Broken Oath: The trail of drugs, guns, and sex that led to a former public defender’s downfall. That’s the headline over at firstcoastnews.com. It’s your basic tale of a defense lawyer who represented Florida prostitutes in exchange for cocaine. The twist? Tomislav David Golik — a Federal Firearms Licensee (gun dealer) — gave these pimps guns.
“Drug dealing is a dangerous business, especially in Jacksonville. After their interactions with Mr. Golik, they were armed [by Mr. Golik],” said Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearm and Explosives agent Mark Mutz. “These firearms range from the small-caliber pistol to shotguns and into several different types of rifles.“
Mr. Golik is an individual who had a severe drug problem and would trade these firearms to support his drug habit and he would later retrieve the firearms on his own,” Mutz said.
Yeah right. Sure he did. “You know that AR-15 I gave you for my coke? Could I have it back now please?”
Once the ATF had Mr. Golik in their sights, they made him their bitch informant. Guess what happened next?
As his drug problem became more severe, he became unable to retrieve his firearms. Golik and his attorney brokered a deal with the U.S. Attorney’s Office and ATF. Court records say he became a confidential informant for ATF in May of 2015. Part of the deal included staying sober and telling ATF about guns he placed on the streets of Jacksonville
“After he approached ATF and we worked together to try and recover these firearms, Mr. Golik continued his illegal activities and behaviors,” Mutz said.
Yup, you read right. The ATF let their informant continue providing criminals with firearms. Who then “worked with” the ATF to “try” to recover the guns. And how did that work out?
According to a search warrant obtained by First Coast News, Golik didn’t stay clean and didn’t tell ATF about every gun he had traded, including one gun that turned up at a BP gas station on Philips Highway during a traffic stop.
“We thought we had a good grasp on the firearms on Mr. Golik introduced into the community only to find out that this firearm and others later on,” Mutz said. “It took us off guard and at that point we realized the scope and magnitude of what Mr. Golik had done.“
I wonder how many of Mr. Golik’s post-ATF informant guns were used in violent crime? Like we’ll ever know . . .
Once again, as in the Fast and Furious scandal involving ATF-enabled sales to known Mexican drug cartel members, we have the ATF letting guns “walk” without tracking, supervision or subsequent arrests. A fact that the ATF agents admitted in open court.
“The hardest part is not knowing who the defendants were. At the beginning, we were sort of at the mercy of Mr. Golik to tell us and direct us because only he knew who had the firearms,” says Mutz.
Lawyers for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Florida wouldn’t comment on this case. But check this comment from ATF Agent Fox:
“This case…it touches everyone in Jax [Jacksonville] and I feel strongly about that. Young woman are being taken advantage of and coerced into prostitution. The individuals that are preying on these ladies and controlling them with drugs are also controlling them with these firearms. And they are using these firearms to control their turf and assert their power in a criminal fashion.”
So the ATF admits that they allowed the gun “loans” to continue.
Clearly, “gunwalking” is standard ATF procedure. How many other cases are there like this across the U.S.A.? It’s high time Congress defunded and disbanded the ATF.
I would wager that cases like this happen on a frequent basis but never come to light. Utter bullshit that no one gets held accountable, but God help ya if you don’t cross a “T” or dot an “I” on a form 4, or (until recently) shoulder up a Sig brace.
Just “normal enforcement procedure” for the BATFE, no need to be concerned.
This is normal enforcement practice in a lot of federal agencies.
Why does it take months (even more than a year) for DEA to raid a known drug house? (Yeah, I know; they have to do a really, really thorough investigation, while the drugs still get sold, even though that’s illegal.)(But that’s really a whole other thing; if drug sales actually went down, what would all those DEA agents, police officers and paid CIs do for a living?)
Here we go again.
Another get your local bad guys some free untraceable guns.
The wunnerful BATF and Big fires at its most useless best .
Can these folks find their umbrellas in a rainstorm??
This is the only way these fucking clowns can build a case. These idiots are a literal solution in search of a problem that doesn’t exist. This is how their budgets are justified. Just like the FBI and their cultivated dumb-assed domestic terrorists. The last time I saw an ATF agent I gave him the finger to. Ill do the same with it here the next one I see.
