Ex-Attorney Charged With Illegal Machine Gun Sales

A Clarksburg man has been charged with selling machine guns from his home.

Richard K. Brennan, 39, of the 23000 block of Burdette Forest Road, was charged with selling firearms without a state license, owning machine guns that weren’t registered with Maryland State Police, and not keeping a log of his firearms transactions as required by law. 

Brennan, a former attorney, is scheduled to be in Montgomery County District Court on Monday.

“We’re not in a position to comment at this time,” said John Lavigne, a public defender representing Brennan.

According to court records, federal, state and local law enforcement agents reportedly seized eight machine guns and other evidence from Brennan’s home in February.

To sell firearms in Maryland, the vendor must have a federal license that says where the guns would be stored, bought or sold, said Assistant State’s Attorney Stephen Chaikin. In Maryland, machine guns must be registered with Maryland State Police, Chaikin said.

To buy or sell a machine gun, the person selling it must file an application for the registration and transfer to the new owner – which includes a criminal background check and fingerprint cards – and pay a transfer tax, according to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. 

In essence, a machine gun is weapon designed to automatically fire more than one shot with a single pull of the trigger, ATF officials said, though certain parts or combination of parts may also be considered “machine guns” under federal law.

Officials with the ATF wouldn’t comment on specifics regarding the investigation, citing that the agency was involved in the investigation. But ATF officials did say in an email to Patch that federal law requires machine guns to be registered in the National Firearms Registration and Transfer Record and that only guns lawfully possessed before May 19, 1986 “may be lawfully owned or transferred.”

Police allege that the address on Brennan’s Federal Firearms License for his business, PD Demo and Sales, was in Charles Town, W.Va., court records state, but when investigators visited the address, they reportedly discovered that the business was not there.

Police investigators allege that Brennan had kept more than 50 firearms at his home in Clarksburg, had been receiving mail for PD Demo and Sales at his home and had been shipping firearms from his home, though he did not have a license in Maryland to sell firearms, court records state. 

Brennan has been under investigation since July 2010.

According to District Court records, Brennan reported to Montgomery County police the theft of 24 firearms, valued at $26,000, from his home and later claimed that the book that logged his firearm transactions were among the stolen items.

But Montgomery County Police detectives said that they already found three of Brennan’s missing guns before he filed the report, according to District Court records, and had charged Tarrey Jackson — a man renting a room in Brennan’s home — with stealing the guns. Jackson reportedly told police that Brennan was a firearms dealer and had been selling guns from his vehicle, court records state.

Jackson pleaded guilty to having the guns and was sentenced in September to five years in prison, with three and a half years suspended, plus two years supervised probation, according to online court records.

Brennan was disbarred in 2009 for misappropriating funds of clients from his Frederick, Md.,-based debt settlement business.

The Maryland Attorney General’s Office sued Brennan in Frederick County, Md., Circuit Court, alleging that Brennan breached an agreement with the Consumer Protection Division to return the money he took from consumers, to pay $200,000 in penalties and to stop selling debt settlement services, according to court records and information from the Attorney General’s Office.

The court entered a judgment against Brennan and his law firm and ordering him to stop selling debt settlement services to consumers and to pay $2.6 million in restitution to the division.