Small Time Arms Dealer

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Speaker 22 On April 21st, 1992,

Speaker 22 the phone rang at the Portland, Oregon Field Office of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms.

Speaker 22 The caller wouldn't give his name. but he had something he had to get off his chest.

Speaker 22 He said he was a private investigator working for a man named Bob.

Speaker 22 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.

Speaker 22 The caller said he wanted to tell Agent Comery to be careful,

Speaker 22 and then he hung up.

Speaker 22 It might not sound like much, but it set off alarm bells for Agent John Comery.

Speaker 22 He'd been investigating Robert Mahler, a gun dealer in Salem, for over a year, and they were just about to take the case to a grand jury.

Speaker 22 It wasn't really anything too serious, just some fraudulent paperwork for a gun purchase. Pretty typical fare for an ATF agent.

Speaker 22 But now, just three weeks before that court date, there was this troubling development.

Speaker 22 Sure, there's no way to know if the anonymous caller was telling the truth.

Speaker 22 If Robert Mahler really was talking about taking out the agent who'd been investigating him.

Speaker 22 But how had the caller even known?

Speaker 22 And if the caller knew that Agent Comery was about to arrest Robert Mahler,

Speaker 22 Robert Mahler probably knew too.

Speaker 22 So Agent Comery called the U.S. Attorney's Office and he asked if they could speed up that timeline.

Speaker 22 They could present the case to the grand jury later, but they needed to arrest Mahler now.

Speaker 22 He asked the prosecutor if he could write the criminal complaint and get that in front of the judge and make the arrest immediately.

Speaker 22 The prosecutor said no.

Speaker 22 The case was already scheduled for the grand jury and changing the calendar now would just put the judge in a bad mood.

Speaker 22 So they waited.

Speaker 22 And a grand jury did indict Robert Mahler three weeks later.

Speaker 22 But when the ATF went to pick him up, he was gone.

Speaker 22 By the time ATF agents saw Robert Mahler 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.

Speaker 22 I'm Molly Conger,

Speaker 22 and this is Weird Little Guys.

Speaker 22 This is a silly one, to the extent that anything on this show can really be said to be lighthearted.

Speaker 22 I needed something that wasn't too complicated to get me back into the swing of things after two weeks off.

Speaker 22 I wasn't sure I even remembered how to do this at all after such a relaxing vacation.

Speaker 22 As much as I love my work, it was good to get away from the weird little guys for a minute, if I'm being honest.

Speaker 22 And in the time since my last episode, I got married. It was beautiful and fun and the cake was really good.

Speaker 22 And I went on my honeymoon.

Speaker 22 I was really worried that I wouldn't be able to properly enjoy doing nothing. That's not really my thing.

Speaker 22 But it turns out that lying on a white sandy beach, listening to the gentle waves of the Caribbean Sea,

Speaker 22 could also be my thing.

Speaker 34 I loved it.

Speaker 22 I do think I'll probably go back to keeping my private life private, for the most part.

Speaker 22 That's been my preference for a few years, and for good reason, there are a lot of weirdos out there, you know?

Speaker 22 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.

Speaker 22 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.

Speaker 22 So

Speaker 22 no regrets.

Speaker 22 And It is very funny to me that the only weird little guy I've seen weighing in on the subject so far really does not have any business opining on other people's relationships.

Speaker 22 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 22 But that's a story for another day.

Speaker 22 Today we're talking about guns.

Speaker 22 A lot of guns.

Speaker 22 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.

Speaker 22 Like under a pillow in an empty hotel room in Los Angeles.

Speaker 22 Or in a mysterious shipping container on a farm in violation of international sanctions.

Speaker 22 I know I said I was done with South Africa.

Speaker 37 And I am.

Speaker 22 I am. For now, at least.
I swear.

Speaker 22 This episode is perfectly listenable as a standalone bit of entertainment.

Speaker 22 But it is something I came across while I was researching those episodes.

Speaker 22 When I started researching the story that turned into that monstrous, nearly three-month-long, eight-episode arc about Monica Huggett Stone,

Speaker 22 One of the first side characters I made a note of was a man I never actually even mentioned in those episodes. an arms dealer in Oregon named Robert Mahler.

Speaker 22 In the section of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Report, where I first found Monica, the section about connections between right-wing terrorist groups in South Africa and extremist groups abroad, there's a passing mention of Mr.

Speaker 22 Mahler.

Speaker 22 Like Monica, his name is only in the report the one time, and it's in the paragraph immediately after the one about her.

Speaker 22 The report reads,

Speaker 22 Mr. Robert Mahler, an American citizen, claims in his application to have been recruited by the former South African police to act as a firearms instructor.

Speaker 22 Mahler was caught in the United States after he illegally imported a large cache of weapons to South Africa using fraudulent names and passports.

Speaker 22 He claims allegiance to the Conservative Party and said he had contact with other groups like the Afrikaner Folks Front and the AWB.

Speaker 22 He also said that he was the USA fundraising representative of the AWB.

Speaker 22 I know I just said, you don't need to have listened to those eight episodes about white supremacist terrorism in South Africa during the fall apartheid to understand this episode. And you don't.

Speaker 37 It's okay.

Speaker 22 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 Afrikaner Resistance Movement, an explicitly neo-Nazi group founded in the 1970s in South Africa.

Speaker 22 They kind of still exist, I guess.

Speaker 22 But in the 80s and early 90s, 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, etc.

