Mired in debt, a mild-mannered hobbyist becomes an international arms dealer. Soon the UK is flooded with untraceable antique guns and ammunition and police are baffled.

The shooting occurred at a private event at a nightclub in London’s posh West End on Boxing Day in 2013. It was after 3 a.m., but the DJ was still spinning when the shots erupted, sending the partygoers fleeing. In the aftermath, a 31 year old man, Hassan Mohamed Omer Isman, was dead from multiple gunshot wounds.

Metropolitan police cordoned off the club’s entrance with metal barricades and crime scene tape. Shooting homicides are a relative rarity in London compared to major metropolitan cities in the United States, with fewer than 100 incidents per year. Most shootings are tied to criminal gangs, and when they happen investigators comb through crime scenes in hopes of getting illegal guns off the streets in a country that has done a remarkable job curbing gun violence.

The crime scene at the tacky Avalon club, “a revitalized venue,” its website boasted, “that oozes creativity and class,” appeared unexceptional— it was the perfect place for alcohol and bad blood to spill over into violence.

Except for one thing: When investigators recovered the rounds that killed Omer, they couldn’t match it to any known ammunition in their extensive law enforcement database. What’s more, the rounds and casings defied the most cutting edge analysis. They were from a Colt revolver and had the tool markings of an at-home operation, not those made by industrial presses and factory machines.

But these were not a product of some kind of futuristic armorer. Instead they were obscure, outdated and what the UK considered antique forms of ammunition more suited to firearms from a bygone century than to any modern handgun. Somehow, this anachronistic ammunition had found its way to criminal gangs. More troubling, investigators had no idea how to track it.

It was a travesty, the kind of sweeping overreaction that more paranoid collectors and members of shooting clubs had long feared but that most could hardly imagine coming to pass: In one fell swoop, parliament effectively banned all small firearms with barrels shorter than 12 inches. Such firearms comprised the lion's share of the collection of Paul Edmunds, who, now in his 60s, maintained over the course of his life an affection toward guns to match his avuncular gruffness and steely gaze. The law “ripped the heart out of the shooting community,” Paul later told the Birmingham Crown Court. “It’s not the same anymore.” Practically overnight the legislation made most of his prized guns illegal, effectively destroying his business.

Paul stewed. He was a well known figure in the small but passionate UK firearms scene and a licensed dealer. He was also a lifelong gun enthusiast in a country that didn’t make it easy to collect or own firearms. As a child he had picked through a deserted WWII era airfield: Upon it were miles of open acres, with deserted army barracks, pistol, rifle and grenade ranges. “During weekends and holidays, hours were spent digging in the rolling hills, looking for different types of bullets, crawling through the grass and mud on old firing points looking for cases and occasional live rounds.” At school he would show off his wares to interested students. Friends compared ammunition that they had found in the fields or at home, some of which were donated by grandfathers “sympathetic to the cause.” There were .303 British, .577 Snider, Martini Henry: rounds for every type of gun. Soon Paul could deduce whether a round was for a Lee-Enfield No4 or a SMLE or a Bren machine gun that fired .303 casings.

Guns, particularly antique guns, brought a sense of belonging and proficiency to his life, and it came as little surprise to those who knew him when he turned his passion into a career.

UK legislation governing firearms and ammunition is extremely prohibitive. That does not mean gun ownership is strictly forbidden, however. There has long been a subculture of collectors of so-called obsolete (or antique) firearms, which are kept as curiosities, for ornamental purposes or for sport, and for which ammunition is no longer commercially manufactured but may still be obtained from specialty sources by those vetted and holding special certificates from law enforcement. A would-be owner must have a certificate that gives explicit permission to own that specific gun, and a person may not own ammunition to fire such a weapon without a separate certificate. Firearm advocates and hobbyists have for years complained about the complexities of the laws, suggesting that the definition of “obsolete” or “antique” was too vague. More than 30 pieces of legislation outline what is allowed and what is not allowed, laws which change frequently.

