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Mike Detty, a one-time POLICE contributor, talks about "Guns Across the Border," a first-hand account of his involvement in an ATF "gun walking" operation that preceded Fast & Furious. As a firearms dealer, Detty sold guns to Mexican cartel operatives at the direction of ATF special agents in Arizona. Detty says he was motivated by patriotic duty, and betrayed by the agency he worked for. Show the Guns Across the Border Podcast Transcription: Paul: Hello, this is Paul Clinton with POLICE Magazine. This is themonthly author's podcast with books by and for cops. We have a veryinteresting book this month to discuss. It's called "Guns Across theBorder: How and Why the U.S. Government Smuggled Guns into Mexico: TheInside Story". It was written by Mike Detty. In the book, Mike chronicleshis experience as a federally licensed firearms dealer in the Tucson areaand his role in these gun-walking sting operations and the flooding of gunsto Mexico. Mike has been a contributor to POLICE Magazine. He's written somegreat firearm reviews over the years. His business isessentially selling rifles and other guns at gun shows inArizona. Mike, we're really pleased to have you on, and thanksfor joining us to talk about the book. Mike: Thanks, Paul. It's a pleasure to join you, and thank you forhaving me on. Paul: Talk about this book and how it came about. You found yourselfin the cross-hairs, so to speak, of a very ill-fated,eventually, federal gun operation. Talk a little bit about howyou got involved in this from the beginning and how this gotstarted. Mike: Sure. Historically, it is significant in that Operation WideReceiver, which was the case that I brought ATF into in 2006,eventually morphed into Operation Fast and Furious, about twoand a half years later. The way it started was, as youmentioned, I did gun shows for a living. I am an FFL holder, aFederal Firearms Licensee. I sell AR-15s at Arizona gun shows. I was approached by an individual who wanted to buy six AR-15 Lowersfrom me. The next day, he came back and he asked if I would havemore sometime later in the month. I told him I had another 20 onorder that I expected the next week. His answer to me was, "I'lltake them all." The sheer number that he wanted, and the fact that he was payingcash, and the fact that he was a young Hispanic kid, made mesuspicious right off the bat. That happened on a Sunday. Mondaymorning, I contacted my local ATF contact. He had me fax in thepaperwork, and the he called me back later in the day and askedme if I could come down the following day and spend some timetalking with him. That was really how Operation Wide Receiver began. There was a groupof young men in the Phoenix area that was buying AR-15 Lowers.They were sending them to somebody in San Diego who waspurchasing the top ends of the rifles, 10 inch, which of course,anything under 16 inch barrel length is illegal, but it didn'tmatter to them, because they were pretty mixed up in doingillegal stuff anyway. Anyhow, they would complete these firearms by pinning on a short topend, and then taking them across the border into Tijuana for theFelix Arellano Cartel. That was how Operation Wide Receiverstarted. It kind of went through some twists and turns, but bythe time were finished a year and a half had gone by. I thinkwe'd sold weapons to five different cartels. Paul: Before we get into the details of this, talk a little bit aboutwhere federal law enforcement was coming from and their goals inyour mind, or what they said to you about these operations.They've been termed "gun-walking operations" and I guess theseoperations would fall under this Project Gunrunner. What was theoriginal goal of this operation, as far as you understood? Mike: Project Gunrunner was a project to stem the flow of illegalguns into Mexico. It involved saturating the border states withmore ATF agents and more funding to prevent that from happening.Operation Wide Receiver, when I first got involved and theyfirst started looking at these characters I was selling to, andby the way, after that initial purchase, I didn't sell anythingto these people without prior knowledge of ATF and without themspecifically asking them to do this at their behest, to furtherthe investigation. I just want to make that clear. It wasn't asif I did something, and then, "Oh, I'd better let them know,"just so I don't get in trouble. Paul: I guess the idea is that, this has always been the case, thatthe drugs come from Mexico and the guns and the ammunition go toMexico. So the ATF and the federal government was becoming moreand more concerned about guns that cartel operators werepurchasing here in the border states and taking to Mexico to usein this violent cartel drug war, right? Mike: That's correct. That was correct. The first meeting that I hadwith these ATF people here in Tucson, I was told that I wouldhave a chance to help them take out a powerful drug cartel. I'msmart enough to know the implications of that. Paul: Yeah. That sounds good, actually. It sounds like a noble goal. Mike: Being a patriot, I was eager to help them. It just didn't turnout the way it was outlined to me. What happened to be the goal,we never