Illegal guns flooding into Minneapolis
The odyssey of the one used in the Block E shooting started in St. Louis with a theft and a carjacking.
Paul McEnroe, Star Tribune

Cory Brown had the shakes that come with a $100-a-day heroin habit as he drove through the dicey side of south St. Louis last April, lost and living a junkie's nightmare. He feared he might get robbed, but he was desperate to find his dealer.

A stolen .44 Magnum was tucked under his seat for protection, and it was on a deadly path to Minneapolis.

Weeks earlier, Brown had found the heavy pistol under a pile of socks in his father's dresser. Now the 24-year-old addict was pulling into a gas station for directions.

He got carjacked instead. An armed man set upon him so fast he couldn't reach for the gun. The robber asked for money, but Brown offered him the weapon.

On a Friday night in late March, the gun that Brown had stolen from his father -- and that was then stolen from him in St. Louis -- resurfaced in the Block E complex in downtown Minneapolis. Authorities say it was used to randomly shoot and kill Alan Reitter, a mortgage lender from Minnetonka who had just stepped out of a bar with friends.

The gun, police say, is among a record number of weapons making their way to Minneapolis through an underground market that's flooding streets with illegal firearms -- and increasing violent crime.

Minneapolis police and federal authorities are taking new steps to thwart the trafficking, but they say it is so shadowy it's hard to stop.

'One by one by one'

Gangs and drugs are driving gun violence, and "all we can do is go out there and attack their leaders and straw buyers -- one by one by one every single day," said Lt. Mike Carlson, who's leading an 11-member team of city officers and federal agents known as the Violent Offenders Task Force (VOTF).

"That task force operates with two hooks -- connecting gang leadership to criminal activity involving guns and drugs," said Capt. Rich Stanek, head of the department's investigations unit.

Every week, Stanek and Carlson pore over a huge chart that is a puzzle of sorts. Newly recovered guns, gang arrests and drug seizures are put into a computer program that creates links among them and provides crucial intelligence on how the illegal gun trade operates. Stanek said it's a big reason why the task force has been able to get more than 50 federal weapons and drug indictments handed down since the task force was formed.

From January through March of this year, Minneapolis police seized 221 illegal guns, more than 20 percent above the figure for the same period last year.

The number of victims shot, or shot at, rocketed to 219 in January through April, a 38 percent increase from the same period in 2005.

The number of calls for shots fired, meanwhile, is up 28 percent from last year over the same period -- 1,194 calls.

Police investigators say the alleged shooter in the Block E killing, Derick Holliday, 21, who was arrested near the scene, has told them he found the gun in a trash can near his apartment in Minneapolis. They say they doubt that's true.

"You don't just find a .44 Magnum discarded in a trash can," Stanek said.

But so far, investigators have not figured out how that gun got here from St. Louis.

A confidential 2005 report by the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, obtained from sources outside the ATF, draws a portrait of the growing illegal marketplace for guns in the Twin Cities.

It describes how from January 2004 to last August, authorities traced nearly 1,200 firearms in Minneapolis involved in criminal investigations.

The report also says that nearly 200 guns recovered during Minneapolis crime investigations in the past 18 months were sold by at least seven legitimate gun retailers in the Twin Cities.

People in Minneapolis caught with the guns typically used straw buyers -- without a criminal record -- to buy guns from retailers that wound up being used in crimes.

In its investigation of a gang called the Shotgun Crips, for example, the task force has seized about 30 guns, according to an ATF summary prepared for the Star Tribune.

Women affiliated with the gang, acting as straw buyers, have told investigators that they were directed to buy certain guns for the gang.

Some of the women are shown on surveillance cameras inside a local gun store being directed to buy certain weapons, investigators say. In one scene on tape, a couple leave after peering into a gun case, and within an hour, the woman returns to make the purchase.

ATF officials declined to comment on the report.

On the streets almost daily

The task force takes to the streets almost every day, working informants and acting on tips to crack down on the illegal gun trade. It is a daunting task for officers such as Sgt. Greg Freeman.

With his shaved head and solid build, Freeman needs only an earring to look like Mr. Clean. Formerly a uniformed officer who supervised squads on the tumultuous North Side, he's now one of two officers in the new task force's weapons section.

Freeman and his partner, Sgt. Dave Burbank, have a caseload of more than 250 gun-related crimes this year. Asked if they felt swamped, Freeman rolled his tired eyes.

