On an unusually cool Miami afternoon, alleged international arms smuggler Teodoro Giovan de Oliveira and a gunrunner met near the entrance of a fishing gear store to plot their next big deal.
For months, Oliveira had been lying low, spooked by the bust of a competitor in the illicit Florida-to-Brazil weapons trade, according to a law enforcement document that captured details of their December 2017 conversation. His clients were getting impatient. As jetliners passed overhead on their approach to Miami International Airport, Oliveira explained to his associate — a trafficker-turned-federal informant — how he planned to fill orders for assault rifles while avoiding the fate of his rival: He’d ship everything in pieces.
“Maybe it takes longer, but the guns will get to their destination,” Oliveira said, according to an internal Department of Homeland Security summary of the encounter seen by Bloomberg News. “That’s what matters.”
In a phone interview this week, Oliveira denied ever being involved in gun trafficking. But the summary and allegations from Brazilian authorities portray him as a pioneer in an emerging trend in international smuggling. In several South American countries, criminals are dealing in parts rather than whole guns, tapping into a fad among US enthusiasts who assemble AR-15-style rifles from a smorgasbord of easily available components. They’re also exploiting a regulatory gap that’s uniquely American: The purchase of almost all such pieces is entirely unregulated within US borders.
If he’d wanted to buy a complete AR-15, Oliveira would have needed to walk into a licensed gun store and pass an FBI background check. But to make one, he simply could go online to buy nearly every part needed and have them shipped anywhere in the US. The lack of rules means that international criminal groups can legally buy gun components in bulk without any scrutiny. Oliveira and others have sent parts to a vacation rental or even a Comfort Inn in Orlando, according to investigative files. It’s all perfectly legal — until the parts are smuggled out of the country.
“Nowhere else in the world can you just go online and buy pieces like this,” said a Paraguayan gun importer in an interview in Asunción. He asked not to be identified speaking about the illicit gun trade. “People in the market for this stuff, they know exactly what the rules are.”
Under those rules, the only component that’s regulated — meaning the maker must stamp it with its name and a serial number and the buyer must pass a background check — is a roughly 4-by-8 inch piece of metal called the lower receiver, which holds the gun together.
International traffickers are swapping out high-quality lower receivers with untraceable versions made of hardened plastic or with ones designed for air guns, as demonstrated by recent police seizures in a growing number of cases in South America and the Caribbean. Some have been able to operate in the US for years without being detected. Even when they’re caught, they often face light penalties.
Arms traffickers operating this way are now the main source of assault rifles for some of the world’s largest and most brutal criminal gangs, including Brazil’s PCC and Red Command. They’re also supplying drug cartels in Colombia, Bolivia and Ecuador, authorities say. Brazilian cops have a name for the menacing, DIY weapons: Frankenstein guns.
A Bloomberg News investigation this year documented how the federal government has helped US gunmakers boost their legal exports to countries that are ill-equipped to handle the surge in weapons. The growing business of gun parts exposes another failure: Weak US rules governing that market are making some of the world’s most dangerous places even deadlier.
In March, a cache of 13 assault rifles was seized near Rio after a firefight that killed the leader of a gang accused of assassinating 40 police officers and public security agents. The confiscated guns were sent to Cidade da Polícia, or Police City, a massive law enforcement complex that sits at the intersection of three favelas. There, forensics specialists searched in vain for serial numbers.
The weapons included AR-10s, a heavy version of the AR-15 capable of piercing bulletproof glass and body armor. “Based on previous experience and the total absence of markings, it’s likely the seized weapon was built by organized crime using generic pieces obtained in large part from the United States,” the forensics report concluded.
There’s no indication that any US parts makers or dealers know their products are being smuggled abroad by criminal groups.
Every few years, the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives sends agents to Rio to train officers on trace requests. Traces use serial numbers to help investigators determine where in the supply chain a weapon was diverted into criminals’ hands. When the agents last visited, in August, Rodrigo Barros, then the chief of the weapons forensics unit, had some blunt feedback.
“I told them, ‘Look, tracking these rifles using your system works when you’ve got whole weapons. But nowadays, that’s not what we’re up against,’” Barros recalled in an interview. “They didn’t really have an answer for what we should do. Their response was that it’s not just in Rio. It’s not just Brazil. It’s everywhere.”
