AUBURN — In the spring of 2022, a woman walked into gun shops across Androscoggin and Kennebec counties and bought dozens of firearms: pistols, rifles, and semiautomatics.
Jennifer Scruggs passed background checks and signed forms on multiple visits to Turner, Manchester and Auburn firearms dealers, telling them, and the federal government, that all 55 guns were personal purchases.
But according to federal prosecutors, every sale was built on a lie. The guns were really for two men from California, convicted felons prohibited from owning firearms.
The bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives call those straw purchases, or “lie and buys,” and they are a federal crime.
While gun shop owners say they’re rare, law enforcement sees straw purchases — which can be difficult to spot in the moment and harmful in hindsight — as a stubborn gap in the system unabated by campaigns to educate firearm dealers and strengthen enforcement.
In a place like Lewiston, where gun violence has increased over the past decade, the question becomes harder to ignore: How many of those weapons started with someone walking into a shop, signing a form and lying about who the gun was really for?
Warning signs
Lewiston police Lt. Derrick St. Laurent said the ATF keeps track of the use of illegal guns in crimes, not local police. However, it’s the department’s experience that “most straw guns are found outside of Maine” and later traced back to a gun seller here, who can identify the buyer from transaction records and applications.
“Say you were a straw purchaser, and you go out and buy 50 guns over a period of a month and one of those guns comes up in a crime in Los Angeles. Then a month later, one of those guns is found in a crime in Chicago,” St. Laurent said. “Then the ATF knows, ‘OK, this guy’s up to no good.’ Then they launch an investigation … These guns can be very hard to track, some of them are never accounted for, but once a gun is recovered, it’s pretty easy to trace it back.”
When police come across straw purchases in Maine, St. Laurent said, they see “typically females buying guns for their boyfriends or drug suppliers.”
The data show that firearms being purchased in Maine are contributing to crime elsewhere. In 2020, 249 guns purchased in Maine were seized in five Northeastern states. In 2023, law enforcement seized 412 more.
Gun shop owners in the Androscoggin County area say straw purchases don’t happen often, but they are often recognizable.
Nate Maillet of First Due Firearms in Sabattus said he watches for signs someone is trying to buy a gun on behalf of someone else.
“You can just tell,” Maillet said.
But when it comes to gun sales in Maine, Maillet and other firearm store owners in Androscoggin County said, criminal activity is rare.
Gun shop owners say their clientele is made up of mostly return customers and some first-time buyers, usually with home protection on their minds. Some want something they can conceal and carry.
In the 2022 case in central Maine, the conspiracy became transparent after one of the guns the woman bought turned up at a crime scene in California. Federal agents traced the weapon to a Maine gun shop. Investigators reviewed the woman’s full purchase history and tracked her connection to the two California men, including payments, travel records and messages that allegedly showed coordination between the three.
One weapon, a Browning model 1911 .380, later turned up in at an incident in Los Angeles in which a man fired his gun in the air shouting, “Crips!” Another firearm, a Glock 19, was discovered in a robbery investigation in Los Angeles.
The warning signs of a straw purchase can be subtle — sometimes it’s the way a buyer avoids eye contact, declines to handle the gun they’re buying or comes in with a strange, overly specific request.
“When someone comes in saying, ‘I want that exact handgun for that exact price,’ and won’t even hold it? That’s not normal,” Maillet said.
“Two or three times a year maybe,” said John Reid, owner of J.T. Reid’s Gun Shop in Auburn and a former Auburn police officer. “It’s pretty flagrant. We throw them … out.”
Like Maillet, Reid watches for signs, but for the most part he doesn’t question a customer’s reasons for buying a weapon.
“Our only thing is: Can you pass the background check and are you acting responsibly?” Reid said. “We’ve thrown people out of here before — usually for obvious alcohol or drugs … We just don’t put up with that.”
Still, shop owners are wary of what can happen after a sale.
Maillet said he’s never had a customer fail a background check. But he’s walked away from transactions based on gut feeling — especially if someone appears intoxicated, evasive or coached.
“But if you know you’re going to get denied, you’re not walking into a legal store,” he said. “You’re finding a different way.”
Both Reid and Maillet said they work regularly with law enforcement, including the ATF, which conducts “advanced traces” to track a gun’s chain of custody.
Reid said he works with police and occasionally opens his doors after hours so police can conduct their investigations.
“It’s not like CSI: Miami,” Maillet said. “They don’t always tell me what they’re working on. But I cooperate fully.”
How it happens
Several Maine cases have drawn federal attention to straw purchases and gun trafficking networks.
One case centers on Tyquinn Cannon, a 25-year-old New York man who pleaded guilty in 2024 to conspiracy to make false statements to federally licensed firearms dealers and illegal possession of a firearm all in a conspiracy to traffic firearms to his home state.
Cannon worked with co-conspirators in Maine to illegally purchase guns and provide them to buyers who couldn’t legally own them, court documents said.
