The Gun-Running Police Chief: A Small Town’s Big Scandal 

United States: In Adair, Iowa, a small town with only 794 people, the police department made a strange request to buy 90 machine guns, including a powerful minigun. Later, federal agents found out that the police chief, Bradley Wendt, had been using his job to get the weapons and sell them for personal gain.  

Wendt was convicted of crimes like lying to the police and illegally possessing a machine gun. He is not sorry for what he did and is trying to challenge his conviction. 

“If I’m guilty of this, every cop in the nation’s going to jail,” Wendt said to CBS News shortly before a federal judge sent him to prison for five years. It seems that Wendt has joined the bandwagon of criminal activities that are sweeping the country.   

CBS News investigations revealed numerous sheriffs, captains, lieutenants, chiefs of police purchasing and/or dealing in firearms including guns of warfare in 23 states in the union, Puerto Rico, Washington, D.C., from the South, Midwest, Northeast, and the West Coast California inclusive.  

Analyzing data from the US government audits of local police departments and court records of the last 20 years the researchers found at least 50 cases when a police officer was involved in selling firearms to individuals, even through dealers and over the Internet from their home or from the trunk of their car. 

 Often the weapons were passed on to gun owners, thus these were bought at inflated prices sometimes even up to ten times their cost price.  

In some instances, the guns ended up with deadly criminals involved in such felony as drug peddling, smuggling, and in a particular instance, the murder of the 14-year-old boy when watching a football match at high school. In 2011 federal agents raided a smuggling operation in New Mexico in which a police chief, mayor and village trustee supplied automatic weapons and tactical equipment to a Mexican drug cartel.   

Ten years later, police and prosecutors exposed a gigantic cross-state criminal organization involving a banned Russian arms trader, three chiefs of police, a sheriff and a Delta Force sharpshooter who supplied full-auto machine guns to a criminal buyer. All of them pleaded guilty. 

 Another so-called conspirator, who was involved in the instance and worked as an intelligence analyst for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, has plead not guilty and is also awaiting trial.