DAN FREEDMAN
chron.com
Houston and Texas
More Information
THE TRAIL OF SMUGGLED WEAPONS
August and September 2010: Dallas brothers Otilio and Ranferi Osorio are first flagged by ATF for multiple handgun purchases.
August 2010: A load of 23 weapons is seized in La Pryor, Texas, with its serial numbers obliterated. The guns are sent to West Virginia for tracing.
Sept. 17: Three of the guns are traced to the Osorios and friend Kelvin Morrison.
Oct. 10: Otilio Osorio buys a Draco AK-47 pistol in Dallas.
November 2010: The Osorios and Morrison deliver a load of weapons to an undercover informant as part of a secret DEA operation. But they are not arrested.
Feb. 15, 2011: U.S. federal agent Jaime Zapata is killed in Mexico in a highway stop by gangsters. Ballistic tests show one of the guns is the Draco bought by Otilio Osorio.
Feb. 28, 2011: The Osorios and Morrison are arrested.
August and September 2010: Dallas brothers Otilio and Ranferi Osorio are first flagged by ATF for multiple handgun purchases.
August 2010: A load of 23 weapons is seized in La Pryor, Texas, with its serial numbers obliterated. The guns are sent to West Virginia for tracing.
Sept. 17: Three of the guns are traced to the Osorios and friend Kelvin Morrison.
Oct. 10: Otilio Osorio buys a Draco AK-47 pistol in Dallas.
November 2010: The Osorios and Morrison deliver a load of weapons to an undercover informant as part of a secret DEA operation. But they are not arrested.
Feb. 15, 2011: U.S. federal agent Jaime Zapata is killed in Mexico in a highway stop by gangsters. Ballistic tests show one of the guns is the Draco bought by Otilio Osorio.
Feb. 28, 2011: The Osorios and Morrison are arrested.
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WASHINGTON - Otilio Osorio was just 22 in October 2010 when he purchased a Romanian-made Draco AK-47 pistol in Joshua, just outside Fort Worth.
There was nothing remarkable about the sale until the gun, with its serial number obliterated, was identified as one of three weapons used to kill Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agent Jaime Zapata on a Mexico highway four months later.
Documents obtained by the Houston Chronicle show that at different points in 2010, two Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms divisions - Dallas and Phoenix - had evidence implicating Osorio well before drug gangsters gunned down Zapata and his partner Victor Avila, who survived.
But no one put it all together until agents in Dallas arrested Osorio in February, 13 days after Zapata's death and four months after Osorio purchased the deadly Draco.
Now the case of Osorio, as well as his ex-Marine brother Ranferi Osorio, and their next-door neighbor in the Dallas suburb of Lancaster, Kelvin Leon Morrison, is exhibit A in an effort by congressional Republicans to uncover a Texas version of the flawed tactics used in the Phoenix-based Operation Fast and Furious.
Phoenix operation
Texas Sen. John Cornyn has demanded answers from Attorney General Eric Holder on whether ATF agents in Texas - akin to the botched Operation Fast and Furious in Arizona - allowed such guns to "walk" into Mexico in an effort to track them, rather than intercepting them and arresting the purchasers.
"The attorney general has taken every opportunity to sidestep and stonewall, and until he reassures Texans that gun-walking never occurred in our state, I will continue to press him for answers," Cornyn said.
As part of Fast and Furious, ATF agents in Phoenix were instructed to track weapons purchases as they moved up the chain to Mexican drug cartels. But they lost sight of 1,400 guns that ended up in Mexico, two of which were found at the murder scene of Border Patrol agent Brian Terry in Arizona in December.
Cornyn and others say they're especially concerned because the Osorio-Morrison case also involved a gun used in the murder of a U.S. law enforcement agent.
Dallas office's records
ATF officials in Dallas remain adamant that there was no Fast and Furious in Texas.
"This case has nothing to do with Fast and Furious," said Thomas Crowley, spokesman for ATF in Dallas. "There hasn't been any gun-walking in the Dallas division of ATF."
The records reviewed by the Chronicle, some of them obtained from Iowa Republican Sen. Charles Grassley - who along with Republican Congressman Darrell Issa of California is probing the Fast and Furious debacle - suggest the Zapata gun case instead may have been an instance of missed opportunities, intelligence-sharing failures and the inability to connect the dots and make arrests before the weapon was ever purchased in October 2010.
The Osorios first showed up on ATF's radar in August and September of that year when the Dallas division received records of their purchases, known as "multiple sales summaries," of the Dracos and other pistols in the Dallas area.
Tracing load of weapons
Such reports flood ATF offices and by themselves are not normally cause for suspicion, ATF officials have said.
The trio next appeared on Sept. 17, 2011, the day the agency's National Tracing Center in Martinsburg, W.Va., completed traces on a load of 23 guns seized in a traffic stop in La Pryor, Texas, 46 miles from the U.S.-Mexico border. One of the guns came back to Morrison and two to Ranferi Osorio.
The load, records show, actually had been flagged down in La Pryor more than a month earlier on Aug. 7. But the serial numbers had been obliterated. It took ATF technicians until mid-September to restore them.
Complicating the puzzle was the fact that the trace requests came not from the Dallas ATF, but the Las Cruces, N.M., office, where agents were investigating a family involved in smuggling guns to Mexico.
When the trace results were available, the reports were not sent to Dallas but to the Phoenix ATF office, which oversees Las Cruces.A federal law enforcement source said the results trickled in to the Dallas office between Sept. 17 and Oct. 28, 2010.
ATF traced the sales to 10 people in the Dallas area, but did not zero in on the Osorios or Morrison. Instead, they had their sights on another buyer.
Only later did agents determine that buyer also was linked to the Osorios and Morrison, the source said.
Nevertheless, the source insisted: "We didn't ignore (the Osorios and Morrison). We looked into everybody.''
Robert Champion, ATF agent in charge in Dallas, declined an interview request, citing ongoing prosecutions in the case.
In November 2010, authorities encountered the Osorios and Morrison yet again.
According to affidavits, Dallas agents were asked by the Drug Enforcement Administration to provide an undercover informant for an operation in which he would call arms smugglers in the Dallas area and request a gun load for transport to the Los Zetas trafficking gang via Laredo.
When the informant pulled into a Walmart parking lot in the Dallas area, he was met by the Osorios, who handed over 40 firearms, about half of them Dracos or Romanian AK-47 rifles.
The informant drove the load to Laredo, where ATF agents arranged a traffic stop by deputies who seized the weapons.
Back in the Dallas area, officers did a similar stop on the vehicle that delivered the weapons to the informant, and officers identified the occupants as the Osorios and Morrison.
Yet, the three men were not arrested.
A federal law enforcement source said the November undercover operation was part of a larger DEA case, which authorities didn't want to jeopardize.
The Osorios and Morrison were arrested on Feb. 28 and have pleaded guilty to gun-law violations. They are awaiting sentencing.
dan@hearstdc.com