I see the house every day when I go to work, so it's always there every day, and I always
think about her.
I mean, there's not one day that I don't think about her.
When convicted felon Peter Garcia was released from prison, his wife Evelyn reluctantly
agreed to let him come back home.
We took him back, and he started the same thing all over again, and it escalated.
And I begged her, I said, Evelyn, please don't take him back.
He's going to kill you.
He's going to kill you, Evelyn.
Don't take him back.
Early on this winter morning, police entered the Garcia home in Far Rockaway, New York,
to find a grim scene.
Evelyn's son and nephew had been shot, but were alive.
Evelyn was dead.
This defendant, Peter Garcia, is responsible, under our law, for taking a.380 Lawson and
shooting his wife, Evelyn Garcia.
The gun that killed Evelyn Garcia was a Lawson.380, the gun most frequently traced by the
ATF, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms.
Police had hoped that crime scene evidence would prove that Peter Garcia pulled the trigger,
but some Lawsons are manufactured with a special coating that rarely leaves fingerprints.
Without prints, the best police could hope for was to uncover half an answer.
After the gun was test fired, I conducted a microscopic examination on the recovered
bullets and the recovered casings, cartridge casings, to determine if they were fired from
that gun or not fired from that gun.
Ballistics tests conclusively showed that the gun found at the scene was indeed the
murder weapon.
But tracing the pistol's serial number was essential to prove that Peter Garcia owned
the gun.
For that, local police would turn to the ATF.
But when ATF tried to trace the Garcia gun, Lawson said there was no record of the gun's
serial number, that the gun had never been made.
When you run a trace on a firearm, it's going to tell a story.
The story is going to be that this gun originated or was born in this location.
In this particular case, what was different is that that did not occur.
How does a gun that was never made kill an innocent woman?
The answer leads to a world of corporate neglect and criminal greed, to a black market in guns
and those who are trained to stop it, and ultimately, to one of the largest gun thefts
in United States history.
Funding for Frontline is provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
Funded by annual financial support from viewers like you.
This is Frontline.
Additional funding for this program was provided by the California Wellness Foundation, the
Center on Crime, Communities, and Culture of the Open Society Institute, the John D.
and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Columbia Foundation, and the Wallace Alexander
Garbodi Foundation.
The mystery of the Garcia gun would not be solved in New York City, but 3,000 miles away
in an area east of Los Angeles, known as the Inland Empire.
It was here that agents from the ATF had been mounting undercover operations to stem the
tide of illegal guns.
I'm out to buy guns and explosive devices that are operable, that are functioning, that
are loaded.
I don't know any other facet of work where the slightest mistake could be your last.
Darrell McCrary was an Air Force Special Agent during the Gulf War.
For the last five years, he's worked undercover for ATF.
I've been in more danger during my undercover assignments in the United States than I've
ever been in or ever felt associated with my time in the military.
I mean, I've seen pretty much everything, from machine guns to two-shot derringers to
high-capacity 16-plus round handguns, 30-round drum-fed guns, street sweepers, MAC 10s that
are often seen in the movies.
It is just a hodgepodge of different guns, accessories, tools of the trade, if you will.
Small-caliber, 25-caliber, semi-automatic pistol.
The caliber on this is a 9-millimeter demilitarized version, basically an M16.
Modified shotguns, those are the ones that have been, the barrel has been sawed off at
one end.
This is referred to as a SPAS 12, it's an assault shotgun.
What would someone do with this?
Nothing more than cause a lot of damage and wreak a lot of havoc with a farm like this.
You can't even imagine.
This is basically grenade-dropped.
You know, it's what this is.
No more than that.
Every gun in this room was recovered by ATF as part of a criminal investigation, but few
can ever be traced back to a criminal.
So it was no surprise when the ATF failed to trace the Lorsen 380 that killed Evelyn
Garcia.
The search for the Garcia gun might have died there.
But a few months earlier, McCrary had received an eyebrow-raising tip from a confidential
informant.
The usually reliable CI believed that he could get two Lorsen 25-caliber handguns, new, in
the box, and completely clean.
Street language for a gun that cannot be traced back to the buyer.
The guns came to us in the box.
One of the things that stood out was the barcode.
There was actually a barcode on the box.
Not only were the guns brand new, their serial numbers ran sequentially, starting with the
number one, meaning that some of these guns were the first ones ever manufactured by Lorsen.
McCrary was suspicious.
But that we were buying that first case, you know, bells and whistles were going off.
Special Agent Darryl McCrary with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Fire, I'm here to start
field office.
