by Erik Larson
On April 30, Agent Urrea called S.W. Daniel and ordered three sets of internal parts for silencers, one kit containing the operating mechanisms of an S.W. Daniel nine-millimeter machine gun, and one the frame flat. He expressed concern about the kinds of records S.W. Daniel kept, explaining that he was concerned because he had a criminal record. The company assured him it only kept shipping invoices.
Urrea also ordered a machine-gun flat from L&M Guns and persuaded Travis Motes to bend the frame for him. Motes mailed the shaped frame to Urrea. In the process, according to ATF documents, Motes violated provisions of the Gun Control Act of 1968 prohibiting any company from manufacturing a lower receiver without an ATF license. ATF charged, moreover, that by mailing the frame to California, moreover, Motes violated the act’s provisions against shipping firearms across state lines directly to consumers. (Companies can sell guns to out-of-state residents by mail but must ship them first to a licensed dealer in the buyer’s home state.) Urrea also asked Motes whether he could provide twenty-five more machine-gun kits with already-shaped flats so that he could make twenty-five machine guns and sell them to friends in South America. Motes said he might be able to accommodate him.
Urrea continued buying silencer parts and machine-gun kits from S.W. Daniel, L&M, and a third company, La Vista Armaments of Louisville, Kentucky, gradually building enough evidence to convince a federal judge to grant search warrants to allow ATF agents to search the companies. On July 19, 1984, ATF agents raided L&M and S.W. Daniel, seizing firearms, firearm parts, and, most important, customer lists and shipping records. Urrea and a colleague spent a month examining these records and found that in California alone some twenty-four consumers had received all the components necessary to build a silencer—and thus possessed the equivalent of completed silencers—but none had bothered to register the device.
The bureau used the seized records to launch some four hundred individual criminal investigations relating to arms trafficking and illegal possession of restricted weapons. In June 1985, ATF agents arrested Sylvia and Wayne and, using an experimental tactic, charged them with conspiracy to sell illegal silencers. (By now Sylvia and Wayne had divorced but continued a close working relationship.) In formal court arguments, they claimed they were simply trying to fill a valid need for replacement parts for silencers owned by legitimate users.
The ATF investigators found a rather different story.
All in all from November 1983 to July 1984, the government charged, S.W. Daniel had mailed six thousand silencer kits and machine-gun kits. Only four buyers had bothered to register the devices. When ATF checked the customer lists through the FBI’s National Crime Information Center, it found that more than fifty customers had prior criminal records or were believed to be involved in drug peddling and other forms of organized crime. Posing as IRA gunrunners, Mexican narcotics smugglers, and assorted ne’er-do-wells, undercover ATF agents were welcomed by international arms traffickers, narcotics smugglers, and assorted ne’er-do-wells.
An ATF agent posing as a member of the Irish Republican Army ordered $15.6 million of silencer-equipped machine guns, hand grenades, and rocket-propelled grenades from a group of New York arms traffickers who, according to Treasury documents, illegally manufactured and sold firearms and explosives to countries forbidden by U.S. law from receiving domestically produced weapons. A Treasury case report noted that the leaders of the group “were dealing directly with Sylvia and Wayne Daniel … for the purchase of the machine guns and silencer kits, which were then sold to the ATF undercover agent.” The leaders were convicted of violating federal firearms laws.
Agents also arrested an Oregon man who sold machine-gun lower receivers to the Neo-Nazi Order, the group whose members assassinated Alan Berg in Denver and allegedly murdered a Missouri state trooper. After his initial arrest, the man bragged to friends that ATF had failed to find his real stash of weapons hidden underneath his water bed. A tipster leaked the secret to ATF. Agents returned to the man’s house, drained the bed, and found two S.W. Daniel machine guns and five silencers, all made from kits.
Another investigation captured a Texas man after he sold seven S.W. Daniel machine guns, with silencers, to an ATF undercover agent who had posed as a Houston narcotics dealer. The suspect had received forty-four silencer kits from S.W. Daniel and twenty-five tubes from L&M Guns.
