FORMER SHERIFF’S CAPTAIN GETS PRISON
Garmo sentenced to 2 years for illegal sales of firearms
Guns have come to represent many things to Marco Garmo.
As a 12-year-old boy, they represented security after he and his father were robbed at the small market the family owned in El Cajon.
Later, when he was a sheriff’s captain in charge of a large swath of East County, firearms provided a distraction to the stress of work and family life.
“His vice has been weapons, and that vice only increased over time,” his defense attorney concluded.
Federal prosecutors say Garmo’s “powerful love of guns” represented something more calculated and opportunistic.
Far from a mere hobbyist, Garmo instead used his badge to skirt state and federal law and ran a profitable side business that sold new “off-roster” law-enforcement-only firearms to the public. He saw these specialty guns not only as a way to earn money, but as a way to curry favor with wealthy gun enthusiasts who might in turn support his future bid for sheriff, according to prosecutors.
But Garmo won’t be running for office. On Friday, U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel sentenced Garmo, 53, to two years in prison, a term that follows the recommendations of both the defense and prosecution.
Curiel said the former law enforcement official almost reached a level of “becoming a mob boss of sorts” in the way he used his position to dole out favors and thought
himself above the law. “You identified the winners and losers,” the judge told him before pronouncing the term.
The judge also ordered Garmo to pay an $8,350 fine — the profit from the sale of 10 guns made to undercover agents.
A felony record prohibits Garmo from ever owning firearms again, and he has agreed to forfeit 58 firearms and more than 5,300 rounds of ammunition as part of the case. In a settlement agreement approved earlier this week, his wife will be able to keep 14 of those guns after asserting community property interest.
He was ordered to report to prison on or before June 10.
“I’ve spent more than half my life in law enforcement being part of the solution, and now I find myself today being part of a burden on the system,” Garmo told the judge.
“I apologize to the Sheriff ’s Department and all the people I let down,” he added, “all the people who looked up to me for leadership and inspiration.”
Garmo might have been considered a formidable candidate for sheriff.
He was born in Canada to a Palestinian Christian mother and a father who was Chaldean — a Catholic from an ethnic Iraqi minority — who fled religious persecution in the 1960s. The family later immigrated to the U.S., where Garmo was naturalized as a young child. They moved to San Diego and settled into a growing Chaldean community in East County.
The idea of becoming a cop took root after he and his father were robbed while manning their Quik Pik store on Avocado Boulevard. It was Christmas Eve in 1979. His father was pistolwhipped and badly injured. The robbers, who were White, mistook him for Iranian and lobbed an ethnic slur as they fled.
The young Garmo felt dismissed by the officers who came to investigate.
“It seemed to him that the officers could have cared less,” his lawyer, Kevin Barry McDermott, wrote in a sentencing memorandum. “Mr. Garmo resolved to make a difference and from that point he began to think about becoming a police officer.”
His 27-year career was marked by a can-do, selfstarter attitude and a number of prominent assignments that have made him a well-known figure in San Diego law enforcement as well as a leader in the local Chaldean community. His work ethic was drilled into him as a child who was expected to support the family business rather than play sports or hang out with friends.
“Mr. Garmo is an example of the American dream earned to fruition,” McDermott said.
As a deputy he worked everything from jails and community policing to gangs and narcotics. He was the first sheriff’s deputy to join the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force following the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and later developed a program for local law enforcement to work with federal agencies on terror investigations.
He was promoted to captain in 2016 and stationed in Rancho San Diego, in charge of a jurisdiction that covers 150 square miles of East County.
By then, Garmo had already established himself as a go-to procurer of “off-roster” firearms — certain guns that are legal for law enforcement to purchase on the primary market. The law does allow law enforcement to occasionally resell these guns to the general public on the secondary market, but the transaction must be made through a licensed firearms dealer as a intermediary, and it can’t be a regular, profitable venture.
He continued his side business from his sheriff’s office, even enlisting a lieutenant, Fred Magana, to assist.
Over the course of six years, federal investigators determined Garmo bought at least 150 off-roster firearms, falsely stating they were for himself before transferring or pretending to loan about 100 of them to civilians. His clientele included wealthy business people, lawyers and a doctor — people he saw as possible benefactors when it came time for his run for sheriff, prosecutors said.
Many of the guns went to Leo Hamel, a prominent San Diego jeweler who pleaded guilty in the case.
The prolific gun-dealing came to the attention of the Sheriff’s Department in 2016, and the results of an investigation were presented to the District Attorney’s Office in 2017. But criminal charges were declined; he was disciplined internally.
“Instead of being chastened by his brush with accountability, it appears that Garmo was emboldened by his escape from any real consequences,” noted the prosecutors, Assistant U.S. Attorneys Nicholas Pilchak and Andrew Haden.
Later, Garmo boasted to an undercover agent that a police officer’s ability to have high-capacity magazines was open for interpretation because “the D.A. is not gonna (expletive) file on a cop,” according to records filed in court.
Garmo’s gun-dealing continued.
“Most people would have stopped,” the judge pointed out. “There is this arrogance that surfaced.”
In late 2018, undercover agents with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives began responding to Garmo’s online ads for specialty guns. The agency had to throw more agents at the operation than planned due to the high number of guns Garmo was selling, prosecutors said.
McDermott said Garmo didn’t knowingly sell guns to anyone who was prohibited from owning them, and he used licensed firearms dealers for the transactions.
“This is a not a case where a defendant was selling firearms out of the trunk of his car to anyone off the street,” the attorney said.
While it is unknown if any of those guns were used in the commission of a crime, attorneys acknowledged that two firearms registered to Garmo were recovered by law enforcement during unrelated criminal investigations, including at least one in Detroit.
The corruption didn’t stop there.
The investigation uncovered a scheme in which Garmo directed clients to an associate — garage door installer Waiel Anton — who promised for a fee to help gun owners obtain concealed-carry weapon permits faster than usual at the Sheriff ’s Department.
There was also a plan to secretly work with Anton and an unnamed county employee to get a landlord’s condemned building reopened, with Garmo being paid by the landlord part of a consulting fee. But the landlord ultimately declined to participate.
Investigators also set a trap for Garmo, baiting him with insider information of an impending raid on his cousin’s illegal marijuana dispensary to see if he would tip off his family. He did.
Garmo, who retired amid the investigation, ultimately pleaded guilty to one count of engaging in the business of dealing firearms without a federal license.
Now that he has been sentenced, the San Diego County Employees Retirement Association will determine if the conviction qualifies for felony forfeiture. If so, Garmo’s service credit would be knocked down to the first date of the commission of the crime and his retirement benefits recalculated. He would also have to reimburse any amount that was overpaid, including the more than $141,800 in retirement benefits he received last year, according to SDCERA’s chief of operations, Mary Ball.
It is unclear if he will testify against two others who are headed to trial as part of the investigation: Anton and Giovanni Tilotta, a licensed gun dealer and owner of Honey Badger Firearms in San Diego, who is accused of coordinating some sales. Garmo’s attorney said in December that the subject had not been discussed with prosecutors.
Tilotta is accused of accepting backdated paperwork so a lawyer client could avoid the 10-day waiting period to buy two handguns and an AR-15-style rifle from Garmo, according to Garmo’s plea agreement.
That lawyer, Vikas Bajaj, pleaded guilty in December to a misdemeanor charge of aiding and abetting the falsifying of paperwork on firearms purchases. He was placed on probation for a year.
Magana and Hamel are set to be sentenced later this year.