I'll be attempting to make a purchase of one case, which is approximately 36 Lorsen 25-caliber
handguns from our primary subject, Jeremy Mendoza, Investigation Number 9319595005-S
as in Sierra.
McCrary arranged to meet the gun supplier, 22-year-old Jeremy Mendoza, by posing, in
his words, as just some knucklehead wanting to buy guns.
I keep it simple.
It's not television, it's not Dirty Harry.
It's Darryl McCrary's life in the balance based on what decisions I make and how I present
myself to people.
It's a nice gauge, man.
That new?
Yeah.
How much you get for that?
Mendoza's asking price was $40 a gun, an unusually low street price for a completely clean weapon.
It's a very dangerous environment, and it's an ever-changing environment, and you've got
to be very quick on your feet, and you've got to have the ability to adapt very quickly
to changing situations.
Hey, well, if I give you a pager, can I give you a pager number, and then...
The first time I was introduced to him, I was wearing a wire net, as to say that I was
wearing a device and my confidential formant.
Without even giving me any type of forewarning or whatever, he just reaches up and he slaps
Mendoza upside the head, bam.
And I'm thinking, what the hell is going on here?
It's like everything changes within a split second, and I'm going, oh, it's all going
to hell now, in a handbasket.
Immediately, I assume a defensive posture, because I don't know what's going on, and
immediately the CI goes, hey, man, you've got a wasp on you.
You've got a wasp on you.
He starts beating Mendoza, and Mendoza starts beating himself, and he's jumping around.
And at that time, the guy's looking at me, and he's going, and I'm thinking, what, what?
My fly's open.
I look down, and my wire's dangling on my legs.
I'm like, reach down, grab it, and stuff it in my pocket.
And just as I do that, Mendoza straightens up, and he turns around, and he looks at me.
And it's like for a moment there, he knows something's not right, but he doesn't know
what it is.
And I just start talking again.
Okay, you said you were going to do, you're all right, you said you were going to do what?
And it was just the luck of the draw that that particular day wasn't my day to be called
up, I guess.
Mendoza offered to meet again and guaranteed a steady supply of guns.
What shocked McCrary was the sheer numbers for sale.
When you're out in an undercover capacity, or you're working in a reform, and he brings
back one gun, that's no big deal.
When he brings back two or three guns, that's no big deal.
When they pull up, you know, and it's kind of like shopping on a home shopping network,
and they open up their trunk, and there are cases of guns in the trunk.
You can barely hide your surprise.
I mean, I'm literally having to think to myself, don't give yourself away.
Don't give yourself away.
Just relax.
You know, take a deep breath, look off, because I'm thinking, there's no way that this guy
has all these guns.
There's no way.
How can you have all these guns?
Nobody would have, I don't see this many guns if I go to the gun shop, you know.
And to know that they must have come from somewhere, and they're brand new, and they're
in the box, and they're packaged, you're thinking, you know, where the hell did this come from?
What Darryl McCrary was seeing was the tip of the iceberg.
For the previous 10 years, the inexpensive pistol market had skyrocketed, and with it,
the number of illegal guns on the streets.
In California, for every 10,000 cheap handguns sold each year, roughly 2,200 have shown up
in crimes.
It is an explosion that has caught even veteran law enforcement officers by surprise.
Eighty-fifty-eight.
We're talking a lot of guns.
We average probably eight to ten guns being brought in here daily.
I mean, it's overwhelming, the amount of guns.
When I first started here, we averaged maybe one gun a week.
Scotty Zolko works in the evidence vault of the San Bernardino Police Department.
It's his job to keep track of weapons recovered from crime scenes, a task getting harder to
keep up with every year.
The boxes on the shelves are all handguns, and there's an average of about 40 guns in
each box.
When I came here in 1975, we had a gun room that was probably smaller than this aisle
right here.
And we probably only had 100, 150 guns total, long guns and handguns.
There's a lot of guns in here.
There's probably in excess of 10,000 guns in here.
Police departments across Southern California recover and dispose of nearly 40,000 guns
every year.
While all makes and models of guns have flooded the illicit market, the weapon of choice for
gun traffickers is the inexpensive, easily concealed pistol.
Where's he at now?
Is anybody back there with him?
The dramatic increase in the number of cheap handguns manufactured in the 1980s and early
90s paralleled the tripling in youth gun deaths.
How many times did he shoot at you?
Just once, was he close to you or far away?
Do you know if it was a revolver or an automatic?
I'm an ER doc.
I practice emergency medicine, and I used to do it full time.
It's not enough just to treat trauma.
