By Mark Fazlollah;
The Philadelphia Inquirer
PHILADELPHIA - When Trenton crack dealer Sean Hagins spotted the Pennsylvania tags and NRA sticker on a customer’s pickup, he saw opportunity.
Hagins had been dealing drugs for years, was an ex-felon with a history of psychiatric problems; he could not buy guns himself. The customer, David Downs, had a nasty crack habit and had been laid off from a Bensalem belt factory.
Downs told a jury at the federal courthouse in Philadelphia that Hagins spotted the sticker on his truck and asked him if he could help him get some guns in Pennsylvania - where they’re far easier to buy than in New Jersey.
“I told him yes,” Downs testified last month.
By the time the feds caught up to them, Downs had ferried about 50 guns from Bucks County shops to Hagins, who moved many of them to Trenton’s pushers and gang members.
Hagins and Downs’ transactions were emblematic of a thriving illegal economy: exploiting Pennsylvania’s relatively weak gun laws to export firearms.
“Everyone knows where these guns are ending up,” said Jersey City Mayor Jerramiah Healy. “You’re ending up with 15- and 16-year-old kids having guns.”
These types of transactions - buying guns for others, or “straw purchases” - are illegal. They can happen anywhere. But in Pennsylvania, they’re exceptionally easy.
Someone with a clean record can often buy a gun in a half hour. It takes weeks, even months, in New Jersey or New York.
As a result, at least for supplying the Northeast, Pennsylvania rivals gun-friendly Southern states like Virginia or Georgia as a firearms exporter, according to data from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
Each year, hundreds of guns seized from criminals in New York and New Jersey are traced back to Pennsylvania gun stores, the ATF statistics show.
In 2006, ATF traced 332 guns from New Jersey crimes back to Pennsylvania gun dealers. No other state sent more.
The same year, 461 Pennsylvania guns were seized in New York City and state. Only Virginia sent more crime guns there, ATF found.
A review of dozens of court cases shows there is a seemingly endless supply of people willing to meet the demand for black-market guns. Most are not high-end smugglers but crack addicts, girlfriends of felons, or low-level hustlers looking to make a fast $100.
There was Javier Checo, 28, who moved from Queens, N.Y., to Allentown and, after a prison term for robbery, plunged into gun trafficking - getting guns in Allentown for $300 each and selling them to his drug-dealing buddy in New York City for $800. Two of his straw buyers were single mothers with young children. In September, Checo pleaded guilty to firearms charges.
Allentown firearms trafficker Nashawn Law, 24, was sentenced to 17 years in prison for shipping dozens of guns to clients in North Jersey from 2003 to 2005. He used eight straw buyers, including two ex-girlfriends.
New York City officials were so concerned about the flow of weaponry that they sued gun stores in Pennsylvania and four other states, alleging they had failed to control straw purchases.
To illustrate the point, teams of city investigators took hidden cameras into the stores and staged mock straw purchases.
A male agent would do all the talking, sometimes even declaring that he wanted a specific gun. At the close of the sale, the female investigator would fill out the federal firearms forms, claiming the gun was for her. The man would then hand over the cash.
The suit, still pending, cited a number of examples, among them the case of a New York drug dealer who used his sister and girlfriend, both Pennsylvania residents, as straw buyers at a Reading gun store. He took nine weapons to New York.
Weak controls on gun sales are only part of the problem. In Pennsylvania and other states, police and prosecutors generally haven’t made straw buyers a priority.
In Philadelphia, the police unit responsible for tracking guns is only now digging out of a 6,000-case backlog caused by inadequate staffing. The delays got so bad that judges sometimes dismissed cases because necessary lab work wasn’t finished in time.
And most of the state’s 67 county prosecutors didn’t file any cases against alleged straw buyers in 2006 or 2007, court records show.
In Philadelphia, Assistant District Attorney Albert Toczydlowski said his office rarely prosecuted straw buyers until recently, when the state set up a task force to focus on gun violence.
The unit is making about 10 arrests a month, only a small fraction of offenders.
Federal prosecutors in Philadelphia, who have the advantage of stronger criminal penalties, likewise file only about 20 to 30 cases a year. It’s a matter of limited resources, a spokesman said.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Paul Shapiro, who won convictions of Hagins and Downs, said straw buying “seems to be an epidemic.”
In Trenton, guns supplied by Hagins and Downs in 2004 and 2005 helped fuel one of the most intense periods of gang violence in the city’s recent history.
Police in that city recovered the guns from an accused murderer; a man who was firing wildly at people sitting on a porch; a gunman who fought with a police officer; and seven other felons.
‘Friendliest gun shop’ All but one of the guns were purchased by Downs over the counter at established Bucks County sporting-goods stores, sometimes three or four at a time.
In less than two years, Downs bought 27 pistols at a small store in Penndel called Guns & Things, which bills itself as “the friendliest gun shop in Pennsylvania.”
Hagins went along during one buying trip in October 2004, Downs testified.
“We were both browsing,” he said. “Mr. Hagins saw the Intratec and was very interested in it.”
That weapon is a 9mm Intratec DC-9 - an assault-style handgun popular with street criminals, with a flash suppressor and large-capacity ammunition magazine.
Hagins didn’t have the $593 to pay for it. But Downs said the saleswoman, who knew him well by this time, agreed to put it aside. They went to Trenton to get the cash, and Downs picked it up the next day.
Hagins resold the gun for $2,500, according to testimony.
A little more than a year later, police seized the DC-9 from a 16-year-old accused murderer, Kayir Cauthen, allegedly a member of the Bloods street gang. Prosecutors say he used a different weapon to kill a 34-year-old man he mistakenly thought was from a rival gang. His trial is pending, and his lawyer says he’s innocent.
