spacemanspiff
Senior Member
following the link will lead you to pictures of a gun being horribly mutilated and then not even given a proper christian burial. 
http://www.anchoragepress.com/newarchives/coverstoryvol12ed49.html
They were three pistols just looking for a good home
By Tony Hopfinger
They were the young and innocent, the slick and strong, three powerful pistols full of possibilities. They could keep the peace, protect homes, even win wars, yet they possessed a dark side capable of robbing and wantonly killing.
There was Beretta Cougar, a .45-caliber semiautomatic handgun with a sturdy, chromed backbone. He was a tough-looking Italian with roots in the United States. His cousin, Beretta 9 mm, also a semiautomatic pistol, was born in Maryland just outside Washington, D.C. Had things gone differently, Beretta 9 mm might have served in the Iraq War. The third gun, Baby Desert Eagle, was a .40-caliber Israeli pistol whose parents build everything from rocket launchers to payphones.
In late 2001, the Beretta cousins and Baby Eagle left their homes and rode planes and ships, crossing oceans and borders. They arrived in Anchorage, where they landed in a glass display case at Fred Meyer on Dimond Boulevard, a store known more for selling groceries and women's clothing than firearms and ammunition.
In the United States, which has some of the developed world's most liberal gun-ownership laws, it's fairly easy to get a gun, even if you're a bad guy. Perhaps that's why guns are involved in eleven thousand homicides in the U.S. each year.
“Guns don't kill people, people kill people,†gun manufacturers like to say. Certainly the Berettas and Baby Eagle had no intention of hurting anybody when they came to Alaska. They just wanted a good home.
That all changed January 21, 2002, when two young men walked into Fred Meyer. They smashed the gun case and snatched the Berettas and Baby Eagle.
The guns lived a terrifying few weeks on the streets of Anchorage at the mercy of kids barely out of high school. In the end, a woman was shot in the leg and another was robbed. A man was kidnapped and an AIDS patient lost his pot. Bullets flew from Midtown to South Anchorage.
Police arrested the punks and recovered the guns. As authorities stored the Berettas and Baby Eagle in evidence lockers, the equivalent of solitary confinement, the guns recalled what their parents told them: “Guns don't kill people, people kill people.â€
Guns linked to crime aren't always treated so innocently, however. Guns, too, can be sentenced to death.
The lives of these three pistols might have gone unnoticed if wasn't for the fact that Alaska has the nation's highest per-capita rate of stolen guns.
During about a ten-year period ending in August 2002, seventeen guns were stolen for every thousand American households. In Alaska, there were forty-three firearm thefts per thousand households - more than two and a half times the national average - according to the Americans for Gun Safety Foundation, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit group pushing for stricter gun laws.
Guns are practically part of being an Alaskan. Most have at least one firearm in the house. They use them for hunting, scaring grizzlies and protecting their homes - which is why household burglaries account for most of Alaska's stolen guns. Criminals also resort to bolder moves, however, like the smash-and-grab theft at Fred Meyer last year.
A hot gun is a valuable commodity. You can sell it for cash, jacking up the price if the buyer is a convicted felon who can't buy firearms legally. You can trade it for drugs. Stolen guns also are ideal for committing crimes; they're hard to trace back to the perpetrator. All the more reason that so many guns used in crimes are stolen.
The high rate of gun ownership - that is, the accessibility of guns - also might help explain why Anchorage is facing a growing problem with gun violence.
Just the other week, a spate of early morning shootings in Anchorage injured one person and left another dead. The “mayhem,†as an Anchorage police spokesman called it, began just after midnight on a Tuesday, when somebody fired at least nineteen shots at several men near the Fireweed Theater. A couple hours later, somebody unleashed on a man sitting in a Ford Explorer. He caught a bullet in the leg. That same morning, somebody shot and killed a woman in her car in South Anchorage.
Young people are behind many shootings, apparently cherishing their Sony PlayStations as much as their Berettas, playing gangsta as if there were no consequences. “It's not real to them. They think (shooting guns) is like a video game, that you can't get hurt,†said Deb Smith, deputy U.S. Attorney for Alaska.
During the past eighteen months, federal, state and local authorities have partnered to crack down on gun violence in Anchorage under the national initiative Project Safe Neighborhoods. The U.S. Attorney General's office has pursued stiff sentences by prosecuting gun-related cases in federal court. The idea is to get the worst offenders off the street and send a message to those still out there. Since 2000, federal prosecutors have brought charges against one hundred and ninety-five people in Alaska on gun-related charges.
