How To Get Guns In Chicago Roleplay
John Thomas set up the deal the style he had arranged nearly ii dozen others. A friend said he wanted to buy as many guns as he could, then Thomas got in impact with someone he knew who had guns to sell.
The three of them met in the parking lot of an LA Fitness in south suburban Lansing at noon on Aug. vi, 2014. Larry McIntosh, whom Thomas had met in his Southward Shore neighborhood, took two semi-automatic rifles and a shotgun from his auto and put them in the buyer'due south car. He handed over a plastic shopping bag with iv handguns.
None of the weapons had been acquired legally — two, in fact, had been reported stolen — and none of the men was a licensed firearms dealer.
Thomas' friend, Yousef, paid McIntosh $vii,200 for the seven guns. He e'er paid well.
Thomas did piddling but watch the exchange, but he got his usual broker'south fee of $100 per gun, $700 total. Information technology was "the most money I've seen or made," he recalled — his biggest deal yet.
It was besides his last.
Amid Chicago's ongoing epidemic of gun violence — with nearly 500 people killed in shootings and more than than ii,800 wounded this yr through September — the availability of guns has been blamed as a root cause and become a defining political and public safety issue.
City constabulary have seized near 7,000 illegal firearms so far in 2017 and federal government have stepped up efforts to have down dealers.
All the same, it's by no means articulate that targeting those similar John Thomas makes a real difference.
Most of the guns police seize come from Indiana and other states where firearms laws are more lax, police and researchers have institute. After they were purchased legally, nearly were sold or loaned or stolen. Typically, individuals or small-scale groups are involved in the dealing, not organized trafficking rings, experts say.
Different the drug trade — often dominated by powerful cartels or gangs — illegal gun markets operate more like the way teenagers get beer, "where every developed is potentially a source," said Philip Cook, a researcher at the University of Chicago Crime Lab who's as well a Duke University professor.
Under force per unit area to respond to the violence, law enforcement has focused on making examples of people caught selling, buying or possessing guns. But government acknowledge that these cases do little to stem the period of guns into the city.
"Yous are a single salmon swimming upstream at Niagara Falls," said Anthony Guglielmi, a spokesman for the Chicago Police Department. "If your policing strategy is to decrease the number of guns in your city, good luck, because there are likewise many guns out at that place. It's ameliorate to go later the person with the gun."
An in-depth examination of Thomas' case — based on constabulary reports, court records and interviews, including a series of conversations with Thomas — shows how authorities target more often than not street-level offenders, sometimes enticing them with outsized payoffs. In this and other cases, critics say their techniques enhance questions of whether they are dismantling gun networks or effectively helping to set them up.
"You take this specter of whether information technology'southward creating criminal offense, which is troubling to a lot of people," said Katharine Tinto, a professor at the Academy of California Irvine Schoolhouse of Police who has studied the investigative tactics of the U.S. Bureau of Booze, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. "It'southward not equally if yous're trying to get someone you know is a tearing gun offender. Yous're going later someone and purposely trying to entice them into doing a felony."
A Natural Salesman
At 33, John Thomas has a charming smile that sometimes displays his chipped forepart tooth. His mother's name, Val, is tattooed on his left forearm — a tribute to her for bringing him into the globe, though he said he could never count on her. His girl's name, Jataviyona, is tattooed on his right shoulder.
Fifty-fifty as a child, Thomas was a natural salesman, quick with a hustle.
"That'due south my gift, I guess — to sell," he said.
He grew up in the part of Southward Shore known as "Terror Town." A brusk walk from a popular Lake Michigan beach, information technology's long been a mix of center-class homeowners and lower-income renters, with bungalows, condominiums and multi-unit of measurement flat buildings on tree-lined streets.
By the time Thomas was growing up in the 1980s and 1990s, the neighborhood was struggling. Many white homeowners and merchants had fled later African-Americans moved in. Thousands of people in South Shore and surrounding communities lost their jobs when the nearby steel mills closed. When the scissure epidemic hit in the early 1990s, gang violence soared.
Thomas' father wasn't around, and his female parent struggled with addiction, co-ordinate to Thomas and a younger sister, Sade Thomas-Adams. With five other siblings, Thomas was raised by an aunt and uncle he considered his parents.
Thomas' uncle was a pastor, and the family unit spent a lot of time at church, giving him a lifelong religion. During the week, the kids were told to focus on their studies and come abode right later school to avoid the dangers of gangs and drugs. Thomas and some of his siblings chafed at those rules, though, escaping from the business firm to hang out with friends, drink and smoke marijuana.
