It was a Smith & Wesson .38-caliber revolver. It made him feel safe.
At night, sleeping in his friend’s Chevy van parked near Eighth and Keefe, with the sound of gunshots and sirens a nightly serenade, Michael Ray Green would tuck the gun under his head for protection. The hard lump of its cylinder provided a comforting reminder of the control it gave him. People did whatever he wanted when he forced them to look down its barrel.
But each time he stuck the revolver in someone’s face, he drifted a little farther from the stable life he imagined as he was released from prison. He planned to get married to his girlfriend, Misty, and provide support and example to her three kids, who he loved as his own. Each time he held someone at gunpoint it moved him closer to the horror of Oct. 10, 2006, when Smith & Wesson J454768 recoiled four times in his hand. The night he murdered a Jimmy John’s delivery driver, and the chaos he wove with the barrel of the revolver overtook him completely.
Guns are used in most homicides, including about 68 percent of murders nationally and 80 percent in Milwaukee.
Almost all of the guns used in these crimes were once manufactured, sold and purchased legally. Some are sold to straw purchasers – go-betweens who buy the gun for a criminal – while some are sold directly to thugs who don’t yet have a record, and many are stolen from legal owners. Often these guns end up illegally resold, traded or passed around.
Illegal guns are rampant in the city. Milwaukee police took close to 2,400 guns off the streets in 2006 and seized another 1,028 firearms in the first four months of 2007, a 29 percent increase over the same period last year. Area hospitals treated more than 800 gunshot wounds in 2006.
Americans debate the right policy to stop the violence and curb the flow of guns, but the discussion typically lacks a thorough understanding of where all the illegal guns originate and how they get onto the streets. The reality is different than many imagine.
Michael Green and Smith & Wesson J454768 are just one example out of thousands in which the wrong people come into possession of guns. Too often people pay the ultimate price when the law fails. And the law fails too often.
This is the story of one such failure and one such gun.
• • •
On Oct. 8, 2005, Cody Sustman, a 19-year-old troublemaker who had moved to the South Side of Milwaukee from Hartford, got into his car and headed north on U.S. 45 toward Wild Rose, Wis. It was a two-and-a-half-hour drive to the sleepy hamlet southwest of Green Bay, but it would be worth it. Sitting unattended in a little wooden shed were hundreds of firearms just waiting to be snatched.
Sustman had gotten into gun dealing somewhat by accident. He’d become addicted to Milwaukee’s street game. That and cocaine. He sold dope to prop up both habits, but was always small-time. Then he discovered a more rewarding racket.
The revelation came when Sustman and his neighbor, a two-time felon named Michael Koscinski, drove to one of Koscinski’s dope hookups at 34th and Fond du Lac to score some cocaine. When they arrived, Koscinski chatted up a couple of street dealers. A few minutes later, Koscinski returned asking Sustman if he’d be interested in selling the Colt 9 mm he was packing.
“$350 and they can have it,” said Sustman. The dealers bought it and threw in a little free blow. They asked Sustman if he could get more. “I told them I could every now and then,” he says. The drug dealers wrote down their phone number and a partnership was formed. Sustman and Koscinski would provide guns in quantity and the dealers would line up buyers.
“Dope isn’t that hard to sell, but you can only make so much,” Sustman says. “But guns, they’re wanted everywhere. I knew they could get me on top of the game – having money, the ride, the clothes, the girls…”
Sustman began by buying pistols off the streets and from “people from the suburbs” to resell through his connection at a profit. But he wasn’t able to get much more than what he paid for the weapons and had a hard time consistently getting quality pistols. Guns are status symbols on the streets and a lot of buyers want something nice to stick in their waistband.
Since Sustman had no criminal record, he considered operating as a straw purchaser, buying guns from gun stores legitimately, then reselling them to felons. Very few straw purchasers are prosecuted due to a difficult burden of proof. But to wash his hands of crimes the guns were sure to be involved in, Sustman would have to report the weapons he bought as stolen before he sold them. Reporting so many “thefts” would surely alert authorities. Not only that, but the profit margin was too low.