It is in these federal court cases where you'll find tales of stolen guns, stories as fascinating as the criminals who fire them. Much of this information comes from police and the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which trace the histories of stolen guns to learn how they escape into the underworld, and “help identify gun trafficking as well as crime cells,†said Brad Earman, special agent with the ATF's Alaska bureau.
One gun ATF agents traced this past year was a cheap pistol, a Bryco .380-caliber semiautomatic, that killed an Anchorage teenager at the J.C. Penney parking garage in downtown Anchorage. In the span of a couple months, the gun traveled to three states, passing through a distributor, wholesaler, gun dealer and three owners before it was reported stolen. It didn't show up again until nearly ten years later. By then, a teenager was dead and another boy's life was ruined.
The Bryco pistol had a turbulent childhood. He'd been labeled a bad seed before he was even born in a Southern California factory in early 1993. Brycos were fetching less than ninety bucks in those days. People complained they jammed and misfired. Antigun advocates argued guns like the Bryco served no other purpose but to commit crimes.
With such a sour reputation, all this particular Bryco .380 had to cling to was his name, and his serial number, 443392. Shortly after he was assembled, Bryco was shipped to a distributor in Carson City, Nevada. A month later, he was sold to an Anchorage wholesaler, who then resold him to the Army & Air Force Exchange on Elmendorf Air Force Base.
Bryco was on display at the Exchange for five days. On May 4, 1993, a military employee bought the pistol. But after firing Bryco a few times, he decided he didn't like the gun and promptly sold it to a co-worker for eighty-eight dollars.
The new owner had the gun only a few days before he reported it stolen. He told police that after he bought the gun, he met a young woman at a 7-Eleven who asked him for a ride. She ended up staying with him at his Eagle River apartment for a couple days. In the early hours of May 10, 1993, he showed her his new Bryco. Later that day the woman was gone and so was the gun.
In a recent interview, the woman remembered staying with the man and seeing Bryco but denied stealing the gun.
Bryco 443392 wasn't heard from again until nine and a half years later.
On the afternoon of October 10, 2002, two eighteen-year-old Anchorage men met in the stairwell of the J.C. Penney parking garage downtown. Miguel Orellana planned to sell Dustin Lloyd an eighth of an ounce of marijuana. When Lloyd apparently balked at paying forty dollars, the going street rate, the two got into a fight.
Orellana brandished Bryco 443392 and shot Lloyd at least five times, including twice while he was on the ground.
Two days later, police found the gun cowering under the porch of Orellana's Fairview home.
A federal judge sentenced Orellana to twelve years in prison. Bryco was locked up, too, in an evidence locker at the federal building on Seventh Street.
One day earlier this year, the locker doors opened. ATF agents asked a building maintenance man to take Bryco to a workbench on the top floor of the federal building. A power saw with a metal cutting blade sat nearby. Before Bryco knew what was happening, he was dismembered. His parts were thrown out with the trash, then dumped at the city landfill.
U.S. gun manufacturers churn out more than a million handguns a year, an astounding two pistols a minute. Many are distributed among the eighty thousand firearm dealers and pawnbrokers licensed in the United States. There are so many gun dealers in the country that they outnumber McDonald's franchises nearly three to one, according to The Violence Policy Center, a national nonprofit trying to draw attention to gun crimes.
Handguns are an ever-growing industry that dates back to when the bubonic plague swept Europe in the early fourteenth century. Two hundred years later, in the early 1500s, an Italian named Mastro Bartolomeo Beretta began producing gun barrels for the Republic of Venice. The Beretta family has been in the gun business ever since and says it is the world's oldest-running gun manufacturer. The company today has firearm factories in Brescia, Italy, and Accokeek, Maryland, where thousands of machines, robots and workers assemble Beretta weapons.
Two high-end pistols came from these factories in late 2001. The Beretta Cougar .45 and Beretta 92FS 9 mm made their way to Anchorage much like the Bryco .380, passing from distributors to wholesalers, until they arrived at the Fred Meyer store on Dimond Boulevard. The Beretta cousins were displayed in a glass case, where Baby Desert Eagle joined them in early 2002.