But for anyone who understood how to navigate the bureaucratic snares and could procure and sell such firearms and ammunition legally, a ready market of collectors and aficionados existed on the fringes. Paul, whose meticulous mind was well attuned to just such a pursuit, acquired the necessary certificate and became a regular in the antique gun scene, where he had a reputation for being able to procure unique firearms from overseas.

He also developed a bespoke talent: He could make obscure ammunition in calibers that were no longer available, which he was able to legally sell to those with the right certification and license.

His Gloucestershire workshop bore tribute to his craftsmanship and professional dedication. Scattered around were bags of copper casings, lead and a smelter, sizing dies and shell holders, gas checks and primers, all the parts which compose ammunition. The little cottage was more akin to an armory.

Paul had settled into a niche, and in that well worn nook between the UK’s porous gun laws and a customer base of eager enthusiasts, he was thriving.

All of which made Parliament’s 1997 legislation a certifiable disaster, both personally and professionally. The UK was reeling after 16 children and a teacher had been murdered inside a primary school gym the previous year, one of the most egregious and shocking gun crimes in the history of the UK. In the backlash that followed the Dunblane massacre, tough new legislation went farther than any before in effectively banning handguns. A gun buyback campaign also got thousands of guns, many of them illegal, off the streets.

Paul, in a stroke of bad timing, had recently gone on a gun-buying spree to support his business. He was now in debt over £50,000 (over $60,000). He disagreed with the new legislation on philosophical grounds, maintaining that guns were an easy scapegoat for underlying problems of crime, justice and policing.

Less philosophically, but perhaps more urgently, he needed a way out of debt.

Paul hardly looked like an international gun dealer ambling into the American gun show. For all his weaponry, he was hobbled by his back pain, which he had medication to treat, and hearing aids, making some of the conversations he had frustrating for both sides.

He had traveled from the UK to the U.S., and he was using his skill to turn his fortunes. Aside from his accent, he fit in among the crowd of American gun enthusiasts, who milled from table to table appraising the matte black AR style assault rifles, tactical handguns and, at specialty booths, glass cased curiosities from ages past.

But the similarities with others in the crowd stopped there. The average gun show attendee –whatever their zealous online personalities or private fantasies–is a mere hobbyist, where Paul was a highly trained professional. He had an exacting eye for quality products. The U.S. was a one stop shop for an arms buyer, and if regulations in the U.K. were tightening, the trend in the U.S. went the other direction.

Paul had a monastic dedication to guns and an abiding persistence in the face of what he viewed as his country’s great folly toward them. He walked the gun show earnestly, quickly skimming past the firearms made of composites and adorned in camo. He was searching for the right combination of age, quality and caliber, something like his own secret recipe.

Rather than slow down in the face of tightening gun laws, Paul had resolved to lean in and use his particular expertise and storehouse of knowledge to build a business out of gunpowder and brass. As his business expanded, he opened dozens of bank accounts, some hundreds of thousands of pounds spread across them. He traveled frequently to the United States, a land of unimaginable plenty for an arms dealer. This was one of 37 such gun-buying trips between 2009 and 2015, trips in which he spent hundreds of thousands of pounds, so he could turn a tidy profit on the weapons in transactions in the UK where he could demand top dollar. Between trips to the States, he traveled across Europe and to Cape Town, South Africa, where he located pistols used in WWII.

Importing them, he continued to find even after the tight handgun restrictions went into effect, was not nearly as difficult as some might imagine. When he flew overseas on trips to gun conventions in Chicago, Las Vegas and Denver, he made shrewd purchases that included items like Colt pistols made in the 1950s, modern handguns in the eyes of the law and very illegal to import into the U.K. But customs agents rarely knew better, particularly in the face of his withering dismissals. Paul persuaded customs that these modern weapons were made pre-1939, qualifying them as antique. He didn’t break a sweat with the older guns, the legitimate antiques, because he already found loopholes and exceptions to the strict new handgun laws.