came close to achieving that goal. If you read thebook, I think there was something far more insidious going onthan trying to take out a drug cartel. Paul: Part of, I think, at least what we've heard said publicly fromthe ATF, and obviously this was a huge scandal that resulted incongressional hearings, and of course the deaths of two federalagents, speaking of course of border patrol agent Brian Terry,and also ICE special agent Jamie Zapata. Guns that apparentlywere sold through these sting operations were found at both ofthose crime scenes. Mike: Correct. Paul: Right. Mike: All three of those guns were from Fast and Furious, althoughthere is nothing that would prove any of the guns from WideReceiver showing up at future crime scenes. We know that they'veshown up at crime scenes in Mexico. Fortunately, nothing hasbeen found here in the United States. Paul: The critique of the ATF through all this has been, why didn'tyou track the guns? Was there some goal early on to eitherattach some type a micro-tracker or microchip to the gun? Wasthere any effort early on by them to track these guns? Mike: No. I do mention in the book, it's been reported in mainstreampress that under President Bush things were done moreresponsibly. They tracked the guns they were working withMexican officials. That's hogwash. None of that's true. Therewas one attempt to put a tracking device in a rifle duringoperation receiver, and it failed miserably. It was neverfielded, it was never talked about again. The other thing, what I was told from the start, was that there wasongoing cooperation with the Mexican authorities and that ifthey didn't interdict the guns that at some point in time, theyknew where the guns were at, they were going to round them allup, or most of them. I mean, nothing is 100%. It was conveyed to me that the operation I was working wasmultinational, meaning that the Mexican authorities were onboard with it, and that this was how they were going to take outthis cartel. That just proved to never be true. The Inspector General's report that was issued last fall, it cites Ithink three different phone conversations during the three yearsI was involved with Operation Wide Receiver where they hadcontacted Mexican authorities, but there was never any ongoingcoordination. There was no commitment by Mexican authorities tofollow these guns anywhere into Mexico. In fact, none of themwere ever tracked. Paul: Wow. You mentioned that there were a couple of very interestinganecdotes in the book of failed attempts by these agents tofollow and/or arrest these straw purchases and the buyers whocame to you to purchase these guns. Mike: Sure. In fact, there was one event, I believe it was 50 .38Super Pistols that one of these guys bought one night. It wasATF's intention to have an air surveillance to follow these gunsto the load house, sit on the load house until they were loadedup in the load truck, and then follow them to Mexico so thatfrom the time those guns left my house, it really never lefttheir visual surveillance until they crossed the border. Thatwas very important to help them prove their case. In the book, I relay how this turned into a three-day surveillance.They sat outside a house for quite a while and were concernedthat they actually might have missed somebody going out the backdoor with the guns, because the original intent was for thoseguns to go very quickly, and it never happened. They did stay onthe house. Once they got into a car, they were able to followthem. They went down close to the border, and then on the Indianreservation, they drove in circles for three or four hours. WhenI asked one of the agents why somebody would do that he said,"These are experienced drug smugglers. They know what type ofaircraft we use for air surveillances." In their case, they werefortunate. They had a helicopter to back up while the DTS planewent and got refueled and then came back. They were never able to do much with that information. They know theguns crossed the border, but once they crossed the border, theydidn't have any idea what happened to them. Paul: Wow. Let's talk about your role in this, because it really isfascinating. Your book, I have to give you credit here, I mean,you've really written a detailed book, and you've included a lotof great details about how these went down. Talk a little bitabout how some of these transactions would work. You have abusiness and you are able to sell firearms out of your home.Talk a little bit about how this would work, how the cartelmembers would purchase the guns. You would kind of set a littleshowroom in your living room, right? Mike: Right, yeah. Being a divorced guy, I had a living room thatdidn't have a stick of furniture in it, so I used that space. Ihad guns set up. AR-15s and semi-auto AK-47s and 30 types ofpistols, and I would set them up. I wanted these guys toperceive that I had plenty of inventory, so I didn't just putone out of each one. I would put stacks and stacks of guns, andthen I'd leave one out of the box for them to look at and figureout what they wanted to buy. They would usually come late at night. When they were going to do apurchase, usually they would have a plastic grocery bag full ofcash. A