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Date: Thu, 17 Jul 1997 18:13:59 -0700
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From: Paul Andrew Mitchell [address in tool bar]
Subject: SLS: Appendix "G" (fwd)
<snip>
>
>Hallejuluh! Here it is.
>
>Carol Moore in D.C.--Belly of the Bully Boys
>cmoore@capaccess.org
>
>Report of
>THE DEPARTMENT OF THE TREASURY
> on the
> BUREAU OF ALCOHOL, TOBACCO, AND FIREARMS
> Investigation
>of
>Vernon Wayne Howell
> also known as
> David Koresh
> September 1993
>
>Appendix G
>
>A BRIEF HISTORY OF FEDERAL FIREARMS
>ENFORCEMENT
>
> Frederick S. Calhoun, Ph.D.
>Historian
>Federal Law Enforcement Training Center
>
> The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and
>Firearms (ATF) is a relatively young law
>enforcement organization,
>having been created formally in 1972. Yet,
>measured by the federal laws related to the
>regulation and taxing of
>alcohol, tobacco, and firearms--the laws ATF
>now enforces--the history of the
>bureau's duties and responsibilities
>stretches across the full two centuries of
>American history. As early as 1791, revenue
>acts taxed both alcohol and
>tobacco and created the offices of tax
>inspector, collector, and supervisor.
>During the next century, the offices
>changed names as frequently as the tax
>rates changed, but the federal interest in
>raising revenues from alcohol
>and tobacco remained strong. Indeed, the
>formal organization of an independent
>bureau within the Department
>of Treasury specializing in alcohol,
>tobacco, and firearms law enforcement
>belatedly recognized the distinct need
>for such an agency.
> After the Civil War, revenue agents
> battled moonshiners throughout the South
>in some of the bloodiest
>opposition ever to federal law enforcement.
>Revenue agents and deputy U.S. marshals by
>the score were killed as
>they roamed the hills and hollows searching
>out illicit stills. Prohibition changed the
>government's focus from taxing
>whiskey to banning it, yet the revenue
>agent's job remained as dangerous. After
>experimenting in social adjustment
>a dozen years, Prohibition was rescinded.
>Spawned by the 1933 repeal of Prohibition,
>the Alcohol Tax Unit was
>established as a tax-collecting branch
>within the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).
> Continued concern over the violent,
>organized mobs that plagued the major
>cities compelled the federal
>government to try to curb the gangsters'
>ability to arm themselves. Rather than ban
>outright the purchase of
>machineguns and sawed-off shotguns--the
>weapons of choice for the
>mobsters--Congress in 1934 simply imposed
>a tax those weapons. Paying the tax
>required registering the weapon. The
>registration requirement was intended
>to discourage ownership of such weapons
>without outlawing them. No self-respecting
>gangster would want to
>register, much less pay the tax, on his Tommygun.
>Their evasion of the tax gave the
>government another legal tool
>to use in arresting the gangsters and
>breaking up the mobs.
> Because it was a tax rather than a
>prohibition, it fell to Treasury to enforce
>the law as part of Treasury's
>role in collecting all funds due the
>government. Within Treasury, the Alcohol
>Tax Unit seemed the logical branch
>to enforce the new law. Registering and
>taxing stills required many of the same
>procedures and investigatory
>talents that would be needed to register
>and tax weapons. In the end, the new
>assignment proved comparatively
>easy. The unit was not overwhelmed with
>registrations nor by the 1940s were the
>investigations into evasions of
>the tax very time-consuming. As the
>gangsters declined in number and power, so
>did their use of machineguns and
>sawed-off shotguns. Enforcing the alcohol
>taxes again occupied most of the unit's
>attention.
> In 1951, the Alcohol Tax Unit began
>enforcing federal taxes on tobacco, thus
>prompting a name change
>in 1952 to the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax
>Division. Once again, the logic seemed to
>be that collecting the tax on
>tobacco closely resembled the work
>necessary to collect the tax on alcohol,
>machineguns, and sawed-off shotguns.
