Smugglers from other countries can buy almost all of the American-made parts they need to make assault weapons that can’t be tracked online. Now, criminal groups in Latin America are often better armed than the police who roam the ganglands.
Police say that Teodoro Giovan de Oliveira and a gunrunner met near the entrance of a fishing gear shop on an unusually cool Miami afternoon to plan their next big deal.
A police document from December 2017 shows that Oliveira had been hiding for months after a rival in the illegal weapons trade from Florida to Brazil was caught. This was because the competitor was scared. His customers couldn’t wait any longer. As planes flew over on their way to Miami International Airport, Oliveira told his partner, a drug dealer who had become a government informant, how he planned to ship assault rifles without getting caught like his rival: he would ship everything in pieces.
Oliveira said this week in a phone chat that he had never been involved with gun trafficking. But the summary and accusations from Brazilian officials make him look like he was one of the first people to do something new in the world of drug trafficking. Criminals in several South American countries are selling gun parts instead of whole guns. They are taking advantage of a trend among gun fans in the US who put together AR-15-style weapons from a wide range of easily accessible parts. They are also taking advantage of a legal hole that only exists in the US: buying most of these items is not at all restricted within the country’s borders.
Oliveira would have had to go to a licensed gun shop and pass an FBI background check in order to buy a full AR-15. But to make one, all he had to do was buy almost all the parts online and have them sent anywhere in the US. International crime groups can buy a lot of gun parts legally because there aren’t any rules that stop them. Police files show that Oliveira and others have sent parts to a holiday rental or even a Comfort Inn in Orlando. Everything is allowed as long as the parts aren’t taken out of the country illegally.
“You can’t just go online and buy pieces like this anywhere else in the world,” a Paraguayan gun importer told the newspaper El Ti �mpo. He asked not to be named because he was talking about the illegal gun trade. “Those who are interested in this stuff know the rules inside and out.”
The only part that’s controlled by those rules is the lower barrel, which is a 4-by-8-inch piece of metal that holds the gun together. The maker must stamp it with their name and a serial number, and the buyer must pass a background check.
International criminals are replacing high-quality lower receivers with ones made of hardened plastic that can’t be tracked or ones made for air guns. This is shown by the fact that police have recently seized more and more of these lower receivers in South America and the Caribbean. Some of them have been able to work in the US for years without being caught. People who do this often get away with it when they are caught.
Some of the biggest and most violent criminal groups in the world, like Brazil’s PCC and Red Command, get most of their assault weapons from people who steal them in this way. Authorities say they also sell to drug gangs in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Colombia. The dangerous weapons that people make themselves have a name in Brazil: Frankenstein guns.
This year, Bloomberg News did a story on how the federal government has helped US gunmakers increase the number of guns they legally send to countries that aren’t ready to handle the extra guns. Weak US rules on this market are making some of the world’s most dangerous places even more dangerous. This is shown by the growing business of gun parts.
The head of a gang that was accused of killing 40 police officers and public safety agents was killed in a firefight near Rio in March, and 13 assault rifles were found nearby. The guns that were taken away were sent to Cidade da PolÃcia, also known as “Police City,” which is a huge police station at the point where three favelas meet. There, forensics experts looked for serial numbers but couldn’t find any.
Some of the guns were AR-10s, which are heavier versions of the AR-15 and can go through bulletproof glass and body armor. The forensics report said, “Based on past experience and the complete lack of markings, it’s likely that the seized weapon was made by organized crime using generic parts mainly from the United States.”
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There’s no sign that any US sellers or manufacturers of parts are aware that their goods are being brought into the US illegally by criminals.
The US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives sends agents to Rio every few years to teach police how to handle trace requests. Traces use serial numbers to help police figure out where in the supply chain a gun got stolen and given to crooks. Rodrigo Barros, who was in charge of the weapons forensics unit at the time the spies last went there in August, gave them some straight information.
“I told them, “Look, your system can track these guns when you have whole weapons.” “But that’s not what we’re up against now,” Barros said in an interview. “They didn’t really know what we should do.” Their answer was that it wasn’t just in Rio. Not just Brazil. It’s all over.”
