// Mike Detty, a one-time POLICE contributor, talks about "Guns Across the Border," a first-hand account of his involvement in an ATF "gun walking" operation that preceded Fast & Furious. As a firearms dealer, Detty sold guns to Mexican cartel operatives at the direction of ATF special agents in Arizona. Detty says he was motivated by patriotic duty, and betrayed by the agency he worked for. Show the Guns Across the Border Podcast Transcription: Paul: Hello, this is Paul Clinton with POLICE Magazine. This is the monthly author's podcast with books by and for cops. We have a very interesting book this month to discuss. It's called "Guns Across the Border: How and Why the U.S. Government Smuggled Guns into Mexico: The Inside Story". It was written by Mike Detty. In the book, Mike chronicles his experience as a federally licensed firearms dealer in the Tucson area and his role in these gun-walking sting operations and the flooding of guns to Mexico. Mike has been a contributor to POLICE Magazine. He's written some great firearm reviews over the years. His business is essentially selling rifles and other guns at gun shows in Arizona. Mike, we're really pleased to have you on, and thanks for joining us to talk about the book. Mike: Thanks, Paul. It's a pleasure to join you, and thank you for having me on. Paul: Talk about this book and how it came about. You found yourself in the cross-hairs, so to speak, of a very ill-fated, eventually, federal gun operation. Talk a little bit about how you got involved in this from the beginning and how this got started. Mike: Sure. Historically, it is significant in that Operation Wide Receiver, which was the case that I brought ATF into in 2006, eventually morphed into Operation Fast and Furious, about two and a half years later. The way it started was, as you mentioned, I did gun shows for a living. I am an FFL holder, a Federal Firearms Licensee. I sell AR-15s at Arizona gun shows. I was approached by an individual who wanted to buy six AR-15 Lowers from me. The next day, he came back and he asked if I would have more sometime later in the month. I told him I had another 20 on order that I expected the next week. His answer to me was, "I'll take them all." The sheer number that he wanted, and the fact that he was paying cash, and the fact that he was a young Hispanic kid, made me suspicious right off the bat. That happened on a Sunday. Monday morning, I contacted my local ATF contact. He had me fax in the paperwork, and the he called me back later in the day and asked me if I could come down the following day and spend some time talking with him. That was really how Operation Wide Receiver began. There was a group of young men in the Phoenix area that was buying AR-15 Lowers. They were sending them to somebody in San Diego who was purchasing the top ends of the rifles, 10 inch, which of course, anything under 16 inch barrel length is illegal, but it didn't matter to them, because they were pretty mixed up in doing illegal stuff anyway. Anyhow, they would complete these firearms by pinning on a short top end, and then taking them across the border into Tijuana for the Felix Arellano Cartel. That was how Operation Wide Receiver started. It kind of went through some twists and turns, but by the time were finished a year and a half had gone by. I think we'd sold weapons to five different cartels. Paul: Before we get into the details of this, talk a little bit about where federal law enforcement was coming from and their goals in your mind, or what they said to you about these operations. They've been termed "gun-walking operations" and I guess these operations would fall under this Project Gunrunner. What was the original goal of this operation, as far as you understood? Mike: Project Gunrunner was a project to stem the flow of illegal guns into Mexico. It involved saturating the border states with more ATF agents and more funding to prevent that from happening. Operation Wide Receiver, when I first got involved and they first started looking at these characters I was selling to, and by the way, after that initial purchase, I didn't sell anything to these people without prior knowledge of ATF and without them specifically asking them to do this at their behest, to further the investigation. I just want to make that clear. It wasn't as if I did something, and then, "Oh, I'd better let them know," just so I don't get in trouble. Paul: I guess the idea is that, this has always been the case, that the drugs come from Mexico and the guns and the ammunition go to Mexico. So the ATF and the federal government was becoming more and more concerned about guns that cartel operators were purchasing here in the border states and taking to Mexico to use in this violent cartel drug war, right? Mike: That's correct. That was correct. The first meeting that I had with these ATF people here in Tucson, I was told that I