Joseph Lestrange, a former senior official investigating transnational organised crime at the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS), says that the purchases begin with the gangs finding people who are eligible to buy them on behalf of those who are not.
“You have transnational criminal organisations who pay recruiters to find straw buyers with clean criminal records”, Lestrange says. They can then “easily go into a federal firearms license dealer and buy one, two or a few firearms, depending on the laws that apply to that state.”
Analysis of US court records from an earlier arms seizure sheds light on how this process works.
I should buy about 3 guns like this. They are big guns, baby, big guns . . . That’s something I can use to do a lot of bad things . . . you can wipe out an area completely.
In 2021, Joly Germine, a leader of 400 Mawozo, one of Haiti’s largest gangs, organised the purchase of guns from his jail cell in Haiti. Court documents state that Germine used WhatsApp to instruct Florida-based straw buyers to obtain military-style rifles — weapons he said would give him dominance over the Haitian police and enable him to inflict huge casualties.
I should buy about 3 guns like this. They are big guns, baby, big guns . . . That’s something I can use to do a lot of bad things . . . you can wipe out an area completely.
The stuff is heavy. He [the shipper] complained . . . He hasn’t complained about the one I prepared today, but the other two drums, a lot of trouble.
From March to November, two Florida-based Haitians bought 24 weapons from gun shops in the state, including a Barrett M82 .50 calibre anti-materiel rifle and 9 Century Arms AK-type rifles, court documents show. Assisted by Germine’s girlfriend, Eliande Tunis, the group planned to hide the guns in barrels and transport them to Haiti. The conspirators completed two weapons shipments, with a third seized in an FBI raid on a lock up in Orlando.
The stuff is heavy. He [the shipper] complained . . . He hasn’t complained about the one I prepared today, but the other two drums, a lot of trouble.
The money to buy the guns had come from a series of kidnappings carried out in Haiti by 400 Mawozo, prosecutors say. In June and July 2021, $25,000 was paid to the gang to secure the release of two US citizens, with $50,000 paid to free a third American hostage the next month.
The gang often used money transfer services, breaking large amounts down into smaller transactions and using multiple services on the same day to avoid suspicion. In this way, the gang sent $37,500 to the US between March and October 2021.
Germine, who was extradited to the US in 2022, pleaded guilty to the gun trafficking charges in 2024 and was found guilty in May for his involvement in the hostage taking of American citizens in Haiti.
One of the shops used by Germine’s straw buyers was Lucky Pawn, a small pawnbroker that sits on the side of a highway in the north of Miami and purchases and sells cars, jewellery and guns.
When approached by the FT, an employee named Frankie, the store’s jeweller, declined to provide details on what checks are carried out on customers, dismissing the volume of guns shipped from Florida to Haiti as insignificant compared to US military support for Israel. “This is shit compared to what’s being sent to Gaza, paid for by American taxpayers,” said Frankie, who declined to give a surname.
