Alexander Gekelman returned to his Northeast Portland home on Thanksgiving night in 2011 and found it ransacked.

"They tore the whole house apart," Gekelman recalled.

Stolen from a rifle case in his garage: a Benelli 12-gauge semi-automatic shotgun with 500 rounds of ammunition and an M44 bolt action 7.62-caliber rifle.

"They weren't locked up," Gekelman said. "I'd just gotten back from a hunting trip."

Gekelman reported the break-in to Portland police, and in less than two weeks one of the stolen firearms turned up in an illegal sale.

An average of 232,400 guns are stolen a year during burglaries and other property crimes nationwide, based on

from 2005 through 2010. At least 80 percent of them aren't recovered.

In this case,

investigators closing in on the burglary suspects helped find the stolen weapon.

At 5:30 p.m. on Dec. 7, 2011, an informant working with Portland burglary detectives paid $300 in cash for a firearm from Alan Osman, the owner of USA Market off Southeast Division Street. Undercover officers watched the exchange outside a Northeast Portland auto service center.

The informant walked off with a weapon, wrapped in white cloth, that proved to be Gekelman's stolen shotgun.

Authorities say the market owner bought stolen property to resell from a ring of burglars suspected in up to 80 home break-ins, including Gekelman's, in Portland, Gresham, Clackamas County and Clark County. The burglaries occurred between late 2011 and early 2012.

For a full month, all of Portland's burglary detectives were focused on busting the ring in a special detail police dubbed Operation Red October.

Portland detectives say the ring probably was responsible for single-handedly driving up the city's monthly number of reported burglaries to 468 in November 2011, the highest number of burglaries reported in the past two years.

Alan Osman

A federal judge admonished Osman, now 26, that he was "facilitating burglary" and sentenced him for selling a stolen firearm to six months in federal prison followed by six months of home detention with electronic monitoring.

"How do you get from running an honest shop to selling...loaded handguns,'' U.S. District Judge Michael Mosman asked Osman.

"With all due respect, I was stupid,'' Osman said. "The devil was playing with my mind, you know. I should have known better.''

Osman's brother and more than half a dozen other men and teenage boys were convicted on burglary charges in state court.

The young crew of burglars routinely wore gloves and hooded jackets and shoved open rear or side sliding doors or windows before ransacking homes, stealing cash, jewelry and laptops. Neighbors often reported seeing a getaway vehicle with four or five occupants.

Portland police recovered this shotgun stolen in a residential burglary in the Operation Red October investigation.

Many of the victims were of Chinese, Vietnamese or Russian descent, possibly because the suspects, mostly Eastern European immigrants, thought they might be reluctant to report the crimes because of language or cultural barriers, police said. Several burglaries occurred while homeowners were attending church.

The suspects would congregate at the USA Market, a five-aisle convenience store. Police covertly installed a video camera focused on the outside of the market. Investigators trailed the suspects in cars as they cased homes and even kept their eyes on them from a Portland police plane.

Among the associates of this band of thieves was

Dumitrash wasn't charged with any of the burglaries, but he was seen repeatedly with members of the group and his home was searched as part of the investigation, said former Portland police Sgt. Dan Slauson, who had supervised Portland's burglary task force.

"They were running amok, wreaking havoc," said Portland Detective Doug Halpin, a lead investigator. "It takes five to 10 minutes to commit the crime and two years to investigate. But we think that this group has been dismantled for the most part."

-- Maxine Bernstein