May 22, 2025 • 62 mins
In 1992, a small business owner in Oregon had to shut down his gun store. But he had to do something with all his remaining inventory….
Sources:
https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2014-01-21-ariel-sharon-apartheid-south-africa-and-mutual-military-interests/#.Vc4WVige5lk:
Moore, Matthew. “Arming the Embargoed: A Supply-Side Understanding of Arms Embargo Violations.” The Journal of Conflict Resolution, vol. 54, no. 4, 2010, pp. 593–615.
United Nations General Assembly. Special Report Of The Special Committee Against Apartheid. Implementation Of The Arms Embargo Against South Africa. United Nations General Assembly, 1986. Princeton University, Firestone Library
Klare, Michael T. “EVADING THE EMBARGO: ILLICIT U.S. ARMS TRANSFERS TO SOUTH AFRICA.” Journal of International Affairs, vol. 35, no. 1, 1981, pp. 15–28.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1979/11/18/tripping-up-a-s-african-gunrunner/74a6f74b-18d3-4850-9ab6-8a206c1a0bac/
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Col Zone Media. On April twenty first, nineteen ninety two.
The phone rang at the Portland, Oregon field office of
the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. The caller wouldn't
give his name, but he had something he had to
get off his chest. He said he was a private
(00:24):
investigator working for a man named Bob. He said Bob
was the owner of a gun shop in Salem, Oregon,
and Bob had recently obtained a photograph of an ATF
agent named John Comery. The caller said he wanted to
tell agent Comery to be careful, and then he hung up.
(00:48):
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
(01:12):
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.
Speaker 2 (01:32):
But how had the.
Speaker 1 (01:33):
Caller even known, And if the caller knew that Agent
Komery was about to arrest Robert Maler, Robert Maler probably
knew too. So Agent Komery called the US Attorney's office
and he asked if they could speed up that timeline.
They could present the case to the grand jury later,
(01:54):
but they needed to arrest Maller now. The prosecutor if
he could write the criminal complaint and get that in
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
(02:18):
a grand jury did indict Robert Moller three weeks later,
but when the ATF went to pick him up, he
was gone.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
By the time.
Speaker 1 (02:28):
ATF agents saw Robert Maler again two years later, he'd
already smuggled hundreds of guns halfway across the world to
arm a group that hoped to start a civil war.
I'm Molly Conger, and this is we're little guys. This
(03:03):
is a silly one to the extent that anything on
this show can really be said to be lighthearted. I
needed something that wasn't too complicated to get me back
into the swing of things after two weeks off. It
wasn't sure I even remembered how to do this at
all after such a relaxing vacation. As much as I
(03:24):
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
(03:45):
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.
Speaker 2 (04:00):
Also be my thing. I loved it.
Speaker 1 (04:04):
I do think I'll probably go back to keeping my
private life private for the most part. That's been my
preference for a few years, and for good reason. There
are a lot of weirdos out there, you know. But
I couldn't just disappear for a few weeks without any explanation,
and I did put a lot of thought into the
decision to share a bit of myself with the wider world.
(04:29):
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
(04:50):
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.
Speaker 2 (05:12):
But that's a story for another day.
Speaker 1 (05:16):
Today we're talking about guns. A lot of guns, guns
where they shouldn't have been, guns bought and sold by
men who shouldn't have had them, Guns that showed up
in places they weren't allowed to go, and guns that
were found in unexpected places, like under a pillow an
(05:37):
empty hotel room in Los Angeles. We're in a mysterious
shipping container on a farm in violation of international sanctions.
I know, I said I was done with South Africa
and I am. I am for now, at least I
swear this episode is perfectly listenable as a stack and
(06:00):
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
(06:21):
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,
(06:42):
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.
Speaker 2 (06:52):
After the one about her.
