Small Time Arms Dealer

agent named John Comery. The caller said he wanted to tell agent Comery to be careful, and then he hung up. It might not sound like much, but it set off alarm bells for agent John Comery. He'd been investigating Robert Maler, a gun dealer in Salem, for over a year, and they were just about to take the case to a grand jury. It wasn't really anything too serious, just some fraudulent paperwork for a gun purchase, pretty typical fare for an ATF agent. But now, just three weeks before that

court date, here was this troubling development. Sure, there's no way to know if the anonymous caller was telling the truth, if Robert Maler really was talking about taking out the agent who'd been investigating him.

front of the judge and make the arrest immediately. The prosecutor said no, the case was already scheduled for the grand jury and changing the calendar now would just put the judge in a bad mood. So they waited, and a grand jury did indict Robert Moller three weeks later, but when the ATF went to pick him up, he was gone.

all after such a relaxing vacation. As much as I love my work, it was good to get away from the weird little guys for a minute, if I'm being honest. And in the time since my last episode, I got married. It was beautiful and fun and the cake was really good, and I went on my honeymoon. I was really worried that I wouldn't be able to properly enjoy doing nothing. That's not really my thing, But it turns out that lying on a white sandy beach listening to the gentle waves of the Caribbean sea.

Getting married was a joyful thing for me and for my partner, and it felt very grim to even consider keeping that to myself just because some weird little guy out there might try to make me regret sharing my happy news. So no regrets. And it is very funny to me that the only weird little guy I've seen weighing in on the subject so far really does not

have any business opining on other people's relationship. I mean, look, I know we've all got our baggage, but if your last marriage ended because you caught your son in law in bed with your wife, you should mind your business.

and I am. I am for now, at least I swear this episode is perfectly listenable as a stack and alone bit of entertainment. But it is something I came across while I was researching those episodes. When I started researching the story that turned into that monstrous, nearly three month long eight episode arc about Monica Huggetts Stone, one of the first side characters I made a note of was a man I never actually even mentioned in those episodes,

an arms dealer in Oregon named Robert Maller. In the section of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Report where I first found Monica, the section about connections between right wing terrorist groups in South Africa and extremist groups abroad, there's a passing mention of mister Maller. Like Monica, his name is only in the report the one time, and it's in the paragraph immediately.

he was the USA fundraising representative of the AWB. I know, I just said, you don't need to have listened to those eight episodes about white supremacist terrorism in South Africa during the fall upartheid to understand this episode. And you don't, It's okay if you didn't join me on that saga. All you really need to know right now is that the AWB, the group referred to in that paragraph was the Africaner Resistance Movement, an explicitly neo Nazi group founded

in the nineteen seventies in South Africa. They kind of still exist, I guess, but in the eighties and early nineties they did quite a bit of terrorism, bombings, murders, shootings. They tried to participate in a minor coup, but they fucked it all up and some of them died, et cetera. And to do all of that, obviously they needed guns. And if you did listen to those other episodes about

all that violence in South Africa. You know that they had guns, They smuggled guns in from outside of the country, and they stole guns from military bases. But what I didn't really get into in those episodes is why every single gun the AWB had seemed to be stolen or smuggled. See by the nineteen nineties, it was getting pretty hard

to find a brand new gun in South Africa. In nineteen sixty three, the United Nations Security Council adopted Resolution one eighty one calling for all countries to voluntarily stop selling or allowing export of guns, ammunition, and military equipment to South Africa. In nineteen seventy seven, Resolution four eighteen

made that embargo mandatory. A subsequent UN resolution in nineteen eighty six tightened those restrictions and clarified that, yes, allowing sales to pass through a third country is still a violation of the embargo. On paper, no one was supposed to be selling military equipment to South Africa, and yet South African soldiers, police, paramilitaries, civilians, and terrorist groups all

seemed to have plenty of foreign hardware. After that initial voluntary embargo was passed in nineteen sixty three, the United States announced it intention to comply fully, but Henry Kissinger's interpretation of the resolution allowed the US government to continue selling things like military aircraft as long as everyone pretended that they believed that those things would be used for