Engineered as a military rifle in the late 1950s by a company called ArmaLite, the AR-15 was built from dozens of replaceable components, making it easier for soldiers with minimal training to strip, clean and swap out parts. That dramatically increased the rifle’s longevity in the field.
It also posed a challenge following passage of the Gun Control Act of 1968 in the wake of the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy. The first such legislation in decades, the new law required that one part in every firearm sold in the US be engraved with the manufacturer’s name and a serial number. In a pistol, that’s the frame; in a rifle, it’s the receiver.
“The ATF had to pick a part of each firearm to determine whether or not that would constitute either the frame or the receiver of that firearm,” said Mark Collins, director of federal policy at Brady: United Against Gun Violence, an advocacy group. On an AR-15 — and the many rifles based on its design — “the lower receiver has this beautiful faceplate where you can very obviously engrave serial numbers and identification markings.”
But regulating the AR-15 solely through its lower receiver was problematic from the beginning. The rifle actually has two receivers, one lower and one upper, and the firing pin is in the upper receiver. The lower receiver holds the trigger mechanism and hammer, but both those can be purchased separately — and without a background check — as parts. What’s left, the housing of the receiver, can be forged using 3D printers or machining equipment, or swapped out with a seemingly harmless air-gun part.
Once the US assault weapons ban expired in 2004, the rifle’s modular design meant that enthusiasts could assemble, modify and upgrade it right out of their garages, and firearms manufacturers began pushing the AR-15 as a DIY rifle. Consumers now can purchase handguards, receivers and stocks in a variety of styles and colors. Thousands of factories around the country are using computerized milling machines about the size of a small SUV to churn out rifle parts and sell them online.
Even established manufacturers have shifted their business model. Anderson Manufacturing, based in Hebron, Kentucky, makes a popular but relatively cheap AR-15 nicknamed “the poor man’s pony” because it’s considered nearly as good as Colt’s — and both companies use an equine motif. In 2016, Anderson produced more than 453,000 finished rifles and no receivers for individual sale, federal data show. Four years later, the company made a mere 22,500 complete rifles but 440,000 receivers.
Some criminal gangs prefer the reliability of professionally manufactured lower receivers — and traffickers are happy to oblige. Smuggled receivers have been discovered hidden in shipping containers, parcels, even cereal boxes. Anderson-made lower receivers have shown up in major seizures recently in Chile and Ecuador, both as smuggled parts and assembled into high-powered rifles bound for drug cartels.
“We want to make it clear that we don’t produce anything with ill intent,” said a spokesman at Anderson who declined to give his full name. “We follow US guidelines and work closely with the ATF to ensure our parts don’t end up in the wrong hands. If that does happen, it’s the result of something further down the line.”
When lawmakers passed the 1968 law, assault rifles weren’t a popular commercial item. Since the DIY market for them took off in the past decade, gun-part makers have fought in court to keep the regulatory gap open. Some, including Texas-based EP Armory, tout on their websites the use of their products to avoid current gun regulation.
To address public safety concerns, the Justice Department updated the definition of the term firearm last year to make clear that parts kits designed to build “functional weapons” are subject to the same federal laws as traditional firearms, said ATF spokesperson Kristina Mastropasqua. Still, parts kits that don’t include the lower receiver aren’t regulated, even though they’re designed to go into a functional weapon.
Few people know the consequences of this regulatory scheme better than Elvis Corrales, a Homeland Security Investigations special agent in Miami. Corrales specializes in what’s known as counter proliferation, which combats the smuggling of sensitive US technology abroad — items such as computer chips and aircraft parts.
“It’s ease of access, it’s that simple,” Corrales said of gun parts. “You can go online and there are a slew of companies selling these components.” He said 80% of his work in Miami involves gun trafficking.
Six years ago, those trafficking cases exploded, as armed groups across South and Central America shifted from bribing police and military officials for diverted guns in their own countries to smuggling directly from the US. Initially, the cases involved caches of whole weapons. But soon the criminals figured out how easy it was to acquire assault-rifle parts and smuggle them in small parcels through commercial-freight carriers, mailed packages and even inside the luggage of accomplices visiting the US on tourist visas.
In October 2018, an inspector at the international mail facility near Miami got lucky while scanning two Argentina-bound packages labeled as used sporting goods. Inside were barrels, bolt carriers, pistol grips, gas tubes and trigger kits — enough parts to make more than twenty AR-15 assault rifles.