would have a chance to help them take out a powerful drug cartel. I'm smart enough to know the implications of that. Paul: Yeah. That sounds good, actually. It sounds like a noble goal. Mike: Being a patriot, I was eager to help them. It just didn't turn out the way it was outlined to me. What happened to be the goal, we never came close to achieving that goal. If you read the book, I think there was something far more insidious going on than trying to take out a drug cartel. Paul: Part of, I think, at least what we've heard said publicly from the ATF, and obviously this was a huge scandal that resulted in congressional hearings, and of course the deaths of two federal agents, speaking of course of border patrol agent Brian Terry, and also ICE special agent Jamie Zapata. Guns that apparently were sold through these sting operations were found at both of those crime scenes. Mike: Correct. Paul: Right. Mike: All three of those guns were from Fast and Furious, although there is nothing that would prove any of the guns from Wide Receiver showing up at future crime scenes. We know that they've shown up at crime scenes in Mexico. Fortunately, nothing has been found here in the United States. Paul: The critique of the ATF through all this has been, why didn't you track the guns? Was there some goal early on to either attach some type a micro-tracker or microchip to the gun? Was there any effort early on by them to track these guns? Mike: No. I do mention in the book, it's been reported in mainstream press that under President Bush things were done more responsibly. They tracked the guns they were working with Mexican officials. That's hogwash. None of that's true. There was one attempt to put a tracking device in a rifle during operation receiver, and it failed miserably. It was never fielded, it was never talked about again. The other thing, what I was told from the start, was that there was ongoing cooperation with the Mexican authorities and that if they didn't interdict the guns that at some point in time, they knew where the guns were at, they were going to round them all up, or most of them. I mean, nothing is 100%. It was conveyed to me that the operation I was working was multinational, meaning that the Mexican authorities were on board with it, and that this was how they were going to take out this cartel. That just proved to never be true. The Inspector General's report that was issued last fall, it cites I think three different phone conversations during the three years I was involved with Operation Wide Receiver where they had contacted Mexican authorities, but there was never any ongoing coordination. There was no commitment by Mexican authorities to follow these guns anywhere into Mexico. In fact, none of them were ever tracked. Paul: Wow. You mentioned that there were a couple of very interesting anecdotes in the book of failed attempts by these agents to follow and/or arrest these straw purchases and the buyers who came to you to purchase these guns. Mike: Sure. In fact, there was one event, I believe it was 50 .38 Super Pistols that one of these guys bought one night. It was ATF's intention to have an air surveillance to follow these guns to the load house, sit on the load house until they were loaded up in the load truck, and then follow them to Mexico so that from the time those guns left my house, it really never left their visual surveillance until they crossed the border. That was very important to help them prove their case. In the book, I relay how this turned into a three-day surveillance. They sat outside a house for quite a while and were concerned that they actually might have missed somebody going out the back door with the guns, because the original intent was for those guns to go very quickly, and it never happened. They did stay on the house. Once they got into a car, they were able to follow them. They went down close to the border, and then on the Indian reservation, they drove in circles for three or four hours. When I asked one of the agents why somebody would do that he said, "These are experienced drug smugglers. They know what type of aircraft we use for air surveillances." In their case, they were fortunate. They had a helicopter to back up while the DTS plane went and got refueled and then came back. They were never able to do much with that information. They know the guns crossed the border, but once they crossed the border, they didn't have any idea what happened to them. Paul: Wow. Let's talk about your role in this, because it really is fascinating. Your book, I have to give you credit here, I mean, you've really written a detailed book, and you've included a lot of great details about how these went down. Talk a little bit about how some of these transactions would work. You have a business and you are able to sell firearms out of your home. Talk a little bit about how this would work, how the cartel