civilian purposes. In nineteen seventy eight, fully half of the planes in use by the South African Air Force were made by US companies. The same loophole was used to supply the South African military with US made communications equipment

and computers. Even after Jimmy Carter stopped these gray area sales to the South African government, private companies in South Africa were still free to make the exact same purchases, and they often did so on behalf of the government, and some countries just kept openly selling weapons to South Africa no matter how many resolutions were passed. The Chilean government under Pinochet had no issue violating the resolution, and Paraguay was known to turn a blind eye when other

countries laundered those transactions through them. But nobody, and I mean nobody, sold South Africa more guns, planes, bombs, and drones than Israel. In one of several reports submitted to the United Nations in nineteen eighty five by the UN Committee Against Apartheid. The committee's chairman notes that they had been aware of Israel's ongoing assistance on South Africa's nuclear

weapons program since nineteen seventy seven. The report quote condemns this diabolical alliance and calls for concerted international action against it. With substantial assistance from Israel, South Africa was able to eventually scale up domestic production for most of their military needs. South African soldiers carried domestically produced copies of the Israeli UZI,

but small arms were a different story. There was a growing demand for guns among white South African civilians, so corporations did what they always do, and they found a way to make money meeting that need. There were a

handful of high profile incidents in the late seventies. Employees of American gun manufacturers Colt Industries and Winchester Arms were caught selling massive quantities of firearms to dummy corporations operating in third party countries, and then those arms were trafficked into South Africa and sold at a premium to eager buyers. When Walter Plowman pled guilty to trafficking firearms manufactured by

Colt through a company in West Germany. He pleaded for leniency, telling the court that it wouldn't be fair to punish him harshly because it was an open secret that the State Department knew this was happening and routinely looked the other way. That's not a great argument for the court, but I do think it's true. Winchester Arms was caught selling thousands of rifles and shotguns and millions upon millions of rounds of ammunitions to a shell company in the

Canary Islands. The Canary Islands is a tiny island territory with a population of barely a million people. They didn't need fifty million bullets. That should have been a red flag on the export declaration, but it went on for years. In nineteen seventy nine, an arms dealer in Detroit was sentenced to just two years in prison after pleading guilty to shipping nearly half a million dollars worth of guns and ammunition to South Africa in at least twenty one

separate shipments. The Washington Post article that year about his conviction notes that it wasn't police work or strict export control that caught him. It was a FOURKL life operator in the freight hangar at Chicago's O'Hare Airport. The employee was stacking boxes in the hangar when he noticed that one box was torn open a bit, exposing its contents. Packages containing bullets are required to be labeled as such, and he reported to his superior that this box was not.

It was easy money. Apparently South Africa was desperate for guns, so they were willing to pay a significant premium to a discrete arms dealer. And despite the illegality of these sales, everyone seemed to be turning a blind eye. I couldn't tell you now, based on the records available to me, how widespread this understanding was in the arm stealing community.

I don't know what the numbers would have been like if you'd pulled American gun shop owners in nineteen ninety about their willingness to try this, But I am well to bet that for every high profile prosecution of a guy who got greedy or sloppy and got caught, there were probably dozens of guys who dabbled making small shipments

that never got flagged. Because in the cases we do have where guys got caught, every single one of them is pretty upfront about how easy it was, and the punishments were light enough that it wouldn't necessarily be a deal breaker for someone who wanted to make hundreds of thousands of dollars for mailing a package. And in nineteen ninety two, Robert Maler was running out of options. He had a lot of guns and no way to sell them.

