Obama Justice Department Decapitates Gun Industry: FBI Arrest 21 Gun Industry Executives in Las Vegas to Attend Gun Show


Illinois Gun
Infowars.com
January 22, 2010

What’s being touted as the largest single investigation and prosecution against individuals in the history of the Justice Department’s enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act occurred Monday in Las Vegas.


Since the election of Obama the main question for gun owners has been, “when will Obama come after the guns”?


The individuals arrested are executives and employees of military and law enforcement products companies that were in Las Vegas to attend the 2010 Shooting, Hunting, Outdoor Trade Show (Shot show) and are charged with violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA).

The indictments allege that the defendants engaged in a scheme to pay bribes to the minister of defense for a country in Africa but the alleged sales agent was in reality an undercover FBI agent.

The defendants allegedly agreed to pay a 20 percent commission to a sales agent who the defendants believed represented the minister of defense of an African country in order to win a portion of a $15 million sale to outfit the country’s presidential guard.

The Las Vegas Sun is reporting the names of those arrested and the location of their companies as being;

Daniel Alvirez and Lee Allen Tolleson, Bull Shoals, Ark., Helmie Ashiblie, Woodbridge, Va., Andrew Bigelow, Sarasota, Fla., R. Patrick Caldwell and Stephen Gerard Giordanella, Sunrise, Fla., Yochanan Cohen, San Francisco, Haim Geri, North Miami Beach, Fla., Amaro Goncalves, Springfield, Mass., John Gregory Godsey and Mark Frederick Morales, Decatur, Ga., Saul Mishkin, Aventura, Fla., John and Jeana Mushriqui, Upper Darby, Pa., David Painter and Lee Wares, United Kingdom, Pankesh Patel, United Kingdom, Ofer Paz, Israel, Israel Weisler and Michael Sachs, Stearns, Ky., and John Benson Wier III, St. Petersburg, Fla.

One name on the list, Amaro Goncalves is reported to be a vice-president of sales for Smith & Wesson (SWHC)

According to reports the arrest did not take place at the SHOT show but the FBI did use the show as an oportunity to bring all of the people together in one place for arrest.

Needless to say with the recent incident involving the BATFE and the Texas Gun Show, this action by the Justice Department and the FBI is causing concern and confusion for patroits and gun owners nation wide.

David Codrea of the Gun Rights Examiner is asking “why the mass arrests here and now”?

One of the main comments from bloggers is “what’s wrong with paying a commission.”

Since the election of Obama the main question for gun owners as been, “when will Obama come after the guns”?

It looks like that question has been answered!

Links of interest

http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2010/jan/19/fbi-arrests-21-las-vegas-foreign-bribery-case

http://www.examiner.com/x-1417-Gun-Rights-Examiner~y2010m1d21-Whats-going-on-with-SHOT-Show-sting?#comments

http://www.examiner.com/x-1417-Gun-Rights-Examiner~y2010m1d21-What-is-the-Foreign-Corrupt-Practices-Act

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_05/b4165000370242.htm

EDITORS NOTE: Anyone see a pattern developing here???

Hmm guess they better start arresting freight brokers too because almost all good paying loads require a "agent fee". Essentially a kickback to the shipper to get the load. No agent fee, no load.

What a goatfuck. There's no way the feds are going to win this case. I have a feeling the charges will be dropped soon. Yet another black eye for the "G-men."

I hope you are correct.

Since the Constitutional Republic is all but gone though and we now live in a judgeo-corpocracy where legislation is controlled by corporate interests (read owner's of the fed etc.) and with Eric Holder's views of the Constitution clearly planted in Bizarro land, this might just stand. The ripples this could send through the industry could be devastating as companies curb their business in fear of the tyrannical hand of Federal prosecution in the Fed owned kangaroo courts. Since this deals with international trade it could even be tried in Admiralty I imagine (although IANAL).

The feds could bankrupt the entire industry by tying up all the mfr's in bogus, but very very costly, litigation. The feds prosecutorial budget is limitless, backed by the feds printing press. Firearms manufacturers... not so much.

they may be looking to dry up the supply line first before doing anything else..that way very few new customers get any guns and they can deal with the ones that already have..

UPDATE:

The Bribery Case Against the Arms Dealers

http://www.futureofcapitalism.com/2010/01/the-bribery-case-against-the-arms-dealers

Today's New York Times gives big play to an article about a federal case against 22 arms-industry executives that the newspaper describes as "the biggest prosecution of individuals for foreign corporate bribery ever pursued by the Justice Department." The article makes clear that the "bribes" in question were actually payments by arms dealers to undercover FBI agents posing as African government officials. I emailed Harvey Silverglate, a lawyer and civil liberties activist who is author of Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent. "Isn't that entrapment?" I asked, "Are there any limits on this sort of thing? I realize it happens all the time -- Marion Barry, Abscam, street-level local drug type operations -- but am I wrong to be uncomfortable with the blurring of the distinction between an actual crime and a potential crime manufactured by the government for the purpose of tempting people into violating the law?"

