Lawyer testifies why he bought silencer during reverse sting
Crime, courts and legal issues in Milwaukee and throughout Wisconsin
A Wauwatosa lawyer tried to explain to a jury Wednesday why he purchased a "hitman's gun" with a "highly, highly, highly illegal" silencer from a police informant at a mall parking lot.
Thomas Michael Barrett, 54, was arrested in August 2011 during a reverse sting outside Mayfair Mall. Police say he paid an informant $400 for two stolen guns and a silencer. The transaction was recorded by detectives. Barrett was charged with possessing a firearm silencer, a felony punishable by up to three years in prison.
Barrett has put up an energetic, sustained defense with help from a series of attorneys. At one point, he argued the state's law that sharply restricts silencers amounts to an unconstitutional infringement of the Second Amendment right to bear arms.
Wearing a color block, blue heather sweater, Barrett took the witness stand in his own defense Wednesday. He told jurors a former client had told him about a friend who might have some pistols to sell. Barrett said he's been a gun enthusiast since he was a boy. (After his arrest, detectives seized more than two dozen guns from Barrett's home, all of which he legally owned).
The seller was Michael Bond, a man with a long criminal record who was federally indicted months before the gun deal with leading a major marijuana distribution ring in Milwaukee. He was looking to help authorities, and earn a break at his sentencing.
The guns, and the silencer, and his story of them probably being stolen, were all provided by detectives working with an Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms task force.
Barrett, who has no prior criminal record, said when Bond first mentioned, on the phone, that one gun had a silencer on it, Barrett didn't believe him. When he met with Bond and saw the two guns and the silencer in the parking lot, Barrett said he thought the item looked like a silencer, but he still wasn't sure it was one.
As to his offer to help Bond "dipose of it," if it was a silencer, Barrett said he knew that he could turn it in to the ATF.
Prosecutors tried to show Barrett, who was an amateur gunsmith, clearly knew the item was an illegal silencer, and may have been trying to get Bond to just give it to him.
Barrett said as soon as he met Bond, he became a bit nervous that he was perhaps being set up to be robbed. He said he kept trying to do some "fast talking" to get out of the situation without upsetting Bond, and initially offered to buy the gun without the silencer for more than Bond had been asking.
But Bond kept insisting Barrett should buy both, and the silencer, and then offered the whole lot for $400, well less than the $600 they had discussed over the phone.
"I didn't want to piss him off," Barrett said. "He wouldn't take no for an answer."
On cross examination, Assistant District Attorney Megan Williamson challenged Barrett's contention that he wasn't sure the item was a sllencer, noting he had removed it from the gun, examined it.
She also asked why, if his intention was to turn the item in to ATF, he stored it separately in a locked box after the purchase, and made detectives get a separate search warrant to open it, rather than just immediately offer the suspect item to authorities.
"I had just been arrested, by a bunch of people with machine guns," he said. "I was in shock."
The jury will begin deliberations in the case Thursday.
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