I guess we should back up for a second. In nineteen eighty eight, Robert Maler and his wife Nancy bought a commercial property in say at an auction. They got a great deal on the place. They paid about sixty percent of the assessed value for the storefront, and within a few months he'd gotten his federal firearms license and opened a gun store, calling it Name Guns. That's all caps with periods name. I assume business was decent. They ran ads in the local paper for holiday specials, scratch

and dent sales, and special events. In nineteen ninety there was this enigmatic series of ads in the classified section of the Statesman Journal that read miss Elliefonte, pro gun activist, invites you to stop by and visit her Tuesday through Sunday at Name Guns. I could find no explanation for that could possibly mean. I looked everywhere I could think to look, but I can't find a pro gun activist using the pseudonym miss Ellie Fante. That's sort of like

a stylized elephant. I don't know what that means. It is hard to say how the ATF found out about the machine guns. Unfortunately, the federal courts in Oregon have not digitized their collection of records from the early nineties, so there's definitely information in that record that I just don't have. But based on the records I do have access to without flying to Portland to plead with a court clerk, I have a pretty good guess. I think

it was Gary. You see, in nineteen ninety, the tiny town of Falls City, Oregon, had a population of about eight hundred people, and two of those people were Robert and Nancy Maller. They commuted about half an hour into Salem to run their gun store, and in nineteen ninety, Falls City was looking to replace their entire police force. That sounds dramatic, but they were looking for a new

police chief. The town relied on the county sheriff for anything major, but in town for day to day things, they did have their own police department, and it was staffed with just a single officer, the chief, and in April of nineteen ninety, Fall City, Oregon, made the baffling decision to hire a thirty one year old man with no police experience. He wasn't even certified to be a police officer. He was not qualified for the job. For the first few months after he was hired, he wasn't

even in town. He was at the Oregon Police Academy getting certified. Gary Allen himself had previously worked as a security guard at a casino in Nevada, and before he moved to Falls City, he'd been a private investigator in Portland, but he'd never been a real cop before, and it turns out he wasn't really that good at it. Gary self graduated from the police Academy at the end of July, so he officially started work as the police chief in

Falls City in August of nineteen ninety. By December thirty first of that same year, he'd been placed on unpaid leave pending an investigation into allegations that he had simply stopped showing up for work entirely. Later that same night, New Year's Eve nineteen ninety, witnesses saw Gary get into an argument with his girlfriend at the bar. The articles I could find don't name the girlfriend or weigh in on whether Gary's wife knew that he had a girlfriend.

So after getting into an argument at the bar with his girlfriend, he leaves, and he's seen leaving the bar a little after one am, and then witnesses see him start kicking in the doors of several homes. None of the reporting explains this. He was convicted of burglary, but that just means he entered at least one of those homes.

It doesn't sound like he stole anything. One newspaper article offered the vague explanation that he'd been drinking heavily and he was at this point looking for either his girlfriend or an unnamed male acquaintance, presumably because he wasn't done with the argument that started in the bar, and so somewhere in between breaking into the first house and the third or fourth one, he encountered some random passers by on the sidewalk and he stabbed one of them in

the neck. That sixteen year old boy did need a few stitches, but he was not critically injured. Gary self was fired, obviously in exchange for pleading guilty. Most of the charges were dropped. He was convicted of one count of burglary and one count of assault and sentenced to just ten days in jail, which he was allowed to serve on weekends, but the conviction made him a felon. After his sentencing, the prosecutor told reporters, quote, we wanted to get this guy out of firearms and out of

law enforcement. And the prosecutor specifically mentioned that Gary self had a significant collection of firearms, one that included several machine guns. So I think it's safe to say the investigation into the machine guns really got going after Gary Self's arrest for that strange drunken rampage a little after midnight on New Year's Day nineteen ninety one. The lone ATF report that I could actually get my hands on indicates that they did open this investigation into Gary shortly

after his arrest on those assault charges. Agent John Comery received approval for the investigation on January twenty second, nineteen ninety one. It wasn't a complicated case. The ATF solved it pretty quickly. During Gary Self's short stint as the police chief of False City, he had befriended Robert Maller. The pair used official police department letterhead and lied when they filled out the ATF Form five, the Application for

tax Exempt Transfer and Registration of Firearms. And so they filled out this paperwork as though Robert Maler the gun dealer, were facilitating a legitimate purchase of machine guns for a government agency, in this case, the Fall City Police Department. In fact, the two men just wanted the machine guns for their person collections. Gary self was federally charged with possessing an unregistered firearm later that same year, and he pretty quickly entered a guilty plea. And so in this case,