We need to prevent it, and that if we want to expand our ability to save people from
dying from a gunshot wound, we need to keep them from getting shot in the first place.
Dr. Garen Wintemute has been working for new regulation of the firearms industry for the
past 10 years.
His main target is the cheap handgun.
The idea here is to refocus upstream, but it's foolish to ignore, as we have for so
long with regard to firearm violence, where it starts, and that's with the manufacture
of firearms.
I'm actually something of a moderate in the spectrum of gun policy.
I don't own any guns at the moment, but I have in the past.
I've taught shooting for a living.
I grew up with guns to some extent, and I think they have a legitimate role to play
in society.
I think the role they do play has gotten entirely out of control.
The basic consumer protection framework that people have come to know and rely upon for
everything from motor vehicles to teddy bears simply does not exist, and it does not exist
as a result of conscious and deliberate action taken by Congress in the 1960s.
The very existence of the inexpensive homegrown handgun market can be traced to the assassination
of Robert Kennedy in 1968, eager to do something to stop the flow of cheap small caliber guns,
like the one that killed Kennedy.
The federal government demanded new, strict controls on imported handguns.
What in the name of conscience will it take to pass a truly effective gun control law?
But the 1968 Gun Control Act would have unintended consequences.
Its restriction on foreign guns created an entirely new, protected American industry,
which now produces all of the country's cheap, low caliber handguns.
Six companies in Southern California dominate the business, all located within a one hour
drive of the hotel where Kennedy was shot.
Together, the companies manufacture over a quarter of a million guns each year for a
combined annual sales of nearly $15 million.
Braco Arms, Lorson, Davis, Phoenix, and Sundance.
Three years ago, Dr. Garen Wintemute published a report on these companies damning the production
methods and marketing practices of the group he calls the Ring of Fire.
It's borrowed from the term describing the volcanoes that sit around the rim of the Pacific
Ocean.
And there was an effort to link, by adopting that term, to link the sense of hazard associated
with those volcanoes to these firearms manufacturers.
We specifically looked at a known number of guns made by each company in a defined period
of time so that we could look at the risk per gun, if you will, of being involved in
crime regardless of the number of guns any particular company made.
And it was on that basis that we found that guns from the Ring of Fire companies were
more than three times as likely to show up in ATF's tracing data as were guns from other
major manufacturers.
Everything is different about the way these guns are functioning in the criminal community.
He's had quite a devastating effect.
He has promoted the idea that our guns are unsafe.
And he's done this in a reckless and careless manner, and he's gotten a number of people
to believe it.
Bruce Jennings is the patriarch of the Southern California gun industry.
A brand new P-51 Mustang, built two years ago by hand, it's got a Rolls-Royce engine
in it at 1,640 horsepower, 450 mile an hour airplane.
We're just ordinary people living ordinary lives.
We're not out here creating problems.
We're just minding our own business and, you know, concentrating on manufacturing and sales
of firearms.
It's a legitimate business, it's an interesting business, and we enjoy it.
Bruce Jennings is the president of BL Jennings, one of the largest distributors of small caliber
pistols in the country, a company he started as a spinoff from his father George's firearms
business.
My father tried everything in business.
He tried the fishing pole holders, he tried hairspray devices, he tried tooling, he tried
medical devices, snake bite kits.
My father's arms were just covered with scars from where he was testing a snake bite cutter
kit.
He was quite an inventor, a very interesting man, but most of his ideas were a little bit
on the odd side.
Here is when my father was doing fishing pole holders, a little plastic PVC and a metal
stake for a fishing pole holder.
But what he did, he doodled on paper continuously, and this is one of the guns that he developed.
You could see the shape of the gun, you could see little mechanisms and little sketches.
This design would later become the Raven 25 caliber pistol, one of the most successful
guns ever manufactured.
George Jennings would sell three million of them over the next 25 years.
George Jennings' son Bruce learns the trade from Dad, splits off in 1978 to found his
own company, Jennings Firearms.
Bruce's sister Gail splits off with her husband Jim Davis, who is George Jennings' plant manager,
to found Davis Industries in 1982, and then onto the market also comes a high school buddy
of Bruce Jennings by the name of Jim Waldorf, who decides there's room here for me too.
His plant manager is the disaffected brother, John, of Jim Davis, husband to Gail Jennings,
daughter to George Jennings, not to leave out George's nephew, Steve, who also found
a company that never got very big and has since gone out of production.
It's one family.
McCrary's investigation was into its second month when Mendoza revealed something new.
Instead of the cheap 25 calibers he had been selling, Mendoza unwrapped two cases of powerful
Lorson 9-millimeter pistols, the increasingly popular gun on the street.
