Covert Mission
New member
From today's Wall St. Journal online:
Mr. Sizer's Sideline: How a Gun Supplier Goes About Business
By JEFFREY TAYLOR
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
PHILADELPHIA -- Gregory Sizer was running a Christian bookstore here
when he decided to launch a second business: selling guns.
He recruited friends to buy handguns and assault rifles at gun stores.
He resold the weapons illegally for higher prices, both in his bookstore
and in car-trunk transactions on the street. A charismatic man known
for delivering powerful speeches at his inner-city church, the
6-foot-6-inch Mr. Sizer also bought guns himself, sometimes while
wearing a hat inscribed with the words "I Love Jesus."
Mr. Sizer might have put his stamp on the City of Brotherly Love as one
of its leading gun suppliers, but he chose his customers poorly; one of
them was a man who claimed to represent New Jersey mobsters but
was in fact a paid government informant.
Easy Money
Transcripts of tape-recorded conversations between Mr. Sizer and that
informant provide an unusually detailed look at how an unlicensed gun
business operates. Mr. Sizer's group bought and resold more than 90
pistols and rifles in early 1998, many of which were later traced to
use in crimes, says the Treasury Department's Bureau of Alcohol,
Tobacco and Firearms. The profit margins were high -- as much as
$550, for instance, on a Hi-Point assault rifle that originally sold for
about $150.
The wave of deadly shootings in recent months
has drawn national attention to the role gun
dealers play in supplying guns to people legally
prohibited from buying them. In Mr. Sizer's case,
a gun bought by one of his men wound up in the
hands of a distraught local woman too young to
purchase it legally. She used the Jennings 9mm
pistol to kill her three children and herself.
As it turns out, though, neither the tragedy nor
Mr. Sizer's arrest on gun charges alienated him
from the members of his church, the
Evangelistic Temple Church of God in Christ.
Parishioners continue to talk to Mr. Sizer by
phone and pray for his redemption. Last year, a
group from the church packed a bail hearing as
character witnesses.
"No one here is 100% holy till they get to glory," says Temple member
Ethelyne Williford. "We love him with a Godly love. That's how we can
support him." Mr. Sizer, who declined to be interviewed in jail, pleaded
guilty in July to federal gun crimes and will be sentenced next month.
Mr. Sizer's business sprouted in a community where occupied row
houses mingle with charred shells and murals commemorate
civil-rights leaders and slain gang members. This part of North
Philadelphia is a hotbed of illegal gun trafficking -- so intense that the
ATF deploys a task force to do what amounts to a constant undercover
investigation, says Tom Stankiewicz, the agent who runs it.
Mr. Sizer first dabbled in the business several years ago, as he told one
of his gun-buying colleagues, making runs to Southern states with
liberal gun laws and bringing the weapons back for resale in
Philadelphia. Influenced by his deeply religious mother, Mr. Sizer later
embraced the Christian church, says his pastor, the Rev. Glen Dawson.
Mr. Sizer started his book business in the back of a barbershop, selling
Bibles, hymnals and other religious materials.
Last year, he moved the bookstore out of the barbershop and into larger
quarters across the street, cutting into its modest revenue with
increased expenses for rent and utilities. And he started buying
firearms again, most of them from C&C Sports Center, a gun shop in
middle-class Northeast Philadelphia. He was able to get a permit to
carry guns because he had no criminal record.
Selling guns was simply more profitable than selling religious
paraphernalia. Mr. Sizer started by buying inexpensive handguns on
which his resale profit margin would be high. According to an interview
he later gave to the ATF, he sold about 14 of these guns to a drug dealer
he knew, making $100 to $150 of tax-free profit on each one.
As his business grew, he often bought more than one handgun on a
single day, a so-called "multiple purchase" that gun dealers are
required to report to the ATF. These transactions prompted the ATF to
open a file on Mr. Sizer, Mr. Stankiewicz says.
Throughout this period, Mr. Sizer maintained strong ties to his church.
He often took the microphone at services to deliver his "testimony,"
reading scripture and telling inspirational stories. Mr. Sizer was a good
speaker, his church friends say, a compelling presence at the church
podium who was capable of inspiring "the holy spirit" in others with his
own enthusiasm. He was a good salesman, too, coming off in the ATF
tapes as both glib and persuasive.