Back home, his Gloucestershire cottage was a sanctuary. In his well-appointed workshop he kept a bullet press, a machine used to make bespoke ammunition. Standard issue for fictional badasses like Jason Bourne and Jack Reacher, the press allowed him to make ammunition in a dizzying array of sizes and configurations for virtually any caliber weapon. Each slug sits snuggly packed atop as much powder as desired for specific applications, and velocities change depending on the intended use and target. Pull down on the handle and the projectile is married with its casing, a kind of poetic coupling for the firearms purist.

If Paul was worried about his customer base in the wake of the 1997 laws, his fears were quickly allayed. Most were collectors, and many of his transactions were still technically legal according to the byzantine and overlapping regulations governing antique guns. The legislation was as complex as it was restrictive, enabling dealers well versed in the nuances to dance a legal tightrope. In some ways the complexities even made it easier to cross legal lines with relative ease, escaping notice under a cloak of technical specifications and highly specialized distinctions of provenance and age.

But his best customers weren’t collectors. He had a strict code: How they used the weapons and ammunition he supplied was their business and none of his concern.

Even so, for an avid gun lover and enthusiast, a thrill had to accompany any suspicion that a modern day war was taking place. And he was supplying the weaponry.

The Avalon Club shooting was not an aberration. Antique ammunition was turning up at crime scenes all over the UK, a discordant note amid the ravages of brutal gangland violence. In 2011, masked rioters had fired at a police helicopter using an obsolete gun and homemade ammunition. A soldier was killed outside the Royal Artillery Barracks in May 2013, and police found that one of the attackers was carrying an antique pistol. On Boxing Day in 2014, homemade ammunition killed Hassan Mohamed Omer Isman, and in 2015, Derek Myers, 25, was shot and killed outside the Big Bang club. With gun laws tightening, demand among criminals had soared–and the simple economics of the black market dictated that whoever supplied the guns and ammunition could demand sky high prices.

But where was it all coming from, investigators puzzled?

Gregg Taylor, a soft-spoken, intellectual and fidgety ballistics investigator raised in one of the quiet suburbs outside Birmingham, spent most of his days staring down the length of a high-powered comparison microscope.

As an analyst at the National Ballistics Intelligence Service, Taylor’s job was usually simple: He would take crime scene bullets recovered by investigators at crime scenes and look under his microscope to see whether the bullets matched with the weapons recovered from the crime scene—a crucial step in investigating and prosecuting gun crimes and tracking down perpetrators. Taylor and his colleagues would register their findings in a national database that compiled enhanced-resolution photographs of ammunition. It was this database that law enforcement agencies used to identify whether ammunition or guns were being used in multiple shootings.

But there was nothing simple about the bullets he was looking at now—imperfect handmade lead .44 caliber castings with red wax seals and a brass copper plate at the bottom that could not be matched to a source. They were more like works of art than the off-the-production-line ammunition he was accustomed to. Rarely was there a digitized accounting of small batch sales. There were no receipts, no transaction records, no order forms. And few authorized sellers produced products like this. It was, Taylor had to conclude, the perfect ammunition for criminals, virtually untraceable through the conventional chain of carefully tracked transactions that help investigators solve gun crimes.

As he continued logging the rounds brought to him for analysis, he began to notice some striking similarities. In all, the lead bullets with their distinctive red wax seals were found at more than 100 crime scenes. Among the rounds found by law enforcement were bullets and shell casings fired from a 19th century St Étienne pistol, .44 caliber Russian slugs, and 9.4mm Dutch rounds, all of which were ludicrously anachronistic (albeit still deadly) in an age of GLOCK 9mms and .45 ACP rounds, globally the most widely-used and recognizable ammunition in production today.

The sheer quantity of antique ammunition that had turned up–which was undoubtedly a small fraction of the whole–suggested a massive operation, possibly a vast contingent of arms dealers trading in arcane weapons.

How had a network like this gotten off the ground? If it was an international cartel, was there a cell operating in the UK?

Dr. Mohinder Surdhar received an order for watches and batteries.

