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As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe NowA former Ohio police chief who admitted to misusing his position and conspiring with two Hoosier gun dealers to illegally traffic hundreds of fully automatic machine guns has been sentenced to three years of probation.
Dorian LaCourse, 66, of Milford, Ohio, pleaded guilty earlier this year to conspiracy, making false statements in records maintained by a federal firearms licensee and making false statements to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Indiana and the ATF’s Columbus, Ohio, field division made an announcement regarding the conspiracy in April.
LaCourse is the former chief of police of Addyston, Ohio, serving a village of roughly 1,000 residents as the only full-time police officer.
Investigated by ATF, LaCourse’s case came before Senior Judge Sarah Evans Barker in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana. The federal judge ordered that LaCourse pay an $11,800 fine and serve three years of probation, including six months of home detention.
The federally licensed Indiana firearms dealers – Johnathan Marcum, 34, of Laurel and Christopher Petty, 58, of Lawrenceburg — previously pleaded guilty to conspiracy in separate cases. Each faces up to five years in federal prison.
According to court documents, LaCourse, Marcum, and Petty, illegally exploited a law enforcement exception to the federal ban on the possession or transfer of fully automatic machine guns.
In his role as the chief of police, LaCourse signed multiple “demonstration letters” falsely stating that the Addyston Police Department was interested in purchasing various types of machine guns, including military-grade weapons, and asking that Marcum and or Petty give the demonstration. Marcum and Petty then sent the letters to the ATF to obtain the weapons.
LaCourse also placed direct orders for German-made machine guns that were alleged to be paid for by the police department but were fully funded by Marcum and Petty, who intended to bypass restrictions on the importation of such weapons by anyone other than the police or the military.
At no point was the Addyston Police Department ever authorized to purchase any of the machine guns, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
Additionally, the Indiana gun dealers were never provided any demonstrations of machine guns to the police department. Instead, the dealers resold the military-grade weapons at a profit often five or six times the purchase price.
The conspirators purchased or caused the importation of 200 fully automatic machine guns. LaCourse received more than $11,500 from the gun dealers for his role in the scheme, while the dealers received the majority of the profit.
More than 100 illegally obtained machine guns, 52,500 rounds of ammunition, and more than $6,000 in proceeds of the crime were seized from LaCourse’s office desk and will be forfeited to the United States.
“Astonishing is a fair description of the course of conduct that took place here,” Myers told reporters Wednesday. “I think it’s very surprising, the sheer volume of machine guns we are talking about here. Guns that are meant to be mounted to the top of a military vehicle, not in the hands of a one-man police department.”
The rest of the guns were transferred to federally licensed people who have been permitted to have them and were not part of the offense, Myers said.
“The ATF tracks those closely so we are aware of where all of them are,” he said. “None of them have been found to be in the hands of criminals at this time.”
Assistant U.S. Attorneys James M. Warden, William L. McCoskey, and Nicholas J. Linder prosecuted the case.
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