Firearms charges reveal a mystery

Oatka

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http://www.denverpost.com/news/news0605b.htm

Firearms charges reveal a mystery
By David Olinger
Denver Post Staff Writer

June 5, 2000 - For 20 years as a licensed firearms dealer, Trader Jim Gowda traveled from gun show to gun show, selling thousands of guns without paperwork.

One employee at the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms office in Denver called Trader Jim's traveling business the largest gun-trafficking case in history.

Another wrote that hundreds of guns were traced from suspected criminals to a single Colorado dealer.

Another reported Gowda had sold thousands of weapons at gun shows in Colorado and other states, yet had only a handful of federal sales forms identifying customers.

Gowda maintains he was just taking his personal weapons collection to the shows, and he didn't know federally licensed dealers had to document all their sales.

Until recently, "I doubt that 80 percent of the dealers knew you had to keep a record of your personal sales," he said.

Last November, a federal grand jury decided Gowda's business method was illegal.

Its indictment reads like a simple case against a firearms dealer accused of selling eight guns in ways that violated federal laws.

Behind the case lies this puzzle: How did Trader Jim manage to sell guns as a federally licensed firearms dealer for 20 years in a manner authorities now claim was criminal? And how did he license his house as a gun business 10 times in a Denver suburb that prohibited selling guns from a house?

Gowda declined to estimate how many personal guns he has sold in the last 20 years, saying he had been advised not to discuss the details of his case. But his lawyer, Joe St. Veltri, described Gowda as a man caught in a changing climate of law enforcement, particularly after the Columbine High massacre focused media and public attention on private sales at gun shows.

Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms "now focuses some of its law enforcement efforts in an area that they had ignored," he said. "I think gun shows, in the last two years, have become the most important concern of ATF."


Gerald Petrilli, ATF's enforcement chief in Denver, agreed that firearms dealers are getting hauled into federal court more often these days. But that, he said, is a result of improved manpower and investigative techniques as well as a more aggressive enforcement strategy.
In the early 1990s, when 280,000 people were licensed to sell guns in the United States, a dealer might see an ATF inspector once a decade, Petrilli said. Moreover, an ATF policy allowed agents to investigate a gun show only if they could show probable cause that a particular seller was violating federal laws.

Given such limitations, ATF regulation of firearms dealers "was a disaster, as far as I was concerned," Petrilli said, adding that enforcement has improved significantly.

In September 1996, 16 years after ATF licensed Gowda to sell firearms, its agents raided his Arvada home, finding a silencer and 227 guns in the basement. Federal prosecutors seized all but four of those guns, claiming they were acquired improperly.

During the raid, agents reported finding tax forms showing that James and Sharon Gowda listed annual income of only $2,005 to $5,942 in the previous five years from their gun show business. They also reported finding $41,000 in cash; platinum, gold and silver bars and coins worth "tens of thousands of dollars;" art, jewelry, hundreds of knives and several hundred thousand rounds of ammunition.

The agents left with the guns and all the records they could find. Gowda returned to the gun-show circuit, where he sold guns for three more years before a grand jury indicted him.

He continued selling guns after the indictment.

Trouble early on

Gowda, 57, began selling guns as a young man in Colorado, where he first ran afoul of federal gun laws in 1978. A federal grand jury indicted him and an associate, Waldemar Drwall, on charges of dealing guns without a license and selling handguns to people who did not live in Colorado.

Gowda pleaded guilty to one charge, selling a handgun to a Wyoming resident. The judge then permitted him to enter a pretrial diversion program, and the indictment was dropped.

By 1980, Gowda was back in business as a federally approved gun dealer. His licensed business location: 6129 Lee St. in Arvada, in a middle-class neighborhood. ATF renewed his license in 1981, 1982, 1983, 1984, 1987, 1990, 1993, 1996 and 1999.

Gowda and his wife, Sharon, traveled to gun shows throughout the West during those two decades, selling under the name Trader Jim's. He bought guns from people at the shows and sold them to other gun show customers.