lot of times, they didn't know how much money was inthat back, because somebody at the stash house would hand them abag and say, "Here, go buy as many guns as you can for thismoney." A large portion of every evening was spent just countingthat cash. In fact, it was after one event where one of these people tried toburn me for $5,000, I actually went out and bought a bank-quality money-counter. The first thing we would do when they gotthere was, we would count the money, and then they'd know howmuch money they had. Paul: I love that detail in the book. A lot of these guys would justgive you stacks of 5 and 10 dollar bills, and you would have tospend 45 minutes to an hour counting small bills. Right? Mike: Yeah. That was typical. There was one group out of Phoenixwhose ringleader was dyslexic, I think. He would always hand mehis money and have me count it. At first I thought it might be atest to see if I was being honest with him, because once I gotto the certain dollar amount, I would hand him back the rest ofthe money. It did in fact turn out to be, either he couldn'tcount, or was just so severely dyslexic, he couldn't count themoney himself. Paul: Talk about some of the characters. One of them I think came inwearing pink ostrich boots. Talk a little bit about who theseguys were. Mike: It was kind of a happenstance. In other words, we fell into ahornet's nest while we were just looking for a honeybee. Therewas one particular gentleman I was doing business with. He had acousin, a very distant cousin, in town. Her husband was infederal penitentiary for dealing dope. She would host thesebarbecues that she would invite other people in this trade tothese barbecues. It didn't matter what cartel or what familiathey were from. They were welcome guests there, but during thecourse of the barbecue she would tell them, "Hey, if your guysneed guns, I've got a hookup for you. Here's the deal. You justpay me a commission on every gun you buy, and that'll keep mehappy and I'll keep you hooked up with this guy with the guns." These people from those barbecues would accompany the original buyer.It just got crazy because there were so many people that wantedto come and buy guns. Paul: I'm sorry, so this is really your classic straw purchase,right? Mike: Yep. Paul: So they would fill out the paperwork for people who would bedenied on a background check, right? Mike: Right. These were all people that legally couldn't buy becausethey weren't citizens. The one guy that could, he ended up doinga lot of the paperwork himself. He was actually connected with acartel in Caborca that had been raised here in the United Statesand was a US citizen. He was doing a lot of the purchasing. Someof the other groups, they would bring people they knew that hadclean records that would do the purchasing for them. That's where all the charges, unfortunately, I mean, it's arelatively minor charge, for Operator Wide Receiver was forstraw purchasing. In other words, when they filled out thebackground check, they checked the box saying, "This firearm isfor personal use. I'm buying this gun for myself." That turnedout not to be true, and we know that because they took themacross the border and sold them down there. Paul: Yeah. What types of guns did they buy? We've heard that theylike these AK-47 or AK variants that had wire stocks. What kindof stuff did they buy? Mike: Those were probably the bulk of what they really wanted was thecheaper AKs. At the time, I was buying the Romanian imports.WASR was the model name. Some of them had underfolding stocks orside folding stocks or fixed stocks. At the time I want to say,I was selling them retail for under $400. That was the bulk ofwhat they bought. Then there were some other groups that wanted to have AR-15s and theywanted to have the good quality, the best quality I could find,but that wasn't the bulk. The majority of the stuff was AK-47rifles and pistols. Paul: Those were available fairly cheap for them, right? Like yousaid, you could get one for $400 or so? Mike: I was retailing them for $400, which meant that I probably mademaybe $100 on that transaction. Paul: Okay. And I guess they liked these Colt .38 Supers as well? Mike: The Colt .38 Supers weren't gun for fighting. They were gunsthat somebody would wear to kind of show almost their rank.There was one guy that as buying these for a cartel in I thinkit was Magdalena. The head guy would hand them out aspresentation pieces. In other words, you've done somethingreally valuable for me, or you've taken a great risk for me, andI'm going to rewards you with this status symbol. Paul: Okay. Mike: That's how those were used, but like I said, they bought thosein quantity with one guy buying 50 when he'd need from me. Paul: Yeah. You worked, really, as you describe in the book, as anundercover operative with the ATF, kind of almost dictatingevery step of the way, right? Mike: Yeah. Like I said before, there was nothing that I did on myown. There were very few, rare instances where somebody calledme on the phone and I'd have to make a quick decision. Trying tothink of what ATF would want me to do. Usually I would beg offand say, "Listen, I can…
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