Larry Vickers announced his guilty plea in a Facebook post.
James Sawyer, the police chief and only officer in Ray, N.D., spent his days waiting to catch the occasional driver going over the 25 mph speed limit where the highway hits this farm town of 700 residents. Outside of helping nearby deputies with a rare car chase or the sporadic break-in, there was little for him to do, town officials recall.
Until one day several years ago, when Sawyer got a strange request, according to court documents. A man named Larry Vickers, who held popular firearms-tactics training sessions for law enforcement, needed a favor: Could Sawyer help him import a machine gun into the country? All he had to do was write a letter that would be submitted to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives saying his one-man department was interested in buying the highly restricted weapon.
Vickers was no ordinary instructor. He was a Delta Force veteran, revered by military veterans and cops, whose gun videos got millions of views on YouTube. Sawyer agreed to help. The chief went on to write letters saying his department was possibly interested in buying 73 different firearms, including machine guns and short-barreled rifles, prosecutors allege. He never saw the guns. The letters allowed Vickers and his associates to keep or sell them.
You’re the only one I’ve ever done these for because I consider you a good friend, brother,” Sawyer wrote to Vickers in 2018, according to federal court documents.
Federal prosecutors in Maryland last October announced that a grand jury indicted Sawyer, Vickers and several others for conspiracy to illegally acquire machine guns. Prosecutors allege that dealers and police officials from around the country worked together to illegally import numerous heavily regulated weapons into the U.S. The sprawling gunrunning operation has entangled a former Homeland Security analyst and the former sheriff of the most populous county in New Mexico.
Most of the defendants have yet to enter pleas, but Vickers shocked his fans, many of whom believe he was unfairly targeted, by pleading guilty in October to participating in the gun-import operation as well as other charges. He faces at least five years in prison.
“I own my actions and understand the consequences—big-boy rules as many of us, myself included, have said in the past,” Vickers said, according to a post on his Facebook account.
Sawyer, who resigned from his post months before he was charged, also faces five years in prison if convicted. Neither Sawyer nor his lawyer responded to requests for comment.
According to court documents, Sean Reidpath Sullivan helped export two Swiss rifles in 2019. In a text exchange, Larry Vickers expressed interest in the lower rifle, prosecutors say.
The federal government first imposed tight restrictions on machine guns—which fire continuously with one pull of the trigger—and short-barreled rifles in 1934 to crack down on their use by gangsters and bootleggers. Anyone wanting to buy one had to register it with the federal government and pay a special tax.
In 1986, President Ronald Reagan signed a law that banned the manufacturing of new machine guns for sale to civilians. Legal machine guns—those made before 1986—have since soared in value because of their limited number. A fully automatic M16 is worth between $40,000 and $60,000, according to industry experts. Their owners are usually wealthy gun collectors.
There was an exception. Dealers could still get new machine guns to show off to police departments that were interested in buying them for their SWAT teams. All the dealer had to do was get a letter from the police department and submit it to the ATF, a division of the Justice Department. If police officials liked what they saw, they could make the purchase.
But some dealers began using the process to bring guns into the country without any intention of selling them to police agencies, prosecutors and industry experts say.
“People started abusing it,” said a gun-industry consultant. “Now you’ve got guys bringing in hundreds of machine guns a year.”
In recent years, authorities have begun to crack down. A Maryland sheriff was indicted last year for writing letters to help get machine guns that a local shooting-range owner allegedly rented out to his customers. The sheriff has pleaded not guilty. Deputies from a small Pennsylvania sheriff’s department and a gun dealer were sentenced to prison time in 2017 and 2018 for illegally importing machine guns and selling the parts.
Federal and local law-enforcement officials are making changes to their policies. One sheriff’s department ensnared in the case has stopped issuing such letters. The ATF increased scrutiny of such transactions.
“When we see indications of noncompliance or unlawful activity, we appropriately respond,” an agency spokeswoman said. “We have enhanced review of these transfers.”
She declined to comment on the Vickers case.
The government hasn’t presented any evidence in the Vickers case that the guns ended up being used in violent crime. But federal prosecutors say their effort to reduce gun violence includes cracking down on illegal gun trafficking and possession.
“Law-enforcement officers who engage in this criminal behavior are not above the law,” said Marcia Lubin, spokeswoman for the U.S. attorney’s office in Maryland, which is heading prosecution of the case.
Mr_Big_Koch
It was a single gun sold online by an Arizona man with the username “Mr_Big_Koch” that played a vital role in cracking the case.Christopher Fiorentino dabbled in bitcoin, real estate and firearms made by the German company Heckler & Koch, hence his username on an online gun marketplace. He lived in a wealthy Phoenix suburb, and owned an Aston Martin and a Mercedes-Benz G wagon.