I have the docket sheet for Gary's federal case. The actual documents aren't digitized, but I have the Dockett sheet and it's not sealed. And I have a lot of news stories from nineteen ninety one about Gary's drunken rampage, about Gary getting fired, about Gary bleeding guilty to stabbing a teenager. But what I don't have are any news stories about the former police chief fraudulently obtaining a machine gun for personal use. I know the digital record isn't perfect.

There are plenty of things that existed in nineteen ninety one that I'll never see.

expired and he doesn't bother renewing it. Yes, I should explain, just in case you're not familiar. So this is a license that you have to apply for with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms to be allowed to deal guns. But you can't be running a gun store without an FFL and you have to renew it every three years. So at this point he's been running the gun store for three years, the license is going to expire. Normally

you would just renew it, but he doesn't. I think at this point he knows the ATF probably won't reissue it. So I mean, no one's been charged yet, but he had to have known something was coming. So, despite no longer having a license to legally sell guns, his gun store is still open five days a week. And it's around this time in October of nineteen ninety one that

Robert Maller starts taking trips to South Africa. In November, Gary Self is indicted on that machine gun charge, and so now Robert Maller absolutely knows that his days are numbered. His name is on that paperwork. If Gary is guilty,

then so is he. In March of nineteen ninety two, just a few weeks after Gary Self blood guilty to possessing that machine gun, Robert Maller went to the county clerk's office and he put the deed of his house in his wife's name, and he filed paperwork to give his wife Nancy power of attorney, so if he were for some reason absent, she would be legally empowered to make decisions regarding their property. He's preparing to be unavailable.

But is that because he knows he's going to prison, or because he's preparing to do whatever it takes to not go to prison. In early April of nineteen ninety two, Gary Self is sentenced on that gun charge. He doesn't get any jail time. He has to do home detention for a few months, and he'll have a few years

of probation, but no jail time. And in that lone ATF report that I do have Agent COOMERI wrote that both the Portland Police and an informant would later report to the ATF that Robert Maler had expressed interest in having both the agent and his co defendant quote knocked off. So now I'm wondering maybe in April of nineteen ninety two, maybe Gary self was scared. He was stuck in his house on home detention, he couldn't leave, and he thought

Robert Maler wanted to kill him. Maybe the anonymous caller who warned the ATF that Moller was going to try to kill Agent Coomery had his own reasons to want Moller in custody, But we'll never know. The report says that they never identified the caller. When agents did finally get the go ahead in May of nineteen ninety two to arrest Robert Maller for purchasing those machine guns, he was gone. He was already in South Africa. Robert Maller was in South Africa for most of nineteen ninety two

and nineteen ninety three. He didn't come home for good until March of nineteen ninety four, and in the two years he spent abiding arrest on federal gun charges, he did come home a few times. News reports say he entered the country at least twice using a false passport. I know one of them was when he came home for the last time, and it's hard to say when

the other one was. But in January of nineteen ninety three, the Clerk of Court in Moltnomah County recorded a transaction and listed the payer as Bob Mahler, and the transaction was a filing fee for a divorce petition between a Bob Maler and a Nancy Maller. This petition did end up getting dismissed. They never followed up on it, so

they didn't get divorced in nineteen ninety three. Listeners in Oregon may have noticed that the Moltnoma County courthouse is notably in Portland, and that's an hour and a half away from where they live in Falls City. I guess maybe he thought no one would recognize him there. When Robert Maller's US passport expired in nineteen ninety three. He couldn't renew it. He was a fugitive, but he didn't

let that slow him down. Now again, Unfortunately, the Oregon federal courts have not digitized their early nineties transcripts, so I don't have access to the trial transcript from his earlier criminal cases. But what I do have is an unpublished opinion from the Bankruptcy Appellate Panel in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Because Robert and Nancy Maller did eventually get divorced in nineteen ninety five, and after that divorce,

