How Dealer Lured Small-Town Police Into Gunrunning Operation

James Sawyer, the police chief and only officer in Ray, N.D., spent his days waiting to catch the occasional driver going over the 25 mph speed limit in his farm town of 700 residents. Sawyer got a strange request. d Larry Vickers, who held firearms-tactics training sessions for law enforcement, needed a favor: Could Sawyer help him import a machine gun into the U.S.? All he had to do was tell the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives saying his one-man department was interested in buying the highly restricted weapon, reports the Wall Street Journal. .Sawyer went on to write letters saying his department was possibly interested in buying 73 different firearms, including machine guns and short-barreled rifles, prosecutors allege. He never saw the guns. The letters allowed Vickers to keep or sell them. 

Federal prosecutors in Maryland last October said that a grand jury indicted Sawyer, Vickers and others for conspiracy to acquire machine guns illegally. Prosecutors allege that dealers and police officials from around the U.S. worked together to import numerous heavily regulated weapons illegally. The sprawling gunrunning operation has entangled a former Homeland Security analyst and the former sheriff of New Mexico's most populous county. Vickers shocked his fans by pleading guilty in October to participating in the gun-import operation. Sawyer resigned from his post before he was charged. The federal government imposed restrictions on machine guns—which fire continuously with one trigger pull—and short-barreled rifles in 1934 to crack down on their use by gangsters and bootleggers. Anyone wanting to buy one had to register it with the U.S. and pay a tax.