Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, January 9, 1993 TAG: 9301120411
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARGARET EDDS STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: BRONX, N.Y. LENGTH: Long
A DEADLY EXPORT
TODAY AND FOR THE NEXT TWO DAYS, we are publishing excerpts from a series of stories produced by our sister papers, The Virginian-Pilot and The Ledger-Star in Norfolk, about how guns - more specifically handguns - are fueling crime both in Virginia and outside it.The stories also focus on how Virginia's relatively loose gun-control laws create the opportunity for illegal trade of guns across state lines. Guns that are easily bought here then are smuggled into states farther north that have more stringent gun-control laws. This trade often involves illegal drugs as well.
Some of these stories were written by reporters in a combined Richmond bureau shared by the Roanoke Times & World-News and the Norfolk papers.
COMING SUNDAY: How some Virginia communities view guns and are coping with associated problems. Also, how the National Rifle Association works to defeat gun-control legislation nationwide.
COMING MONDAY: How voters can be heard on gun-control issues.
In a gentler era a half-century ago, Rayvon Jamison's address on this borough's Grand Concourse would have meant entree to a life of comfort and ease.
Instead, the once-grand boulevard to which Rayvon was born became for him a one-way, dead-end street.
On July 30, 1990, the chubby-cheeked 9-month-old was wheeling his powder-blue walker around his grandmother's tenement apartment when gunfire erupted in the hall outside. Seven brass bullets, intended for Rayvon's uncle, pierced the steel-plated door. None hit their target; three struck the little boy.
By the time the police delivered him to Lincoln Hospital 30 minutes later, Rayvon - clad in a diaper and a blood-soaked T-shirt - was dead.
It was no help to Rayvon that New York, the city where he was born, has some of the toughest gun laws in the Western world. For 350 miles to the south is Virginia, a state that does not.
The gun that killed Rayvon was bought 11 days earlier at a sporting goods store in Petersburg, Va. Gary R. Gee, the man who purchased it, had just been released from a mental ward at Central State Hospital, according to a police background report.
No one knows how many hands the Taurus 9mm semiautomatic pistol that killed Rayvon passed through between Gee and the New York triggerman. But police believe the sequence began with a gunrunner, who probably paid Gee a fee for buying the weapon and then carried it north.
If so, the gun followed a route traveled by hundreds - and probably thousands - of Virginia firearms each year.
A four-month investigation by The Virginian-Pilot and The Ledger-Star into the extent and impact of that gunrunning shows the irony that Virginia, a relatively prosperous, pastoral state that often looks askance at its neighbors to the north, is fueling murder and other crimes in communities weighed down by poverty and drugs.
Eva Jamison, who cradled her dying nephew in her arms after Rayvon was shot, knows that truth.
Rayvon was "just a fun-timing baby. He made everyone in the house happy," she said.
Jamison places part of the blame for Rayvon's death on the state that so easily allowed purchase of the murder weapon. "The gun laws that they have in Virginia are hurting people, are killing people behind the backs of Virginians."
In recent years, Interstate 95 from Virginia to New York has become known to East Coast law enforcement officials, prosecutors and federal firearms experts as a highway of death.
Officials suspect that several thousand weapons every year travel from gun stores and flea markets in Virginia up I-95 to Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York. They know with certainty that hundreds of Virginia guns turn up in homicides, robberies, drug disputes and other crimes in those cities and elsewhere.
East Coast hoodlums - some in organizations so elaborate they resemble small businesses; some acting alone or with a few buddies - come south, often bearing drugs to swap for guns. They sell the drugs for hefty profits in Virginia and return with arsenals that produce an equally good return on investment in New York.
A paramilitary-style, Intratec 9mm assault weapon that sells for about $300 here can fetch up to $1,200 on the streets of New York; a compact Davis .380-caliber pistol, a favorite of gunrunners, sells for $80 here and $400 or more in New York.
While the full extent of the gun trafficking is unknown, federal firearms officials have tapped Virginia as the No. 1 point of origin for weapons recovered in two of the nation's most violent cities, New York and Washington, D.C.
Nationwide, between October 1989 and September 1992, more than 2,600 weapons sold in Virginia turned up in crimes outside the state, according to data supplied by the Treasury Department's Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. Of those Virginia-origin weapons, 223 were linked to homicides, including 72 deaths in New York, 38 in Maryland and 23 in Washington, D.C.
But those numbers are probably dwarfed by police cases in which firearms cannot be traced, or no weapon is recovered.
Such figures may surprise Virginians. But they are well-known in the patrol cars and courtrooms of the Bronx, Brooklyn, Southeast Washington and similar destinations. Listen to a few of the voices:
Thomas Barrett, 35, an Irish-American teacher-turned-cop, father of four red-haired daughters, and a familiar face on the streets of central Harlem, where he recently intercepted a stash of 13 Virginia guns: "I've met a lot of Virginians who are very fine, responsible people. But the laws themselves and maybe a few politicians are responsible for a lot of deaths on the street up here."
