.......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... ..........

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Longtime Albuquerque gun dealer and collector Robert “Bob” Adams was far from happy when the Department of Homeland Security took away his prized collection of nearly 1,600 firearms from his home and business in January 2013.

He had his lawyers file court documents to get them back, despite statements in the four search-and-seizure warrants claiming he had attempted to smuggle guns from Canada to the United States, made false statements and evaded taxes along the way, as well as falsified licensing and import documents.

It’s all over now.

Last week, the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver upheld a ruling by Senior U.S. District Judge James A. Parker from last July suppressing the seizure.

ADVERTISEMENTSkip

................................................................

By Friday, the government had thrown in the towel, dropping the criminal case it had filed against him 19 months earlier.

“The United States declines to further prosecute this matter,” said a motion to dismiss the superseding indictment.

His lawyers at Freedman, Boyd, Hollander called the seizures a “textbook example of governmental abuse and overreaching” in a motion seeking to suppress the evidence. Adams’ lawyers Vincent Ward and Nancy Hollander said in the motion that out of the nearly 1,600 firearms and hundreds of pages of documents, the government “drummed up charges related to seven of the seized firearms and one of the customs forms found in Mr. Adams’ trash.”

Adams is a retired federal employee who has been collecting guns since he was 14 and has amassed a large and valuable collection that forms a significant portion of his retirement assets, the defense said in its motion.

Prosecutors Norman Cairns and Kimberly Brawley said that pejorative wording used by the defense constituted “an attempt to cast the government in a false light and criticize the government’s decision to seek an indictment.”

While Adams’ lawyers called his gun collection rare, old and historically significant, prosecutors said only a handful date to before 1898. Some 90 percent that Adams called “curios and relics” were in fact firearms like any other and subject to the Gun Control Act regulations, they said.

“The government’s decision to charge any person with a felony crime is a serious matter that is not taken lightly,” the prosecutors said, adding that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives suspected as early as 2006 that Adams was “smuggling firearms into the U.S.”

Parker, the trial judge, initially ruled against Adams following a May 2014 hearing at which the government highlighted allegations of inadequate record-keeping for guns Adams sold, his advertising of firearms as not having importer’s marks and other alleged violations.

The defense asked Parker to reconsider his decision, claiming the case agent knowingly or recklessly made false statements and omitted material information from the warrant affidavit.

Ultimately, Parker concluded that “once all of the extraneous information and argument is stripped away, the allegations on which the government rests its case are meager.”

“There are simply too many missing pieces for the court to create a coherent, or even semi-coherent, picture of criminal activity,” the judge wrote in an opinion suppressing all evidence obtained through the January 2013 warrants.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office appealed.

The three-judge panel agreed with Parker, concluding that there was no probable cause for the searches.

At one point in the opinion, in fact, 10th Circuit Judge Robert E. Bacharach says the agent’s theory of Adams’ supposed falsification of documents is both invalid and illogical.

“The government’s theory,” Bacharach wrote, “illustrates the theory, ‘Head I win, tails I win.’ ”