Canadians Fear Spread of Smuggled U.S. Guns : Crime: High-profile incidents, porous border raise concern. Police focus more attention on traffickers.

The battle exploded onto the placid streets of suburban North York when metropolitan police here tried to question a 23-year-old man near an after-hours nightclub. The suspect pointed a pistol out of his car window and emptied it at pursuing officers. Then he pulled out a second gun and fired again.

None of the officers was hurt. But the incident was seen here by many as evidence of the escalating level of criminal violence in Canada’s cities. And police later determined that at least one of the guns had been smuggled into Canada from the United States.

A month later, in October, 1993, three men carrying 9-millimeter automatics and a .25-caliber pistol entered an upscale jewelry store in Vancouver and escaped with more than $300,000 in merchandise. Their guns too had been smuggled in from the United States.

The weapon used in the North York shootout was among at least 120 funneled onto the streets of Toronto by Larry Braxton, licensed by the U.S. government to sell firearms in Detroit under the name Larry’s Leathal Weapons.

The source of the guns used in the jewelry heist was a federally licensed firearms dealer in Burlington, Vt., named Wayne D. Reed. Agents of the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms have tracked 952 weapons ordered by Reed in a single year; they believe all the weapons were smuggled into Canada, usually through the Akwesasne Mohawk Indian Reservation on the Canada-New York border.

More than 100 guns traced to Reed have been seized with warrants or turned up at killings, robberies, assaults and other crime scenes from Quebec to British Columbia, said Richard Dotchin, ATF resident agent-in-charge in Burlington.

With these and other incidents contributing to spreading alarm about the level of violent crime in Canadian cities, law enforcement officials across Canada and the government in Ottawa are, among other things, focusing more sharply on gun trafficking from south of the border.

“There’s a very, very strong network for smuggling handguns from the United States,” said Julian Fantino, police chief in London, Ontario, a city of 331,000 on the popular smuggling route between Detroit and Toronto. “There’s a lot of money to be made.”

The number of guns entering Canada illegally is impossible to determine, since smuggling by definition avoids detection. And there are skeptics, especially in the academic community, about the scope of this problem. Still, the handful of smuggling operations penetrated by authorities in the last two years suggests that the number of smuggled firearms easily could run to the thousands.

Canadian Justice Minister Allan Rock already has announced that tougher penalties for trafficking weapons will be included in a comprehensive new gun-control law scheduled to be introduced in Parliament this month. The new law would tighten what already are some of the most restrictive gun regulations in the world, and would extend mandatory registration from handguns to all firearms.

Canada’s two most populous provinces, Ontario and Quebec, have in the last six months formed elite, multi-agency police units devoted exclusively to suppressing firearms, and Canada Customs is adapting techniques used against suspected drug smugglers to gun trafficking.

Bill LeDrew, director general of enforcement for Canada Customs, is reluctant to draw conclusions about the scope of the problem but acknowledges that a smart gunrunner has the odds on his side.

“The greatest difficulty we have is the individual who appears to be a legitimate traveler, gets in his car and drives to Buffalo or Detroit and loads up on three, four or five weapons,” said LeDrew.

“They’re not hard to hide, and unless we have some clear indication, he’s not likely to get caught. We only inspect four or five percent of the cars that cross. . . . These people can ply their trade regularly because they’re hard to identify. . . . The reality is, we are not intercepting too many of them.”

From pre-Civil War abolitionists bringing runaway slaves to freedom in Canada to Prohibition-era rumrunners looking to slake Americans’ thirst, smuggling has been a byproduct of the long, demilitarized border between Canada and the United States.

Cigarette smuggling from the United States into Canada became so pervasive that last February Ottawa slashed tobacco taxes in an effort to take the profit out of the black market. It worked, and many smugglers--in a reversal of the Prohibition trade--turned to liquor, which remains heavily taxed in Canada and can retail for as much as 2 1/2 times the American price.

Now they may be moving into handguns.

“If you’re a smuggler, the kind of commodity is irrelevant; it’s whatever you can make money with,” noted Greg Connolly, a constable with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s customs and excise unit in Windsor, Ontario, just across the border from Detroit.

Last December, the unit arrested two Canadian auto workers and an American mortgage loan broker in what looked to be a routine case of smuggling liquor. One of the Canadians, however, had cached 21 illegal firearms and admitted to officers that at least eight had been smuggled in from the United States.

Comparative numbers demonstrate the ready-made market in Canada for smuggled firearms. According to the Canadian Justice Department, of the 7 million firearms in private hands in Canada, only about 950,000 are handguns, which are very tightly regulated. Juxtapose this with the United States, home to an estimated 200 million guns, including 67 million handguns, and relatively lax controls. Then divide by a wide-open, 5,500-mile border.

Police say profit margins on smuggled weapons begin at 100% and go up. Profits are high enough to have lured into the trade at least one university student from Toronto. The second-year business major told a CBC television interviewer last year that he arranged a single gunrunning trip, intending to finance a $600 installment payment on his tuition. His “buyer” turned out to be an undercover police officer.

