However, Baltimore's gun task force combs through available local data to find supply patterns. Investigators in Lt. Dan Lioi's group are putting together several multistate trafficking cases after realizing that clusters of weapons came from the same out-of-state sources.
It was Lioi's unit that, in April, traced the three West Baltimore guns back to the Virginia burglary. In that case, Virginia State Police had already arrested the burglar, Michael Wayne Lewis II; he has pleaded guilty to federal gun charges. Lewis sold some of the guns and traded others for PCP, according to federal court papers.
"When there are a lot of guns stolen, oftentimes they want to make a quick sale for profit," said Special Agent Greg Gant, head of the Maryland division of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. "They sell the guns, and they immediately put them in the streets."
Guns also appear on the street though straw purchases - transactions in which people with clean records acquire guns for friends or acquaintances who have criminal records and are prohibited from buying guns. "A conspiracy can take place in someone's home," he said. "That is virtually impossible for us to detect."
But interstate traffickers do get caught. A recent investigation by agents with the ATF used confidential informants to connect an Alabama man and a New York man to the illegal sale of 33 guns in Maryland.
"It is a significant case," Gant said. "Those guns will not be hitting the streets. We were very pleased."
A defendant in the case, Moises Castillo Jr., a 25-year-old from Tarrant, Ala., unwittingly took a federal confidential informant on a series of gun buys at several Alabama gun stores. In one store, JoJo's Gun and Pawn in Birmingham, the men bought three AK-47s for $900, then left, according to court papers.
Jimmy Griffith, who identified himself as the clerk who handled the transaction, said last week he became suspicious when the men came back that day for more guns. "Everyone comes in and buys multiple guns," he said. "If we could have undone the transaction, I would."
Over and over, Castillo instructed the federal informant to remove the guns' serial numbers, according to the indictment. At one point, he even insisted on seeing photographs of the guns with the numbers obliterated.
A second defendant, Otis Gomez-Zapata, 28, of the Bronx, N.Y., admitted to selling guns in the Mott Haven section of the Bronx for 10 years, according to the indictment.