Nancy filed for bankruptcy. During her bankruptcy case, Robert Maler filed a complaint with the bankruptcy court that Nancy had sold assets that belonged to him. The court didn't agree, but that's not what matters here. I don't care about their assets. Normally, when you swear before a judge that you're going to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth to help you God, the assumption is that

you mean it. But if you have a history of being a liar, like the kind of lies that end up in a court record, real serious lies, the kind that are crimes. That's fair game. Opposing parties can bring that up to impeach your credibility. So it's in an excerpted transcript of this hearing in his ex wife's bankruptcy case that we find this fascinating admission. So Robert Maler is on the stand under oath, and Nancy's attorney holds up an exhibit and asks him do you recognize this?

many people so many fake passports. Again, we don't have to backtrack into those South Africa episodes, but a foreign mercenary or a gun smuggler with a fake passport was a recurring theme. It was never explained in any of the sources I used how this kept happening because their fake passport seemed to be pretty he could, I mean people were crossing borders with them to evade international arrest warrants.

Leonard Wienendahl was able to enter the UK while he was on Interpol's most wanted list using one of these fake passports. So maybe this is how they were getting them. Someone in the passport office just looked the other way while two men filled out the paperwork together and in they stamped paperwork they knew to be fraudulent. These fake passports worked perfectly because they weren't fake passports. They were real passports with fake names. Well that's not quite right either,

is it. Because the name on the passport isn't fake. It's not a randomly chosen pseudonym, it's not a made up person. It is someone's real name. It just wasn't Robert Maller's real name. I wish I could tell you that I know who yan Vandrmreva was the problem with these Afrikaans' names is that there's not very many of them, so a lot of people have the same or very similar names, and so I know there were more than

a few yon Vandrmrevas out there. So I can't promise you that it means anything at all that there was a yan Vandrmreva who would have been the right age and who was a South African policeman in the early nineties. That yon Vandrmreva, the one I'm thinking of, worked in military intelligence and was later charged in connection with the nineteen eighty seven massacre in Durban that killed thirteen people,

most of whom were children. Yan Vandrmreva was not convicted the court failed to present sufficient evidence that he'd been the one who threw the murder weapons into a smelting furnace to destroy the evidence.

license to sell guns. But they still have a lot of guns. And I'm sure there's some procedure for people who find themselves in this situation. I bet it's not even really all that rare. I didn't bother looking up exactly what you're supposed to do with excess inventory if you're no longer allowed to sell it. But I do know what you're not supposed to do, and that's sell it anyway. And you're really not supposed to sell those guns anyway by exporting them overseas without an export license.

And you're really really not supposed to sell those guns anyway by exporting them to a country subject to a worldwide arms embargo. But in August of nineteen ninety three, Nancy Maller did just that.

Robert Moller did have a habit of collecting military surplus gear, including military cargo trucks, and so she was shipping him something like, for example, an M thirty five cargo truck, a twenty three foot long vehicle that weighs fifteen thousand pounds.

guns and nearly fifty thousand rounds of ammunition. The container arrived in South Africa in October of nineteen ninety three, and so if you did listen to those South Africa episodes, you might recall this point in the timeline. This is right around the time that the Africaner Resistance movement is ramping up international efforts to recruit foreign mercenaries, many of whom brought stolen firearms with them. But Robert Moller's cargo container held a lot more guns than any of those

German mercenaries could have ever smuggled out of Bosnia. Every gun counted, and Maller had really delivered. In February of nineteen ninety four, Robert Maller, using his fake passport, applied for a visa to visit the United States. His fake passport was stamped on entry in New York later that month. It's not clear why he flew home just then, right as things were heating up in South Africa. The Africaner Resistance movement believed they were poised to start a civil war.

