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
NEW ORLEANS—For as long as Anthony Cannatella can remember, Elliot's Gun Shop has been a thorn in his side. A third-generation New Orleans cop, Cannatella, now deputy police chief, says he has traced more guns used in crimes back to the nondescript warehouse on Jefferson Highway than to any other business in the region. A criminal record, a mental illness, being underage—there sometimes seemed no barrier to getting a firearm from Elliot's, police say. Once, says Cannatella, Elliot's sold an AK-47 to a 65-year-old grandmother who later told police she bought it for her dead uncle.
So when federal agents shut down Elliot's in May, confiscating hundreds of rifles, pistols, and ammunition in one of their biggest raids, it came as at least a small victory in the fight against crime in one of the nation's most violent cities. Agents traced 2,300 crime guns to Elliot's—one of the highest such numbers in the country. "What we're doing is not gun control," says James Letten, U.S. attorney in New Orleans. "It's crime control."
Yet as impressive as it was, the raid on Elliot's was relatively rare, and replicating the operation in other cities is likely to prove difficult. While pressure from Justice Department officials in Washington has led to more cases against individuals who illegally obtain firearms, prosecutions of errant gun dealers are far more problematic. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives "is very underresourced to do this," says Daniel Webster, a professor of public policy at Johns Hopkins University. "And they have pretty lousy federal laws to hold gun dealers accountable."
Uphill battles. Going after gun dealers is indeed a tricky business. Investigators failed to close down Elliot's once before, and while prosecutors are confident in their case this time, the owners have denied the allegations. Lacking the means to inspect every dealer, the ATF usually targets only those with high trace numbers or repeat violations. A 2004 report by the Justice Department's inspector general found that the ATF's inspections of gun dealers were "infrequent and of inconsistent quality" and that when violations were found, agents often failed to follow up.
The agency has since made progress: Out of 7,000 compliance inspections last year, the agency revoked 115 licenses, compared with just 22 in 2002. But given the nation's 108,000 federal firearms licensees, that number is small. Police say they are hampered by restrictions on the release of trace data—the same information that helped the feds shut down Elliot's (box, Page 30).
Many criminals get their guns on the black market, of course—127 firearms stolen from a sporting goods store in New Orleans in January quickly fell into the hands of felons. But gun dealers play a significant role, as well. Data from about two dozen cities have shown that over half of all guns used in crimes came from only 1.2 percent of dealers.
A gun dealer is not necessarily at fault because a criminal bought a weapon from him; most guns change hands before they are used in crimes, and bigger dealers are more likely to have more guns traced back to them. Yet stores that make illegal sales tend to do so in large numbers. The ATF concluded in a 2000 report that dealers' "access to large numbers of firearms makes them a particular threat to public safety when they fail to comply with the law."
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.
This story appears in the July 23, 2007 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.