The physiotherapist, who had a short crop of spiky dark hair and a fleshy, round face, checked the message on his phone. A day later he responded, “I will have your watches by lunchtime tomorrow. No batteries the right size.”

“No problem at all,” came the response from a man listed in the doctor’s phone only as “Sam.”

Dr. Surdhar was sending and receiving the messages through WhatsApp, which is semi-encrypted but, he would soon learn, not impermeable. It wouldn’t take prying eyes long to discern that “watches” and “batteries” were convenient and thinly veiled code words.

Birmingham had long held the unenviable title of the UK's Gun and Gang Capital. The so-called Johnson Crew ran the streets with impunity. Though they had formed in the late ‘80s in response to far-right movements, the gang now controlled the security detail at nightclubs and ran the regional drug trade. A fallout between members led to a feud settled in blood, and the group fractured into two, the spinoff dubbing itself the Burger Bar Boys, named for the fast-food restaurant at the corner where their territory began.

What had started as community protection against white supremacists evolved into aggressive, turf war gang violence, drug distribution and extortion. Warring factions felled each other in a hail of bullets. The gangs had fought for two decades in the streets, modern embodiments of a Peaky Blinders ethos. Even when police intervened, charges were often dropped. Gangsters walked free owing to an impenetrable wall of silence, an omerta taken by the groups’ devout members. The gangs operated as judge, jury and executioners, and justice was handled with deadly efficiency.

All of which necessitated a ready supply of weapons and ammunition. Even before the restrictive 1997 gun legislation, firearms had been heavily restricted in the UK. Now, with sales of conventional hand guns effectively banned, arming the escalating turf war became a logistical quandary.

For the Burger Bar Boys, the job of sourcing the weapons fell to a rough hewn and stocky thirty-something named Sundish Nazran, the group’s chief armorer. Nazran had a connection to a physiotherapist licensed to own firearms, Dr. Surdhar. Nevertheless, he quickly became the gang’s go-to source for weapons.

Dr. Surdhar, in turn, had his own valuable connection, an unlikely link to a specialized corner of the UK’s gun community that bore little in common with Birmingham’s street gangs: Paul Edmunds.

The genius of Paul's operation was that it could operate right out in the open. He kept a booth at the International Antique and Vintage Arms and Militaria Fair in Birmingham, about 120 miles northwest of London and held four times annually. His booth was stocked with ammunition and customers knew they could come to him for bespoke products no longer manufactured by the gun industry.

It was there that Dr. Surdhar, one of his best customers, likely came to see him one November in 2008. The event was held at the National Motorcycle Museum within the National Conference Centre, hardly a likely backdrop for an arms deal. Dr. Surdhar threaded his way past booths stocked with wartime holsters and P08 Lugers arrayed on blanketed tables, racks of military battledress, daggers and bayonets from WWI and WWII, Webley air pistols, racks of Lee–Enfield bolt-action or magazine-fed rifles long since decommissioned from military service, revolutionary war-era sabers, an array of various bric-a-brac—a Willys Jeep truck smoking set, books like Ernst Junger's Storm of Steel—and munitions: a rusted mortar shell, an inactive grenade, artillery without its fuzed projectile.

Finally, he found his man. Behind the table was Paul, who would have met Dr. Surdhar’s eyes with a look of recognition. Everything about these transactions, Paul would later claim, was on the up-and-up. Surdhar was a respected medical professional with a license to own certain firearms and buy certain kinds of ammunition. Paul was merely providing a useful commercial service. If Surdhar was there to fulfill an order on behalf of a notorious street gang, well, that was his business.

It was a huge collar for the police. The Godfather of the Burger Bar Boys, forty-something Nosakhere Stephenson, also known as “Nosa,” was soon arrested for weapons possession and dealing as part of a clandestine police action known as “Operation Cookie.” The gangs were using WhatsApp, and a confiscated phone became an open window into the war.

