I did not grow up around guns the way many traditional American gun owners did. Like maybe you did. Learning the fundamentals of shooting with a Ruger 10/22, a 22 pistol, or a classic 1911 would have been ideal.
Unfortunately, I was born in Brooklyn, New York, and raised in Queens in the 1970s and 1980s. If there was a civilian gun culture in New York City back then, it mostly belonged to police officers, security guards, and the occasional hunter who escaped the city on weekends.
My family fit into none of those categories.
My parents were poor immigrants from Ireland, and my father spent years in America illegally. Guns simply did not exist in our house. Even toy guns, water pistols, and cap guns were forbidden. If guns appeared negatively on the nightly news, that was enough reason for my parents to ban them entirely.
That, of course, did not stop me from becoming fascinated by them.
The neighborhood barbershop always seemed to have old copies of outdoor and hunting magazines littered across the waiting area. My father took my brothers and me fishing and crabbing occasionally, so while waiting for haircuts I would flip through them.
The fishing stories bored me.
The gun reviews did not.
As I got older, I read everything I could find about firearms. If my mother had caught me with a gun magazine, you would have thought she had found a copy of Hustler or Oui under my mattress.
Owning a gun went onto the mental checklist of things I would someday do as an adult.
I did not expect my first handgun to arrive years earlier, illegally, through what would later become known as the Iron Pipeline. But it did.
THE IRON PIPELINE
In the mid 1980s, New York City was a pretty violent place. My father had been viciously beaten and robbed twice just coming home from work on the subway. While I was a capable streetfighter and carried knives, my 16-year-old mind went to: What do you do if someone pulls a gun on you? Why, you pull your own gun, of course. But how to get one?
I went to Santos, the guy who knew how to get things. Specifically, through his cousins.
“What can they get? Berettas? 1911s? Uzis?” My young mind reeling with possibilities.
“Choices may be limited, but I guarantee my cousins will have something you’d want. Things like that are up in the thousands though, especially the Uzi.”
I didn’t have that kind of money as a 16-year-old. I realized, too, that bigger handguns would be harder to carry concealed. There was a whole legacy of stories about how cops could spot bulges and outlines in your clothing or the way you walked that suggested that you were carrying. I worked good jobs and made money as a kid and could come up with a few hundred, but wasn’t really disciplined enough to save more than that at the time.
“OK, how about something small and light? Like a .22, .25 or .32?”
“They usually can get .32-caliber Walthers, but you’re looking at a G again.”
I decided on a .22 or .25, because I only knew about what I’d seen in books and gun magazines. I was thinking a 950-series Beretta or a Bauer 25.
“I’ll talk to my cousins. They’ll hook you up.”
When you’re not old enough to buy a gun, and you’re in a time and place where you can’t own it anyway even if you were, and you’re buying it from a guy who knows a guy … maybe you’re expecting a scene from the latest action movie involving stacks of military ordnance like grenades and AKs. Marcos and Angel showed me a little spread of what I’d now consider junk Saturday Night Specials. The cheap stuff made more for flash than firing found at crime scenes across the country. But they impressed me at the time by their presence and reality.
Right away, I knew I did not want a revolver. So, I discounted three of them right off the bat.
I did like the look of one, and it was a .25-caliber Raven. Completely unfamiliar with the name, I asked, “How much?”
“You’re Santos’ homie. I can do $200.” (In today money that’d be close to $1,000.)
I had that much.
“You got a holster?”
“Nah, B. But I tell you what, I can give you ammo.”
In all this prep, I never considered ammo. But I should have, because I knew it would be a problem because of a family friend named Doug.
Doug was in his mid 20s. His father was an NYPD officer who passed away, and Doug inherited his old man’s guns, a Smith & Wesson Model 10 and a Model 40. Both were .38 Specials. This was significant because Doug went to buy ammo for the range, and he bought a box of the shorter .38 Colt because it was on sale, and he could shoot the slightly shorter cartridge out of both guns.
Within a week he was visited by two plainclothes officers. They had a warrant to search his house for a firearm that was not listed on his permit, because his permit had two .38 Specials listed. No .38 Colts. I don’t believe he was charged, but they tore his apartment up looking for a gun that didn’t exist and treated him like a criminal the entire time.