Soon Mr. Sizer was doing business by cell phone and delivering guns in a
late-model Buick Regal. Concerned about the number of guns he was
buying in his own name, he began looking for people to make the
purchases for him. One such buyer was Juan Coreano, a friend who
worked as a security guard at his bookstore.
A former Marine military policeman with a cocaine habit but no
criminal record, Mr. Coreano had no trouble obtaining his gun permit. Mr.
Sizer accompanied him for his first gun purchases, putting up the cash
to buy them and paying Mr. Coreano a $50 fee for each gun.
In an interview, Mr. Coreano, 37 years old, accuses Mr. Sizer of
exploiting his drug addiction to get him to buy guns. Yet the two men
shared a religious connection -- and a relationship at least as
complicated as Mr. Sizer's bond with his church. Before leading Mr.
Coreano into the gun business, Mr. Coreano says, Mr. Sizer had helped
convert his friend to Christianity by bringing him to a service at the
Evangelistic Temple.
'He Messed Me Up'
Still, Mr. Coreano, who recently began serving a 23-month prison
sentence after pleading guilty to gun charges, isn't as inclined to
forgive Mr. Sizer as are other members of the congregation. "He abused
my friendship," Mr. Coreano says. "He saved me, but he also messed me
up. You can't say one thing and do another."
Mr. Sizer enlisted Steve Colter, an employee of the barbershop where he
had sold his Christian books, to look for buyers from outside the
neighborhood. In February 1998, Mr. Colter introduced Mr. Sizer to a
buyer who claimed to represent Mafia interests in Atlantic City, N.J.,
but who was an ATF informant.
In early transactions with the informant, Mr. Sizer was cagey. One took
place on Feb. 11 in an alley behind the barbershop. Mr. Sizer showed up
in his green Buick and opened the trunk to show the informant and an
undercover ATF agent two assault rifles, a Hi-Point and a Norinco. But
he let Mr. Colter hand the weapons over and collect the cash for them
after he had driven away.
The ATF agent paid $1,400 for the two guns. The serial numbers had
been filed off both rifles, but the police crime lab managed to restore
one of them, and it matched that of a gun purchased by Mr. Sizer. Mr.
Sizer had bought the two rifles for a total of $295, making a profit of
$1,105, minus an unspecified finder's fee for Mr. Colter.
In an interview from prison, Mr. Colter says that the high price worried
him, making him suspect -- too late -- that the buyers were undercover
agents.
The Mistake
At this point, Mr. Sizer made a major mistake: Eager to keep all the
profit for himself, he contacted the ATF informant directly. A series of
transactions between Mr. Sizer and undercover ATF agents followed,
most discussed in detail on the ATF tapes. One transaction took place
inside the Christian bookstore. In another deal, Mr. Sizer delivered guns
in a box bearing the return address of a religious publisher.
Mr. Sizer also disclosed various details about his gun business. He
obliterated serial numbers from the guns using a file, a grinding wheel
and black paint, he said, and he sometimes attended gun shows, where
private collectors aren't obliged to check the backgrounds of buyers.
The transcripts of the ATF tapes reveal a somewhat harder side of Mr.
Sizer than was evident to his friends at the Evangelistic Temple. On
March 6, for instance, he was heard delivering the ultimate sales pitch
on a gun he was offering: "Hit anybody once, you kill him. You know what
I'm saying?"
Soon the ATF was tracking Mr. Sizer's every move, shadowing him as he
drove to buy guns and watching him from the street as he left his
bookstore to sell them. Employees of Mr. Sizer's favorite gun store
were cooperating with the ATF by informing agents of purchases made
by Mr. Sizer and others in his group.
The ATF was concerned, in particular, about the many cheap Jennings
9mm handguns being purchased by Mr. Coreano. Unlike Mr. Sizer, Mr.
Coreano wasn't reselling them to ATF agents, and the agents theorized
--correctly -- that he was selling them on his own to others in the
neighborhood.
In April, agents confronted Mr. Coreano and persuaded him to come back
to ATF headquarters, waive his Miranda rights, and give a statement
that incriminated both himself and Mr. Sizer. In the taped conversations
between Mr. Sizer and the ATF informant, Mr. Sizer was soon describing
Mr. Coreano's legal problems.