In the evening, he often drives the North Side on undercover surveillance, through neighborhoods desperate for relief from gun violence but where investigators are greeted at times with cold stares.

On almost every block he can recall a gun crime. Swinging past Jerry's Flower Shop, now for sale after the store owner was shot to death in a robbery several years ago, Freeman shakes his head because of the loss.

It's not about gangs controlling turf there, he says. It's about controlling drug trafficking and backing up their operation with force.

One recent evening, Freeman swung back toward 26th and Dupont Avenues N. Petty crack deals were going down, and kids on bikes with cell phones were hustling to get to the corner to sell a foil pulled from their sweatshirts.

But he had bigger targets in mind than going after a $50 crack deal.

"It's like herding cats to go after that," he said.

The illegal guns streaming into Minneapolis are not coming just from straw buyers who shop in Twin Cities gun and sporting goods stores. Those gun traffickers are now targeting outstate Minnesota contacts, recent cases show.

Late last year the task force turned its attention hundreds of miles north to Pillager, pop. 464, while retracing guns confiscated in gang and drug crimes in Minneapolis. It turned out that Irl W. Schiley was having popular garage sales from summer to fall.

Word had spread to Minneapolis, investigators say, that if you wanted to get a steady supply of guns, Schiley's sales were worth the drive. The retired refinery worker from St. Paul bought handguns at other garage sales, then sold them for between $125 and $250, depending on the weapon's make.

Two men from Minneapolis became his regular customers and bought at least 40 handguns from him, he said in an interview last week.

"They were turning around down there and selling them for $500," he said. "I kept asking what they were doing, and they said they had some friends who need a little home protection."

When confronted this year by ATF and FBI agents assigned to the police task force, Schiley said he realized he had broken the law. He acknowledges now that his regulars were buying more guns than the average person.

"I guess they were using me to get the guns," he said. "The way they've (law enforcement officials) explained it to me -- yeah, I was breaking the law."

Schiley was indicted two weeks ago in federal court for selling firearms without a license. Weapons he sold have turned up in about a dozen gun-related crimes, police say.

Regrets

Cory Brown said he often wondered what happened to the Magnum he stole from his father. At times, he said, he even entertained the thought that he'd be able to track down the man who robbed him and recover the weapon.

Last week, when a reporter called and told him how the gun, traced back to his father, had been used to kill Reitter in downtown Minneapolis, Brown let out a long breath.

"I should have owned up to it long ago, that I stole it and it got stolen from me," he said. "I didn't call the police because I was buying drugs. Friends kept telling me that this is going to come back. ... I was always afraid this was the sort of thing that would happen."

Late last week, after speaking with a reporter, he said he finally told his father -- who never knew the gun was missing -- how he stole it, and how it traveled through an underground weapons network to be used a year later in a stunning Minneapolis homicide. "It wasn't pretty," Brown said of the father-son conversation.

Reactions to this story:

3. Does anybody else suspect that the .44 mag was not stolen from this Cory Brown but simply traded for drugs?

Bing Go

Exactly what law is broken by buying or selling a gun to a fellow Minnesotan?

So this Schiley guy, a MN resident, was buying guns from MN residents, then selling them to MN residents? How is this the business of the Feds? Exactly what law is broken by buying or selling a gun to a fellow Minnesotan?

So this Schiley guy, a MN resident, was buying guns from MN residents, then selling them to MN residents? How is this the business of the Feds? Exactly what law is broken by buying or selling a gun to a fellow Minnesotan?

So this Schiley guy, a MN resident, was buying guns from MN residents, then selling them to MN residents? How is this the business of the Feds? Exactly what law is broken by buying or selling a gun to a fellow Minnesotan?

The law requires a FFL for those who are in the business of selling firearms; he clearly was, and didn't have one. There's obviously some gray areas in between somebody selling a gun once every couple of years and somebody doing it as a regular business activity - - but he very clearly wasn't in the gray area.

I think it's a silly law, myself, but it is the law.

So this Schiley guy, a MN resident, was buying guns from MN residents, then selling them to MN residents? How is this the business of the Feds? Exactly what law is broken by buying or selling a gun to a fellow Minnesotan?

Hmm. So how often may one conduct transactions, and yet not be enough to constitute "regular business activities"? i.e. at what point does it stop being a "hobby"? How do you tell?

Hmm. So how often may one conduct transactions, and yet not be enough to constitute "regular business activities"? i.e. at what point does it stop being a "hobby"? How do you tell?

Good questions; there isn't a definitive answer to any of them.