members would purchase the guns. You would kind of set a little showroom in your living room, right? Mike: Right, yeah. Being a divorced guy, I had a living room that didn't have a stick of furniture in it, so I used that space. I had guns set up. AR-15s and semi-auto AK-47s and 30 types of pistols, and I would set them up. I wanted these guys to perceive that I had plenty of inventory, so I didn't just put one out of each one. I would put stacks and stacks of guns, and then I'd leave one out of the box for them to look at and figure out what they wanted to buy. They would usually come late at night. When they were going to do a purchase, usually they would have a plastic grocery bag full of cash. A lot of times, they didn't know how much money was in that back, because somebody at the stash house would hand them a bag and say, "Here, go buy as many guns as you can for this money." A large portion of every evening was spent just counting that cash. In fact, it was after one event where one of these people tried to burn me for $5,000, I actually went out and bought a bank- quality money-counter. The first thing we would do when they got there was, we would count the money, and then they'd know how much money they had. Paul: I love that detail in the book. A lot of these guys would just give you stacks of 5 and 10 dollar bills, and you would have to spend 45 minutes to an hour counting small bills. Right? Mike: Yeah. That was typical. There was one group out of Phoenix whose ringleader was dyslexic, I think. He would always hand me his money and have me count it. At first I thought it might be a test to see if I was being honest with him, because once I got to the certain dollar amount, I would hand him back the rest of the money. It did in fact turn out to be, either he couldn't count, or was just so severely dyslexic, he couldn't count the money himself. Paul: Talk about some of the characters. One of them I think came in wearing pink ostrich boots. Talk a little bit about who these guys were. Mike: It was kind of a happenstance. In other words, we fell into a hornet's nest while we were just looking for a honeybee. There was one particular gentleman I was doing business with. He had a cousin, a very distant cousin, in town. Her husband was in federal penitentiary for dealing dope. She would host these barbecues that she would invite other people in this trade to these barbecues. It didn't matter what cartel or what familia they were from. They were welcome guests there, but during the course of the barbecue she would tell them, "Hey, if your guys need guns, I've got a hookup for you. Here's the deal. You just pay me a commission on every gun you buy, and that'll keep me happy and I'll keep you hooked up with this guy with the guns." These people from those barbecues would accompany the original buyer. It just got crazy because there were so many people that wanted to come and buy guns. Paul: I'm sorry, so this is really your classic straw purchase, right? Mike: Yep. Paul: So they would fill out the paperwork for people who would be denied on a background check, right? Mike: Right. These were all people that legally couldn't buy because they weren't citizens. The one guy that could, he ended up doing a lot of the paperwork himself. He was actually connected with a cartel in Caborca that had been raised here in the United States and was a US citizen. He was doing a lot of the purchasing. Some of the other groups, they would bring people they knew that had clean records that would do the purchasing for them. That's where all the charges, unfortunately, I mean, it's a relatively minor charge, for Operator Wide Receiver was for straw purchasing. In other words, when they filled out the background check, they checked the box saying, "This firearm is for personal use. I'm buying this gun for myself." That turned out not to be true, and we know that because they took them across the border and sold them down there. Paul: Yeah. What types of guns did they buy? We've heard that they like these AK-47 or AK variants that had wire stocks. What kind of stuff did they buy? Mike: Those were probably the bulk of what they really wanted was the cheaper AKs. At the time, I was buying the Romanian imports. WASR was the model name. Some of them had underfolding stocks or side folding stocks or fixed stocks. At the time I want to say, I was selling them retail for under $400. That was the bulk of what they bought. Then there were some other groups that wanted to have AR-15s and they wanted to have the good quality, the best quality I could find, but that wasn't the bulk. The majority of the stuff was AK-47 rifles and pistols. Paul: Those were available fairly cheap for them, right? Like you said, you could get one for $400 or so? Mike: I was retailing them for $400, which meant that I probably made maybe $100 on that transaction. Paul: Okay. And I guess