At the crucial moment, as the cover team was taping the buy, McCrary got another surprise.
So I'm standing here, and right in the middle of that, a big tractor trailer, 18-wheeler,
pulls up into the parking lot, and he cuts right in the middle of our deal.
I mean, so while we're doing this deal, it's like pretty much for anybody else out there,
I don't exist anymore.
So I'm thinking, you know, I'm going to have to, well, hold up, man, I need to, you know,
this man in his truck, he's kind of peeking us out, you know, I want to make sure that
we're doing this deal and nobody really knows what we're doing, you know, so.
So he accommodates me, and he says, okay, no problem, you know, we start talking about
his car and, you know, girls and stuff like that, and I'm waiting.
I'm thinking this is the truck from hell.
This guy goes forward, then he backs up.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Let me get this dude out of his truck.
We're talking about 415, right?
Cool.
Something's going on here, man.
He can't believe this, man.
What's up with this, man?
Cold as day.
He got this dude fucking around in his truck.
And I'm thinking, well, what is this?
This is, anytime but now, you know, we would have never been able, I couldn't have found
a truck if I needed one, but now this big truck's here.
And what I'm trying to do is slow this deal down so that we capture this for later, you
know, prosecutorial reference, we're able to say this is what happened on this particular
date and associate it with some tape, some footage.
See, that way you can just hit me up.
I ain't got it.
Because last night, man, I was trying to get up, I'm coming from L.A., fucking traffic's
bad.
I get up here, man, homeboy had told me.
He talked to me yesterday and said, oh, yeah, homeboy got him, you know, come on up, right?
Finally the truck pulls off and I'm like, okay, this guy's gone.
I'm looking around, everything's okay.
We do the deal.
We can count some money out, everything's square, boom, we're off to the races.
But it was like, you know, just like I said, Murphy's going to rear his ugly head.
And it seemed like every time we would get together, it would be one more thing that
would happen.
You know, first it's the B thing, now it's the truck.
The very next day, Agent McCrary learned that his biggest worry had come true, that he was
not Mendoza's only client.
The next con, known as Andre Mitchell, was also selling the same models of Lorson guns
to another ATF undercover agent.
Yeah, what was special about this situation was, yeah, the guns were cheap and the amount
we were haggling over, how many do I get for 10, how many do I get for 15?
What about later and getting some cases or something down the road?
So it just seems like this guy had a, you know, endless supply, you know, and he was
confident that he can get more.
He asked, hey man, where are you getting these guns?
And Mitchell replied, I know a guy who's getting them from the factory.
And this was a very crucial piece of information, because now we knew the source of the guns.
We knew the gun type.
Now we knew the source of the guns, which would lead us in a different direction.
Alarmed at the spreading gun sales, McCrary decided to put how to trace on the pistols
he was buying from Mendoza through both the ATF and California systems.
He got the same puzzling results as the New York police when they tried to trace the Garcia
gun.
According to Lorson, the guns with those serial numbers had never been produced.
There was nothing on the gun.
It was as if this gun was never sold, never existed.
So essentially you have a gun that has no history.
McCrary then learned that Mendoza actually worked at Lorson.
Every sign pointed to an inside job.
To find out how deep the Lorson gun ring went, McCrary decided to broaden his search to include
criminal records involving any Lorson gun.
Starting by crime, he patiently developed a system for tracing the guns.
It's only after I get this list that I realize the magnitude of this problem.
These are coming directly from the factory.
These are hot off the presses, if you will.
We're able to realize that this guy is a hot commodity.
He does, in fact, work for Lorson Engineering.
It's getting that special prize in the Cracker Jack box, and that's what we got.
Lorson Engineering is the country's fifth largest handgun manufacturer.
Its president, Jim Waldorf, prides himself on making the world's most affordable handguns.
Is this one of your better sellers?
It's a good seller, but our best seller is actually the.380.
The.380 is the number one selling handgun in the United States.
It's a seven shot capacity.
We've sold quite a few of them, I think, as far as.380 production goes in the United
States.
We were probably 40% of the.380 sales in 1993.
40%?
40% in 1993.
That's an incredible figure.
It is an incredible figure.
Well, we truly are the world's most affordable handguns, and we consider ourselves actually
the blue collar gun of America.
So you've done good numbers with this as well.
It's been a very popular seller.
It's been a very popular seller.
Essentially, affordable firearms or a gun that does not have a retail price tag of perhaps
$600 is a Chevrolet, it's not a Mercedes.