“At a store you can get nice guns, a Glock for $500 or $600. But you go on the streets looking to make a profit and you say ‘Hey, I got a brand new Glock .40 right here in the box, $700.’ People are going to look at you crazy. They can get a stolen Glock .40 down the street for $200.”
Stolen guns. Sustman knew that was the only way to really get ahead. And he knew exactly where to steal them: a garage full of firearms in Wild Rose. The owner would never notice a few missing here and there. One hundred percent profit.
• • •
A few times a month, 69-year-old James Schrader would pack his burgundy 1999 Ford step-side truck full of his wares and head to wherever the expo center, convention hall or fairground hosting the event was located – Green Bay, Milwaukee, La Crosse, Eagle River, Eau Claire… wherever. These so called “gun shows” have all kinds of things for sale: military manuals on how to improvise explosives or assault an aircraft with small arms; have-a-nice-day happy-face T-shirts with little Hitler mustaches above the smiling mouths; plastic stabbing weapons that can pass metal detectors. But most people, like Schrader, go for the guns.
When he wasn’t manning his table displaying the scores of pistols and long guns for sale, Schrader would browse the sniper rifles, handguns, assault rifles, carbines and shotguns the other dealers were selling. He kept an eye out for what was once the most commonly used gun in crimes: Smith & Wesson .38-caliber revolvers. He collected them. But he also looked for guns he could buy cheap,
clean up, then resell at a profit at future gun shows.
Schrader kept his private collection of rare and valuable guns in a 15-by-30-foot vault in the basement of his house in Wild Rose. But he performed restorations and stored the firearms he sold at gun shows inside a converted detached garage adjacent to his house. Hundreds of guns passed through Schrader’s workshop. He could never keep track of them all, and his grandson, Cody Sustman, knew it. Sustman took eight pistols from his grandfather in June of 2005, and another seven or eight in September of that same year. “He never noticed,” Sustman says. “Honest to God.”
By the time Sustman started stealing guns from his grandfather, he and his partner, Michael Koscinski, had already connected to a number of gun buyers. They would take newly acquired guns to a drug house on the North Side, display them on a table and start entertaining offers. Sort of a small gun show. The weapons sold like hotcakes. Sometimes they were bought in bulk – say, six guns for $2,500 and a half-ounce of cocaine – but mostly they went one at a time.
Sustman didn’t really need Koscinski, but the 38-year-old had provided the hookup to get started in the gun dealing business. Sustman felt he owed him. Koscinski was happy with the brand-new Sig Sauer 9 mm pistol Sustman gave him and was willing to accompany Sustman on sales calls to violent North Side neighborhoods for a little dope here and there. Buyers often threw in some coke to sweeten their offers on pistols. Sustman also figured it was good to have a little backup from Koscinski in case a sale got out of hand.
Like the time Sustman got a call around 2 a.m. “You got any of those things?” said the slurring voice of a guy Sustman recognized as a past customer. “Come over. We want to buy some.”
When Sustman arrived at the house on Center Street, the buyer and his friends had been partying hard and were ripping drunk. They had somehow come across a large sum of money and wanted to spend their cash on more guns.
“Things got uncomfortable really fast,” says Sustman. The intoxicated buyers started arguing cost, getting louder and more agitated. Sustman grabbed his products and backed up towards the door, ready to pull the Glock from his waistband if anyone tried anything. Having Koscinski and his Sig 9 mm along on business seemed like a good idea from then on.
But Sustman didn’t really trust his partner. Koscinski had a hefty crack habit and was a two-time felon who seemed to be asking for a third conviction. He was openly selling cocaine and weed to kids around his and Sustman’s apartment building on South 15th Street. Sure enough, police, responding to a complaint from a neighbor, searched Koscinski’s apartment on Sept. 21, 2005, and found the Sig Sauer 9 mm. Desperate to save his own skin, Koscinski told police exactly where he got it: from his neighbor, Cody Sustman.