'Trying to Get Slick'
Mr. Sizer blamed Mr. Coreano for "trying to get slick" by selling guns on
his own. Yet after a brief period of "chilling" in which no agents showed
up to arrest him, Mr. Sizer was back to selling guns.
In September, the ATF's fears about Mr. Coreano were realized: One of
the guns he bought and resold turned up at a crime scene at which a
young woman named Miguelina Estevez killed her two-year-old triplet
sons and herself. The 19-year-old mother had been distraught,
neighbors say, because her boyfriend left her and moved back to their
native Dominican Republic.
Mr. Sizer was arrested the same month. For nearly a year, he resisted
an indictment, although Messrs. Coreano, Colter and others who bought
guns for Mr. Sizer all pleaded guilty to gun crimes and pledged to
testify against him.
Through it all, members of the Evangelistic Temple stood by Messrs.
Sizer and Coreano. Their pastor, the Rev. Dawson, explains the Temple's
support this way: The words painted on its storefront -- "a church in
the hood with the hood at its heart" -- are more than a motto. Rather,
Rev. Dawson says, they testify to the church's commitment to redeem
local people from the temptations of their bleak community.
"We all fall short," the pastor says, adding that he believes the two men
were "tricked" by Satan into criminal activity.
While awaiting trial, says his lawyer, Andrew Gay, Mr. Sizer retreated
into his faith, refusing to acknowledge the overwhelming evidence
against him. Mr. Gay says he tried to persuade Mr. Sizer to plead guilty
because judges are often more lenient in sentencing defendants who
admit their crimes. But Mr. Sizer wanted to go to trial, Mr. Gay says,
because he firmly expected God to grant him a miracle in the form of an
acquittal.
On the day the trial was to begin, Mr. Sizer reversed course and pleaded
guilty to all nine felony charges against him: one count each of
conspiracy and selling guns without a license and seven counts of
possessing weapons with obliterated serial numbers. He faces a term
of five to eight years without parole.
What changed his mind? His lawyer, Mr. Gay, had researched miracles on
the Internet -- Lourdes, Fatima, the Miracle of the Grotto. "I said, 'Look
at the numbers. There are hundreds of thousands of cases tried, but
very few miracles,' " Mr. Gay says. "I asked him, 'Why do you think God
would cause a miracle in this case?' "
Mr. Sizer's Sideline: How a Gun Supplier Goes About Business
By JEFFREY TAYLOR
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
PHILADELPHIA -- Gregory Sizer was running a Christian bookstore here
when he decided to launch a second business: selling guns.
He recruited friends to buy handguns and assault rifles at gun stores.
He resold the weapons illegally for higher prices, both in his bookstore
and in car-trunk transactions on the street. A charismatic man known
for delivering powerful speeches at his inner-city church, the
6-foot-6-inch Mr. Sizer also bought guns himself, sometimes while
wearing a hat inscribed with the words "I Love Jesus."
Mr. Sizer might have put his stamp on the City of Brotherly Love as one
of its leading gun suppliers, but he chose his customers poorly; one of
them was a man who claimed to represent New Jersey mobsters but
was in fact a paid government informant.
Easy Money
Transcripts of tape-recorded conversations between Mr. Sizer and that
informant provide an unusually detailed look at how an unlicensed gun
business operates. Mr. Sizer's group bought and resold more than 90
pistols and rifles in early 1998, many of which were later traced to
use in crimes, says the Treasury Department's Bureau of Alcohol,
Tobacco and Firearms. The profit margins were high -- as much as
$550, for instance, on a Hi-Point assault rifle that originally sold for
about $150.
The wave of deadly shootings in recent months
has drawn national attention to the role gun
dealers play in supplying guns to people legally
prohibited from buying them. In Mr. Sizer's case,
a gun bought by one of his men wound up in the
hands of a distraught local woman too young to
purchase it legally. She used the Jennings 9mm
pistol to kill her three children and herself.
As it turns out, though, neither the tragedy nor
Mr. Sizer's arrest on gun charges alienated him
from the members of his church, the
Evangelistic Temple Church of God in Christ.
Parishioners continue to talk to Mr. Sizer by
phone and pray for his redemption. Last year, a
group from the church packed a bail hearing as
character witnesses.
"No one here is 100% holy till they get to glory," says Temple member
Ethelyne Williford. "We love him with a Godly love. That's how we can
support him." Mr. Sizer, who declined to be interviewed in jail, pleaded
guilty in July to federal gun crimes and will be sentenced next month.
