Arms-Smuggling Ring Broken Up; Nearly 200 Weapons Confiscated

In what authorities called one of the largest weapons seizures in county history, nearly 200 semiautomatic rifles and 80,000 rounds of ammunition were seized by federal agents, culminating an undercover investigation of a San Diego arms-smuggling ring, it was announced Wednesday.

The two-week investigation by Operation Alliance, a task force composed of members from the U.S. Customs Service, Drug Enforcement Administration and state and local agencies, ended with the arrests of four men who delivered 98 Chinese-made AK-47 assault weapons, 2 handguns and about 8,000 rounds of ammunition to a Customs agent posing as a representative of a drug-trafficking organization in Sinaloa, Mexico.

An additional 93 AK-47 rifles and 70,000 rounds of ammunition belonging to the four men were seized in Irvine, and will be used as evidence against the alleged exporters, agents said.

Estimated Street Value

The assault rifles, which can fire up to 40 rounds a minute, had a street value of $285,000, they said.

Weapons smuggling “is a very high priority for Customs in general. We think this is a very significant seizure,” Steve Trent, U.S. Customs agent-in-charge in San Ysidro, said Wednesday while standing in front of stacks of the weapons at a Customs facility near the border.

Most of the rifles were wrapped in plastic and packaged neatly in cardboard boxes. A small instruction manual accompanied each.

“It’s the largest weapons export seizure in San Diego County that I can recall,” Trent said.

Those arrested Tuesday were identified as Enrique Gobea-Rabago, 25, a San Diego used-car salesman who is a citizen of Mexico; Adam Hahn, 25, an Irvine gun dealer; Jose Luis Rodriguez, 27, a San Diego auto mechanic, and Mario Lopez-Gutierrez, 29, an unemployed resident alien living in Chula Vista.

The men were arrested at the home of Gobea-Rabago in the 3900 block of Coleman Avenue in San Diego. Gobea-Rabago is believed to be a leader of the weapons-smuggling ring in San Diego, Trent said. The later seizure of weaponry took place at Hahn’s in the 100 block of Streamwood Street in Irvine.

All four were being held Wednesday at the Metropolitan Correctional Center on suspicion of conspiracy to illegally export firearms. If convicted, they could each be sentenced to 10 years in prison and fined $1 million, agents said.

Legally Imported

The AK-47s seized were legally imported from China into the United States before March, when laws restricting exportation of such weapons went into place, Trent said. Agents are investigating the sources of the weapons.

U. S. authorities have long documented illicit traffic in weapons from the United States south to Mexico, where comparatively few firearms are produced and where restrictions make legal purchase difficult. Nonetheless, Mexican-based drug gangs have been found to be well-armed with a wide array of automatic and semiautomatic weapons, many of them believed to have been purchased from U.S. sources, sometimes in exchange for narcotics.

Since January, 358 AK-47s have been seized in narcotics raids in San Diego, and authorities say the assault rifles are commonly used by drug dealers and traffickers. A task force made up of DEA agents and San Diego police Monday recovered four AK-47s when it made a heroin bust, said Donald Clements, DEA resident agent in charge in San Ysidro.

“It’s effective and it’s fast . . . and it’s a fad,” Clements said of the weapons. “It’s just the weapon of choice, definitely. It’s the one everybody wants.”