Acting on the tip from Koscinski, officers gained access to Sustman’s apartment and recovered a marijuana plant, pistol cases, and hundreds of rounds of ammunition, but no guns. According to Sustman, he was able to pass all the firearms he had to a friend on his patio, who then made off unnoticed while the police were searching Koscinski’s apartment.
Sustman, for being in possession of pot, and Koscinski, for being a felon in possession of a firearm, spent the next 72 hours in county jail. What Sustman didn’t know was that Koscinski was in a room with federal agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), and he was telling everything he knew about Sustman’s gun trafficking. Koscinski was hoping to reduce the possible 10-year sentence he faced as a felon in possession of a firearm.
Koscinski also helped the authorities
set up a taped meeting between Sustman and undercover ATF agents during which Sustman claimed he could get firearms. But agents weren’t able to get their case against Sustman together fast enough to stop him from burglarizing his grandfather’s gun room just weeks later.
• • •
After spending 72 hours locked up for marijuana possession, Sustman wanted to party. The cash he got from his few leftover guns went right up his nose. But he knew the opportunity to get back on his feet was just a few days away. His grandparents were heading out of town.
Around 11 p.m. on Oct. 8, Sustman arrived at Schrader’s house in Wild Rose, which is set back 200 feet from a lonesome country highway. There was no one to see him searching for the best entry to the outbuilding his grandfather used to store and work on guns.
But little did Sustman know as he wiggled through a broken window that he had been ratted out by his partner, Michael Koscinski, and was under investigation by the ATF. In the back of his mind, he’d always known he’d get caught eventually, but what he never expected, as he scanned the racks of long guns hanging on the walls and the cases of pistols on the floor, was that his grandfather would soon be under investigation, too.
Sustman tossed six briefcases holding 30 pistols through the gun room window, loaded them in his car and drove back to Milwaukee, arriving back at his apartment at 1:30 a.m. He unloaded the heavy briefcases from his car and lugged them into his apartment on South Fifth Street. One by one he flipped open the cases, took a quick inventory of the contents, and transferred everything into another case.
He was getting good at doing the math. He estimated the 30 handguns he had just scored would fetch around $8,000. Some of the weapons in the pile, like the brand new Glocks, would get him over $500 a pop. Sustman favored Glocks and wouldn’t sell the Austrian-made semiautomatic pistols for anything less than half-a-grand. Others, like the .357s, would fetch around $350. Most semiautomatic .40s and .45s sold for about $400.
The .38-caliber Smith & Wesson revolvers, the most common gun in the bunch, would only go for about $200.
With the 30 pistols he took from his grandfather in tow, Sustman made his way to his hookup, CJ, a hustler on the North Side. The eyes of everyone in the house lit up when Sustman pulled open the pistol-packed briefcase. CJ made some phone calls: “It’s here and you need to get here immediately,” he told eager customers. “People made it from the South Side in like three minutes,” says Sustman. The place was soon crawling with customers.
Almost all of the guns were sold that night, including a rather unremarkable Smith & Wesson .38-caliber revolver, chrome-plated and stamped with the serial number J454768 when it was forged in Springfield, Mass., in 1976. The gun would take a life just one year later. But the guy who went home with it that night, a felon named Ronald Barnett, wouldn’t be the one pulling the trigger.
• • •
Precisely when Michael Green first started using guns is unknown, but he was exposed to their deadly force at age 17. In 1999, Green and his then-best friend William Clyde Jones were the victims of a robbery attempt gone bad. One of the robbers shot Jones and then ran off. Green’s last memory of his friend – looking down at him gasping for breath, then deflating, lifeless, blood bubbling from a bullet wound in his chest – stains all of the good memories.
