The federal government didn't intend to license Otis W. Cutler Jr. to supply guns to drug dealers. But that's what he did with the license they gave him.
Over seven months in late 1992 and early 1993, Cutler, a polished, college-educated former Marine with a hobbyist's fervor for firearms, ordered at least 184 handguns for delivery to his Northwest Baltimore home. Nearly all ended up in criminals' hands.
In the year since agents of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms caught up with him, police have recovered 37 of Cutler's guns in crimes, including at least three murders. More than 100 are believed to be still out there, planted around the city like lethal mines.
"His guns are going to be used for years in crime in Baltimore City," says ATF Agent Richard Young, who led the investigation. "He did a lot of damage in a short time."
Cutler, 31, who recently reported to federal prison to begin serving a 27-month sentence for his illegal gun scheme, says he wasn't thinking about violence when he got in the gun business.
"I thought it was a way to pick up some extra bucks," he says.
He admits that what he did was wrong but bristles at any suggestion that he bears a share of blame for crimes committed with the guns he sold. In an ironic echo of the gun lobby's central thesis, he says: "We don't have a problem with guns. We have a problem with criminals."
The Cutler case illustrates one of the paths by which weapons move to criminals. What distinguishes this path is that the federal government lends a helping hand.
Mail-order purchase of handguns has been banned in the United States since 1968. Yet, like Otis Cutler, any federal firearms licensee -- 3,401 in Maryland, 258,000 nationwide -- can pick up the phone and order all the guns he wants from distributors for prompt, interstate delivery.
If the licensee then begins to resell the guns to criminals, chances are good that ATF will eventually catch on as police report serial numbers of guns picked up in crime. Last August, a Tennessee man was convicted of selling more than 7,000 guns illegally, one of scores of dealers prosecuted each year for selling to criminals.
In Maryland in 1991, Carroll L. Brown, a former Baltimore postal worker, was caught selling to drug dealers and sentenced to 21 months in prison. He sold 335 firearms before he was stopped.
Concluding that it is inefficient to lock up crooked dealers only after the damage is done, the Clinton administration has ordered ATF to scrutinize license applicants more closely.
Since February, applicants have had to supply fingerprints, photographs, extensive personal information and copies of state and local business licenses. The license fee was increased last year from $30 for three years to $200 for the first three years and $90 for a three-year renewal. The administration now is seeking to increase the fee to $600 a year.
ATF expects the stiffer review and higher fees eventually to eliminate the majority of license holders, who sell few or no guns. With fewer licensees to monitor, the thinking goes, the 240 ATF ** firearms inspectors nationwide will be able to spot lawbreakers earlier.
Most license holders simply want to purchase personal weapons at a dealer's discount and to get the stacks of catalogs and newsletters that gun companies send to licensees.
A typical story is that of Sam Borzymowski, a 46-year-old engineer for American Telephone & Telegraph Co. who got his license a dozen years ago. He has never sold a single gun, he says.
When he first applied, he had hopes of operating a firearms business from his Northeast Baltimore home. After checking city zoning regulations, he concluded it would entail "too much bureaucracy and legal hassle."
As a longtime hunter and occasional target shooter, however, he has continued to pay the license fee every three years merely to stay on the mailing lists. "A lot of [firearms licensees] are just like me," Mr. Borzymowski says. "They want to keep a toe in the industry. I'm just a name on a list, and as far as I'm concerned, I'm harmless."
Thousands of licensees
The list of federal licensees in Maryland alone runs to 143 inches of fine print, including names both explicit (Bear Arms Inc., Make My Day Guns & Ammo, The Second Amendment) and unlikely (Thompson Custom Cabinets, Pizza-Italia, Fort Foote Computer Services).
Many of the licensees have signed up after seeing the Shotgun News, a fat tabloid advertising newspaper published in Nebraska that is the gun trader's bible. There, dozens of solicitations offer "FFL Kits" -- collections of application forms and rule books to help people acquire federal firearms licenses.
