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Alleged neo-Nazi from Stoughton charged in FBI gun sting
By adamg on Fri, 04/30/2021 - 11:38am
Michael Moura, 27, of Stoughton, was arrested at a Brockton mall on Wednesday after he allegedly paid an undercover FBI agent several hundred dollars for a Glock and AR-15 to defend himself from the Biden administration.
Unfortunately for Moura, the FBI had been playing him along for more than a year to see if he would actually pay for a gun, which he legally isn't supposed to own, since he'd pleaded guilty in April, 2020 to criminal harassment of his girlfriend - including cutting her car's brake lines while she was at a concert in Worcester.
The maximum penalty for the charge was 2 1/2 years - enough to make it illegal under federal law for him to ever own a gun - although he was only sentenced to roughly six months in jail. He was out not long after his conviction because of the time he'd already served following his arrest in November, 2019.
In an affidavit, an FBI agent said the bureau had had its eyes on Moura even before that conviction, as part of its surveillance of local violent groups.
Most recently, Moura was a member of the Nationalist Social Club, whose purpose you can guess from its name. He had earlier helped found Resist Marxism, a precursor to Super Happy Fun America, one of whose leaders, Mark Sahady, now faces charges for his role in the failed Capitol putsch.
On June 27, 2020, Moura attended a "Back the Blue" rally at the State House (he's the one with his face covered entirely in black) with the Nazi group (which Sahady claims to not want at his rallies).
According to the affidavit, an undercover agent, identified as "UC1, " who "has been assigned to investigate groups that have professed a willingness to use violence to further their extremist and social ideology," and who claimed to be ex-military with access to guns, spoke to Moura last May about his desire to obtain a gun.
Only problem for Moura: Since he was only recently released from jail, he had no money to pay for the gun. Obliging FBI undercover agents then crafted a scheme in which they would pay Moura for transporting what they said was tens of thousands of dollars of counterfeit money, and that Moura agreed, claiming he really needed a gun because he and his girlfriend were moving to Fall River.
On Aug. 5, the affidavit continues, one of the agents gave Moura $60,000 in counterfeit bills, which he had to deliver from Andover to Albany, NY - where he was met by an agent who gave him $500 in payment. Before he could use that to buy a gun, though, he spent the money on other things, so the considerate agents offered him more courier jobs, for a total of $1,000 in credit towards a gun.
On March 18 of this year, Moura was given $100,000 in fake bills, to be driven from Saugus to Newport, RI. There, an undercover agent asked Moura about whether he wanted a new or used gun and noted that a new gun would cost more. Moura allegedly said he didn't care "as long as it doesn't jam on me."
On April 2, Moura got his second assignment: Move another $100,000 in counterfeit money from Newport to Brockton. A couple weeks later, an agent texted him and asked if he still wanted the gun, Moura said yes and arranged to meet with the agent to buy the gun at the same Brockton location - the Westgate Mall.
On April 20 and 21, Moura and the undercover agent exchanged texts to finalize the deal, now for a both a Glock handgun and an AR-15. The agent had a question for Moura:
UC4: On the AR do you want it to go pew pew pew. Or BRRRRRRRT.
Moura: the 15? Brrrrrt.
The affidavit helpfully translates:
Based on my training and experience, information provided to me by other investigators, and the context of these communications, I understand that when UC4 asked Moura whether Moura wanted the AR to go "pew pew pew" or "BRRRRRRRT," UC4 was asking whether Moura wanted a semi-automatic or a fully automatic weapon. I further understand that when Moura responded "brrrrrt" and "whatever sounds better lol," Moura showed that he understood UC4's question and wanted a fully automatic weapon."
Around 8:40 a.m. on Wednesday, Moura pulled into the mall parking lot, where the agent was waiting, and got into the agent's car and gave him $600, after which the agent gave him a black hockey bag with the two guns and ammunition in it. After putting the bag in his own car's back seat, he walked back to the agent's car and got in and they drove a short distance to an ATM.
As they drove, Moura told UC4 that he (Moura) was "trying to stockpile as much as I can because with this fucking administration you don't know what the fuck is going to happen. Moura continued, "I don't want to be on any kind of a list, you know what I mean, because when they try and confiscate guns, like, it's all these people."