Mr. Silverglate was kind enough to respond as follows:

Unfortunately, the Supreme Court has a very narrow definition of entrapment. If the subject of the scenario is shown to have a "predisposition" to commit the time, then there is no entrapment. The bottom line is that the definition is, oddly, both vague and very narrow. And so entrapment defenses rarely persuade juries, given the judge's narrow instructions. And, in fact, trial judges often do not even allow the defendant to present an entrapment defense.

Ellen Podgor, in her excellent "White Collar Crime in a Nutshell" volume, notes that "entrapment first requires a showing of government inducement." Entrapment "requires a lack of predisposition by the defendant to engage in criminal conduct." An infamous case is the prosecutor of former Senator Harrison Williams in the infamous "Abscam" investigation. See U.S. v Williams (2nd Circuit, 1983). I viewed the videotapes secretly recorded of Sen Williams' discussions with the faux Arabs, and I would have voted to acquit. He got convicted, however.

The result is that more and more DOJ/FBI investigations involve "crime" that is suggested, originated, spurred on by the feds or by "cooperating individuals" (informants and such) who need to work off a beef the feds have with him/her. One wonders how much lower the federal crime stats would be if it were not for federally-invented and generated "crime."

But none of this should surprise us citizens any longer. Federal agencies for a while now have been creating the problems that they then need ever-more agents to "solve." Consider that the drug war enforcers lobby for stricter drug laws! For them, it's a guarantee of full employment. And so the drug law enforcement industry has grown and prospered. ...

The FCPA investigation reported in today's NYTimes (page A3 of the Boston edition) has one sentence that is of great interest to me, although I do not have time to follow through and look more deeply into it: "According to one indictment, a Florida executive later showed the deal to his company's outside law firm and sent the undercover team an e-mail message rejecting the corrupt proposal. The same day, he called and negotiated a way to do the deal anyway, the indictment claimed."

What this conveys to me is that the defendant actually tried to obey the law, tried to structure the deal in a way that would be legal. What other likely explanation could there be for the guy checking with legal counsel (!), then following legal counsel's opinion that the deal, as then structured, was unlawful? He actually rejected the deal that his lawyer said was unlawful! In other words, the executive restructured the deal in a way that he thought was legal. How is this a crime? And because of the amorphous wording of these statutes, it is quite difficult to know when one is violating the law. This, combined with the entrapment aspect, should leave one uneasy, skeptical, careful in jumping to conclusions of guilt.

Harvey

None of this is to say that bribery by businessmen of foreign government officials is a good thing or that it should be legal or that prosecutors should turn a blind eye to it when it occurs. But it is one thing to discover emails or wire transfers or checks or to wiretap phone calls indicating an actual bribe of an actual foreign government official. It's another thing to employ an FBI agent to pose as a government official in the hope of inducing a businessman to commit a crime.

That is basically the focus. Make the gun business so risky and costly to do that the supply lines begin to dry up.

There are huge factions within the government that just want to have a state-run gun industry for the most part that would more closely resemble how it was up to WW2. Companies that sold guns to the government rarely sold them to the public, and the government usually owned the manufacturing facility one way or another.

There are some changes coming down in small arms and equipment technology that they feel current laws are "insufficient to handle" but if the government were to gain total control of the manufacturing through a number of means, they could do a lot to keep the new technology out of civilian hands. Part of that is to attack and try to capture control of those firms which are capable of making and selling the stuff to the general public.

The other thing you have to realize is that the Justice Department is the primary shareholder in UNICOR, the prison industry conglomerate that effectively uses the law enforcement agencies to gain ownership of slave workers. UNICOR already has a lot of government contracts for a lot of stuff and has moved well into Defense Department contracts.

The security protocols can even be put in place for the manufacture of small arms, especially next generation stuff where you are unlikely to have ammunition circulating around where weapon components are made.

There is another way this can go when the government gets mean and goes to entrap and attack large corporations who are quite capable of defending themselves. Some corporations actually do it. Unfortunately for the 21 guys who got indicted the gun companies are probably not as likely to use that option on their behalf, but the flip side of that foreign business is sure, you pay bribes up to a certain point.

Then the foreign government decides to get greedy, and that usually means someone gets "arrested" on trumped up charges and the government "asks" for large sums of money, contract renegotiation, other unreasonable demands engineered to change the real structure of what is going on.

Not long after that is when the ex-Delta force guys start showing up. Ross Perot would be flat broke by now if he were not pulling that sort of stuff with the Iranians back in the 1970s.

He thought he could play with the big bad fed in the 1990s and apparently got intimidated out of it. I don't think you could call him the "last" of America's corporate tough guy tycoons, but there was a point where Clinton and the Justice department actually violated Ross Perot's personal third amendment rights by getting a court order that he had to house the IRS and other agents who were running surveillance against him. On his own property, in his own house. The IRS agent was to constantly monitor Perot for any possible tax law violations, but had been trained to monitor him for any possible law violations at all and then alert his supervisors of it.

Even now, he surrounds himself with a level of security some national leaders don't have, and if some crew of feddie punks steps up to lay hands on him, they are quite likely to get splattered.

The Federal Prosecutors must justify their existence.

I am reminded of the following quote from the Declaration of Independence:

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our People, and eat out their substance.