Speaker 22 And to do all of that, obviously they needed guns.

Speaker 22 And if you did listen to those other episodes about all that violence in South Africa, you know that they had guns.

Speaker 22 They smuggled guns in from outside of the country and they stole guns from military bases.

Speaker 22 But what I didn't really get into in those episodes is why every single gun the AWB had seemed to be stolen or smuggled.

Speaker 22 See, by the 1990s, it was getting pretty hard to find a brand new gun in South Africa.

Speaker 22 In 1963, the United Nations Security Council adopted Resolution 181, calling for all countries to voluntarily stop selling or allowing export of guns, ammunition, and military equipment to South Africa.

Speaker 22 In 1977, Resolution 418 made that embargo mandatory.

Speaker 22 A subsequent UN resolution in 1986 tightened those restrictions and clarified that, yes, allowing sales to pass through a third country is still a violation of the embargo.

Speaker 22 On paper, no one was supposed to be selling military equipment to South Africa.

Speaker 22 And yet, South African soldiers, police, paramilitaries, civilians, and terrorist groups all seemed to have plenty of foreign hardware.

Speaker 22 After that initial voluntary embargo was passed in 1963, the United States announced its intention to comply fully. But Henry Kissinger's interpretation of the resolution allowed the U.S.

Speaker 22 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.

Speaker 22 In 1978, fully half of the planes in use by the South African Air Force were made by U.S. companies.

Speaker 22 The same loophole was used to supply the South African military with US-made communications equipment and computers.

Speaker 22 Even after Jimmy Carter stopped these gray area sales to the South African government, private companies in South Africa were still free to make the exact same purchases, and they often did so on behalf of the government.

Speaker 22 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.

Speaker 22 And Paraguay was known to turn a blind eye when other countries laundered those transactions through them.

Speaker 22 But nobody, and I mean nobody, sold South Africa more guns, planes, bombs, and drones than Israel.

Speaker 22 In one of several reports submitted to the United Nations in 1985 by the UN Committee Against Apartheid, the committee's chairman notes that they had been aware of Israel's ongoing assistance on South Africa's nuclear weapons program since 1977.

Speaker 22 The report, quote, condemns this diabolical alliance and calls for concerted international action against it.

Speaker 22 With substantial assistance from Israel, South Africa was able to eventually scale up domestic production for most of their military needs.

Speaker 22 South African soldiers carried domestically produced copies of the Israeli Uzi.

Speaker 22 But small arms were a different story.

Speaker 22 There was a growing demand for guns among white South African civilians.

Speaker 22 So, corporations did what they always do, and they found a way to make money meeting that need.

Speaker 22 There were a handful of high-profile incidents in the late 70s.

Speaker 22 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.

Speaker 22 And then those arms were trafficked into South Africa and sold at a premium to eager buyers.

Speaker 22 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.

Speaker 22 That's not a great argument for the court,

Speaker 22 but I do think it's true.

Speaker 22 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.

Speaker 22 The Canary Islands is a tiny island territory with a population of barely a million people.

Speaker 22 They didn't need 50 million bullets. That should have been a red flag on the export declaration.

Speaker 22 But it went on for years.

Speaker 22 In 1979, 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 21 separate shipments.

Speaker 22 A Washington Post article that year about his conviction notes that it wasn't police work or strict export control that caught him.

Speaker 22 It was a forklift operator in the freight hangar at Chicago's O'Hare Airport.

Speaker 22 The employee was stacking boxes in the hangar when he noticed that one box was torn open a bit, exposing its contents.

Speaker 22 Packages containing bullets are required to be labeled as such, and he reported to his superior that this box was not.

Speaker 22 It was easy money, apparently. South Africa was desperate for guns, so they were willing to pay a significant premium to a discreet arms dealer.

Speaker 22 And despite the illegality of these sales, everyone seemed to be turning a blind eye.

Speaker 22 I couldn't tell you now, based on the records available to me, how widespread this understanding was. in the arms dealing community.

Speaker 22 I don't know what the numbers would have been like if you'd polled American gun shop owners in 1990 about their willingness to try this.

Speaker 22 But I am willing to bet that for every high-profile prosecution of a guy who got greedy or sloppy and got caught, there were probably dozens of guys who dabbled, making small shipments that never got flagged.

Speaker 22 Because in the cases we do have where guys got caught,

Speaker 22 Every single one of them is pretty upfront about how easy it was.

Speaker 22 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.

Speaker 22 And in 1992, Robert Mahler was running out of options.

Speaker 22 He had a lot of guns and no way to sell them.

Speaker 22 I guess we should back up for a second.

Speaker 22 In 1988, Robert Mahler and his wife Nancy bought a commercial property in Salem, Oregon at an auction.

Speaker 22 They got a great deal on the place. They paid about 60% of the assessed value for the storefront.

Speaker 22 And within a few months, he'd gotten his federal firearms license and opened a gun store, calling it N-A-M-E Guns. That's all caps with periods, NAME.

Speaker 22 I assume business was decent. They ran ads in the local paper for holiday specials, scratch and dent sales, and special events.

Speaker 22 In 1990, there was this enigmatic series of ads in the classified section of the Statesman Journal that read,

Speaker 22 Miss Elifante, pro-gun activist, invites you to stop by and visit her Tuesday through Sunday at NAME Guns.

Speaker 22 I could find no explanation for what that could possibly mean.