"Sell guns the day you get your license. No delay!" says a recent front-page ad listing a Colorado address.
Yet of the 3,401 Marylanders who hold federal gun-dealers' licenses, a mere 401 can legally sell handguns, because only that number hold state pistol and revolver dealer's licenses. In other words, 3,000 Marylanders have the right to order all the handguns they want by mail -- but no right to sell a single one.
For a few each year, the insatiable demand for handguns from criminals whose record prevents them from buying in shops
creates an overwhelming temptation.
'It was my hobby'
The way Otis Cutler tells it, he got into the gun business for the same reason most folks do: He loved guns.
"Basically, it was my hobby," he said before he reported to prison, sitting in the Woodlawn apartment he shared with his wife and two children. "I wanted to build a collection -- six-shooters from out West, the Remington repeating rifle. Basically, stuff you could hang on the wall."
By his own account, Cutler grew up in Columbia, served in the Marines, attended college in Texas and worked at sales and marketing jobs. His firearms training at Marine boot camp piqued an interest that later grew, he said.
For a time, he said, he owned an AK-47 assault rifle with a 30-round magazine, which he enjoyed shooting at commercial ranges around the Baltimore area. "That's where I really got educated," he said.
Finally, eager for discounts, he applied for a dealer's license. He had been indicted on theft charges in 1991 in a case, later dismissed, that he explains as a misunderstanding with his then-employer, Maryland National Bank. He was never arrested on the theft charge, so the standard FBI record check for license applicants turned up nothing. In October 1992, after about a three-month wait, he got his license.
Cutler had visited the Maryland State Police licensing section off Security Boulevard to inquire about the requirements for a state pistol and revolver dealer's license, ATF Agent Young says. But he never applied, possibly because he feared the state background check would turn up the theft indictment.
Diversified Investments
By the time the federal license arrived, Cutler said, he needed money. He looked through Shotgun News and picked out a few gun distributors: Chattanooga Shooting Supply in Tennessee and Ashland Shooting Supply and Southern Ohio Gun Distributors, both in Ohio. Following their instructions, he mailed copies of his federal license and began to place orders.
By mid-October, United Parcel Service trucks began arriving regularly at Cutler's house on Carlisle Avenue in Northwest Baltimore, the address of the business he called Diversified Investments.
The freight was indeed diversified, within the limited range of modern handguns. There were menacing-looking assault pistols, Intratec TEC-9s and Cobray M-11s. There were cheap .25-caliber and .380-caliber handguns, made by companies like Lorcin Engineering and Jennings Firearms. And there were classier, costlier imported Glock semiautomatics.
Trips to Virginia
Aware that he could not legally sell the handguns without a state license, Cutler embarked on a scheme he believed would launder the guns and permit their sale.
Finding in Shotgun News a dealer called Smokehill Farms outside Fredericksburg, Va., Cutler called its proprietor, Gid White. He told Mr. White he was in the military and was about to be called up for service in Somalia. While abroad, he wanted the guns he'd bought to be part of his private collection, not on his books as a dealer, he told Mr. White.
So in six trips to Mr. White's shop, Cutler transferred dozens of handguns from his license to Mr. White's license. Then he showed a Virginia driver's license, obtained using a relative's address, and "bought" all the guns back, purportedly as a private citizen, paying a few dollars per gun for the paperwork.
Cutler hoped to take advantage of the biggest loophole in Maryland's handgun law: the unregulated private sale. Any Marylander can sell his own handguns to a private purchaser without either the state police criminal record check or the seven-day waiting period required when a dealer sells a handgun.
Cutler says he believed that, after he passed the guns through Smokehill Farms' dealer license, they became his personal property to sell to whomever he wished.
