Post by AirkingsCan you expand on the sting? I think that occurred while I lived out of
state.
Dave
--
Post by Joel RosenbergSure, if they know that it is a straw purchase. If they merely suspect
that
Post by Joel Rosenbergit might be the right thing to do is to report it to the authorities -- as
Mark Koscielski did, resulting in that sting that so embarrassed
Lillehaug.
A somewhat biased account of it is at
http://www.nisat.org/blackmarket/north_america/united_states/united_states_of_america/98.02.01-A%20gun%20shop%20sting%20a%20world%20of%20trouble.html
.
The key points (some of which aren't mentioned in the piece) are:
1. Mark noticed a pattern, reported it, and cooperated with the Feds.
2. The Feds, under Lillehaug -- the US Attorney, at that point -- let
the sting go on far too long, and settled it far too quickly, and
for far shorter sentences than they should have. They had the
ringleader on upwards of 117 straw purchases; they let him plead
out for less than four years in jail, apparently because Lillehaug
was embarrassed at how many crimes had been committed with the
sting-bought guns.
3. Both the Feds and the local politicians tried to make Mark out to
be the bad guy, when he was, demonstrably, quite the opposite.
Title: A gun shop sting, a world of trouble
Star Tribune (Minneapolis) Sunday, 1 Febuary 1998 Kevin Diaz / Star Tribune
Neighbors around Mark Kosciel ski's gun store in south Minneapolis
long had worried that some of the firearms sold there legally might
end up in the hands of criminals.
They didn't know the half of it.
Dozens of cheap handguns traced to Koscielski's Government Surplus and
to four suburban gun stores have turned up in crack house raids,
shootings, traffic stops and felony arrests, some of them involving
juveniles.
But what residents didn't know -- and what top city officials who lost a
two-year court battle to close the store didn't know -- was that about
150 guns were bought there while federal investigators were monitoring
the store and tracking buyers who resold guns to gang members and drug
dealers.
Lawyers for the suspected gun runners have accused federal agents of
contributing to the proliferation of guns in the city, a concern that
eventually led officials to close the investigation, after a year,
in 1996.
Some of the 150 guns have been retrieved during arrests, but many
apparently still are circulating in the community. Federal documents
provide a chilling glimpse into a pervasive underground gun trade
that, in Minneapolis and elsewhere, turns legally purchased handguns
into an arsenal for criminals.
One of the pistols from Koscielski's shop was found next to the body of
Derrick Adams, 22, the driver of an open T-top Monte Carlo who was
involved in a shootout at Golden Valley Rd. and Newton Av. N. in
Minneapolis.
Another, a .45-caliber pistol, fell into the hands of two boys, ages 9
and 13, who found it in a discarded purse while they played under a
south Minneapolis railroad overpass.
By June 1996, federal officials, alarmed by an increasing volume of gun
trafficking from the operation, quietly halted the investigation by
the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF).
Tom Doyle, a top ATF official in St. Paul, said they pulled the plug to
avoid the "appearance" of government involvement in the proliferation
of guns.
"We were concerned that too many guns were going out in the street," he
told the Star Tribune in a recent interview.
Federal public defenders have accused the investigators of actually
swelling the flow of guns. In a half-dozen court cases stemming from
the ATF investigation -- the last one ended Jan. 9 with the sentencing
of a convicted gun runner -- they raised legal challenges of
"sentencing entrapment" and "outrageous government conduct."
Behind the scenes, the comfort level of some top federal law enforcement
officials was pushed to the limit, and not just within the ATF.
David Lillehaug, the U.S. attorney for Minnesota, said, "As a legal
matter, that argument [for entrapment and outrageous government
conduct] was not valid.
But from the standpoint of investigative policy, more guns went out
under observation than there should have . . . The neighborhood could
have expected more from the investigation."
ATF officials maintain that they did nothing to add to the flow of gun
traffic. "Without our involvement, the guns continue to go out, then
as now," said Kelvin Crenshaw, resident agent in charge of the ATF
office in St. Paul. "The straw purchases go on."
Confirms fears
Minneapolis elected officials, told in recent weeks by the Star Tribune
about the operation, said that it confirms their worst fears about
the legal sale of guns in the city.
