In August 2018, convicted felon Dereke Holden of San Jose sold $13,200 worth of guns to an undercover police officer within a matter of days.

Background-check laws prevented him from purchasing a firearm legally, so Holden came up with a workaround that federal authorities say is part of a statewide trend: He recruited a friend to purchase guns in a place with fewer gun restrictions than the Bay Area — in this case, Las Vegas — and bring them back.

It was through this method that Holden and 22-year-old Jose Sotomayor came to sell nine pistols and two assault rifles to an undercover police officer. Last November, the two were indicted as part of a large federal and state law investigation targeting gun and drug trafficking in the South Bay.

The case pales in comparison to the scale of several Bay Area gun rings that have been busted in recent years, but the modus operandi was the same. Federal authorities estimate that hundreds of thousands of guns have been brought to the Bay Area from Nevada and even rural places in California that have fewer restrictions for gun dealers.

Jill Snyder, a special agent with the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, said that in 2016 more illegal guns were seized in California than any other state. She said guns are brought to the black market in two main ways: gun store burglaries and “straw purchasers” who buy the weapons from so-called “source states” and transport them to an area where they can be sold at a profit.

“For California, it’s its own source state. Most of the guns we seize have been purchased in another part of California,” Snyder said. “We do have cases, though, where firearms are trafficked from Nevada … It depends on the type of gun you want, it depends on the area you live in, if the guns are accessible. If you want a machine gun, that might be more (money). If you want a silencer, that might be more. It’s supply and demand, like everything else.”

Traffickers who operate solely within California take advantage of differences in gun laws between rural parts of the state and cities such as Oakland, which has passed several strict gun control ordinances in recent years. California as a whole also has more stringent age requirements and other restrictions limiting gun sales.

Whenever it can, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives tracks the “time to crime” — from when a gun is illegally trafficked to when it turns up in a criminal investigation. Agency records made public in federal sentencing memos in a gun trafficking case last year note that one pistol sold on the streets of Oakland was used by a gang member in an Auburn homicide 90 days later. Another was used in an attempted murder in San Leandro within a day of being acquired.

On Sept. 6, after pleading guilty to selling guns without a license, Sotoymayor was sentenced to two years, six months in federal prison. Holden has pleaded guilty as well and is awaiting sentencing in January, according to court records.

Sentencing disparities

When gun traffickers are caught and charged, it is relatively easy to escape serious jail time. One 2016 case involved several East Bay residents traveling to the Sacramento area, burglarizing gun shops for dozens of weapons and reselling them in Alameda County, yet all but one was sentenced to 33 months or less in prison.

The defendants were brazen — one burglary involved driving a pickup truck through the front of a gun store and grabbing guns as the burglar alarm blared — and a gun store owner wrote a statement saying the thefts put him out of business.

A count of conspiracy to sell firearms without a license — a common charge levied against gun traffickers — carries a sentence of up to 10 years in federal prison. Certain federal drug distribution charges, by contrast, can carry a maximum term of life.

One exception came last November, when Oakland resident Andre Martel Winn was sentenced to 14 years in federal prison for leading a gun ring caught trafficking dozens of firearms throughout the Bay Area. Federal authorities linked the guns to more than a dozen crimes, writing in court records they were used in three separate homicides and four attempted murders.

Authorities say Winn and his co-defendants legally purchased the guns in Nevada and brought them back to Oakland for resale, taking Greyhound buses with the guns in their luggage — a travel method authorities say reduced the risk of being arrested.

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Federal judge upholds California ban on carrying guns in public “The Oakland-based conspirators paid the middlemen for the gun orders prior to the purchase of the guns via MoneyGram money orders wired to MoneyGram locations in Nevada,” federal prosecutors wrote in sentencing memos in Winn’s case. “The middlemen picked up the cash and gave it to yet another level of conspirators who purchased the firearms in Nevada — hereinafter, ‘the straw purchasers.’ The Oakland-based co-conspirators traveled from Oakland to Reno via Greyhound bus, picked up the guns and brought them back to Oakland.

But Winn’s sentence was longer than most because of a charge of robbery affecting interstate commerce, from a gas station robbery in Oakland committed within 24 hours of acquiring the gun he used. Several of Winn’s co-defendants, convicted of gun trafficking charges, were sentenced to as little as three months probation.