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![So much for 'free trade': From a basement near Baltimore, he 'plotted to smuggle' guns to Cameroon Vide](https://2img.net/i/fa/vide.gif) | Subject: So much for 'free trade': From a basement near Baltimore, he 'plotted to smuggle' guns to Cameroon Fri Oct 07, 2022 12:34 am | |
| Cameroonians in Maryland say they understand why.
![So much for 'free trade': From a basement near Baltimore, he 'plotted to smuggle' guns to Cameroon QYEUPZSA7EI63DDOSODL27GYEY](https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=https://arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.com/public/QYEUPZSA7EI63DDOSODL27GYEY.jpg&w=916)
ROSEDALE, Md. — They called the cramped basement of the red brick house in the Baltimore suburbs “the lab” and agreed to leave their phones in a bucket at the door before they went in. On group chats, they went by aliases and spoke in code words about the projects they worked on inside.
Deliveries kept arriving at “the lab” in 2018 and 2019, federal agents later discovered. Thousands of rounds of ammunition. A gas mask. A ghillie suit, a full-body camouflage suit worn by hunters or military snipers. They were addressed to Tamufor St. Michael, the house’s owner. He bought 24 rifles online between 2017 and 2019, according to court records, and picked them up from a nearby gun shop.
St. Michael didn’t intend to keep the arsenal he’d amassed at his home in Baltimore County’s Rosedale community with a group of volunteers. Instead, he wrapped the guns in metal foil and hid them in the bed of a Toyota pickup truck loaded into a shipping container to Nigeria, prosecutors said, destined for the front line of a bloody civil conflict over language and identity in St. Michael’s native Cameroon.
Cameroonians in Maryland, who’ve spent years watching conflict unfold in their home country from afar, are torn as sentencing looms for St. Michael, who is out on supervised release after pleading guilty to felony charges of conspiracy and violating the Arms Export Control Act.
Some see him as a lawbreaker. Others see a patriot who went too far.
St. Michael and Robert Bonsib, the lawyer representing him, declined to comment on his case. But court records and interviews with those who knew St. Michael tell the story of a journey that took the now-42-year-old activist from a quiet arrival in the U.S. and enlistment in the U.S. Navy to the leader of a covert effort that prosecutors cast as a plot to evade American authorities and smuggle arms.
Federal investigators who testified in court about what they found described alarming volumes of weaponry and a basement of equipment resembling a full-scale manufacturing operation, capable of inflicting serious damage.
Still, “people consider him as a messiah,” said Eric Tataw, a Cameroonian activist in Lanham who runs a car rental company. “If every single other Cameroonian had the opportunity, they would send guns.
.https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/10/06/cameroon-gun-smuggling-st-michael/
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