"They had their foot in both worlds — the church and the street," said Thomas-Adams.
Thomas developed his first hustle while in grammar school, he said. He and his friends would offer to assist shoppers with their bags and carts outside an Aldi supermarket. He learned he could talk to people and earn tips.
Thomas graduated to other ways of making coin. First, he said, he sold baggies of fake marijuana. Eventually, neighborhood dealers set him up with real drugs.
In November 2001, when he was 17, Thomas was arrested for selling $20 worth of crack cocaine to an hole-and-corner police officeholder, and was convicted and given probation. The incident was one in a long string of cases, including a 2005 gun possession conviction.
Subsequently that, Thomas began to sell marijuana and developed a successful promotional strategy. When customers bought a nickel bag — a pocket-size quantity for $5 — he gave them another for free. "Two for v," was how he marketed information technology. His profits, he said, came from book.
"Everybody wanted information technology," he said.
When he was xx, Thomas began to hang around a new neighborhood store so much the family who ran it offered him a chore. One time again, he put his people skills to work. The store sold knockoff gym shoes, merely some people didn't want to come up there because it would mean crossing gang lines.
"And then I'chiliad taking the shoes to them," Thomas said. "I'grand selling them shoes left and right."
Gang violence was a stubborn trouble in the neighborhood, and moved ever closer to Thomas. At xvi, he said he witnessed a fatal shooting. At 18, an acquaintance killed one of Thomas' friends. So, at 22, his best friend from babyhood was gunned down.
Thomas said he tried to steer clear of guns.
"I know what they have done to people," he said.
A New Friend, and an Opportunity
In late 2013, Thomas was desperate. Then 29, he was a new father and the master flagman of his girl, and trying to leave criminal life behind. For several years, he'd worked low-paying jobs at restaurants, grocery stores and an uncle's construction concern, but he struggled to pay his rent. Equally a convicted felon, options were limited.
Then, he met Yousef.
Thomas had taken a job at a tobacco shop in the Beverly neighborhood, making $25 a day, he said. There, he hit information technology off with one of the guys who hung around the store. Yousef was in his 20s and, like Thomas, joked a lot. They started smoking marijuana together. Thomas said Yousef — who, through his lawyer, declined to comment — knew he was broke. Yousef told Thomas he could help — if Thomas helped him.
"He comes in and asks me about guns," Thomas said. "I said that where I'g from, we don't sell guns."
But Thomas said Yousef kept bringing it up. At some bespeak, he said, Yousef told him he knew a businessman named Pops who could give Thomas a existent chore if he helped them.
What finally persuaded Thomas, he said, was the dollar-shop diapers he'd been ownership for his girl: They sometimes gave his daughter hives. He saw the diapers every bit a sign he was stuck, and his daughter was paying for it.
"It was just hard," he said. "Too hard."
Thomas made his beginning call — to one of his cousins — in January 2014. Steven Thomas, 38, had served fourth dimension for attempted murder in his early 20s, court records show. At present, he was trying to rebuild his life. After earning an associate'south caste in prison, he was working to support his family and taking classes to become a massage therapist.
Thomas asked if his cousin knew anyone with guns to sell.
"The first matter he asked me was, 'Is everything OK?'" John Thomas recalled.
He said his cousin wasn't certain at first just called back the side by side day: He'd come with a couple of guns. John Thomas got in bear on with Yousef and introduced him to his cousin at the tobacco shop. He said they went to the dorsum of the shop, and when his cousin left a few minutes later, Yousef paid John Thomas $200 for arranging the deal.
"Just for a call," Thomas said. "I didn't even have to do nothing."
Thomas, giddy, said he used the money to purchase food, baby formula and amend diapers.
What Thomas didn't know was that Yousef had paid Steven Thomas $400 for a Glock 9mm pistol — and then immediately resold the gun for $800, court records show. Even later on he paid Thomas, Yousef made a quick $200.
Everyone seemed to come up out ahead. So the next day, the three men did information technology all again. Thomas talked with his cousin, who then sold ii guns to Yousef, and Thomas made $100. Yousef so sold the guns to Pops for $one,600, twice what he'd just paid for them.
To Thomas, it was easy money — money he needed.
Alarm Signs
Thomas didn't know, even so, that Yousef was existence watched by federal agents.
In January 2014, shortly before Yousef approached Thomas, the ATF had launched an initiative in Chicago to "attack trigger-happy crime associated with illegal firearms and narcotics." As part of that effort, the ATF called on a longtime informant.
