Patrick “Tate” Adamiak never sold a single real firearm—not one—even though he sold $10,000 per month of military gear and gun parts legally as one of Gun Broker’s top 500 dealers. That is until the ATF decided to target him personally, frame him and lie under oath about the facts of his case. Now, unless someone quickly rights this unconstitutional wrong, Adamiak will be held in federal prison until 2042.
Adamiak, clearly, is the type of American most people admire.
“I am extremely patriotic. My whole life has been that way,” he told the Second Amendment Foundation by phone from a federal prison in New Jersey. “I am still proud to be American, proud of our flag and proud to be in this country. I have always had a strong desire to succeed.”
Adamiak enlisted in the Navy when he was 17, and eventually became an E-6 Master-at-Arms. He has a bachelor’s degree and was working on a master’s until his arrest. He was on track for an officer’s commission within Naval Special Warfare.
“I was pursuing becoming a SEAL officer,” he said. “I went to California for the first phase. A few months after that I was arrested, after a decade of working my ass off.”
He has always been “into guns.”
“My dad started teaching firearm safety,” he said. “I had BB-guns, and then I got my first rifle when I was eight. Since then, I’ve been hooked. I started collecting military gear and guns until I had a vast collection. This was our hobby together – me and my dad. We were building a collection together. I have about 150 firearms in my collection,” Adamiak said.
By 2016, his personal collection was gaining serious momentum.
“I was buying guns, military surplus and replica firearms,” he said. “My idea was to build a military display museum. I started buying, selling and trading to start my business, while I was in the Navy.”
Adamiak’s hobby quickly turned into a side-hustle – a hobby or pastime that pays for itself.
“I started focusing on that,” he said. “I got an LLC, a business license and a tax number. I started selling on Gun Broker. I became one of the top 500 sellers of niche gun parts. I’d buy in bulk and sell off a couple items. That’s how my business started, and it really took off.”
Adamiak was contacted by another large dealer who had similar interests and owns a military surplus museum.
“Basically, I put in a big list – a bulk order,” he said. “He started shipping to me every two or three weeks. I would buy at wholesale prices. It was completely legal – a big bunch of gun stuff. I obtained a replica Mark 19 grenade launcher and a replica M240 machinegun, which they later lied about at my trial.”
Confidential Informant
The confidential informant, or CI, that brought Adamiak’s freedom to an end was cooperating with the ATF to work off charges of his own.
“He used to own a machinegun shop,” Adamiak said. “The ATF raided his house, found a gun and charged him with felon in possession. He kept asking me for a machinegun, which I never got him. I got him a shroud off of Gun Broker. The ATF paid him around $8,000 for my case alone.”
“To be clear, I never sold a single item that qualifies as a firearm or requires an FFL (Federal Firearm License). Only non-regulated gun parts,” Adamiak said.
While dropping off gear at Adamiak’s home, the CI saw the replica grenade launcher and belt-fed machinegun replicas. He asked Adamiak if he had an SOT (Class 3 FFL).
“No, they’re replicas,” Adamiak replied. “That was the end of the conversation. We finished trading and bartering and he left.”
From this point forward, Adamiak said he became the target of a “fishing expedition by the ATF.”
“I was repeatedly asked by various people if I had machineguns for sale, and my answer never changed: No!” he said. “They attempted over and over again to have me source or put together a machinegun for them, but as a law-abiding citizen, I refused. I even cited NFA rules on several occasions in writing. I wouldn’t even bend a MAC-10 flat for them, which they asked me to do many times.”
Adamiak did agree to broker the purchase of a PPSh-41 barrel shroud for a client. The part does not qualify as a firearm.
“It was literally purchased in open commerce, with a business check, from a confirmed FFL as an unregulated part directly off of Gun Broker,” he said. “Evidently, the ATF must have realized this was the closest thing they could get from me to a firearm, but what they really wanted was to get in my house to see the Mark 19 and the M240 replicas that their CI was boasting about.”