Mr. Sizer's business sprouted in a community where occupied row
houses mingle with charred shells and murals commemorate
civil-rights leaders and slain gang members. This part of North
Philadelphia is a hotbed of illegal gun trafficking -- so intense that the
ATF deploys a task force to do what amounts to a constant undercover
investigation, says Tom Stankiewicz, the agent who runs it.
Mr. Sizer first dabbled in the business several years ago, as he told one
of his gun-buying colleagues, making runs to Southern states with
liberal gun laws and bringing the weapons back for resale in
Philadelphia. Influenced by his deeply religious mother, Mr. Sizer later
embraced the Christian church, says his pastor, the Rev. Glen Dawson.
Mr. Sizer started his book business in the back of a barbershop, selling
Bibles, hymnals and other religious materials.
Last year, he moved the bookstore out of the barbershop and into larger
quarters across the street, cutting into its modest revenue with
increased expenses for rent and utilities. And he started buying
firearms again, most of them from C&C Sports Center, a gun shop in
middle-class Northeast Philadelphia. He was able to get a permit to
carry guns because he had no criminal record.
Selling guns was simply more profitable than selling religious
paraphernalia. Mr. Sizer started by buying inexpensive handguns on
which his resale profit margin would be high. According to an interview
he later gave to the ATF, he sold about 14 of these guns to a drug dealer
he knew, making $100 to $150 of tax-free profit on each one.
As his business grew, he often bought more than one handgun on a
single day, a so-called "multiple purchase" that gun dealers are
required to report to the ATF. These transactions prompted the ATF to
open a file on Mr. Sizer, Mr. Stankiewicz says.
Throughout this period, Mr. Sizer maintained strong ties to his church.
He often took the microphone at services to deliver his "testimony,"
reading scripture and telling inspirational stories. Mr. Sizer was a good
speaker, his church friends say, a compelling presence at the church
podium who was capable of inspiring "the holy spirit" in others with his
own enthusiasm. He was a good salesman, too, coming off in the ATF
tapes as both glib and persuasive.
Soon Mr. Sizer was doing business by cell phone and delivering guns in a
late-model Buick Regal. Concerned about the number of guns he was
buying in his own name, he began looking for people to make the
purchases for him. One such buyer was Juan Coreano, a friend who
worked as a security guard at his bookstore.
A former Marine military policeman with a cocaine habit but no
criminal record, Mr. Coreano had no trouble obtaining his gun permit. Mr.
Sizer accompanied him for his first gun purchases, putting up the cash
to buy them and paying Mr. Coreano a $50 fee for each gun.
In an interview, Mr. Coreano, 37 years old, accuses Mr. Sizer of
exploiting his drug addiction to get him to buy guns. Yet the two men
shared a religious connection -- and a relationship at least as
complicated as Mr. Sizer's bond with his church. Before leading Mr.
Coreano into the gun business, Mr. Coreano says, Mr. Sizer had helped
convert his friend to Christianity by bringing him to a service at the
Evangelistic Temple.
'He Messed Me Up'
Still, Mr. Coreano, who recently began serving a 23-month prison
sentence after pleading guilty to gun charges, isn't as inclined to
forgive Mr. Sizer as are other members of the congregation. "He abused
my friendship," Mr. Coreano says. "He saved me, but he also messed me
up. You can't say one thing and do another."
Mr. Sizer enlisted Steve Colter, an employee of the barbershop where he
had sold his Christian books, to look for buyers from outside the
neighborhood. In February 1998, Mr. Colter introduced Mr. Sizer to a
buyer who claimed to represent Mafia interests in Atlantic City, N.J.,
but who was an ATF informant.
In early transactions with the informant, Mr. Sizer was cagey. One took
place on Feb. 11 in an alley behind the barbershop. Mr. Sizer showed up
in his green Buick and opened the trunk to show the informant and an
undercover ATF agent two assault rifles, a Hi-Point and a Norinco. But
he let Mr. Colter hand the weapons over and collect the cash for them
after he had driven away.
The ATF agent paid $1,400 for the two guns. The serial numbers had
been filed off both rifles, but the police crime lab managed to restore
one of them, and it matched that of a gun purchased by Mr. Sizer. Mr.