>The 1968 passage of the Omnibus Crime
>Control and Safe Streets Act and the Gun
>Control Act expanded the IRS
>unit's jurisdiction to the criminal use of
>explosives and bombs. The new laws also
>defined specific federal offenses
>involving firearms, including
>transportation across state lines and use
>in organized crimes. In recognition of this
>new enforcement responsibility, the Alcohol
>and Tobacco Tax Division changed its name
>to the Alcohol, Tobacco,
>and Firearms Division (ATFD). Two years
>later, Congress passed the Explosives
>Control Act defining certain
>bombings and acts of arson as federal
>crimes. It assigned jurisdiction for
>enforcing this new law to ATFD.
> With these expanded responsibilities,
>the Treasury Department on July 1, 1972
>created the Bureau of
>Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms under the
>general oversight of the Assistant
>Secretary of the Treasury for
>Enforcement, Tariffs and Trade, and
>Operations. For the past twenty-one years,
>ATF has enforced the collection
>of federal taxes on alcohol and tobacco and
>the federal controls and regulations on
>firearms, with particular
>attention to their use by criminals.
>Although on its face the bureau seems a
>discordant collection of separate duties,
>the techniques for enforcing the taxes and
>ferreting out the illicit products, whether
>cases of whiskey, cartons of
>cigarettes, crates of automatic weapons, or
>containers of bombs, are strikingly
>similar.
> Subsequent laws have expanded ATF's
>jurisdiction. The 1976 Arms Export Control
>Act focused the
>bureau's attention on international gun
>smuggling. The 1982 Anti-Arson Act gave ATF
>authority to investigate the
>destruction of property by fire as well as
>by explosives. Increased taxes on
>cigarettes and alcohol, and enhanced
>regulatory measures such as the 1978
>Contraband Cigarette Act, have also
>enhanced the bureau's responsibility
>to ensure the government receives its
>lawful taxes.
> The bureau has been an effective force
>in law enforcement. Supplies of illicit
>alcohol and smuggled tobacco
>have steadily decreased, and tax revenues
>have risen. During 1991, for example, ATF
>collected $7.7 billion in alcohol
>taxes and $4.8 billion in tobacco taxes.
> ATF agents have also focused on tracking
>down armed career criminals and
>criminal gang members. Investigations in
>Florida resulted in the arrest of 45
>Warlock motorcycle gang members
>in 1991. Members of the Gullymen Posse, a
>gang of Jamaican drug dealers known for its
>propensity to commit
>murder, were arrested in New York by ATF
>agents in January 1991. Similarly, an ATF
>investigation into the
>activities of the Born to Kill gang
>culminated in the arrest of a dozen gang
>members in August 1991. Sixteen
>members of the San Diego chapter of the
>Hells Angels were convicted in 1992. As a
>result of these and similar
>investigations, ATF has become the nation's
>principal repository for gang-related
>information and intelligence. The
>bureau has also earned an excellent
>reputation for working well with federal,
>state, and local law enforcement
>agencies.
> ATF agents also specialize in
>identifying anonymous bombers by their
>"signature" habits in making bombs.
>For example, in 1990, the assassin of
>Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals Judge
>Robert Vance was ultimately
>identified by ATF agents who recognized the
>way the bomb was constructed. Similarly, in
>the midst of the tragedy
>in Waco, Texas, ATF agents investigating
>the World Trade Center bombing helped to
>identify the van that was
>used to hold the bomb. This early
>identification led FBI agents to the rental
>car company and thereafter to arrests
>of the terrorists before they could escape
>the country.
> The bureau has developed considerable
>expertise in arson investigations. At the
>request of the National
>Fire Protection Agency, ATF began developing nationwide standards for
>fire investigators. The State Department's
>Diplomatic Security Service invited ATF to
>develop a protocol
>establishing an International Response Team
>of investigators trained to search blast
>scenes involving U.S. property
>abroad. Despite a rather eclectic array of
>duties, ATF has succeeded in developing
>considerable expertise in each
>area of its enforcement responsibilities.