Two years later, Green was convicted of felony homicide by negligent use of a vehicle for fatally running down a 3-year-old boy and then fleeing the scene. Green told detectives he had just left his brother’s house when the fatality occurred. He was there, he said, to inquire about getting a gun.
After being convicted in 2001 and serving three years in a state prison, Green emerged in 2004 with good intentions about becoming a husband and father. But he never married his girlfriend Misty. And at some point, the struggle between doing the right thing and the ways of the street – as his adopted mother describes his lifelong internal conflict – was settled. He started hanging out more and more with his murdered best friend’s younger brother, Ronald Barnett, and his Smith & Wesson revolver. Barnett was living at a drug house near Eighth and Keefe and, according to Green, the pistol was accessible to anyone who frequented the residence. It was just one of several guns stashed there.
In July 2006, Green and Barnett had burglarized a house. The men were told it belonged to a dirty corrections officer who was dealing large amounts of cocaine. Green was worried the cops were on to him about the break-in and later told detectives that he felt he needed to do more robberies to get money for a lawyer just in case he got busted.
On the night of July 30, 2006, Green, Barnett and two other men were looking for someplace to stick up as they drove the streets of the North Side. At close to 2 a.m. the Riverwest Tavern, a bar on East Auer Street, was still full of people, which meant a bit more risk, but also the potential for full wallets in addition to a booming cash register. Green manned a long-barrel shotgun with a shoulder sling and a pistol grip, while Barnett took charge of the Smith & Wesson .38. The men pulled ski masks over their heads and charged into the bar with Green on point.
Leveling the shotgun and revolver at anyone who looked jumpy, the men ordered everyone onto the floor. Green cleaned out the register while his friends collected cash, credit cards and cell phones from customers.
“Anyone tries to follow us, we’ll shoot you in the fucking face,” threatened one of the assailants on his way out the door. The thieves made off with $320.
Meanwhile, Green worried about another ramification of the burglary of the corrections officer. One of Green’s partners, a 13-year-old nicknamed Little D, was upset because he didn’t get anything from that break-in. The brash teenager threatened to turn Green in to police. Green hoped to buy his silence and took him along on another robbery that was sure to pay off big.
On Oct. 7, 2006, Green, Little D and Ronald Barnett rang the doorbell to a house on North 15th Street at 11:05 p.m. An acquaintance had told Green that the resident there had received a large financial settlement and kept the funds in a cabinet. Green, disguised in a ski mask, fingered Smith & Wesson J454768 as 73-year-old Samuel Robinson fumbled with the locks. As Robinson started to pull open the door, Green rushed through the threshold, knocking him off balance. Green stuck the revolver into the frightened man’s chest, but according to Robinson, he fought back and pushed the gun to the side. The weapon discharged. Robinson says the bullet grazed his forehead before lodging in a wall. The struggle was over quickly. Green was too powerful for the elderly man and soon had control of him.
“Say anything and I’ll shoot you in the head,” Green told Robinson.
Little D and Barnett followed into the house and the intruders wrestled Robinson, who walks with a cane, into the basement and tied him up. Little D took charge of the revolver as Green searched the house for the money. Finding nothing, Green returned to the basement. According to Robinson, the men repeatedly kicked him in the groin and stomach and pistol-whipped him with the Smith & Wesson while trying to coerce the location of the cash. Abandoning hope that Robinson had the money they were looking for, they began asking for the next best thing.
“Got any guns?”
Robinson said he had a shotgun in a closet. Green flew up the stairs to look, but found nothing. When he returned to the basement, Little D was holding Smith & Wesson J454768, pointing it at the old man. He had cocked back the hammer, readying it to fire.
Green snatched the revolver away from his young partner and uncocked it. The men continued to threaten Robinson and debated what to do with him.
“Let’s break his leg,” one assailant suggested.
‘I’ll shoot you in the head and throw you in the river,” another threatened.
“I’ll set you afire…”
The men eventually fled through the back door, leaving Robinson battered and frightened, but alive. He was able to untie himself and call the police. But it was just one more crime, with the suspects and gun unknown to the police.