Functions extremely well, quality is extremely good, but we build Chevrolets, and the average
American drives a Chevrolet, they don't drive a Mercedes.
Retails in the area of about $149.
That's fantastic.
I pay an average of $600 for a firearm that I carry.
We're giving them affordable self-protection.
There's two million people a year that defend themselves with a handgun, and you don't hear
that on the six o'clock news.
We're giving them affordable self-protection, something that the blue collar worker can
afford to keep in his dresser drawer at home to protect his family.
It's cheap for sure.
The prices are low, and if that's what they mean by affordable, I agree.
I very much disagree with their contention that these guns on balance are protection.
Like the other companies, Lorson promotes its guns primarily as a means of self-protection,
but there's actually a great deal of evidence.
In fact, there's a periodical called Gun Tests, which I think arguably might be considered
consumer reports for the gun community.
Doesn't accept advertising, calls it like they see it.
They class these guns generally as potentially worse than useless for defensive purposes.
Gun Test Magazine, which, speaking of your 22, said we wouldn't pay any amount of money
for a gun that self-destructs in a couple hundred rounds.
Stay away from this one.
Well, number one, I think you have to realize that Gun Test Magazine is an extremely, extremely
critical magazine, and I think that number two, you want to take a look at what issue
of gun tests that was, and it's probably a very old issue.
May 96.
May 96.
I haven't seen that issue.
I haven't seen that issue.
Gun Tests Magazine, like Garen Wintemute, has been critical of almost all the ring-of-fire
guns.
And it's jammed again.
I'm not going to be able to clear this one.
Can I get some professional help here?
I point my gun at the bad guy.
I pull the trigger, and the gun locks up, as they often do, as they have in my hands.
I'm not speaking hypothetically here.
Suddenly, I'm facing an armed intruder with a gun in my hand pointed at him that is useless
to me.
I'm in deep trouble.
Garen Wintemute's research has inspired 31 communities in California to pass laws banning
the sale of low-quality guns, threatening the profits of companies like Lorson.
California was built with firearms, and it's certainly a person's civil right to own a
firearm.
And I think that when you start looking at prohibiting ownership of a firearm based on
the price of the firearm, you've just taken a very large segment of society and told them
that they don't belong to an elitist class, and therefore they have no right to defend
their family.
So you think that those laws would be discriminatory?
Absolutely discriminatory.
I feel they'd be more discriminatory than slavery.
More discriminatory than slavery?
Absolutely.
It also comes with a detachable wrist strap or shoulder straps for the ladies.
You don't want to let the ladies out of it.
I'll carry that also on your shoulders.
Like that one.
Yeah, this one's nice.
This one and this one.
Which one was the one that you said?
Soldiers like Lorson achieve their success by keeping sales volume high.
They do so by constantly developing new technologies, new materials, and new markets.
That's a little different than the other one.
Yeah, it has a gap coming from here to the ones.
This pink grip comes in 22 caliber as well as the 25 caliber.
The 22 caliber...
Women are probably 25% of our sales, but it's growing.
Yeah, there is a huge consciousness of personal safety in the women's market.
A dealer's survey suggested that it wasn't actually women that were buying them.
It was men that were buying them for their wives and their girlfriends.
Okay, and there was an assumption that they liked pink.
Assumption they liked the feminist type of thing.
And as Carlotta pointed out, she'd prefer a black gun.
I prefer a black, yeah.
They have a famous ad with three of their pistols, one with a pearl-handled grip, one
with a pink grip, and the caption on the ad is, three little ladies that get the job done.
The handgun industry exhibits all the behaviors of a consumer product industry.
Well, the feel of a gun in itself is kind of a powerful feel.
You get to pick something up that makes you more equal than the person standing next to
you, and a lot of people thrive for that.
Most people love to pick up a gun and feel it.
They like the way that it feels in their hand.
It transfers a kind of a spiritual feel into their body by holding such a powerful piece.
But a gun is a very sensual item.
It's a very powerful, sensual piece of equipment.
This little pistol has a laser device located in the frame, and the frame of the gun is
made out of polymer, which is plastic.
And this is the new standard.
This is where, in 1997, the firearms industry is headed.
The laser, I'll demonstrate it here, is this red dot.
The red dot is where the bullet will impact.
It's a very fun feature for a gun, and especially when you're doing target shootings.
It's very, very fun.
The laser will tell you where that bullet's going to go, but it doesn't tell you what's
there.
It doesn't tell you that that moving target at the other end of the darkened room is a
bad guy and not a member of your family who's gotten up to go to the bathroom.