In Ohio, agents arrested a convicted felon named Joe Canatelli, who had also sold machine guns and silencers to an ATF undercover agent. Canatelli had purchased silencer tubes and internal components directly from L&M and S.W. Daniel, and from a federally licensed firearms dealer in Youngstown, Ohio, who had agreed to order the silencer kits and machine-gun kits for Canatelli. The dealer, in a formal affidavit, stated that Canatelli “had previously told me that you can make a buck by putting the kits together, and that he knew some guys that wanted to buy some M11s with silencers for the mob. He further explained that they ‘would be used only once for hits.’ ” Agents seized three machine guns made from “flats,” and three silencers. Canatelli and an associate were convicted and sentenced to prison.
The growing list of arrested S.W. Daniel customers included a San Jose man who made machine guns and silencers and distributed them in Mexico; an Aurora, Illinois, man found during a search to possess an arsenal of more than thirty weapons and a large supply of cocaine, marijuana, and amphetamines; two Tucson narcotics dealers who had sold two machine guns and three silencers to an ATF agent posing as a Mexican narcotics smuggler; and a federally licensed firearms dealer in Florida found during a search to possess one and a half pounds of uncut cocaine and ninety-four blank Granadian passports. The dealer told the ATF agents a child had found the passports “in the road.” When the agents asked the dealer to open a safe in his closet, he hesitated and asked, “What if there’s something in here other than guns that I don’t want you to find?”
Agents found the cocaine.
“There are literally thousands of persons now in the United States and probably outside the United States who have a fully operable silencer which is not registered to them and which is possessed unlawfully,” wrote Brian C. Leighton, the assistant U.S. attorney assigned to prosecute the Daniels, in a pretrial statement. “It was incredibly easy for these people to receive the silencer; they merely had to order the internal-parts kit from SWD and order a tube from one of the many tube distributors—all of whom advertised in Shotgun News.” These were “assassin-type weapons,” he said, and posed “a definite danger to the community.”
As the case approached the trial phase, however, the government found itself compelled to abandon its conspiracy strategy and admit that no law forbade the sale of silencer components or the machine-gun parts as sold by S.W. Daniel. Indeed, federal law expressly excluded silencer parts from ATF regulation. The Daniels pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor for failing to pay taxes in the sale of two firearms. They were sentenced to six months’ probation and forced to pay $900 in taxes and fines, but because they had escaped felony charges, they were allowed to retain their Federal Firearms License.
The investigation had not cowed the Daniels. On May 1, 1985, Shotgun News ran an ad placed by Wayne Daniel titled, “Now It’s Happening in AMERICA,” and featuring a large photograph of Hitler and Mussolini. The ad recounted the ATF raid on S.W. Daniel and listed the names and home cities of the agents involved. Wayne referred to them as the “Gestapo” and likened their search to a Nazi search for Polish gun owners in 1939. “The uniforms of this new ‘Gestapo’ may not be taylored [sic] and bear the eagle and swastika on the sleeve, rather they choose to wear a business suit or sport jacket and slacks from the racks of a cut-rate department store—but their purpose is the same, they want total control and YOU, as an American citizen, DISARMED!”
The agents named in the ad, among them Earl Taylor, demanded that Daniel retract the advertisement. He refused.
In a handwritten letter he replied: “I am at a complete loss of words perhaps from bending over laughing. No malice was intende
d by the ad.… It is my opinion that nothing in the ad is anything but the truth, as you know nothing is libelous or slanderous if the truth is published with no malice.”
The agents filed a private libel suit against Wayne Daniel and Snell Publishing, the publisher of Shotgun News. “It wasn’t the fact that he was attacking ATF, because ATF was accustomed to being attacked,” Taylor told me. “It was the fact that he mentioned the ATF agents by name. I was offended by it and so were most of the other agents.”
None of the agents hoped to get rich from the suit, Taylor said. They knew that at the time Wayne Daniel had few personal assets. “It was, by God, to let them know that they couldn’t do that to law-enforcement officers who were doing their mandated duty.”
The court ruled in the agents’ favor and ordered Wayne Daniel to pay each agent $1,000 in damages, a symbolic victory. The court found Snell not liable.