• • •
At a glance, Joseph Munz’s life was as far removed from the world of Michael Green as you could imagine. He grew up on a farm in rural Lodi, Wis., a small town not far from Devil’s Lake State Park. Munz attended UW-Milwaukee and hoped to get a degree in architecture. He worked several jobs to put himself through college, including summers at the Lodi Canning Company. During the school year, he was a delivery man for Jimmy John’s, and had just started a second job handling security at the Brew City Restaurant.
In reality, however, Munz and Michael Green had many things in common. Both men played high school football, loved motorcycles and were artistically inclined. Green had worked as a delivery driver and attended UWM for a short period, just like Munz.
But their most defining similarity was this: As Green had been victimized by a robbery attempt gone bad in 1999, so would Munz in 2006.
On Oct. 6, 2006, as Munz was getting his first taste of drinking legally at the bars while ringing in his 21st birthday, Michael Green was stalking two more victims.
Ramie Camarena and Patricia Cottrell were walking eastbound on Center Street when they sensed someone approaching quickly from behind.
“Don’t turn around,” a man said as he closed within a few paces. Camarena, startled, turned instinctively, ignoring the command.
“Give me your purses,” the man demanded. “You wanna get popped?”
She had never before seen the unmasked, light-skinned, African-American man pointing a silver revolver at her and her friend. It wouldn’t be until days later that she’d learn his name : Michael Ray Green.
Green snatched the women’s purses and ran back to a white van. There, he split the $100 he found in the ladies’ wallets with Barnett, who was driving. One of the women’s credit cards was used to fill up the van’s gas tank. The fuel would allow Green to follow his random impulses while driving around the North Side four days later.
On Oct. 10, 2006, Green was weaving through the side streets of the East Side trying to avoid any incidental run-ins with cops. He was out of places to go. His girlfriend, Misty, had booted him from her place after a fight over his refusal to “be a man” and get a job. For two weeks, the 24-year-old had been sleeping in Ronald Barnett’s stolen rust-bucket – the white Chevy van – tucking the Smith & Wesson under his head for protection.
The day before had been the birthday of Green’s best friend, William Clyde Jones, murdered seven years before. He would have been 27. His death haunted Green.
Driving down Locust Street, Green knew he couldn’t afford to get pulled over. The fact that he didn’t have a driver’s license – not to mention his criminal record – would lead the cops to search the van. And they would definitely find the .38-caliber revolver lodged under the driver’s seat. As a convicted felon, getting caught with a firearm could mean 10 years. So Green drove carefully, scanning the streets.
A maroon Saturn sedan was parking on the road as Green approached the 3200 block of North Weil Street. As he passed the vehicle, a Jimmy John’s delivery sign fastened to its roof caught his eye. The opportunity was too good to pass up.
By the time Green reached the intersection of Weil and Concordia, a few feet past the parked Saturn, he had made up his mind to rob the delivery driver. Green turned down the alley behind the house that Joe Munz was walking toward, pulled a gray knit hat over his head, grabbed the pistol from under his seat, and exited the van.
Holding the revolver in his dominant left hand, Green snuck through the gangway between the duplex where Munz was making his delivery and a neighbor’s bungalow to the south. There was no time to think. Stick a gun in someone’s face
and it’s all improvisation from there on. There hadn’t been much planning of the other robberies he’d committed at gunpoint over the last couple of months, but they had all worked.
As he reached the front of the house, Munz was finishing his delivery.
“Have a nice night,” said Joe, grabbing a $3 tip.
As Munz turned to walk down the porch steps and back to his car, he saw, standing slightly to the south of the westward facing duplex, Michael Green, dressed in jeans, a hooded sweatshirt, tennis shoes and a knit hat. He held a chrome-plated handgun, Smith & Wesson J454768, in his outstretched left hand.
“Drop it,” Green demanded, referring to the cash.
“Fuck you, shut up,” Munz replied defiantly.
