According to US Today
N MAIN STREET in Man, West Virginia, a woman marched through the front door of Uncle Sam’s Loans, a cavernous pawn shop packed with hunting bows, fishing lures and camping supplies for the residents of this small Appalachian town. Behind the counter hung the linchpin of Uncle Sam’s business: guns.
The woman flashed her credentials, which revealed that she was an investigator with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the nation’s gun industry watchdog. She was here to make sure Uncle Sam’s had cleaned up its act.
This was the ATF’s third inspection of Uncle Sam’s in seven years. The two most recent audits found that the store had transferred weapons without conducting background checks and failed to provide safety notices to handgun buyers. At one point, ATF records show, more than 600 firearms that should have been in stock could not be found – a red flag for gun trafficking.
In both cases, the violations were serious enough to warrant stripping Uncle Sam’s of its license to sell guns, according to ATF records. But agency officials decided to spare the shop, issue an official warning to its owners and give them another chance to prove they could follow the rules.
As the investigator leafed through handwritten ledgers in the spring of 2014, she discovered that things had hardly improved. Sales records were incomplete, the store failed to report required information to law enforcement, and safety notices still weren’t going out. The inspector typed out her findings and sent them to her superiors.
Their decision: Issue yet another warning.
Months later, the ATF learned that Uncle Sam’s was the backbone of a sprawling gun trafficking scheme. Witnesses told the agency that Steven Adkins, a longtime shop employee who’d purchased a stake in the business, had enlisted a host of people, including a colleague’s girlfriend and his brother-in-law, to falsify paperwork so it would appear they had purchased guns in legitimate transactions, according to court records. In reality, the guns were used to bribe coal officials in a pay-to-play scheme at a local mine. Others were sold on the black market, witnesses said.
One accomplice told investigators “hundreds, if not thousands of firearms” had been trafficked through Uncle Sam’s. According to court records, he recalled parking his truck around the back of the store, loading up guns and delivering them to a convicted felon. Another accomplice said he drove guns from Uncle Sam’s to Adkins’s home, where Adkins allegedly sold them out of his basement.
Adkins pleaded guilty to aiding and abetting a false statement relating to purchases of more than 50 firearms from late 2008 to August 2014. He was sentenced to 10 months in prison. No one else was convicted in the trafficking scheme.
“Everybody knew where to get a firearm: Adkins,” said Roger D.B. Muncy, whose father founded Uncle Sam’s in 1975. “We’re all human, but you don’t send guns out the back door.”