they liked these Colt .38 Supers as well? Mike: The Colt .38 Supers weren't gun for fighting. They were guns that somebody would wear to kind of show almost their rank. There was one guy that as buying these for a cartel in I think it was Magdalena. The head guy would hand them out as presentation pieces. In other words, you've done something really valuable for me, or you've taken a great risk for me, and I'm going to rewards you with this status symbol. Paul: Okay. Mike: That's how those were used, but like I said, they bought those in quantity with one guy buying 50 when he'd need from me. Paul: Yeah. You worked, really, as you describe in the book, as an undercover operative with the ATF, kind of almost dictating every step of the way, right? Mike: Yeah. Like I said before, there was nothing that I did on my own. There were very few, rare instances where somebody called me on the phone and I'd have to make a quick decision. Trying to think of what ATF would want me to do. Usually I would beg off and say, "Listen, I can't do this afternoon because I have a doctor's appointment," or something else. Everything that I did was under their direction. Paul: You tell kind of a good little anecdote here. They had you wearing a transmitter, and it sounded like the ATF Tucson office only had one transmitter, and it was kind of cutting out at times? Mike: Yeah. Its age was uncertain, its quality was not good, and it appeared to be the only one they had, because in three years of working with them, it was the same transmitter that I used night after night. Paul: Yeah. Mike: There were instances, and some of your veteran cops and shooters that are listening to this will understand. I'm in my early 50s, right, and after a lifetime of shooting, I don't hear so good. I'm one of those people that has the volume all the way up on my cellphone so that I can hear conversations clearly. Well, imagine yourself being in a room of cartel associates and having an agent call and say, "Hey, Mike, your wire's down. Turn it off and then back on again real quick." Then you look around the room to see if any of these other people in the room have heard what you just heard through your phone. I was very fortunate in that regard. Stupid things like that, looking back, were just crazy. The risk that I took and some of the risks that I was exposed to through no fault of my own. Paul: And I guess eventually they placed some cameras in your house, and they put one in a clock radio, and I guess one in a Kleenex box, right? Mike: Yeah. The clock radio is kind of a neat thing, because it would not only record, but it would transpond, I don't know if that's the right term. There was somebody sitting in a truck outside that could see it real time, but that was just one instance, and I guess that equipment was too expensive for each office to have, especially the smaller Tucson office. In other instances, they had what was called a "Hawk," which was a video and audio recorder that they could hide in a box of Kleenex. Usually, that would sit on my wet bar, where it could watch the entire living room that I was using as showroom. In addition to that, I would have a digital recorder in one of my pockets. The reason they had me do that was because the quality was so much better than what they could record with the transmitter. It was just dual redundancy, so they'd have backup to backup. Paul: Yeah. And I guess, as you mentioned, you were involved in this for three years. It sounded like when it first started it was initially only supposed to be a very short operation that you were going to be involved with. Talk a little bit about the length of time, I mean, did you become frustrated at times with this? Mike: Not really. I mean, while it was going on, it seemed to keep me really interested, and I seemed motivated my knowing that I may be part of something historical. As it turns out, it ended up I was part of something infamous rather than historical. Paul: Good word for it, yeah. Mike: I didn't have a crystal ball at that time, but I really did. I was motivated by a patriotic sense of duty, and I really had this feeling of fate and that God put me in this place in this position right now to help. I wouldn't have felt right just telling these guys I couldn't help them. Of course, from years I've written for POLICE Magazine, I'm a pro-law enforcement guy, and I never would suspect that these guys all seem like great guys, and I didn't see ever having a problem for being on the wrong end of their hire, which I eventually did end up. Paul: Yeah. Mike: It was an interesting three years, and like I said, I didn't mind doing the work for them, and I didn't mind at the time taking risk, because I thought that whatever was going to be gained from this would be so valuable to the United States and to the detriment of the various cartels that were pursuing. Paul: We'll get into the end