Ballistics expert Gregg Taylor, who was involved with Operation Cookie, used the opportunity to pass his findings along to the West Midlands Police, where Detective Constable Phil Rodgers was working the Burger Bar Boys case. Rodgers–strong chinned, with steely eyes often set in a squint–had studied molecular biology and genetics but preferred the action of the field.

“There are hundreds of people sitting in their garages, making stuff,” Rodgers knew. This was an at home job. The work of an artist.

Through the WhatsApp conversations found on Nosa’s phone, national investigators helped police collar Sundish Nazran, the Burger Bar armorer. Sixteen more gang members were indicted, jailed, and sentenced to more than a collective 200 years imprisonment.

It was a huge law enforcement victory, and yet it felt wholly incomplete. Despite the arrests, investigators still had no idea where the guns and bullets were coming from. And people were still being shot and killed with the period ammunition, an all too real throwback to Peaky Blinders.

Operation Cookie came to a close with the usual round of press conferences and claims of victory by the police. But Rodgers felt there was more work to do on the Burger Boys, and armed with Taylor’s insights about the antique ammunition turning up at crime scenes across the country he turned his attention to cracking the criminal supply chain.

Rodgers met with one bullet caster in the Midlands, at a business called Jacks Precision, to figure out who would have the expertise to make rounds like these. The owner of Jacks Precision couldn’t identify them: their strange nippled top, the brass copper plate at the bottom, a sign of grand craftsmanship. Some of the bullets were swaged, meaning they were pressed with an extremely esoteric reloading press. Most industrial rounds are covered in metal jackets to prevent the quickened wear and tear of a barrel, but older ammunition was commonly unjacketed. A copper plate was sometimes affixed to the bottom of a slug to clear out the bore after an unjacketed lead round passed through the barrel. It was a crude fix and made the bullet less accurate, but it solved a key problem in an age before commercially produced ammunition.

Nazran, the Burger Bar Boys armorer, did not have a home reloading set or the know-how to manufacture boutique ammunition at scale. But Jacks Precision provided a lead. The only customer who purchased .45 calibers in the Midlands was some kind of a doctor.

Rodgers went back to Nazran’s phone and kept pausing on the string of messages regarding watches and batteries. He traced the messages to Dr. Surdhar. The doctor and Nazran had conducted dozens of weapons transactions, many involving antique pistols and revolvers costing roughly £3,000 each (about $3,700) USD.

Police arrested Dr. Surdhar. But it was apparent that he was just another link in a longer chain. Despite having Surdhar in custody, investigators seemed no closer to finding the manufacturer.

Meanwhile, back in his laboratory, ballistics expert Taylor concluded that the same priming tool used to seat the priming charge in a live round of ammunition had produced many of the rounds dating to a shooting in 2003 outside a hair salon. The rounds found during the arrest of Dr. Surdhar were identical—when compared through the powerful microscopes in Taylor’s lab—to the ones found during the arrest of Nazran. Find the tool, find the maker, the investigators believed. “That was the needle in the haystack,” Taylor later recalled.

Rodgers scrutinized Nazran and Dr. Surdhar’s cases, re-examining all the physical and forensic evidence. As was the case with Nazran, no tools were recovered at Dr. Surdhar’s home, there were no reloading presses, and it did not appear that the gang had the expertise to conduct any kind of in-house manufacturing operation. Rogers knew they had to find a lathe or another milling device, though in truth they didn’t even know what any of the equipment would look like. The investigators needed expert consultation.

On a whim Rodgers checked with members of Dr. Surdhar’s gun club and made a lucky connection. One of those members was also an arms and ammunition dealer, Paul Edmunds.

Rodgers met Paul at the motorcycle museum during one of the International Antique and Vintage Arms and Militaria Fairs held that year. The meeting was informal; Rodgers didn’t consider Paul a suspect at that point. What he quickly discovered during the conversation was that Paul was uncommonly knowledgeable about exactly the kinds of weapons and ammunition they were investigating, uncommonly so even for someone among the community of dedicated enthusiasts.

Rodgers showed him the bullets and casing they had found at the various crime scenes.

They were, of course, very familiar to him.