Undaunted, the Daniels branched out into other firearms. They introduced a pistol-grip shotgun with a high-capacity drum magazine and a forward grip and called it the Street-Sweeper, best described as resembling a shotgun version of a tommy gun. “Delivers Twelve Rounds In Less Than Three Seconds!!!!” one ad proclaimed in Shotgun News. “Time for spring cleaning,” the ad continued. “Why try clean-ups with inadequate equipment?? Buy the machine designed to clean thoroughly on the first pass.”
The company’s latest innovation is the Ladies’ Home Companion, apparently intended for use by women to protect themselves and their homes. A variation on the Street-Sweeper, it is just under two feet long, has a twelve-shot revolving drum, and fires a heavy rifle-caliber .45–70 “government” cartridge that causes explosive recoil—yet the gun has only a rear pistol grip and no other handle. A gun dealer submitted the weapon to the Maryland Handgun Roster Board for consideration as a “revolver.” The trigger requires thirty to forty pounds of pressure, according to tests by Don Flohr, a Maryland State Police firearms expert who tests weapons for the board. S.W. Daniel advertised the gun as being “ideal for use in confined spaces,” yet Flohr refused to test-fire it for fear of damaging the backstop to the state’s indoor pistol range. With the degree of understatement common to forensic investigators, Flohr noted that anyone shooting this gun “may be somewhat disturbed by the force of escaping gases, noise, and recoil experienced.”
The board ruled the gun had no valid use, thus making it one of the precious few handguns awful enough to be banned for sale in Maryland. An official with the Maryland board described the gun as “a sick joke.”
I would have liked to ask Sylvia and Wayne why they seemed hell-bent on skirting firearms laws, but neither returned the many calls I made—and the faxes and overnight letters I mailed—to their Atlanta headquarters. I asked Earl Taylor whether the Daniels were driven in their corporate antics by some kind of Second Amendment fundamentalism.
“Shit no,” he said. “I think Wayne’s strictly in it for the money. That doesn’t make him a bad guy—he’s a sharp businessman. And Sylvia’s a sharp businesslady.”
Sylvia in particular makes an appealing character for America’s gun lovers—“those assholes” in the NRA, as Taylor put it. “Here’s a woman who’s a manufacturer of a submachine gun. She brings lawsuits against the government all the time for mistreating us gun owners. She’s just a person they can identify with.”
In Towson, Colonel Supenski had me slip on pistol earmuffs and safety glasses, then handed back the Cobray, now fully loaded with a thirty-two-round clip. He invited me to fire away.
I fired slowly at first, trying to accustom myself to the trigger action and the roll of the weapon. The trigger action was uneven, but quick. I fired with abandon, trying to aim at a series of steel man-shaped targets named Pepper Poppers after their inventor. The targets are designed to fall backward when struck by a bullet. The cliff came alive as if a tribe of beetles had suddenly decided to decamp. I downed all four targets and then turned the gun on a loose piece of wood embedded in the earth behind them. Shards blew off in all directions. Shell casings rocketed past me, one striking the rim of my safety glasses and bouncing off my eyebrow. In a matter of seconds I’d used up all thirty-two rounds.
Watching the dirt fly, one can be lulled into believing this is, after all, just fun and games. I wanted to fire off another clip; hell, I wanted to “rock and roll,” the gun culture’s euphemism for firing a machine gun in full auto. This was fun. Remote destruction is a dynamite rush.
As I drove home, however, I was struck by the dissonance between the innocent clink of the Pepper Poppers and the deadly power of each bullet. What cost, this fun and games? Any one of those bits of lead invisibly traversing the space between me and the target would have been enough to blow a man’s brains out.
“You put a gun like this in the hands of a juvenile,” Supenski testified at the civil trial that examined how Nicholas Elliot acquired his gun, “and you’ve got death waiting to happen.”
The judge struck this and most of Supenski’s testimony from the record as prejudicial and inflammatory.
“Well, I should say so,” Supenski told me, nodding fiercely. “Damn right! It should have been inflammatory. A whole lot of people should have heard it and they should have been inflamed.”