The Baby Eagle, as it's commonly called, is manufactured by Israel Military Industries, the company known for the UZI submachine gun. IMI also builds satellite rocket launchers and payphones, although the company's primary purpose is to supply the Israel Defense Forces, “fulfilling its most important mission - ensuring the safety and security of Israel and its citizens,†according to the corporate profile on IMI's website.
It was a blustery Monday evening in January 2002 when three young Anchorage men got the daring idea to steal guns from Fred Meyer before the store closed for the night. Two walked into the store while the third waited in a car outside. Baby Eagle and the Berettas watched as the men peered through the glass case. The men briefly disappeared to the store's hardware department, returning to the guns armed with a hammer. They shattered the case and snatched the Berettas, Baby Eagle and four other pistols.
One of the men escaped with three guns, but Fred Meyer employees tackled his cohort. The man pleaded for them to let him go, saying he had two kids and couldn't afford to go to jail. The store manager told them to let him loose. The manager later said he didn't want anybody to get hurt. The man left a backpack full of guns on the floor and ran out the store.
Later that night, the thieves divided up the three pistols they'd grabbed. Kristopher “Kristo†Panichello-Schell claimed the Baby Eagle. Clifford Leonard got the Beretta Cougar. Dale Dodson took the Beretta 9 mm.
The next two weeks would be filled with robberies, an AK-47 machine gun attack, a wild hotel party and a botched kidnapping.
The men behind the Fred Meyer smash-and-grab illustrate a growing trend of wannabe-gangsters tearing it up from Jewel Lake to Muldoon.
Some federal prosecutors and ATF agents who have worked in cities larger than Anchorage, where gangs are a much bigger problem, smirk at kids like these. It's as if today's Anchorage gangster takes his cues from music and movies, right down to his gang signs. Most are small-timers with no idea what it takes to run big drug operations, launder money or traffic guns.
Still, in a city known more for moose than gangs, the increased shootings and Alaska's top stolen-gun ranking is troubling, particularly when many of those behind the problem are so young and ostensibly ignorant.
Three days after the men knocked off Fred Meyer, Dale Dodson, nineteen, went to meet two guys to sell the stolen Beretta 9 mm. Dodson was still shaking off a shooting from the night before. He and his buddy “Kristo†Panichello-Schell had been driving around the Jewel Lake area, a territory claimed by a group called the Raspberry Block Boys, when a car pulled up beside them. Out jumped Antonio “Black Tony†Dukes, allegedly firing an AK-47 or a gun like it. Dodson and his friends weren't hit.
Dodson sold the Beretta 9 mm to Danny Richards and Dwayne Dollison. The next night, on January 25, 2002, Dodson again met up with the two men, this time at Space Station, an entertainment arcade on Spenard Road. He planned to unload some hot stereo speakers and the Baby Eagle pistol stolen from Fred Meyer.
When Dodson said he wanted three hundred dollars for the speakers, Richards allegedly pulled out a pistol and said “???? that, I ain't buying nothing from you. I am taking it from you.â€
“This is jack, mofo. I'll kill you.â€
Richards and others climbed into Dodson's blue Ford Probe and ordered him to drive, saying he was going to kill him at “the bluff.†Dodson tried to jump out of the car, but Richards pulled him back inside, pistol whipping his head. As the car passed the Carrs grocery store on Northern Light Boulevard, Dodson jerked the steering wheel and pulled into the parking lot. He jumped out and ran to an armored truck parked nearby.
Later that night, police stopped Richards and Dollison in a white Caprice and recovered the Baby Eagle and Beretta 9 mm.
There was still one gun left from the Fred Meyer robbery floating around. Clifford Leonard, who helped rob the store, had taken a liking to the Beretta Cougar. At a hotel party a week after the robbery, a friend's video camera caught him smoking dope, flashing gang signs and pointing the loaded Beretta Cougar.
The next evening, Leonard and “Kristo†Panichello-Schell knocked on the door of Delfina Walker's apartment near Jewel Lake and asked to use her bathroom. When Walker, a neighbor of Panichello-Schell's, let the men inside, Leonard pulled out the Beretta Cougar. He traced the gun barrel from the bridge of Walker's nose, around each of her breasts and down to her sternum. She was so scared that she wet her pants. The men robbed her of three hundred and eighty dollars, jewelry and an ounce of pot belonging to an AIDS patient Walker was caring for.
Two days later, on February 4, 2002, Leonard and Panichello-Schell met a guy parked at the Carrs on Jewel Lake Road to snag yet more dope. Leonard waited in a nearby car, clutching the Beretta Cougar. Panichello-Schell, armed with another pistol, climbed inside the alleged drug dealer's vehicle.
