The top investigator at New York City’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) takes gun violence personally. His mother was shot to death by her crazy boyfriend, and he was also shot when he was 15 years old.
John DeVito, who grew up in low-income housing in Alabama, said he can still smell gunpowder when he remembers his mother’s tragic death.
“She didn’t deserve that,” said DeVito, who was shot three times in the chest when she tried to intervene.
“She was a good person, a good woman trying to rebuild her life.”
After her death, DeVito joined the ATF as an intern and never looked back.
He became an official agent in 1997 and held multiple posts in Miami, Washington, D.C., Virginia and New Jersey before coming to the city in 2019.
As a street detective in Miami, he investigated armed drug trafficking organizations, armed robberies of commercial businesses, armed carjackings, gang-related extortion, murder, and gun trafficking crimes.
He also spent more than 10 years as an operator for the ATF’s Special Response Team, a tactical group that responds to high-risk law enforcement operations.
In New York, DeVito helped push for a stronger partnership between the NYPD and ATF, setting up daily in-person and Zoom meetings about mass shootings in the city that now involve multiple agencies. The Gun Violence Strategic Partnership has evolved into the Gun Violence Strategic Partnership.
His goal, which brought together government agencies daily, was that instead of guns used in crimes being piled up and tracked sporadically, they were immediately and regularly tracked, where they came from, and other The purpose was to be able to confirm whether it was used in a crime. It’s a crime, he said.
He counts the incident of subway gunman Frank James, who shot and killed 10 people on the N subway in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, on April 12, 2022, as a sign that his plan is coming to fruition.
ATF helped NYPD track down the gun James used to shoot rush-hour commuters in Ohio, obtained documentation proving James purchased the gun, and police and helped prosecutors build a strong case against him.
James was sentenced to 10 concurrent life sentences for this massacre.
“Right now, we’re doing this as standard operating procedure,” DeVito said.
“New York is now being looked at as a model.”
The now 49-year-old father of twin 12-year-old girls is ultimately focused on bad guys who use guns, he said.
“Guns aren’t the problem,” said DeVito, who plans to retire next month.
“I’m a supporter of the Second Amendment. At the end of the day, the problem is that guns end up in the wrong hands.”
DeVito said the ATF is facing new challenges from “plastic pipelines,” or man-made ghost guns.
Homemade guns currently make up a small portion of all firearms in the city, but they could become a bigger problem in the future, says a roomful of computer-generated guns on display on the 35th floor of the ATF office in Lower. Mr. Nakamura said. Manhattan.
Guns such as rifles and revolvers are a combination of computer-generated plastic parts and purchased metal parts.
The plastic parts are made to look like brightly colored toys, he explained as he held one of the neon green molds.
He explained that anyone who wants a gun can now use a 3D printer to manufacture the gun body, but they still need to buy the parts for the gun.
“Some parts of guns can’t be digitally printed, so they still have to be purchased,” he says.
But that’s about to change.
“That’s the next evolution,” he said.
“Ultimately, composite plastics will become so durable that at some point in our lifetime we will see composite plastics being made into slides and barrels.”
DeVito plans to spend more time with his family after he retires in Tennessee, saying his mother’s death shaped him as a person.
“Since then, I have lived every day with the guilt of not being able to protect my mother and the shame of begging for someone else’s life,” he said.
“But I was very, very lucky. I lived.”