"Law enforcement sometimes does things that on the surface look
insensitive to the community's concerns," said Mayor Sharon Sayles
Belton. "But they do so believing that the outcome, if successful,
achieves a greater good."
In fact, the government cases all held up in court, and ATF officials
take credit for bagging eight suspected gun runners, all of them
now "dinged" by felony raps preventing them from legally buying guns.
The sales by Koscielski's and the other gun stores were found to be
perfectly legal and proper. What wasn't legal and proper was what
happened to the guns afterward.
Jerome Winzig, who lives two blocks from Koscielski's store, said the
immediate area is a solid middle-class neighborhood and wasn't harmed.
"What I think is terrible," Winzig added, "is that a gun store in our
neighborhood is being used to destroy other [crime-plagued]
neighborhoods, and we're powerless to do anything about it."
ATF officials say the illegal gun trafficking discovered in the
Koscielski (pronounced Kah-SELL-ski) investigation was a "drop in the
bucket": About 1,500 illegal guns are recovered every year in
Minneapolis.
It's an arms flow that local and federal authorities say they are often
helpless to check-- even when they know full well what's going on --
until they have proof of an illegal resale. Typically, that proof
comes with the commission of another crime. And by then, sometimes,
it's too late.
The Koscielski case also shows that, at a time when local and federal
officials have been celebrating their cooperative efforts to combat
crime, Minneapolis officials, who were trying to close the store, were
largely in the dark about ATF operations there.
Keep your hands out
The entrance to Koscielski's gun shop is a plain metal door in an alley
behind a neighborhood commercial strip at E. 48th St. and Chicago Av.
S. His "guns and ammo" sign faces a neighborhood coffee shop. Inside
the metal door, a smaller sign on a barred gate warns customers: "Keep
your hands out of your pockets."
The proprietor, 43-year-old Mark Koscielski, a lifelong Minneapolis
resident and Vietnam-era Army veteran, is usually friendly and always
armed.
When Koscielski opened for business on March 15, 1995, residents in the
adjoining Field and Northrup neighborhoods complained long and loud in a
series of public meetings. He got a bomb threat.
At the time, city planning officials were redrawing zoning districts to
contain the city's estimated 125 federally licensed firearms dealers,
most of them "kitchen table" dealers selling an occasional gun out of
their homes.
Koscielski's was one of only two or three full-fledged gun shops in
Minneapolis. Today, his is the only store in the city to deal
exclusively in firearms and related paraphernalia. He maintains that
most of his customers are police officers.
In May 1995, three months after Koscielski opened, the city began legal
proceedings to close him down, arguing that he was in violation of a
moratorium on new gun stores created by the city's zoning process.
Koscielski, accusing the City Council of political harassment,
showed up at one City Hall hearing wearing a "Murderapolis" T-shirt.
At about the same time, a 26-year-old woman named LaShawn Slayden began
visiting the store. She soon became a repeat customer at Koscielski's,
as well as at Bill's Gun Shop in Robbinsdale and the Gun Shop &
Pawnbroker in Richfield.
As it turned out, she was buying guns for her boyfriends, chiefly
Kawaskii Blanche, a reputed leader of the Bogus Boyz street gang.
Slayden eventually was indicted for making 22 "straw" purchases,
meaning she said she was buying the guns for herself but was in
fact reselling them to others, sometimes at $900 a pop -- nearly
10 times their original value.
Slayden, who confessed to buying guns under false pretenses and was
sentenced to 18 months in prison, was able to buy guns legally
because she had no prior felony record.
Not so for her customers. Blanche, for example, racked up 15 adult
convictions in a three-year period, including one for holding a gun
to his sister's head.
Mercenaries
By her own account, Slayden -- called a "mercenary" by the federal
prosecutor in her case -- remained a gun conduit for the Bogus Boyz
from June 1995 to June 1996. During that time, police estimate, the
gang was responsible for 20 shootings in which people were injured
and hundreds of others in which people were shot at.
Slayden's black-market business began to unravel in June 1996, when
11-year-old Byron Phillips was killed in what remains an unsolved
drive-by shooting on Minneapolis' North Side. Court records filed in
the investigation indicate that the leading suspects in the killing
were members of the Bogus Boyz.
