From the front page of today's Newark Star Ledger
http://www.nj.com/news/ledger/index.ssf?/base/news-11/118326493913550.xml&coll=1
Tracking the flow of illegal weapons into city takes law enforcement sleuths to Florida
Sunday, July 01, 2007
BY JONATHAN SCHUPPE
Star-Ledger Staff
The gun was a black Hi Point C9 semi-automatic, cheaper than an iPod and small enough to cram into a hip pocket.
Plastic and metal, it was made in Ohio, shipped to a Florida gun shop and, in the summer of 2002, landed in the hands of a jittery 17-year-old from Newark named Wali Wolfe.
As Wolfe walked with his cousin down a dark street late one August night, two men approached and Wolfe feared he was going to be robbed. He pulled the trigger, launching three 9 mm full-metal-jacket bullets at 1,200 feet a second.
But his cousin, Larry Tobias, accidentally stepped into the line of fire. One bullet ripped through Tobias' chest and out his back, knocking him to the pavement.
Wolfe ran home to hide the gun. Minutes later, his cousin lay bleeding in his mother's arms. "I'm cold, Mommy," Tobias said.
He died before the ambulance arrived.
The weapon's 1,100-mile passage from gun store to killing scene was the work of a small ring of smugglers who helped feed Newark's lucrative underground arms market. Exploiting Florida's lenient gun laws, they bought dozens of high-powered pistols to resell on the streets of New Jersey, home to some of the country's toughest firearm restrictions.
Federal agents and local police spent four years investigating the gun-running pipeline. No one questioned the importance of stopping the flow: In addition to the gun that killed Tobias, at least nine others turned up at Newark crime scenes. One was used to pistol-whip a worker in a bodega robbery; others were found on suspected drug dealers.
The smuggling operation shows what local authorities face as they battle a resurgence in gun violence. Murders last year in Newark rose to the highest level since 1990. Nonfatal shootings rose for the fourth straight year. And police recovered nearly 900 illegal guns in 2006, a record.
At the heart of this struggle is the insatiable demand for weapons in cities and an inexhaustible supply from Southern states like Florida, where it is relatively easy to buy them.
"That's the way firearms trafficking works," said William McMahon, the top agent in the New York metropolitan region for the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. "Smugglers take the path of least resistance and make a profit of it. It's a straight path into urban neighborhoods."
Uncovering such rings requires a mix of streetwise detective work, meticulous record checks and a little luck. Even after four years, agents don't have all the answers about the network.
Their investigation, outlined in police reports, federal court documents and interviews, started with agents following the trail backward, from that deadly night in Newark to a day seven weeks earlier, when a man walked into a store in central Florida and asked to buy a bunch of cheap handguns.
START OF THE PIPELINE
The buyer was Jonathan Joseph Prioleau, who ran his own bail-bond business out of a dilapidated storefront in Lake Wales, about an hour due east of Tampa. He lived in a small ranch house off a dirt road that passed through the orange groves of Polk County.
Prioleau stood about 6-foot-2, weighed 220 pounds but had an unimposing demeanor. He was 28, favored T-shirts and jeans, and, it seemed to agents, didn't have much ambition.
In June 2002, court records show, Prioleau met two men looking for guns to sell in New Jersey. Neither man could legally buy arms in Florida so they offered to pay Prioleau to purchase the weapons for them. He agreed.
As a licensed bondsman, Prioleau had no legal restrictions. He had a permit to carry a firearm, could buy as many as he wanted and he was not subject to Florida's three-day waiting period.
Prioleau was what authorities call a "straw buyer," a person who legally purchases cheap guns for traffickers who resell the guns at steep markups in cities where they are illegal.
One major smuggling route, nicknamed the "Iron Pipeline," begins in the South and moves along Interstate 95, snaking past Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Philadelphia, Newark, New York City and Boston.
Estimating the size of the gun flow is difficult. Authorities know about only the guns they recover, and some of them are untraceable. And even when they successfully trace the guns, Congress restricts the ATF from releasing the information to anyone other than a law enforcement agency investigating a criminal case.
Frustrated by the violence, dozens of mayors, including Newark's Cory Booker, have banded together to lobby Congress to loosen the restrictions. The mayors say the law makes it harder for local police to track the flow of illegal guns into their cities.
But data alone will not stem the tide. By the time the guns reach their destinations, most have had their serial numbers filed down, obscuring the code authorities use to track them.
That's what happened to Prioleau's purchases.
He bought at least 50 guns, including several Hi Point C9s, for the smuggling ring. Manufactured by Hi Point Firearms of Dayton, Ohio, the pistol is compact, reliable and retails for about $150 -- reasons why cops call it "the Hyundai of guns."