"Confidential Informant ane," every bit he was identified by federal prosecutors, is non named in court records. He had worked for the government for nearly a decade, since being indicted for fraud and agreeing to cooperate. Gray-haired and squat, the informant posed as a businessman who wanted to buy weapons he could sell overseas, according to underground ATF recordings and court records.
One of the people he approached about getting guns was Yousef. Authorities have not said why they targeted Yousef and why the informant's cover story involved selling guns overseas.
Through a spokeswoman, the ATF declined comment.
In January and February 2014, Yousef met with the informant, whom he knew as Pops, eight times for deals that involved 13 guns, according to court records. Some of those deals involved guns Thomas helped Yousef purchase from Thomas' cousin, the records show.
That March, ATF agents confronted Yousef: With Pops' help, they had been monitoring his gun deals. Yousef faced the possibility of going to prison house for unlicensed gun dealing. Or he could piece of work for the authorities.
Yousef agreed to cooperate. In court records, he became "CI-3," and has not been identified by final name in Thomas' instance. From March to July 2014, the government paid Yousef a total of $6,380 for "living and operational expenses" in add-on to the money he used to buy the guns, court records show.
Yousef got to work lining up more gun deals, continuing to use Thomas as his chief, but not only, middleman. Afterward his cousin, Thomas brought in an onetime friend: Anthony Logan, whom everyone called Ophidian. Thomas told Logan he knew someone who often overpaid for guns.
In the spring and summer of 2014, Thomas, Yousef and Pops did several deals with Logan, who introduced them to other friends. When those sources dried upwards, Thomas arranged quick exchanges in an alley with people he didn't know himself. There were handoffs in parking lots and a trip to Gary, Indiana, where the deal nearly unraveled and Thomas, hoping to salve it, wandered the streets until he constitute the seller.
After each sale, Yousef met with ATF agents and turned over the guns and recording equipment he had secretly been wearing, co-ordinate to court records.
As the money kept coming in, Thomas overlooked warning signs. I seller fifty-fifty tried to tell him he might be dealing with informants.
"My people are leery about you all," Thomas told Yousef after talking with a gun source in the south suburbs, according to an ATF study. "They say you all the feds."
Yousef vowed that he wouldn't do any more business with that supplier.
Still, Yousef seemed willing to buy anything. While some of the deals produced semi-automatic rifles and high-powered handguns, he as well bought guns that were rusty or missing parts. On 1 occasion, Thomas even got Yousef to pay $700 for what turned out to be a BB gun — another alarm sign Thomas ignored.
'I Ain't Been Doing Nix.'
That summer, as politicians struggled to deal with violence in the urban center, Mayor Rahm Emanuel appealed to the Obama assistants for assistance getting guns off the street. The ATF responded by announcing information technology was sending vii boosted agents to Chicago.
At the aforementioned time, the number of sales Thomas had brokered passed xx, and he had to expand his sources to continue producing guns. He reached out to Larry McIntosh, the friend of a friend from the neighborhood.
McIntosh proved to exist a consistent source. He sold Yousef more than 2 dozen guns in the summertime of 2014 and promised even bigger deals through a connexion in Indiana.
That August, he offered a package of at least 14 guns. Yousef and Thomas were set to brand the buy on Aug. 26, according to ATF records. Just Thomas said Yousef called him at abode that morning and asked if they could meet for breakfast to talk about a job offering from Pops. Wearing a favorite Blackhawks shirt and squeamish jeans, Thomas stepped exterior.
"Information technology was, like, five in the morning," Thomas recalled. "I see a greyness PT Cruiser [with] a white lady, she's got a calculator, and I'thou thinking, what is she doing in this neighborhood at this fourth dimension of the morning? I wait on my left, and I meet a gray van, and at that place'south some white guys in it, and I say, 'Whoa, whoa, this is non right.'"
Moments later, 1 of his uncles arrived to give Thomas a ride, and they left. They had gone but a few blocks when law lights flashed behind them. Thomas was whisked to an ATF facility, where he was read his rights and questioned by ii agents, co-ordinate to the ATF's video of the interrogation.
The agents told him he would be charged with being a felon in possession of a firearm.
"Me personally, I ain't been doing zilch," Thomas protested.
The agent leading the questioning showed Thomas a moving picture. "There'due south you, holding a gun."
Later a long pause, Thomas said, "I didn't buy nothing."
"You didn't accept to buy anything," the agent said. "We have you on video, holding guns. Y'all set up all the deals."
Thomas wanted to know if Yousef had been working with agents from the offset.
One of the agents said no but encouraged Thomas to get an informant. Thomas refused.
