August 2019 | Rolling Stone | 81
to have to show identification, intentionally
keeping the funds anonymous. The U.S. at-
torney’s office in Austin greenlighted an in-
vestigation. They found large wire transfers
to Garwood, who had already been flagged
in the minigun-smuggling scheme because
his company’s markings were on the bat-
tery seized on the Anzalduas bridge. Phone
calls and text messages tied Fox to Carlson,
who had also been flagged in an ATF data-
base after an AK-47 purchased in his name
had turned up at a crime scene in Mexico. At
that point, “We were like, ‘OK, our suspicion
was correct,’ ” McElligott says.
On February 8th, 2017, federal agents
served a search warrant on Fox’s home.
Had it been a drug case, a platoon of police
commandos in body armor might have bro-
ken down the door and tossed a flash-bang
grenade in the living room. But this was a
gun case, and plainclothes agents politely
knocked. “They came in real quiet,” Diane
says. “They sat down at the dining-room
table and said, ‘These are the issues, can we
look around?’ Mike said, ‘Sure.’ ”
In the garage, the agents found a fully as-
sembled minigun with an obliterated serial
number, along with detailed schematics and
a slew of minigun parts. Although Carlson
had warned Fox to lay low after the Anzaldu-
as seizure, Fox and Garwood had embarked
on a joint venture of their own. The idea had
been to build 10 more miniguns using Gar-
wood’s access to parts and the money Fox
made from Carlson. It’s not clear to whom
they’d intended to sell the miniguns, but in
order to drum up business, they’d gone to
the 2016 SHOT Show, the firearms industry’s
annual extravaganza in Las Vegas. “We made
a bunch more contacts,” Fox says. “Even
Saudi Arabia was sending a guy over to talk
about 600 miniguns for their military. I took
out all my retirement money, like $85,000,
and gave Tracy another $100,000 on top of
that. We were going big-time.”
Fox told much of this to the agents who
searched his house. He basically admitted ev-
erything he’d done, as well as what he knew
about Carlson and Garwood. “I hadn’t slept
in two years,” Fox says. “It’s been hell just
trying to hold everything together. Once they
came to the door, that was the end of it.” The
agents confiscated the minigun, but left with-
out making an arrest.
More than six months passed and all three
suspects remained free men. When Carlson
learned he was under investigation, he fled
to Mexico, but ATF agents called Mexican im-
migration authorities and he was deported to
the U.S. for having an expired visa. He would
eventually plead guilty to unlicensed posses-
sion of a machine gun, as well as conspira-
cy to export firearms without a State Depart-
ment license — the same stopgap statute used
to convict Solis. In November 2018, he was
sentenced to nearly six years.
Cottrell described Carlson as Quintero’s
“main man,” who oversaw a network of
position. In it was an innocent family, three
of whom were slain in the whirring onslaught
of bullets. In photos taken at the scene, the
father and mother lie in the front seats, cov-
ered in blood and broken glass. The woman
is still holding her four-year-old daughter,
whose cranium has been impacted by a min-
igun round. In the back seat, a six-year-old
girl lies facedown on the floorboard, her
pink shirt and white sandals splattered with
blood. It looks like she was trying to hide.
For Fox, the ending was anticlimactic. “I
was never really arrested,” he says. “They
just asked me to show up one day and get fin-
gerprinted. I knew I was in deep shit then.”
In July 2018, he pleaded guilty to conspira-
cy to defraud the United States, based on his
structuring of money orders. He was not con-
victed on any gun charges, but the facts of
the minigun scheme weighed heavily against
him in court. He was hoping to get proba-
tion, but the judge told him he didn’t deserve
leniency because he had been a police offi-
cer and should have known better. Though
he likes to gripe about Obama, Fox doesn’t
blame his fate on liberals or gun control. “I
did it,” he says. “I told everybody I did it. It
was illegal. I get it.” In January 2019, he was
sentenced to three years at the minimum-
security penitentiary in Beaumont, but has
not yet started serving time on account of
complications from a recent foot surgery.
In April 2018, Garwood was allowed to
turn himself in to U.S. marshals in Austin,
and was released on bond. He was the only
person involved in the case who refused to
be interviewed, but he pleaded guilty to a
single charge of conspiracy to unlawfully
transfer machine guns. He got off with pro-
bation and a $50,000 fine.
Incredibly, both Fox and Garwood got to
keep their federal firearms licenses. Both are
still listed by the U.S. attorney general’s office
as gun dealers in good standing. This may be
because of a loophole buried in the applica-
ble statute, obviously the handiwork of the
gun lobby. Pursuant to Section 923(f )(4) of
Chapter 18 of the United States Code, if a gun
dealer is charged with a crime, ATF is “ab-
solutely barred” from revoking his license if
he is acquitted. At the same time, the stat-
ute gives ATF exactly one year from the time
of indictment to initiate any revocation pro-
ceedings. So there’s no way of revoking a li-
cense if the court proceedings last more than
a year, as is common. “We didn’t try to hold
on to them,” Diane says, referring to her hus-
band’s two licenses, including the one to pos-
sess machine guns. “Mike tried to give them
the original copies. They kept saying, ‘We’ll
get them from you next time.’ ”
As for the miniguns themselves, Cottrell
and Weddell say that American authorities
have no jurisdiction to reclaim them from
Mexican territory. When I last speak to Quin-
tero, I ask him where, in theory, he imagines
they might be. “Who knows?” he says. “They
could be anywhere.”straw buyers that spanned the state of Texas,
but it’s unclear how a kid from Austin could
have gotten into business with an organiza-
tion as secretive and dangerous as the Gulf
Cartel. “There was digital evidence that he
sought this activity out,” says the postal in-spector, who obtained Carlson’s phone rec-
ords by subpoena. “He sought out gun traf-
ficking. He was not approached by some
mysterious person.”
When Carlson writes me from the feder-
al prison in Bastrop, he doesn’t want to talk
about the facts of his case, but he does offer
some thoughts on the conflict in Mexico. His
handwriting is extremely neat, his gram-
mar and composition surprisingly formal. “I
have spent time in Reynosa, Quecholac, Te-
peaca, and Acatzingo,” he writes, referring
to one of Mexico’s most perilous cities, and
a string of insular little bandit towns in the
state of Puebla. “I have been to San Martín
Texmelucan many times, and I have traveled
across Veracruz and Guanajuato. Personal-
ly, I believe the term ‘cartel’ is misused. Mex-
ican crime syndicates don’t have a monopo-
ly on anything, hence the current chaos and
violence.” He goes on to say that the word
cartel might better be applied to the United
States government, for its monopoly on the
“petro- dollar,” and that the bloodshed afflict-
ing Mexico “stems from the so-called War on
Drugs.” About that, he’s not wrong.
To date, there have been no media or
law-enforcement reports of the Gulf Cartel or
any other criminal organization making use
of Fox’s miniguns, but in March 2019, Mexi-
co’s National Commission on Human Rights
released the results of an investigation into a
gun battle that took place last year on a high-
way a few hours north of Reynosa along the
Texas border. Mexican marines were tak-
ing heavy fire from a splinter element of Los
Zetas and the Gulf Cartel, and called for he-
licopter backup. The Black Hawk — armed
with a Dillon Aero minigun — took off from
a military base in Reynosa. When the chop-
per arrived, the door gunner opened fire on
a pickup that was driving past the marines’CASUALTIES
OF WAR
Three people were
killed by a minigun
when an innocent
family was caught
in the crossfire in
a battle between
the Mexican military
and a cartel in 2018.