> The raid by ATF agents on the Branch
>Davidian compound resulted from its
>enforcement of
>contemporary federal firearms laws. In a
>larger sense, however, the raid fit within
>an historic, well-established and
>well-defended government interest in
>prohibiting and breaking up all organized
>groups that sought to arm or fortify
>themselves. The 1934 law taxing weapons was
>only the first time the federal government
>addressed private
>ownership of weapons; it was not the first
>federal effort to control firearms. From
>its earliest formation, the federal
>government has actively suppressed any
>effort by disgruntled or rebellious
>citizens to coalesce into an armed group,
>however small the group, petty its
>complaint, or grandiose its ambition. The
>collection of large arsenals by organized
>groups lent itself, ultimately, to the
>violent use of those weapons against the
>government itself or portions of its
>citizenry. Indeed, federal agents who tried
>to disband the groups frequently became the
>targets.
> The discomfort over armed organizations
>predated the Constitution. The outbreak of
>what became known
>as Shays' Rebellion in 1786 gave added
>urgency to the establishment of a strong
>national government. During the
>rebellion, hundreds of angry Massachusetts
>farmers, most veterans of the Revolution
>and facing foreclosures on
>their farms, banded together to keep the
>courts from issuing any executions. Calling
>themselves Regulators, the
>farmers quickly organized into a small
>army. Significantly, their first foray was
>to capture the arsenal at Spring
>field. Although the Regulators failed, the
>specter survived. Five months, delegates
>from each of the thirteen states
>met in Philadelphia to design a new
>experiment in government.
> The lesson of Shays' Rebellion was not
>forgotten, even after the new government
>was formed. In 1792,
>Congress passed a law empowering the
>president to call out the state militias to
>suppress insurrections if either
>an associate justice of the Supreme Court
>or a local district court judge certified
>that opposition to the laws was
>beyond the powers of the civil authority to
>suppress. Ironically, the first occasion to
>resort to that law grew out
>of the violent, organized, and armed
>resistance to the federal government's
>whiskey tax. Thus, two of the duties
>that ATF would later inherent--enforcing
>alcohol taxes and controlling
>firearms--combusted in 1794 into the
>Whiskey Rebellion, the first violent
>opposition to the new federal government.
>(1)
> Across the next century, succeeding
>presidents had sporadic, though no less
>fearsome, occasion to
>dispatch the Army and the state militias to
>suppress various outbreaks of armed
>opposition to federal laws, taxes,
>and interests. In 1799, Fries Rebellion
>against a federal tax on houses forced
>President John Adams to muster the
>militia. Fugitive slave rescues during the
>1850s prompted the government to call out
>the military. Organized
>resistance in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania,
>New York, Ohio, and Wisconsin raised a
>troublesome specter. "The main
>opposition," President Millard Fillmore
>warned Congress in December 1851, "is aimed
>against the Constitution
>itself." At the end of the decade, John
>Brown's ill-fated raid on
>
>-----------------------------------
>(1) Bowen, Miracle at Philadelphia, p.
>287; Frederick S. Calhoun, The Lawmen.
>United States Marshals
>and Their Deputies, 1789-1989, (Washington,
>D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press~ 1990),
>p. 32.
>Harper's Ferry, Virginia, sparked the
>government to decisive action. Brown chose
>Harper's Ferry because of the
>federal arsenal there. His intent was to
>distribute the weapons among Southern
>slaves and lead them in revolt for
>their freedom. Federal troops, however,
>thwarted the plan.(2)
> After the Civil War, the federal
>government battled unrepentant Southerners
>to protect the rights of
>the freedmen. Nonetheless, federal
>officials acted only after the innumerable
>Klan-style attacks were finally
>perceived as organized. "Outrages of
>various descriptions," Attorney General
>George Williams advised southern U.S.
