76 | Rolling Stone | August 2019
The Vietnam veteran, overweight and ailing,
was nearly 70 years old, and his wife, Diane,
wasn’t much younger, but they had recent-
ly taken custody of their grandsons, a pair
of rambunctious two-year-old twins. “We
found out our daughter was a heroin addict,”
Fox says in a tired, raspy voice. He’s seated
at his kitchen table in Georgetown, Texas, a
middle- class suburb of Austin, holding a mug
of coffee in both hands. The end of one fin-
ger is missing from a lawn- mower accident.
“We had no idea heroin was so bad,” he says.
“I’d been a cop, and I couldn’t even spot it in
my own kid.” Their adult son had also fallen
victim to heroin, and would later commit sui-
cide. “I had cancer on top of that,” Fox says.
“Malignant melanoma.” All of this happened
after he had to take his only living relative, a
sister in Louisiana, off life support. “It was
like a soap opera,” says Diane, her eyes filled
with tears. The legal and medical bills, plus
the expense of raising two toddlers, quickly
depleted their savings, which led Fox to look
into a certain side business.
Fox had been a licensed gun dealer since
2007, and had acquired additional federal li-
censes to manufacture ammunition and pos-
sess machine guns. To qualify for the per-
mits, he had to have a physical storefront,
but his was just a rented metal warehouse
that he hardly ever used. He made most of
his money manufacturing ammunition in his
garage and selling it to people he met online
or through word of mouth. The ammo busi-
ness was especially profitable in Texas during
the Obama presidency, he says: “Hoarding is
a thing.”
One of his clients was Tyler Carlson, a
26-year-old solo operator who seemed to
make a living buying and selling guns and
ammo on a website called Texas Gun Trader.
“He had this route from here to Dallas, and
he always dealt in cash,” Fox says. “He was
connected out the ass. You never knew what
he was going to show up with.” Carlson had
already bought tens of thousands of rounds
of ammunition and eight .50-caliber sniper
rifles from Fox when he approached him in
the summer of 2015 with the idea of build-
ing a military weapon known as a minigun.
Despite the diminutive name, a minigun
is a heavy, six-barreled rotary cannon that
can fire up to a hundred bullets per second.
“If there was ever a most dangerous weapon
put on the face of the Earth, it’s a 134,” Fox
says, meaning an M-134, the U.S. military’s
nomenclature for the weapon. It’s powered
by a motor that runs off an external power
supply, and is typically found mounted on
attack helicopters and fixed-wing gunships,
where it’s used to support ground troops in
combat. With a minigun, a door gunner can
saturate an enemy position with bullets in a
matter of seconds, or mow down a squad of
soldiers with a single push of the trigger.
The M-134 is a descendant of the Gatling
gun, and is legally classified as a machinegun. Unlike assault rifles, which are perfect-
ly legal, machine guns are banned for civil-
ian ownership without a federal license, like
the one Fox held. Miniguns are exclusively
manufactured by a pair of defense contrac-
tors located six blocks from each other in
Scottsdale, Arizona. Their primary buyer is
the Pentagon, but under State Department
supervision, they also export to a number of
foreign customers, including the government
of Mexico.
In 2016 and 2017, videos emerged of Mexi-
can soldiers in Black Hawk helicopters using
miniguns to unload on Gulf Cartel safe hous-
es and convoys in and around the border city
of Reynosa, across the river from McAllen,
Texas. In February 2017, Mexican marines
used a minigun to kill a cartel boss named
Juan Francisco Patrón Sánchez, along with
11 of his sicarios, who were bombarded by
what looked in the nighttime video like an
onslaught of explosive laser beams. It was
the closest thing yet to the Mexican govern-
ment using airstrikes on its own citizens, and
according to an affidavit filed in federal court
in Austin, as confirmed by officials from the
Department of Homeland Security, the Gulf
Cartel responded to the Mexican govern-
ment’s tactical escalation by seeking to ob-
tain miniguns of its own.
Carlson was tall and heavyset, with light-
brown hair and blue eyes, and spoke flu-
ent Spanish. Fox didn’t know much about
him except that he was from Austin, drove
around in a black Tacoma loaded with guns
and money, and was married to a woman
from Mexico. Carlson had already acquired
a handful of minigun parts, but to finish as-
sembling the weapon he needed the help of
a gunsmith like Fox, who knew how to forge
and cast components working from blue-
prints in his garage. Fox claims to have taken
Carlson at his word when he said he want-
ed the weapon to hunt wild hogs on a family
ranch in South Texas. He knew Carlson was
not licensed to possess a machine gun, and
that transferring one to him would be a felo-
ny, but he agreed to take on the job anyway.
“Ty had a lot of money,” Fox says. “We start-
ed talking numbers.”
Over the next year, Fox built a total of four
miniguns for Carlson. Each one cost $14,000
to build, and could be sold for $240,000
apiece. Fox won’t say how much he earned,
but according to a knowledgeable source,
a minimum of $500,000 changed hands
between Carlson and Fox. “I was receiving
so much cash I didn’t know what to do with
it,” Fox says.
Then, one afternoon in June 2016, “Ty
shows up and says, ‘We got a problem,’ ” Fox
recalls. A few days earlier, American border
guards had stopped a vehicle attempting to
cross into Mexico near Reynosa, and found
a small arsenal of weapons in the back seat.
The driver had been arrested, the guns and
ammo seized, including components of one
of the miniguns Fox had built.A few years ago,
a retired police
officer named
Mike Fox found
himself badly in
need of money.
Contributing editor SETH HARP wrote about
Mexico’s gasoline mafias last September.
ARMING THE CARTELS