evading arrest for two years. They didn't charge him for entering the country with a forged passport or fraudulently obtaining a visa. They even released him on a ten thousand dollars bond, despite the fact that he had just spent two years hiding out on a foreign country and he clearly had the ability to obtain fake passports. I've seen a lot of bond hearings, and I can't think of a single judge I've ever seen in my life who would grant pre trial release to someone who was arrested

with a fake passport. But nevertheless, he entered a guilty plea for making a false statement on a firearm application, and in June of nineteen ninety four. He was sentenced to six months of home confinement, and that could have been the end of it. After all, the race War didn't even happen in South Africa. While Robert Maller was stuck in court in Oregon, the election was held, Apartheid ended.

radio equipment, sleeping bags, things like that. A press release from the police in Pretoria said they knew that the container belonged to an American and that that American was no longer in South Africa, and this time things moved quickly. South African police contacted federal authorities in the United States, and in November of nineteen ninety four, a swat team surrounded Robert and Nancy Maller's apartment. They surrendered peacefully, and

they were both arrested. Robert Maller agreed to plead guilty to exporting firearms without a license in exchange the charges against his wife were dropped.

an export license. But he was a twice convicted felon, and he'd gotten off pretty light all things considered. He did not learn his lesson. He was convicted for violating federal firearms laws for the third time after pleading guilty in twenty eighteen to being a felon in possession of a firearm. After sitting through two days of the state's case at trial, he changed his mind and entered a

guilty plea. But he only admitted to one of the guns, but there were more than forty of them and forty thousand rounds of ammunition.

into making straw purchases for him. So not only was he breaking the law, he was making other people participate without their knowledge.

to ask. He didn't want his wife to know that he'd spend a bunch of money on four military surplus trucks, so would Bill mind storing them at his house? He had plenty of land, so he agreed. But then the favors just kept coming. Moller kept buying things and asking, can I just keep this at your house? Can I put this in your garage? Can I put this in your shed? Can I put this on your land? He

just kept asking, and Bill kept saying yes. Moller purchased a storage trailer that he wanted to fill with disaster supplies, doomsday prepper stuff.

losing her patience. Maller has stored so many boxes of emergency supplies and cases of AMMO in her garage that she can no longer access the workspace where she cans her vegetables the guns needed to go. Exactly when Connie learned about Maller's past is murky. There are a few versions of this timeline, but she wasn't the only one asking questions. Here's where it gets a little confusing, and

I wish I could draw you a diagram. Connie, Bill's wife, has a brother named Adam, and Adam is married to a woman named Kara, who happens to be Moller's stepdaughter. I think this really is mostly coincidental. They live in a very small town. Bill and Connie were friends with Moller, but they didn't really think of themselves as being family. Although technically Connie's sister in law was his stepdaughter, so the fact that they're related is largely coincidental. But Connie's

brother is part of this story too. Connie would later tell an ATF agent that she'd googled Maller sometime in late twenty fifteen, so that's a few months before she called the ATF to report him. Maller's attorneys argued that Connie only called the ATF because she was mad at him over some kind of personal dispute.

hang out with a lot. But he's getting a weird vibe off of him, and Moller keeps asking Adam, do you want to go shooting together? Do you want to go shooting together? And Adam did not want to, and he wanted to even less after he looked this man up and found out that he was a convicted felon. And so at this point all he knows is that

Moller has asked him to go shooting. He has not personally witnessed his wife's new stepdad in possession of a firearm, so the tip he submitted to the ATF didn't really go anywhere. Adam also wrote an anonymous letter to the National Rifle Association just letting them know that one of their certified firearms instructors was a convicted felon, But it doesn't seem like anything came of that either.