On July 2, 2002, Prioleau walked into Guns Galore in Lakeland, Fla., and bought four guns, including a Hi Point C9 with a matte black finish, an eight-shot magazine and the serial number P114520 etched on its frame. It cost $141.95.
In the next few weeks, the gun arrived in New Jersey.
Investigators haven't determined exactly how, but say they have learned over the years that smugglers use common steps to avoid detection: Rent a nondescript car, preferably with a trunk. Hide the guns in a backpack or duffel bag in the trunk. Limit the stops and stick to the busiest highways, always following the speed limit and other traffic laws.
(Gun traffickers particularly like weekends around July 4, authorities say, when the roads are clogged and police busy.)
Some traffickers avoid driving altogether. Investigators recently arrested a Newark man as he was getting off a Greyhound Bus in Penn Station with two duffel bags full of guns, they said.
Other traffickers make mistakes that can't help but draw attention.
A few years ago, a group of smugglers arrived at a Georgia gun store in a car with New Jersey license plates. After he sold them a batch of weapons, the store owner, curious about the out-of-state plates, called authorities, who determined the car had been rented at Newark Liberty International Airport.
Investigators ultimately detained it at a New Jersery Turnpike toll plaza. In the trunk they found suitcases stuffed with a couple dozen guns, their serial numbers filed off.
Agents say the days of large conspicuous hauls are over: Most smugglers now try to keep their take small and easy to hide. The men who bought Prioleau's weapons, they suspect, delivered just a few at a time for resale on the street.
They believe that's how Wali Wolfe got his Hi Point C9 in August 2002.
AN IRON BOND
Wolfe and his cousin, Tobias, were somewhat typical of the victims -- and perpetrators -- of street violence in Newark. Both were black men who had dropped out of high school -- Wolfe from Shabazz, and Tobias from West Side. Tobias had an arrest record, for minor theft and drug charges.
Neither worked. Both had guns.
Like brothers, they grew up in the same house, went to the same grammar school, rode bikes together, played ball together.
"Wali looked up to Larry. Larry was his idol," their grandmother, Mattie Greenhowe, said.
They lived with extended family on North Ninth Street, where, on Aug. 22, 2002, they were playing cards past midnight when Wolfe announced that he needed cigarettes. Tobias got up, too.
"This boy can't go outside by himself. I'll go with him," Tobias said, according to Greenhowe.
On their way out the door, both young men grabbed their guns.
As they were walking back home along Roseville Avenue, Wolfe and Tobias saw two men get out of a car and approach them. Thinking they were about to get robbed, the cousins started running. Wolfe fired behind him, squeezing the trigger three times.
One bullet hit Tobias.
Wolfe dragged his bleeding cousin onto the porch of a nearby house. Then he ran home, bursting through the front door. It was after 2 a.m.
"Larry was shot," the boy shouted.
Later that night, after being questioned by police, Wolfe admitted he accidentally shot his cousin. Police charged him with murder.
With Wolfe's help, investigators found the gun in the basement and took it to the Newark Police Department's Ballistics Lab.
THE 9MM TRAIL
Housed in a one-room office on Arlington Street, the lab processes every gun, bullet and shell casing taken from Newark crime scenes -- about 15,000 pieces of evidence a year. Detectives there confirmed that the bullet that killed Tobias came from Wolfe's gun. They also used chemicals to lift the obliterated serial number, and logged it in a blue three-ring notebook labeled "Serial Number Restoration Book."
Three months later, in November 2002, ATF Special Agent Mike Mohr walked into the lab and asked for the binder.
Mohr had been working on a case against a Colorado arms smuggler and wanted to see if Newark police had seized any guns that could be traced to him.
A native of suburban Union County, Mohr had been a probation officer and a deputy U.S. marshal before joining the ATF in 1998.
He came to the lab with his partner, Newark Police Detective Daren Coley, assigned to the ATF's New Jersey Firearms Task Force. Together, they spent a day writing down hundreds of serial numbers going back two years, hoping to link some to the Colorado smuggler.
Back at his desk in West Paterson, Mohr entered the numbers into databases to reveal the buyer's name, and if the gun had been part of a bulk sale -- a telltale sign of gun trafficking.
The name of the Colorado trafficker came up just once. But a new name kept showing up: Jonathan Joseph Prioleau.
Mohr noticed something else troubling. Two Hi Point 9 mm pistols that Prioleau bought were seized in Newark less than 60 days after he bought them in Florida. The so-called "time to crime" is usually a lot longer, often a year or two.
One of the guns was recovered in a car occupied by suspected drug dealers.
The other was used to kill Larry Tobias.
GUNS AND MORE GUNS
Mohr and Coley started a formal investigation, but knew it was going to be difficult. Even when confronted with evidence, most straw buyers don't admit it.