F ATF
All this time the conspiracy was that the alphabet agencies were supplying drugs, firearms and kiddie porn intentionally to drum up business for themselves.
I’m starting to think maybe they’re just all a bunch of raging dumbasses.
Which is it G-Man, are you a criminal or a moron?
Are they dumb asses or are they deliberately involved and profiting off these crimes? When they get caught they hatch this kind of story to cover up their own cartel crimes.
Trick question, they’re proven that they can be both.
The ATF continues to run roughshod over the rule of law. From this article, What if they coerced a criminal defense lawyer into informing on *his own clients* to save his skin?
If they did I t would be difficult or impossible for the ATF to proceed with prosecutions in those cases, because attorney-client privilege would prevent any such evidence or testimony from coming into court.
But the betrayal of trust is still there. Even a scumbag had to be able to trust that his lawyer won’t rat him out.
I’m surprised this Golik didn’t get shanked in prison, and I CANNOT believe that the Florida Bar Association would ever let him practice again after this.
Privilege doesn’t apply to the planning of a crime.
Forget closing the fake “gunshow loophole”, let’s focus on closing the real and prevalent ATF loophole.
I have heard “gun experts” say doing away with the AFT would be worse because that don’t know what would replace it. I hope the AFT is completely defunded and ground into the dust bend of history. The government murders more people than it kills in the gas chamber or the electric chair.
I think it’s about high time the ATF was put out of business by WE the PEOPLE. How much longer are we going to have our rights choked by the same assholes out there doing crap like this? Insanity!
Marijuana enforcement from all of the states that legalized it will be their next reach. BATF is going nowhere. Is there a way to take the gun portion out of BATF and make it DOJ? Make BATF into BATM (Alcohol Tobacco and Marijuana)
No one, I say no one talks about Bush 2 and his Operation Wide Receive.
So post a link and, oh, I don’t know, a couple of sentences about it?
If you’re really ambitious, write it up and submit it to TTAG as an article.
Wide Receiver: Encourage FFLs to make suspect sales so you can see where the guns go.
Fast and Furious: Encourage FFLs to make suspect sales so you can order your agents not to watch where the guns go.
Today’s news: Shield a criminal from prosecution so you can use him as a Confidential Informant, act surprised when he uses his ‘get out of jail free’ card to commit crimes risk-free (ALL law enforcement agencies do this one).
When you put all these “operations” including Wide Receiver, Fast and Furious and this together we see a pattern coming out of the ATF. The ATF is just another crime syndicate that needs to be brought down with RICO laws.
When they get caught they play the victim. The ATF have set up plausible deniability. Through the use of FFLs and informants. This setup makes it seem to the lay person that they were just incompetent. When in fact they are criminally involved and profiting from these illegal activities.
Re: Fed Up:
“Today’s news: Shield a criminal from prosecution so you can use him as a Confidential Informant, act surprised when he uses his ‘get out of jail free’ card to commit crimes risk-free (ALL law enforcement agencies do this one).”
Thanks for the comment.
Reminds me of what the FBI did (and did NOT) do in the Whitey Bulger case in Boston. Criminal gangster with FBI protection from State criminal charges, and not prosecuted on Federal charges for YEARS.
Also the Feds, not being satisfied with having removed the “criminal intent / mens rea” component from so many crimes to make them easier to prosecute, are STILL trying to cheat the “justice” system.
John in Indy
Wide Receiver included a few things Fast and Furious didn’t…
Cooperation with the Mexican government; WR coordinated with the Mexican authorities, while F&F wasn’t mentioned to the Mexicans by the Feds.
Tracking; WR guns had tracking devices in them, so the Feds (both US and Mexican) could track where they went. F&F guns had no tracking devices; once sold the Feds were unable to track them at all.
Any comparison between the two should include these facts.
Well, we may have some inspectors general allowed to do their jobs over the next several years. Can they prosecute, or do they have to leak their findings to the administration-hostile among the media (but, I repeat myself), to get the torches and pitch forks stirred up?
Does anyone honestly believe the .Gov is reeely gonna downsize in power? Gimme a break
They do if their funding is frozen, downsized or eliminated entirely..
Which rarely happens.