Patricia Sandel, a parent and school secretary at Manhattan's Julia Richman High School, where a 15-year-old boy last January brought to school a Davis .32-caliber handgun purchased 12 months earlier in Woodbridge, Va.: "I wish Virginians would tighten up their laws. It's scary."
Isaac Fulwood, the recently retired police chief in Washington who notes that more than one-third of the guns recovered in his violence-racked city come from Virginia: "The District [gun] law suffers from paralysis as long as guns can come in from Virginia and Maryland. It's a legal system supporting an illegal system."
`They're killing people'
Julie Kochnover knows firsthand about the differences between New York's gun laws and Virginia's.
The owner of a check-cashing store in Brooklyn, Kochnover applied in October 1991 for a permit to carry a gun. She had to be fingerprinted and fill out a detailed form, explaining why she needed the gun - she works in a dangerous occupation and handles money.
Next came a police background check for any record of state or federal offenses, or of commitment to a mental institution. Finally, Kochnover was interviewed by police and asked to submit corporate papers, bank deposit slips and other proof that her claim for needing a gun was valid.
It was late June - more than eight months after the application was submitted - before the permit was granted.
In contrast, most Virginia residents can immediately buy as many guns as they can afford. All that is required is a state-issued photo I.D., such as a driver's license, and a second form of identification listing the same address.
Record checks fail
A much-touted "instant records check," adopted in November 1989, tightened the procedure somewhat. It requires gun sellers to call state police for a computer check on whether a potential buyer has a felony conviction. In such cases, the gun cannot be sold.
But that check did nothing in the case of Gary Gee - it failed to intercept a buyer with a history of mental instability.
The records check also does not stop non-felons who use bogus Virginia driver's licenses as identification, a fact made clear by court records and interviews with federal prosecutors, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms investigators, and police officers. Nor does it deter illegal "straw purchasers" - welfare mothers, crack addicts or down-and-outers who, for a fee of $50 or so, will buy a gun for an out-of-state gunrunner.
One such case is that of Solomon David Johnson. The 24-year-old Norfolk resident has a spotty employment record, three preschool children, a GED certificate earned after dropping out of the ninth grade, and - though he denies it - evidence of former drug use.
In late 1989, according to federal court records and interviews, Johnson began buying guns for Walter Miller, a sometimes-Norfolk, sometimes-New York resident whom Johnson was living with while they took a trade school class. Over the next year, Johnson bought 11 weapons at two Hampton stores, Ruffino's Gun Shop and Peninsula Gun Works. He passed them to Miller, who took them to New York for sale.
Authorities say it is unclear whether Johnson was paid cash or turned over the guns to erase a drug debt. Johnson told authorities he was coerced into buying the guns.
Eventually, firearms bureau agents - alerted to the multiple purchases by one of the gun store owners - located Johnson. He admitted the scheme and was sentenced to four months in prison for gunrunning, a light penalty based largely on his cooperation and partly on his young family's plight.
A fact that did not appear in Johnson's court record, and that was not part of the equation in his lenient sentence, was the use to which one of the guns had been put.
That weapon - a Ruger 9mm semiautomatic pistol sold at one of the Hampton gun stores on Sept. 27, 1990 - is ultimately the reason Julie Kochnover applied for a New York gun permit in 1991. It also is the reason she no longer leaves doors unlocked in her suburban Long Island home, and that she can scarcely abide 15 minutes without knowing the precise whereabouts of her 13-year-old son.
Early on June 22, 1991, bandits who had entered the Nostrand Check Cashing Service through a hole cut in the ceiling, intercepted the owner. They bound his hands and feet, and then shot two bullets into his chest. Ivan Kochnover, 46, a former high school biology teacher, was killed with the gun bought by Johnson. His death prompted an outpouring of cards and flowers from the Brooklyn neighborhood where his business operated.
How the weapon made its way to the robbers, who have never been caught, is uncertain. Johnson gave the guns to Miller; Miller himself was slain in New York before police could question him.
For Julie Kochnover, life still revolves around her late husband. This fall, on what would have been his 48th birthday, she and her son took red roses, a bar of his favorite dark chocolate and a bouquet of balloons to his grave.
"He loved life, loved people," she mused in an interview a week later. "It isn't a way you think someone you love is going to die."
Kochnover has a message for Virginians: "Make those laws strict so those guns stop coming up here. They're killing people."
No one suggests that guns would disappear from New York or Washington if the Virginia pipeline were severed. But officials believe that the significant disruption of the gun flow from Virginia would dent the problem.
In 1991, Project Lead - an underfunded firearms-bureau program that strives to match recovered weapons in major cities with their states of origin - traced 1,126 of the 13,769 handguns recovered by police in New York. Most of those guns were involved in crimes; 41 percent had been sold by Virginia dealers. Next closest were Florida, with 16 percent, and Ohio and Texas, with 9 percent each.
In Washington, D.C., 36 percent of the 1991 traces led to Virginia; 26 percent to Maryland, which has a seven-day waiting period for handgun purchases; and in third place, 4 percent to North Carolina. Virginia has ranked well ahead of every other state in supplying the district with guns each year since at least 1987.