Investigators at the ATF grew suspicious when a dealer in Florida reported that a gun it had purchased from Fiorentino appeared to be a highly regulated short-barreled rifle. They discovered that Mr_Big_Koch was selling a lot of guns and didn’t have a dealer’s license, prosecutors allege.
When ATF agents raided the condo Fiorentino shared with his fiancée, they found more than 60 guns, including four short-barreled rifles that he hadn’t registered with the federal government, prosecutors allege. They also discovered that he had a Heckler & Koch machine gun that wasn’t registered.
But it was his phone that revealed a much broader web. There were WhatsApp messages between Fiorentino and a former Homeland Security analyst named Sean Reidpath Sullivan who had a side business importing guns from Europe. Prosecutors alleged that Fiorentino was buying imported guns through an alleged black-market network that Sullivan and Vickers had developed.
Fiorentino has pleaded not guilty to several charges, including possession of the unregistered guns, dealing without a license and pandemic unemployment-assistance fraud.
“Any transactions that he engaged in were through federally licensed dealers and anything they’re alleged to have been doing he was not aware of or involved in,” said Brian Russo, Fiorentino’s lawyer.
Sullivan also pleaded not guilty to illegal-gun-importation charges in September.
“We look forward to resolving in court the allegations that he unlawfully imported machine guns as part of his business,” said Jim Wyda, an attorney for Sullivan. “There is no evidence that Mr. Sullivan intended for firearms to get into the hands of dangerous people. And they didn’t.”
‘A peaceful place…a friendly face’
To make their scheme work and help get the machine guns they wanted, Vickers and Sullivan appear to have zeroed in on small-town police chiefs like Sawyer, prosecutors allege.The grand jury also indicted Matthew Hall, who served as police chief in Coats, N.C., from 2012 to 2020. Coats has a population of about 2,200, and had seven officers and no SWAT team during Hall’s tenure. Yet during his time as chief of Coats—whose town motto is “A peaceful place…a friendly face”—Hall requested the demonstration of 92 guns, prosecutors said.
At one point, Hall—on Vickers’s behalf—requested to see a belt-fed Belgian machine gun for possible purchase for his department, prosecutors say.
Hall hasn’t entered a plea, his lawyer said.
Prosecutors don’t say whether the police chiefs got anything in return for aiding Vickers. Text exchanges between Vickers and the chiefs included in the indictment convey the chiefs’ admiration for the celebrity gun trainer. Ray officials said it is their understanding Sawyer was an avid fan of Vickers’s YouTube videos.
At least one major law-enforcement figure was involved, prosecutors say. In the indictment of Vickers, Sullivan and police chiefs Hall and Sawyer, they allege that the former sheriff of Bernalillo County, N.M., identified as M.G., along with his undersheriff, sent letters to an Albuquerque gun-shop owner requesting demonstrations of more than 1,000 guns between 2015 and 2021, even though the agency’s SWAT team began phasing out machine guns in 2013. Manny Gonzales was the sheriff during the time frame noted by prosecutors.
Manny Gonzales formerly served as the sheriff of Bernalillo County, N.M. Photo: Roberto E. Rosales/Albuquerque Journal/Zuma Press
Prosecutors say that Gonzales, like the other law-enforcement officials involved, had no expectation the guns would ever be used by the sheriff’s office. Gonzales, who ran unsuccessfully for Albuquerque mayor in 2021 and had been a Democrat, announced a U.S. Senate bid as a Republican this month.
Gonzales hasn’t been charged. A spokesman for his Senate campaign referred requests for comment to a recent FoxNews.com story in which Gonzales calls the allegations politically motivated, and said he followed the law and that his name would be cleared.
Prosecutors say the Albuquerque gun-shop owner to whom Gonzales submitted letters was helping Sullivan try to illegally obtain the weapons, and has been indicted in the scheme.
Current Bernalillo County Sheriff John Allen said he had no information on whether any of the machine guns requested by Gonzales were ever used for demonstrations for his agency—or where the guns are now. Allen has since barred anyone in the sheriff’s office from requesting machine guns for demonstrations.
“Sheriff Allen is deeply concerned about the potential circulation of over a thousand machine guns, especially in light of Albuquerque’s challenges with gun violence,” said sheriff’s office spokeswoman Jayme Fuller.
Last February, before townspeople in Ray learned about the charges, James Sawyer submitted his resignation letter. He said his health was deteriorating and he needed to retire from law enforcement. Sawyer had been living in a city-owned trailer and said he was moving back home to Alabama.
For Vickers, the felony conviction means that one of the nation’s leading gun gurus can no longer own or possess firearms. He must forfeit his gun collection to the U.S. government. Prosecutors said he can still use airsoft guns, but only for active-shooter training.
“Nothing could be a greater punishment for him than his inability to possess, use and demonstrate the use of firearms,” said Gerald Ruter, his attorney.
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