From: lvc@cbnews.cb.att.com (Larry Cipriani)
Subject: The Story of a Gun by Erik Larson - part 3 of 8 or so
Organization: Ideology Busters, Inc.
Date: Sun, 10 Jan 1993 22:23:53 GMT
Keywords: atlantic, anti-gun baloney

From The Atlantic, January 1993

THE STORY OF A GUN
By Erik Larson

THE INGRAM GOES PUBLIC
   Under its new managers RPB had more success selling the Ingram line to
foreign governments, but domestically it faced a set of daunting business
obstacles.  One partner was convicted of bribing a prosecutor to drop a
customer's drug charge.  Two others, Robert Morgan and Jack Leibolt, were
involved in the narcotics-smuggling operations of Pablo Escobar-Gaviria
and the Medellin cartel.  In 1980 Morgan was sentenced to thirty years in
prison for smuggling two tons of marijuana into Florida.  Leibolt, according
to a sweeping 1989 indictment of Escobar, once piloted a plane for the
cartel and, in September of 1979, supplied the group with six silencer-
equipped machine guns.  (He pled guilty in August of 1990 to conspiracy
to import cocaine.)
   Despite all this, RPB succeeded in at last transforming the Ingram
from a limited-circulation military weapon into a semi-automatic handgun
for general use.  "It became available everywhere," says Earl Taylor, a
twenty-one-year veteran of the ATF and now a vice-president of Norred and
Associates, an Atlanta security concern that counts among its many assign-
ments the protection of Colonel Oliver North.  "All gun shops everywhere
were selling it.  Everywhere."
   The gun proved easy to convert to fully automatic operation - so easy
that even inexperienced gun owners could make the change in a matter of
minutes, using only a file.  Demand for the gun soared nationwide, and black
markets formed as middlemen, including one Georgia policeman, bought large
quantities, converted the guns, and resold them to the drug underworld.
   In October of 1981 Wayne Daniel married Sylvia Williams, a striking
young woman from Alabama.  The next month she became a member of  RPB's
board of directors.  She would soon prove to be a feisty, outspoken
opponent of the ATF.
   Relations between the company and the ATF and other law-enforcement
agencies deteriorated throughout 1981 and 1982.  The Georgia Bureau of
Investigation and the FBI began an intensive hunt for Jack Leibolt, who,
according to minutes of an RPB board meeting, had gone "underground."
Citing Leibolt's activities, the ATF threatened to pull RPB's firearms-
manufacturer's license.  Moreover, the agency persuaded a federal judge
that the RPB semi-automatic handgun, so easy to convert to fully auto-
matic operation, was a machine gun and should be made subject to the strict
registration provisions of the National Firearms Act.
   To sever his ties to Leibolt, Wayne Daniel in October of 1982 liquidated
the company.  An auction house sold its assets for half a million dollars.
   A reasonable person might expect that at this point the MAC-10 would
have been allowed to disappear from America's arsenal and consigned to
Thomas Nelson's history books.  But RPB Industries rose quickly from the
tomb, this time as S.W.Daniel, Inc., named for Sylvia Williams Daniel.
After the ATF's ruling, the Daniels set out in earnest to develop a weapon
that could be sold readily to the public.  They succeeded - introducing
by 1983 the Cobray M-11/9 - but nonetheless continued sending prototype
after prototype to the ATF's technical branch in Washington, as if probing
for holes in the law.  Once, for example, they sent a prototype of what
they claimed was a single-shot weapon.  It was the same weapon that the
judge had ruled was a machine gun, but with a plate over the bottom of
the grip where the clip would otherwise be inserted.  The ATF, however,
found that the plate could be removed, and classified this weapon, too,
as a machine gun.
   The company also sold machine-gun "flats," stamped and notched pieces
of steel that could be bent to form the frame, or "lower receiver," of a
machine gun.  Under federal law a machine-gun receiver is treated as if it
were a complete firearm.  The flats were legal - provided that certain
holes were left undrilled.  The Daniels sold their flats legally.  All a
consumer had to do to commit an instant felony was to drill out a single
hole - but that was the consumer's problem.
   Referring to Wayne Daniel, Earl Taylor says, "He'll come close to the
edge of the envelope - maybe not blatantly doing somethin illegal, but
he's very anxious to test and see how far he can go in the weapons field."
   This attitude, Taylor believes, was a marketing posture that made the
Daniels' products all the more attractive to gun buyers.  Wayne Daniel,
he says, "can kind of feel the pulse of this gun culture out there and
kind of say things and do things and market things that appeal to those
people."
   One episode in particular illustrates the lengths to which the company
was willing to go.  In January of 1983 the Daniels invited two men, Joseph
Ledbetter and James Travis Motes, to their home to make the men a propo-
sition.  Ledbetter and Motes had installed air-conditioning in the RPB
offices and electrical lighting in the S.W.Daniel headquarters.  The
Daniels suggested that they diversify into the business of making the outer
tubes for silencers.  S.W.Daniel would make the internal parts.  The two
companies would advertise in the same gun publications and travel to the
same gun shows.  By selling only parts, both would stay on the right side
of federal law requiring registration of completed silencers.  Indeed, no
law barred the sale of silencer parts.  In the eyes of the law, however,
any consumer who merely took delivery of both internal parts and tubes
would automatically possess a completed silencer - a felony if the silencer
was unregistered.  But again, that was the consumer's worry.
   Wayne Daniel went so far as to give Ledbetter and Motes a gauge to guide
them in fashioning the tubes, and an advertising layout that S.W.Daniel
had used earlier to sell a line of completed registered silencers to approved
buyers through Shotgun News, a thick tabloid often referred to as the gun
owner's bible.
   Ledbetter and Motes founded L&M Guns and began selling their tubes
through Shotgun News and at gun shows around the country.  The Daniels,
meanwhile, began advertising their internal parts kits and displaying them
at the same gun shows.  On at least one occasion the two companies found