In another sign of the volume, the federal Eastern District of Virginia - which under U.S. Attorney Richard Cullen has made gunrunning cases a priority - ranks second only to western Texas in recent prosecutions of gun-related felonies.
Virginia's popularity among gunrunners is a function of geography, culture and lenient laws, experts say.
For motorists headed south from New York, the state is the first on the I-95 corridor in which there is no waiting period or other serious impediment to buying a gun quickly. Nor are driver's licenses - an acceptable form of identification for buying a gun - hard to come by.
The Department of Motor Vehicles requires applicants to submit two forms of identification, such as a birth certificate or an old driver's license. But law enforcement officials say that the rule is sometimes ignored and in any event the truth is easily skirted. One firearms bureau agent said he has seen applications for counterfeit birth certificates in "Soldier of Fortune" magazine; another option is to get a fake driver's license in another state and surrender it as proof of identity in Virginia, he said.
Gun dealers and law enforcement groups, who regularly find gun buyers using bogus addresses, argue that the DMV should require proof of residence before granting a driver's license. In New York, for instance, applicants for a driver's license must produce a utility bill or some other item confirming their address. Licenses also are distributed by mail, ensuring that the address is valid.
But officials at the Virginia DMV say those steps are too cumbersome. "It would inconvenience all legitimate residents by making them wait," said DMV spokeswoman Jeanne Chenault.
Virginia also is a state of choice for gun purchases in part because of familial ties linking it to cities such as New York. Often gunrunners have family or friends in Virginia whose addresses or driver's licenses can be of use when they come south.
The commonwealth began to gain notoriety as a gunrunning state in 1987 and 1988, years that coincided with a dramatic rise in violence from the nation's crack epidemic.
"At one time, just a select few would go down [to Virginia]," said Robert Johnson, who heads the Project Lead office in New York. "Now it's a free market. I see a greater number of people buying a greater number of weapons."
The case of Rayvon
One of those familiar with the statistics, Bronx homicide detective John Tierney, said the most compelling case he has encountered for tough gun laws is 9-month-old Rayvon Jamison's.
"I'm a gun enthusiast, an avid hunter," said Tierney, who was on duty the afternoon Rayvon was shot, and who worked through the night for a break in the case. "But there's no need without a thorough investigation to sell a person a gun. I've never needed a gun immediately."
Rayvon's death "was horrible," he said. "I've been in this business a long time, and I don't remember anything like this, a cute little kid in a diaper. This is not John Doe, drug dealer."
The genesis of Rayvon's misfortune appears to have been a running dispute between his 29-year-old uncle, Joe, and neighborhood youths. A bottle-throwing incident and a dispute over a caricature on a T-shirt preceded the shooting.
Two youths, who said they accompanied the 18-year-old gunman, pleaded guilty to second-degree manslaughter and attempted manslaughter. The alleged triggerman, Anthony Rupert, accepted a first-degree manslaughter plea in September 1992 after a two-week trial on a murder charge. His sentence, seven to 21 years, disappointed Rayvon's family.
But if they felt the courts failed them, they feel equally let down by a society that seems so casual about the merchandising of guns. The story of the gun that killed Rayvon is a classic case of the lax regulation in the gun trade.
According to Tierney, the route the pistol that killed Rayvon traveled began at a Taurus manufacturing plant in Brazil. The gun was shipped to a Milwaukee wholesaler on April 28, 1990. Two months later, on July 9, it arrived at Dance's Sporting Goods in Petersburg, where it was put up for sale for $379.99.
Dance's is a family-owned business specializing in hunting and fishing equipment. There is no indication from law enforcement officials that the store has been an ongoing source of guns taken to New York.
When Gary Gee showed up on July 19, said owner Marlon Dance, he produced two forms of Virginia identification, proof enough for a sale.
"I had no idea he'd gotten out of a mental institution," said Dance, who argues that such information should be part of the instant records check. "It's a horrible, horrible event," Dance said of Rayvon's death, but he also denies culpability.
Gee, whose whereabouts are no longer known, told police investigators he lost the gun at the Petersburg bus station. Despite their suspicions, firearms agents had no proof otherwise, and no charges were brought.
When the gun surfaced in New York, it was in the hands of a local thug reputed to lend weapons for a price. One of his customers was 18-year-old Anthony Rupert.
Among the papers in Tierney's police file is a copy of Gee's bill of sale. Accompanying the price tag for the Taurus 9mm was a charge of $9.99 for a box of brass bullets. Such ammunition, manufactured in China, was a novelty to Tierney, but he quickly came to understand its power.
One of the brass bullets fired at the Jamisons' apartment entrance penetrated the steel-plated door, Rayvon's body, a full-sized refrigerator and a plaster wall before coming to rest in the building's brick facade.
The final item on the bill of sale was a $2 fee for a long-distance call to complete a police records check on Gee.
"We thought that was hysterical," said Tierney, recalling the reaction in the detective bureau when officers saw how little Virginia does to keep guns out of criminal hands.
"Hysterical . . . and sad."