Small Time Arms Dealer

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This is the story of the one.

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On April 21st, 1992,

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 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.

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

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.

It wasn't really anything too serious, just some fraudulent paperwork for a gun purchase.

Pretty typical fare for an ATF agent.

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

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

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

But how had the caller even known?

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

Robert Mahler probably knew too.

So Agent Comery called the U.S.

Attorney's Office and he asked if they could speed up that timeline.

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

He asked 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 a grand jury did indict Robert Mahler three weeks later.

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

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.

I'm Molly Conger,

and this is Weird Little Guys.

This 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.

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

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

And in the time since my last episode, I got married.

It was beautiful and fun and the cake was really good.

And I went on my honeymoon.

I was really worried that I wouldn't be able to properly enjoy doing nothing.

That's not really my thing.

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

could also be my thing.

I loved it.

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.

Getting married was a joyful thing for me and for my partner, and it felt very grim to even consider keeping that to myself just because some weird little guy out there might try to make me regret sharing my happy news.

So

no regrets.

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

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.

But that's a story for another day.

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 in an empty hotel room in Los Angeles.

Or 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 standalone 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 Huggett Stone,

One of the first side characters I made a note of was a man I never actually even mentioned in those episodes.

an arms dealer in Oregon named Robert Mahler.

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.

Mahler.

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

The report reads,

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.

Mahler 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 and said he had contact with other groups like the Afrikaner 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 during the fall apartheid 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 Afrikaner Resistance Movement, an explicitly neo-Nazi group founded in the 1970s in South Africa.

They kind of still exist, I guess.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

In 1977, Resolution 418 made that embargo mandatory.

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.

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

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

After that initial voluntary embargo was passed in 1963, the United States announced its intention to comply fully.

But Henry Kissinger's interpretation of the resolution allowed the U.S.

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

companies.

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

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

And some countries just kept openly selling weapons to South Africa no matter how many resolutions were passed.

The Chilean government under Pinochet had no issue violating the resolution.

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

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

In one of several reports submitted to the United Nations in 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.

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

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

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

But small arms were a different story.

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

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

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

Employees of American gun manufacturers, Colt Industries, and Winchester Arms were caught selling massive quantities of firearms to dummy corporations operating in third-party countries.

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

When Walter Plowman pled guilty to trafficking firearms manufactured by Colt through a company in West Germany, he pleaded for leniency, telling the court that it wouldn't be fair to punish him harshly because it was an open secret that the State Department knew this was happening and routinely looked the other way.

That's not a great argument for the court,

but I do think it's true.

Winchester Arms was caught selling thousands of rifles and shotguns and millions upon millions of rounds of ammunitions to a shell company in the Canary Islands.

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

They didn't need 50 million bullets.

That should have been a red flag on the export declaration.

But it went on for years.

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.

A 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 forklift operator in the freight hangar at Chicago's O'Hare Airport.

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

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

It was easy money, apparently.

South Africa was desperate for guns, so they were willing to pay a significant premium to a discreet 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 arms dealing community.

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.

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.

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 1992, Robert Mahler 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 1988, Robert Mahler and his wife Nancy bought a commercial property in Salem, Oregon at an auction.

They got a great deal on the place.

They paid about 60% 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 N-A-M-E Guns.

That's all caps with periods, NAME.

I assume business was decent.

They ran ads in the local paper for holiday specials, scratch and dent sales, and special events.

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

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

I could find no explanation for what 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 Elifante.

That's sort of like a stylized elephant.

I don't know what that means.

It is hard to say how the ATF found out about the machine guns.

Unfortunately, the federal courts in Oregon have not digitized their collection of records from the early 90s.

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

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

I have a pretty good guess.

I think it was Gary.

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

And two of those people were Robert and Nancy Mahler.

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

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

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

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

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

He wasn't even certified to be a police officer.

He was not qualified for the job.

For the first few months after he was hired, he wasn't even in town.

He was at the Oregon Police Academy getting certified.

Gary Allen'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.

But he'd never been a real cop before.

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

Gary Self graduated from the police academy at the end of July.

So he officially started work as the police chief in Falls City in August of 1990.

By December 31st of that same year,

he'd been placed on unpaid leave.

pending an investigation into allegations that he had simply stopped showing up for work entirely.

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

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

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

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

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

None of the reporting explains this.

He was convicted of burglary, but that just means he entered at least one of those homes.

It doesn't sound like he stole anything.

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

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

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

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Gary Self was fired, obviously.

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

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

But the conviction made him a felon.

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

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

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

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 22nd, 1991.

It wasn't a complicated case.

The ATF solved it pretty quickly.

