(The following is a very condensed version of a news report from Reuters. The story will be expanded as more facts become available, and anyone mentioned in this story should be presumed innocent until proven otherwise.)
In 1976, Victor Cobian’s father, Victoriano Cobian, asked his girlfriend Maria to marry him and move to Racine from Tonaya, a small agave farming town in Jalisco, Maria said in an interview. It was already common for people from Jalisco to migrate to and from Wisconsin, first for farm work, then for better paying factory jobs. Extended family, including Elias and Oswaldo Cobian, followed over the next several decades. Victor was born to Victoriano and Maria in 1982.
Victoriano, age 58, died March 2, 2013. Victor was under court supervision at the time for carrying a concealed “electric weapon” but was given permission to travel to Mexico and spend the final month with his father. The court would okay future trips to Mexico, for reasons unknown. (Victor having extended family in Mexico means there are many reasons the court may let him out of the range of probation.)
Members of the Cobian family worked with Mexican citizen and Cobian cousin Jesus Cisneros in 2018 to recruit family and friends to buy guns and take them to California where they were smuggled across the border.
On May 21, 2018, gunmen from a CJNG hit squad known as Delta tried to kill a Jalisco government minister – who previously served as the state’s attorney general – in a brazen afternoon attack outside a Japanese restaurant near the city center. A few weeks later, on June 9, a team of Mexican Federal Police investigating the attack gathered before dawn outside a Guadalajara cemetery, across from a two-story building used by Delta. Agents crept into the bright orange house through the garage. Moving upstairs, they found 36 weapons, including grenade launchers and nearly 8,000 rounds of ammunition. The Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generacion (CJNG) is one of Mexico’s top fentanyl trafficking gangs.
A Jalisco ballistics lab report showed 27 of the firearms were traced to the United States. It did not establish if the weapons were used in the attack. One of them, a Barrett .50 caliber registered as Gun #31 in the report, led investigators to Wisconsin. Weighing 30 pounds, Barrett .50 calibers are used by militaries around the world for their ability to rip through armored vehicles from over a mile away. They are among the most powerful weapons civilians can buy in the United States through licensed dealers and sell for around $9,000.
Gun #31 was traced to Shooters Sports Center in Caledonia where Victor Cobian’s cousin, Elias Cobian, purchased the gun on April 9, 2018. Another cousin, Oswaldo Cobian, also bought a .50 caliber rifle from Shooters on April 11. Oswaldo picked up another one a couple of months earlier. On July 10, Patrick Finnell, Elias and Oswaldo’s friend and coworker at an energy infrastructure company, walked out of Shooters Sports Center with another Barrett .50 caliber. Finnell later bought three more .50 calibers. In an interview, Finnell confirmed buying the weapon. Finnell said he bought the weapon on behalf of the brothers, who he said told him the gun was going to Mexico, adding he thought “they were full of shit.”
In Wisconsin, licensed dealers can legally sell multiple high-caliber semi-automatic rifles to adults. “We do not condone the illegal movement of firearms,” store owner Bernie Kupper said. He said it was not unusual for people to refer friends and family to the store.
In four U.S. states along the Mexico border, federal rules adopted a decade ago to combat rampant trafficking mean gun dealers must report multiple purchases of certain high caliber rifles. In Wisconsin and many other states, there are no such requirements.
Once in Mexico, the gun’s black market value increases to between $30,000 and $50,000. The great majority of illegal guns in Mexico come from the United States. 250,000 guns illegally cross the border each year. Mexico has tight gun laws and just a single gun store, located on a military base. By contrast, the United States has nearly 78,000 gun dealers – more than the combined number of McDonald’s, Burger King, Subway and Wendy’s franchises
In October 2018, agents investigating the Cobian cousins got a break. Local police in Oak Creek, near Racine, found multiple storage cases for high caliber firearms in a dumpster at a construction site. They suspected the discarded cases were a sign weapons were being trafficked. The dumpster was near Victor’s Again, a bar that Victor Cobian’s parents opened in 1991.
On February 28, 2019, after gathering intelligence for four months, agents saw the brothers carrying two FN SCAR assault rifles into Oswaldo’s garage. Agents were worried the guns would be moved to the border. They secured a search warrant in less than 24 hours.
In the parking lot of an abandoned KMart the next afternoon, around 75 agents from ATF, local police, FBI, and Homeland Security gathered. Backed by BearCat SWAT vehicles, they raided the homes of Patrick Finnell and Victor, Oswaldo and Elias Cobian, among others. Agents recovered 52 firearms, including the two FN SCARs.
No .50 caliber Barrett rifles were found. But Victor Cobian was arrested at his house with three empty Barrett cases and a conversion kit to turn weapons into fully automatic machine guns.
Also found were two Colt 1911 pistols sporting gold-plated grips and ornately decorated with cartel insignia. Victor said the conversion kit wasn’t his. He said he embellished the pistols in homage to his home state of Jalisco and his love of gangster TV shows. One of the pistols was engraved with San Judas Tadeo, a saint popular with Mexican narcotraffickers. The other was inlaid with a gold 50-peso coin, similar to coins stolen during a heist of Mexico’s Central bank in 2019. Carved below the coin were the letters “CJNG”.
All defendants entered not guilty pleas in February 2023. A jury trial is scheduled to begin May 6, 2024. Victor Cobian denied involvement in or knowledge of the alleged trafficking scheme.
The Racine case unlocked “the most prolific CJNG firearms trafficking network ever discovered,” said ATF agent Chris Demlein. The traffickers in Racine and two connected cells in other locations bought more than $600,000 of high-end military-style firearms in under a year.