Lethal Passage_ The Story of a Gun - Erik Larson [73]
In all, Project Detroit led to investigations of thirteen licensed dealers—including six of the top ten in traces—and successful prosecutions against all but three. Two of the three died (one blew himself up while manufacturing hand grenades); the third, whose case was still pending at the time of the report, was a Toledo, Ohio, dealer who allegedly sold cheap .25-caliber Raven pistols to anyone, regardless of age and background. That investigation began after weapons sweeps in Detroit’s public schools turned up an inordinate number of guns traced to him.
Project Detroit also turned up a new and troubling wrinkle in firearms trafficking: the use of counterfeit licenses. To order weapons from a distributor, all the law requires a dealer to do is send a photocopy of his license, freshly signed in ink. The law does not require that the dealer first have his signature notarized or otherwise validated. Nor does it require the firearms distributors who receive these copies to verify the license numbers. Distributors, driven by the profit imperative to seek as many retail outlets as possible, tend to be lax about making sure their customers are bona fide, commercial dealerships. Major manufacturers are far more picky. The same profit imperative drives them to seek out the biggest distributors with the widest reach, characteristics a fly-by-night company is not likely to possess. Smith & Wesson, for example, told me it only accepts new distributors into the fold after dispatching a sales representative to visit their operations and evaluate the quality of their records. At the same time, a company spokesman disavowed any responsibility for the customary practices of the industry. “We’re not in the business of policing the laws or enforcing the laws,” he told me, “other than seeing that we ourselves follow the laws.”
According to Bernard La Forest, the Detroit special agent in charge and author of the Project Detroit report, one licensed dealer altered his license number several times, each time making photocopies. He gave these to associates who used them to order guns for themselves at wholesale prices. “The wholesalers thought they were dealing with eight individual dealers, when in fact it was one guy’s license,” La Forest said.
Any distributor who did find himself moved to check a dealer’s license number would quickly find that once again the age of automation has passed the firearms industry by. No easy mechanism—no 800 telephone line, no computer-accessed data bank—exists to allow quick verification of a dealer’s license number and identity. Likewise, La Forest said, ATF has no effective means of distributing an alert to dealers to watch for licenses known to be counterfeit.
The Project Detroit report failed to note what ought to be the most troubling finding of its underlying investigations: that apparently honest dealers accounted for the remaining one thousand traces, a fact that testifies again to the high costs imposed on the rest of us by even legitimate gun shops. Indeed, of the top ten dealers as ranked by ATF traces, the four who were not investigated by ATF nonetheless accounted for ten to twenty traces each, including traces involving at least four homicides. In all, Project Detroit traced guns sold by legitimate dealers from New York to Alaska and used subsequently in at least two kidnappings, thirty-four homicides, and hundreds of narcotics offenses—this again from only 1,226 seized weapons.
In his introduction to the report, La Forest asked: “What would the results indicate if we had the capability of successfully tracing 10,000 to 15,000 weapons seized by all law enforcement agencies in this metropolitan area?”
What the report also demonstrates is the great value of cumulative information on the guns used in crime and the dealers who sold them. But such information is hard to come by. Until 1989, ATF couldn’t even do a computer search to detail which guns were traced most. Early in 1989, two reporters from the Cox Newspaper chain found that the ATF tracing center in Landover, Maryland, possessed