The AR-15 was designed as a military rifle by a company called ArmaLite in the late 1950s. It was made up of dozens of parts that could be swapped out, which made it easy for soldiers with little training to take apart, clean, and replace parts. That greatly extended the rifle’s useful life in the field.
After the killings of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy in 1968, when the Gun Control Act was passed, it was also hard to do. The new law, which was the first of its kind in decades, said that every gun sold in the US had to have a part with the manufacturer’s name and a serial number etched on it. Like the frame of a gun, but like the barrel of a gun.
“The ATF had to pick a part of each gun to see if that part was either the frame or the receiver of that gun,” said Mark Collins, who is in charge of government policy at the advocacy group Brady: United Against Gun Violence. There is a beautiful faceplate on the lower barrel of an AR-15 and many other rifles that are based on its design that makes it easy to engrave serial numbers and other data.
But controlling the AR-15 only through its lower receiver was never going to work well. The gun has two receivers, an upper and a lower one. The firing pin is in the upper receiver. The trigger and hammer are inside the lower barrel, but you can buy them separately as parts, and you don’t even need a background check. The receiver’s case can be made with 3D printers or machining tools, or it can be replaced with an air gun part that seems safe.
When the US ban on assault weapons ended in 2004, gun owners could put together, change, and improve the rifle in their own workshops thanks to its modular design. Gunmakers started advertising the AR-15 as a do-it-yourself rifle. Handguards, triggers, and stocks can now be bought in a range of styles and colors. Gun parts are made in thousands of plants across the country on computerized milling machines about the size of a small SUV and then sold online.
Even well-known companies that make things have changed how they do business. Anderson Manufacturing, based in Hebron, Kentucky, makes a famous but not very expensive AR-15. It’s called “the poor man’s pony” because it’s thought to be almost as good as Colt’s, and both companies use horses as a logo. Federal records show that Anderson made more than 453,000 finished rifles but no receivers for sale individually in 2016. After four years, the company only made 22,500 full guns but 440,000 receivers.
Some illegal groups like the dependability of lower receivers that were made by professionals, and traffickers are happy to supply them. Hidden receivers have been found in shipping bins, packages, and even cereal boxes. Lower receivers made by Anderson have been found in large amounts in recent seizures in Chile and Ecuador. They were found both as smuggled parts and put together in high-powered rifles that were going to drug gangs.
A spokeswoman for Anderson who wouldn’t give his full name said, “We want to make it clear that we don’t make anything with bad intentions.” “To make sure our parts don’t get into the wrong hands, we follow US rules and work closely with the ATF.” It will happen because of something further down the line if that does happen.
Assault weapons weren’t very popular in stores when the 1968 law was made. In the past ten years, the market for do-it-yourself gun parts has grown quickly. Gun part makers have gone to court to keep the legal gap open. Some, like EP Armory in Texas, say on their websites that their goods can be used to get around current gun laws.
Concerns about public safety led the Justice Department to change the meaning of “firearm” last year. This made it clear that parts kits meant to make “functional weapons” are subject to the same federal laws as regular guns, according to Kristina Mastropasqua, a spokesperson for the ATF. Still, parts kits that don’t come with the lower barrel aren’t controlled, even though they’re meant to be put together with a working gun.
Elvis Corrales, a special agent for Homeland Security Investigations in Miami, knows more than most about what this regulatory plan will mean for people. It is Corrales’s specialty to stop the illegal shipping of secret US technology to other countries, like computer chips and airplane parts. This is called “counter proliferation.”
It’s just easy to get to,” Corrales said about gun parts. “There are a lot of companies online that sell these parts,” he said. He said that gun theft makes up 80% of his work in Miami.
It became very common for armed groups in South and Central America to smuggle guns straight from the US six years ago, instead of paying police and military officials to divert guns in their own countries. At first, the cases were about hiding whole guns. Soon, though, the criminals learned how easy it was to get parts for assault rifles and sneak them into the US in small packages sent by commercial freight carriers, through the mail, or even in the luggage of friends who were coming on tourist visas.
In October 2018, an inspector at an international mail center near Miami got lucky while looking through two packages going to Argentina that were marked as used sports equipment. There were enough barrels, bolt carriers, pistol grips, gas tubes, and trigger kits inside to make more than twenty AR-15 assault rifles.