Speaker 22 I looked everywhere I could think to look, but I can't find a pro-gun activist using the pseudonym Miss Elifante.

Speaker 22 That's sort of like a stylized elephant. I don't know what that means.

Speaker 22 It is hard to say how the ATF found out about the machine guns. Unfortunately, the federal courts in Oregon have not digitized their collection of records from the early 90s.

Speaker 22 So there's definitely information in that record that I just don't have.

Speaker 22 But But based on the records I do have access to without flying to Portland to plead with a court clerk,

Speaker 22 I have a pretty good guess.

Speaker 22 I think it was Gary.

Speaker 22 You see, in 1990, the tiny town of Falls City, Oregon had a population of about 800 people.

Speaker 22 And two of those people were Robert and Nancy Mahler.

Speaker 22 They commuted about half an hour into Salem to run their gun store.

Speaker 22 And in 1990, Falls City was looking to replace their entire police force.

Speaker 22 That sounds dramatic, but they were looking for a new police chief.

Speaker 22 The town relied on the county sheriff for anything major, but in town, for day-to-day things, they did have their own police department, and it was staffed with just a single officer, the chief.

Speaker 22 And in April of 1990, Falls City, Oregon made the baffling decision to hire a 31-year-old man with no police experience.

Speaker 22 He wasn't even certified to be a police officer. He was not qualified for the job.
For the first few months after he was hired, he wasn't even in town.

Speaker 22 He was at the Oregon Police Academy getting certified.

Speaker 22 Gary Allen's self 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.

Speaker 22 But he'd never been a real cop before.

Speaker 22 And it turns out, he wasn't really that good at it.

Speaker 22 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 1990.

Speaker 22 By December 31st of that same year,

Speaker 22 he'd been placed on unpaid leave. pending an investigation into allegations that he had simply stopped showing up for work entirely.

Speaker 22 Later that same night, New Year's Eve, 1990, witnesses saw Gary get into an argument with his girlfriend at the bar.

Speaker 22 The articles I could find don't name the girlfriend or weigh in on whether Gary's wife knew that he had a girlfriend.

Speaker 22 So after getting into an argument at the bar with his girlfriend, he leaves.

Speaker 22 And he's seen leaving the bar a little after 1 a.m.

Speaker 22 And then witnesses see him start kicking in the doors of several homes.

Speaker 22 None of the reporting explains this.

Speaker 22 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.

Speaker 22 One newspaper article offered the vague explanation that he'd been drinking heavily and he was at this point looking for either his girlfriend or an unnamed male acquaintance, presumably because he wasn't done with the argument that started in the bar.

Speaker 22 And so, somewhere in between breaking into the first house and the third or fourth one, he encountered some random passersby on the sidewalk and he stabbed one of them in the neck.

Speaker 22 That 16-year-old boy did need a few stitches, but he was not critically injured.

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Speaker 22 Gary Self was fired, obviously.

Speaker 22 In exchange for pleading guilty, most of the charges were dropped.

Speaker 22 He was convicted of one count of burglary and one count of assault and sentenced to just 10 days in jail, which he was allowed to serve on weekends.

Speaker 22 But the conviction made him a felon.

Speaker 22 After his sentencing, the prosecutor told reporters, quote, we wanted to get this guy out of firearms and out of law enforcement.

Speaker 22 And the prosecutor specifically mentioned that Gary Self had a significant collection of firearms, one that included several machine guns.

Speaker 22 So I think it's safe to say the investigation into the machine guns really got going after Gary Self's arrest for that strange drunken rampage a little after midnight on New Year's Day 1991.

Speaker 22 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.

Speaker 22 Agent John Comery received approval for the investigation on January 22nd, 1991.

Speaker 22 It wasn't a complicated case. The ATF solved it pretty quickly.

Speaker 22 During Gary Self's short stint as the police chief of Fall City, he had befriended Robert Mahler.

Speaker 22 The pair used official police department letterhead and lied when they filled out the ATF Form 5, the application for tax-exempt transfer and registration of firearms.

Speaker 22 And so they filled out this paperwork as though Robert Mahler, the gun dealer, were facilitating a legitimate purchase of machine guns for a government agency, in this case, the Fall City Police Department.

Speaker 22 In fact, the two men just wanted the machine guns for their personal collections.

Speaker 22 Gary Self was federally charged with possessing an unregistered firearm later that same year, and he pretty quickly entered a guilty plea.

Speaker 22 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 docket sheet, and it's not sealed.

Speaker 22 And I have a lot of news stories from 1991 about Gary's drunken rampage, about Gary getting fired, about Gary pleading guilty to stabbing a teenager.

Speaker 22 But what I don't have are any news stories about the former police chief fraudulently obtaining a machine gun for personal use.

Speaker 22 I know the digital record isn't perfect. There are plenty of things that existed in 1991 that I'll never see.

Speaker 22 But it does seem odd that those same local newspapers that reported Gary Self's assault assault charges don't seem to have run stories about Gary getting arrested again a few months later on a federal firearms charge.

Speaker 22 I can't explain it.

Speaker 22 So looking at our timeline here, Gary gets arrested for assault in January. He pleads guilty in February, but at this point, he doesn't know yet that the ATF is looking into him.

Speaker 22 In October of 1991, Robert Mahler's federal firearms license expired, and he doesn't bother renewing it.

Speaker 22 I guess I should explain, just in case you're not familiar, so this is a license that you have to apply for with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms to be allowed to deal guns.

