Selling weapons south of the border is big business — and America’s loose gun laws are also devastating for Mexico.The inside story of a Texas gun-smuggling ring
. To qualify for the permits, he had to have a physical storefront, but his was just a rented metal warehouse that he hardly ever used. He made most of his money manufacturing ammunition in his garage and selling it to people he met online or through word of mouth. The ammo business was especially profitable in Texas during the Obama presidency, he says: “Hoarding is a thing.”
Carlson was tall and heavyset, with light-brown hair and blue eyes, and spoke fluent Spanish. Fox didn’t know much about him except that he was from Austin, drove around in a black Tacoma loaded with guns and money, and was married to a woman from Mexico. Carlson had already acquired a handful of minigun parts, but to finish assembling the weapon he needed the help of a gunsmith like Fox, who knew how to forge and cast components working from blueprints in his garage.
Law enforcement seized parts from one of Fox’s miniguns at the Anzalduas bridge border crossing. Photo credit: ATF The most striking thing about this black market is how few gunrunners are caught. Most of them are U.S. citizens, and in America there is no comprehensive federal law against firearms trafficking, making investigations difficult and the penalties relatively light, especially compared with smuggling drugs. Lawmakers have repeatedly introduced anti-trafficking bills in Congress, only to see them torpedoed by gun-industry lobbying.
Pérez’s office collects detailed confiscation data from every city and state in Mexico. “More interesting than the numbers,” he says, “is that when you ask traffickers why they are not using the ports, why they are not using the border with Guatemala, their response is basically, ‘Because I’m not stupid.
Mexico has the primary responsibility of stopping guns from entering its territory, but at many ports of entry, vehicles coming from the U.S. are simply waved through without even slowing to a stop, owing to the volume of traffic under the North American Free Trade Agreement. The personnel that would be needed to search the hundreds of thousands of cars and trucks and buses and trains doesn’t exist, especially in northern Mexico, where unprecedented violence has stretched state resources thin.
“At first we were trying to figure out what it was,” says Duane Cottrell, the lead HSI officer on the team of federal agents assigned to the case. The officers suspected the work of a majorcell. They found the minigun parts especially worrisome. “I’ve never seen anything comparable to miniguns at the border,” says Mike Weddell, who led ATF’s side of the investigation. “It’s a mass-casualty weapon.
Though now badly fractured, the Gulf Cartel is the original Mexican crime syndicate, with roots going back to the Prohibition era. “The company,” as it’s known locally, is involved in all kinds of illicit activity but mostly profits from drug trafficking, oil-and-gas theft, and human smuggling.
It had been three months since Solis’ arrest, and the feds were still keeping an eye on Quintero when ATF got a tip: A Mexican national known as Saul was set to buy a sniper rifle from Quintero’s 51-year-old uncle, Alfredo Arguelles. Unbeknownst to Saul and Arguelles, their go-between was an informant. ATF set up a sting operation for the morning of September 7th.
Weddell says that cases like these are more complicated and time-consuming for law enforcement than they should be. “A firearms-trafficking bill is what we need more than anything else,” he says. “It would narrow things down to where we’re not looking for technicalities, paperwork violations, that don’t go to the merit of what we’re actually investigating. Not hanging cases on pieces of other statutes that we patch together.
Such proposals, while massively popular, are almost certainly doomed in the Republican-controlled Senate. Even if passed by the Senate, the bills would likely be vetoed by President Trump, who took $30 million from the NRA in 2016. Among the many favors Trump has done for the gun industry, he has refused to appoint a director to the ATF, leaving the agency under acting deputy directorship, a status it often languishes in under Republican presidents.
Three people were killed by a minigun when an innocent family was caught in the crossfire in a battle between the Mexican military and a cartel in 2018.when Carlson first approached Fox about building a minigun, he had already acquired a rotor, some barrels, and a power cable. “But he didn’t have the receiver housing,” Fox says. “That’s the part that’s registered,” the crucial component engraved with a serial number.
A few months after Trump took office, the Justice Department ended an Obama-era initiative called Operation Choke Point, an anti-money-laundering program that discouraged banks from taking large deposits in cash from payday lenders, escort services, coin dealers, and other shady businesses. That gun dealers were added to the list was a bugbear for the gun lobby and right-wing press, which celebrated the program’s 2017 demise — but not before it tripped up Fox, and ultimately led to his arrest.
According to prosecutors, Fox purchased a total of $272,000 in money orders. All of them were for less than $3,000, suggesting Fox was guilty of a federal crime known as structuring, or breaking a larger purchase into a series of smaller purchases so as not to have to show identification, intentionally keeping the funds anonymous. The U.S. attorney’s office in Austin greenlighted an investigation.
More than six months passed and all three suspects remained free men. When Carlson learned he was under investigation, he fled to Mexico, but ATF agents called Mexican immigration authorities and he was deported to the U.S. for having an expired visa. He would eventually plead guilty to unlicensed possession of a machine gun, as well as conspiracy to export firearms without a State Department license — the same stopgap statute used to convict Solis.
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