Operation Wide Receiver

An Informant?s Struggle to Expose the Corruption and Deceit That Led to Operation Fast and Furious

Mike Detty

• Publisher: Skyhorse
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781632209467
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Amérique du Nord

The true and shocking story of an undercover smuggling operation. Conducted under the umbrella of Project Gunrunner and intended to stem the flow of firearms to Mexico, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) ran a series of "gun walking" sting operations, including Operation Wide Receiver and Operation Fast & Furious. The government allowed licensed gun dealers to sell weapons to illegal straw buyers so that they could continue to track the firearms as they were transferred to higher-level traffickers and key figures in Mexican cartels.Motivated by a sense of patriotic duty, Tucson gun dealer and author Mike Detty alerted the local ATF office when he was first approached by suspected cartel associates. Detty made the commitment and assumed the risks involved to help the feds make their case, often selling guns to these thugs from his home in the dead of night. Originally informed that the investigation would last just weeks, Detty's undercover involvement in Operation Wide Receiver—the precursor to Operation Fast & Furious, by far the largest "gun walking" probe—stretched on for an astonishing and dangerous three years.Though the case took several twists and turns, perhaps the cruelest turn was his betrayal by the very agency he risked everything to help.Skyhorse Publishing, as well as our Arcade imprint, are proud to publish a broad range of books for readers interested in history--books about World War II, the Third Reich, Hitler and his henchmen, the JFK assassination, conspiracies, the American Civil War, the American Revolution, gladiators, Vikings, ancient Rome, medieval times, the old West, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.

1

The Proposition

GUNS ARE AS much a part of Arizona as the Saguaro cacti that dot the desert’s floor. Used for protection, hunting, and competition, it’s not uncommon to spot one in a pickup’s rack or in the holster of a soccer mom putting gas in her minivan. The sight of people openly carrying guns causes no more concern than an errant Gila monster crossing the grocery store parking lot. Arizona is filled with rugged people who celebrate their pioneer spirit and take responsibility for their own safety. For the most part it is these honest, hard-working, God-fearing people who attend gun shows there. For the most part . . .

It was at the big February gun show in 2006 at the state fairgrounds in Phoenix that I first met Diego Rodriguez. I was helping one of my customers make a selection from the rifles I had on display when one of my helpers, Chenzo, came over and asked me if I had more AR-15 lowers than the six that were on display.

“That’s all I brought,” I told him. “Why?”

“The guy standing over there wants to buy all six and he wants to know if you have more.” He pointed to a smiling young chubby Hispanic man with his hat on sideways, baggy shorts, and knee-high socks. Given his “gangster-like” appearance, I seriously doubted his background check would even go through.

The only real difference between an AR-15 rifle and the US military’s M-16 rifle is that the AR-15 is semiautomatic while the M-16 is fully automatic. The AR-15 can be broken into two major assemblies: the upper and lower. The upper consists of the barrel, receiver, and bolt carrier group while the lower consists of the buttstock, pistol grip, and fire control components. The lower also possesses the serial number, and in the eyes of the federal government is considered a complete firearm—even if the upper assembly is not installed. For that reason, licensed dealers like me must do a background check on anybody purchasing a lower. Run by the FBI, the instant background check was mandated by the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act of 1993. The computerized system checked all state criminal records to see if the purchaser had any criminal background.

Several minutes later, Chenzo handed me a wad of cash totaling $1,600. “That’s for the six lowers,” he said. “His background check went through without any problems.”

I went over to where we kept the #4473 forms and made sure the paperwork had been filled out correctly. It had. We had done everything by the book and had completed a legal transaction. But where did that young kid get so much cash, and why did he need so many lowers? Why was he asking if we had more? I dog-eared the form so that I could find it easily in the stack.

I didn’t think much about it that night, but the following day the same young man returned to my display. He and a friend were holding bags of what I could tell were AR-15 lowers. I wondered if he wanted to return the ones he’d bought yesterday. He smiled at me and I walked over.

“Hey, you were busy yesterday when I was here, but I just wanted to introduce myself. I’m Diego Rodriguez,” he said.

I shook his hand. “Mike Detty,” I said. “Was there something wrong with the lowers I sold you?” I pointed to the bags he and his friend carried.

“No, we just bought these today from another guy. But I was wondering if you had any more lowers available?”

“Nope, you got them all yesterday. I’ve got twenty more on order from my supplier but they won’t get here until next week.”

“I’ll take them all,” said Rodriguez.

This erased any doubts that this kid might be doing something legitimate. In addition to the six he bought from me the day before, he and his friend were now holding at least eight AR-15 lowers and trying to broker a deal for twenty more. Fortunately we had the #4473 form on file and I had his full name, address, and social security number to pass on to the authorities.

I handed Diego a business card and told him to call me later in the week for the status of those twenty lowers.

