Federal gun investigations draw Congressional scrutiny

By HOWARD ALTMAN | The Tampa Tribune
Published: July 13, 2011
Updated: July 13, 2011 - 12:58 PM


In December, Customs and Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was shot by a man connected to the Sinaloa drug cartel.

The death of a law enforcement agent would have been big news by itself, but it was the weapons used in the slaying that made the story scandalous. Guns found where Terry was killed were linked to a botched effort by the federal government to track weapons commonly used by drug cartels.

Operation Fast and Furious was run by the Department of Justice and the Phoenix Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives office, and has since come under heavy criticism because agents lost track of many of the weapons, including at least two where Terry was killed.

Seven months earlier, and 1,700 miles to the east, investigators in the ATF's Tampa office were running its own gun smuggling investigation, this one dubbed Operation Castaway. It targeted a Florida man who was illegally trafficking about 1,000 weapons, some of which wound up in the hands of killers south of the border.

Now a U.S. senator and two Congressmen – including Gus Bilirakis, R- Palm Harbor, want to know whether there were similar problems in the Tampa investigation.

"We are looking into allegations that Operation Castaway incorporated the same policies as Operation Fast and Furious, allowing guns to be purchased, or straw purchasers to buy guns, and then allow those guns to be transferred to third parties and not follow the guns," said Beth Levine, a spokeswoman for Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa.

On Tuesday, Bilirakis wrote a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder and Acting ATF director Kenneth Melson asking, among other things, if Operation Castaway "allowed weapons to be trafficked to Honduras" and if the agency has accounted for all the guns involved.

"I find it very troubling that the United States government would willfully allow weapons to be acquired by dangerous criminal and drug trafficking organizations, thus compromising our strategic and national interests," Bilirakis wrote. "This appears to be an extremely misguided effort by the ATF and DOJ and I hope that we do not allow such flawed programs to continue to threaten the safety of the United States."

Today, Bilirakis sent a similar letter to ICE director John Morton.

Grassley, Bilirakis and U.S. Rep. Darrel Issa, a Republican from California, began looking into Operation Castaway after a pair of bloggers, David Codrea and Mike Vanderboegh, wrote a piece based on an anonymous source claiming that the Tampa ATF office was "walking" guns to Honduras in a manner similar to how the Phoenix office ran Operation Fast and Furious. The story was widely repeated in the conservative blogosphere and ultimately on Fox News.

But a plea agreement in May, 2010 – well before Terry was killed and Operation Fast and Furious became news – seems to show substantial differences between the two operations.

Fast and Furious was an operation launched in 2009 in which ATF officials allowed gun dealers near the Mexican border to sell guns to third parties in an effort to track the weapons' journey to cartels and other criminal organizations. One agent told congressional investigators that agents lost track of as many as 1,500 weapons under the program.

Operation Castaway began in the summer of 2009 and included the ATF, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, sheriff's offices in Orange, Osceola and Brevard counties and the Miami-Dade Police Department. As a result of the investigation, Hugh Crumpler III, a decorated Vietnam War veteran, acknowledged that he illegally sold about 1,000 guns, shipping the bulk of them to Honduras and other countries in Central and South America.

As with Operation Fast and Furious, the guns sold by Crumpler wound up in the hands of at least one killer, according to federal documents, as well as a violent drug organization in Puerto Rico, the hitman for a Colombian drug organization, a murder-for-hire gang and an effort to smuggle guns into Colombian prisons.

But unlike Operation Fast and Furious, these guns apparently wound up in the hands of criminals before Operation Castaway was even launched, according to federal court records.

Crumpler's attorney at the time, Roger Weeden, said he did not think it was possible that guns from Operation Castaway wound up in the hands of criminals in Latin America once the investigation began because agents "closely monitored Crumpler's activities after they got involved with him.''

Crumpler told investigators he began selling the guns in 2007, first a few at a time, until it became "a habit" in which he would travel to several gun shows a month.

Operation Castaway began after the ATF's National Tracing Center Multiple Sales Database revealed that Crumpler purchased 529 handguns in 62 transactions from federally licensed firearms dealers in Florida. Many were the same types of weapons and several were found to have been used in crimes only a short time after Crumpler, 64, purchased them "further indicating that the firearms were being illegally trafficked," according to a plea agreement signed by Crumpler in May, 2010.

In several instances where Crumpler did sell guns to individuals from Honduras, including those who were not in the country legally, agents intercepted the individuals and seized the weapons, according to the documents.

Crumpler was sentenced to 30 months in prison on charges of dealing firearms without a license and unlawfully possessing short-barreled rifles.

An investigation into Crumpler, including surveillance and the use of wire taps, undercover agents and confidential informants, was launched later that year, according to the plea agreement. It eventually expanded. Six men were also charged and sentenced and two more have fled.

The U.S. Attorney's Office for the Middle District of Florida, which prosecuted Crumpler, declined comment, as did the Tampa ATF office.


http://www2.tbo.com/news/breaking-news/ ... ar-243657/