At his office, Supenski placed two weapons on a conference table, one the Cobray M-11/9, the other the new Smith & Wesson nine-millimeter he carries each day, a beautifully machined weapon with a wood grip and three different safety mechanisms designed to prevent accidental shootings. “The gun industry, unlike any other, is allowed to run amok,” he said. “If you had industry regulations, or if you had safety regulations or product-liability regulations, you better believe they’d see the light, you’d see a lot more of those”—he pointed to the Smith & Wesson pistol—“and none of those. And you wouldn’t need the California assault-weapon ban, you wouldn’t need a New Jersey ban, a Maryland Saturday-night-special law. You wouldn’t need them because that kind of garbage would never be released into the mainstream.
“Could Nicholas Elliot have killed people with this?” Supenski said, touching his own pistol. “Yeah, he could have. That’s true. But he wasn’t drawn to that one. He was drawn to this one.” The Cobray lay on the table, dull and black. The only gleam came from the holes left where the previous owner had drilled out the serial numbers. “The sad part of it is, you look at what happened and you ask, is that something that with a little bit of foresight and a little less greed or maybe stupidity, or whatever the hell it was—is that something that could have been prevented? The answer, quite simply, is yes.”
He pushed his glasses higher on his nose. “You know the part of that case that really bothered me—the clerk who sold the kid that goddamn gun. He was an ex-cop.”
CHAPTER SIX
NICHOLAS
NICHOLAS DID COME ACROSS BILLY CUTTER on Friday morning, and true to form Cutter again called him a name. Nicholas went into a bathroom and took his Cobray from his backpack. He left both there, however, and exited the room. What he did next is not entirely clear. According to his own statement, made to Det. Donald Adams, the lead homicide investigator, he wandered into the band room and, at one point, helped a man with the very apt name of Mike Lucky.
At some point between ten-twenty and ten twenty-two that morning, Nicholas walked into one of the trailers—the relocation modular units—that had been partitioned into classrooms. The room, called T108, was small, one of three classrooms built from a large trailer akin to those that serve as field offices at large construction sites. Each classroom had windows, its own door, and a stairway down to the central courtyard of the school. Other similarly divided trailers were positioned around the courtyard. Room T108 was occupied at that moment by a single individual, Sam Marino, who taught French and English at the school.
Nicholas, who that semester was taking Marino’s sixth-period French I class, asked Marino if he could help him practice dialogue. Nicholas offered to go to his locker and bring back a tape recorder he claime
d to have brought with him that morning. It might help with the practice, he told Marino. Could he go and get it?
Marino said he would be glad to help, but not right then. He knew Nicholas was scheduled to be in the Bible class just getting under way in the trailer across the courtyard, taught by M. Hutchinson Matteson—“Hutch”—a popular teacher and the church’s youth pastor. “I told Nicholas he should be getting to his other class,” Marino recalled. He told the boy to come back later.
Just as Nicholas left the trailer, another teacher, Susan Allen, walked in. Her next period was free, and she customarily came to T108 to take a break, grade papers, and prepare for her next classes. She and Marino chatted a bit as Marino gathered his books under his arm and braced himself for the bitterly cold walk to his next class. Allen was now sitting at the desk; Marino was standing with his back to the door.
He felt the frigid blast of outside air, then heard something thud to the floor. The impact undoubtedly was caused when Nicholas let his backpack fall from his grasp. Marino did not turn around, however. He and Allen continued talking for another thirty seconds, maybe another minute. “All of a sudden,” Marino said, “I heard a real, real loud noise.”
He whirled toward the sound. “At first I thought it was like an M80—like a big, big firecracker—real loud. I didn’t know what it was, and so I turned around and looked.”
He saw Nicholas and saw too that he was holding something. There was nothing unusual about his appearance or his expression, Marino later testified. Nicholas was, as always, “Mr. Serious,” Marino said. Although Nicholas often walked around with a smile, he somehow managed at the same time to seem very sober and earnest. “He wanted to show me something,” Marino said. “He was intent on showing me something.”
Nicholas held what appeared to be a toy. It was black and sharply angled. Whatever it was, it had the shape of a gun, but the idea it might be a real firearm had not settled in Marino’s mind. “In a situation like that, I’m a very positive individual,” Marino said. “You want to think it’s not what you really thought you saw or heard.”