Panichello-Schell pulled the gun on the dealer and demanded “the stuff.†They struggled over the gun and it went off, shooting a female passenger in the leg. Panichello-Schell and Leonard fled before police arrived but were picked up a week later.
Police believe the Beretta Cougar remained on the streets for six more weeks. A gun with a partially effaced serial number that matched the Cougar turned up in the hands of new owners after an alleged drive-by shooting in Midtown.
Panichello-Schell pleaded guilty to one count of gun theft and is serving six and a half years in federal prison. Leonard is serving just over nine years in federal prison on the same count. Dodson, who pleaded guilty to charges related to the theft of firearms, was handed a one-year sentence.
Somewhere on the muddy bottom of Cook Inlet not far from Anchorage are dozens of rusted guns. In the 1960s, when Anchorage police and Alaska Troopers wanted to get rid of stolen or broken guns they'd recovered, they dumped them in the inlet.
Police no longer discard stolen guns in Cook Inlet. They destroy the guns themselves or turn them over to the ATF, which has a maintenance man at the federal building who cuts up the guns with a power saw or torch. In other cases, Anchorage police auction the guns or issue them to officers. Last year, the police department's contracted auctioneer collected more than eighty-seven thousand dollars from the sale of about four hundred recovered guns to licensed firearms dealers.
The pistols stolen from Fred Meyer today are stored in the federal building under the guard of ATF agents. The guns will likely be destroyed, said Brad Earman, the ATF special agent, although an appeal of sorts is in the works that may free them soon. The ATF is holding off on dismembering the guns until Fred Meyer's insurance company decides whether to file a claim. If the insurance company asks for the guns, it could resell the Beretta cousins and Baby Eagle.
It would be a fitting ending if you believe guns don't kill people.
Contact Tony Hopfinger at [email protected] or (907) 644-5406.
How “Death of a gun†was reported
History of the guns came from federal and state court filings, police charging documents, stolen gun police reports and company reports on the websites of Beretta and Israel Military Industries.
Document research was supplemented with interviews with representatives of the Bryco and Magnum gun manufacturers, Fred Meyer and the U.S. Attorney General's Alaska office, and U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives agents.
http://www.anchoragepress.com/newarchives/coverstoryvol12ed49.html
They were three pistols just looking for a good home
By Tony Hopfinger
They were the young and innocent, the slick and strong, three powerful pistols full of possibilities. They could keep the peace, protect homes, even win wars, yet they possessed a dark side capable of robbing and wantonly killing.
There was Beretta Cougar, a .45-caliber semiautomatic handgun with a sturdy, chromed backbone. He was a tough-looking Italian with roots in the United States. His cousin, Beretta 9 mm, also a semiautomatic pistol, was born in Maryland just outside Washington, D.C. Had things gone differently, Beretta 9 mm might have served in the Iraq War. The third gun, Baby Desert Eagle, was a .40-caliber Israeli pistol whose parents build everything from rocket launchers to payphones.
In late 2001, the Beretta cousins and Baby Eagle left their homes and rode planes and ships, crossing oceans and borders. They arrived in Anchorage, where they landed in a glass display case at Fred Meyer on Dimond Boulevard, a store known more for selling groceries and women's clothing than firearms and ammunition.
In the United States, which has some of the developed world's most liberal gun-ownership laws, it's fairly easy to get a gun, even if you're a bad guy. Perhaps that's why guns are involved in eleven thousand homicides in the U.S. each year.
“Guns don't kill people, people kill people,†gun manufacturers like to say. Certainly the Berettas and Baby Eagle had no intention of hurting anybody when they came to Alaska. They just wanted a good home.
That all changed January 21, 2002, when two young men walked into Fred Meyer. They smashed the gun case and snatched the Berettas and Baby Eagle.
The guns lived a terrifying few weeks on the streets of Anchorage at the mercy of kids barely out of high school. In the end, a woman was shot in the leg and another was robbed. A man was kidnapped and an AIDS patient lost his pot. Bullets flew from Midtown to South Anchorage.
Police arrested the punks and recovered the guns. As authorities stored the Berettas and Baby Eagle in evidence lockers, the equivalent of solitary confinement, the guns recalled what their parents told them: “Guns don't kill people, people kill people.â€
Guns linked to crime aren't always treated so innocently, however. Guns, too, can be sentenced to death.