According to his lawyer, Gowda regarded these as private trades of used guns at informal gatherings, distinguishing them in his own mind from federally regulated sales of new guns shipped to a dealer's store. In his view, "he was selling from his private collection and buying for his private collection," St. Veltri said.

Federal law permits private collectors to sell at gun shows without paperwork or background checks. At the same time, licensed firearms dealers are required to call for a background check on every gun show customer and keep a record of each sale.

According to records filed in federal court, ATF realized at least a decade ago that Gowda was treating gun show sales as private transactions. In February 1990, agency inspector Melanie Shea visited his home, examined his records and gave him a warning.

"As part of the inspection, gun show regulations were thoroughly reviewed with James Gowda," ATF agent Kenneth Coffey wrote. "He was therefore on notice of his rights and obligations as a firearms dealer at that time." Coffey wrote that 6 1/2 years later, in an affidavit seeking permission to search Gowda's home.

By then, undercover agents and confidential informants had reported buying handguns from the Gowdas without background checks or sales forms at gun shows in Fort Collins, Adams County, Grand Junction, Aurora, Las Vegas, Phoenix and Tulsa. In one case the agent reported getting a handwritten receipt from Gowda, sign ed "Jim Phillips." Few ATF forms filled out

Federal law requires firearms dealers to keep a record of each gun sale on a yellow sheet known as Form 4473. In Colorado, that form typically holds the only record of the retail customer if the gun is used in a crime.

The September 1996 raid of the Gowdas' basement found notebooks with "handwritten entries listing thousands of firearms purchases and sales over the past 10 years," but "only a handful of ATF Form 4473s," Coffey wrote.

Federal law has required background checks on every customer buying a handgun from a firearms dealer since 1994, and on all dealer sales since 1998. The Colorado Bureau of Investigation told Coffey that Gowda called to check on just 15 customers from 1994 to 1996.

Federal law also requires firearms dealers to document the guns they buy and sell in an "acquisition and disposition book" separate from their sales forms. ATF kept all but four of 227 guns found in the Gowdas' basement, claiming a lack of documentation. Three of the 227 guns had been reported stolen, one just months earlier in Lakewood.

Chris Eastburn, an inspector specializing in gun-trafficking cases, spent a year poring over the scraps of information seized in the raid, creating a giant computer file and an estimate that Gowda had sold perhaps 10,000 guns without paperwork. In a July 1999 memo, he described Trader Jim's business as "the largest criminal case we know of involving gun trafficking."


Eastburn entered the serial numbers of thousands of guns that had passed through Gowda's hands into ATF's national "suspect gun database," in case they turned up later in criminal arrests.
According to a memo from Petrilli, the Denver office chief, many did. Hundreds of gun traces are "reflected in the growing body of evidence in this case," he wrote, documenting that a licensed dealer participated in sales "traced to firearms possession by convicted felons," as well as gun seizures "connected with suicide, firearms and drug-related crimes."


In an interview, Petrilli said ATF routinely entered Trader Jim's identifiable sales into its suspect gun database because "Mr. Gowda, as far as we're concerned, was trafficking guns all over the place." At the behest of federal prosecutors, Petrilli declined to answer other questions about the case.
ATF allowed the Gowdas to remain in the gun business for years after the raid, apparently in the hope that, as agent Coffey wrote, they would "cooperate pro-actively in the future" about others in the gun show community.

In 1999, ATF even renewed Trader Jim's license.

For two decades, that license has been issued to Gowda's home. According to Arvada planning and zoning officials, every renewal violated a city zoning ordinance precluding retail sales from residences.

"In Arvada you can't sell guns from the house," said Mike Elms, the city planning director. "It's been that way at least since 1979." In the mid-1990s, ATF sought to improve its inspections of retail gun businesses by reducing the huge number of "kitchen table" dealers who had licensed their homes. It did so by requiring dealers to attest under perjury penalties that state and local laws, including zoning ordinances, permitted gun sales at their licensed premises. Additionally, gun dealers were required to send a copy of the license application to the local police chief.