That one shipment eventually led authorities to a massive trafficking network that spanned the US, Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil. Working with Argentine national police, Homeland Security agents spent the next year uncovering it in an operation code-named Patagonia Express. The guns were assembled in clandestine labs in and around Buenos Aires, then smuggled into Paraguay in a military van the traffickers had purchased at auction, authorities say.
The smuggling was coordinated directly by the PCC, one of the world’s largest criminal gangs. Members in some cases bought what they needed directly on the internet, then had the parts shipped to Brazilian nationals living in Florida. In June 2019, Corrales flew to Argentina and accompanied agents as they conducted raids across 50 sites, seizing an armory’s worth of weapons.
It was the largest arms seizure in Argentine history. An Argentine official, who asked not to be identified, agreed that the case was a success but said that parts for hundreds of rifles had already slipped through by the time the first shipment was caught. “This also shows how big the problem really is.”
It takes 65 to 100 parts and a couple of hours to build a working AR-15. Ronnie Lessa learned how by watching videos on YouTube and consulting online blueprints. A convicted arms trafficker and former Rio police sergeant, Lessa searched for components almost every day on US websites using his smartphone, according to a police analysis of his online activity that included purchasing orders.
He bought rail clamps for scopes using the pay site Shopify and had them sent to a brick home in Atlanta, where a young relative was staying with a family who hosted foreign students. He bought IMI Defense folding stock adapters from Rguns.net, an online retailer in Illinois, using a service called Shipito that lets international shoppers rent a US billing address.
And he bought dozens of upper receivers made by South Carolina-based American Tactical that he shipped to a Comfort Inn in Orlando, to a fake name in Miami, and to an adobe-style home in Pompano Beach, Florida. That house is just down the road from Oliveira, the same alleged smuggler Homeland Security agents had already been watching.
No one ever caught on — until Lessa allegedly assassinated a Rio councilwoman and her driver in a March 2018 drive-by shooting that shocked even the crime-ridden city.
When Brazilian police arrested Lessa a year later and raided two properties in his name, they found gun-smithing equipment and parts for 117 assault rifles, according to investigative files, which included an inventory of the search. The murder weapon wasn’t there — police suspect it had been dumped in the ocean — but forensics show the bullets that pierced Councilwoman Marielle Franco’s cheek, eyebrow, ear and skull came from a 9mm submachine gun.
Lessa is serving a minimum of 13 years in a Brazilian prison for weapons trafficking and destroying evidence; he’s awaiting the conclusion of his trial for Franco’s killing. His lawyers say he’s not guilty and was at a bar when the crime was committed.
Illicit workshops like the one Lessa was running in a dingy apartment with no stove or fridge are showing up across Latin America, individual cells in a sprawling system that’s now pumping out thousands of assault rifles a year, according to Andrei Serbin Pont, a Buenos Aires-based researcher who combs social media posts and news reports to map the trend. Guns made by a gang that stamps its DIY assault rifles with a skull motif have been seized recently in Brazil, Paraguay and Bolivia, said Serbin Pont. Similar rifles have been taken from criminal groups and militias in Colombia, Ecuador, Haiti and Venezuela.
“I was browsing through my Twitter list for Brazil today, and all the rifles seized in the past 72 hours were AR rifles” assembled from components, Serbin Pont, who is president of the Regional Coordinator for Economic and Social Research, a think tank known by its Spanish acronym CRIES, said in late November. “These trafficking organizations have become very savvy at how they go about this.”
The influx of US-sourced gun parts is now a recurring theme on the local news in these countries. On the US side, even leading gun-control groups are unaware of the growing role that parts play in trafficking. Bloomberg reviewed almost 7,000 pages of documents related to 10 investigations into parts smuggling between the US and South America, including the cases against Lessa and Oliveira. Combined, the documents paint a picture of foreign cartels and criminal gangs whose members are setting down roots on US soil then openly and freely buying parts and smuggling them back home. Cases that are a matter of life and death in places where the guns are headed are often a low priority for federal prosecutors dealing with rampant gun violence in the US, details from those cases suggest.
Throughout 2019 and 2020, Homeland Security continued to feed intel on Oliveira and two of his partners in Florida to Brazil’s Federal Police, according to at least five letters sent by the US law enforcement agency to its counterpart abroad. One of the suspects, João Marcelo Lopes, had already been arrested and pleaded guilty to weapons smuggling in Fort Lauderdale in 2016. Brazilian police believe that he started sending gun parts south again almost as soon as he was released from jail the following year.