themselves facing each other across an aisle.
   The ATF began an investigation after a detective with the Mono County,
California, sheriff's office discovered an unregistered silencer during a
search.  The investigation quickly gained momentum.  At one point an ATF
special agent, Peter Urrea, psed as the president of the Widow Makers
Motorcycle Club and ordered silencer componenents from L&M guns.  He also
said he had a criminal record.  The components were sent, no questions asked.
   The investigation widened to include machine-gun flats sold by S.W.Daniel
and L&M.  Urrea continued buying silencer parts and machine-gun kits from
S.W.Daniel, L&M, and a third company, La Vista Armaments, of Louisville,
Kentucky, and won a warrant to search S.W.Daniel headquarters.  On July
19, 1984, ATF agents raided the company, seizing firearms, components,
and, most important, customer lists and shipping records.
   The ATF used the seized records to launch some 400 individual inves-
tigations relating to arms trafficking and illegal possession of restricted
weapons.  In June of 1985 ATF agents arrested the Daniels and, using an
experimental tactic, charged them with conspiracy to sell illegal silencers.
(By now the Daniels had divorced, buy they had continued to have a close
working relationship.)  Later, in formal court arguements, they would claim
that they were simply trying to fill a valid need for replacement parts for
silencers owned by legitimate users.
   The ATF's investigators found a rather different story.  All in all, from
November of 1983 to July of 1984, the government charged, S.W.Daniel had
mailed some 6,000 silencer and machine-gun kits.  Only four buyers had
bothered to register the devices.  When the ATF ran the customer lists
through the FBI's National Crime Information Center databank, it found that
more than fifty customers had prior criminal records or were believed to
be involved in drug peddling and other forms of organized crime.  Posing
as IRA gunrunners, Mexican narcotics smugglers, and assorted ne'er-do-wells,
undercover ATF agents were welcomed by international arms traffickers,
narcotics smugglers, and assorted ne'er-do-wells, among them a New York
group that accepted an order for some $15.6 million worth of silencer-
equipped machine guns, hand grenades, and rocket-propelled grenades.  A
confidential ATF report noted that the leaders of the group "were dealing
directly with Sylvia and Wayne Daniel...for the purchase of the machine
guns and silencer kits."  Agents also arrested an Oregon man who had pro-
vided machine-gun lower receivers to the Order, the group that had assassi-
nated Alan Berg.
   "There are literally thousands of persons now in the United States and
probably outside the United States who have a fully operable silencer which
is not registered to them and which is possessed unlawfully," Brian C.
Leighton, an assistant U.S. attorney assigned to the case, wrote in a
pretrial statement.  "It was incredibly easy for these people to receive
the silencer; they merely had to order the internal-parts kit from SWD
and order a tube from one of the many tube distributors - all of whom
advertised in Shotgun News."  These were "assassin-type weapons," he said,
and posed "a definite danger to the community."
   As the case approached the trial phase, however, the government found
itself compelled to admit that no law forbade the sale of silencer com-
ponents sold by S.W.Daniel.  Indeed, federal law expressly excluded
silencer parts from ATF regulation.  The Daniels pled guilty to a mis-
demeanor.  They were sentenced to six months' probation and forced to
pay $900 in taxes and fines, but because they had escaped felony charges,
they were allowed to retain their federal firearms license.
   The investigation had not cowed the Daniels.  On May 1, 1985, Wayne
Daniel placed an ad in Shotgun News headed "Npw It's Happening in AMERICA,"
featuring a large photograph of Hitler and Mussolini.  The ad recounted
the ATF's raid on S.W.Daniel and listed the names and home cities of the
agents involved.  "The uniforms of this new 'Gestapo' may not be taylored
[sic] and bear the eagle and swastika on the sleeve, rather they choose
to wear a business suit or sport jacket and slacks from the racks of a
cut-rate department store - but their purpose is the same, they want
total control and YOU, as an American citizen, DISARMED!"
   The agents named in the ad, among them Earl Taylor, demanded that
Daniel retract the advertisement.  He refused.  In a handwritten letter he
said, "I am at a complete loss of words perhaps from bending over laughing."
   The agents filed a private libel suit against Wayne Daniel and Snell
Publishing, the publisher of Shotgun News.  Taylor says, "It was, by God,
to let them know that they couldn't do that to law-enforcement officers
who were doing their mandated duty."
   The court ruled in the agents' favor and orderd Wayne Daniel to pay
each agent $1,000 in damages, but found Snell not liable.
   Undaunted, the Daniels branched out into other firearms.  They introduced
a pistol-grip shotgun with a high-capacity drum magazine and a forward grip,
resembling a shotgun version of a tommy gun, and called it the Street-
Sweeper.  "Delivers Twelve Rounds In Less Than Three Seconds!!!!" one ad
proclaimed in Shotgun News.  The ad continued, "Time for spring cleaning.
Why try clean-ups with inadequate equipment??  Buy the machine designed to
clean thoroughly on the first pass."
   The company's latest innovation is the Ladies' Home Companion, apparently
intended for use by women to protect themselves and their homes.  A variation
on the Street-Sweeper, it is just under two feet long, has a twelve-shot
revolving drum, and fires a heavy .45-70 "government" cartridge that
causes explosive recoil - yet the gun has only a rear pistol grip and no
other handle.  Moreover, the trigger requires thirty to forty pounds of
pressure.  S.W.Daniel advertised the gun as being "ideal for use in
confined spaces," yet Don Flohr, a Maryland State Police firearms expert
who tests weapons for the roster board, refused to test-fire it for fear
of damaging the state's testing range.  An official with Maryland's
Handgun Roster Board calls it "a sick joke."
   I'd have liked to ask the Daniels why they seemed hellbent on skirting
firearms laws, but neither returned the many calls I made recently to their
Atlanta headquarters.

