Lethal Passage_ The Story of a Gun - Erik Larson [71]
Soon afterward, Baltimore’s HEAT squad and the local ATF office began a joint investigation. An ATF agent compared serial numbers from the RSR shipping invoices with records of guns confiscated during arrests made by Baltimore police. He discovered that one month earlier, on September 20, officers had confiscated a nine-millimeter pistol that had been shipped to Carroll Brown in July. Two weeks later, he found, Baltimore police had seized two more of Brown’s guns, from two suspects arrested for illegal possession of handguns. One suspect, according to a federal affidavit, was a three-time felon.
On November 16, Baltimore detectives investigating a homicide conducted a search of one suspect’s home and recovered a Cobray M-11/9 made by S.W. Daniel and sold by Brown. Five days later, police arrested four other suspects on handgun charges and found three more guns that had been sold by Brown, including another Cobray pistol. One of the guns, a Glock nine-millimeter automatic, had been shipped to Brown by a distributor just five days before. Another arrest one week later yielded another Cobray, this with its serial number obliterated. Technicians were able to restore the number, and police traced this gun also to Brown. It had been shipped to him about six weeks earlier.
On December 10, a man named Melvin King telephoned Brown and, identifying himself as a resident of Richmond, Virginia, asked to buy a Glock. King called Brown twice more over the next two days. On December 13, Brown agreed to meet him and sell him the pistol. Brown told King to come to a shopping plaza located about a mile from Brown’s home.
When King arrived, he found Brown sitting in his 1989 Dodge, listening to a radio scanner capable of picking up police communications. Brown told King to sign what he called a “requisition blank” but told him not to write down that he was from Virginia. Brown agreed to sell King two more Glocks at another meeting they set for one week later.
Melvin King was an ATF agent. On December 20, he arrested Brown on felony charges of violating federal firearms laws. The next day Baltimore police arrested Brown again, this time on state charges. Brown pleaded guilty on March 7, 1991, and on May 31 was sentenced to twenty-one months in federal prison, later reduced to nineteen months.
The guns Brown had sold, however, continued their travels. As of January 1991 police had recovered only a tenth of the 268 handguns he had received from distributors.
Just over a week after his sentencing, at about two A.M. on a lovely spring night, another of Brown’s guns made an appearance on the streets of Baltimore. A drug dealer named Ronnie Hunt had acquired a Glock .40-caliber pistol that Brown had sold to a convicted felon the previous October. Hunt and an associate cornered Sheldean Simon, a member of a local rap group called Murder Inc., and opened fire. Simon drew two nine-millimeter pistols of his own, but faced an onslaught like something from the tommy-gun massacres of the 1920s. Within seconds his opponents fired some seventy rounds of ammunition. Simon fired only once. He died after being struck by two of the forty-four rounds fired from Hunt’s Glock .40.
Brown’s nine-year-old daughter wrote a letter to the court to help her father: “Dear Judge: My daddy is not a bad man. He has been very good to all of us. He does his best to take care of us.” Rev. James Ross, pastor of Nicodemus Baptist Church in Baltimore, wrote to the judge as well, pleading that Brown