Paul was of two minds at this moment.

On the one hand, he was being confronted by a police investigator with ammunition used by a criminal organization–ammunition he had manufactured and sold to a customer now charged in a major criminal case. On the face of it, this bade poorly.

On the other hand, his Walter White act had always been fueled in part by a smokescreen of either deceit or willful ignorance regarding his own wrongdoing. He had imported banned firearms right under the noses of customs officials with that attitude, and he had, in fact, been interviewed by police before, always in the role of expert consultant. The best way to deal with suspicion, he might well have surmised, was to proceed without a trace of guilt.

Additionally, Edwards was supremely confident in and proud of his expertise, a rarified knowledge that few living souls could fully or even partially hope to grasp. Confronted with a cascade of arcane facts and technical specifications, even seasoned officials were often cowed, willing to take his word as final verdict. The same expertise that set him apart from the gun show riff raff on his buying expeditions seemed to have made him strangely untouchable over the years. In matters pertaining to the legality of antique firearms, he was one of a very few true authorities, and he brandished that expertise like a cudgel.

For those reasons, and despite a nagging feeling that he was being set up, Paul made up his mind to be his usual brand of helpful. After an initial conversation at the Vintage Arms Fair, Rodgers arranged to visit Paul's cottage, some 60 miles outside town, to continue the conversation. For the long drive, he brought Taylor, the ballistics expert. Gloucestershire was a laid back combination of gothic old world architecture and roads that twirled into the dark wilderness.

In June, 2015, Rodgers and Taylor met Paul at his door, a quiet culmination of a cat-and-mouse chase. As they entered and looked around, they saw bags of copper bullet casings, canisters of gunpowder, dozens of shotguns, rifles, handguns, and antique firearms. It seemed the workshop of a man utterly obsessed more than that of a devoted hobbyist and sport shooter. But Paul had the permits to import, own, and sell a variety of antique firearms. Everything they saw went toward his income.

Paul welcomed the investigators into his home and they made their way through a connecting door into the garage where Paul kept his workshop. As if on cue, a diffused sunbeam filtered into the workshop to reveal a bullet press. In addition to the press were the primer tools and the mold, as well as other bullet-making equipment, exactly the tools the investigators had been searching for.

Paul began to feel uneasy, he reported later. He was trying to present himself as a helpful resource, but it now seemed like a mistake to have invited the investigators to his workshop. In his more than two decades in the business, “no policeman has ever entered my house to ‘pick my brains’ that has ever refused a tea or coffee,” he later wrote. These two refused tea or coffee.

The officers proceeded with their questions, keeping the conversation technical. They had questions about machines such as the reloader, about homemade ammunition and its origins. Paul began to spiel off explanations laced heavily with jargon.

Then Rodgers asked a very specific question: “Do you know anything about these?” he posed, presenting a photograph of bullets and casings collected from the scenes of dozens of shootings in the West Midlands.

As if to demonstrate his innocence through a complete blameless openness, Paul offered to make a round for them, right there. He pressed a bullet into the casing and made a wax seal. He handed Rodgers and Taylor the finished ammunition, pressed in seconds. The weight was nearly the same as one of the samples they had photographed.

As if to further confuse the investigators with subtleties, Paul proceeded to explain that the cartridge he had used to construct this round was actually slightly smaller than normal and wouldn’t fire correctly in the intended gun.

But Paul had played his hand poorly. The round he had made had similar tool markings and bore the red wax seal at the base. It was impossible not to see the similarities.

“So I’m looking at Taylor. He’s looked at this for years and suddenly there’s someone standing there going, ‘Yup, that one’s mine,’” Rodgers recalled later.

“I think this was the case,” Taylor said later, agreeing with Rodgers and adding that Paul wanted to show how “I know more than you… I’m gonna be able to basically bamboozle you with detail.”

Between the lines of the polite conversation, Rogers and Taylor were realizing they had just found the mastermind behind one of the strangest and most ingenious ammunition networks in history, managing to fly beneath the radar of investigative technology by going back in time.