At 8:52 a.m, as he got out of the agent's car, Moura found himself surrounded by FBI agents and police, who put him under arrest.
Complete FBI affidavit (15.7M PDF).
Innocent, etc.
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Comments
LMAO. You can’t make these
LMAO. You can’t make these things up.
A good rule of thumb: the
A good rule of thumb: the stranger you are talking to that seems very willing to help you buy something very illegal to own under federal law is always a federal agent.
Law-abiding citizen
Just another one of those “law-abiding citizens” the NRA keeps telling me about. Is Moura one of the proverbial “good guys with guns” or nah?
Too late now, but this would have been a better plan
If this guy just stopped worrying about imaginary sh*t and got a friggin' job, his life would be pretty sweet. Instead he's off to the slammer.
$600?! The price alone
$600?! The price alone should have tipped the idiot off.
For legal permit holders in MA, an AR (which would have to be pre-ban) usually costs several thousand dollars. Out-of-state, a low-grade AR can be purchased for several hundred dollars.
Similarly, Glocks available in MA shops are usually pre-owned, older models that still sell for close to a thousand.
Based on the fact that this guy couldn't legally obtain a license, it seems like he should have expected to pay more than market value in MA, certainly not significantly below the market value. Sort of like how if you get a loan from a loan shark vs. a legitimate lender, you pay a higher interest rate. I guess it never occurred to him that the price was too good to be true. Good thing, too, as this bigoted idiot has no business being armed.
(No subject)
ummm..
IIRC, once a gun is used in a serious crime, it's value goes way down. I don't think it's going to make it to the shelves of Four Seasons..
I think he thinks
That his price was $600 plus the barter of the cash delivery errands.
This feels like the comedic
This feels like the comedic backstory of Remy in Higher Learning, what a complete clown
I’m guessing this Trumper
I’m guessing this Trumper didn’t get into college.
There are different kinds of college
I suspect being a trumper is more of the problem than educational status.
One less wannabe murderer out
One less wannabe murderer out there.
Well done FBI.
Left unaddressed is whether
Left unaddressed is whether the girlfriend he was moving with to Falls River is the same one whom he damaged brakes before.
too bad. more
red meat and meat beer for the rest of us
That's a revealing selfie. The t-shirt
he's wearing says, "How much xans [xanax] and lean [a street-drug cocktail based on codeine-containing cough syrup] do you have to do before you realize you're a fucking loser?"
He actually bought and wore that shirt in public *on purpose*.
The Twitter thread Adam cited above is worth reviewing to realize how active this ambulatory turd was in violent local neo-Nazi activities: https://twitter.com/AntiFashGordon/status/1281203206517854213
One hopes this example of devolution has not already contributed to the gene pool.
OH!
OH! He's a Russ fan, that actually explains a lot lmao
Entrapment
Guy is a scumbag, but this kind of police work is total entrapment and shouldn’t be legal.
I believe the rule is, "Entrap me
once, shame on you...."
Well ...
I thought about entrapment as I started reading the affidavit, but by the time I was done, I thought it was pretty ingenious, if incredibly time consuming, how the FBI got this guy.
Entrapment implies somebody was basically trapped into doing something they ordinarily wouldn't, that they got somebody who had a momentary lapse of judgment or just made a bad mistake they normally wouldn't.
But this guy, they strung him along for a year and gave him numerous chances to back out. And each time they asked him if he still wanted a gun, each time they came up with some oddball scheme for him to earn "credits" with which to buy a gun, he didn't say no, he just kept plowing forward, like he had a gun savings account or something.
tl;dr: What MC said.
When vice racked up arressts
the accusation was entrapment. Of course by the legal definition of entrapment it was not. The arrests were morally harassment and sadistic but not entrapment.
In this case there is no entrapment. This fellow wanted a weapon to cause actual harm. Government employees used legal and pretty obvious steps to show create an irrefutable argument that the guy wants a weapon to do violence.
Have no idea of what his prison sentence will be but it will not be short.
A pretty good indicator that
A pretty good indicator that it wasn't entrapment was that FBI agents spent a year working on it and got a federal prosecutor to bring charges against the guy. While the specifics change from administration to administration, there's standing DOJ policy to only bring charges that they are confident will lead to a conviction. If it was a clear case of entrapment under the law, it wouldn't have made it this far.