been convicted of several felonies. He had told her a version of the story where it was his ex wife, Nancy, who had gotten into trouble for shipping those guns overseas. So as they're searching the house, an agent is talking to Moller's wife outside, and the agents inside the house encountered two locked doors, and Maller's wife says she doesn't have the keys to those, And what a red flag

that is. I can't imagine living with someone who distrusts me so profoundly that they keep their private, separate bedroom locked with a key that I don't have. When agents did get the door to Maller's bedroom open, they found six guns in there. Under his pillow, there was a forty five caliber pistol. It was not only loaded, but there was a round in the chamber. I'm not a huge gun guy, but if you're not a gun guy either,

that means the gun was very ready to fire. That means you could just pull the trigger in a bullets coming out. I just can't imagine laying my head on a pillow and there is a chambered round an inch from my brain. They found a few more guns in various hiding spots around the room. There were rifles, shotguns, pistols, a little bit of everything, and they were all loaded. They also found two thousand bullets in his bedroom. In addition to the gun under the pillow, they found another

forty five caliber pistol under his bed. And this gun maybe the greatest mystery of this story. Those guns he sent to South Africa weren't supposed to be there, but I know how they got there. It wasn't legal, but it's not a mystery. Nancy shipped from there a forty foot cargo container. But this gun, this gun shouldn't have been under Robert Maler's bed. And I don't mean just because he couldn't legally own a gun. This gun couldn't be under there. There's no explanation for how it could

be there legally speaking. The last known location of that gun before ATF agents founded under Robert Maller's bed in twenty sixteen was in the custody of the Silverton, Oregon Police Department in May of two thousand and nine. In May of two thousand and nine, the cleaning staff at a hotel in Los Angeles were stripping the sheets in an empty hotel room. The room's occupant checked out, but he forgot something. He left his gun under the pillow.

The hotel staff called the Los Angeles Police Department to come pick up the gun. Because Maller had booked the room using his credit card, they were able to determine that he owned it, and rather than have him travel all the way back to LA they transferred custody of the firearm to the police department in Silverton, Oregon, where

he was living at the time. Court records contain only a brief footnote that the Silverton Police Department had been unable to locate any record that they'd ever received that gun from the LAPD or released it back to Robert Maller, but obviously they did. The LAPD had records showing that they released the gun to the Silverton, Oregon Police Department. They sent Robert Moller a letter telling him that's what

they'd done, and the letter was in his house. There are records that this happened, but neither one of those police departments had that gun, because that gun was under Robert Maler's bed. So one of these police departments isn't telling the truth. One of them gave a convicted felon his gun back willfully were because they cut corners and they didn't do the required paperwork and they didn't notice he wasn't supposed to have it in the first place.

The man who originally sold Robert Maller that gun, a man named Curtis, testified at Maller's trial he still had the bill of sale from the transaction and he held onto it for nearly a decade. And on that bill of sale, Robert Maler had written down not his own name, but he wrote Alex Maler, his brother's name. And Curtis was very cooperative throughout the investigation. He told agents that

he'd gone shooting with Maller several times. He was a childhood friend of Moller's new adult step sons, so the four of them hung out from time to time over games of table tennis. Smaller would often brag about how skilled he was with firearms.

to take care of your family. On the second day of his trial, the prosecution rested their case before his defense attorney had a chance to present his case. Moller called it off. He didn't want to finish the trial.

He wanted to plead guilty, and the state originally recommended a sentence of more than six years, which is, honestly, you know, kind of reasonable given the guidelines, his prior history, etc. But then Mahler petitioned to withdraw his plea, explaining that when he pled guilty, he only meant he was guilty of possessing one gun. He hadn't understood that he was pleading guilty to possessing all of the guns in the indictment, and this apparently worked. In the end, everyone agreed that

he shouldn't spend a day in jail. He was convicted of possessing one firearm and he was given three years of probation.