They started by asking an ATF agent in Tampa to visit Guns Galore, the store where Prioleau bought lots of guns, including the two found in Newark. Employees remembered the bondsman coming into the store with two other men -- another sign of gun running.
As a criminal enterprise, gun trafficking is not like drug trafficking, where participants can make hundreds of thousands of dollars in a single shipment that will ultimately be consumed by customers. Gun runners rely on transporting a high volume of weapons that rarely disappear. That increases the risk of getting caught.
Most straw buyers earn only about $50 a gun, or do it for drugs. Traffickers who sell them on the streets make hundreds of dollars more.
Prioleau was still buying guns, so the agents hoped to catch him in the act. Mohr flew to Tampa to join the investigation on the ground. But because Prioleau didn't have to wait three days to buy his guns, there was no way of knowing which store he would visit next. Agents decided it would be a waste of time and resources to put a nonstop tail on Prioleau.
Mohr returned home empty-handed.
Back in Newark, more Prioleau-bought guns were turning up at crime scenes. One was a Hi Point C9 taken from a passenger in a car pulled over for speeding on South Orange Avenue in January 2003. Another was an Accutek AT380 that officers pulled from the waistband of a passenger in a car that ran a red light on 7th Avenue a few days later.
The following spring, Prioleau's buying spree suddenly stopped. Agents figured he heard that the ATF was asking about him.
Then Mohr got an unexpected break, news from a fellow agent in Florida: Another bondsman had started his own shopping spree. And his guns were turning up in Newark.
CAUGHT INSIDE THE RING
Based in Jacksonville, agent Mark Padget told Mohr that he had just nabbed a 43-year-old bondsman named John Joe Wilson for buying batches of guns for suspected traffickers. Investigators found receipts showing a trail to New Jersey. And when agents confronted Wilson, he admitted being a straw buyer.
In Padget's case file, Mohr found a surprising link: a statement from one witness who said some of the guns went to Prioleau.
Now it looked like agents had uncovered an organized ring that was buying scores of guns from both Tampa and Jacksonville and smuggling them to Newark.
"Holy cow," Mohr recalled thinking. "Now you're talking three different cities and God knows what else is going on. Now it's a larger conspiracy with double the amount of guns."
Mohr kept monitoring gun recoveries in Newark for guns linked to Prioleau and Wilson. One was used in a bodega robbery where members of the Crips street gang pistol-whipped a clerk. Others were recovered in more routine police operations, including traffic stops.
Working backward from those incidents, Mohr and the Florida agents started drawing links between the men and their accomplices.
Every gun tells a story," Mohr said. "These guns told us a story that we all tried to piece together."
After months of digging, agents confronted Prioleau. At first, he denied his involvement. Gradually, he changed his story and began cooperating against the others.
In April 2006, Mohr recommended federal charges against more than a dozen people, including Prioleau, Wilson, their associates, the suspected ringleaders in Newark and people who had been arrested with the guns in New Jersey.
Federal prosecutors in Florida filed charges against Prioleau, Wilson and some of the associates who paid them for the guns.
Prioleau and Wilson both pleaded guilty to conspiracy to make false statements to firearms dealers -- for filling out federal forms saying they were the actual buyers of the guns.
Because they cooperated, both received light sentences: a day behind bars, and probation -- Wilson got two years, Prioleau three. Prioleau was ordered to serve five months of it in home detention.
Three other suspects, including the two men with Newark connections, pleaded guilty to possession of a firearm by a convicted felon and were sentenced to between 18 months and 110 months in prison.
But the agents' suspicions about the Newark-based ringleaders remain just that. Nearly five years after Tobias' death, no one has been charged with actually smuggling the weapon that killed him. Nor have authorities determined how the other guns made it to Newark.
Most of the guns bought by the Florida ring remain unaccounted for.
"There are pieces we're still working on, and we're not going to stop working," Mohr said.
LETHAL LEGACY
Wali Wolfe pleaded guilty to reckless manslaughter and illegal possession of a weapon in the incident that killed his cousin. In June 2003, he was sentenced to three years in state prison. He remains there today, because of repeated parole violations.
The rest of the family lives in a different house, in East Orange, where Greenhowe has banned even toy guns.
"We can't handle it," Greenhowe said. "No guns."
Mohr and the other agents always have new cases. In the past two months, members of the Firearms Task Force have traveled to Georgia, Florida, North Carolina and Mississippi to investigate smugglers selling guns in Newark.
The job is getting harder, they say, because smugglers are getting smarter and buying guns in smaller quantities. New guns continue to show up.
"We'll stop them as soon as we can, but they will continue to show up on streets," McMahon said. "If someone traffics 20, 30, 40 guns today, some will still be showing up years from now. That's the thing about guns. They last forever."
Jonathan Schuppe may be reached at
[email protected] or (973) 392-7960.