“When applying for their search warrant the ATF told the judge in a criminal complaint that at issue was the PPSh-41 barrel shroud that they said was a machinegun, but that was not even close, legally,” Adamiak said.
Show Trial
More than 40 federal agents and police officers raided Adamiak’s home and a rental property he owned. Agents came from the ATF, FBI, HIS, NCIS, SWAT, Bomb Squad and local police.
“They turned my house upside-down, but did not find a single functional machinegun or destructive device,” Adamiak said.
The agents seized about 35 replica firearms and parts from Adamiak’s personal collection and labeled them “suspected machineguns and destructive devices.”
Most worrisome, the agents seized money and silver Adamiak collected as “proceeds of illegal activity,” including his antique currency collection, which was worth thousands of dollars. Eventually, hiring an attorney was difficult for Adamiak because law enforcement took all of his savings.
“It’s my opinion and that of my family’s that the ATF realized they had messed up after they didn’t find a single illegal weapon,” Adamiak said. “So, they completely reinterpreted the statutes and implemented a new rule to spin the jury and get me convicted. They manufactured crime to convict me.”
The ATF’s first indictment charged Adamiak with possessing 33 machineguns. There were no destructive devices mentioned. To counter, Adamiak and his attorneys hired former ATF senior official Dan O’Kelly as a defense witness.
O’Kelly joined the ATF as a Special Agent in 1988 after serving 10 years as a sworn police officer. He became a legend within the agency, including a stint as the lead instructor of Firearm Technology on staff at the ATF National Academy. O’Kelly has taught internationally and co-wrote the program establishing the Certified Firearm Specialist for the ATF, while he was at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.
The prosecutors knew that O’Kelly would make mincemeat of their charges, so they reindicted Adamiak, charging him with possession of one machinegun and four destructive devices.
“They knew we’d make them look like fools at trial with Dan’s testimony, so the AUSA filed motions to block his expert testimony saying, ‘Any testimony about the definition of a frame or receiver of a machinegun would be both irrelevant and confusing to the jury.’” Adamiak explained.
His trial, he said, was “literally theatrical.”
“The AUSA absolutely twisted every fact, cherry-picked messages to completely change the whole narrative, and blatantly lied about everything to make me look bad,” he said.
- She claimed the down payment for Adamiak’s house were profits of illegal gun trafficking. Adamiak bought his house a year before he started his hobby business using his Navy pay.
- She claimed Gun broker is the dark web.
- She used his military training against him.
- She claimed he stole parts from the military, despite the fact that he had detailed records for every single part.
- She claimed his honest business strategy of buying low and selling for profit was “greed.”
- She attempted to make Adamiak look like a neo-Nazi because he had his grandfather’s WWII war trophies stored in his safe, some of which had German markings on them.
Throughout the trial, the ATF claimed that their CI had warned Adamiak about the “illegal weapons.” Most worrisome was the replica M249, which cannot even chamber a live round.
“The ATF even admitted in the report that it’s a replica,” Adamiak said. “The judge even brought this up in my sentencing order which indicates that she still thinks it’s real. It’s fake!”
All of the counts against him were almost laughable. None made any legal sense.
- Counts 1 and 2 concerned the PPSh-41 receiver, which is not a firearm under current federal law.
- Counts 3 and 4 concerned his M203 and M79, which are Title 1 firearms that were legally transferred by an FFL. Neither had a 40mm barrel affixed. Adamiak had 37mm barrels for both, which are legal and not subject to National Firearms Act (NFA) regulation.
- Count 5 concerned two inert RPGs, which were missing all of the parts to make them functional and had holes drilled directly into their chambers.