The Braxton and Reed cases, however, provide more typical examples.

Both men took customized orders from their Canadian contacts and delivered a variety of weapons, including such easily concealed guns as the Raven .25 and the Bryco .380 favored in holdups and close-range slayings. And both men were caught after weapons traced to them were recovered from Canadian crime scenes.

The guns moved through two of the best-traveled smuggling portals into Canada: the Windsor-Detroit border stop and the Akwesasne Mohawk reservation.

Metropolitan Detroit (home to more than 2,700 federally licensed firearms dealers) and Windsor have a symbiotic commercial relationship similar to that of San Diego and Tijuana, minus much of the illegal immigration. Each year, more than 20 million travelers enter Canada through Windsor and nearby Sarnia, which are a four-hour freeway drive from Toronto.

Among the travelers were Stephen Gooding and Davey Gill, two Toronto men indicted along with Braxton for smuggling guns into Canada.

According to court records, the pair carried as many as 30 handguns at a time through the congested border checkpoint and never were detected. Their smuggling operation unraveled only after they were stopped on a Toronto freeway by provincial police in March, 1993. In an ensuing struggle with the officers, three semiautomatic handguns spilled out of Gooding’s pants pocket. More weapons were found in his waistband and inside the car.

Toronto police relayed to ATF agent George Krappmann in Detroit the two men’s admission that they were regular customers of a Detroit dealer, a formidable young man who on at least one occasion met them at his mother’s house in the suburbs to deliver them their guns. Their purchase price was $130; they resold the guns in Toronto for $300 to $450. They knew their supplier only as “Brax.”

The name struck a chord for Krappmann. Just days earlier he had received a call from another Toronto detective telling him that a pistol recovered from a murder scene had been traced to Detroit weapons dealer Larry Braxton.

After a three-month investigation, the 5-foot-7, 300-pound Braxton was charged. He pleaded guilty to two counts of weapons charges last year and on Monday began a 30-month prison sentence.

Reed, who operated out of his house in a rundown neighborhood north of Burlington, also was brought to the attention of the ATF by Canadian police after weapons purchased by him turned up in a variety of crimes.

Perhaps the bloodiest incident linked to a Reed-ordered weapon was a 1992 drug-related holdup in Brossard, Quebec, in which four people were shot to death after two gunmen stormed their condominium.

In a plea bargain with the U.S. attorney’s office in Vermont, Reed was sentenced to three years’ probation in August, 1993. The resulting anti-smuggling investigation has resulted in four more arrests and still is under way.

Most of the weapons purchased by Reed--everything from sophisticated, European-made semiautomatics to cheap, small-caliber pistols manufactured in California--entered Canada through the Mohawk reservation, according to the ATF and Charles Tetzlaff, the U.S. attorney in Vermont. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police report that the reservation has been a favored smuggling route for years, mainly for cigarettes and liquor, but also for firearms.

Despite alarms being sounded by police, not everyone in the law enforcement community is ready to acknowledge that the number of smuggled guns is on the rise.

Philip Stenning, associate professor at the University of Toronto’s Center on Criminology, noted that police looking to protect themselves from government budget-cutters have a vested interest in magnifying the crime problem. He said a sharp rise in guns entering the country could be expected to lead to a similar increase in gun-related crime.

Instead, crime rates in Canada, after increasing through the 1970s and ‘80s, have for the most part leveled off in this decade and remain minuscule compared to those in the United States. Rates of homicide and robbery--two crimes closely associated with firearms--have stabilized in recent years.

A recent study done for the Canadian Justice Department, however, reinforces the belief that a large number of the guns used in criminal acts in Toronto were smuggled into the country. A Toronto consulting firm traced 550 handguns seized by Toronto police in 1993 and found that more than 60% were unregistered.

“Because there are few manufacturers of handguns in Canada, many of these unregistered handguns may have been illegally imported,” the report noted. “However, it is not known if these guns were recently smuggled or if they existed in Canada for some time.”

Front-line police officers are less impressed by statistical analysis than by their own experience.

“I can say in my experience as a cop on the street that I’ve seen an increase in the number of guns around the criminal element,” said Ron Gentle, a veteran detective who heads the special firearms enforcement task force in Ontario. “It used to be that it was unusual to find a gun at a crime scene. Now it’s unusual when you don’t.”

The disagreement over guns mirrors a divergence over the entire crime issue in Canada. Despite statistics showing that crime rates are for the most part level, opinion polls indicate public concern about crime and violence is at an all-time high. Many police officials, if they concede the accuracy of the crime-rate reports, say the intensity of criminal violence has risen even if the number of crimes has not.

Tetzlaff, the U.S. attorney who directed the prosecution of Reed, seemed bemused by the Canadian debate over the extent of the gunrunning problem. He was blunt in his assessment of the 952 weapons ordered by Reed and smuggled into Canada.

“I view it as a lot of guns,” he said. “From my perspective, we ought to be very concerned about that.”