The lives of these three pistols might have gone unnoticed if wasn't for the fact that Alaska has the nation's highest per-capita rate of stolen guns.
During about a ten-year period ending in August 2002, seventeen guns were stolen for every thousand American households. In Alaska, there were forty-three firearm thefts per thousand households - more than two and a half times the national average - according to the Americans for Gun Safety Foundation, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit group pushing for stricter gun laws.
Guns are practically part of being an Alaskan. Most have at least one firearm in the house. They use them for hunting, scaring grizzlies and protecting their homes - which is why household burglaries account for most of Alaska's stolen guns. Criminals also resort to bolder moves, however, like the smash-and-grab theft at Fred Meyer last year.
A hot gun is a valuable commodity. You can sell it for cash, jacking up the price if the buyer is a convicted felon who can't buy firearms legally. You can trade it for drugs. Stolen guns also are ideal for committing crimes; they're hard to trace back to the perpetrator. All the more reason that so many guns used in crimes are stolen.
The high rate of gun ownership - that is, the accessibility of guns - also might help explain why Anchorage is facing a growing problem with gun violence.
Just the other week, a spate of early morning shootings in Anchorage injured one person and left another dead. The “mayhem,†as an Anchorage police spokesman called it, began just after midnight on a Tuesday, when somebody fired at least nineteen shots at several men near the Fireweed Theater. A couple hours later, somebody unleashed on a man sitting in a Ford Explorer. He caught a bullet in the leg. That same morning, somebody shot and killed a woman in her car in South Anchorage.
Young people are behind many shootings, apparently cherishing their Sony PlayStations as much as their Berettas, playing gangsta as if there were no consequences. “It's not real to them. They think (shooting guns) is like a video game, that you can't get hurt,†said Deb Smith, deputy U.S. Attorney for Alaska.
During the past eighteen months, federal, state and local authorities have partnered to crack down on gun violence in Anchorage under the national initiative Project Safe Neighborhoods. The U.S. Attorney General's office has pursued stiff sentences by prosecuting gun-related cases in federal court. The idea is to get the worst offenders off the street and send a message to those still out there. Since 2000, federal prosecutors have brought charges against one hundred and ninety-five people in Alaska on gun-related charges.
It is in these federal court cases where you'll find tales of stolen guns, stories as fascinating as the criminals who fire them. Much of this information comes from police and the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which trace the histories of stolen guns to learn how they escape into the underworld, and “help identify gun trafficking as well as crime cells,†said Brad Earman, special agent with the ATF's Alaska bureau.
One gun ATF agents traced this past year was a cheap pistol, a Bryco .380-caliber semiautomatic, that killed an Anchorage teenager at the J.C. Penney parking garage in downtown Anchorage. In the span of a couple months, the gun traveled to three states, passing through a distributor, wholesaler, gun dealer and three owners before it was reported stolen. It didn't show up again until nearly ten years later. By then, a teenager was dead and another boy's life was ruined.
The Bryco pistol had a turbulent childhood. He'd been labeled a bad seed before he was even born in a Southern California factory in early 1993. Brycos were fetching less than ninety bucks in those days. People complained they jammed and misfired. Antigun advocates argued guns like the Bryco served no other purpose but to commit crimes.
With such a sour reputation, all this particular Bryco .380 had to cling to was his name, and his serial number, 443392. Shortly after he was assembled, Bryco was shipped to a distributor in Carson City, Nevada. A month later, he was sold to an Anchorage wholesaler, who then resold him to the Army & Air Force Exchange on Elmendorf Air Force Base.
Bryco was on display at the Exchange for five days. On May 4, 1993, a military employee bought the pistol. But after firing Bryco a few times, he decided he didn't like the gun and promptly sold it to a co-worker for eighty-eight dollars.
The new owner had the gun only a few days before he reported it stolen. He told police that after he bought the gun, he met a young woman at a 7-Eleven who asked him for a ride. She ended up staying with him at his Eagle River apartment for a couple days. In the early hours of May 10, 1993, he showed her his new Bryco. Later that day the woman was gone and so was the gun.
In a recent interview, the woman remembered staying with the man and seeing Bryco but denied stealing the gun.
Bryco 443392 wasn't heard from again until nine and a half years later.