Green, unaccustomed to resistance and seeing that Munz was “pretty big,” cocked the revolver’s hammer back with his left thumb to emphasize his order. But Munz wasn’t fazed. He charged towards the robber.
The barrel of Smith & Wesson J454768 spat sparks into the crisp October night, sending a 10.1-gram jacketed bullet speeding over 1,000 feet per second into the chest of the 220-pound delivery driver. Something switched in Munz’s brain as the bullet struck. He grabbed Green in a bear hug. He was fighting for his life.
Green didn’t even know he’d hit Munz as the larger man grabbed him with his powerful hands and punched him in the face. Green managed to keep the weapon pointed at Munz’s chest as the two grappled. He fired the weapon a second time. Munz didn’t make a sound as the bullet tore through his lung. He kept fighting, knocking the pistol from his assailant’s hand toward the gangway between the houses.
Green shook himself loose and went for the gun. Munz tackled him from behind. Green fell onto the gun, but Munz jumped on top of him and rained down punches to the back of his head. Green reached under himself and grabbed J454768. Turning over, he hit Munz in the head repeatedly with the pistol until he was able to get back on his feet. Munz, shot and beaten but not yet defeated, grabbed Green’s leg as he tried to flee. Green hit him in the head with the pistol one more time and ran back to the van.
This account of events is according to Green’s statement to detectives. Green only mentions firing J454768 twice. But Joe Munz sustained four gunshot wounds – three of them ruled potentially fatal on their own.
When paramedics arrived on the scene, Joe Munz was lying in the grass unable to speak. He had a pulse of 152 and nodded when asked if he had been shot. When the medical team moved him to the ambulance, Joe’s vitals crashed quickly. The 21-year-old, who was described by friends as a “big teddy bear,” was dead.
Acting on a tip from a confidential informant, police arrested Michael Green at his girlfriend Misty’s house five days later. Many guns that are used in homicides end up in the river, scattered in pieces in dumpsters, or tossed into storm drains. But Michael Green returned the revolver he used to kill Joe Munz back to its illegal owner. Detective David Anderson found the Smith & Wesson in a desk drawer at Ronald Barnett’s place, along with an earring, a ring and a penny.
• • •
On April 15, 2007, ATF agents raided James Schrader’s property in Wild Rose. The agents seized 349 guns. Schrader, like his grandson Cody, is suspected of dealing firearms illegally. But where Sustman was selling guns on the streets, Schrader peddled his hardware at gun shows. The laws governing both are the same: If you are not a licensed firearms dealer (many gun show dealers are not licensed), you may sell guns to whomever you want. If you know a person is a felon, it is illegal to sell them a firearm, but you are not required to perform a background check to find out. If you make your living selling guns, however, you need a federal dealer’s license. To be charged with dealing firearms without a license, authorities must prove that gun sales are your primary source of income.
Cody Sustman was nailed for both infractions. He admitted that gun dealing was his business and that he knew Koscinski was a felon when he gave him a pistol. He was sentenced to two years and 10 months in prison. A penalty that Sustman thinks is light, considering the damage done by just one of the guns he sold. “I got off easy because I’m young, dumb and white,” says Sustman.
Charges were still pending against Schrader in May. It appears he maintained a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy when selling guns. He never inquired about the identity or criminal history of an undercover agent who bought a Glock .40-caliber pistol from him at a Green Bay gun show. Authorities believe a lot of crime guns are bought this way at these free-for-alls.
The evidence suggests Schrader made a lot of money buying guns from shows, cleaning them up, and reselling them at a profit. Agents seized $20,000 in addition to the 349 guns they recovered from his property. The search warrant affidavit implies that he’s been making his living dealing guns without a proper license, which would subject him to federal prosecution.
In addition, an ATF confidential informant, wearing a wire at a gun show, purchased an illegal modified part from Schrader to make an M-16 assault rifle fully automatic. Schrader also sold the informant an illegal tool designed to modify other weapons to fully automatic. According to the informant, Schrader has sold firearms at gun shows for 15 years. Who knows where the hundreds of guns he’s sold have ended up?