Paul Edmunds was arrested soon after Rodgers and Taylor visited. He went quietly, though his terrier barked at the officers. Paul would later tell police that what became of his bullet collection is “your problem—got nothing to do with me. Like me selling a knife and you take that knife and kill somebody and then the system blames me for selling you the knife." In law, this is known as proximate cause.

Following his arrest, investigators found a “recipe book” that contained dozens of guides to making rounds for weapons. Owing to his certification, many of those rounds were perfectly legal for him to manufacture and carry. What he was not allowed to do was supply a caliber to someone whose firearms certificate did not accommodate those calibers, customers like Dr. Surdhar. Investigators also learned that in his prolific arms dealing career he had fudged import documents.

When Paul's trial began in November 2017 in Birmingham, prosecutors argued he had knowingly violated the 1997 firearms law, circumventing the system to import and sell illegal firearms and ammunition. They further discovered bullet-mold tools that were modified or damaged, possibly to throw off the investigation. There was also the fact that Paul “had unexplained deposits of more than £350,000” across his bank accounts, according to a statement released by the prosecution.

For his part in the scheme, Dr. Surdhar was found guilty of conspiracy to transfer prohibited firearms and ammunition and was jailed for 13 years. Paul was found guilty of conspiracy to supply prohibited firearms and ammunition and was jailed for 30 years, a longer sentence for ultimately refusing to cooperate with their investigation. (Paul reported he would appeal the verdict.)

“Any gun or bullet off the streets of Birmingham or the UK is, or indeed any arsenal, is going to potentially save lives, because these firearms or bullets won’t be used to shoot or maim people,” said Warren Stainer, a senior crown prosecutor in the West Midlands Crown Prosecution Service's Complex Casework Unit. Paul “was manufacturing on an industrial scale. He was importing significant amounts of firearms; antique revolvers and he was making the bullets that matched them up. He offered the whole package to the criminal world as it was.” He added that Paul “had no regard for how those bullets and guns were going to be used.”

Paul has his defenders. To them, Paul was a dedicated craftsman whose unique skills preserved historic artifacts and kept them operational. When I started researching and reporting this story, I visited Birmingham and knocked on the doors of independent, private arms manufacturers, like Jacks Precision, and visited one commercial storefront known for luggage, clothing and sport shooting paraphernalia. In an alleyway, through an intercom, when I asked to speak with someone about firearms and ammunition manufacturing, a man told me to disappear. They were indeed private, as if the code of silence that kept the street gangs in operation had reached a subset of Birmingham’s public. I began calling around to Paul's family and relatives, his neighbors and associates, to get a better sense of the man charged with producing thousands of rounds of ammunition that were ultimately linked to more than 100 crime scenes. The responses were colorful in their suggestions to screw right off.

One family member, who asked not to be named for fear of harming an ongoing appeals process, told me that the lack of general firearm knowledge, including misinterpretation of UK firearm laws, led to the jailing of an innocent man.

“Tracing cartridges back to [Paul] is not the same as proving that he assembled ammunition and then conspired to provide it to a hideous gang of people whom [Paul] would despise,” the family member told me. “He knew one member of that horrible group, who he believed was a respectable doctor and who he could legally sell to.”

The results of those sales, of course, are indisputable. One of the weapons purchased, then sold by Dr. Surdhar, was linked to the murder of a man named Kenichi Phillips in 2016. Phillips had been sitting in his car when he was shot in the face with antiquated ammunition. He was 18 years old.

Another family in Birmingham had since taken over the demand for antique weapons ammunition, a testament to the number of specialty firearms still on the streets and the persistent loopholes whose exploitation, investigators argue, Paul pioneered.

More than 200 handguns linked to Paul remained unaccounted for at the time of his arrest.

KENNETH R. ROSEN is an American writer, journalist and war correspondent based in Central Europe. He is the recipient of the Bayeux Calvados-Normandy Award for war correspondents and has been twice a finalist for the Livingston Awards.

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