Speaker 1 (06:55):
The report reads, mister Robert Maler, an American city, claims
in his application to have been recruited by the former
South African police to act as a firearms instructor. Maller
was caught in the United States after he illegally imported
a large cache of weapons to South Africa using fraudulent
names and passports. He claims allegiance to the Conservative Party
(07:18):
and said he had contact with other groups like the
Africaner Folks Front and the AWB. He also said that
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
(07:40):
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
(08:01):
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.
(08:24):
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
(08:48):
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
(09:10):
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
(09:32):
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
(09:55):
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
(10:20):
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,
(10:43):
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
(11:08):
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
(11:30):
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.
(11:52):
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
(12:16):
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.
(12:38):
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,
(13:03):
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
(13:25):
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
(13:47):
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
(14:08):
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,
(14:28):
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.
(14:51):
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
(15:13):
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
(15:38):
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
(15:58):
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
(16:23):
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
(16:44):
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
(17:09):
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
(17:30):
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
(17:50):
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
(18:12):
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
(18:33):
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
(18:55):
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
(19:17):
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
(19:39):
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
(20:00):
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
(20:22):
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
(20:45):
few stitches, but he was not critically injured. Gary self
was fired, obviously in exchange for pleading guilty. Most of
(21:09):
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
(21:31):
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
(21:55):
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
(22:16):
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
(22:40):
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
(23:04):
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,
(23:27):
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.
Speaker 2 (23:49):
But it does seem.
Speaker 1 (23:50):
Odd that those same local newspapers that reported Gary self's
assault charges don't seem to have run stories about Gary
getting arrested again a few months later on a federal
firearms charge. I can't explain it. So looking at our
timeline here, Gary gets arrested for assault in January. He
(24:11):
pleads guilty in February, but at this point he doesn't
know yet that the ATF is looking into him. In
October of nineteen ninety one, Robert Mahler's federal firearms license
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
(24:33):
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
(24:54):
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
(25:18):
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,
(25:41):
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
(26:02):
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,
(26:23):
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
(26:47):
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
(27:09):
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
(27:31):
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
(27:53):
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,
(28:17):
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
(28:38):
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
(28:58):
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
(29:19):
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
(29:43):
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
(30:04):
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
(30:26):
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?
Speaker 2 (30:41):
And he does.
Speaker 1 (30:43):
It's a South African passport and inside the passport the
picture is of Robert Maler, but the name isn't his.
It was issued to a man named Jan van der
meervh attorney asks him, how did you get this? Did
(31:04):
you steal this man's passport and just switch out the picture?
Speaker 2 (31:08):
How did you.
Speaker 1 (31:08):
Manage to get what appears to be a very real
fake passport? And Maller answers quote, he went down with
me and helped me fill out the forms and walked
me through the procedure to get a passport, and we
used his ID to get a passport for me. And
(31:31):
that's so interesting to me. I'd been wondering for a
while now how this network was able to get so
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
(31:53):
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.
(32:18):
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,
(32:43):
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
(33:03):
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
(33:23):
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
(33:45):
the one who threw the murder weapons into a smelting
furnace to destroy the evidence.
Speaker 2 (33:50):
In fact, all twenty.
Speaker 1 (33:51):
Of those charged with carrying out that massacre were acquitted.
Speaker 2 (33:56):
But we know what happened.
Speaker 1 (33:58):
Someone shot those children, but it could just have easily
been some other man named yan who helped this arms
dealer get that fake passport. I really couldn't tell you,
and regardless of whose friend Yon might have been. It
was this passport that Robert Moller used to travel back
to the United States undetected while he was evading arrest.
(34:20):
So in nineteen ninety two, Nancy Moller is at home
in Oregon. They've had to close the gun store. Her
husband is missing, and the store doesn't have a valid
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
(34:42):
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.
(35:03):
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.
Speaker 2 (35:19):
She shipped a forty foot.
Speaker 1 (35:20):
Cargo container to South Africa and in it there were
some of her husband's things, some personal belongings that he
might like to have now that he's living abroad. One
news article lists quote a vehicle as being among those possessions,
but it doesn't say what sort of vehicle it was.