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

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.

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.

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

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

And so in this case, I have the docket sheet for Gary's federal case.

The actual documents aren't digitized, but I have the docket sheet, and it's not sealed.

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.

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 1991 that I'll never see.

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.

I can't explain it.

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.

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

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.

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

So,

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

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

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

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.

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.

And he filed paperwork to give his wife Nancy power of attorney.

So if he were for some reason absent, she would be legally empowered to make decisions regarding their property.

He's preparing to be unavailable.

But is that because he knows he's going to prison?

Or because he's preparing to do whatever it takes to not go to prison?

In early April of 1992, 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 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.

So now I'm wondering, maybe

in April of 1992,

maybe Gary Self was scared.

He was stuck in his house on home detention.

He couldn't leave.

And he thought Robert Mahler wanted to kill him.

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

had his own reasons to want Mahler in custody.

But we'll never know.

The report says that they never identified the caller.

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

He was already in South Africa.

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

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

And in the two years he spent evading 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 1993, The clerk of court in Multnomah 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 Mahler and a Nancy Mahler.

This petition did end up getting dismissed.

They never followed up on it.

So they didn't get divorced in 1993.

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.

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

When Robert Mahler's U.S.

passport expired in 1993, 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 90s transcripts, so I don't have access to the trial transcript from his earlier criminal cases.

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

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

And after that divorce, Nancy filed for bankruptcy.

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

The court didn't agree, but that's not what matters here.

I don't care about their assets.

Normally, when you swear before a judge that you're going to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth to help you God,

the assumption is that you mean it.

But if you have a history of being a liar, like the kind of lies that end up in a court record, real serious lies, the kind that are crimes,

that's fair game.

Opposing parties can bring that up to impeach your credibility.

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

So Robert Mahler is on the stand under oath.

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

And he does.

It's a South African passport.

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

But the name isn't his.

It was issued to a man named Jan van dermerve.

And the attorney asks him,

how did you get this?

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

fake passport?

And Mahler 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 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 the sources I used how this kept happening.

Because their fake passports seemed to be pretty good.

I mean, people were crossing borders with them to evade international arrest warrants.

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

So maybe this is how they were getting them.

Someone in the passport office just looked the other way while two men filled out the paperwork together.

And then they stamped paperwork they knew to be fraudulent.

These fake passports worked perfectly because they weren't fake passports.

They were real passports with fake names.

Well, that's not quite right either, is it?

Because the name on the passport isn't fake.

It's not a randomly chosen pseudonym.

It's not a made-up person.

It is someone's real name.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

But we know what happened.

Someone shot those children.

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.

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.

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.

But they still have a lot of guns.

And I'm sure there's some procedure for people who find themselves in this situation.

I bet it's not even really all that rare.

I didn't bother looking up exactly what you're supposed to do with excess inventory if you're no longer allowed to sell it, but I do know what you're not supposed to do.

And that's sell it anyway.

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

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

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

She shipped a 40-foot 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 Mahler did have a habit of collecting military surplus gear, including military cargo trucks.

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.

But it doesn't say.

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

but I do know that he owned four of them in 2016, 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 sleeping bags or camouflage uniforms were in there,

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

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So what do this animal

and this animal

and this animal?

Have in common?

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The container arrived in South Africa in October of 1993.

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 Afrikaner resistance movement is ramping up international efforts to recruit foreign mercenaries, many of whom brought stolen firearms with them.

But Robert Mahler'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 Mahler had really delivered.

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.

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?

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.

Maybe he hoped to return quickly with more weapons.

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.

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 7th, 1994, on those old charges from 1992.

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 $10,000 bond.

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.

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.

But, nevertheless.

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.

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.

It was over.

Until the rest of the guns turned up.

In October of 1994, 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 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 1994, a SWAT team surrounded Robert and Nancy Mahler's apartment.

They surrendered peacefully, and they were both arrested.

Robert Mahler agreed to plead guilty to exporting firearms without a license.

In exchange, the charges against his wife were dropped.

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

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

Robert Mahler remarried in 2005.

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.

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 federal firearms laws for the third time after pleading guilty in 2018 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 40 of them and 40,000 rounds of ammunition.

As a felon, 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 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.

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 without their knowledge.

His defense was confusing.

The whole situation started in 2012 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 Mahler didn't have one.

But his friend Bill did.

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.

He didn't want his wife to know that he'd spend a bunch of money on four military surplus trucks.

So would Bill mind storing them at his house?

He had plenty of land, so He agreed.

But then the favors just kept coming.

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?

He just kept asking and Bill kept saying yes.

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.

So could he keep it at Bill's house?