Because Schrader could only provide serial numbers for some of the weapons that Sustman took, many can’t be traced. So far, nine of the pistols for which authorities were provided serial numbers have been recovered. Six were taken off felons and one from a 14-year-old.
Michael Green pleaded guilty to killing Munz and will spend the next 57 years in a cell that he measures to be 36 playing cards wide by 17-and-a-half playing
cards deep.
Smith & Wesson J454768 will sit in the Milwaukee Police Department’s evidence warehouse forever. Its grime-caked walnut grips and the nicks in its chrome are the record of a 30-year journey to Oct. 10, 2006, when a small-time robber used it to murder a 21-year-old student of architecture working an honest job.
It’s just one gun.
But its impact began to dawn on Cody Sustman as he sat in the Green Bay Correctional Institution speaking to Milwaukee Magazine. “I don’t know if you know this,” his words strained through teeth that were wired shut, the result of a fractured jaw he received from a fellow inmate, “but the gun that was used to kill the delivery guy, that was one of mine… I’m responsible.”
Sustman admits to selling more than 50 guns on the street.
He is just one dealer.
Mario Quadracci is an assistant editor of Milwaukee Magazine.
• • •
Sidebars:
Surveying Inmates About Guns
To better understand the city’s illegal gun trade, Milwaukee Magazine sent surveys to every inmate in the state prison system serving time for armed robbery or felony possession of a firearm – a total of 180. We received 31 responses, giving us a 17 percent response rate. Here is their collective history as gun users:
4% Purchased a gun legally from a gun store
40% Used a straw purchaser
92% Bought a gun from someone on the street
80% Sold a gun on the street:
8% Bought a gun from a gun show
68% Have been shot
92% Have had friends or family killed by a gun
13.26 Average age when they first owned a gun
Tracing Straw Purchases
Milwaukee Circuit Court Judge Jeffrey Kremmers, who oversees the city’s gun court, has heard the same thing over and over from criminals.
“Apparently there are guns lying all over the streets, as that’s where people constantly tell me they’re finding them,” Kremmers says. “It’s ridiculous, but that’s the excuse I hear every day.”
Law enforcement once was better able to trace how criminals got guns; after all, the overwhelming majority of guns are manufactured and sold legally. But since 2003, a federal appropriations bill rider championed by Republican Congressman Todd Tiahrt of Kansas has restricted access to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) firearm trace data. That’s right: Municipalities, law enforcement agencies and the public are barred from seeing the data.
The ATF’s trace data can tell investigators where a gun was made and sold, which can then be used to expose patterns in gun trafficking. But the riders make it illegal for law enforcement, outside of the ATF, to use the aggregate data; only information on a specific case is available.
“You can’t find out where all the crime guns from Milwaukee County are coming from,” says District Attorney John Chisholm. “Even if you compile the data yourself, piece by piece, you can’t share that information with anybody or else it’s a felony offense. It’s just mind boggling.”
The Tiahrt Amendments are designed to protect licensed firearms dealers that sell guns used in crimes from civil lawsuits and harassment. But they prevent law enforcement from tracking which gun stores are selling the most guns to straw purchasers and questionable operatives.
Milwaukee Magazine followed up its survey of prisoners on gun-related charges with face-to-face interviews of more than a dozen inmates in five prisons. The results suggest an alarmingly brisk gun market in Milwaukee driven by straw purchasing and stolen guns.
Forty percent of inmates surveyed admit to using a straw purchaser to get a gun. The most common straw purchaser: girlfriends and drug customers with clean records willing to perform the service in exchange for a fix.
Marquiston Wesley, incarcerated for armed robbery, explained how he’s used crack customers as straw purchasers. “A lot of them are so addicted to crack that the first amount of drugs they see they’ll take it and do anything for it.”