Mr. Golik looks like Mark Cuban
Lesse what we gots here-
Guns, hookers, and blow.
JWM, someone is trying to horn in on you…
EDIT – Today’s story – The president of young Manhattan Democrats, who just so happens to be an employee of NYC mayor De Blasio, was arrested for possession of child porn:
http://nypost.com/2017/05/26/de-blasio-staffer-arrested-for-child-pornography/
And a knuckle dragging republican lord cheeto supporter killed two people on a train in Portland.
Citation, please.
Well, it was a stabbing and he might have been a democrat.
If Lord Cheeto goes down, so does the economy and the nation.
No, not a Republican, he was a batsh*t crazy (probably literally so) Nihilist Bernie supporter, who seemed to hate everyone, and who killed two men confronting him about his verbal attacks on 2 apparently Muslim women (wearing hijab). A link to this maniacs’ facebook postings is at:
http://www.independentsentinel.com/trump-hating-sanders-nazi-kills-good-samaritans-helping-muslim-teens/
The benefit of the Internet is that it takes very little work to find useful information about current events. The bad thing about the Internet is that it encourages immediate judgements and responses, before all necessary information CAN be known.
Blessed be the men who died defending these women.
John in Indy
So, in other words, woodenships, a one off name, is a liar and likely a kapo bloomberg plant.
If the left didn’t have lies they’d have nothing.
I know I’ll likely get flamed for saying this but…
It strikes me that while the ATF has “screwed up again”, that this is all just taking advantage of black markets that shouldn’t exist because drugs and prostitution should be legal for consenting adults. It’s the criminalization of these behaviors that creates the “value” on those markets and also what drives the *cough* proprietors of these businesses to violence.
IMHO, the government has created a problem that it basically is incapable of dealing with and this ATF incompetence/criminal action is merely a ripple effect.
If you do get flamed, I will loan you my asbestos pajamas for I agree totally with what you have said.
I agree the government learned from prohibition era where crime family’s took over made fortunes & government saw a chance to take over it all make everything illegal they could control it but opened Pandoras box instead
Totally agree on the prostitution bit. I’m not so sure about the drug bit. My basic political philosophy is that freedom should be maximized and government minimized. Basically, well ordered liberty. We need enough laws to prevent anarchy. It doesn’t matter that I think the use of hard drugs and sex work are immoral because what other people are doing is none of my business as long as they are not endangering me or my property.
Making prostitution illegal only helps pimps who use drugs and violence to rob people of their freedom. Legalized prostitution minimizes the whole human trafficking aspect of it. When something is legal, it is usually much more professional. Everybody can call the cops, their lawyers, the better business bureau, the local news, etc.
Highly addictive drugs rob people of their freedom. But, as long as we have doctors who legally are getting people hooked on opiates, it is hard to argue against legalizing drugs. Many of the opiod OD’s are the result of adulterated drugs. If they were legal, people would have access to much safer (not safe) drugs.
While the U.S. Constitution may have a prohibition on the establishment of religion (aka using government funds to support a church), there does not appear to be any prohibition on legislating morality.
From a strict ECON 101 perspective, attempts to regulate commerce on the supply side does not appear to work well when there is sufficient demand. Government efforts to restrict supply only raises prices, whether it be white market or the black market that arises to meet the unmet demand that the white market cannot satisfy.
Those in the drug biz may need some kind of protection, many need a few layers. The guns he holds will only be used in self defense or protecting his “product”.
Believe it or not, I understand this. If he is high level, he is not strung out and paranoid and knows more than most about the dangers of firearms. I doubt he would(personally) use a firearm against a LEO or give a firearm (that could be traced in any way to him) to anyone.
If this lawyer was using his guns for pawn to the hookers or pimps, that would be a different story. Low level drug using criminals just might do anything if they got desparate
This is not a comment on the actions of either Mr. Golik or the BATFE, but: The folks at First Coast News do a great deal of damage when they refer to Mr. Golik as a Duval County Public Defender. While he might be based in Duval County, he would be an attorney with the Fourth Circuit Public Defender’s office.
I’m sorry, I read this whole post but I don’t see where the Feds admit that they allowed this swell guy to walk guns to criminals with their blessing.
They’re not called “F-Troop” for nothing.