sell them weapons, nothing’s going to happen. They’re just going to go to someone less ethical than myself. And he may send the multiple-purchase form in, he may not send it in. Not all dealers are good.”
Society did not make out in this deal quite so well as Guns Unlimited. The store booked at least $15,000 in sales. Yet twenty-nine of the forty-eight handguns that Faraz bought wound up in Matthew Jones’s hands and thus in the gun-trafficking network, where weapons migrate quickly to their final users. (Some of the guns were kept by Jones, Faraz, and some of Faraz’s friends.)
In the second trafficking case, a local college student, Dean Archer, was recruited to buy guns by a convicted felon. He made his first purchase on December 1, 1990, when he bought four handguns from Guns Unlimited—not just any guns, but four inexpensive pistols made by Davis Industries, a California company whose guns are favored by traffickers who buy them cheaply in jurisdictions with lax controls, then sell them at a steep markup to inner-city buyers.
No one at Guns Unlimited seemed overly concerned by the purchase. The clerk on duty that Saturday night did not feel moved to telephone ATF. Moreover, she sold Archer the guns on the strength of a rent receipt for a Virginia apartment and his driver’s license—a New York driver’s license.
When ATF learned of Archer’s purchase—three days later—the agency was instantly suspicious and launched a preliminary investigation. A few days after the first purchase Archer reappeared at Guns Unlimited, this time accompanied by a young woman, Lisa Yvonne Scott. Scott bought seven cheap Davis handguns. Again ATF learned of the sale only through a multiple-purchase form mailed by Guns Unlimited. Again the form arrived three days after the purchase—more than enough time for those guns to make their way from hand to hand, state to state. And again ATF immediately assumed that something illicit had occurred.
ATF’s Norfolk office called Guns Unlimited to get more details and learned that Scott had been accompanied by an unidentified male later identified as Dean Archer. By this point, however, eleven of the country’s favorite crime guns were on the street.
A few days later Scott appeared again and bought thirteen Davis pistols. This time Mike Dick telephoned ATF. Nonetheless, Archer and Scott left the store with their new purchases. The total of cheap and deadly Davis pistols bought by the pair had risen to twenty-four. Four days later Scott and Archer made yet another buying trip, but at last ATF was waiting. The two were arrested and convicted.
Clearly the store had been helpful to the bureau. But why would Guns Unlimited even consider selling