Gowda did. In 1996 and 1999, he sent Ron Sloan, Arvada's police chief, an application listing a single-family home as the licensed premises of his gun business, along with a notation that he would be selling "mostly" at gun shows.

But Sloan said he was unaware that Arvada ordinances prohibit gun sales from homes, so an application listing a residential address "would not necessarily raise a red flag for me." Since ATF does not require police chiefs to sign or return such applications, "all I do is receive them and file them," he said.

Familiar charges


The federal indictment of James Gowda, issued in November 1999 and revised in February, contains a familiar charge. As in 1978, he is accused of selling a handgun to someone he knew lived in Wyoming. He is also accused of selling guns to people without listing their name, age or address and of selling a gun from his house to someone he knew was a felon.

According to the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, which has conducted all background checks of Colorado gun buyers except for one four-month period last year, Trader Jim has called for background checks on just 10 gun customers since January 1999. Most of those came after he was indicted.

Federal regulations do allow a firearms dealer to sell a personal gun without a background check, but only if he has owned it for at least a year and keeps a record of the sale.

At trial, Gowda is expected to argue that many of his sales were personal, and that the record-keeping requirements of ATF are convoluted and unevenly enforced.

"Was he selling guns from his stock in trade, or was he selling from his private collection?" St. Veltri asked. "Gowda's point is that the law is not of sufficient clarity."


Meanwhile, St. Veltri hopes to move the trial out of Colorado, where a high school massacre with weapons acquired privately at a gun show has been followed by a referendum campaign to ban all private gun show sales.
"I was thinking Las Vegas," he said.

Copyright 2000 The Denver Post.

David is at: newsroom@denverpost.com
The editor is Glenn Guzo at: guzzo@denverpost.com


[This message has been edited by Oatka (edited June 05, 2000).]
 
I'm torn. On one hand, I believe the GCA68 to be unconstituional, and I believe what this chap did SHOULD be legal. On the other hand, this guy is in deeeeeeeeep yogurt. I know many FFL holders, and many other guys who seem to appear regularly at the local shows, and we ALL recongize that what this guy did was in violation of federal law. It's a little fuzzy in the story whether this guy had in fact been supplying a disproportionate number of firearms that were later tied back to real crimes. I'd appreciate hearing other opinions here.
 
I applaud him for his civil disobedience.

So @#$%^%$ what if he broke illegal federal "law"!

------------------
John/az
"When freedom is at stake, your silence is not golden, it's yellow..." RKBA!
www.cphv.com
 
Well, until somebody takes GCA '68 to court and has it found un-Constitutional, it's the law of the land--whether or not I like it is beside the point. The penalties are well known--or should be.

Personal weapons? "Thousands"? 'Scuse me?

Once upon a time, all gun dealers had to sell only from a fixed address. Somewhere in the late 1970s or in the 1980s, the NRA lobbied for dealers to be able to sell at gun shows.
In general, this ruined gun shows for individuals like me. Aside from "real gun" dealers, here came the para-military junk. Previously, the BS-deal was that guys' wives would hold the license; hubby would do the yellow sheets, and go to the shows as "individual sellers". While it was somewhat annoying, it was rather limited. Now, regular dealers would go to the shows. I'm not saying they shouldn't; I'm just saying it took the fun out of the small-time traders' deal, and same for a lot of collectors.

"Commercial" came in; fun went out.

But if this Denver dude was selling that many guns without a license, he's gonna have hard time persuading me that he's an "occasional seller". If he holds a dealer's license, and hasn't done his paperwork, shame on his sorry butt--he begged and pleaded to have himself done to!

Well, what the hey! After eight beers, I'm bulletproof and invisible, too! That doofus might as well go stand on a railroad track and wave the rigid digit at an oncoming locomotive!

Noooo sympathy from me...

Art
 
Art,
I was overseas a lot during that time frame and I remember exactly what your talking about.....I think it was the last time I actually remember good swaps and deals....fubsy.
 
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