In the end, that one package led police to a huge network of trafficking that included the US, Argentina, Paraguay, and Brazil. In an operation code-named Patagonia Express, Homeland Security officers worked with Argentine police to find it over the next year. Authorities say the guns were put together in secret labs in and around Buenos Aires and then brought into Paraguay in a military van that the traffickers bought at an auction.
The PCC, one of the biggest crime groups in the world, was in charge of the smuggling. There were times when members got exactly what they needed online and then had the parts sent to Brazilians living in Florida. In June 2019, Corrales flew to Argentina and went with agents on raids that took place at 50 different sites and seized enough guns to fill an armory.
It was the biggest capture of weapons in Argentine history. An anonymous Argentine official agreed that the case was a success, but they also said that by the time the first shipment was found, parts for hundreds of rifles had already gotten through. “This also shows how badly things are going.”
It takes about two hours and 65 to 100 parts to put together an AR-15 that works. Ronnie Lessa learned how to do it by looking at online plans and watching videos on YouTube. Lessa, a former Rio police sergeant and convicted arms dealer, used his smartphone to look for parts almost every day on US websites, according to a police investigation of his online activity that included purchase orders.
He used the payment site Shopify to buy rail clamps for scopes and had them sent to an Atlanta brick home where a young relative was living with a family that took in international students. He used Shipito, a service that lets people from outside of the US rent a US billing address, to buy IMI Defense folding stock adapters from Rguns.net, an online store in Illinois.
He also got a lot of upper receivers from American Tactical in South Carolina and had them sent to a Comfort Inn in Orlando, a fake name in Miami, and an adobe-style home in Pompano Beach, Florida. The house in question is right next door to Oliveira, and Homeland Security agents had already been keeping an eye on that person.
No one knew until Lessa is accused of killing a Rio councilwoman and her driver in a drive-by shooting in March 2018. The crime-filled city was shocked.
After a year, Brazilian police arrested Lessa and searched two properties in his name. The searches turned up gunsmithing tools and parts for 117 assault weapons, according to investigative files that included a list of what was found. Police think the murder weapon was dumped in the ocean because it wasn’t there. However, a 9mm submachine gun was used to fire the bullets that hit Councilwoman Marielle Franco in the cheek, eyebrow, ear, and head.
Lessa is in a Brazilian jail for at least 13 years because he trafficked weapons and destroyed evidence. He is waiting for the end of his trial for killing Franco. His lawyers say he’s not guilty and that he was at a bar when the crime happened.
According to Andrei Serbin Pont, a researcher based in Buenos Aires who looks at news stories and social media posts to map the trend, illegal workshops like the one Lessa was running in a dirty apartment that didn’t have a stove or fridge are popping up all over Latin America. These workshops are like cells in a huge system that’s now making thousands of assault rifles every year. Serbin Pont said that guns made by a group that puts a skull on their do-it-yourself assault rifles have been seized lately in Brazil, Paraguay, and Bolivia. Guns like these have been taken from criminal groups and gangs in Venezuela, Ecuador, Colombia, and Haiti.
Serbin Pont, president of the CRIES think tank in Spain, said in late November, “I was going through my Twitter list for Brazil today and all the rifles seized in the last 72 hours were AR rifles put together from parts.” “These groups that traffic people have become very good at what they do.”
A lot of gun parts from the US are now showing up in these countries’ news stories. In the US, even the most important gun control groups don’t know that parts are becoming more and more important in trafficking. Bloomberg looked at almost 7,000 pages of papers related to 10 investigations into parts smuggling between the US and South America. These papers included the ones linked to the cases against Lessa and Oliveira. When put together, the papers show that members of foreign cartels and criminal gangs are settling down in the US and then buying parts openly and smuggling them back home. Cases where guns could mean the difference between life and death in the places they are going are not always a top concern for federal prosecutors in the US, information from those cases shows.
At least five letters sent by the US police force to its colleague in Brazil show that Homeland Security continued to give information about Oliveira and two of his partners in Florida to that police force in 2019 and 2020. This person, João Marcelo Lopes, had already been caught and pleaded guilty to smuggling guns in Fort Lauderdale in 2016. Police in Brazil think that he started sending gun parts back to Brazil almost as soon as he got out of jail the next year.