He traveled from New York to Maine several times in the fall of 2022 to coordinate firearm purchases with local accomplices. He was seen entering and leaving several licensed gun stores in Auburn, Gray and Scarborough.
Cannon allegedly used Cash App to fund straw buyers to complete the purchases and surveillance footage at the shops showed the co-conspirators deferring to Cannon before decision making. One gun, a Glock 43X, was recovered in New York less than a month after it was sold in Maine.
Cannon, whose sentencing is scheduled for July, faces up to 15 years in prison.
Scruggs, who pleaded guilty in January 2024 to one count of conspiracy to commit firearms offenses and 10 counts of making false statements during the acquisition of firearms from licensed dealers, faces up to 15 years in prison. She agreed to waive her right to appeal any sentence of five years or less.
The Cannon and Scruggs cases come amid a broader federal push to crack down on gun trafficking and straw purchases — crimes that often evade detection until the weapons surface in the hands of someone who shouldn’t have them.
Such was also the case in 2023 when Abdullahi Issak of Lewiston was arrested for orchestrating a small trafficking ring from December 2020 to July 2022 which, with the aid of straw purchasers, moved dozens of handguns out of Maine.
Issak pleaded guilty in March 2023 to conspiracy to make false statements to federally licensed firearms dealers and possession of a firearm by a prohibited person. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison.
According to federal investigators, Issak relied on at least two straw buyers, one of whom told law enforcement she bought guns for him because he gave her “drugs and money.” The same woman purchased 10 firearms from licensed dealers in Turner and Auburn between December 2020 and May 2021. The transaction between Issak and the straw purchaser happened within hours of the purchases, according to surveillance footage, cell phone data and interviews conducted by ATF agents.
Agents tracked at least five of the weapons to out-of-state recoveries in Massachusetts, New York and North Carolina. One gun was discovered two weeks later in Boston and another, purchased in April 2021, was found during a felony vehicle stop in North Carolina.
Court documents indicated Issak used middlemen to move guns south, instructing his co-conspirator to “bring it down there” because it would be “smarter” if he avoided drawing attention himself.
Despite never entering a gun store himself, Issak stayed in close contact with straw purchasers helping direct their activity. One co-conspirator told investigators that Issak would advise on the types of firearms he wanted and would give them cash ahead of the purchases and drugs in a final exchange.
According to the Department of Justice and ATF trace data, Maine has no permit requirement or state straw purchase statute.
The state has grown as a source in gun trafficking corridors targeted by federal initiatives.
In 2020, 127 guns bought in Maine were seized in Massachusetts, 26 in New Hampshire, 14 in Connecticut, 13 in Rhode Island and 69 in New York. In 2023, 225 guns were seized in Massachusetts, 28 in New Hampshire, 37 in Connecticut, 20 in Rhode Island and 102 in New York — all purchased in Maine.
While straw purchasing is linked to grander conspiracies to funnel firearms from states with lax gun laws to those with more stringent laws, sometimes gun shops and law enforcement are blindsided by a one-off purchase.
Nikeshia Knight, 25, of Waterville, was sentenced in February for serving as a middleperson in a 2022 straw purchase. A Glock pistol, recovered from an arrest in Salem, Massachusetts, was traced to a purchase at A&G Shooting in Fairfield. Knight orchestrated the purchase by providing a straw purchaser money and fentanyl as payment for completing the sale.
Investigators confirmed Knight was behind the purchase by reviewing text messages between her and the straw purchaser in which Knight admitted she could not see the purchase through herself because she was “in the middle of dealing with a case” and couldn’t pass a background check.
Knight was sentenced to 37 months in federal prison, followed by three years of supervised release.
The question of how guns turn up on the streets of Maine cities and towns and beyond comes down to patterns investigators have come to recognize — quiet deals usually involving drugs, money and participants willing to put their names on federal documents legally binding themselves to their respective purchases.
St. Laurent says the crime is frustratingly simple and surprisingly common.
“You go to the gun store, and you’re buying guns knowing they’re not for you — and you’re signing that federal form affirming that the guns are for you,” he said. “It’s a pretty easy case to prove.”
Whether out of addiction, manipulation or loyalty, straw purchasers continue to supply weapons to people who can’t legally buy them.
“I wish that we’d really start buckling down and have mandatory minimums for people who are engaged in straw purchases,” St. Laurent said. “If you really send a message that this is not tolerated, then people are really going to think twice before they go out there and make a straw purchase for somebody.”
This story is part of a series of stories exploring gun violence in Lewiston. We are taking a deep dive into how incidents of shots fired have affected the feeling of safety in the city, particularly in the downtown area where the majority of the shootings have taken place. As a part of the downtown community, the Sun Journal staff has taken a great deal of personal accountability on this topic in the interest of public safety. If you have personally been affected by gun violence in Lewiston and want to tell your story, you can email staff writer Joe Charpentier at [email protected].