result of this in a minute, but one thing I found very interesting was that you were very meticulous through this investigation about the notes that you took and the records, and you kept pretty good records about conversations and things you were doing and saying. Mike: Right. I kept my notes daily. I always tried to make time to write down the events of the evening along with conversation as quickly as possible after they happened, so that it would be fresh in my mind. Originally, I started doing this for two reasons. One, I always thought I might write a book, because it was kind of an extraordinary circumstance that just an ordinary guy like me got involved in. The other reason was, we were doing so many of these buys that I was afraid if I ever had to testify, I have to be certain if this event happened on this night during this buy, and so forth, so I could keep one buy separate from all the others that happened. That was my intent originally. Because I had gone and I bought my own digital recorder, every time a burned a CD of an evening's buy with the bad guys, or several phone conversations I had with the bad guys, to burn that to a CD, I had to download it to the hard-drive on my computer. When things started not looking right to me, I started recording conversations with the special agents and phone calls with the special agents. That was all on the hard-drive of my computer, along with my notes. Paul: Yeah. Mike: At one point in time, when they brought in a special prosecutor from Washington D.C. to prosecute Wide Receiver, she asked me if I'd kept any notes or a journal or anything. I said, "Yeah, I have a journal. I don't want to give it you, because there's a lot personal information in there." It was an actual journal, it wasn't just transcribes of bad guy buys. She demanded it. It was the old thing, "You know, look, we can do it the hard way or we can do it the easy way. I'll make life miserable if I don't get it," so I did give it to her. She never expected to see what was in there. It was either her or one of the special agents in Tucson sent that up to Special Agent in Charge, which was Bill Newell, in the Phoenix office. He or she ordered immediately to ATF Office in Tucson, "Don't take anymore cases from this guy. Don't talk to him, don't acknowledge him in any way." Basically, I was shut out. He knew long before me that my notes contained information that eventually was going to be very embarrassing to him. At one point in time, my computer was hacked. All the audio files that there were nights and nights and nights of purchases at my house, phone calls, and so forth, those were all corrupted. I kept them all in one folder. Every one of those files was bad. Before I got too paranoid, I went and checked some of the shorter phone conversations that I had with these bad guys. To the special agent in charge of this case, I would attach it to his Yahoo! account, because DOJ and ATF email accounts have filters on them that limit the file size, so I would have to use his personal Yahoo! account. I went back and said, maybe I can get back some of these conversations by checking those emails. Surprisingly enough, every email I had ever sent him, or every email he'd ever sent me, had been wiped clean from my computer. Paul: Wow. Mike: Now I'm in a position. I'd contacted somebody that's a very good friend who's one of our most elite military intelligence assets and told him what was going on and gave him information about my computer and my wireless system and so forth. He called me back a couple hours later and he said, "Look, Mike, you're welcome to fly out here. My guys think if they look at your box, they can figure out who got into it. But here's the rub. Let's say we find out exactly who did this to you, who do we take that to? Because I think you're going to take it to the same people who did it to you." Paul: Oh boy. Mike: "What good's it going to do to you." The fortunate thing about this, and the reason that I haven't been put in a very difficult spot was because I have an external hard-drive as a professional writer. Every few days I back up my computer. I was able to restore all those files, but whoever got into my computer and corrupted those files, they knew that this could put them in very bad light. Paul: Yeah. And during the story, you talk about, you would have conversations with these cartel operators and you'd burn a CD and just take it over and drop that over to the ATF office in Tucson, right? Mike: Right. Paul: So you were sharing some of this material with them during the course of this investigation as well, right? Mike: That was the sole purpose of recording this stuff. Paul: Yeah. Mike: By happenstance, I mean, it just happened to all be on the hard- drive on my computer. Paul: Yeah. Mike: I think that certainly kept me out of a very sticky spot with our federal government. Paul: Yeah. It's a very