Police Chief’s Massive Gun Smuggling Ring Exposed – ‘Every Cop’s Doing It!’ 

Police Chief's Massive Gun Smuggling Ring Exposed - 'Every Cop's Doing It!' Credit | U.S. District Court, Southern District of Iowa
Police Chief's Massive Gun Smuggling Ring Exposed - 'Every Cop's Doing It!' Credit | U.S. District Court, Southern District of Iowa

United States: In a shocking turnout, it was observed that Adair, Iowa, has a population of 794. Therefore, it extended its suspicion when its three three-person police department asked regulators to purchase ninety machine guns, including the M134 Gatling-style minigun with a capacity of shooting six thousand rounds of ammunition every sixty seconds. 

Federal agents later learned that Adair’s police chief, Bradley Wendt, was purchasing firearms and reselling them on the side for his personal profit. 

More about the news 

Wendt was earlier this year found guilty in a case that involved conspiracy to defraud the United States, making false statements to federal officers, and possessing a prohibited machine gun. 

According to Wendt, before a federal judge sentenced him to a 5-year prison term, “If I’m guilty of this, every cop in the nation’s going to jail,” CBS News reported. 

Wendt did not show any remorse and has therefore appealed his conviction. 

CBS News investigation identified top cops – sheriffs, captains, lieutenants, chiefs of police – who bought and trafficked in firearms and weapons of war from 23 states, Puerto Rico and Washington D.C., deep south to midwest, northeast, and the west coast. 

Police Chief's Massive Gun Smuggling Ring Exposed - 'Every Cop's Doing It!' Credit | U.S. District Court, Southern District of Iowa
Police Chief’s Massive Gun Smuggling Ring Exposed – ‘Every Cop’s Doing It!’ Credit | U.S. District Court, Southern District of Iowa

An analysis of government audits and court documents from all 50 states and across the past two decades reveals at least 50 instances of police officers selling their firearms through online swaps for guns, through licensed firearms dealers, from their homes, or from the trunk of their cars. 

Further detail into the case 

Most of the firearms found their way to civilians, and in most cases, they changed hands with fancy caliber as much as ten times what was paid for them. 

Quite often, the guns ended up in bad hands, thus being used in criminal activities such as drug trafficking, arms dealing internationally, and, in one instance, the shooting dead of a 14-year-old boy watching his high school football game. 

Ten years later, the attorneys recognized a scheme involving several states, a Russian arms dealer under sanctions, three chiefs of police, one sheriff, and a member of the Delta Force, who sold the machine guns deliberately to a criminal vendor. 

All of them pleaded guilty. Additionally, an alleged co-conspirator working as an intelligence analyst for the US Department of Homeland Security denied wrongdoing, and his case has been proceeding to trial.