Robert Moller did have a habit of collecting military surplus gear,
(35:45):
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.
Speaker 2 (35:58):
That would explain the need for.
Speaker 1 (36:00):
Forty foot container, but it doesn't say. I don't know
if he owned an M thirty five truck in nineteen
ninety three, but I do know that he owned four
of them in twenty sixteen, so he did like them.
There's a lot of vagueness about the general contents of
the container. I couldn't tell you how many radios or
(36:22):
sleeping bags or camouflage uniforms were in there, but I
do know that there were two hundred and twenty seven
guns and nearly fifty thousand rounds of ammunition. The container
(36:49):
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
(37:10):
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
(37:35):
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.
Speaker 2 (37:54):
Right this is February.
Speaker 1 (37:55):
Nineteen ninety four, and in April of nineteen ninety four,
they hoped to set off enough bombs and cause enough
chaos that there couldn't be an election. Maybe he hoped
to return quickly with more weapons.
Speaker 2 (38:09):
He did tell the.
Speaker 1 (38:10):
Court later that he was the American fundraising representative for
the group, so maybe this was the last minute effort
to raise more money for the race war. Either way,
he never made it Back at home in Oregon, he
was spotted by someone who called in a tip and
he was arrested on March seventh, nineteen ninety four, on
(38:30):
those old charges from nineteen ninety two. At that point,
that's all he's charged with, and he wasn't charged with
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
(38:52):
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
(39:15):
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.
Speaker 2 (39:37):
It was over.
Speaker 1 (39:39):
Until the rest of the guns turned up. In October
of nineteen ninety four, the South African police found the
shipping container. It still had most of the guns and
ammunition inside, inexplicably, along with a large amount of survival gear, camouflage, uniforms,
radio equipment, sleeping bags, things like that. A press release
(40:01):
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
(40:25):
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.
Speaker 2 (40:36):
He served a little over a year.
Speaker 1 (40:39):
Of his eighteen month sentence, and he was released from
prison in October of nineteen ninety six. By then, he
and Nancy were divorced and Nancy had remarried a prison guard,
Robert Maller, remarried in two thousand and five. And you
might think, well, he's learned his lesson. He's been convicted
twice for federal crimes involving guns, not crimes of violence exactly.
(41:02):
They were paperwork crimes. The things he was actually convicted
of were just paperwork, lying on a form, not having
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
(41:24):
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
(41:45):
thousand rounds of ammunition.
Speaker 2 (41:49):
As a felon.
Speaker 1 (41:50):
He wasn't supposed to have any guns or any bullets.
But I think a lot of us could shrug it
off and say it's nobody's business if a seventy year
old man in rural Oregon kept a rifle on hand
for putting down sick animals or shooting a predator that
came too close to his cows, or something like that.
(42:11):
But that's not what this was. He was hoarding bullets,
and according to testimony at trial, he was conning friends
who didn't know he wasn't allowed to have these things
into making straw purchases for him. So not only was
he breaking the law, he was making other people participate
(42:31):
without their knowledge.
Speaker 2 (42:34):
His defense was confusing.
Speaker 1 (42:38):
The whole situation started in twenty twelve when he bought
a couple of military cargo trucks at an auction in
Washington State. But these giant trucks are so big that
in order to drive them on the highway you need
a commercial driver's license, and Robert Moller didn't have one,
but his friend Bill did, and Bill agreed to go
(42:59):
up to Washington with him and drive the trucks home.
When they got back to Oregon, Moller had another favor
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
(43:21):
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,
(43:41):
doomsday prepper stuff.
Speaker 2 (43:43):
He didn't have room for.
Speaker 1 (43:44):
It, and again, he didn't want his wife to know
he'd spent money on it, so could he keep it
at Bill's house? And then it was a gun safe,
and then another gun safe, and then several car loads
of guns. Suddenly Bill's garage is completely taken over by
three massive gun safes filled with dozens of guns. And
(44:07):
Bill doesn't dislike guns. He has a gun safe. He
keeps it in his bedroom. But Bill's wife, Connie is
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
(44:30):
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
(44:51):
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
(45:12):
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
(45:32):
Connie only called the ATF because she was mad at
him over some kind of personal dispute.
