19955: Marassa: Sun Sentinel: Who supplying guns to haiti? (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: DeSprit Marassa <lwasauvaj@hotmail.com>

Guns smuggled from South Florida arming Haitians

By Jake Bergman and Oriana Zill de Granados
Special to the Sun-Sentinel

March 6, 2004

The political unrest in Haiti, with its graphic daily images of gunfire and
street violence, is focusing attention once again on the island's South
Florida gun connection.

Behind drugs, gun cases now occupy most of the attention of federal
prosecutors in Miami, Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach, statistics show.
The U.S. Attorney's Office does not keep track of the intended destination
of smuggled guns.

But the ATF has said that 25 percent of the gun-smuggling cases handled by
its Miami office during the past three years have involved firearms destined
for Haiti. The island is the top foreign destination for guns exported
illegally from South Florida.

"The movement of guns from South Florida to Haiti has been going on for a
long time, and these cases are almost always linked to unrest in Haiti,"
said Daniel McBride, who heads technical services for the Palm Beach County
Sheriff's Office. McBride was in charge of the Miami office of the federal
Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms office during the 1990s, when dozens
of Haitian gunrunners were prosecuted.

Agents across the country have noted a trend: Wherever Haitian immigrants
gather within the United States, ATF sees a boom in gun-smuggling cases. In
Atlanta, for example, ATF is seeing a rise in guns flowing to Haiti in
correlation with that city's growing Haitian population.

Haitian gun smugglers have become increasingly sophisticated in recent
years. Elaborate family networks of Haitian immigrants employ brothers and
cousins as fronts to buy pistols and long guns in small increments to avoid
sending up red flags on ATF paperwork. Agents become suspicious when they
spot a single individual making large or repeated purchases at a particular
gun shop.

The smugglers amass the guns and ship them to Port-au-Prince in a variety of
ways -- hidden inside of electronic equipment, sewn into the lining of
clothing and deep within the hulls of freighters that move along the Miami
River piled high with bicycle parts, used mattresses, used clothing and
other consumer items.

Avoiding detection

For years they escaped detection because federal authorities were far more
interested in what was brought into the United States than in what left the
country. More recently, Haitian gun smugglers have refined their tactics to
get around tightened security in a post-Sept. 11, 2001, world, avoiding the
ports and airports and using friends and family members to smuggle small
amounts of arms to avoid detection.

There is no shortage of potential buyers in Haiti -- political factions and
their armed escorts, drug traffickers, armed militias, rebel forces and even
Haitian police. The profit margin is high; a $150 Lorsen handgun will sell
for $400 to $500 once it reaches the island. A $400 Glock pistol can cost as
much as $1,500 once on the streets of Haiti, according to the ATF.

In the past, the ATF has had difficulty stopping the trafficking of small
arms to conflicts overseas. It is perfectly legal to buy large quantities of
so-called "long guns," which include shotguns, AK-47 type copies and many
other military-style weapons and ammunition without raising any red flags or
reports to ATF, said retired ATF agent Gerald Nunziato. Nunziato was a
special agent assigned to the creation of ATF's gun tracing database.

While traffickers break the law when they ship weapons overseas without the
proper license, they are rarely caught, Nunziato said. A review of gun
smuggling cases shows that even when they are caught, the sentences tend to
be minor.

Guns are illegal to buy or sell in Haiti, so smugglers can make large
amounts of money by buying them cheaply in the United States and selling
them on the streets of Haiti.

ATF agents describe the flow of smuggled guns to Haiti as constant, although
at certain times they have noticed peaks of activity. The last noticeable
increases occurred between 1999 and 2000 and between 1994 and 1995, both
periods coinciding with attempts to oust former Haitian President
Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

In 1994, for example, two Miami men, Patrick Loisseau, 24, and Florence
Toussant, 25, were charged with smuggling semi-automatic pistols to Haiti
inside frozen turkeys. Agents said in press reports at the time that the
pair bought 110 pistols from a dealer in Pompano Beach. The men told agents
they thawed the birds, inserted the pistols, and then refroze them. They
carried the turkeys to Haiti in their checked luggage on board a commercial
flight.

Voodoo blessing

In 1999 and 2000, agents in South Florida broke up about a dozen
gun-smuggling rings involving some 300 weapons.

A convicted smuggler specializing in semiautomatic pistols by the name of
Vladimyr Bernadin remains a fugitive. ATF suspects he is hiding out in Haiti
where he is a well-known voodoo priest charged with blessing the cargo of
marijuana and cocaine traffickers.

Bernadin, 63, was arrested in February 2000 and accused of lying about being
a U.S. citizen when he tried to purchase five Mossberg shotguns and five
Taurus 9 mm. pistols from the 27th Avenue Pawn and Gun Shop in Miami. He was
then released on bail and fled.

The gun shop's owner also had his own run-in with federal authorities.
According to court records, Roman Hernz pleaded guilty to a single count of
illegal gun sales, surrendered his license and was placed on probation.

He was arrested after ATF agents noticed he had a large Haitian clientele
and was selling a large volume of the same type of gun.

Agent Kevin O'Keefe said in court records that Hernz taught many of his
Haitian customers how to use straw purchasers to avoid ATF reporting
requirements and didn't run background checks.

An ATF source in Miami said few cases have been prosecuted recently because
the number of guns in each shipment was fairly small.

"We have recently seen more activity up the coast in Broward County near
Palm Beach and Fort Lauderdale," he said, indicating that the Haitians were
trying to avoid detection of their gun purchases by moving further up the
coast of Florida.

Jake Bergman and Oriana Zill de Granados are reporters with the Center for
Investigative Reporting, a non-profit journalism organization in San
Francisco.

South Florida Sun-Sentinel Staff Writer Ann W. O'Neill contributed to this
report.
Copyright © 2004, South Florida Sun-Sentinel

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