80 | Rolling Stone | August 2019
it 24 hours a day. If you see them driving to
the border, you can reach out to CBP, and
they’ll make the stop based on reasonable
suspicion. But until all that happens, you
can’t stop the person.”
Maloney’s bill is one of a number of
gun-control bills now on the legislative agen-
da, thanks to the new Democratic majority
in the House. Most of the measures are con-
cerned with limiting mass shootings here in
America, but some of the regulations would
also help tamp down on smuggling to Mex-
ico. Rep. Norma Torres (D-Calif.), for in-
stance, has sponsored a bill that would re-
quire purchases of multiple assault rifles to
be automatically reported to ATF.
Such proposals, while massively popular,
are almost certainly doomed in the Repub-
lican-controlled Senate. Even if passed by
the Senate, the bills would likely be vetoed
by President Trump, who took $30 million
from the NRA in 2016. Among the many fa-
vors Trump has done for the gun industry,
he has refused to appoint a director to the
ATF, leaving the agency under acting depu-
ty directorship, a status it often languishes in
under Republican presidents.
“ATF is the bastard child of federal law en-
forcement,” says Robinette, the former HSI
agent. “They’re understaffed. They have
no resources. Their wings are clipped. It
has to do with politics, lobbyists. Gun con-
trol is a toxic subject. But we’re not pro or
against guns. We’re about illegal trafficking.”
He points to a provision in the 1986 Firearm
Owner’s Protection Act — the NRA’s signature
legislative achievement — that prohibits the
ATF from keeping an electronic database of
gun sales, which makes the process of trac-
ing weapons absurdly laborious.
“Say law enforcement wants to trace a
Smith & Wesson that turned up at a crime
scene in Mexico,” says Bouchard. “They send
the make, model, and serial number to ATF’s
National Tracing Center. It goes to a clerk
who has to actually call Smith & Wesson and
get someone on the line and give them the
info. ‘Who’d you sell it to?’ ‘XYZ distributor.’
Now ATF has to call XYZ and get someone on
the line. ‘Who’d you sell it to?’ ‘Mike’s Gun
Shop in Texas.’ Now you have to call Mike
and ask him to go through all his paper rec-
ords, which could take days to a week.”
In the Quintero case, though, the agents
had something more to go on: the minigun
parts. Weddell says the team’s top priori-
ty was figuring out where such a powerful
weapon had come from, and whether addi-
tional miniguns were bound for the border.
They managed to trace the battery to Gar-
wood Industries in Arizona, one of only two
minigun manufacturers in the United States.
But before they had identified Carlson or
Fox, a break in the case came from perhaps
the most obscure of all federal law-enforce-
ment agencies, the U.S. Postal Inspection
Service. As it turns out, guns are less tight-
ly regulated in America than money orders.
B
ACK IN 2015, when Carlson first
approached Fox about building a
minigun, he had already acquired
a rotor, some barrels, and a power
cable. “But he didn’t have the receiver hous-
ing,” Fox says. “That’s the part that’s regis-
tered,” the crucial component engraved with
a serial number. Without it, the weapon can’t
function, and Fox couldn’t fabricate one on
his own. Enter Tracy Garwood, the graying,
mustachioed, 63-year-old CEO of Garwood
Industries, which sells miniguns to the U.S.
military and NATO forces worldwide. (The
other manufacturer, Dillon Aero, sells to
the Mexican military.) Fox found Garwood’s
number online, and after one phone con-
versation, they agreed to meet at Garwood’s
headquarters in a nondescript office park on
the periphery of suburban Phoenix.the materials from Garwood to build four
miniguns for Carlson, who supplied all the
money needed to acquire parts. Once a gun
was complete, Fox and Carlson would take
it out and test it. If it worked, Carlson would
pay Fox a bonus of $25,000 and take pos-
session of the weapon. Once, when loading
a finished minigun into the back seat of his
truck, Carlson mentioned that he had a long
drive ahead of him, but Fox still claims not to
have known that the miniguns were bound
for Mexico. In January 2016, Carlson sent
Fox another $50,000 in a FedEx envelope.
“Don’t spend it all in one place,” he texted.
What to do with all the cash was quickly be-
coming a problem for Fox.
A few months after Trump took office, the
Justice Department ended an Obama-era ini-
tiative called Operation Choke Point, an anti-
money-laundering program that discouraged
banks from taking large deposits in cash from
payday lenders, escort services, coin dealers,
and other shady businesses. That gun dealers
were added to the list was a bugbear for the
gun lobby and right-wing press, which cele-
brated the program’s 2017 demise — but not
before it tripped up Fox, and ultimately led
to his arrest.
“The Obama regime in its infinite wisdom
passed a law,” Fox says. “They didn’t want
anyone in the gun and ammunition world
to expand their horizon.” His wife explains:
“If you go down to the bank and open an ac-
count, and say, ‘I’m going to bring you cash
every day,’ if you tell them you’re a gun busi-
ness, they won’t let you do it.” Turned away
from Austin-area banks, Fox had to find an-
other way of stashing the piles of cash accu-
mulating in his house.
In late 2016, Tim McElligott, an HSI agent
in Austin who specializes in financial investi-
gations, got a call about Fox from a colleague
at the U.S. Postal Inspection Service. “Fox
was going to different post offices,” McElli-
gott tells me, “sometimes four or five differ-
ent post offices on the same day, and buying
up money orders.”
“He was laundering hundreds of thou-
sands of dollars,” says the postal inspector
who first noticed the transactions and asked
to remain anonymous because he wasn’t au-
thorized to speak on the record. “Basically
converting cash to money orders, then fun-
neling them into investment accounts, back-
tracked with fake paperwork, to make it
appear as though those funds were tied to
invoices. I knew that Mr. Fox was a retired
law-enforcement officer, and that he was a
firearms-license holder. It began to develop
into a picture. My belief was that he was like-
ly engaged in underground firearms traffick-
ing. That’s a common thing to see.”
According to prosecutors, Fox purchased
a total of $272,000 in money orders. All of
them were for less than $3,000, suggesting
Fox was guilty of a federal crime known as
structuring, or breaking a larger purchase
into a series of smaller purchases so as notThe two men weren’t far apart in age and
had a lot in common. They both loved guns
and hated the Obama administration, and
Garwood was having money troubles of his
own. He had developed an improved mini-
gun design with a lightweight titanium re-
ceiver, but the guns had been failing, costing
him business with the U.S. government. “He
was almost broke,” Fox says. “He couldn’t
make his house payment.”
When Fox headed back to Texas, he was
carrying with him two housing receivers with
the serial numbers machined off, as well as
detailed schematics. In exchange, Fox had
given Garwood $50,000 in an ammo box.
“He didn’t ask any questions about that,” Fox
says. To cover his tracks, Garwood submitted
paperwork to the ATF falsely stating that the
components had been destroyed.
Fox made several trips back to Arizo-
na during the following months, and usedARMING THE CARTELS
“To the cartels,
smuggling guns is
just as important as
the cash coming back
from the dope they sell,”
says a DEA agent. “It’s
something no one’s
really talked about.”