Sizer had bought the two rifles for a total of $295, making a profit of
$1,105, minus an unspecified finder's fee for Mr. Colter.
In an interview from prison, Mr. Colter says that the high price worried
him, making him suspect -- too late -- that the buyers were undercover
agents.
The Mistake
At this point, Mr. Sizer made a major mistake: Eager to keep all the
profit for himself, he contacted the ATF informant directly. A series of
transactions between Mr. Sizer and undercover ATF agents followed,
most discussed in detail on the ATF tapes. One transaction took place
inside the Christian bookstore. In another deal, Mr. Sizer delivered guns
in a box bearing the return address of a religious publisher.
Mr. Sizer also disclosed various details about his gun business. He
obliterated serial numbers from the guns using a file, a grinding wheel
and black paint, he said, and he sometimes attended gun shows, where
private collectors aren't obliged to check the backgrounds of buyers.
The transcripts of the ATF tapes reveal a somewhat harder side of Mr.
Sizer than was evident to his friends at the Evangelistic Temple. On
March 6, for instance, he was heard delivering the ultimate sales pitch
on a gun he was offering: "Hit anybody once, you kill him. You know what
I'm saying?"
Soon the ATF was tracking Mr. Sizer's every move, shadowing him as he
drove to buy guns and watching him from the street as he left his
bookstore to sell them. Employees of Mr. Sizer's favorite gun store
were cooperating with the ATF by informing agents of purchases made
by Mr. Sizer and others in his group.
The ATF was concerned, in particular, about the many cheap Jennings
9mm handguns being purchased by Mr. Coreano. Unlike Mr. Sizer, Mr.
Coreano wasn't reselling them to ATF agents, and the agents theorized
--correctly -- that he was selling them on his own to others in the
neighborhood.
In April, agents confronted Mr. Coreano and persuaded him to come back
to ATF headquarters, waive his Miranda rights, and give a statement
that incriminated both himself and Mr. Sizer. In the taped conversations
between Mr. Sizer and the ATF informant, Mr. Sizer was soon describing
Mr. Coreano's legal problems.
'Trying to Get Slick'
Mr. Sizer blamed Mr. Coreano for "trying to get slick" by selling guns on
his own. Yet after a brief period of "chilling" in which no agents showed
up to arrest him, Mr. Sizer was back to selling guns.
In September, the ATF's fears about Mr. Coreano were realized: One of
the guns he bought and resold turned up at a crime scene at which a
young woman named Miguelina Estevez killed her two-year-old triplet
sons and herself. The 19-year-old mother had been distraught,
neighbors say, because her boyfriend left her and moved back to their
native Dominican Republic.
Mr. Sizer was arrested the same month. For nearly a year, he resisted
an indictment, although Messrs. Coreano, Colter and others who bought
guns for Mr. Sizer all pleaded guilty to gun crimes and pledged to
testify against him.
Through it all, members of the Evangelistic Temple stood by Messrs.
Sizer and Coreano. Their pastor, the Rev. Dawson, explains the Temple's
support this way: The words painted on its storefront -- "a church in
the hood with the hood at its heart" -- are more than a motto. Rather,
Rev. Dawson says, they testify to the church's commitment to redeem
local people from the temptations of their bleak community.
"We all fall short," the pastor says, adding that he believes the two men
were "tricked" by Satan into criminal activity.
While awaiting trial, says his lawyer, Andrew Gay, Mr. Sizer retreated
into his faith, refusing to acknowledge the overwhelming evidence
against him. Mr. Gay says he tried to persuade Mr. Sizer to plead guilty
because judges are often more lenient in sentencing defendants who
admit their crimes. But Mr. Sizer wanted to go to trial, Mr. Gay says,
because he firmly expected God to grant him a miracle in the form of an
acquittal.
On the day the trial was to begin, Mr. Sizer reversed course and pleaded
guilty to all nine felony charges against him: one count each of
conspiracy and selling guns without a license and seven counts of
possessing weapons with obliterated serial numbers. He faces a term
of five to eight years without parole.
What changed his mind? His lawyer, Mr. Gay, had researched miracles on
the Internet -- Lourdes, Fatima, the Miracle of the Grotto. "I said, 'Look
at the numbers. There are hundreds of thousands of cases tried, but
very few miracles,' " Mr. Gay says. "I asked him, 'Why do you think God
would cause a miracle in this case?' "