Speaker 22 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.

Speaker 22 Normally, you would just renew it. But he doesn't.

Speaker 22 I I think at this point, he knows the ATF probably won't reissue it. So,

Speaker 22 I mean, no one's been charged yet, but he had to have known something was coming.

Speaker 22 So despite no longer having a license to legally sell guns, his gun store is still open five days a week.

Speaker 22 And it's around this time, in October of 1991, that Robert Mahler starts taking trips to South Africa.

Speaker 22 In November, Gary Self is indicted on that machine gun charge. And so now Robert Mahler absolutely knows that his days are numbered.
His name is on that paperwork. If Gary is guilty, then so is he.

Speaker 22 In March of 1992, just a few weeks after Gary Self pled guilty to possessing that machine gun, Robert Mahler went to the county clerk's office. and he put the deed of his house in his wife's name.

Speaker 22 And he filed paperwork to give his wife Nancy power of attorney. So if he were for some reason absent, she would be legally empowered to make decisions regarding their property.

Speaker 22 He's preparing to be unavailable.

Speaker 22 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?

Speaker 22 In early April of 1992, Gary Self is sentenced on that gun charge. He doesn't get any jail time.

Speaker 22 He has to do home detention for a few months and he'll have a few years of probation, but no jail time.

Speaker 22 And in that lone ATF report that I do have,

Speaker 22 Agent Comery wrote that both the Portland police and an informant would later report to the ATF that Robert Mahler had expressed interest in having both the agent and his co-defendant, quote, knocked off.

Speaker 22 So now I'm wondering, maybe

Speaker 22 in April of 1992,

Speaker 22 maybe Gary Self was scared.

Speaker 22 He was stuck in his house on home detention. He couldn't leave.

Speaker 22 And he thought Robert Mahler wanted to kill him.

Speaker 22 Maybe the anonymous caller who warned the ATF that Mahler was going to try to kill Agent Comery

Speaker 22 had his own reasons to want Mahler in custody.

Speaker 22 But we'll never know. The report says that they never identified the caller.

Speaker 22 When agents did finally get the go-ahead in May of 1992 to arrest Robert Mahler for purchasing those machine guns, he was gone. He was already in South Africa.

Speaker 22 Robert Mahler was in South Africa for most of 1992 and 1993.

Speaker 22 He didn't come home for good until March of 1994.

Speaker 22 And in the two years he spent evading arrest on federal gun charges, he did come home a few times.

Speaker 22 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.

Speaker 22 But in January of 1993, The clerk of court in Multnomah County recorded a transaction and listed the payer as Bob Mahler.

Speaker 22 And the transaction was a filing fee for a divorce petition between a Bob Mahler and a Nancy Mahler.

Speaker 22 This petition did end up getting dismissed. They never followed up on it.
So they didn't get divorced in 1993.

Speaker 22 Listeners in Oregon may have noticed that the Multnomah County Courthouse is, notably, in Portland. And that's an hour and a half away from where they live in Fall City.

Speaker 22 I guess maybe he thought no one would recognize him there.

Speaker 22 When Robert Mahler's U.S. passport expired in 1993, he couldn't renew it.
He was a fugitive.

Speaker 22 But he didn't let that slow him down.

Speaker 22 Now again, unfortunately, the Oregon federal courts have not digitized their early 90s transcripts, so I don't have access to the trial transcript from his earlier criminal cases.

Speaker 22 But what I do have is an unpublished opinion from the bankruptcy appellate panel in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

Speaker 22 Because Robert and Nancy Mahler did eventually get divorced in 1995.

Speaker 22 And after that divorce, Nancy filed for bankruptcy.

Speaker 22 During her bankruptcy case, Robert Mahler filed a complaint with the bankruptcy court that Nancy had sold assets that belonged to him.

Speaker 22 The court didn't agree, but that's not what matters here. I don't care about their assets.

Speaker 22 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,

Speaker 22 the assumption is that you mean it.

Speaker 22 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,

Speaker 22 that's fair game. Opposing parties can bring that up to impeach your credibility.

Speaker 22 So it's in an excerpted transcript of this hearing in his ex-wife's bankruptcy case that we find this fascinating admission.

Speaker 22 So Robert Mahler is on the stand under oath.

Speaker 22 And Nancy's attorney holds up an exhibit and asks him, Do you recognize this?

Speaker 22 And he does.

Speaker 22 It's a South African passport.

Speaker 22 And inside the passport, the picture is of Robert Mahler.

Speaker 22 But the name isn't his.

Speaker 22 It was issued to a man named Jan van dermerve.

Speaker 22 And the attorney asks him,

Speaker 22 how did you get this?

Speaker 22 Did you steal this man's passport and just switch out the picture? How did you manage to get what appears to be a very real

Speaker 22 fake passport?

Speaker 22 And Mahler answers, quote,

Speaker 22 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.

Speaker 22 And 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.

Speaker 22 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.

Speaker 22 It was never explained in any of the sources I used how this kept happening.

Speaker 22 Because their fake passports seemed to be pretty good. I mean, people were crossing borders with them to evade international arrest warrants.

Speaker 22 Leonard Wienendahl was able to enter the UK while he was on Interpol's most wanted list using one of these fake passports.

Speaker 22 So maybe this is how they were getting them. Someone in the passport office just looked the other way while two men filled out the paperwork together.