Let's pick this apart
Wicked late in the day, I know, but Kentucky Oaks day and laundry were obstacles to Internet punditry.
Defend himself from what? There's four adverse things that could happen to him:
-Death
-Injury
-Abduction
-Theft
Absent a war draft or a federal conviction for a capital crime, I'm not sure how the Biden (or any) administration would target him for death. Nor could I reason why he'd be taken away or beaten randomly. If he's ever worked, the "theft" already occurs in the form of taxation at the hands of the non-partisan IRS.
Quoting it again to drill deeper on the theft part. Says below that he paid $600 for the gun, plus the cost of his labor in delivering cash. I don't imagine that he's yet sought compensation for business use of his vehicle. I'm actually curious as to whether or not the aforementioned IRS will credit him the 57 1/2 cents per mile he drove as part of a sting against him.
His tax return aside, let's circle back to the "theft." What's his net worth? He's moving to Fall River. Is he renting, or did he purchase a home? He's 27, and he probably doesn't earn much from employment, because he's clearly unhappy with his lot. Assets minus revolving consumer debt, maybe five grand tops? Hell, let's make it six grand to make easy math.
$600 cash for the gun, so he's spent $600 to defend $6,000 worth of wealth. If Bill Gates bought defense at the same rate, he'd spend $13 billion. I very much doubt that Bill Gates owns firearms, and if he maintains human sentry at his residence, that's probably a few hundred grand a year tops.
MC Slim JB's "un(expletive)able hate nerd" turn of phrase comes to mind. Raise your standards, lady. Poor woman.
A-ha! Glad I read through twice. Okay, he had no money to pay for the gun, so his net worth was no more than $0 as of 12 months ago. He sought to spend money to defend his net worth of $0. Seriously, poor woman. I hope she didn't get impregnated.
And if you're buying the gun for any other reason, it's called "witness protection", bro. Well, either that, or you want someone else dead. I missed my calling as a prosecutor.
Is that a typo, Gaffin? Did you mean Fallujah? You wrote Fall River.
If it isn't, median price for a 1 BR apartment in Fall River is $1,298. https://www.zumper.com/rent-research/fall-river-ma
It's $1,450 in Providence, where he might ostensibly avoid whatever threats he thinks exist.
Of course, the $152 per month actually means something when, again, you were worth $0 a year ago.
https://www.zumper.com/rent-research/providence-ri
I'm left wondering why he bothers with New England at all at this point in his life.
So, if we add the $1,000 credit from courier work to the other $600 which he tendered to the agent for the gun, that's $1,600. He was going to spend $1,300 a month to live in a community where he was so afraid of violence, he was willing to spend $1,600 on a gun.
Also, of course he spent the first $500 on other things, he had $0. I spend $2,200 in a good, disciplined month.
I mean I saw a photo yesterday of a 78-year old guy giving his wife a (expletive) flower. I'd hate to see how threatened this guy would have felt had he been governed by Mussolini.
I'm not Johnny Bootlicker at this point, nor should anyone be who reads a newspaper, but I would have had absolutely, positively no problem with the agents just shooting him dead right there in front of the ATM. Why not? He has a gun that he's not supposed to possess.
May we keep that level of stupid and hateful out of the gene pool forever.
Much as I wish I had coined the phrase, I got the term
"army of unfuckable hate nerds" as used to describe neo-Nazis, men's rights advocates, incels and assorted other societal dregs from Marc Maron.
you know it's weird..
how you careen wildly sometimes between anti-government, anti-regulation libertarian and.. this:
Gun laws are a folly
In that the horse is already out of the barn. I don't like big government or prosecution of victimless crimes, but I have no problem with somebody with a killing gun (because that AR ain't no good for nothing else) being shot dead, either by fed, or by civilian.
It would be ideal if police interactions with civilians were minimized, but, at the very least, I'd like to have the strike zone redrawn to where having an assault rifle is the thing that gets you choked to death by a cop instead of selling loose cigarettes or passing a bad $20.
Kyle Rittenhouse and George Zimmerman should both be in witness protection.
Fall River
"he really needed a gun because he and his girlfriend were moving to Fall River."
Well, now it's all clear. The guy's not trying to protect himself against Joe Biden; he's trying to protect himself against Lizzie Borden.