enlightening book. Talk a little bit about, I guess you were audited at one point by the ATF, right? Mike: Yeah. Surprisingly, not too long after the last case I brought them had come to an end, I had two ATF investigators. They're not actual agents, but they're more on the regulatory side of the things. They showed up at my door one day and they said, "We're here to conduct an audit." I knew what they were going to find. In my books, for instance, if there's 75 AK-47s that are logged out to one particular person, they're going to have some questions, so I asked them, I said, "First of all, do you know who I am and do you know what I've done for your office?" Meaning the Tucson ATF office. The young lady replied, "Yes, we do, and I want you to know that Bill Newell is the one that ordered this audit." Bill Newell was the special agent in charge of the Phoenix office. Paul: Mm-hmm. Mike: So I didn't think too much about it. Paul: Yeah. It came from the top. Mike: It came from the top, and this was after they had already gotten my notes, and apparently knew that every conversation I had was on the hard-drive of my computer. Over the course of a couple weeks, they came to me and they said, "You know, we have 80 serial numbers here we can't find." The guy said to me, "You're not going to be able to keep your license. Most likely, you're going to be criminally prosecuted. You can't lose 80 serial numbers, not these type of guns, Mr. Detty, and keep your license and not get prosecuted." Oh my God! Paul: Wow. Mike: I can't believe this. Paul: Yeah. Mike: What am I going to do? I'm just getting ready to go to the hospital to have an ankle replaced, and I thought, well, I'd better do whatever I can. So I did my own audit, and I actually did a physical inventory of every gun that I had. The lower receiver of an AR-15, because it has a serial number on it, they call it a complete gun. I had boxes and boxes of just stripped low receivers. In other words, they didn't have any triggers or hammers or magazine releases installed, and just the bare basic component, because some people like to buy them that way and then build a gun from parts. I had over 400 of these in boxes out in the garage. There were 24 to a box. It was I think in July when these people conducted the audit, so I went and sit in my living room in the air- conditioning while I put these boxes on hand trucks and brought them out of the garage and through the front door and put them in front of them. Each box contained 24 each. All they had to do was pull the receiver out of the box, count the serial number. Somehow, during the course of three days of doing this, they lost 80 serial numbers. Every one of those missing serial numbers was receivers that were in those boxes. My question is, how can somebody who's been hired by the federal government get a box of 24 receivers placed in front of them, open the box, count 3, close the box, open the next box, count 8 out of 24, close the box. Every one of those 80 serial numbers were in those cases of stripped lower receivers. [call dropped off 32:44] Paul: Just go ahead and pick up where you left off. Mike: I'm not sure where we cut off, but getting back to these boxes of stripped lower receivers, I had 24 in each box, and these agents, or investigators, as they call them, I think, they were counting them. There were some of the boxes of 24 each, they opened and counted 3. There was another box of 24 they opened and counted 8 of those. There's another box they opened and counted 12 of the 24. At the same time, you're telling me that there's a possibility that I'm going to lose my license and maybe be charged criminally for losing these serial numbers. Looking back, is it just that these people were so inept, that these federal employees couldn't count? Are they that badly screwed up? Or is it a case that somebody came out here and gave them orders and specifically told them to lose some serial numbers so that I could be discredited? So if something happened further down the road, they'd say, "Look, this guy's records were so screwed up, we had to take his license from him." Paul: A reasonable person might come to that very same conclusion. Mike: Yeah. If you read my book, and I'm sure you did, I tried to lay it all out there, let the reader decide for himself. Is it biased? Of course it's biased, because I wrote it. If one of these ATF agents here in Tucson had written a book, it'd look very different. But there's nothing in that book that's not the truth. There's nothing in that book that I haven't already documented. There's nothing in that book that's not a recording of some type that I can't prove. Paul: Yeah. Mike: That's why ATF's been so quiet about this. What can they say? They have no comeback. Even the Inspector General report that came out last fall, there were periods of time directors for ATF didn't cover. In the Inspector