Speaker 22 And then they stamped paperwork they knew to be fraudulent.

Speaker 22 These fake passports worked perfectly because they weren't fake passports. They were real passports with fake names.

Speaker 22 Well, that's not quite right either, is it? Because the name on the passport isn't fake. It's not a randomly chosen pseudonym.
It's not a made-up person. It is someone's real name.

Speaker 22 It just wasn't wasn't Robert Mahler's real name.

Speaker 22 I wish I could tell you that I know who Jan van der Merve was.

Speaker 22 The problem with these Afrikaans names is that there's not very many of them, so a lot of people have the same or very similar names.

Speaker 22 And so I know there were more than a few Jan van der Mervas out there.

Speaker 22 So I can't promise you that it means...

Speaker 22 anything at all, that there was a Jan van der Merve who would have been the right age and who was a South African policeman in the early 90s.

Speaker 22 That Jan van der Merve, the one I'm thinking of, worked in military intelligence and was later charged in connection with a 1987 massacre in Durban that killed 13 people, most of whom were children.

Speaker 22 Jan van der Merve was not convicted. The court failed to present sufficient evidence that he'd been the one who threw the murder weapons into a smelting furnace to destroy the evidence.

Speaker 22 In fact, all 20 of those charged with carrying out that massacre were acquitted.

Speaker 22 But we know what happened. Someone shot those children.

Speaker 22 But it could just have easily been some other man named Jan who helped this arms dealer get that fake passport. I really couldn't tell you.

Speaker 22 And regardless of who his friend Jan might have been, it was this passport that Robert Mahler used to travel back to the United States undetected while he was evading arrest.

Speaker 22 So in 1992, Nancy Mahler 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.

Speaker 22 But they still have a lot of guns.

Speaker 22 And I'm sure there's some procedure for people who find themselves in this situation. I bet it's not even really all that rare.

Speaker 22 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.

Speaker 22 And that's sell it anyway.

Speaker 22 And you're really not supposed to sell those guns anyway by exporting them overseas without an export license.

Speaker 22 And you're really, really not supposed to sell those guns anyway by exporting them to a country subject to a worldwide arms embargo.

Speaker 22 But in August of 1993, Nancy Mahler did just that.

Speaker 22 She shipped a 40-foot cargo container to South Africa.

Speaker 22 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.

Speaker 22 One news article lists, quote, a vehicle as being among those possessions, but it doesn't say what sort of vehicle it was.

Speaker 22 Robert Mahler did have a habit of collecting military surplus gear, including military cargo trucks.

Speaker 22 And so if she was shipping him something like, for example, an M35 cargo truck, a 23-foot-long vehicle that weighs 15,000 pounds, that would explain the need for a 40-foot container.

Speaker 22 But it doesn't say.

Speaker 22 I don't know if he owned an M35 truck in 1993,

Speaker 22 but I do know that he owned four of them in 2016, so he did like them.

Speaker 22 There's a lot of vagueness about the general contents of the container.

Speaker 22 I couldn't tell you how many radios or sleeping bags or camouflage uniforms were in there,

Speaker 22 but I do know that there were 227 guns and nearly 50,000 rounds of ammunition.

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Speaker 22 The container arrived in South Africa in October of 1993.

Speaker 22 And so, if you did listen to those South Africa episodes, you might recall this point in the timeline.

Speaker 22 This is right around the time that the Afrikaner resistance movement is ramping up international efforts to recruit foreign mercenaries, many of whom brought stolen firearms with them.

Speaker 22 But Robert Mahler's cargo container held a lot more guns. than any of those German mercenaries could have ever smuggled out of Bosnia.

Speaker 22 Every gun counted, and Mahler had really delivered.

Speaker 22 In February of 1994, Robert Mahler, using his fake passport, applied for a visa to visit the United States. His fake passport was stamped on entry in New York later that month.

Speaker 22 It's not clear why he flew home just then, right, as things were heating up in South Africa. The Afrikaner resistance movement believed they were poised to start a civil war, Right?

Speaker 22 This is February 1994 and in April of 1994, they hoped to set off enough bombs and cause enough chaos that there couldn't be an election.

Speaker 22 Maybe he hoped to return quickly with more weapons.

Speaker 22 He did tell the court later that he was the American fundraising representative for the group. So maybe this was a last-minute effort to raise more money for the race war.

Speaker 22 Either way, he never made it back.

Speaker 22 At home in Oregon, he was spotted by someone who called in a tip.

Speaker 22 And he was arrested on March 7th, 1994, on those old charges from 1992. At that point, that's all he's charged with.

Speaker 22 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.

Speaker 22 They even released him. on a $10,000 bond.

Speaker 22 Despite the fact that he had just spent two years hiding out in a a foreign country, and he clearly had the ability to obtain fake passports.

Speaker 22 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 pretrial release to someone who was arrested with a fake passport.

Speaker 22 But, nevertheless.

Speaker 22 He entered a guilty plea for making a false statement on a firearm application, and in June of 1994, he was sentenced to six months of home confinement.

Speaker 22 And that could have been the end of it. After all, the race war didn't even happen in South Africa.
While Robert Mahler was stuck in court in Oregon, the election was held. Apartheid ended.

Speaker 22 It was over.

Speaker 22 Until the rest of the guns turned up.

Speaker 22 In October of 1994, the South African police found the shipping container.

Speaker 22 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.

