DOWNTOWN BROOKLYN — A Georgia man was sentenced to an 18-year prison term for smuggling 151 firearms up Route 95, the "iron pipeline," into the city, the Brooklyn district attorney announced Thursday.
Michael Quick made 13 car trips from Georgia to Brooklyn over the course of eight months with as many as 25 firearms at at a time, including assault weapons, the DA said in a press release. Quick sold them all to an undercover police officer at the corner of Foster Avenue and East 96th Street in Canarsie.
During a public safety meeting in Clinton Hill last week, Public Advocate Letitia James and NYPD's Chief of Command Carlos Gomez expressed concern about the influx of Southern guns coming into Brooklyn, blaming loose gun laws in states like Georgia, Virginia and South Carolina for arming young gang members in the neighborhood.
A 9-mm gun bought in Georgia for $200 can be resold in Brooklyn for $1,000, District Attorney Ken Thompson said.
Over the course of the trips, Quick transported an AR-15 assault rifle, MAC-11 subcompact machine pistol, two TEC-9 semiautomatic pistols and a variety of pistols and revolvers, some purchased in stores and some stolen, according to the release, and sold them to NYPD for $126,000 total. A 25-gun shipment was the largest single weapons buy in NYPD's history, according to the district attorney's office.
Quick, who has a residence in Staten Island in addition to his Georgia address, pleaded guilty to first-degree criminal sale of a firearm and first-degree criminal possession of a weapon on Aug. 6.
"This harsh prison sentence reflects our determination to bring to justice out-of-state firearms traffickers who use lax gun laws down south to flood our city with guns," Thompson said in a statement. "We will continue to go after these merchants of death no matter where they live."
Quick's lawyer did not respond to a request for comment.
