If you are a Martini Henry or Martini Cadet fan you probably know or have done busines with Ken Chaffer at Jemtreks in Australia
http://winsoft.net.au/~jemtrek/Recently The Sydney Police raided Jemtreks and seized their inventory. Jemtreks is not in Sydney but Gulgong. This is about like the The Houston Police driving up to Dallas and doing a raid.
Details about why or how have been sketchy. Ken latest email fills in the details. Can this happen here?
Here's Ken's email
Dear Douglas,
With the raid and court thing, I can't say a great deal about it until after the court case which is now set down for the 26th, 27th, and 28th November 2003. I have been to court five times so far to get to this stage. My Barrister, Mr Terry Shulze,is one of your countrymen also and knows a lot of our clients personally.
Basically, what happened, is that we were subjected to a full blown raid on the 30th April, which lasted a full week, 8 cops here every day, and the last day there was 14 of them. there was also a 24 hour cop parked out the front for the duration, checking every one coming and going. This raid, was on the pretext of my dealer's licence renewal, which was due on the 30th June, for which I had already paid for that, and my employees permits. The cheque had already been cashed in early April.
Anyway, basically, these cops checked every gun, frame, and reciever we had, both dealers stock, and all our own personal collections, against records they had with the numbers on the guns, the book entries, the computer records, and the acquisition and disposal books. A girl from the Firearms Registry had spent three days here a month before, checking FAR records with ours, and found about 80 inaccuracies, out of about 6,500 entries, and mostly these inaccuracies were on the FAR side, like a wrong number eg: a 65 reading as 56 etc. She went back to FAR on the Friday, to change the records to reflect the same on both. She commented that ours was the best set of books that she had seen so far. She was promptly transferred out of the dealers section on the following monday morning.
Steve Gregory was head of the dealer's section in FAR. He went on Holidays, a week before the raid, and returned to work a week after the raid. He has since left (or been pushed?) out of FAR altogether and is now in Tasmania somewhere.
At the same time as we were raided (within a week of one another), There was also another dealer in Queensland and one in Victoria, both mates of mine, who were also raided. Both handled the same sort of stuff, both small family run businesses like us, both with very limited financial resources, and both were charged with exactly the same charges like us. Another BIG thing we three dealers had in common, we were all founding members of the Pauline Hanson One Nation, Political party, which proved to be such a big threat to the other two major political parties in Australia.
On or about the 28th August Pauline Hanson and co founder David Etteridge were jailed in Queensland, on trumped up charges of electoral fraud, and became Autralia's first Political prisoners, and caused a public out cry which is still going on as I write this.
Anyway, this special squad of cops, (From the Firearms Crimes Task team), affectionately known in our circles as the Gestapo, (In fact the gestapo could learn a thing or two off these fellows), continued their 100% audit. This was the first audit EVER.
Back in 1996 when they changed the laws, the whole premises was inspected by the local police, and was classed as a STRONG ROOM. These cops,(Gestapo), reckon it is not a strong room, and charged me with two counts :
"Unsecure Firearms category A and B" and Unsecure Firearms category C,D, & H" Which is effectively every gun we owned, which was not a genuine antique. In fact 50--60 of the guns they stole, off us were genuine antiques, that were registered off other dealers interstate where the laws vary from here in NSW. So basically it is one lot of cops word against the other , and we are in the middle. The local cops were horrified.
Under the 1996 act, if we get found guilty or plead guilty, we lose every last gun we have (Worth somewhere between 1.5 and 1.75 Million dollars), lose our gun licenses for ten years, and can spend up to 14 years in jail. So pleading guilty is not an option, besides why plead guilty when you know you're not?
We are pleading not guilty to all charges, but I am under no illusions, that we will get a fair trial. The whole justice system out here stinks to high heaven, and is riddled with corruption. The judges do basically what the Government tells them to do.
We were only a small family run business, with every last cent we had, tied up in our guns, but by the same token we had risen to number one in Australia for exports of firearms of any type. We were also amongst the top ten gun retailers in NSW, so we were seen by the Government as being a "Tall Poppy" in the industry, and very easy to target for political gain.
They stole 2,750 complete guns, plus hundreds of frames, recievers, barreled actions and parts guns, and all our ammunition and collectors cartridges.
We have less than 1% of our stock left (antiques, spare parts, and accessories), which don't require a licence, so we have been selling whatever we can of these, and our own personal assets just to survive, until we know the outcome of the court case.
In the meantime, I have been writing two books. The first, which I want to get published first, (If I can find a good publisher in the USA to push it), I first started writing 23 years ago, and is about my experiences as an Opal Miner at Lightning Ridge from 1970 --1973. I believe it will have a wider readership than the gun one, and I am up to 260 pages on that one and only have 70--80 pages to go and it can go to the publishers. The second book is about the guns, and the raid in particular. It starts off with me as a small boy of eight years old collecting air rifles, and progresses through all the law changes, the raid, and the outcome of the court case. I have done the first 80 pages of that one, plus the section on the raid, so I only have to fill in the gaps, and some of these gaps need a fair bit of research. I have put that one on the back burner for the time being, until I can get the Ridge one finished.
So win lose or draw, there will be a book on the guns, and I would definately like the NRA to get behind it and push it because, it happened here, it is only a matter of time before it can happen anywhere. I am hearing horror stories every day of the week regarding guns in this country, and it seems like everyone is powerless to stop it. The apathy out here is simply unbelievable.
Kindest regards,
Ken.