Speaker 22 A press release from the police in Pretoria said they knew that the container belonged to an American, and that that American was no longer in South Africa. And this time, things moved quickly.

Speaker 22 South African police contacted federal authorities in the United States, and in November of 1994, a SWAT team surrounded Robert and Nancy Mahler's apartment.

Speaker 22 They surrendered peacefully, and they were both arrested.

Speaker 22 Robert Mahler agreed to plead guilty to exporting firearms without a license. In exchange, the charges against his wife were dropped.

Speaker 22 He served a little over a year of his 18-month sentence, and he was released from prison in October of 1996.

Speaker 22 By then, he and Nancy were divorced, and Nancy had remarried a prison guard.

Speaker 22 Robert Mahler remarried in 2005.

Speaker 22 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. They were paperwork crimes.

Speaker 22 The things he was actually convicted of were just paperwork. Lying on a form.

Speaker 22 Not having an export license.

Speaker 22 But he was a twice convicted felon and he'd gotten off pretty light, all things considered.

Speaker 22 He did not learn his lesson.

Speaker 22 He was convicted for violating federal firearms laws for the third time after pleading guilty in 2018 to being a felon in possession of a firearm.

Speaker 22 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.

Speaker 22 But there were more than 40 of them and 40,000 rounds of ammunition.

Speaker 22 As a felon, he wasn't supposed to have any guns or any bullets.

Speaker 22 But I think a lot of us could shrug it off and say it's nobody's business if a 70-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.

Speaker 22 But that's not what this was.

Speaker 22 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.

Speaker 22 So not only was he breaking the law, he was making other people participate without their knowledge.

Speaker 22 His defense was confusing.

Speaker 22 The whole situation started in 2012 when he bought a couple of military cargo trucks at an auction in Washington State.

Speaker 22 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 Mahler didn't have one.

Speaker 22 But his friend Bill did.

Speaker 22 And Bill agreed to go up to Washington with him and drive the trucks home. When they got back to Oregon, Mahler had another favor to ask.

Speaker 22 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.

Speaker 22 But then the favors just kept coming. Mahler 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?

Speaker 22 He just kept asking and Bill kept saying yes.

Speaker 22 Mahler purchased a storage trailer that he wanted to fill with disaster supplies, doomsday prepper stuff. He didn't have room for it.
And again, he didn't want his wife to know he'd spent money on it.

Speaker 22 So could he keep it at Bill's house? And then it was a gun safe. And then another gun safe.

Speaker 22 And then several carloads of guns. Suddenly, Bill's garage is completely taken over by three massive gun safes filled with dozens of guns.

Speaker 22 And 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.

Speaker 22 Mueller 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.

Speaker 22 The guns needed to go.

Speaker 22 Exactly when Connie learned about Mahler's past is murky. There are a few versions of this timeline.

Speaker 22 But she wasn't the only one asking questions.

Speaker 22 Here's where it gets a little confusing and I wish I could draw you a diagram.

Speaker 22 Connie, Bill's wife, has a brother. named Adam.

Speaker 22 And Adam is married to a woman named Kara who happens to be Mahler's stepdaughter.

Speaker 22 I think this really is mostly coincidental. They live in a very small town.
Bill and Connie were friends with Mahler, but they didn't really think of themselves as being family.

Speaker 22 Although, technically, Connie's sister-in-law was his stepdaughter. So the fact that they're related is largely coincidental.
But Connie's brother is part of this story too.

Speaker 22 Connie would later tell an ATF agent that she'd googled Mahler sometime in late 2015. So that's a few months before she called the ATF to report him.

Speaker 22 Mahler's attorneys argued that Connie only called the ATF because she was mad at him over some kind of personal dispute, but Connie says she had to do it.

Speaker 22 You see, her brother Adam was a federal agent with the Bureau of Land Management.

Speaker 22 So he's not like a regular cop. He's not in the FBI.

Speaker 22 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 Mueller his guns back.

Speaker 22 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 22 So she's kind of stuck.

Speaker 22 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.

Speaker 22 But apparently, he'd gotten a bad vibe off his wife's new stepdad years earlier in their relationship.

Speaker 22 Again, Adam and Kara are adults, married adults, when Kara's mother marries Robert Mahler. And so here's this man, you know, his wife's mom has a new boyfriend.
This isn't a guy you know.

Speaker 22 This isn't a guy you hang out with a lot, but he's getting a weird vibe off of him.

Speaker 22 And Mahler keeps asking Adam, do you want to go shooting together? Do you want to go shooting together? And Adam did not want to.

Speaker 22 And he wanted to even less after he looked this man up and found out that he was a convicted felon.

Speaker 22 And so at this point, all he knows is that Mahler has asked him to go shooting. He has not personally witnessed his wife's new stepdad.
in possession of a firearm.

Speaker 22 So the tip he submitted to the ATF didn't really go anywhere.

Speaker 22 Adam also wrote an anonymous letter to the National Rifle Association, just letting them know that one of their certified firearms instructors was a convicted felon.

Speaker 22 But it doesn't seem like anything came of that either.

Speaker 22 So, regardless of who knew what and when,

Speaker 22 in January of 2016, Connie called the ATF.

Speaker 22 That much we know for sure. She called and she reported it, and they sent an agent out to talk to her.

Speaker 22 And when the ATF eventually searched Robert Mahler's home, he wasn't there, but his wife was.

Speaker 22 She told the agents that she didn't think her husband owned any guns, but she did think that he had a concealed carry permit.