Speaker 2 (45:37):
But Connie says she had to do it.
Speaker 1 (45:40):
You see, her brother, Adam was a federal agent with
the Bureau of Land Management, so he's not like a
regular cop.
Speaker 2 (45:49):
He's not in the.
Speaker 1 (45:50):
FBI, but he's a federal law enforcement officer, and he
told her that no matter how bad she wanted her
garage back, she could not give Moller hid guns back.
Now that she knows that he's a convicted felon, it
would be a felony for her to knowingly facilitate the
transfer of a firearm back into his possession.
Speaker 2 (46:14):
So she's kind of stuck.
Speaker 1 (46:17):
Connie did testify at the trial, so I have her
own sworn statements to go on. Her brother, Adam wasn't
called as a witness, so I just have the secondhand
report from the ATF here. But apparently he'd gotten a
bad vibe off his wife's new stepdad years earlier in
their relationship. Again, Adam and Kara are adults, married adults.
(46:41):
When Kara's mother marries Robert Maller, and so here's this man.
You know, his wife's mom has a new boyfriend. This
isn't a guy, you know, This isn't a guy you
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
(47:02):
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
(47:26):
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.
Speaker 2 (47:38):
So regardless of who knew what.
Speaker 1 (47:41):
And when, in January of twenty sixteen, Connie called the ATF.
That much we know for sure. She called, and she
reported it, and they sent an agent out to talk
to her. And when the ATF eventually searched Robert Maller's home.
He wasn't there, but his wife was. She told the
(48:02):
agents that she didn't think her husband owned any guns,
but she did think that he had a concealed carry permit.
She also seemed surprised to learn that her husband had
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.
(48:24):
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
(48:47):
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
(49:09):
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
(49:29):
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
(49:51):
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
(50:11):
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
(50:35):
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.
(50:56):
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
(51:19):
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
(51:42):
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
(52:03):
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,
(52:25):
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
(52:46):
skilled he was with firearms.
Speaker 2 (52:49):
One excerpt from an ATF report reads. He stated that
he shot the cult.
Speaker 1 (52:54):
Better than Maler did, and added that Moller was a
bad shot. Shots fired literally, and Curtis also told the
agents that in addition to selling Maler that pistol, he'd
also purchased a rifle from Maller some years back. The
two had had a falling out years before the arrest.
(53:16):
Curtis recounted that after some disagreement, Maller had showed up
at his workplace and told him, quote, I'd hate for
something to happen to you where you wouldn't be able
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
(53:39):
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
(54:01):
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
(54:23):
of possessing one firearm and he was given three years
of probation.
Speaker 2 (54:29):
I really can't explain it.
Speaker 1 (54:32):
Not that I think jail would have benefited Robert Maler
or even society, but it is puzzling these days. Robert
Maler is just an old man. He loves table tennis,
but his favorite hobby seems to be filing nuisance lawsuits
against people who say.
Speaker 2 (54:52):
No to him.
Speaker 1 (54:55):
In twenty twenty, he filed a lawsuit against a hospital
he was asking for over a million dollars in damages
to compensate him for the immense emotional anguish caused by
their refusal to place him under general anesthesia immediately upon
his arrival for a scheduled elective surgery. He claims that
the doctor agreed to this request ahead of time because
(55:18):
if he had to remain conscious, he would have an
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
(55:38):
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
(55:58):
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,
(56:19):
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
(56:41):
assistant who caused him to become too warm by placing
a blanket on his bed.
Speaker 2 (56:48):
The suit was dismissed.
Speaker 1 (56:51):
In twenty nineteen, he filed a lawsuit against the state
of Oregon asking for one hundred and fifty five thousand
dollars in damages because he felt he was not afforded
adequate due process in fighting a traffic citation. That one
was also dismissed. There are a lot of these, truly,
it's kind of impressive. There are a lot of these.