And then it was a gun safe.

And then another gun safe.

And then several carloads of guns.

Suddenly, Bill's garage is completely taken over by three massive gun safes filled with dozens of guns.

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.

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.

The guns needed to go.

Exactly when Connie learned about Mahler's past is murky.

There are a few versions of this timeline.

But she wasn't the only one asking questions.

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

Connie, Bill's wife, has a brother.

named Adam.

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

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.

Although, technically, Connie's sister-in-law was his stepdaughter.

So the fact that they're related is largely coincidental.

But Connie's brother is part of this story too.

Connie would later tell an ATF agent that she'd googled Mahler sometime in late 2015.

So that's a few months before she called the ATF to report him.

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.

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

So he's not like a regular cop.

He's not in the 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 Mueller his 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.

So she's kind of stuck.

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, 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.

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

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.

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

And so at this point, all he knows is that Mahler has asked him to go shooting.

He has not personally witnessed his wife's new stepdad.

in possession of a firearm.

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

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

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

So, regardless of who knew what and when,

in January of 2016, 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 Mahler's home, he wasn't there, but his wife was.

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.

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'd gotten into trouble for shipping those guns overseas.

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.

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

And what a red flag that is.

I can't imagine living with someone who distrusts me so profoundly that they keep their private, separate bedroom.

locked with a key that I don't have.

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

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

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

I'm not a huge gun guy, but if you're not a gun guy either, that means the gun was very ready to fire.

That means you could just pull the trigger and a bullet's coming out.

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

They found a few more guns in various hiding spots around the room.

There were rifles, shotguns, pistols, a little bit of everything.

And they were all loaded.

They also found 2,000 bullets in his bedroom.

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

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.

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

But this gun.

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.

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

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

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

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.

He left his gun under the pillow.

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

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

And rather than have him travel all the way back to LA, they transferred custody of the firearm to the police department in Silverton, Oregon, where he was living at the time.

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

But obviously they did.

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

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.

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.

One of them gave a convicted felon his gun back,

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.

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.

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

And Curtis was very cooperative throughout the investigation.

He told agents that he'd gone shooting with Mahler several times.

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

Over games of table tennis, Mahler would often brag about how skilled he was with firearms.

One excerpt from an ATF report reads,

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

Shots fired, literally.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

And this apparently

worked.

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

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

I really can't explain it.

Not that I think jail would have benefited Robert Mahler or even society, but

it is puzzling.

These days, Robert Mahler is just an old man.

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

In 2020, 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 if he had to remain conscious, he would have an episode of vasovagal syncope.

That sounds very serious, doesn't it?

But it's just a fancy way of saying that he would get stressed out and faint.

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

I don't think you can have them put you under general anesthesia immediately upon being admitted.

You really want to minimize the amount of time that a person is under general anesthesia, right?

It's just for the surgery part.

You don't get that going until they're about about to operate.

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

which is exactly what happened here.

Mahler was booked for an elective surgery, but those often get pushed back when the OR is needed for emergencies.

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.

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

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

The suit was dismissed.

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.

That one was also dismissed.

There are a lot of these.

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.

His lawsuit was eventually dismissed after he refused a very generous settlement offer because it would have required him to stay away from any future table tennis tournament organized by the rival club.

They were willing to write him a $3,000 check if it meant they could get his signature on a legal document promising not to come to their ping pong 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 Mahler after I discovered his name in connection with the arms trafficking for Nazi terrorists in South Africa.

So imagine that's all you know about a man.

That he smuggled hundreds of guns into South Africa in 1994 for use by people who wanted to start a race war.

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

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

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

Service dogs don't get certified or anything like that.

There's no standard licensing process or governing body.

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

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

You're probably familiar with a lot of these types of tasks, right?

A service dog might guide a visually impaired person around obstacles.

They might detect allergens in food, or sniff out low blood sugar, or predict seizures, or open a door, or provide deep pressure stimulation for someone with a panic disorder.

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

But there has to be training and there has to be a task and that task has to be directly related to the handler's disability.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

On this particular visit, though, the owner says that another customer complained that they saw the dog rest her head on the buffet.

So her face was very close to and possibly touching the food.

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

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

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

At 75 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.

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.

The show is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gagan.

The theme music was composed by Brad Dickard.

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.

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.

Your drive powers your day.

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When you fill up at the Purple Giving Pump at Shell, a portion of your purchase is donated to charities like the California Fire Foundation.

Download the Shell app to find your nearest giving pump, less than two miles away.

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From September 1st to October 31st, participating Shell stations will donate a minimum of one cent per gallon of the fuel pump from the giving pump or a minimum donation of $300.

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