The heat was on. Police searched Slayden's Minneapolis apartment looking
for guns. A month later, she was wounded in a suspected gang shooting in
St. Paul, where she was driving a car. Also in the car were 4-year-old
Davisha Brantley-Gillum and her pregnant mother. Davisha was shot and
killed. That slaying also remains unsolved, despite high-profile efforts
to urge witnesses to come forward.
June 1996 -- during one of the most violent summers on record in
Minneapolis -- also turned out to be a turning point in the ATF
investigation.
ATF agents working the gun case tracked more than 100 buys that had been
made in the previous two months by Slayden and several other suspected
straw purchasers who likely were arming criminals. For prosecutors, the
action was getting too hot to handle.
Lillehaug said that he "informed the highest levels of the Department of
Justice of my concerns," and that he issued a directive that "no more
guns go out" under the auspices of the ATF.
The ATF's Doyle said the bureau had its own concerns and decided to
suspend the operation at Koscielski's on its own.
Minneapolis Police Chief Robert Olson, who was briefed about the ATF
sting effort in June 1996, concurred in the decision to suspend the
operation. "I didn't want to get these guys that bad that we were
letting guns loose in the community -- I wasn't that comfortable,"
Olson said.
Entrapment defense
All three officials, however, denied that police or ATF agents were
pushing the sales of guns to help make their cases, a charge that
would later be made by defense attorneys.
In cases involving two minor gun buyers, Damon Starks and David Faison
-- both of whom were recently sentenced -- Assistant Federal
Defender Andrew Mohring admitted their complicity but argued that the
ATF was running up the numbers of gun sales to get longer sentences.
"The basic reality is that, working with the knowledge and blessing of
federal authorities, [Koscielski] was responsible for dispersing over
75 semiautomatic handguns into the Phillips community, the same
neighborhood about which the chief federal law enforcement officer for
this state [Lillehaug] publicly professes so much concern," Mohring
wrote in court briefs. "These sales were in turn happening at the same
time that the Minneapolis mayor and City Council were trying to get
Koscielski to close or relocate."
Mohring's protest, however, did not hold sway in court, where judges
found no evidence of misconduct by the ATF or the stores where Starks and
Faison bought their guns: Koscielski's, Bill's Gun Shop, Robbinsdale Farm
Garden Pet Supply and Outpost Hunt and Sports in Plymouth.
Volume sales
One of the central cases of the ATF operation involved Larry Klawitter,
a 22-year-old Minneapolis man who, according to court records, had vague
connections to the Gangster Disciples gang.
Klawitter told police that he bought more than 50 guns using a permit
he got in City Hall in January 1996. About 115 such permits are issued
every month in Minneapolis, police say. For Klawitter, it was a license
to print money. He told authorities he made $300 from each gun he
resold, mostly to dope dealers on the street in "drug spots" around the
city.
Several of Klawitter's guns turned up in crack raids and other narcotics
arrests, according to police records. One was the pistol found by the two
boys playing by the railroad tracks.
Klawitter was caught in the act in July 1996, when an ATF agent and an
undercover Minneapolis police sergeant watched him leave Koscielski's with
three new guns and then immediately hand them over to a juvenile.
The juvenile gave police the story, and Klawitter was busted.
In October, Klawitter was sentenced to 41 months in prison. At the
sentencing hearing, U.S. District Judge Michael Davis called Klawitter's
clients "gang members, thugs, slimeballs and juveniles." His description
for Klawitter was even harsher: "You are a purveyor of death."
At the sentencing, though, Klawitter's attorney, Assistant Federal
Defender Katherian Roe questioned why the store and federal agents had
allowed such a high volume of handguns to be sold to the same person
repeatedly.
Police reports show that Klawitter bought 28 guns, sometimes five or
six at a time, in one two-week period alone. "There is absolutely
nothing that this young man could have been doing with these guns other
than what he was doing . . . which was buying handguns illegally as a
straw man," Roe told the court.
"There is some level of responsibility on behalf of the government for
pushing those numbers up," she said, using entrapment as a defense.
Rather than stopping Klawitter and the other suspects, she said, police
videotaped them. "Well, now we have a whole host of videotapes, but we
also have 50 some guns on the streets of the city of Minneapolis." In
the meantime, she noted, Koscielski was running for mayor.