General's report it says, during these missing periods, we've used a confidential informant's personal journal to fill in those spots. You have to look at it two different ways. Are these people so inept that they weren't keeping their own sets of records, or is there something more insidious going on, that they actually went back and destroyed records? Either way, it doesn't look good for them, but hey, here's my journal. Show me what you've got. They're not willing to do that, because it's not going to come out well for them. Paul: Certainly, that was reflected in the response from Eric Holder and others to these Congressional inquiries and to Rep Darrell Issa and his continual requests for information. President Obama invoked the Executive Privilege on this not to talk. Mike: Exactly. Paul: That speaks for itself, I think. Mike: Just to be clear, these two different operations, Operation Wide Receiver did occur under President Bush, and Fast and Furious, of course, was under the Obama Administration. Paul: Yeah. Mike: However, and I point this out in my book, both those operations shared the same Special Agent in Charge of the Phoenix office, and people often ask me this, "Who do you think that approved this gun-walking operation?" I tell them. I said, "Look. This was initiated at the field level. Special Agent in Charge Bill Newell, he didn't look up any further in his chain of command to ask for approval. He wasn't going to supervisors saying, "Hey, this is what I want to do. Can I do it?" No, he's saying, "This is what I'm doing." Even though there are e-mails back and forth between people in the Department of Justice that are just aghast at the number of guns that are crossing the border, now I'm speaking about Operation Wide Receiver, nobody took the next step and admonished Bill Newell. Nobody took the next step and said, "Are you an idiot? You can't do this. Stop doing this." No, they, would sit and wring their hands between themselves, but they didn't do a thing about it. Paul: Yeah. Ultimately, it cost the ATF. The head of the agency resigned over this pretty much. Anyway, interestingly enough, you have two folks listed on the back jacket of the book. One, Sharyl Attkisson, who's a Washington D.C. investigative reporter who was one of the people who broke this story, actually, and you have David Codrea who's a gun writer and a speaker and a pretty intelligent guy. Did you work with those folks with the book? It seemed like you had some pretty good resources there, at least, to tap into. Mike: Two different things. David Codrea writes for Examiner.com, which is people who are concerned about our right and seeing our rights being diminished, and is very vocal about it. Sharyl Attkisson with CBS News. Our introduction was via e-mail. She had kind of been surfing CleanUpATF.org. Before we went on air, we spoke briefly about Jay Dobyns and his book "No Angel." He was an undercover ATF Tucson agent who was actually the first federal agent to get patched in as a member of the Hell's Angels biker group. Paul: Mm-hmm. Mike: Can you hold on? I'm sorry, Paul. Just one second. Paul: Yeah, no problem. Mike: Jay and some other agents, who had felt like they had not been dealt fairly with by ATF and were sick of the management and mismanagement at all levels of administration with ATF, have a website called CleanUpATF.org. Sharyl had posted something on one of their forums about, "Hey, if you know anything about Fast and Furious, I'd appreciate your information." Actually had her personal e-mail address. I sent her an e-mail. I said, "I don't know anything about that specific case, but I'd be happy to talk to you about Wide Receiver." This all happened probably February, following the shooting of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry. Paul: That's when this story really, really heated up. Mike: Yeah. There wasn't a story until that happened. Nobody knew about this. Paul: Yeah. Mike: I was still kind of sitting around, waiting to see if they were ever going to do anything with Wide Receiver, because at that point, that hadn't been prosecuted yet. When the highest officials at DOJ and ATF came out and said, "Listen, we never allowed guns to cross the border for part of any investigation. Never happened, didn't happen, it's not going to happen. Forget about it." I knew already there was a cover-up in progress, because I'd been part of one that was allowing that to happen. Paul: Wow. Mike: I wasn't sure who to go to. I wasn't sure who to talk to, because my big fear was that somebody would come down on me for obstructing justice or something. I was just really afraid to talk. In the months to follow, I had sent Sharyl bits and pieces of information, and finally, I think it was the following September, I actually did an on-air interview with her. A very skilled lady, very competent. Her integrity is without any flexibility. I