This article misspells the name of an agent of the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. He is Joe Bisbee, not Joe Brisbee.
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Fighting Gun Traffickers Involves Lots of Legwork, a Little Luck
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"If it's 18 months or less, our policy here is we will go and attempt to interview that original purchaser, wherever that individual may be in the United States," he said. "The agent will drive to the Carolinas, fly to San Diego, fly to Texas, wherever, and try to do a face-to-face with that purchaser. Because time-to-crime, when it's 18 months or less, it's usually an indication to us that that's a trafficked gun."
Often, the interviews result only in the gathering of information for intelligence files. In some cases, though, agents strike gold.
On Jan. 27, 1999, when D.C. police investigated gunshots in the 100 block of Webster Street NE, they found no suspects. But they did find a cheap handgun on the ground, a Bryco semiautomatic with an obliterated serial number.
It took several months for the tracing center to do its work because lab technicians first had to restore the serial number. In Washington, ATF Agent Joe Brisbee received the trace report, which said the Bryco had been purchased at a Hampton, Va., gun shop Oct. 17, 1998 -- 102 days before it turned up on Webster Street. The buyer was a Navy enlisted man, Benjamin Orciga, then 30, of Virginia Beach.
Brisbee drove 200 miles and knocked on Orciga's door.
"He was like a kid that got caught with his hand in the cookie jar," Brisbee said.
Orciga admitted to buying the Bryco and three other handguns at various times as a favor for a shipmate, a Jamaican-born Navy petty officer, Garfield Headlam, who had since been transferred to a base in Maryland.
Agents put Headlam under surveillance and, on Nov. 21, 1999, arrested him in Alexandria. He had two assault rifles and a pistol in his car, all newly purchased.
Based on Headlam's "partial confession" and records found in his home, Brisbee said, authorities identified nine other straw purchasers who, like Orciga, had bought guns for Headlam. Like other traffickers, Headlam used multiple buyers because of a Virginia law that limits people to one handgun purchase a month.
Headlam and his accomplices bought at least 57 guns in Virginia's Tidewater area. Most were sold to D.C. drug dealers through one of Headlam's relatives in the city, Brisbee said. Eight of the 10 buyers, including Orciga, were prosecuted and got sentences of as much as a year in jail. Headlam, 32, is serving a 10-year term.
"It's nice when everything just falls into place like that," Brisbee said. "But I'll tell you, cases like this don't happen every day."
Nor does the damage stop when the trafficker is locked up. Of the 57 firearms known to have been bought by Headlam's ring, 46 remain unaccounted for.
"A firearm that gets into the illegal market has a life of its own," Domenech said. "It can commit tragedy after tragedy after tragedy before it's recovered."
One of Headlam's guns, a Taurus semiautomatic, turned up Nov. 12, 2003, four years after his arrest, when police in Kingston, Jamaica, got in a shootout with a violent street gang. There was one fatality, a young gang member.
In his hand was the Taurus.