No choice
All along, ATF officials, government lawyers -- including Lillehaug --
and Koscielski himself all have maintained that agents were merely
tracking legal gun sales, albeit suspicious ones, in the hopes of
developing evidence of illegal resales down the line.
The simple purchase of a firearm by a qualified buyer, even if it's
done over and over, is not in itself a crime, they say.
"As long as someone has a purchase permit signed by the chief of
police, I can't say I'm not going to sell them guns," Koscielski said.
"I have no choice."
Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Walbran, who prosecuted the Klawitter
case, called Koscielski a "very good citizen." When agents got nervous
about the bulk of Klawitter's buys, Koscielski did stop selling to him,
even though he was under no obligation to do so.
"The ATF doesn't run the private commercial world of firearms," Walbran
told the court.
The ATF's Crenshaw said that "straw man" gun purchases are notoriously
difficult to prove, absent evidence that a gun has been resold and
possibly used in a crime, usually long after the initial purchase. Even
then, it usually takes a confession.
"We're not in the business of putting guns out on the street," he said.
"We're in the business of stopping the flow."
Big Tony
In a world of legal gun sales, and an underworld where they just
disappear from sight, stopping the flow can take an uncomfortably long time.
One of the government's main suspects in the summer of 1996 was 21-year-old
Damon Young, also known as "Big Tony."
Young eventually admitted that he had a woman named Reshonda Johnson buy
about 50 guns at Koscielski's over a two-month period and then turn them over
to him. Young allegedly resold them to criminals.
Though ATF agents were suspicious of Johnson's and Young's high-volume
Gun purchases in June 1996, it would be a full year before Young was
arrested and indicted. In June 1997, he was caught paying another man $200
to buy five handguns for him.
Officials have maintained publicly that he was not prosecuted for the
larger gun purchases between May and June of 1996 because that case
remained under investigation.
Privately, however, federal prosecutors said they feared that the
extensive gun purchases at Koscielski's might give rise to successful
challenges of entrapment, leading to potentially adverse court rulings and
"bad law."
Instead, they got Young to acknowledge the 50 prior gun purchases in
1996 as he pleaded guilty to a single count for the buys he made in 1997.
He got 27 months in prison.
Mayor Koscielski
By the time Young was indicted in June 1997, Koscielski was fresh off a
Satisfying victory in federal court, which found that he had opened his
store legally before the city's new zoning regulations had gone into
effect in 1995.
The City Council agreed to pay him $1 in damages and $76,721 in
attorneys' fees.
His quixotic run for mayor was a lark. His campaign platform: Elect me,
and I'll close the gun store. He got 495 votes in the September primary,
placing sixth out of 14.
To this day, Koscielski has not cashed his $1 settlement check. It's
displayed in his gun store as a memento and political statement.
He contends that the blame for illegal gun trafficking rests squarely
with those who traffic in illegal guns or use them in crimes.
"It's like if you buy a car and you chose to go out and get drunk and
run someone over," he said. "As a salesman, yes, I feel bad. But
there's nothing I can do."
Neighbors like Winzig disagree. "When a significant portion of your
product is being used in serious crimes, there's certainly cause for
concern about what's really going on," he said.
Elected officials say it is proof that legal gun sales in the midst of
the city have been putting weapons into the hands of criminals.
"This confirms my fears that a gun shop is a nuisance that attracts an
element that isn't safe," said Council Member Dore Mead, whose ward
includes Koscielski's. "Frankly, this is the first real evidence that
we've seen."
Council Member Brian Herron, whose ward extends into the troubled
Phillips neighborhood, said, "This speaks volumes for the need to get
serious about gun legislation, not just in the inner city, but everywhere."
Chief Olson, who sought gun legislation last year at the Legislature
that would have put limits on the number and frequency of handgun
purchases, concurred.
"These guns are going out every day," he said. "We just happened to get
in on it and nab a few people. Whether we're there or not, the beat goes
on."
This sample is semi-automatically rendered from
the research database, and should not be used
for other than scholarly purposes.
END OF DOCUMENT
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Joel Rosenberg
http://www.ellegon.com/homepage.phtml
(Reverse disclaimer: actually, everything I do or say is utterly
supported by Ellegon, Inc., my employer. Even when I'm wrong.)