(57:12):
There was a year's long ongoing feud between rival table
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.
(57:33):
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
(57:55):
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
(58:15):
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
(58:40):
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
(59:02):
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,
(59:24):
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
(59:44):
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
(01:00:06):
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
(01:00:27):
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
(01:00:51):
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
(01:01:11):
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
(01:01:47):
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
(01:02:08):
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
Col Zone Media. On April twenty first, nineteen ninety two.
The phone rang at the Portland, Oregon field office of
the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. The caller wouldn't
give his name, but he had something he had to
get off his chest. He said he was a private
(00:24):
investigator working for a man named Bob. He said Bob
was the owner of a gun shop in Salem, Oregon,
and Bob had recently obtained a photograph of an ATF
agent named John Comery. The caller said he wanted to
tell agent Comery to be careful, and then he hung up.
(00:48):
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
(01:12):
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.
Speaker 2 (01:32):
But how had the.
Speaker 1 (01:33):
Caller even known, And if the caller knew that Agent
Komery was about to arrest Robert Maler, Robert Maler probably
knew too. So Agent Komery called the US Attorney's office
and he asked if they could speed up that timeline.
They could present the case to the grand jury later,
(01:54):
but they needed to arrest Maller now. The prosecutor if
he could write the criminal complaint and get that in
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
(02:18):
a grand jury did indict Robert Moller three weeks later,
but when the ATF went to pick him up, he
was gone.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
By the time.
Speaker 1 (02:28):
ATF agents saw Robert Maler again two years later, he'd
already smuggled hundreds of guns halfway across the world to
arm a group that hoped to start a civil war.
I'm Molly Conger, and this is we're little guys. This
(03:03):
is a silly one to the extent that anything on
this show can really be said to be lighthearted. I
needed something that wasn't too complicated to get me back
into the swing of things after two weeks off. It
wasn't sure I even remembered how to do this at
all after such a relaxing vacation. As much as I
(03:24):
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
(03:45):
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.
Speaker 2 (04:00):
Also be my thing. I loved it.
Speaker 1 (04:04):
I do think I'll probably go back to keeping my
private life private for the most part. That's been my
preference for a few years, and for good reason. There
are a lot of weirdos out there, you know. But
I couldn't just disappear for a few weeks without any explanation,
and I did put a lot of thought into the
decision to share a bit of myself with the wider world.
(04:29):
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
(04:50):
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.
Speaker 2 (05:12):
But that's a story for another day.
Speaker 1 (05:16):
Today we're talking about guns. A lot of guns, guns
where they shouldn't have been, guns bought and sold by
men who shouldn't have had them, Guns that showed up
in places they weren't allowed to go, and guns that
were found in unexpected places, like under a pillow an
(05:37):
empty hotel room in Los Angeles. We're in a mysterious
shipping container on a farm in violation of international sanctions.
I know, I said I was done with South Africa
and I am. I am for now, at least I
swear this episode is perfectly listenable as a stack and
(06:00):
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
(06:21):
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,
(06:42):
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.
Speaker 2 (06:52):
After the one about her.
Speaker 1 (06:55):
The report reads, mister Robert Maler, an American city, claims
in his application to have been recruited by the former
South African police to act as a firearms instructor. Maller
was caught in the United States after he illegally imported
a large cache of weapons to South Africa using fraudulent
names and passports. He claims allegiance to the Conservative Party
(07:18):
and said he had contact with other groups like the
Africaner Folks Front and the AWB. He also said that
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
(07:40):
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
(08:01):
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.
(08:24):
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
(08:48):
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
(09:10):
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
(09:32):
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
(09:55):
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
(10:20):
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,
(10:43):
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
(11:08):
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
(11:30):
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.
(11:52):
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
(12:16):
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.