The most recent studies show firearms kill nearly 40,000 Americans a year, injure over
twice as many, and are involved in nearly a million crimes.
But Americans have mixed feelings about their guns.
Two-thirds believe guns contribute to violence.
The same number believe they need them for protection.
When you have them, man, just set a case aside, man.
I can get at them.
You know what I'm saying?
You set a case aside, I'll get at them.
You know what I'm saying?
They'll go.
All right, man.
It's all good.
Talk to you later.
The Mendoza case was entering a crucial stage.
Four-door Chevy, California license plate OUR, Oscar's uniform, Romeo 701, Chevrolet
Impala, light cream color.
I'm riding back over them.
McCrary found himself caught in the classic undercover agent's dilemma.
He knew the source of the guns, but he didn't know who else might be involved.
The longer he spent investigating, the more guns would hit the streets, and Mendoza was
putting a lot of guns on the street.
We had made deals to buy as many as four or five cases of these guns at one time.
It was just that this particular person was selling them, being Mendoza, selling them
faster than we could keep up with him.
Try as we might.
I mean, he was selling them too fast, and obviously our anxiety level was going to go
up because of that.
We did not want to miss one gun.
If we had the opportunity to buy it, that was an opportunity that that gun wasn't going
to go out on the street and be used in a crime.
Eighteen cases, 25 calibers, that's 36 guns to a case, or 9 millimeter, that's 30 guns
to a case, and he sold 18 cases.
You're thinking that this guy's serious, that this is for real, that there's no doubt
about it, this guy's a player, and we've got to take him down as quickly as possible.
Jeremy Mendoza had no criminal record.
He had been employed at Lorson for almost two years and was considered a quiet but good
employee who worked in the powder coating section that bakes the rough black finish
onto the guns, the finish that hampered the police in Far Rockaway from getting fingerprints
off the Garcia gun.
When McCrary learned that a shipment of Mendoza's guns had reached all the way to Sacramento,
he decided it was time to go to the Lorson plant and bring him in.
An average industrial complex, much like you'd find in any other part of Southern California,
I know I was quite surprised the first time I came down here to find that a gun manufacturer
would be in a building such as this.
The morning that we arrested Mendoza, we walk in and what we see is just boxes and boxes
of guns, and we don't see anybody.
We don't see any workers, we don't see any security, we don't see anybody, and we kind
of look at each other as if to say, well, you know, what's going on?
Suddenly we do see a worker and he doesn't seem particularly interested in us.
We make contact with him and he walks back and he gets Mendoza who comes up.
And I just walked up to him and I pulled out my badge and I said, you know what time this
is?
And he said, yeah.
And it was simply that.
I mean, there was a brief look of surprise and then there was a resignation of, you got
me.
When McCrary entered the Lorson factory, what he saw had shocked him.
Here at one of the biggest gun manufacturers in the country, he says he was within arms
reach of guns in all states of assembly, with nobody there to stop him.
I've dealt with security on a pretty high level and anybody with a security background
with knowledge of this would probably say, what's security?
Michael Bryant had worked at Lorson as a production line supervisor, overseeing 30 workers, including
Jeremy Mendoza.
Well, there was no security.
There was absolutely no security at all.
They had no security officers, no metal detectors, anything like that.
So people would walk in during lunchtime and walk in the shipping and receiving department
and just look at the guns, just play with them a little bit and look at them and see
how they looked, put them back inside in the box and go back up, go about their business.
Did they ever take them out of the box and keep them?
Oh yes.
There were guns missing in all the shipping and receiving department.
If you were slick about it and watchful, you could take whatever you wanted.
Guns were stored in locked rooms and the locks weren't sufficient enough to keep the two
employees out of the rooms.
Did you have security guards?
No, we didn't, not at the time.
Did you have any kind of fencing or locked?
They were locked closed rooms and I think that if you take a thief that's intent on
stealing something, if they want something bad enough, they're going to steal it.
A gun manufacturer has to have certain level of controls because this is a controlled item.
Every gun that is serialized is a controlled item and to be able to just walk in to a building
and not be questioned for a gun manufacturer is out of the question.
It just would be unfathomable.
I mean it would be like being able to walk into a major department store with nobody
there and all the goodies there for the taking.
Let me give you as a contrast Smith and Wesson.
Go to Smith and Wesson, hundreds and hundreds of yards away from the manufacturing facility
you encounter a gate.
You do not get through that gate without clearance of the very burly, very well informed and
electronically connected security guard who's in a block house.
And if you did get in, you'd have a hard time getting into the plant.
Most of Smith and Wesson's plant is underground for security reasons.
