Congress questions Tampa gun investigation

In December, Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was shot by a man connected to the Sinaloa drug cartel.

The death of a law enforcement agent would have been big news by itself, but it was the weapons used in the slaying that made the story scandalous. Guns found where Terry was killed were linked to a botched effort by the U.S. government to track weapons commonly used by drug cartels.

Operation Fast and Furious was run by the Justice Department and the Phoenix office of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and has since come under heavy criticism because agents lost track of many of the weapons, including at least two in the area where Terry was killed.

Seven months earlier, ATF investigators in Tampa were running their own gun-smuggling investigation, dubbed Operation Castaway. It targeted a Florida man who was illegally trafficking about 1,000 weapons.

Now a U.S. senator and two congressmen, including Rep. Gus Bilirakis, R-Palm Harbor, want to know whether there were similar problems in the Tampa investigation.

"We are looking into allegations that Operation Castaway incorporated the same policies as Operation Fast and Furious, allowing guns to be purchased, or straw purchasers to buy guns, and then allow those guns to be transferred to third parties and not follow the guns," said Beth Levine, a spokeswoman for Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa.

"I find it very troubling that the United States government would willfully allow weapons to be acquired by dangerous criminal and drug trafficking organizations, thus compromising our strategic and national interests," Bilirakis wrote.

A couple days later, Bilirakis sent a similar letter to John Morton, director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Grassley, Bilirakis and U.S. Rep. Darrel Issa, R-Calif., began looking into Operation Castaway after a pair of bloggers, David Codrea and Mike Vanderboegh, wrote a piece based on an anonymous source claiming that the Tampa ATF office was "walking" guns to Honduras the way the Phoenix office ran Operation Fast and Furious. The story was widely repeated in the conservative blogosphere and then on Fox News.

But a plea agreement in May 2010 — well before Terry was killed and Operation Fast and Furious became news — seems to show substantial differences between the two operations.

Under Fast and Furious, launched in 2009, ATF officials let gun dealers near the Mexican border sell guns to third parties in an effort to track the weapons' journey to cartels and other criminal organizations. One agent told congressional investigators that agents lost track of as many as 1,500 weapons under the program.

As a result of the investigation, Hugh Crumpler III, a decorated Vietnam War veteran, acknowledged that he illegally sold about 1,000 guns, shipping the bulk of them to Honduras and other countries in Central and South America.

As with Operation Fast and Furious, the guns sold by Crumpler wound up with least one killer, according to federal documents, as well as a drug organization in Puerto Rico, the hit man for a Colombian drug organization, a murder-for-hire gang and an effort to smuggle guns into Colombian prisons.

But unlike Operation Fast and Furious, these guns apparently wound up in the hands of criminals before Operation Castaway was launched, federal court records allege.

Crumpler's attorney at the time, Roger Weeden, said he did not think it was possible that guns from Operation Castaway wound up in the hands of criminals in Latin America once the investigation began because agents "closely monitored Crumpler's activities after they got involved with him."