(12:38):
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,
(13:03):
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
(13:25):
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
(13:47):
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
(14:08):
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,
(14:28):
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.
(14:51):
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
(15:13):
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
(15:38):
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
(15:58):
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
(16:23):
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
(16:44):
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
(17:09):
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
(17:30):
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
(17:50):
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
(18:12):
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
(18:33):
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
(18:55):
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
(19:17):
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
(19:39):
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
(20:00):
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
(20:22):
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
(20:45):
few stitches, but he was not critically injured. Gary self
was fired, obviously in exchange for pleading guilty. Most of
(21:09):
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
(21:31):
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
(21:55):
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
(22:16):
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
(22:40):
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
(23:04):
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,
(23:27):
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.
Speaker 2 (23:49):
But it does seem.
Speaker 1 (23:50):
Odd that those same local newspapers that reported Gary self's
assault charges don't seem to have run stories about Gary
getting arrested again a few months later on a federal
firearms charge. I can't explain it. So looking at our
timeline here, Gary gets arrested for assault in January. He
(24:11):
pleads guilty in February, but at this point he doesn't
know yet that the ATF is looking into him. In
October of nineteen ninety one, Robert Mahler's federal firearms license
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
(24:33):
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
(24:54):
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
(25:18):
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,
(25:41):
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
(26:02):
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,
(26:23):
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
(26:47):
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
(27:09):
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
(27:31):
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
(27:53):
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,
(28:17):
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
(28:38):
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
(28:58):
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
(29:19):
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
(29:43):
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
(30:04):
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
(30:26):
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?
Speaker 2 (30:41):
And he does.
Speaker 1 (30:43):
It's a South African passport and inside the passport the
picture is of Robert Maler, but the name isn't his.
It was issued to a man named Jan van der
meervh attorney asks him, how did you get this? Did
(31:04):
you steal this man's passport and just switch out the picture?
Speaker 2 (31:08):
How did you.
Speaker 1 (31:08):
Manage to get what appears to be a very real
fake passport? And Maller answers quote, he went down with
me and helped me fill out the forms and walked
me through the procedure to get a passport, and we
used his ID to get a passport for me. And
(31:31):
that's so interesting to me. I'd been wondering for a
while now how this network was able to get so
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
(31:53):
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.
(32:18):
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,
(32:43):
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
(33:03):
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
(33:23):
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
(33:45):
the one who threw the murder weapons into a smelting
furnace to destroy the evidence.
Speaker 2 (33:50):
In fact, all twenty.
Speaker 1 (33:51):
Of those charged with carrying out that massacre were acquitted.
Speaker 2 (33:56):
But we know what happened.
Speaker 1 (33:58):
Someone shot those children, but it could just have easily
been some other man named yan who helped this arms
dealer get that fake passport. I really couldn't tell you,
and regardless of whose friend Yon might have been. It
was this passport that Robert Moller used to travel back
to the United States undetected while he was evading arrest.
(34:20):
So in nineteen ninety two, Nancy Moller is at home
in Oregon. They've had to close the gun store. Her
husband is missing, and the store doesn't have a valid
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
(34:42):
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.
(35:03):
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.
Speaker 2 (35:19):
She shipped a forty foot.
Speaker 1 (35:20):
Cargo container to South Africa and in it there were
some of her husband's things, some personal belongings that he
might like to have now that he's living abroad. One
news article lists quote a vehicle as being among those possessions,
but it doesn't say what sort of vehicle it was.
Robert Moller did have a habit of collecting military surplus gear,
(35:45):
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.
Speaker 2 (35:58):
That would explain the need for.
Speaker 1 (36:00):
Forty foot container, but it doesn't say. I don't know
if he owned an M thirty five truck in nineteen
ninety three, but I do know that he owned four
of them in twenty sixteen, so he did like them.
There's a lot of vagueness about the general contents of
the container. I couldn't tell you how many radios or
(36:22):
sleeping bags or camouflage uniforms were in there, but I
do know that there were two hundred and twenty seven
guns and nearly fifty thousand rounds of ammunition. The container
(36:49):
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
(37:10):
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
(37:35):
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.