Authorities in Brazil allege that Oliveira’s ring smuggled hundreds of thousands of dollars of components by air and sea out of Miami. Rifle barrels, bolt carriers, triggers and frames were easily hidden in mailed parcels and southbound containers packed with designer clothing, smart phones and printers.
Oliveira told Bloomberg in an interview that he “never had a gun in my life.”
“They didn’t catch me doing anything,” he said. “I used to send a lot of phones to Brazil. They tried to link me to sending gun parts. I never did.”
The attorney who represented Lopes in the 2016 case didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Brazilian authorities tracked some of the shipments to Amazonas, a state in the country’s north, according to cargo records seen by Bloomberg. After arrival, the parts were assembled into whole rifles and sold in Rio. In 2022, Brazilian police raided several locations and charged four people as part of an operation known as Florida Heat.
Interpol issued so-called red notices urging US officials to detain Oliveira, Lopes and a third man, but they remained free in the US as recently as this week, according to one person familiar with the situation. Homeland Security officials declined to comment.
The Biden administration has sought to crack down on trafficking, but those efforts have centered on whole guns, most of them smuggled across the border to Mexico. An anti-trafficking law passed by Congress last year focuses only on smuggling whole guns or the lower receiver, an ATF official said.
The lower receiver is the one component that doesn’t show up on Oliveira and Lessa’s purchase histories, one indication of how easy it is for traffickers to find replacements. In at least some instances, Lessa allegedly substituted it with a modified Taiwanese lower receiver made for airguns, according to authorities and a purchasing order reviewed by Bloomberg.
When his attorneys argued that the alleged assassin was actually planning to open a shop selling airsoft guns in Brazil and that the part wouldn’t function as a real gun part, police assembled a working AR-15 using the air-gun receivers.
“Those rifles won’t last 10 years the way an AR-15 from one of the big manufacturers will, but they don’t have to,” Serbin Pont said. “The 17-year-old gang member shooting those rifles in favelas is going to get killed long before the rifle ever wears out.”
It’s a sweltering day at Cidade da Polícia, and Fabricio Oliveira is talking to a couple dozen cadets in a windowless classroom with water-damaged ceilings. Oliveira is chief of special operations at Rio’s civil police. The cadets call him Delegado Fabricio, which is the handle he uses on Instagram where he posts videos showing police helicopters being shot at or people brandishing AR-15s at the recent birthday party of a local gang leader.
“This is the most dangerous city in the world to be a police officer,” said Oliveira, who is not related to Teodoro Giovan de Oliveira, the alleged gun trafficker. “People think I’m exaggerating when I say it’s a war zone. Then they come here and see for themselves.”
A few weeks beforehand, he was part of a team sent in to rescue an officer shot during an ambush inside a favela. The bullet had struck the officer where his vest meets his shoulder. It took more than an hour for the rescue team to reach him in a black armored truck weighing 15 tons and riddled with scars where bullets had ricocheted off the thick steel.
At the center of the truck, a lookout sways in a hammock, poking his head through a fishbowl window and keeping an eye out for shooters among the scatter-shot brick buildings and burning tires put in the road to stop their advance. The glass he sits behind is 3.5 inches thick. It can withstand a couple of direct shots from an AR-15, but more than that and there are no guarantees.
“The bullet-proof vests and vehicles we use were designed to stop these bullets,” the police chief said. “But with what we’re seeing now, it can happen. It can break.”
From January 2018 through March 2023, more than 15,000 gun-related homicides occurred in Rio de Janeiro state, according to public data. That averages about eight a day — a quarter of them within Rio city limits. It’s a startling statistic in a nation where firearms are mostly illegal.
No one knows for sure how many of those homicides were committed by guns fashioned from smuggled parts — mainly because public safety groups have yet to catch on to the trend and police haven’t adjusted their record keeping. In other cases, the rifles look so close to the real thing that officers seizing the weapons may not even realize they’re homemade. What is clear is that the DIY rifle is quickly becoming the new model in Latin America.
“Criminal groups, more and more, they have better weapons than we do,” Oliveira said. “They buy everything separately — nothing with serial numbers — so we can’t even track it. But we can tell by the markings who makes it. It’s all coming from the US.”
Everytown for Gun Safety, which advocates gun-safety measures, is backed by Michael Bloomberg, founder and majority owner of Bloomberg News parent Bloomberg LP.
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