>Attorneys and Marshals in 1874, "and in
>some cases atrocious murders have been
>committed in your district by
>bodies of armed men, sometimes in disguise
>and with the view it is believed of
>overawing and intimidating
>peaceable and law abiding citizens and
>depriving them of the rights guaranteed to
>them by the Constitution and
>laws of the United States." The attorney
>general ordered his attorneys and marshals
>"to detect, expose, arrest, and
>punish the perpetrators of these
>crimes.''(3)
> Throughout the western territories and
>along the Mexican border, the federal
>government found
>occasional need to suppress armed bands of
>outlaws, ganged together to steal cattle or
>rob the mails. General
>William Tecumseh Sherman, sent to the
>Arizona border in April 1882 to investigate
>the outlaw troubles there,
>advised President Chester A. Arthur that
>"the
>--------------------------------
>(2) Fillmore quoted in W.U. Hensel, The
>Christiana Rio and the Treason Trials of
>1851. An Historical
>Sketch, (New York: Negro Universities
>Press, 1911), pp. 92-3; Calhoun, The
>Lawmen. pp. 82-93.
>(3) Attorney General George Williams,
>circular letter to U.S. Attorneys and Marshals, September 3, 1874,
>Attorney General Instruction Book E, Record
>Group 60, Records of the Department of
>Justice, National
>Archives.
>Civil Officers have not sufficient forces
>to make arrests, to hold prisoners for
>trial or punish when convicted." The
>President promptly proclaimed on May 31
>that the areas plagued by the outlaws were
>in a state of rebellion.(4)
> The federal government looked no more
>kindly on the labor strikes that broke out
>in the closing years
>of the nineteenth century and the opening
>years of the twentieth. What seemed so
>dangerous about events such
>as the 1894 Pullman strike was not just the
>disruption of the mails, which was the
>legal basis on which the
>government relied to break the strike, but
>the fact that the mails were being
>violently disrupted by organized
>groups. "We have been brought to the ragged
>edge of anarchy," Attorney General Richard
>Olney frantically
>explained when he ordered that the trains
>be kept running. Eventually, Eugene Debs
>and his colleagues in the
>American Railway Union, which took the lead
>in the strike, were indicted and convicted.
>Once again, it was the
>volatile mixture of violence and
>organization--combinations determined
>difficult to suppress--that evoked the full
>power of the federal government.(5)
> The passage of the National Firearms
>Act of 1934, the first federal effort to
>control private ownership
>of firearms, grew out of this historic fear
>of armed organizations. The various
>collections of gangsters that
>proliferated during Prohibition were the
>true targets of the law, which required a
>tax and registration on the sale
>of their weapons of choice--machineguns
>
>-----------------------------------
> (4) General William Tecumseh Sherman to
>Attorney General Benjamin Brewster, April
>12, 1882,
>Source-Chronological Files, Record Group
>60, National Archives; Calhoun, The Lawmen,
>p. 196; Larry Ball, United
>States Marshals of Arizona and New Mexico,
>1846-1912, (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press,
>1978), pp. 125-6.
> (5) Almont Lindsey, The Pullman Strike,
>(Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
>1967), p. 245, 274-92; Calhoun,
>The Lawmen, 209, 214.
>and sawed-off shotguns. Subsequent federal
>firearms laws have been of a piece. Other
>than the 1968 ban on
>mail-order sales, which was in direct,
>though delayed, response to the
>assassination of President Kennedy, federal
>gun laws have typically been concerned with
>the weapons of considerable destructive
>power generally preferred
>by organized groups--bombs, machineguns,
>and automatic weapons.
> In recent times, the federal government
>has shown itself even less patient with
>armed groups than it had
>historically. Radical extremists of both
>the Right and the Left have been pursued
>aggressively once they began
>breaking the law. For instance, after the
>Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) launched
>its self-styled "people's war"
>by kidnapping newspaper heiress Patty
>Hearst and committing a number of daring
>bankrobberies, the federal
>government dedicated its full resources to
>tracking the group down. Within
>approximately three months, FBI
>agents and Los Angeles police closed in on
>the group at a house just outside what was
>then known as Watts.
>During an intense gun battle and fire,
>every member of the SLA in the house was
>killed.(6)
> Gordon Kahl, who stood at the opposite
>end of the political spectrum from the SLA,
>met a similar end.