“My lawyers said that they were almost happy that I was charged with these RPGs because it was so ridiculous that it would damage the ATF’s creditability and made the jury question their logic,” Adamiak said. “Unfortunately, the ATF decided to take my inert RPGs to their lab, completely rebuild them with components off one of their own real RPGs and demonstrate that they would work by shooting a .30 caliber training round in a self-contained firing mechanism. They essentially inserted a bolt-action rifle into the tube that looks like a rocket, fired one shot and then said it’s a destructive device.”
Continued Lies
Throughout the trial, the ATF’s attorneys showed jurors pictures of Adamiak’s extensive personal collection, including random parts, barrel shrouds and MAC-10 flats.
“They told the jury these were all machineguns,” he said. “The worst was the M240. They displayed a photo of the ATF case agent holding the belt-fed M240 replica and testified that it was a machinegun, and also made filings saying the same thing, despite the fact that the ATF’s own report says it’s a replica and not a firearm at all.”
Rather than winning the trial as his attorneys had claimed they would do, Adamiak was found guilty and sentenced to 20-years imprisonment. His attorneys never even called O’Kelly to testify, whom Adamiak had paid thousands of dollars just to be there.
O’Kelly was not impressed by the prosecution, which he believes was unfair.
“This was a prosecution by people who don’t know enough about guns, who don’t realize that what they’re looking at doesn’t satisfy the statutory definition,” O’Kelly told the Second Amendment Foundation. “When ATF encounters some of these devices, they say a forced reset trigger is a machinegun or a brace is a shoulder stock when they’re not. Then, armed with not enough information, they take it to a federal prosecutor, who takes them at face value. The next thing you know is someone is indicted, and their entire life is over.”
Takeaways
The ATF did not return calls or emails for this story. However, they could not wait to tell the world about Adamiak’s 20-year sentence.
“NORFOLK, Va. – A Virginia Beach man was sentenced yesterday to 20 years in prison for possessing and selling unregistered machineguns and possessing unregistered destructive devices,” a press release sent out in June 2023 falsely claims.
“According to court records and evidence presented at trial, between approximately October 2021 and April 2022, Patrick Tate Adamiak, 28, was obtaining illegal machine guns that were not registered and he was selling these machine guns online. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) purchased eight machine guns from him through a confidential source. They then executed a search warrant at Adamiak’s residence and recovered 25 additional unregistered firearms. A search warrant at his residence found that Adamiak was in possession of two grenade launchers and two antitank missile launchers. Adamiak is a Master at Arms in the U.S. Navy,” the Justice Department press release states.
Thankfully, the Navy never believed any of these false allegations. They never prosecuted Adamiak. In fact, the Navy never even sent him a letter.
Rather than demoting him, they let him burn through his personal leave while in jail. Usually, once a sailor goes to jail, they’re considered as an Unauthorized Absence (UA in military parlance), but with Adamiak, things were different.
The Navy continued to pay him as an E-6 on the 1st and 15th of every month. Once he ran out of leave, he received a DD214 with an honorable discharge.
Unfortunately, Adamiak’s mother died about a month after his arrest, according to his father, David Adamiak.
“It was terrible. What scumbags the ATF are,” his father said. “They arrested him on my wife’s birthday and she died about a month later. They put her in the grave.”
Said David Adamiak: “I’m at my wit’s end. I can’t focus. I can’t believe this would happen to such a patriot. He’s been around guns since he was very young. I taught him how to shoot, and it was all used against him in court. The ATF took this model Sten – it’s just a Sten model. They took it back to their lab, but they couldn’t even get it to fire, but they said now that’s a machinegun. That was pretty much like their entire case.”
A GiveSendGo account has been established to help Adamiak raise funds for his legal battles.
He can be contacted at [email protected] or by mail at:
Patrick Tate Adamiak, #95252-509
Federal Correctional Institution Fort Dix
PO Box 2000
Joint Base MDL NJ, 08640
This story is courtesy of the Second Amendment Foundation’s Investigative Journalism Project. Click here to make a tax-deductible donation to support the project.
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