Brazil’s government says Oliveira’s group brought hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of parts out of Miami illegally by air and sea. It was easy to hide rifle barrels, bolt carriers, triggers, and frames in mail and containers going south that were full of expensive clothes, cell phones, and printers.
He told Bloomberg that he had “never had a gun in my life.”
“I didn’t do anything that they saw,” he said. “I sent a lot of phones to Brazil in the past.” They tried to get me to send parts for guns. “I never did that.”
The lawyer who fought for Lopes in the 2016 case didn’t answer a request for comment.
According to cargo records seen by Bloomberg, the Brazilian government tracked some of the packages to Amazonas, a state in the north of the country. Once they got to Rio, the parts were put together to make whole weapons that were then sold. As part of a plan called Florida Heat, Brazilian police raided several places in 2022 and charged four people.
Interpol sent “red notices” to US officials asking them to arrest Oliveira, Lopes, and a third guy. However, one person with knowledge of the situation says they were still free in the US as of this week. Officials from Homeland Security refused to say anything.
People who work for Biden have tried to stop trafficking, but mostly they’ve focused on whole guns that are brought across the border to Mexico illegally. ATF officials say that a law passed by Congress last year to stop gun trafficking only targets moving whole guns or the lower receiver.
The only part that doesn’t show up in Oliveira and Lessa’s buy histories is the lower receiver. This shows how easy it is for traffickers to find replacements. According to the police and a buying order that Bloomberg looked at, Lessa reportedly replaced it with a modified Taiwanese lower receiver made for airguns in at least some cases.
When the accused killer’s lawyers said that he was actually going to open a store in Brazil selling airsoft guns and that the part wouldn’t work as a real gun part, the police put together an AR-15 that worked using the air-gun receivers.
Serbin Pont said, “Those rifles won’t last 10 years like an AR-15 from one of the big companies will, but they don’t have to.” “The 17-year-old gang member who is shooting those guns in favelas will be killed before the gun even breaks.”
At Cidade da PolÃcia, it’s very hot, and Fabricio Oliveira is talking to a group of about twenty cadets in a room without any windows and with walls that are damaged from water. Officer Oliveira is in charge of special activities for the civil police in Rio. The cadets call him Delegado Fabricio, which is also his Instagram name. On Instagram, he posts videos of people shooting at police helicopters and people with AR-15s at the recent birthday party of a local gang boss.
“This is the most dangerous city in the world to be a police officer,” said Oliveira, who is not related to the alleged gun dealer Teodoro Giovan de Oliveira. “People think I’m not telling the truth when I say it’s a war zone.” After that, they’ll come here and see for themselves.”
A few weeks before, he was sent to a favela to help save a cop who had been shot in an ambush. The cop was hit by the bullet where his vest meets his shoulder. That took more than an hour. The rescue team got to him in a 15-ton black protected truck that was covered in scars from bullets hitting the thick steel.
In the middle of the truck, a watcher sways in a hammock and pokes his head out of a fishbowl window. He is watching for shooters among the broken brick buildings and burning tires that were put in the road to stop them. He is sitting behind 3.5-inch thick glass. A couple of straight shots from an AR-15 should be enough to damage it, but more than that is not a given.
The police chief said, “These bullets can’t pass through our bullet-proof vests or the cars we use.” “But based on what we see now, it’s possible.” It might break.
Public records show that from January 2018 to March 2023, more than 15,000 people were killed with guns in Rio de Janeiro state. That’s an average of eight a day, with a quarter of them happening in Rio de Janeiro. In a country where guns are mostly banned, that’s a shocking fact.
No one is sure how many of those murders were done with guns made from illegal parts, mostly because public safety groups are still getting the word out and cops haven’t changed how they keep track of crimes. Sometimes the guns look so much like real ones that the police who seize them might not even know they’re fake. It’s clear that the do-it-yourself gun is quickly becoming the new thing in Latin America.
Oliveira said, “Criminal groups have better weapons than we do more and more.” “They don’t buy anything with a serial number, so we can’t even keep track of it.” The marks on it, though, let us know who made it. Everything is from the US.
Michael Bloomberg, founder and main owner of Bloomberg LP, backs the group Everytown for Gun Safety, which works to make guns safer.
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