Oh? Do tell.
Oklahoma gun lawyer ordered to spend 15 weekends in jail for tax offense
- Thread starter Old Fart
- Start Date
Oh? Do tell.
It's a loooong story... 11 days of bank robbers in orange jump suits, Alabama pawn shops, a pointy toed boots/shiny cuff links defense attorney, secret closets, FBI agents, little old men stamping out Sten Mark II receivers in the Pennsylvania woods, late nights at the Red Dog and a hung jury, good times!
It was 9-2 with a wishy-washy lady who kept going back and forth, ended up 9-3. He barely made it. If it were left up to our "good old fashioned Oklahoma common sense" (prosecutor's words) he would have been convicted.
Basically, he had an FFL license and was supposed to be inspected at least once every 10 years. 10 years had gone by with no inspection so he got a surprise inspection one day. The ATF inspectors made a note that they couldn't find the serial # on his Sten MKII machine gun. 18 months later they raided his office and house saying he was in possession of a illegal class 3 firearm since, according to the inspection report, he had one without a serial #.
When they raided his place, he had one, with the correct serial number. However, it looked like a drunk child tried to stamp the # on there. They accused him of doing it himself in his work shop however the dies they confiscated from him and presented in the trial weren't even the same size/font as the stamped numbers on the gun.
It turns out, there was a guy in Pennsylvania who was cranking these receivers out as fast as he could in the 80's leading up to the 1984 ban. It was his retirement plan! He was going to stack them up and once the ban hit, the price would go way up and then he could sell them over the next few years and fill his bank account. The ban would prevent him from manufacturing them but he would still be able to sell whatever he had in stock.
He hired 7 temp workers and they were stamping the SNs on them as they came off the line. They would get stacked on shelves then holes drilled, slots cut, etc... and ultimately end up on the SN stamping table. So the result was a situation where back to back SNs could look completely different.
That is also why the ATF records were a little suspect. they had a couple of different documents that had duplicate SNs on them. But that really didn't have much to do with the result in the trial.
The bottom line for me was; he was registered to own a Sten MKII machine gun, when they inspected they found a Sten MKII machine gun and when they went back 18 months later to raid his place, they found a Sten MKII machine gun with the correct SN. I'm not convinced he was innocent but there wasn't enough to prove he had done anything wrong in my and one other juror's opinion. Had they found 2 Sten MKII machine guns, or a Sten MKII machine gun with a different SN he would have been found guilty. It was really as simple as that.
There was another charge; lying to a federal officer or something like that. When they raided his office, they asked him to show them where he stored his guns. He had a room with a safe that he didn't tell them about. His position was that he didn't store and didn't have any FFL guns in there so he wasn't required to tell them about it during the FFL inspection. They didn't present anything that disputed that as far as I was concerned so I was cool with it. It felt like that and one or two other charges were their attempt to just pile stuff on him...
lol, according to the 6'3 250lb bank robber with a scar across his cheek that they brought in in hand and ankle cuffs and an orange jumpsuit, he did keep it in his trunk!
I've read the transcript and tend to agree with you.
Edit: You left out the part of his witness that utterly destroyed the ATFs database credibility for that time period. Also you probably weren't privy to all the blatant stonewalling by the US Attorney and possibly the fact that they dropped a whole bunch of other charges. Or was all that in a subsequent trial? I forget.
We could tell there was a bunch of 'stuff' we weren't let in on... couldn't tell if it was relevant or what it was all about but definitely had the feeling there were things we didn't know. At the end of the day, I just looked at the charges wrt to the Sten MKII and viewed it the way I described above. I wouldn't be surprised if there is a lot more to the story than what we got but the case as presented didn't prove to me he had done anything wrong and the prosecution's case seemed like a bunch of smoke and mirrors. They spent way too much time on issues that didn't make sense or weren't relevant in the end. Tried to make little things look more incriminating than they were. The dies and ATF records for example.
There were a handful of charges but there was the illegal possession charge and then the rest were all related to what happened during the inspection(s).
He definitely didn't have it together, some of the guns were at his office, some were at his home, he wouldn't let them in one of the rooms at his office (said his co-worker was having a meeting in there and couldn't be interrupted) so they had to come back later in the afternoon, one of his silencers was "on loan" to an Edmond police officer (should have been on site), he couldn't find his log (found it later behind his safe), etc...
But those weren't the charges so...
The bolded part.
Yep. They should have charged him if they thought he did all that. But wait...most of that is not against any law! Damn! lol
The prosecutors tried to railroad him, there's just no other way to describe it. They were trying to cover up for the ATF's and their own incompetence over trivial bookkeeping stuff. They'd rather ruin a guys life and send him to prison than get a bad performance review in their file I guess...
Everything about Doug would make a good movie. He's one of those larger-than-life characters. On top of that he has a heart of gold.
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