I didn’t need that in my life. After all, I’m buying a gun from a guy who knows a guy, and I’m in high school.
Angel produced a well-worn box of Remington .25 ACP FMJ and a clamshell-like box holding six Glaser Safety Slugs with pink tips.
“You shoot somebody with these, it’s like getting hit with a Gauge.”
The only thing I truly knew about ballistics at that age was that these guys knew more than I did. I took him at his word and made a mental note to scour the gun rags for any mention of these 12GA-in-a-pinky-nail Glaser rounds (hint: in reality these are awful).
That was The Iron Pipeline, or at least a piece of it. It’s not an independent criminal organization that controls illegally trafficked firearms, but groups of individuals who may or may not be connected, who buy things in areas where they are more accessible, and sell them in places where they are hard to come by (if not outright illegal) for a significant markup. It could be guns or ammo, switchblade knives, or even fireworks. Some of them may have drug/drug-adjacent connections, and some of their wares may be stolen.
The network wasn’t sophisticated. These guys weren’t Scarface. It was informal, local, and above all: opportunistic. Multiply that by every similar neighborhood in every restricted jurisdiction for a hundred years and you have The Iron Pipeline.
The name comes from the I-95 corridor, a major north-south highway route that runs from Miami to Maine, crossing some 15 states and about a dozen major metro areas in the process. If anything is being moved along the East Coast of America (both legal and illegal, from cocaine to coconuts), it’s no surprise if it touches I-95.
Looking back 40 years ago, I know those guys probably paid $30 for the Raven and the friend price was $200 and not $250, but included the ammo. The Glaser stuff was not true, but it was believed to be at the time. Those prices reflected the reality of living in one of the most restrictive gun jurisdictions in the country, if not the world, and the message is clear: Criminals don’t obey the law. Where guns are illegal, they just get more expensive.
In the year and a half that I carried that gun, I never had to use it, but there were two mishaps that could have gone wrong for me.
On one occasion, two of the local cops wanted to make an example out of me. They snatched me up and threw me in the back of the squad car and drove me a mile away. If you smarted off, they would beat you down and dump you by the projects in a rough neighborhood known as East New York. I was more concerned about getting searched and considered dumping the Raven in the back of the squad car.
I leaned into that fear and whined that this other neighborhood wouldn’t take my bus transfer, and that I didn’t have enough money to get home. That was mostly to throw them off in case they wanted to go through my pockets and take any money I happened to have on me (even the NYPD was in on the action, which was no news to anyone who lived in a neighborhood like mine).
They unknowingly stopped the car about a block from my house, played the “bad cop-bad cop” routine for a few minutes, then cut me loose. A little shaken at barely getting out of a first felony conviction, but at least not beaten to a pulp.
A short time after that, one of Santos’ cousins was caught with a loaded Beretta 9mm in his car. As soon as I heard the news, I started sweating that he might narc me out for being a customer. I considered getting rid of the Raven but decided against it. He kept his mouth shut about his side business and did a year in Rikers Island.
November 8, 1987, was my last day as a civilian. The next day I was bound for Parris Island. I had given away all my butterfly knives, martial arts weapons, 007 blades, and daggers to my closest friends.
I wasn’t going to do that with the gun.
Knives were one thing. Guns had consequences that lasted longer than friendships.
My Raven went in the gym bag along with a sawed-off shotgun I acquired (a story for another day) and all their ammunition. I removed the firing pins the night before and tossed them in a dumpster on the corner of 95th street, then walked past the 100th Precinct to the Cross Bay Bridge.
There weren’t too many fishermen or crabbers out that morning. Halfway in the middle of the causeway over Jamaica Bay, I dropped that gym bag into the water with a 20-pound dumbbell. If they were ever found they would be inoperable, so I wasn’t going to have to worry about them being used in a crime after they left my possession.
In a few days, the Federal government was going to give me my very own gun, a brand-new M16A2 service rifle as a 17-year-old child soldier in the United States Marine Corps.