episode of vasovagel syncope. That sounds very serious, doesn't it, But it's just a fancy way of saying that he would get stressed out and faint. Now I'm not a doctor, but I don't think that's a thing. I don't think you can have them put you under general anesthesia immediately upon being admitted. You really want to minimize the amount of time that a person is under general anesthesia, right, it's just for the surgery part. You don't get that

going until they're about to operate. And there are a lot of important reasons why you don't just use general anesthesia to help someone calm down. But one reason why you wouldn't want to preemptively administer general anesthesia is surgeries don't always happen on time, which is exactly what happened here. Mahler was booked for an elective surgery, but those often get pushed back when the OAR is needed for emergencies, so he's forced to remain conscious for hours while inside

of the hospital. He refused several offers of sedatives or tranquilizers to alleviate his anxiety. He insisted that the only acceptable solution was full general anesthesia from start to finish. Additionally, he named as a defendant in his lawsuit the nursing assistant who caused him to become too warm by placing a blanket on his bed.

tennis clubs that got incredibly out of hand. His lawsuit was eventually dismissed after he refused a very generous settlement offer because it would have required him to stay away from any future table tennis tournament organized by the rival club. They were willing to write him a three thousand dollars check if it meant they could get his signature on a legal document promising not to come to their pingpong events,

but he wouldn't back down, so he got nothing. There is one lawsuit still pending right now, and this is the first thing I ever read about Robert Maller after I discovered his name in connection with the arms trafficking for Nazi terrorists in South Africa. So imagine that's all you know about a man that he smuggled hundreds of guns into South Africa in nineteen ninety four were used by people who wanted to start a race war, and

the next fact you learn about him is this. He's currently locked in a vicious legal battle with the owner of an all you can eat sushi buffet in Portland, Oregon, because the owner asked him not to let his twelve year old Doberman, Juliette touch the spring rolls. Whether juliet the twelve year old Doberman is a real service dog is not for us to decide. Service dogs don't get certified or anything like that. There's no standard licensing process

or a governing body. But the law does require a service dog to have a specialized training beyond that of a regular household pet, and that training has to be related to a specific task that they can perform related to the handler's disability. You're probably familiar with a lot of these types of tasks, right. A service dog might

guide a visually impaired person around obstacles. They might detect allergens in food or sniff out low blood sugar, or predict seizures, or open a door, or provide deep pressure stimulation for some with a panic disorder. There are a million tasks that a service dog can be trained to perform, but there has to be training, and there has to be a task, and that task has to be directly related to the handler's disability. The law says that the positive impact of the dog's presence has to go beyond

the handler's general comfort or well being. So it can't just be I like to have the dog here, I benefit from having the dog here. You have to be able to say a specific task, and so far he has declined to produce any evidence to the court if the dog has any special training, led alone training to carry out a particular task related to a disability. This one's still being litigated, so legally speaking, there is dispute

here about the facts. Moller claims that he was braided, that the owner screamed at him, and he was humiliated when the restaurant kicked him out because of his well behaved service animal, and the restaurant owner has made a sworn statement that Moller has been a regular at her buffet for six years and she's always let it slide that his pet dog accompanies him into the restaurant because in past visits, this dog, this elderly Doberman, just sits

quietly under the table and doesn't bother anyone. On this particular visit, though, the owner says that another customer complained that they saw the dog rest her head on the buffet so her face was very close to when possibly touching the food. She says she simply asked him to keep his dog at the dining table, as he'd done in past visits, and in her version of events, he did leave the restaurant visibly upset, but not because she screamed at him. After that interaction, he'd gotten into a

verbal altercation with several other customers. At seventy five years old, I do think Robert Mahler's arms dealing days are long gone. I do have a feeling that he will not be recovering hundreds of thousands of dollars from the sushi buffet, But I'll keep an eye on both. Were Little Guys as a production of Coolzie Media and iHeartRadio. It's research written and recorded by me, Molly Hunger. Our executive producers are Sophie Lichtermann and Robert Evans. The show is edited

by the wildly talented Lory Gigan. The theme music was composed by You can email me at Weird Little Guys podcast at gmail dot com. I will definitely read it, but I probably won't answer it. It's nothing personal. You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other listeners on the Weird Little Guys Supreddit. Just don't post anything that's going to make you one of my Weird Little Guys