can't say enough nice things about her. She is what all journalists should be. She spent a great deal of time vetting me out and looking at the information that I had before we even talked about doing an interview, because the last thing she wanted to do was put somebody on camera that's going to make her look bad somewhere down the road. Paul: Yeah. Mike: David Codrea, very much the same thing. I started feeding him bits of information. He did his own job of vetting me too, and for quite a while named me as an unnamed source in his articles. After he discovered, yeah, what this guy is saying is true, it checks out with other people I know that have worked out of that office, and so forth. Both of these people have known me for a couple of years know. They've known me to be a person that's told the truth from the very beginning to the very end. Unfortunately, that hasn't been true for ATF and DOJ. Paul: Let's get into that briefly. First of all, why do you think they weren't able to really pursue more serious charges against these purchasers considering all the detailed evidence that you provided them? Mike: The first Assistant U.S. Attorney on my case, I met him actually a couple of years after Operation Wide Receiver concluded. Actually, him and his son bought a gun from me at a gun show, and he was looking at my business card and he's like, "Gosh, your name sounds familiar. Why do I know that name?" Of course, I knew his name right away, because I'd seen it on reports and so forth. I said, "You might know that from Operation Wide Receiver." He's like, "Oh, geez, yeah! Yeah. All the reports that I read, finally to meet you here in person and put a face with that name." We chatted for quite a while. I asked him, "Tell me why you never prosecuted Wide Receiver? Because the ATF agents had told me that he was in the process of promoting himself for U.S. Magistrate, and that was the reason he'd never actually taken this case to court." He said, "Well, it's nothing like that. I'm not going to take a case to court where I have to lie. I'm not going to have my professional credibility and integrity questioned because the ATF screwed up so badly." He went on to tell me, "When I got involved with this case, I was lead to believe that there was ongoing cooperation with the Mexican authorities. That's the only reason that I signed off to allow these guns to continue to go across the border. Once I found out that wasn't the case, I wasn't going to devote another heartbeat to developing this case to take it to trial." He declined prosecution on this case, even though he was involved from the outset. Paul: It was just going to fall apart on him. Mike: Right. He eventually did get his U.S. Magistrate appointment. The next young lady, Assistant U.S. Attorney, to look at the case, she declined for the same reason. She's like, "Do you realize what a black eye this is going to give us if we take this to court and acknowledge how many guns we let go across the border without there being Mexican involvement? Not to mention the lying on the part of ATF." So she declined it. Paul: Yeah. Mike: A year and a half later, they send out a prosecutor named [Lauren Wind] and she was with the Gang Task Force Unit in Washington, D.C., specialized in doing MS13 cases. She decided to take on this case. If you read the Inspector General's report about Fast and Furious, probably the first 70 or so pages is about Wide Receiver to kind of set up a history of what's going on here and why that was important to subsequent Fast and Furious. There's quite a bit of e-mail back and forth with her and people in Washington about, there were significant numbers of guns let go, there was no Mexican authority involvement. What are we going to do? This was happening about that time everything with Brian Terry's death was coming out in news, around March and April, subsequent to his passing. They wanted to keep that whole topic of gun-walking out of court. They didn't want to have another black eye. The other thing was, they didn't want any of these cases to go to trial. They said, "Look here's what we're going to do. We're going to narrow the scope, and we're going to charge you with lying on your background check, three years maximum." Nine out of the ten players involved in Wide Receiver took that deal. The one guy that pushed for his own trial had all charges dismissed, I think at 10 a.m. when the trial was supposed to start at 11 a.m. Paul: We ran out of time with Mike, but we just want to thank him for joining us, and we want to encourage our listeners to check out his book, "Guns Across the Border." Thanks again for listening to another episode of the POLICE Magazine author's podcast featuring books by and for cops. We encourage you, again to e- mail us with your feedback at [email protected]. Otherwise, we'll see you next month for another edition of the POLICE author's podcast.