Guns & Things owner Mary Ann Dobdrenz winced when a reporter told her the DC-9 ended up in the hands of an accused killer.
In an interview at her shop, which she runs out of her home, Dobdrenz said it was often impossible to separate the straw buyers from the gun enthusiasts.
“You just can’t tell from looking at a person,” she said.
Downs, 47, has a solid middle-class background. He graduated from Delhaas High School in Bucks County and owned a three-bedroom house in nearby Levittown. He even had a permit to carry a concealed weapon.
Eventually, Dobdrenz said, she grew worried about Downs. She passed a list of his gun purchases to a local police officer, who promised to give it to the FBI. She never heard whether federal investigators saw her list.
Dobdrenz said she did ask Downs why he needed so many guns. She never got a good answer.
“He was a real talker,” Dobdrenz said. “There was always a different story.”
A tough sell Measures aimed at discouraging straw buyers have been a tough sell in Harrisburg.
In November, three weeks after Philadelphia Police Officer Chuck Cassidy was killed and several other officers were wounded, Rendell called for lawmakers to “stop the straw purchasers and distribution of illegal handguns.”
“Pennsylvania guns are everywhere, and Pennsylvania is a haven for straw purchasers,” he said.
The state’s guns have left a trail of blood, Rendell said. In 2006, a police officer in New Hartford, N.Y., was killed with a gun that came from an Upper Darby straw buyer.
Rendell proposed several laws to crack down on the black-market sales, including one that would limit buyers to one gun a month. Most of the legislation remains bottled up in a House committee.
One bill made it to the House floor: a measure to require gun owners to file a police report when a gun is lost or stolen. But the legislature derailed it last week.
“Our first priority is to have that type of law,” said Joe Grace, director of CeaseFire PA.
Now, investigators say, when straw buyers are tracked down, their most common story is that they really bought the guns for themselves, but that the guns were stolen. It’s often impossible to disprove.
If the reporting law were in place, buyers who told that story could be arrested - a tool that police say would help them find out where the guns are really going.
George Romanoff, president of the Pennsylvania Association of Firearms Retailers, says the state doesn’t need more laws aimed at straw buyers, just tougher enforcement of ones already on the books.
“It’s supposed to be a felony. They plea-bargain a lot of these things away,” said Romanoff, who owns Western Pennsylvania’s largest gun shop.
Some other states subject buyers to much more scrutiny. In New Jersey and at least four other states, gun buyers must get a police permit; in New Jersey, that means a police photo and fingerprinting - a prospect that scares away many straw buyers, experts say.
One of the Trenton guns, a Colt revolver purchased at a Croydon shop, ended up in the hands of convicted drug dealer Dee Thomas, 23.
About 9 p.m. July 27, 2005, Trenton police saw Thomas firing the Colt at a group of men sitting on a porch on Greenwood Avenue near downtown Trenton, in a block of old houses converted into apartments. One officer opened fire. Thomas fell on the ground and surrendered, shouting that he was firing at a man who had robbed him.
No one was hit. Thomas was sentenced to five years in jail.
Two other Downs-supplied guns were recovered by the same Trenton officer, Sgt. Brian Suschke.
In June 2005, he found a .45-caliber semiautomatic - purchased from Guns & Things - when he searched the car of Anthony Anderson, 27, who later pleaded guilty to felony firearms charges.
The next month, Suschke recovered a .40-caliber Sig Sauer after pusher Armond Holloway tossed the gun and ran. Holloway went to prison for 22 years for drug dealing and weapons offenses.
That case showed how fast guns made it to the street. Downs had purchased the Sig Sauer just a month before, at Mike’s Sporting Goods in Levittown.
Michael Glessner, the owner of Mike’s, said he, too, became suspicious when Downs kept coming back to buy more guns - 13 in all, in eight visits.
In an interview, Glessner said that he questioned Downs intensely during the last purchase, in June 2005.
“You’re buying a lot of guns,” Glessner said he told Downs. “If you’re doing something funny . . . I’m going to testify that I told you, that I personally asked.”
Glessner, who has had many problems with straw buyers, said Downs insisted he was purchasing guns for his collection. Glessner sold him two more pistols.
Before each sale, Glessner ran Downs through the state computerized checking system, which screens for felony convictions and other disqualifiers, such as commitment to a mental institution. It takes about five minutes.
“Maybe there should be a little more than that,” Glessner said of Pennsylvania’s rules.
A paper trail As required by law, each gun dealer was filing a report with ATF whenever Downs purchased more than one gun a week.
In December 2005, agents checking up on those reports knocked on his door and asked to see the guns. Downs confessed. He agreed to wear a wire and testify in court.
His evidence helped convict Hagins on an array of gun-trafficking charges.
Hagins is awaiting sentencing; Downs is scheduled to be sentenced tomorrow.
Prosecutors and agents say they could catch many more straw buyers, using existing laws, if they had more resources.
In late 2006, the state set aside $5 million for a special team of investigators and prosecutors to attack Philadelphia’s gun violence.
The task force decided to focus on straw buyers and hired retired city homicide detectives to investigate cases that had previously been ignored.
Now, every criminal caught with a gun is interviewed about where it came from, and every gun seized by Philadelphia police is traced to its original buyer.
“It gets the word out: Somebody is looking at these straws now,” Toczydlowski said. “You can’t arrest everyone who commits every crime. But with this crime, you can have an effect.”
Kevin Harley, a spokesman for the state Attorney General’s Office, which oversees the task force, said the effort was making progress.
But he cautioned that, given the scale of the underground gun economy, there would be no quick solutions.
“You just hope you’re not spitting in the wind,” Harley said.
Copyright 2008 The Philadelphia Inquirer