One morning last month, Rhode Islanders woke up to the news that the National Rifle Association had been charged with the second-largest campaign finance ethics violation in state history. In a settlement reached by the Rhode Island Board of Elections, the NRA admitted that it improperly funneled money from its national Political Action Committee (or “PAC”) to the Rhode Island-specific PAC, illegal under state law. The PAC was fined a historic $63,000.

What the stories didn’t reveal? That the NRA’s wrongdoing, the record fine, and the shuttering of the NRA’s Rhode Island PAC was the result of the initial hunch of one person: Brown University student Sam Bell.

Bell’s story is certainly noteworthy for its David-and-Goliath appeal; the plot notes sound like a chilled-out version of “A Civil Action.” It’s also remarkable for the NRA’s astonishingly poor cover-up (their reports defy simple arithmetic) and the even more stunning realization that nobody checked them for ten years. But the real reasons Bell matters — the success of his legal complaint and the clues that led him there — together represent something else entirely: a new model, potentially, for enforcing campaign finance laws in Rhode Island and around the country.

Bell is a Ph.D. candidate in Brown’s geology department — not exactly the campus war room, unless you apply a broad interpretation to “digging.” But it’s the 24-year-old grad student’s other job that supplies his political adrenaline, as State Coordinator of the Rhode Island Progressive Democrats. Tall and ebullient, with a perennial tie and glasses that accentuate a scrutinizing demeanor, Bell sharply resembles the consummate grad student, including a thin, brass voice almost perfectly designed for administering factual correction. His age and background, in a way, are camouflage for political foes that get too casual with the facts, whom Bell can skewer (and I can testify) with an encyclopedic knowledge of state politics and polling data down to the district level.

I visited Bell at one of his monthly statewide meetings. A dozen coat-clad adults, all over 40, sat in a fluorescent conference room and looked on while Bell comfortably wrapped up a PowerPoint on monetary policy. Later, Bell told me that his suspicions in the NRA case began not with fishy numbers or a secret source, but an old-fashioned political ass-whooping. So ass-whoopy, in fact, that something didn’t add up.

“We failed miserably at passing an assault weapons ban,” said Bell, referring to the measure’s failure last spring, and citing a failure to act from the legislative leadership despite their repeated official statements of support. That seemed odd to Bell: after all, constituent support statewide for gun control reliably clocks in at overwhelming levels. Sixty-four percent approve an assault weapons ban, including 86% of Democrats, while the NRA received a toxic 56% “unfavorable” rating, both according to polling data from last year. Bell noted that more Rhode Islanders support gun control than supported Barack Obama in the 2012 election.

Then Bell learned that the speaker of the house, the senate president and both chambers’ majority leaders all had accepted money from the NRA — a lot of money. An independent analysis of public campaign finance reports by BPR confirms that the NRA’s Rhode Island PAC spent over $162,000 on Rhode Island elections since 2002, and the speaker and senate president each took $2,700 and $5,700 in the same time frame, respectively. True, Bell reasoned, the Rhode Island legislature is notoriously conservative on issues of reproductive health and voter I.D. — a fact made even more frustrating by Rhode Island’s misnomer status as the most liberal state in America, but even that didn’t make much sense either, per the same polling data that Bell now knew by heart. The mystery wasn’t the legislature’s willingness to take the money, but the money itself. In other words, if the NRA was so unpopular, who was writing the checks?

“We wondered how this group was able to raise so much money,” said Bell. “We had never seen an NRA fundraiser, never heard about one.”

Then he consulted the public records in the Board of Elections archive (the same source of BPR’s analysis) where Bell noticed the organization hadn’t reported a single donor in ten years. Such a practice is only legal if a donation is less than $100, known as “aggregate individual contributions.” Additionally, Bell said that the NRA’s federally filed expenditures matched dollar-for-dollar those of the NRA’s Rhode Island-specific PAC — again, every year dating back to 2002.

Put another way: the NRA didn’t even attempt to hide what plainly appeared to be suspicious activity. Something was clearly up. And Bell was the first to have checked in over ten years.