The ex-cop involved in the Supreme Court Ghost Gun case

By his own admission, Dale Sutherland is an avid shapeshifter, taking on the roles of drug lord, arms dealer and mob boss while running extensive undercover operations for police in Washington, DC over a nearly thirty-year career. As a young officer, Sutherland says, he even stuck needles into his arm so he could pass himself off as an addict when buying drugs. Much of his most ambitious undercover work focused on taking guns off the streets.

On October 8, the Supreme Court will hear a case that could weaken the government’s ability to regulate domestically produced, non-serialized ghost guns, which are currently banned in DC. Many in law enforcement view such untraceable firearms as a serious threat and have seen spikes in the number of ghost guns used to commit crimes. Sutherland, who retired in 2013, founded a nonprofit five years ago that has funneled millions of dollars in anonymous money to the law firm and gun rights groups that took the ghost gun case to the Supreme Court.

“I don’t understand why he would do that,” said retired police sergeant Gerald Neill, who once worked at Sutherland, when told about his former colleague’s nonprofit. “From my perspective of the world, and probably Dale’s, we don’t want people to have ghost guns.”

The Office of Attorney General for the District of Columbia is among the law enforcement agencies urging the court to allow the regulation of ghost guns. In a statement on the case released by his office this summer, D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb said that “ghost guns have flooded into communities across the District at an alarming rate over the past decade. These untraceable weapons bypassed existing gun laws – such as background checks – and increasingly became the weapon of choice for those who commit violent crimes.”

The Metropolitan Police Department, Sutherland’s longtime employer, seized 25 ghost guns in 2018. That number rose to 524 in 2022, an increase of almost 2,000 percent. The same year, the Biden administration implemented a rule — the focus of the Supreme Court challenge — requiring manufacturers of “off-the-shelf” gun kits to add serial numbers to their products and conduct background checks on buyers. Law enforcement agencies have since reported a decrease in the number of ghost guns seized. The Metropolitan Police Department, for example, collected 407 such firearms in 2023 and 151 through June of this year.

Sutherland served on the force before the rise of ghost guns, but knows the risks officers take when they try to seize illegal firearms and stop those who traffic in them. In April, a French documentary series, “Dale L’Infiltre” or, in English, “Dale Undercover,” was shown at an international television festival in Cannes. It tells the story of how Sutherland, a mediocre student and athlete, became a lawyer and, inspired by “The French Connection,” discovered his talent for undercover work. Sutherland is also a pastor and the series explores the discomfort he sometimes felt about his lies and deceit, especially when they led to the justice system coming down hard on low-level addicts. “As a preacher and as a police officer you have conflicts within you,” he says in the series. “So many times I turned off my faith to do my job.”

He seemed to have no reservations about gun stabbing, and the series considers such an operation a turning point in his career. In the early 1990s, Sutherland and an associate, Joe Abdalla, led an informant, Arvell “Pork Chop” Williams, who was shot and killed. (Abdalla now sits on the board of the Constitutional Defense Fund, the nonprofit Sutherland founded and which serves as a conduit for the anonymously funded campaign to challenge gun restrictions.) In the series, Sutherland says department supervisors need someone had to blame for Williams’ murder, and that he was blackballed. “It seemed like I would never get a good job again,” Sutherland remembers. “I was going to be on patrol for the rest of my career.”

So Sutherland embarked on a daring venture. He would pose as a Philadelphia mobster named Richie Giovanni who was looking for guns, drugs and other illegal merchandise. “My commander knew, but he only knew so much,” Sutherland recalled. “We tried to tell him only what he needed to hear, and not too much of the other person.” Sutherland put a Rolex on his wrist and diamond rings on his fingers. He decorated the body shop office used in the operation with a statue of the Virgin Mary, smoothed his dark hair and, cigar in hand, began giving audiences to drug and arms dealers. “Suddenly there were designer brands everywhere in the house, Gucci and Versace,” Sutherland’s daughter recalls in the series. “And when he went to get a pedicure and manicure with clear nail polish, I thought, ‘Okay, he’s really going all in on this thing.'”

Most of the targets were black, but there were also three white men described in the series as “from the mountains” who wanted to unload weapons. “We had guys bringing guns into town,” Sutherland recalled, “and we thought maybe they were like those other drug addicts who sell guns to drug dealers and make our streets unsafe, and they kill cops and murder people and kill it of normal citizens, and so we had to catch these guys. In one deal, ten weapons were purchased from the men, including three fully automatic firearms.

After the targets were captured, the operation was praised. “Back then, all we were doing was arresting drug dealers left and left,” Sutherland says in the series. “And everyone thought it was great that we had gotten guns from a white group that was bringing guns to an African-American city.”

The series notes that Sutherland faced criticism from enemies in the department and federal prosecutors. A department ally and former boss admits “questionable” things happened to Sutherland and his team. “People had guns in the drawer that they forgot to use as evidence,” he says.

But Sutherland’s gifts were enormous. “I encountered a lot of very good undercover officers, but Dale was so much better than them all,” former DC Police Chief Peter Newsham says in the series. In an interview for this story, Newsham, who now heads the Prince William County Police Department, said Sutherland had a “remarkable” ability to gain confidence and remain calm in situations where his life was on the line, work that requires must be. “almost fearless.”

Newsham said he does not recall Sutherland ever expressing support or opposition to the District’s gun laws, but that he would have upheld them regardless of personal beliefs. “If he were to leave the force and decide to support any cause,” Newsham said, “it wouldn’t change my opinion of what he did while he was on the force.”

In addition to the ghost gun case, the law firm and gun rights groups, funded by Sutherland’s nonprofit, have filed about two dozen legal challenges to gun restrictions across the country, intending to take cases to a now admissible court in hopes of scuttling gun laws to bring.

It is unclear whether Sutherland is personally committed to this effort, or merely acting as an intermediary in exchange for compensation. He did not respond to requests for comment. At the end of the series, Sutherland expresses concern that some who hear his story, due to his role as a cop and preacher, may think he never struggled with doubts. “They have the idea that I had it all figured out, that I was doing well, or that I was always balanced. that’s ridiculous,” he says. “My mind is as cunning and rotten as anyone else’s.”