Speaker 22 She also seemed surprised to learn that her husband had been convicted of several felonies.

Speaker 22 He had told her a version of the story where It was his ex-wife Nancy who'd gotten into trouble for shipping those guns overseas.

Speaker 22 So as they're searching the house, an agent is talking to Mahler's wife outside. And the agents inside the house encounter two locked doors.

Speaker 22 And Mahler's wife says she doesn't have the keys to those.

Speaker 22 And what a red flag that is. I can't imagine living with someone who distrusts me so profoundly that they keep their private, separate bedroom.
locked with a key that I don't have.

Speaker 22 When agents did get the door to Mahler's bedroom open, they found six guns in there.

Speaker 22 Under his pillow, there was a.45 caliber pistol.

Speaker 22 It was not only loaded, but there was a round in the chamber.

Speaker 22 I'm not a huge gun guy, but if you're not a gun guy either, that means the gun was very ready to fire. That means you could just pull the trigger and a bullet's coming out.

Speaker 22 I just can't imagine laying my head on a pillow and there is a chambered round an inch from my brain.

Speaker 22 They found a few more guns in various hiding spots around the room. There were rifles, shotguns, pistols, a little bit of everything.

Speaker 22 And they were all loaded.

Speaker 22 They also found 2,000 bullets in his bedroom.

Speaker 22 In addition to the gun under the pillow, they found another.45 caliber pistol under his bed.

Speaker 22 And this gun may be 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.

Speaker 22 Nancy shipped them there in a 40-foot cargo container.

Speaker 22 But this gun.

Speaker 22 This gun shouldn't have been under Robert Mahler's bed. And I don't mean just because he couldn't legally own a gun.
This gun couldn't. be under there.

Speaker 22 There's no explanation for how it could be there.

Speaker 22 Legally speaking, the last known location of that gun, before ATF agents found it under Robert Mahler's bed in 2016,

Speaker 22 was in the custody of the Silverton, Oregon Police Department in May of 2009.

Speaker 22 In May of 2009, the cleaning staff at a hotel in Los Angeles were stripping the sheets in an empty hotel room. The room's occupant had checked out, but he forgot something.

Speaker 22 He left his gun under the pillow.

Speaker 22 The hotel staff called the Los Angeles Police Department to come pick up the gun.

Speaker 22 Because Mahler had booked the room using his credit card, they were able to determine that he owned it.

Speaker 22 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.

Speaker 22 Court records contain only a brief footnote that the Silverton Police Department had been unable to locate any record that they'd ever received that gun from the LAPD or released it back to Robert Mahler.

Speaker 22 But obviously they did.

Speaker 22 The LAPD had records showing that they released the gun to the Silverton, Oregon Police Department.

Speaker 22 They sent Robert Mahler a letter telling him that's what they'd done and the letter was in his house. There are records that this happened.

Speaker 22 But neither one of those police departments had that gun because that gun was under Robert Mahler's bed. So one of these police departments departments isn't telling the truth.

Speaker 22 One of them gave a convicted felon his gun back,

Speaker 22 either willfully or because they cut corners, they didn't do the required paperwork, and they didn't notice he wasn't supposed to have it in the first place.

Speaker 22 The man who originally sold Robert Mahler that gun, a man named Curtis, testified at Mahler's trial. He still had the bill of sale from the transaction and he'd held onto it for nearly a decade.

Speaker 22 And on that bill of sale, Robert Mahler had written down not his own name, but he wrote Alex Mahler, his brother's name.

Speaker 22 And Curtis was very cooperative throughout the investigation. He told agents that he'd gone shooting with Mahler several times.

Speaker 22 He was a childhood friend of Mahler's new adult stepsons, so the four of them hung out from time to time.

Speaker 22 Over games of table tennis, Mahler would often brag about how skilled he was with firearms. One excerpt from an ATF report reads,

Speaker 22 He stated that he shot the Colt better than Mahler did, and added that Mahler was a bad shot.

Speaker 22 Shots fired, literally.

Speaker 22 And Curtis also told the agents that in addition to selling Mahler that pistol, he'd also purchased a rifle from Mahler some years back.

Speaker 22 The two had had a falling out years before the arrest.

Speaker 22 Curtis recounted that After some disagreement, Mahler 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.

Speaker 22 On the second day of his trial, the prosecution rested their case.

Speaker 22 Before his defense attorney had a chance to present his case,

Speaker 22 Mahler called it off. He didn't want to finish the trial.
He wanted to plead guilty.

Speaker 22 And the state originally recommended a sentence of more than six years,

Speaker 22 which is honestly, you know, kind of reasonable given the guidelines, his prior history, etc.

Speaker 22 But then Mueller petitioned to withdraw his plea, explaining that when he pled guilty, he only meant he was guilty of possessing one gun.

Speaker 22 He hadn't understood that he was pleading guilty to possessing all of the guns in the indictment.

Speaker 22 And this apparently

Speaker 22 worked.

Speaker 22 In the end, everyone agreed that he shouldn't spend a day in jail.

Speaker 22 He was convicted of possessing one firearm, and he was given three years of probation.

Speaker 22 I really can't explain it. Not that I think jail would have benefited Robert Mahler or even society, but

Speaker 22 it is puzzling.

Speaker 22 These days, Robert Mahler is just an old man.