Speaker 2 (37:54):
Right this is February.
Speaker 1 (37:55):
Nineteen ninety four, and in April of nineteen ninety four,
they hoped to set off enough bombs and cause enough
chaos that there couldn't be an election. Maybe he hoped
to return quickly with more weapons.
Speaker 2 (38:09):
He did tell the.
Speaker 1 (38:10):
Court later that he was the American fundraising representative for
the group, so maybe this was the last minute effort
to raise more money for the race war. Either way,
he never made it Back at home in Oregon, he
was spotted by someone who called in a tip and
he was arrested on March seventh, nineteen ninety four, on
(38:30):
those old charges from nineteen ninety two. At that point,
that's all he's charged with, and he wasn't charged with
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
(38:52):
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
(39:15):
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.
Speaker 2 (39:37):
It was over.
Speaker 1 (39:39):
Until the rest of the guns turned up. In October
of nineteen ninety four, the South African police found the
shipping container. It still had most of the guns and
ammunition inside, inexplicably, along with a large amount of survival gear, camouflage, uniforms,
radio equipment, sleeping bags, things like that. A press release
(40:01):
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
(40:25):
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.
Speaker 2 (40:36):
He served a little over a year.
Speaker 1 (40:39):
Of his eighteen month sentence, and he was released from
prison in October of nineteen ninety six. By then, he
and Nancy were divorced and Nancy had remarried a prison guard,
Robert Maller, remarried in two thousand and five. And you
might think, well, he's learned his lesson. He's been convicted
twice for federal crimes involving guns, not crimes of violence exactly.
(41:02):
They were paperwork crimes. The things he was actually convicted
of were just paperwork, lying on a form, not having
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
(41:24):
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
(41:45):
thousand rounds of ammunition.
Speaker 2 (41:49):
As a felon.
Speaker 1 (41:50):
He wasn't supposed to have any guns or any bullets.
But I think a lot of us could shrug it
off and say it's nobody's business if a seventy year
old man in rural Oregon kept a rifle on hand
for putting down sick animals or shooting a predator that
came too close to his cows, or something like that.
(42:11):
But that's not what this was. He was hoarding bullets,
and according to testimony at trial, he was conning friends
who didn't know he wasn't allowed to have these things
into making straw purchases for him. So not only was
he breaking the law, he was making other people participate
(42:31):
without their knowledge.
Speaker 2 (42:34):
His defense was confusing.
Speaker 1 (42:38):
The whole situation started in twenty twelve when he bought
a couple of military cargo trucks at an auction in
Washington State. But these giant trucks are so big that
in order to drive them on the highway you need
a commercial driver's license, and Robert Moller didn't have one,
but his friend Bill did, and Bill agreed to go
(42:59):
up to Washington with him and drive the trucks home.
When they got back to Oregon, Moller had another favor
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
(43:21):
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,
(43:41):
doomsday prepper stuff.
Speaker 2 (43:43):
He didn't have room for.
Speaker 1 (43:44):
It, and again, he didn't want his wife to know
he'd spent money on it, so could he keep it
at Bill's house? And then it was a gun safe,
and then another gun safe, and then several car loads
of guns. Suddenly Bill's garage is completely taken over by
three massive gun safes filled with dozens of guns. And
(44:07):
Bill doesn't dislike guns. He has a gun safe. He
keeps it in his bedroom. But Bill's wife, Connie is
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
(44:30):
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
(44:51):
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
(45:12):
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
(45:32):
Connie only called the ATF because she was mad at
him over some kind of personal dispute.
Speaker 2 (45:37):
But Connie says she had to do it.
Speaker 1 (45:40):
You see, her brother, Adam was a federal agent with
the Bureau of Land Management, so he's not like a
regular cop.
Speaker 2 (45:49):
He's not in the.
