IRA Case Depicts S. Florida as a Premier Arms Market

To the young Irish Republican Army soldier from Belfast on a mission to buy firearms, South Florida was a wonderland of weaponry.

“We don’t have gun shows in Ireland, and you see things here like you never imagined,” said Conor Claxton.

So impressed was Claxton at the array of armaments available, and the ease of purchase, that within weeks of his arrival here he and three associates had spent more than $18,000 on dozens of handguns, rifles and rounds of high-powered ammunition, hid the arms inside toy firetrucks, computers and clothing, and then mailed their purchases home to Ireland.

Now Claxton, 27, is being tried on federal gun smuggling and terrorism charges. He is spilling secrets about the clandestine activities of the IRA while spotlighting this region’s importance as a ballistic bazaar where gunrunners shop for bargains.

“He came to South Florida to buy guns because it’s like buying a car,” said assistant U.S. Atty Stephanie Pell, paraphrasing what Claxton told the FBI. “The laws make it so easy.”

The Claxton case provides a rare view both into IRA activities in this country and the flourishing gun trade in this region. Federal and state agents have seen South Florida emerge as the nation’s premier arms market, especially for export.

The reasons: Guns are cheap and available, state laws are relatively lax and the Sunshine State is conveniently dotted with air and sea ports. According to federal agents, weapons flow out of South Florida to the Caribbean and Central and South America as easily as drugs flow in.

“South Florida is a gateway for anything illegal, coming and going,” said Zach Mann, a spokesman for the U.S. Customs Service. “It’s overwhelming.” Federal authorities are so swamped by drug and money-laundering cases, they’re having trouble keeping up with the arms trade, he added.

Most every weekend in South Florida there are gun shows, where anyone with a driver’s license can buy everything from a palm-sized Saturday night special to a .50-caliber Magnum Desert Eagle, capable of bringing down an elephant. Arsenals of guns and ammo are for sale through classified ads in newspapers and magazines. And the area is rife with arms dealers, some willing to skirt the law for a few extra dollars.

Edward Bluestein, the owner of Big Shot firearms in Delray Beach, testified that he sold 38 handguns to associates of Claxton and then, for $50 extra per gun, failed to file the required federal paperwork. Bluestein, 56, pleaded guilty to conspiring to illegally export guns and is awaiting sentencing.

The region’s reputation as a firearms marketplace has drawn buyers from many of the world’s trouble spots. Three presidential candidates in Colombia were killed a little more than a decade ago with guns bought over the counter in Florida. Dozens of weapons purchased in local gun shops were used in an attempted coup in Trinidad and Tobago. In 1998, federal agents busted a Canadian man who planned to ship 250 handguns to Quebec to fuel a biker war.

In the Orlando area, federal agents recently have prosecuted several gun dealers for shipping hundreds of weapons to drug gangs in Puerto Rico.

According to Eduardo Halley, a spokesman for the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms office in Miami, much of the illegal arms traffic lately has been in small arms destined for Haiti. In 32 arms smuggling cases filed since October 1998, almost half have involved shipping weapons to the hemisphere’s most impoverished nation. Other current cases involve arms shipments to the Bahamas, the Dominican Republic and Canada.

But it was the arrest last July of Claxton that has again focused international attention on how the free-flow of arms from South Florida can influence world events, in this case the fragile peace process in Northern Ireland.

Last month the Provisional wing of the IRA reaffirmed its support for the U.S.-brokered Good Friday accords by agreeing eventually to get rid of its hidden weapons.

But Claxton tried to justify his arms smuggling by insisting that Ireland’s centuries-old tradition of sectarian violence makes stockpiling weapons only prudent. “If the peace process fell apart, things would go back to the way they were before--or worse,” Claxton testified last week in U.S. District Court as 12 jurors, Scotland Yard detectives and reporters from Ireland and Britain took notes.

Both the judge and federal prosecutors have tried to keep the blood-soaked history of Ireland’s “Troubles” out of the five-week trial, which is expected to go to the jury today. If convicted of the terrorism charge, Claxton could face life in prison. “You will not be responsible for deciding who’s right and wrong in Northern Ireland,” Judge Wilkie D. Ferguson Jr. told jurors.

But that history is central to Claxton’s defense. He ran guns to the Republic of Ireland, he insisted, to be used only in self-defense. Claxton said his activities were prompted in part by wealthy American supporters who threatened to give their money to other IRA factions if decommissioning takes place.

From the witness stand, Claxton said he joined the IRA at the age of 19 in Belfast “so that people wouldn’t suffer the same degradation that I had to suffer.”

“I’m a soldier,” he testified, pushing his schoolboy spectacles up on his nose and speaking in a soft Irish accent. “My instructions were to go out and buy weapons, basically, and ship them home.”

To buy weapons, say prosecutors, Claxton enlisted a colorful cast of accomplices, including three U.S. residents, all natives of Northern Ireland and Ireland. Two of the three Irishmen, Martin Mullan, 30, and Anthony Smyth, 43, are being tried with Claxton on a variety of gun smuggling charges. The third, a onetime Fort Lauderdale stockbroker named Siobhan Browne, 35, has pleaded guilty to lesser charges but has not agreed to testify.

Bluestein, the gun dealer, said that he received from Smyth a faxed copy of a gun buyer’s “wish list,” which Claxton has admitted writing. On it was a catalog of exotic weapons, including rifles, a machine gun that comes concealed in a briefcase and “anything .25-caliber and above” that was silenced, fully automatic and concealable.

Quizzed by prosecutor Richard Scruggs about how those weapons could be used for self-defense, Claxton said the wish list was only a test to see if Bluestein could be trusted. If the dealer could supply those exotic armaments, Claxton said, he must be an informant. The weapons were not supplied.

The smuggling operation was uncovered about the same time in South Florida and in Britain. In a routine check of registration forms, ATF agent Regina Lombardo noticed that Browne was buying several guns at a time from several locations and using two Social Security numbers.

Lombardo testified that she traced Browne to a post office box where Claxton also received mail. And Claxton’s name turned up on an Interpol list as a suspected IRA terrorist.

At the same time, British postal inspectors monitoring an X-ray machine at a mail sorting center spotted a .357-Magnum pistol in a package Claxton had sent from Florida.

When Claxton was arrested last July in a Deerfield Beach motel room, FBI agents found a phony passport, a shredder, an encrypted computer, two guns, ammunition and a videotape called “Against Her Majesty.”

During an interview, Claxton said that the guns were to be used against British soldiers, the Northern Ireland police force and Protestant paramilitary groups, according to FBI agent Mark Hastbacka.

Claxton denies making that statement.

Although the evidence that Claxton engaged in gunrunning seems overwhelming, he’s tried in several ways to shift the focus of the trial.

At one point, he has complained that although he came to Florida to buy guns, “there were too many guns, more guns than I required.” He also suggested that U.S. lawmakers were somehow responsible for his troubles.

In his statement to the FBI, Hastbacka said, the IRA operative put it this way: “Claxton stated it is common knowledge that obtaining weapons in the United States is easy. Claxton blamed the United States government for not having tougher gun laws.”

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Times researcher Anna M. Virtue contributed to this story.