A Well-Worn Path to a Gun Shop Door
The ATF busts a New Orleans dealer, but replicating the success elsewhere won't be easy
Prosecutors put Elliot's squarely in that category. Along a highway ramp, the shop is just 20 minutes from some of New Orleans's roughest neighborhoods. Timothy Harris opened the shop in 1990, and it wasn't long before police started tracing illegal sales back to his store. Harris didn't seem too concerned. "Business has increased steadily," he told a reporter in 1997. "The more crime there is in New Orleans, the more guns we sell."
But that pattern bothered police. In 2003, Cannatella got a call about a woman whose boyfriend had been beating her. The man, Lawrence Youngblood, had locked the woman out of their house and threatened to fire an AK-47 at anyone who came near. For almost six hours, a SWAT team tried to coax Youngblood out. When they finally broke in, they found him barricaded in a bathroom. Inside the toilet tank was a Glock Model 22 pistol that he had used to shoot at two agents the night before. As a felon, Youngblood should never have been able to purchase the guns. But he did, with the help of his girlfriend and sister, whom he took to Elliot's to buy them.
Cannatella referred Elliot's to the ATF; he even stationed a police car out front. But it wasn't until February 2005 that the ATF revoked the store's license for inspection violations. By May, however, the shop had reopened under the ownership of alleged frontman Herman Eicke, an employee arrested in this year's raid. Even Hurricane Katrina didn't hurt: Because Wal-Mart and other stores stopped selling handguns, Elliot's business only increased.
But then another employee decided to talk, and agents toughened their case. According to court documents filed by prosecutors, Elliot's operated something like this: Using the names of police officers who once bought a gun there, Elliot's purchased Glock pistols from a New York wholesaler at a 20 percent discount meant only for law enforcement. Then it sold the guns at regular cost, for a bigger profit.
Investigators allege the store turned a blind eye to straw purchases, like the one that allowed Youngblood to get a gun. Court documents say that undercover agents made such a purchase from Elliot's at a gun show; the employee didn't hesitate to complete the sale, the documents say, even when a colleague warned that it might be a straw purchase.
Not far from Elliot's, retired police officer Charles Donovan runs his own gun store. He thinks closing down Elliot's was a good thing. Harris, says Donovan, "had exclusive clientele that would go to him because it was no questions asked." But the fallout is hardly over. Recently, a felon with an AK-47 allegedly shot three people driving by his home in Central City. The gun? From Elliot's.
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