Speaker 1 (45:50):
FBI, but he's a federal law enforcement officer, and he
told her that no matter how bad she wanted her
garage back, she could not give Moller hid guns back.
Now that she knows that he's a convicted felon, it
would be a felony for her to knowingly facilitate the
transfer of a firearm back into his possession.
Speaker 2 (46:14):
So she's kind of stuck.
Speaker 1 (46:17):
Connie did testify at the trial, so I have her
own sworn statements to go on. Her brother, Adam wasn't
called as a witness, so I just have the secondhand
report from the ATF here. But apparently he'd gotten a
bad vibe off his wife's new stepdad years earlier in
their relationship. Again, Adam and Kara are adults, married adults.
(46:41):
When Kara's mother marries Robert Maller, and so here's this man.
You know, his wife's mom has a new boyfriend. This
isn't a guy, you know, This isn't a guy you
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
(47:02):
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
(47:26):
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.
Speaker 2 (47:38):
So regardless of who knew what.
Speaker 1 (47:41):
And when, in January of twenty sixteen, Connie called the ATF.
That much we know for sure. She called, and she
reported it, and they sent an agent out to talk
to her. And when the ATF eventually searched Robert Maller's home.
He wasn't there, but his wife was. She told the
(48:02):
agents that she didn't think her husband owned any guns,
but she did think that he had a concealed carry permit.
She also seemed surprised to learn that her husband had
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.
(48:24):
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
(48:47):
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
(49:09):
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
(49:29):
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
(49:51):
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
(50:11):
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
(50:35):
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.
(50:56):
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
(51:19):
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
(51:42):
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
(52:03):
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,
(52:25):
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
(52:46):
skilled he was with firearms.
Speaker 2 (52:49):
One excerpt from an ATF report reads. He stated that
he shot the cult.
Speaker 1 (52:54):
Better than Maler did, and added that Moller was a
bad shot. Shots fired literally, and Curtis also told the
agents that in addition to selling Maler that pistol, he'd
also purchased a rifle from Maller some years back. The
two had had a falling out years before the arrest.
(53:16):
Curtis recounted that after some disagreement, Maller had showed up
at his workplace and told him, quote, I'd hate for
something to happen to you where you wouldn't be able
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
(53:39):
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
(54:01):
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
(54:23):
of possessing one firearm and he was given three years
of probation.
Speaker 2 (54:29):
I really can't explain it.
Speaker 1 (54:32):
Not that I think jail would have benefited Robert Maler
or even society, but it is puzzling these days. Robert
Maler is just an old man. He loves table tennis,
but his favorite hobby seems to be filing nuisance lawsuits
against people who say.
Speaker 2 (54:52):
No to him.
Speaker 1 (54:55):
In twenty twenty, he filed a lawsuit against a hospital
he was asking for over a million dollars in damages
to compensate him for the immense emotional anguish caused by
their refusal to place him under general anesthesia immediately upon
his arrival for a scheduled elective surgery. He claims that
the doctor agreed to this request ahead of time because
(55:18):
if he had to remain conscious, he would have an
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
(55:38):
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
(55:58):
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,
(56:19):
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
(56:41):
assistant who caused him to become too warm by placing
a blanket on his bed.
Speaker 2 (56:48):
The suit was dismissed.
Speaker 1 (56:51):
In twenty nineteen, he filed a lawsuit against the state
of Oregon asking for one hundred and fifty five thousand
dollars in damages because he felt he was not afforded
adequate due process in fighting a traffic citation. That one
was also dismissed. There are a lot of these, truly,
it's kind of impressive. There are a lot of these.
(57:12):
There was a year's long ongoing feud between rival table
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.
(57:33):
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
(57:55):
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
(58:15):
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
(58:40):
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
(59:02):
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,
(59:24):
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
(59:44):
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
(01:00:06):
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
(01:00:27):
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
(01:00:51):
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
(01:01:11):
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
(01:01:47):
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
(01:02:08):
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
Host
Molly Conger
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