It was built at a time when they were worried about its destruction as an act of war.
But Smith and Wesson is like a fortress.
Lawson is like a park.
Here you're producing firearms and you have them being stolen by the thousands and there's
not even a fence, there's not even a security guard.
Now listen, that's a pretty sensational aspect and it's a very sensitive aspect to me because
I don't like the idea of thinking that people stole a couple thousand handguns from us either.
I told Jim exactly what was going on.
I told Jim that there was drugs being sold in this plant.
I told him that there were guns coming up missing and that there was racism in the plant.
And then Jim said, okay, I'm going to investigate and I'll call you back.
Bryant says that so many guns went missing from the factory floor that he was afraid
he might at some point be blamed for the losses.
He devised an inventory system of his own to keep track of the gun parts coming and
going from his department.
So I developed a system and kept accurate account of the 380 frames, the slides, and
the 25 slides and frames.
And I would write down the time in one box.
I would write A and B and then how many, 102 left at 8.37 a.m., or it would be 100 would
be complete with the blue because I had it also color coded also.
So I would have a document to show how many slides and frames that went into the department
and came out.
Soon after starting the inventory system, Bryant was fired from the company.
He filed a racial discrimination suit that was settled out of court by Lorson for $3,000.
The impact of Lorson's security and accounting problems were showing up in police departments
across the country, as when Scott Izolco tried to trace a Lorson.25 caliber reported stolen
in Riverside County.
The gun that we pulled out is stolen from a shipment of guns that was sent out of the
Lorson factory.
According to the records, they had it missing since February of 96 and we've had it here
since February of 95.
I don't know.
Cute, isn't it?
I don't know what they do over there and how long it takes them to discover something is
missing, but if it takes a year, a lot of things could happen with that gun in a year.
According to an internal ATF memorandum, the agency has experienced considerable difficulty
tracing guns through Lorson for several years, and they say there have been over 100 traces
in which Lorson provided incorrect information to ATF, the biggest problem of this kind they
have ever had with a gun manufacturer.
We have done the best at accounting for every single gun that we manufacture that's humanly
possible.
But you've not heard at all that there was a problem with guns being traced to Lorson
and Lorson saying that the gun had not been manufactured, guns that had been used in crimes.
You've never heard this before?
I've heard an allegation, but I don't think that it's ever been confirmed.
You really did not know of any accounting problems that the company had?
I had heard allegations, but I think every company in the world has had accounting problems.
And again, I wish we could get into more detail, but you've absolutely worn me down.
Well, I'd like to talk about it more.
Frontline has learned that ATF is conducting a criminal investigation of Lorson, trying
to determine if it broke the law by failing to report missing guns, and whether Lorson
misled the ATF during its investigation.
But this case has also raised questions about the agency itself and the way it traces guns.
My name's Tammy, and I'm with the ATF Tracing Center in West Virginia, and I need some assistance
with a gun trace.
During the year of the Mendoza investigation, the unsuccessful traces of Lorson guns all
came through the ATF National Tracing Center.
But no one saw a pattern and raised a red flag.
ATF, I think, ends up damned if they do and damned if they don't.
They are attempting to regulate an industry with one hand and several other fingers tied
behind their back.
A simple computer program could have alerted ATF to the unusual pattern of the Lorson traces,
but they didn't have one.
And that's not the only inefficiency in the system.
Part of the problem is that Congress has forbidden ATF from using computers to track gun sales,
not wanting to create a central registry.
Instead, the ATF must follow a paper trail and rely on a labor-intensive process that
finds the gun's owner in less than half of its cases.
It's tremendously inefficient, and it's inefficient by design.
The last time they tried to make a serious effort to regulate, not just the industry
but even illegal commerce in firearms, there was a serious effort made to abolish them
altogether.
I think ATF, as a law enforcement agency, deserves to have the sort of manpower, the
sort of material resources that they need in order to do that job.
We're pleased to be able to give the Distinguished Achievement Award to special agents of ATF.
I know I got up in the morning and had this case.
In my mind, I would sleep, I would dream about different parts of the case, I'd wake up
in the middle of the night and say, oh, I didn't think of that, you know.
I would have never imagined in a million years that, very new to the job, that I would stumble
upon a case like this, the magnitude, you know, all these guns, I wouldn't have thought
about this being in 15 years.
Darrell McCrary is now a rising star in ATF, honored by his colleagues for cracking one
of the biggest cases in Bureau history, but is still bothered by the guns that got away.
Every gun that gets out is a gun that could be potentially used in a crime, it's a gun
that could be potentially used in an act of violence against another person.