The two-hour drive back to my home in Tucson gave me the opportunity to go over the weekend’s events and I tried to imagine a scenario where someone would need so many AR-15 lowers. I couldn’t come up with anything that made sense. No, there was no doubt in my mind that this kid was up to something illegal and was just not bright enough to be less obvious about it.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, more commonly referred to as the ATF, is a Department of Justice agency that oversees and regulates the firearms industry. Tucson has a small branch office in the federal building downtown and I had a contact there.

In the previous two years, I had contacted Special Agent Spencer Edgar twice to report suspicions that my customers were doing something illegal—based solely on the volume of product they were buying. One case involved a Nogales, Arizona, cop who was buying AR-15 lowers and then transporting them across the border where they were being assembled into complete weapons. My involvement in this case was nothing more than reporting each transaction, along with the serial numbers, and faxing the form #4473 to Special Agent Edgar. The cop was confronted, and he resigned. I’m not sure what happened from there. It would not have been out of the ordinary for him to flip and turn over information in return for not being prosecuted or for a reduction in prison time.

A few weeks after the incident with the cop, an older Caucasian gentleman started buying lower receivers from me. The odd thing about this fellow was that he did not seem to know the first thing about shooting or AR-15 rifles. At first he bought five lower receivers at a time and then increased that amount to ten at a time. I contacted SA Edgar after his second purchase and Edgar asked me to inform him of any subsequent transactions. When the man approached me again at another gun show and asked if he could buy seventy-five lowers, I dutifully passed this information on to Edgar who gave me the go-ahead to complete the sale. I told the customer it would take me two weeks to get that many lowers and that we could do the transaction at the next gun show.

The day of the gun show I noticed the man walking slower than usual to my tables. All the color was gone from his face and he showed me the port his doctor had put in his arm for dialysis. Given his hunched posture and weathered looks, he seemed much older than the fifty-nine years his driver’s license divulged. He was so frail that I closed my tables down to help carry the box of lowers out to his car for him. Of course, ATF agents were all around us and followed him back to his trailer in an impoverished part of town. According to Edgar, he confessed quickly saying that he saw nothing wrong with helping Mexican police officers get the parts they needed for good weapons. Apparently his source assuaged his fears by telling him that these parts were being used by Mexican law enforcement. He was indicted and then arrested as he was leaving his dialysis clinic one day. Not long afterwards, I read his obituary in the local paper.

Neither of these cases necessitated me devoting a great deal of time to the investigation or exposed me to any great danger. I wasn’t paid in either case, and I imagined that the case with Diego Rodriguez would not be much different.

Monday morning, I called SA Edgar and explained my conversation with Diego Rodriguez and my reason for concern. Edgar asked me to fax him the #4473 and said he was going to talk to his boss about the case. Later that afternoon Edgar called me back and asked if I could come down to the federal building the next day to meet with him.

After making my way through the metal detector and security on the ground floor of the federal building, I took the elevator to the eighth floor and nervously made my way to the office. I knocked several times but received no response, so I opened the door and walked into a sort of vestibule or antechamber, maybe six feet by six feet, with another door straight ahead and what looked like bulletproof glass overlooking an office on the left. After ringing the doorbell on the second door, I saw Edgar look around the corner through the glass and open the door from the inside.

Edgar ushered me into his cramped office where he introduced me to another field agent, Travis Lopez, who had just finished his training at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Glynco, Georgia. I guessed Lopez to be in his late twenties and learned that he had played football on scholarship at a small Utah college before taking a job as a cop in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Tucson was his first posting with the ATF.

Edgar, who had been a Navy pilot, explained that he was now an Apache Longbow pilot with the National Guard and his unit was to deploy soon—first to Ft. Bliss for training and then on to Afghanistan. He’d be gone over a year. For that reason, Special Agent Lopez would be handling this case and I would be reporting to him from now on.

We went over my conversation with Rodriguez the previous weekend and I told them of my suspicions. Both listened intently. When I was finished speaking, Edgar agreed that this individual and his friend were up to something nefarious and they wanted to investigate this further. He told me he spoke with his boss, Jack Hinkley, the assistant special agent in charge of the Tucson office, and they wanted me to go ahead and sell those twenty lowers to Rodriguez. “Providing that you’re cool with this and still want to help,” he said.

“I don’t mind helping you guys at all,” I said immediately, without really considering what implications this decision might have.

“Good,” said Edgar. “We’ll put one of our agents behind the table with you at the gun show, just to be safe. And in the meantime I’d like you to let Travis know every time Rodriguez contacts you.”

I made sure that my supplier did indeed ship the twenty lowers I needed. Rodriguez called a couple times in the next two weeks and we made plans to transfer the lowers first thing Saturday morning at the Mesa, Arizona, gun show.

Early Saturday morning, I met with Edgar and Lopez in the parking lot of the convention center where the gun show was being held. They introduced me to another agent who was tall, athletic, and physically imposing.

“This is Petey Palmer. We’re going to put him behind the table with you today.”

“Shit,” I joked, “don’t you have anyone bigger?”

I had brought along a shirt with the name and logo of the company whose rifles I sold and gave it to Palmer to wear behind the tables.

