“Keep your hands where I can see them!”

The officers continued to creep towards Wayne Wright with their Glock 9mm pistols pointed firmly at his chest.

Wayne Wright was a retired police officer, firefighter and former helicopter pilot in the U.S. Air Force, but little could have prepared him for the swarm of officers that morning, and the decade-long odyssey that would follow.

Wright was hardly a gun trafficker. He was a respected war veteran (A Bronze Star recipient), an Adjutant Service Officer at his local VFW, and like many retired police officers and military veterans, he collected firearms. What was unique about Wayne’s collection however, was that it contained rare and valuable collector’s items worth nearly a million dollars.

The Gang and Narcotics Division, Gun Unit of the LAPD had failed to seize enough guns in 2004. In order to secure necessary yearly funding from the federal program, Project Safe Neighborhoods, local police programs were expected to demonstrate progress in policing their communities.

In one fell swoop, the LAPD would exceed their entire gun seizures for the prior year, in 2003, and obtain a firearm collection with museum quality pieces.

It was an easy bust. One without the risk or extended police-work of taking down a real gun trafficker, gang member or drug lord, but one with all the gaudy headlines, (read the LAPD press release here) invaluable volume, and bounty of rare collector’s guns, that many had been eying for months, if not years.

Over a decade later, two-thirds of the guns are still missing, despite California state law, and a court order requiring the LAPD to return the contents of the entire seizure. Many of the guns that have been returned have been damaged, and many of the guns that had never been used have been fired.

Despite the seizure of hundreds of his firearms by the police, the only violations the DA could make stick was a single misdemeanor charge of unlawful possession of an “assault” weapon (apparently he’d been the executor of the estate of a brother law enforcement officer, and, according to his attorneys, had simply ‘forgotten’ about it, which might be plausible given that he had 300+ firearms to keep track of.)

Wright ended up working out a plea deal for informal probation on that charge, and because the misdemeanor wasn’t punishable by more than one year in prison, Wright didn’t lose his right to own firearms.

He’s spent years jumping through hoops, fulfilling (arguably illegal) demands for proof of ownership, copies of original sales receipts, and the like. Everything from 1911s to a Walther PP, a Browning Hi-Power to a Browning Citori. The entire list can be seen here, in the complaint recently filed by Wright’s attorneys.

Despite the fact that none of them were owned or possessed in violation of the law, despite the fact that he remained legally entitled to own them, despite the fact that even some elements of the bureaucracy acknowledged that, yes, the firearms should be returned, the LAPD ignored all of his efforts to have them returned.

Wright’s attorneys – C.D. Michel and Joshua Robert Dale – filed a complaint alleging not just violations of U.S. civil rights law, but also violation of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, under the theory that the firearms were destroyed to show that “the City’s Gun Unit was being sufficiently effective in using federal grant money to keep guns ‘off the streets’….”

RICO provides additional penalties and causes of action against criminal acts performed as part of an ongoing criminal organization. It was intended to assist in the prosecution of criminal gangs (i.e., the Mafia) but it has been applied to many organizations deemed to be criminal enterprises in the past including, interestingly enough, the Key West, Florida police department.

To prevail in a RICO action, Wright will have to show that an enterprise, in this case the LAPD, engaged in conduct that showed a pattern of racketeering activity. Here, they argue that since the city Gun Unit intended to deprive Wright of his firearms even though he wasn’t under suspicion of any crime, simply to bag a large haul to show that they were being effective at keeping guns off the streets. And to continue to enjoy the fruits of federal largesse supplied to them for that purpose.

The complaint alleges – unsurprisingly – that Wright is hardly the only one to have been subjected to this sort of behavior from Los Angeles’s finest. They point out the rather strange conditions of his arrest (which they consider entrapment):

The Gun Unit, led by Defendants Tompkins and Edwards, contacted [Wright] as ostensible purchasers of a firearm from [his] collection. They arranged to meet…to inspect the firearm and arrange the transfer. [They] met in Los Angeles County…. Edwards agreed at the meeting to purchase the firearm after inspecting it. {Wright] wanted to immediately take the firearm to a local Federal Firearms Licensee (“FFL”) in order to properly effect the sale under state and federal law. Edwards agreed to the immediate FFL transfer, but played the “eager buyer” and insisted that [Wright] allow Edwards to drive the firearm to the local FFL to surrender the firearm to the FFL and begin the transfer paperwork. After cajoling by Edwards, [Wright] agreed, and gave Edwards possession of the firearm to drive to the FFL, at which point, Gun Unit officers appeared and arrested [Wright].

[Wright’s] reluctance to engage in the transaction in the unlawful manner which Edwards insisted upon was clear from the surveillance recordings of the encounter, and the matter would never be charged as a crime…. It was apparent that no crime had been committed but for Edwards’s insistence of “holding” the firearm while they drove to the dealer to get the lawful transfer process started. It was a bad sting. Nonetheless, LAPD then used the fact of the arrest to get a search warrant to seize Plaintiff’s collection, claiming, with no corroborating evidence, that the collector was a “gun trafficker….”

The complaint also details the many steps Wright took to get his property back, and how, despite having the law on his side, and having gone above-and-beyond to meet every request, no matter how unreasonable, they not only kept his firearms, but destroyed them.