>Kahl belonged to the Posse Comitatus which
>refused to recognize the authority of any
>government above the
>county level. Accordingly, Kahl
>consistently refused to pay his federal
>taxes, even after he served time in prison
>for not doing so. When U.S. Marshals
>attempted to arrest him for violating the
>terms of his probation, Kahl killed
>two of them. For the next five months, Kahl
>hid among his friends and sympathizers
>until FBI agents located him
>----------------------------------
>(6) Los Angeles Times, May 18, 1974.
>in a farmhouse just outside Smithville,
>Arkansas. After refusing to surrender, Kahl
>was killed, and the farmhouse
>was burned down.(7)
> Robert Matthews, the head of a group of
>right-wing fanatics known as the Order,
>embraced many of
>Kahl's beliefs. Unlike Kahl, whose
>resistance was essentially passive until
>the marshals tried to arrest him,
>Matthews and the Order launched an
>aggressive private war against the country.
>Like the SLA, the Order
>committed a series of bank and armored car
>robberies, netting $3.6 million in one
>heist alone. The Order also
>assassinated Alan Berg, a radio talk show
>host in Denver, Colorado.
> The FBI began an equally aggressive
>pursuit. After a brief, violent skirmish in
>Idaho and another in
>Portland, Oregon, FBI agents finally closed
>in on Matthews hiding out among three
>adjoining houses on Whidbey
>Island, some fifty miles north of Seattle.
>After negotiating his surrender for two
>days, Matthews began firing on
>an FBI Hostage Response Team that attempted
>to enter the house. Protected by a full
>suit of body armor,
>Matthews ran from the first floor to the
>second floor firing automatic weapons. The
>FBI dropped a magnesium flare
>from a helicopter. The flare landed on the
>roof of the house and burned through it to
>the room where Matthews
>had stored his ammunition and explosives.
>These ignited, setting off a roaring,
>exploding fire that consumed
>Matthews.(8)
>
>-------------------------------------
> (7) James Corcoran, Bitter Harvest
>Gordon Kahl and the Posse Comitatus: Murder
>in the Heartland, (New
>York: Viking Press, 1990).
>
> (8) James Coates, Armed and
>Dangerous. The Rise of the Survivalist
>Right, (New York: Hill and Wang, 1987),
>pp. 41-76.
> A year later, in the spring of 1985,
>ATF collected considerable evidence that an
>80-member group styling
>itself the Covenant of the Sword and the
>Arm of the Lord (CSA) had stockpiled a
>large arsenal at its fortified
>compound in Arkansas. The group had
>collected over 150 firearms, (including 35
>machineguns), two anti-personnel
>mines, three anti-aircraft rockets, 50
>pounds of military plastic explosives, 300
>blasting caps, 2,000 feet of
>detonating cord, and around 100 explosive
>devices. CSA had also stockpiled food,
>water, and supplies.
> ATF led the assault on the CSA compound
>on April 20, 1985. CSA members retreated
>farther into the
>compound, barricading themselves behind
>their defenses. The agents set up a siege
>perimeter and settled in to
>wait. The group used the wait to destroy
>many of the weapons (and hence evidence)
>illegally obtained. Negotiators
>from the FBI arrived and began the tedious,
>frustrating process of talking the group
>out. Three days later, on April
>22, 1985, James D. Ellison and the 75
>members of the CSA surrendered.(9)
> As both history and recent events
>clearly show, the United States has never
>tolerated armed groups
>residing within its borders. The intent of
>the particular organization, whether
>ideological or criminal, mattered little.
>If the group was building an illegal
>arsenal, the group was subject to a federal
>enforcement action. To this day,
>ATF's enforcement focus retains the flavor
>of that historic concern with armed
>organizations. The agency has
>developed considerable expertise and
>success in investigating the activities of
>motorcycle, street, and drug gangs,
>all of which share in common a proclivity
>to amass large arsenals of powerful
>weapons.
>----------------------------------
> (9) James Coates, Armed and Dangerous.
>The Rise of the Survivalist Right, (New
>York: Hill and Wang, 1987),
>pp. 142-4.
>
>The raid on the Branch Davidian compound
>occurred in the context of that historical
>background.
>
>END Appendix G Treasury Dept. Report on Waco
>
<snip>
========================================================================
Paul Andrew Mitchell : Counselor at Law, federal witness
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