The show opened at nine o’clock as scheduled. Diego Rodriguez, on the other hand, was anything but on time. After 10 a.m. Palmer asked me to call Rodriguez and see where he was.

“We’re on a job right now,” Rodriguez said, “but we should be over there around noon.”

“Alright, Diego, but don’t stand me up—I have other people who want to buy those lowers,” I said, purposely sounding annoyed. I wanted him to know that it wasn’t cool to set up a time and not keep an appointment.

Most of the Tucson ATF office had come down to observe the transaction and then follow Rodriguez to see where he went with the lowers. After hanging up with Rodriguez, I passed on the news to Palmer who then relayed it to the rest of the team—some in the parking lot and some inside the show.

“Don’t let it get to you, Mike,” Palmer told me. “He’s on ‘criminal time.’ We’re all used to it so don’t let it bother you.”

But it did bother me. The six agents who made the two-hour drive from Tucson to Mesa would have normally had Saturdays off. They must have been eager to get back home and spend time with their families or do whatever it was they would be doing on a non-working weekend.

It wasn’t until about two-thirty in the afternoon that Rodriguez finally showed up, reeking of sweat in a very dirty work shirt. He stuck out a chubby paw to shake hands.

“Man, I’m glad you finally showed up. I was just about to sell your lowers to another dealer. Dude, you need to let me know when you’re not going to be on time.”

Rodriguez looked down sheepishly and apologized. I handed him a clipboard with a #4473 form to fill out for his background check while Special Agent Palmer started stacking the boxes with the lowers in them on top of the table and reading me the serial number to write down on the receipt. We chatted back and forth as we wrote and I noticed that SA Edgar was now standing next to Rodriguez pretending to look at the merchandise. He was wearing an Apache Longbow baseball cap pulled down low over his face.

Larry, one of my helpers for the show, saw Edgar’s cap and started a conversation with him. Larry had worked for McDonnell Douglas in the early ’90s and had been involved in the development of Longbow’s upgraded weapons systems. Though Larry knew there was going to be an ATF presence for this purchase he had not yet been introduced to Edgar.

Once Rodriguez had finished completing his form, I used my cell phone to call in the background check to the National Instant Background Check System. Normally I knew within a minute or two if the sale could go through or not. One thing we had not gone over at my briefing was what to do if Rodriguez’s background check came back “delayed” or “denied,” so I held my breath until I got the “proceed” from NICS to transfer the lowers.

“Everything’s a go,” I said to Rodriguez as I hung up my cell phone. “I just need to collect $5,300 from you.”

Rodriguez removed a fat white envelope from his front pocket and threw it on the table. It contained mostly $100 bills and I counted it quickly and placed the money in my fanny pack.

Rodriguez smiled at me and said, “I want to order fifty more receivers just like these.”

“Fifty more!” I spoke loudly so Edgar and Palmer would hear me. “I can get them for you, Diego, but you’re going to need to give me a $5,000 deposit. That’s a year’s worth of receivers for me and I don’t want to get stuck with that inventory if you back out.”

“No problem, bro. I’ll give you a call when your deposit is ready but please go ahead and order the lowers. We’ll need them as soon as possible.”

I volunteered Petey Palmer to help Rodriguez to carry the lowers out to his car. Rodriguez took a couple of boxes and put them under one arm and left the remainder for Palmer to carry out. I had to laugh to myself. The kid was a piece of work!

After they left, I introduced Larry to SA Edgar. Larry had no idea that he was talking to an ATF agent the entire time and apparently Edgar enjoyed talking about the Longbow as much as Larry did. Edgar excused himself to take part in the surveillance, and not much later Palmer stopped back in to return the shirt I’d given him to wear.

I learned later that Rodriguez had started driving so erratically that the surveillance was cut short and the agents returned to Tucson.

I lost track of the number of times Rodriguez called me in the next ten days and while he was always respectful, calling me sir, bro, or Mike, he was something of a pain in the ass. He told me he wanted me to order the lowers and I stood firm that I would need a deposit to place the order. He kept telling me he was having trouble with his bank—a euphemism for what I understood to be the people or organization bankrolling his purchases. In the meantime, I had already ordered the fifty lowers from my supplier and had them sitting in my home warehouse. I wanted this transaction to go through as much as anyone else so I didn’t get stuck with the merchandise.

Each time I spoke with Rodriguez, I’d phone SA Lopez with a synopsis of the conversation. I was calling him so frequently I was afraid that I’d become the same pain in his ass that Rodriguez was to me. But Lopez was always quick to put me at ease. He was a good kid and I liked him immediately. Polite, courteous to a fault, he always seemed positive and upbeat.

I could tell by the way his colleagues spoke to him that they thought Lopez had the potential to become something more than just a standout agent. He was the kind of person people wanted to hang around, much like the star quarterback in high school. Of course, it didn’t hurt matters that he was also good-looking, athletic, and always quick with a smile. Beyond all of that, he seemed to have intelligence and insight that most people his age do not possess. The more I got to know Lopez, the more I liked and even envied him. In a strange way, it almost made up for having to deal with Rodriguez.

After calling me fo...