'I never imagined'
A few of his customers were law-abiding "nurses, teachers and business owners," Cutler said, and ATF does not dispute him. Nearly all the rest of the guns, however, were sold to Wilton U. Caver, 31, a neighbor, convicted thief and accused drug dealer who investigators said sold the guns or traded them for drugs. Cutler does not like to speak about Caver, who is serving a 41-month sentence for his middleman role in the gun sales. Cutler says only that he didn't intend to sell his guns to criminals.
vTC "I wasn't on North Avenue or at Murphy Homes selling out of the trunk of a car," Cutler said. "I never imagined they'd end up where they did."
One invoice ATF agents confiscated from Cutler, prepared neatly on a computer, is headed "Wilton" for Wilton Caver. It lists 20 handguns and assorted ammunition, adds a "Transfer Fee" of $1,050, bringing the total to $6,325.50.
The document is so neat and formal, the prices so precise ($502.45 for a Glock Model 22) and so close to gun-shop prices that it bespeaks a man who thinks he has found a way to beat the system.
In fact, whatever Cutler believed, he had broken several laws. His false claim of Virginia residency constituted perjury on the federal forms he completed at Smokehill Farms. The rapid resale for profit of large quantities of guns could never qualify as an unregulated, private sale, Agent Young says. And, because he was under the 1991 theft indictment, he was not allowed to receive firearms under any circumstances.
'What's $600?'
But no one was keeping an eye on Cutler. As the guns continued to flow, his operation only gradually came to light. On Jan. 16, a Baltimore man was arrested carrying cocaine and a Stallard Arms 9 mm handgun; on Jan. 27, another drug dealer was caught with the same kind of gun.
As ATF performed routine traces, tracking the guns by serial number from manufacturer to distributor to dealer, police on Feb. 11 finally found Cutler on the 1991 theft warrant. When he was arrested, he was illegally carrying a gun he had ordered, a Lorcin .25-caliber pistol.
Finally, after checking with gun distributors and discovering the volume of handguns ordered by Cutler, ATF agents and police executed a search warrant at Cutler's home on Carlisle Avenue and at an Arbutus address he had used.
According to court documents, Cutler "admitted selling firearms to violent narcotics dealers," including Caver.
Cutler pleaded guilty in August to a single count of receiving firearms while under indictment for a felony. As part of a plea bargain, however, he was given until February to report to prison. He asked for the delay so he could perform volunteer work against gun violence in Baltimore schools. His community service consisted of attending several meetings of a Baltimore committee that promotes school safety, where an organizer remembers him arguing against some proposed gun control measures.
The crime count grows
But his real legacy is the growing list of his guns recovered by police. Among them:
* A .380-caliber Jennings, taken from a 32-year-old man on East Monument Street just after he threatened to shoot his girlfriend with it;
* A .25-caliber Raven, found near the body of a 17-year-old boy with a bullet hole in the chest on Elsinore Avenue in Northwest Baltimore;
* A Cobray M-11 assault pistol, in the pants waistband of a 23-year-old drug dealer on Poplar Grove Avenue in West Baltimore;
* A .40-caliber Glock, found in a raid of a downtown hotel room and subsequently shown to have killed an 18-year-old man on Wilson Street in West Baltimore.
ATF is counting on closer scrutiny of federal dealer license applicants and $600 annual fees to reduce the damage done by dealers who go bad. Cutler is skeptical.
He claims he made a profit of about $20,000 in six months of gun sales without trying particularly hard. "If I had set out to sell guns illegally, I could be a millionaire," he said. "To a guy who's selling guns to drug dealers, what's $600?"
The Cutler case provides one final piece of evidence of the difficulty ATF has keeping track of the enormous number of licensed gun dealers. The list of current, valid Maryland licensees, provided to The Sun by ATF and generated by the ATF computer on Jan. 27, five months after Cutler's guilty plea, has a surprising listing near the top of page 89, under license number 5k-35086.
"Otis Wallace Cutler Jr.," the listing says. "Diversified Investments."