And as an agent or as a police officer, you have this edict that you're going to go out
and you're going to prevent this from happening.
This one gun could mean a difference in, you know, a person going home at night.
After three years, McCrary knows what happened to only a fraction of the Mendoza guns.
This particular gun, serial number 367584, it's an L380, was recovered in, or a request
for the trace was done in 1995 out of New York City.
That's the gun that killed Evelyn Garcia.
That's the information that I have.
This gun was used in a murder in New York City.
In addition to the gun that killed Evelyn Garcia, the gun that never existed, the Lorson
guns have already shown up in over 500 crimes.
A homicide in Virginia, a robbery in Louisiana, a carjacking in California.
They screamed and they pulled out guns saying, everybody get down.
This woman was terrorized along with seven other people in the armed robbery of a restaurant.
I was waiting for a gunshot to go off.
I just thought, this is it, or somebody's going to die here.
First you're like numb.
Karen Hayes was carjacked at gunpoint on her way to make a pizza delivery.
But after a while it all starts to sink in and that is terrifying.
That's when you really get scared again.
I watched for days, for weeks I watched, make sure nobody follows me home.
The ATF now estimates that the Mendoza case alone put 6,000 illegal Lorson guns onto the
streets.
You've got to be kidding me, 6,000 guns, that is amazing, Jesus, that is a small army.
To have 6,000 guns out in the illicit market is to have 6,000 or more potential violent
encounters on any given day.
So I mean it's a nightmare in the making.
I mean you've got all the ingredients for trouble.
That trouble, started at Lorson, has spread clear across the country.
I've got Charleston, South Carolina, I've got Long Beach, California, I've got Marion,
Indiana, Atlanta, Georgia.
How do they get from A to B, how did a gun that was made here that was stolen directly
from the factory, how does that gun get to Chicago?
How does it get to short?
Guns kind of take on a life of their own.
There's a pattern here, Mr. Waldorf, a bunch of your guns are missing, it's not my fault.
Mr. Waldorf, your guns are used all the time in crime, it's not my fault.
These folks are looking for anybody else to take responsibility for the consequences of
their actions, it just doesn't fly.
I'm sorry, I don't buy that.
Guns don't go off by themselves, somebody pulls the trigger.
This illicit business of trafficking firearms is capitalism at its best.
Capitalism is all about return, the selling of goods for the highest return.
It is a business and people should know that, a thriving business, a very big business.
This was cheap guns for the taking, this was a great opportunity to exploit.
This defendant had a.380 Lawson and he said, Evelyn, Evelyn, and shot her, boom, in the
head.
Darryl McCrary's investigation sent four street gun dealers to prison, but so far the Justice
Department has issued no indictments against Lawson or its executives.
As the investigation continues into its third year, the ATF estimates the number of guns
missing from Lawson has now reached nearly 14,000.
Still interested, check out Frontline's website at this address.
How on target are you about the guns around us?
Take our guns quiz and find out or get a closer look at those junk guns and how they're rated.
Check out the best arguments on both sides about guns and gun control or read what it
feels like to be shot and much more at www.pbs.org.
Next time on Frontline, it's the new American dream.
For us, this is about people making money and the government and about politicians controlling
the system.
These guys are predators.
Why is the government even in the business of gambling?
How much do we all stand to lose?
Dream money, next time on Frontline.
Your comments about the Opium Kings, a story about the Burmese heroin trade, showed a range
of opinions on the drug war and America's role in the war.
Here's a sample.
Being the cocksure macho attitude of U.S. government officials in this program reminded
me of the toughness that led to the debacle in Vietnam or the fiasco at Waco.
Why is it that we always seem to back dictators like the Burmese junta?
While heroin is certainly a plague on our country, I would submit that the more dangerous
drug, especially in our policymaking offices, is testosterone.
Dear Frontline, it is utterly hypocritical for the American government to be persecuting
Kunsa when America itself is the biggest exporter of one of the deadliest drugs known to mankind.
American companies flood the world with cigarettes, which kill far more people than heroin.
Why go on this rampage against the poppy instead of tobacco?
Obviously it is because tobacco provides enormous profits to American business.
Dear Frontline, stopping Burmese opium production is a fool's game because there are millions
of square miles of territory suitable for growing poppies all over the world.
I am one of millions who are fed up with this brain-dead drug war, which causes so much
needless human misery worldwide.
There's no way to stop drug use, but if we legalize drugs, 95% of the troubles we have
with narcotics will vanish like a bad dream.
Robin Givens, San Francisco.
Let us know what you thought about tonight's program.
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