Feds break up weapons ring shipping firearms to Colombian criminal groups

Federal authorities have broken up a South Florida weapons ring they say was illegally buying firearms and shipping them to Colombian criminal groups.

An indictment filed Thursday in Miami federal court charges three South Florida men with conspiring to buy pistols, semiautomatic rifles and other arms from licensed weapons dealers and and secretly shipping them in air compressors to Colombia during the past year.

Although the indictment charging the men does not identify the criminal groups suspected of receiving the weapons, federal and Colombia authorities are investigating whether some may have ended up in the hands of the National Liberation Army, a U.S.-designated terrorist organization known by its Spanish initials, ELN.

Colombian authorities have accused the ELN, which was founded in 1964 as a leftist rebel group, of carrying out last week’s truck bombing of a national police academy in Bogotá that killed 21 people and wounded more than 70 others. The ELN has been expanding its profile as a criminal organization while capitalizing on the drug trade and kidnapping ransoms after the larger Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) struck a peace deal in 2016 and became a political party.

After the blast last Thursday, Colombian President Iván Duque described it as a terrorist act, while his government said it had proof that a longtime ELN member drove the truck bomb into the Escuela General Santander national police academy in southern Bogotá. It was the deadliest car-bomb attack in Bogotá since 2003.

There is no indication, however, that the weapons illegally shipped from South Florida to Colombia played a part in the deadly Bogotá bombing, authorities said.

The new federal indictment charges the three South Florida defendants with unlawful weapons dealing.

Earlier this month, related criminal complaints said two of the defendants — Francisco Joseph Arcila Ramirez and Gregory Fernando Ortega, who live in Broward County — used a straw buyer to purchase dozens of firearms from Miami-area gun stores such as Lou’s Police Supply and then shipped them hidden inside Husky air compressors to Arcila’s brother in Colombia. Among the purchases: Glock, Draco and Zastava pistols, the complaints said.

Last fall, the straw buyer began cooperating with agents from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and recorded conversations about the weapon transactions and shipments to Colombia, according to the complaints filed by federal prosecutor Michael Sherwin.

The straw buyer is not identified in the complaints but listed as the third defendant, James Smith, in the indictment.

In October, Ortega admonished the straw buyer not to “say anything about him” to federal agents about the firearms they had purchased. Ortega also instructed the straw buyer to lie to ATF&E agents that the “firearms were stolen” and that is why the buyer no longer had them in his possession, according to court documents.

The following month, Ortega told the straw buyer that the agents would not be able to trace any of the weapons because the “serial numbers were scratched off.”

Ortega also told him that he was concerned about Arcila “getting caught.” Arcila arranged the firearms shipments and traveled to Colombia in the fall, according to the complaints.

Ortega, Arcila and Smith are charged with engaging in the business of dealing firearms without a license, making a false statement to a federally licensed firearms dealer and conspiring to defraud the United States.

Ortega is scheduled to be arraigned on Friday and Arcila on Monday. Ortega’s lawyers with the public defender’s office could not be reached for comment. Arcila’s defense attorneys, Kimberly Acevedo and Joseph Rosenbaum, declined to comment.

In Colombia, the national police arrested Arcila’s brother, Alvaro Jay Arcila, and his wife, Ingrid Maldonado Perez, in Barranquilla. In a search of the couple’s home in October, police found assorted firearms parts and accessories, along with four Husky air compressors. One of the compressors had a Home Depot identifier tag with a store inventory number, which was traced by federal agents to the Home Depot store on Southwest Eighth Street in Little Havana.

Arcila, who is a legal permanent resident in the United States, bought the compressors at that Home Depot store in September, according to surveillance video footage.

This story was originally published January 24, 2019 at 12:23 PM.