By Paul Duggan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, March 17, 2008

For police and federal agents trying to keep guns out of the hands of criminals in the District, building a case against a firearms trafficker can mean months of work. Or it can come together quickly -- as fast as a speeding motorcycle.

Virginia State Trooper Eric Linkous was looking for speeders on Interstate 66 in Fauquier County on Aug. 10 when Michael W. Lewis II blew past him on a Suzuki Katana going 99 mph. By the time Linkous caught up with the Suzuki, Lewis, 30, of Front Royal, Va., had abandoned his bike and fled on foot, leaving behind a black satchel.

In the bag were five stolen pistols, four of them taken from a Manassas gun store three nights earlier in a burglary that netted 19 firearms. Lewis, arrested within days of the chase, was soon linked to three other burglaries and nearly 70 stolen guns -- most of them still missing. Authorities said they think the guns were sold to criminals, mainly in the District.

Firearms traffickers such as Lewis profit in an underground economy that has bustled for decades in the District, regardless of the city's long-debated prohibition on handgun ownership, one of the toughest gun-control laws in the nation.

Tomorrow, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments on the constitutionality of the 32-year-old handgun ban in a case that could lead to a landmark ruling on the Second Amendment. Within blocks of the stately, marble-columned court building, and in many parts of the city, the market for illegal guns will continue to thrive -- and the fight against it, the war in the trenches, will go on.

The thefts committed over a six-month period by Lewis, who pleaded guilty to firearms-trafficking charges last month, were commonplace crimes. Investigators said many of the countless illegal guns in Washington neighborhoods were stolen in commercial and residential burglaries outside the city.

Traffickers also routinely pay people with clean backgrounds, known as straw purchasers, to buy firearms for them at gun stores in Maryland, Virginia and elsewhere.

The business is lucrative. A cheap pistol (a "Saturday night special") with a retail value of $100 might fetch better than twice that price on the streets, and the markup on high-quality handguns can be even greater. In many cases, law enforcement officials said, drug dealers pay for guns with cocaine.

"You're talking about supply and demand," said Edgar A. Domenech, head of the Washington field office of the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

"And it's never-ending," he said.

Lewis understood that market, according to authorities. From February to July last year, he stole nearly 50 guns in burglaries at two pawn shops and a sporting goods store in Virginia's Augusta, Warren and Rappahannock counties, investigators said. Then he stole 19 guns in the Aug. 7 break-in at Dominion Arms in Prince William County, they said.

It didn't take long for the hot weapons to reach the streets.

On Aug. 16, about a week after Lewis abandoned his motorcycle and fled, an informant told ATF about three illegal gun dealers in the District who were traveling in a red Ford Expedition. Agents stopped the sport-utility vehicle on Randle Place SE and arrested Brandon L. Williams, Joseph M. McGhee and Hassan Z. Abdelqader, all 24. In the SUV, agents found two stolen pistols, including a Beretta semiautomatic taken from Dominion.

The men eventually admitted to buying more than a dozen guns from Lewis for resale on Washington area streets, according to court documents. They recently pleaded guilty to federal charges and received prison terms ranging from 18 to 51 months.

"We don't know what Lewis was doing between the burglaries and when we caught him, so we may never know where the rest of the guns went in the criminal pipeline," said Mike Campbell, spokesman for the ATF office in Washington. "If we were to venture a guess," he said, "they went straight to D.C."

While the ATF deals mainly with trafficking, looking to take down suppliers, D.C. police work the front lines, seizing guns from the hoodlums who buy them.

"The number we get fluctuates," said police Lt. Mike Whiteside, a supervisor in a plainclothes unit that focuses entirely on confiscating guns from the streets. "But I don't think we've ever had less than 30 in a month. We had a couple of months in the high 40s."

And those were just the weapons found by the 30-member gun recovery unit, which was reactivated in October after a long hiatus. Officers throughout the department seized 2,924 guns last year.

Buying a firearm on city streets "is reasonably easy if you know the right people," said Whiteside's boss, Capt. Brian Harris. His unit saturates neighborhoods citywide, hunting for weapons. "We do everything out there," Whiteside said. Police break down doors with warrants, stop and search suspicious vehicles, frisk known drug dealers on street corners.

"Whatever it takes to lead us to a gun," Whiteside said.

Domenech said his ATF field office collects the serial numbers of all guns seized by police and tries to determine how the weapons ended up in the District -- often the first step in a gun-trafficking case.

If a seized gun has not been reported stolen, Domenech said, his office submits the serial number to the ATF's National Tracing Center. Researchers follow a paper trail, contacting the gun's manufacturer, then the distributor, then the owner of the store that took delivery of the weapon. By law, the store must keep a record of who purchased the firearm on an ATF form that the buyer fills out.

Usually within a week or so, Domenech said, the tracing center can lay out the gun's route from factory to purchaser.

Agents consider it a red flag if a firearm is seized from a criminal within a year and a half of it being purchased by someone else at a store. About 10 percent of the guns confiscated by D.C. police fit that definition, Domenech said.

"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.