A police chief recently sent to prison accused top cops across the country of supplying weapons to violent criminals after he was found guilty of selling weapons for profit, leading to an investigation that uncovered dozens of similar cases.
Bradley Eugene Wendt, the former police chief of Adair, Iowa, was sentenced to five years in federal prison in July after being convicted of using his position to sell police weapons to his personal gun store, where he then sold the weapons for profit, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office.
Just days before he was sentenced, Wendt told CBS News, "If I'm guilty of this, every cop in the nation's going to jail."
The former police chief's statement led the outlet to conduct an investigation, which reportedly discovered 50 cases of officers across the country illegally selling weapons over the last 20 years.
Some of those weapons were then later used to commit crimes. One of the weapons sold was reportedly later used in the shooting death of a 14-year-old boy, as reported by CBS News. Others were accused of selling weapons to a Mexican cartel or working with a Russian arms dealer.
From 2017 to 2021, almost 26,000 guns taken from crime scenes were traced back to law enforcement or military, according to a report by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, although it was not noted which guns were lost, stolen or sold.
Unlicensed dealers were responsible for more than 68,000 trafficked firearms between 2017 and 2021, accounting for 54% of all illegally trafficked firearms, the bureau's report added, as reported by the Associated Press in April.
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