NEW YORK, CMC – A 36-year-old United States nationwide has been sentenced to greater than 5 years in jail for trafficking over 100 “ghost weapons” to the Dominican Republic,’ the US lawyer for the Southern District of New York, Damian Williams, has mentioned.
Williams, the son of a Jamaican-born doctor, mentioned that US District Decide Vernon S. Broderick sentenced Robert Alcantara after he pleaded responsible to conspiring to site visitors firearms and conspiring to launder cash.
“Robert Alcantara alone trafficked over 100 untraceable ghost weapons to the Dominican Republic. The proliferation of illegal ghost weapons is a risk to public security, and our response is obvious: we won’t let up,” mentioned Williams.
Based on the charging paperwork and different filings and statements made in court docket, Alcantara, from 2017 till January 2022, operated a “ghost gun” manufacturing unit out of his residence in Rhode Island.
The indictment states Alcantara bought ghost gun kits at gun exhibits and different locations after which “machined the kits into working firearms.
“As soon as he had accomplished the untraceable firearms, he exported and offered them to the Dominican Republic. Most of these weapons had been handguns, however a quantity had been rifles,” in keeping with the indictment, noting that Alcantara and others then laundered the proceeds of his gun gross sales.
The indictment additional states that, on November 20, 2021, “Alcantara was stopped in his automobile in possession of kits to construct roughly 45 ghost weapons.
“Alcantara was interviewed by legislation enforcement brokers and acknowledged that he was planning to show the 45 kits into working firearms, and he had 50 extra related ghost weapons at his residence.”
Along with the jail time period, Williams mentioned Alcantara was sentenced to a few years of supervised launch.
Williams praised the “excellent investigative work” of the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives and the US Division of Commerce’s Workplace of Export Enforcement, the New York Discipline Workplace, and different US legislation enforcement companies for his or her help within the case.
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