Only five cases of illegally buying and transferring guns were charged in Milwaukee by federal authorities in 2006, even though straw purchasing is a daily occurrence at area gun stores. But to make a charge stick, you have to prove a legal gun buyer did so with the intent to turn it over to an illegitimate purchaser. “You always get the story, ‘I didn’t know he took it,’ or ‘I didn’t know it was missing,’ which makes our job next to impossible” says Assistant District Attorney David Robles.
Stolen Guns
Theft may be the most common way criminals get guns. Whole robbery rings do nothing but steal guns. A few years ago, a South Side street gang stationed several members on an Indian reservation up north near Hayward to sell drugs. They also started burglarizing houses and cabins in the area for guns, which they sold on the streets when they returned to Milwaukee. A nice bonus on top of their dope profits. It wasn’t until an elderly couple was murdered during one of these robberies that law enforcement discovered the drugs and guns connection between Hayward and Milwaukee.
An incarcerated armed robber, speaking on condition of anonymity, says he knows of a similar situation taking place right now. “I’ve got a partner who’s a Maniac Latin Disciple [a South Side gang] and he has the wannabe thugs in Baraboo doing burglaries to purchase his dope and all he wants is pistols and rifles and shotguns in exchange. He takes them right down to the East Side of Milwaukee to sell.”
Many drug dealers tell customers that guns are more valuable than cash. Drug addicts with clean records might straw purchase guns in exchange for dope, but many would rather just steal a firearm to trade. Addicts come from all walks of life, and with Wisconsin having the second-highest rate of gun ownership per capita, a lot of them know where to get a gun.
“You get dope fiends doing burglaries all the time,” says convicted armed robber David Huenink. “They’d offer me all sorts of things, jewelry, electronics. I never went for it. But I’d tell them ‘if you can get a pistol, I’ve got you top dollar.’ An hour later, there it is. The real dope fiends will go kick in a door at one of their own family member’s houses.”
Kids and Guns
Kids exposed to guns are more likely to end up using them. A University of Michigan study published in the journal Science found teens that witnessed or were victims of gun violence were twice as likely to commit violence themselves. Thus, Michael Green, who watched his friend die by a gun, was eventually convicted of murder himself.
More than 90 percent of the inmates we surveyed have had at least one friend or relative killed by firearms. The stories are heart wrenching: Best friends, brothers, mothers, children, cousins… wiped out in an instant. A significant majority of surveyed inmates (68 percent) have also been shot themselves, with many reporting multiple occurrences.
The average age of first gun ownership for survey respondents is 13 years old. Inmates told us time and again that the easiest way to buy a gun on the streets is to ask kids. “Talk to the shorties,” as convicted armed robber Robert Butler puts it.
“You can get a gun faster from a teenager then you can an adult,” says armed robber David Huenink, a 35-year-old Simon City Royal gang member who worked as an enforcer for Milwaukee drug kingpins. He has perpetrated his fair share of violence – he is serving time for robbing and beating a female drug runner – but is chilled by kids he’s seen with guns.
“You wouldn’t believe this new generation. I walked into a dope house to drop off an ounce of cocaine one time and there was a 10-year-old and a 12-year-old sitting head to head at a table with a stopwatch. Each of them had a 9 millimeter. They were seeing who could break their pistol down and put it back together the fastest.”
District Attorney Chisholm often shows juvenile offenders posters of firearms. Most can name each of the weapons. He also asks young offenders how many homicides they think are committed in Milwaukee each year. “They think its thousands and thousands instead of around 100 because they’re all happening in their neighborhoods,” says Chisholm. The perception of living in a war zone combined with a social fascination with guns makes for a lot of armed kids.
“The kids are out of control,” says Willie Harris, incarcerated for being a felon in possession of a firearm. “They all got guns and they’ll use them. They don’t care. Most of their parents are either strung-out or don’t care. Jobs are harder to come by and the kids are getting crazier and crazier.”
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