‘Drug dealer’ defense fails for South Holland man convicted of dealing guns
BY KIM JANSSEN Federal Courts Reporter September 20, 2013 1:00PM
David “Big Dave” Lewisbey — the 23-year-old South Holland man who tried to convince jurors he was a drug dealer, not a gun runner — failed in his audacious bid for freedom Friday when he was found guilty of five counts of illegal arms trading.
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Updated: September 21, 2013 2:10AM
David “Big Dave” Lewisbey — the 23-year-old South Holland man who tried to convince jurors he was a drug dealer, not a gun runner — failed in his audacious bid for freedom Friday when he was found guilty of five counts of illegal arms trading.
A federal jury took just 3½ hours to convict Lewisbey, who prosecutors alleged “flooded the streets of Chicago” with 43 illegal guns in a single weekend last year.
But Lewisbey’s attorney, Beau Brindley, said Lewisbey — a black south suburbanite — was being held to a different standard than the white Indiana men who sold him the guns at Indiana gun shows.
“There’s no difference between what Mr. Lewisbey did and what they did, except the neighborhood he lives in,” Brindley said, adding that he believed the U.S. attorney’s office charged Lewisbey because it was under political pressure from comments Mayor Rahm Emanuel and former Mayor Richard M. Daley made about the need to tackle gun crime.
“It is not the place of prosecutors to do that,” he said. “If we need a change in the law, it’s up to Congress to act.”
Prosecutors declined to respond to that allegation. But they said during the two-week trial that Lewisbey took advantage of Indiana’s more relaxed gun laws to buy duffel bags full of weapons that he later illegally sold for profit in Chicago.
Private gun collectors in Indiana are free to buy and sell from one another without background checks, paperwork or any waiting period, as long as they do it only occasionally and not to earn a living — a defense Lewisbey raised when he took the stand in his own defense.
But prosecutors presented evidence that Lewisbey traveled back and forth repeatedly between Illinois and Indiana gun shows to sell guns during a weekend in April 2012, and that he falsely claimed an Indiana address to get around the law, making nearly $38,000 from guns that had a street value of less than half that.
They spread out the arsenal of 43 guns on a table for jurors to see, and showed Lewisbey brandishing stacks of $100 bills and guns in cellphone “selfies,” as well as Facebook posts and messages in which he appeared to discuss his thriving gun trade.
Faced with that, Lewisbey, who was not charged with any drug crimes, testified, “I made nearly all my money selling weed.”
During a memorable cross-examination from prosecutor Chris Parente, Lewisbey then claimed he’d buried most of his drug cash at secret locations.
“Like a pirate?” Parente asked him.
Acting U.S. Attorney Gary Shapiro said after the verdict Friday that the pirate jibe “was the kind of line you only wish you could have said.”
Lewisbey, who waved to his crying mother before he was led back into custody, faces up to 35 years behind bars when he is sentenced in December.