Speaker 22 He loves table tennis, but his favorite hobby seems to be filing nuisance lawsuits against people who say no to him.

Speaker 22 In 2020, he filed a lawsuit against a hospital.

Speaker 22 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.

Speaker 22 He claims that the doctor agreed to this request ahead of time because if he had to remain conscious, he would have an episode of vasovagal syncope.

Speaker 22 That sounds very serious, doesn't it? But it's just a fancy way of saying that he would get stressed out and faint.

Speaker 22 Now, I'm not a doctor, but I don't think that's a thing.

Speaker 22 I don't think you can have them put you under general anesthesia immediately upon being admitted. You really want to minimize the amount of time that a person is under general anesthesia, right?

Speaker 22 It's just for the surgery part. You don't get that going until they're about about to operate.

Speaker 22 And there are a lot of important reasons why you don't just use general anesthesia to help someone calm down, but one reason why you wouldn't want to preemptively administer general anesthesia is surgeries don't always happen on time,

Speaker 22 which is exactly what happened here. Mahler was booked for an elective surgery, but those often get pushed back when the OR is needed for emergencies.

Speaker 22 So he was forced to remain conscious for hours while inside of the hospital. He refused several offers of sedatives or tranquilizers to alleviate his anxiety.

Speaker 22 He insisted that the only acceptable solution was full general anesthesia from start to finish.

Speaker 22 Additionally, he named as a defendant in his lawsuit the nursing assistant who caused him to become too warm by placing a blanket on his bed.

Speaker 22 The suit was dismissed.

Speaker 22 In 2019, he filed a lawsuit against the state of Oregon, asking for $155,000 in damages because he felt he was not afforded adequate due process in fighting a traffic citation.

Speaker 22 That one was also dismissed.

Speaker 22 There are a lot of these.

Speaker 22 Truly, it's kind of impressive. There are a lot of these.
There was a years-long ongoing feud between rival table tennis clubs that got incredibly out of hand.

Speaker 22 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.

Speaker 22 They were willing to write him a $3,000 check if it meant they could get his signature on a legal document promising not to come to their ping pong events.

Speaker 22 But he wouldn't back down, so he got nothing.

Speaker 22 There is one lawsuit still pending right now.

Speaker 22 And this is the first thing I ever read about Robert Mahler after I discovered his name in connection with the arms trafficking for Nazi terrorists in South Africa.

Speaker 22 So imagine that's all you know about a man. That he smuggled hundreds of guns into South Africa in 1994 for use by people who wanted to start a race war.

Speaker 22 And then the next fact you learn about him is this.

Speaker 22 He's currently locked in a vicious legal battle with the owner of an all-you-can-eat sushi buffet in Portland, Oregon, because the owner asked him not to let his 12-year-old Doberman, Juliet, touch the spring rolls.

Speaker 22 Whether Juliet, the 12-year-old Doberman, is a real service dog is not for us to decide.

Speaker 22 Service dogs don't get certified or anything like that. There's no standard licensing process or governing body.

Speaker 22 But the law does require a service dog to have a specialized training beyond that of a regular household pet.

Speaker 22 And that training has to be related to a specific task that they can perform related to the handler's disability.

Speaker 22 You're probably familiar with a lot of these types of tasks, right? A service dog might guide a visually impaired person around obstacles.

Speaker 22 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 someone with a panic disorder.

Speaker 22 There are a million tasks that a service dog can be trained to perform.

Speaker 22 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.

Speaker 22 The law says that the positive impact of the dog's presence has to go beyond the handler's general comfort or well-being.

Speaker 22 So it can't just be, I like to have the dog here, I benefit from having the dog here, you have to be able to say a specific task.

Speaker 22 And so far he has declined to produce any evidence to the court that the dog has any special training, let alone training to carry out a particular task related to a disability.

Speaker 22 This one's still being litigated, so legally speaking, there is dispute here about the facts.

Speaker 22 Mahler claims that he was berated, that the owner screamed at him and he was humiliated when the restaurant kicked him out because of his well-behaved service animal.

Speaker 22 And the restaurant owner has made a sworn statement that Mahler has been a regular at her buffet for six years.

Speaker 22 And she's always let it slide that his pet dog accompanies him into the restaurant.

Speaker 22 Because in past visits, this dog, this elderly Doberman, just sits quietly under the table and doesn't bother anyone.

Speaker 22 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 and possibly touching the food.

Speaker 22 She says she simply asked him to keep his dog at the dining table, as he'd done in past visits.

Speaker 22 And in her version of events, he did leave the restaurant visibly upset, but not because she screamed at him.

Speaker 22 After that interaction, he'd gotten into a verbal altercation with several other customers.

Speaker 22 At 75 years old, I do think Robert Mahler's arms dealing days are long gone.

Speaker 22 I do have a feeling that he will not be recovering hundreds of thousands of dollars from the sushi buffet,

Speaker 22 but I'll keep an eye on both.

Speaker 22 Read Little Guys is a production of CoolZone Media and iHeartRadio. It's research, written, and recorded by me, Molly Cunger.
Our executive producers are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans.

Speaker 22 The show is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gagan. The theme music was composed by Brad Dickard.

Speaker 22 You can email me at WeirdLittleGuyspodcast at gmail.com. I will definitely read it, but I probably won't answer it.
It's nothing personal.

Speaker 22 You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other listeners on the Weird Little Guys subreddit. Just don't post anything that's going to make you one of my Weird Little Guys.

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