'Similar Buying a Pack of Cigarettes'
The next day, the U.Due south. attorney'south office in Chicago announced 14 arrests on federal charges of illegally possessing or selling guns. Thomas was listed equally the meridian defendant, followed by 13 other men involved in the deals with Yousef, including Logan, McIntosh and Steven Thomas.
If officials knew the original sources for the guns, they were non named in the courtroom records.
In 2015, ane at a time, the men entered guilty pleas. McIntosh — who ii decades earlier was convicted of involuntary manslaughter afterwards he accidentally shot a woman in the head — was sentenced to 10 years in prison. Logan got eight years and four months. The others received betwixt 18 months and 8 years.
In every case, prosecutors noted the gun violence battering Chicago and called for sentences long plenty to send a message.
A Letter From Prison house:
Wesley Pickett is serving viii years in prison house for helping Yousef buy guns. Pickett recently wrote ProPublica Illinois Reporter Mick Dumke a letter sharing his story, as excerpted below. Read the full letter of the alphabet.
Many of the defendants, through their lawyers, insisted they had never sold guns until Yousef started offering to purchase them.
"The government is non seeking to abort those who are unlawfully selling weapons just effectively making gun dealers out of street level hustlers past paying 3 and 4 times the street value of guns," Ralph Schindler Jr., who represented Logan, said in a court filing.
The ATF's tactics are, in some ways, similar to how federal authorities boxing other issues. With political abuse, they accept used cooperating witnesses to offer bribes to elected officials. Fighting terrorism, they have contacted and enticed disaffected young men to discuss possible plots. Whether any of those targets would have acted without prodding is hotly debated following an abort.
The ATF spokeswoman would not hash out the agency's broader strategies.
"We attempt to hit the top people as much as we tin," said a federal law enforcement official who spoke on condition of anonymity. "They're tough cases to prove. If nosotros can get them on one gun, nosotros tin get them off the street."
Wesley Pickett, who is serving eight years for helping Yousef buy guns, admits he was wrong to get involved. But he argues that putting people similar him in prison volition not stem the flow of weapons.
"Getting a gun in the metropolis," he said in a alphabetic character from a federal prison in Pennsylvania, "is like buying a pack of cigarettes at a gas station."
Facing Prison
Yousef, likewise, pleaded guilty to unlicensed firearms dealing. He has not yet been sentenced.
After 3 months in jail following his arrest, Thomas made bond and, in spite of his pending example, got a job every bit a stocker at a Family unit Dollar store in Englewood. Within the twelvemonth, he was promoted to manager.
Thomas blames himself for going later the money in the gun deals. But he doesn't believe he played a role in Chicago'southward gun violence. Though he is streetwise from years running his hustles, he said he believed Yousef'south claims that the guns weren't headed for the streets. In time, Thomas said he stopped thinking most what was happening to the guns.
"Honestly, afterwards a while, once [Yousef] told me that, I didn't really care no more," he said. "I only knew that my daughter was straight."
Equally it turned out, the guns never got back to the street. The ATF bought or collected all of the guns Yousef purchased through Thomas.
In March, Thomas pleaded guilty to two counts of existence a felon in possession of a firearm and 1 count of unlicensed firearm dealing. Prosecutors said that, over the course of seven months, he brokered 23 transactions involving 77 guns.
He faced 25 years in prison.
In August, Thomas went before U.S. Commune Court Judge Andrea Woods to be sentenced. Wearing a tan conform, tan shirt and bluish tie, Thomas was accompanied by his daughter, the aunt who raised him, other family members and his pastor. At one point in the sentencing, he wept.
Nicole Kim, the federal prosecutor, gave him credit for working and caring for his daughter, then 4, but argued that a message should be sent that "if you need extra coin, if you demand a task, this is not OK."
"He's not proud of what he did," said Heather Winslow, Thomas' attorney. "Just absent the influence of the government's buy money, this criminal offence would not take happened."
Given the chance to speak, Thomas became emotional.
"People brand mistakes, and I did," he said. "I'm not a gun salesman."
The judge noted that the government played a role in every deal for which Thomas was being sentenced. But, in spite of the government'due south involvement, she told him he should have said no.
"Information technology is difficult in some ways to reconcile the responsible worker and father I've seen in my courtroom with the person who would be willing to motility 77 firearms," Forest said.
The sentence: vii years in prison. She allowed Thomas to spend several weeks with his daughter before beginning his judgement.
On Oct. ix, he reported to a medium-security federal prison in central Illinois.
WBEZ Chicago's Joe DeCeault contributed to this story.
Source: https://www.propublica.org/article/how-chicago-gets-its-guns
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