On the afternoon of October 10, 2002, two eighteen-year-old Anchorage men met in the stairwell of the J.C. Penney parking garage downtown. Miguel Orellana planned to sell Dustin Lloyd an eighth of an ounce of marijuana. When Lloyd apparently balked at paying forty dollars, the going street rate, the two got into a fight.
Orellana brandished Bryco 443392 and shot Lloyd at least five times, including twice while he was on the ground.
Two days later, police found the gun cowering under the porch of Orellana's Fairview home.
A federal judge sentenced Orellana to twelve years in prison. Bryco was locked up, too, in an evidence locker at the federal building on Seventh Street.
One day earlier this year, the locker doors opened. ATF agents asked a building maintenance man to take Bryco to a workbench on the top floor of the federal building. A power saw with a metal cutting blade sat nearby. Before Bryco knew what was happening, he was dismembered. His parts were thrown out with the trash, then dumped at the city landfill.
U.S. gun manufacturers churn out more than a million handguns a year, an astounding two pistols a minute. Many are distributed among the eighty thousand firearm dealers and pawnbrokers licensed in the United States. There are so many gun dealers in the country that they outnumber McDonald's franchises nearly three to one, according to The Violence Policy Center, a national nonprofit trying to draw attention to gun crimes.
Handguns are an ever-growing industry that dates back to when the bubonic plague swept Europe in the early fourteenth century. Two hundred years later, in the early 1500s, an Italian named Mastro Bartolomeo Beretta began producing gun barrels for the Republic of Venice. The Beretta family has been in the gun business ever since and says it is the world's oldest-running gun manufacturer. The company today has firearm factories in Brescia, Italy, and Accokeek, Maryland, where thousands of machines, robots and workers assemble Beretta weapons.
Two high-end pistols came from these factories in late 2001. The Beretta Cougar .45 and Beretta 92FS 9 mm made their way to Anchorage much like the Bryco .380, passing from distributors to wholesalers, until they arrived at the Fred Meyer store on Dimond Boulevard. The Beretta cousins were displayed in a glass case, where Baby Desert Eagle joined them in early 2002.
The Baby Eagle, as it's commonly called, is manufactured by Israel Military Industries, the company known for the UZI submachine gun. IMI also builds satellite rocket launchers and payphones, although the company's primary purpose is to supply the Israel Defense Forces, “fulfilling its most important mission - ensuring the safety and security of Israel and its citizens,†according to the corporate profile on IMI's website.
It was a blustery Monday evening in January 2002 when three young Anchorage men got the daring idea to steal guns from Fred Meyer before the store closed for the night. Two walked into the store while the third waited in a car outside. Baby Eagle and the Berettas watched as the men peered through the glass case. The men briefly disappeared to the store's hardware department, returning to the guns armed with a hammer. They shattered the case and snatched the Berettas, Baby Eagle and four other pistols.
One of the men escaped with three guns, but Fred Meyer employees tackled his cohort. The man pleaded for them to let him go, saying he had two kids and couldn't afford to go to jail. The store manager told them to let him loose. The manager later said he didn't want anybody to get hurt. The man left a backpack full of guns on the floor and ran out the store.
Later that night, the thieves divided up the three pistols they'd grabbed. Kristopher “Kristo†Panichello-Schell claimed the Baby Eagle. Clifford Leonard got the Beretta Cougar. Dale Dodson took the Beretta 9 mm.
The next two weeks would be filled with robberies, an AK-47 machine gun attack, a wild hotel party and a botched kidnapping.
The men behind the Fred Meyer smash-and-grab illustrate a growing trend of wannabe-gangsters tearing it up from Jewel Lake to Muldoon.
Some federal prosecutors and ATF agents who have worked in cities larger than Anchorage, where gangs are a much bigger problem, smirk at kids like these. It's as if today's Anchorage gangster takes his cues from music and movies, right down to his gang signs. Most are small-timers with no idea what it takes to run big drug operations, launder money or traffic guns.
Still, in a city known more for moose than gangs, the increased shootings and Alaska's top stolen-gun ranking is troubling, particularly when many of those behind the problem are so young and ostensibly ignorant.
Three days after the men knocked off Fred Meyer, Dale Dodson, nineteen, went to meet two guys to sell the stolen Beretta 9 mm. Dodson was still shaking off a shooting from the night before. He and his buddy “Kristo†Panichello-Schell had been driving around the Jewel Lake area, a territory claimed by a group called the Raspberry Block Boys, when a car pulled up beside them. Out jumped Antonio “Black Tony†Dukes, allegedly firing an AK-47 or a gun like it. Dodson and his friends weren't hit.