   At the Baltimore County Pistol Range, Leonard Supenski had me slip on
pistol earmuffs and safety glasses.  Then he shoved a clip into the Cobray
and passed it to me.  He invited me to blast away.
   The trigger was quick - no more demanding than that of a cap pistol.  I
fired with abandon at a series of steel man-shaped targets called Pepper
Poppers, after their inventor.  The targets are designed to fall backward
when struck by a bullet.  The earthen wall came alive as if a tribe of
beetles had suddenly decided to decamp.  I downed all four targets and
them turned the gun on a loose piece of wood embedded in the earth behind
them.  Shards blew off in all directions.  Shell casings rocketed past me,
one striking the rim of my safety glasses and bouncing off my eyebrow.  In
a matter of seconds I'd used up all thirty-two rounds.
   Watching the dirt fly, one can be lulled into believing that this is,
after all, just fun and games.  I wanted to fire off another clip; hell,
I wanted to "rock and roll," the gun culture's euphemism for firing a
machine gun in full auto.  This was fun.  Remote destruction is a dynamite
rush.
   "You put a gun like this in the hands of a juvenile," Supenski testified
at the civil trial, "and you've got death waiting to happen."  The judge
struck his testimony from the record, ruling it prejudicial and inflammatory.
   "It should have been inflammatory," Supenski told me.  "A whole lot
of people should have heard it and they should have been inflamed."  He
pushed his glasses higher on his nose.  "You know the part of that case that
really bothered me?  The clerk who sold the kid that goddamn gun was an
ex-cop."

-- 
Larry Cipriani, att!cbvox1!lvc or lvc@cbvox1.att.com