Dodson sold the Beretta 9 mm to Danny Richards and Dwayne Dollison. The next night, on January 25, 2002, Dodson again met up with the two men, this time at Space Station, an entertainment arcade on Spenard Road. He planned to unload some hot stereo speakers and the Baby Eagle pistol stolen from Fred Meyer.
When Dodson said he wanted three hundred dollars for the speakers, Richards allegedly pulled out a pistol and said “???? that, I ain't buying nothing from you. I am taking it from you.â€
“This is jack, mofo. I'll kill you.â€
Richards and others climbed into Dodson's blue Ford Probe and ordered him to drive, saying he was going to kill him at “the bluff.†Dodson tried to jump out of the car, but Richards pulled him back inside, pistol whipping his head. As the car passed the Carrs grocery store on Northern Light Boulevard, Dodson jerked the steering wheel and pulled into the parking lot. He jumped out and ran to an armored truck parked nearby.
Later that night, police stopped Richards and Dollison in a white Caprice and recovered the Baby Eagle and Beretta 9 mm.
There was still one gun left from the Fred Meyer robbery floating around. Clifford Leonard, who helped rob the store, had taken a liking to the Beretta Cougar. At a hotel party a week after the robbery, a friend's video camera caught him smoking dope, flashing gang signs and pointing the loaded Beretta Cougar.
The next evening, Leonard and “Kristo†Panichello-Schell knocked on the door of Delfina Walker's apartment near Jewel Lake and asked to use her bathroom. When Walker, a neighbor of Panichello-Schell's, let the men inside, Leonard pulled out the Beretta Cougar. He traced the gun barrel from the bridge of Walker's nose, around each of her breasts and down to her sternum. She was so scared that she wet her pants. The men robbed her of three hundred and eighty dollars, jewelry and an ounce of pot belonging to an AIDS patient Walker was caring for.
Two days later, on February 4, 2002, Leonard and Panichello-Schell met a guy parked at the Carrs on Jewel Lake Road to snag yet more dope. Leonard waited in a nearby car, clutching the Beretta Cougar. Panichello-Schell, armed with another pistol, climbed inside the alleged drug dealer's vehicle.
Panichello-Schell pulled the gun on the dealer and demanded “the stuff.†They struggled over the gun and it went off, shooting a female passenger in the leg. Panichello-Schell and Leonard fled before police arrived but were picked up a week later.
Police believe the Beretta Cougar remained on the streets for six more weeks. A gun with a partially effaced serial number that matched the Cougar turned up in the hands of new owners after an alleged drive-by shooting in Midtown.
Panichello-Schell pleaded guilty to one count of gun theft and is serving six and a half years in federal prison. Leonard is serving just over nine years in federal prison on the same count. Dodson, who pleaded guilty to charges related to the theft of firearms, was handed a one-year sentence.
Somewhere on the muddy bottom of Cook Inlet not far from Anchorage are dozens of rusted guns. In the 1960s, when Anchorage police and Alaska Troopers wanted to get rid of stolen or broken guns they'd recovered, they dumped them in the inlet.
Police no longer discard stolen guns in Cook Inlet. They destroy the guns themselves or turn them over to the ATF, which has a maintenance man at the federal building who cuts up the guns with a power saw or torch. In other cases, Anchorage police auction the guns or issue them to officers. Last year, the police department's contracted auctioneer collected more than eighty-seven thousand dollars from the sale of about four hundred recovered guns to licensed firearms dealers.
The pistols stolen from Fred Meyer today are stored in the federal building under the guard of ATF agents. The guns will likely be destroyed, said Brad Earman, the ATF special agent, although an appeal of sorts is in the works that may free them soon. The ATF is holding off on dismembering the guns until Fred Meyer's insurance company decides whether to file a claim. If the insurance company asks for the guns, it could resell the Beretta cousins and Baby Eagle.
It would be a fitting ending if you believe guns don't kill people.
Contact Tony Hopfinger at [email protected] or (907) 644-5406.
How “Death of a gun†was reported
History of the guns came from federal and state court filings, police charging documents, stolen gun police reports and company reports on the websites of Beretta and Israel Military Industries.
Document research was supplemented with interviews with representatives of the Bryco and Magnum gun manufacturers, Fred Meyer and the U.S. Attorney General's Alaska office, and U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives agents.
