Benjamin Cortez-Gomez says an empty wallet — and greed — drove him to sell guns after the COVID-19 pandemic torpedoed his low-paying catering gig.
“All you think about is that quick buck,” says the 32-year-old South Sider, who corresponded with the Chicago Sun-Times by email from jail because federal officials denied him permission to meet with a reporter.
“I’m talking about perhaps up to $10,000 in a day,” Cortez-Gomez says. “Who else makes that type of quick cash in a couple of hours — besides drug dealers?”
Federal agents arrested him in July 2020 after he bought seven handguns in Indiana and drove them back to Chicago to sell.
On Wednesday, he was sentenced to almost nine years in prison after pleading guilty to gun trafficking. He was one of more than 130 people arrested on gun charges during President Donald Trump’s Operation Legend, a crackdown on crime in Chicago.
Cortez-Gomez asked the judge for a five-year prison term, which would have allowed him to walk free with a sentence of “time served.” Prosecutors wanted a sentence of more than 11 years in prison.
Prosecutors say Cortez-Gomez was a “prolific” gun dealer who bought firearms from Indiana suppliers he found on the Internet, including a website called Armslist.
He left a message on the phone of one La Raza gang member from Chicago, saying, “Now, if you have some shooters that will help me get them off my hands and give me the loot, then I can go get them handguns,” according to prosecutors.
Cortez-Gomez denies the customer was a gang member.
And he says his crimes weren’t motivated by a desire to help criminals.
He says he just badly needed money after losing his job in 2020.
“I can say that my crime was more at a quick financial opportunity rather than anything else,” he says.
Cortez-Gomez says he would go to gun shows in Indiana and that, even though, as a felon, he’s banned from buying firearms, it was easy to get them.
“In Indiana, only an ID or driver’s license is required to purchase a firearm through a private seller,” he says.
At his sentencing, Cortez-Gomez appeared in an orange jump suit and black-frame glasses.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Elie Zenner told the judge that Cortez-Gomez was an “unrepentant and prolific gun-trafficker” and said Chicago is “awash” in illegal guns from Indiana. He said Cortez-Gomez knew he was selling to gang members who would provide them to shooters.
“Illegal guns was a way of life for him,” Zenner said.
Cortez-Gomez had studied law behind bars and represented himself for much of his case, but lawyer John Miraglia stepped in to speak for him at sentencing.
“The man has some genuine, decent qualities,” Miraglia said.
Two of Cortez-Gomez’s sisters gave testimonials on his behalf. Then, dabbing his eyes with a Kleenex, Cortez-Gomez said, “I am very remorseful.”
The judge noted Cortez-Gomez’s attempts at self-improvement in jail and his difficult life.
“I will not lay at your feet the entire problem of gun violence in Chicago,” Blakey said.
In sentencing Cortez-Gomez, the judge said he needed to give him a wakeup call.
“You were undeterred by prior prison sentences,” he said.
In his online correspondence with the Sun-Times, Cortez-Gomez wouldn’t give details of his gun deals.
According to court records, a concealed-carry permit in another man’s name, David Saldana, was found in the car he was driving when he was arrested.
“There is really no how-to manual,” Cortez-Gomez says. “It’s more about exploring the Indiana gun show community and getting to know people. Once you become close and friendly, it turns into financial gain, a business-making opportunity, and you become blind to the consequences.”
According to court records, Stephen King, 69, of Indianapolis, admitted buying guns from legitimate dealers and selling them to others, including at least 25 of them to Cortez-Gomez without verifying his identity.
He told investigators he thought Cortez-Gomez’s real name was David Saldana.
In 2022, King was sentenced to 18 months in prison for dealing firearms without a federal license. He sold more than 160 guns, prosecutors say. His lawyer told the judge that King’s hobby of buying and selling guns turned into an illegal enterprise.
“You’ve got to love this business,” King once said when buying two handguns from a federally licensed dealer in the Indianapolis suburbs, according to court records. “The products sell themselves.”
Though prosecutors say Cortez-Gomez’s gun running contributed to violence and bloodshed, he says: “I am against violence in Chicago, period.”
Before getting involved in gun-running, Cortez-Gomez says he worked in warehouses and restaurants like TGI Fridays, Little Caesars and Dunkin.
“Those jobs are hard labor,” he says.
He grew up in Elgin and moved to “nitty-gritty Chicago” in his teens. He lived in Palmer Square on the Northwest Side.
Cortez-Gomez says his father abused him and his mother. His father died of cancer in 2007, when Cortez-Gomez was 15.
“My son didn’t have a father figure growing up in his early teens and was a young boy with a lost mind with nowhere to go,” his mother said in a letter last month to the judge, asking for leniency.
Cortez-Gomez says he graduated from North-Grand High School in Hermosa Park in 2010 and joined the Guardian Angels in the summer of 2013, when he was 21. The Guardian Angels are unarmed volunteers who patrol CTA L trains, aiming to prevent violence.
Cortez-Gomez says they’d meet downtown and break up into groups to patrol different train lines. He says, for instance, that he once escorted a woman to her home from a train platform at 1 a.m. because she didn’t feel safe.
“I wanted to make a positive impact in my community,” he says.
In 2016, according to Cortez-Gomez, he was hustling to become a freelancer who feeds video to news organizations. One day, he arrived at the scene of a car that crashed in a police chase in Back of the Yards after a fatal gang shooting.
“They illegally searched my car, which led to the discovery of my police scanner,” he says. “They weren’t happy about it.”
He was charged with possession of a police scanner, but the case was dismissed when he forfeited it.
He says his dream of becoming a freelance photojournalist ended because he couldn’t afford the $10,000 cameras others were using — and the competition was too intense.
“I lost hope and gave that up but still listened to radio traffic near my house,” he says.
In 2018, he got arrested in a carjacking case. He pleaded guilty to a charge of aggravated unlawful restraint and was sentenced to four and a half years in prison.
But he says he wasn’t a carjacker. At his sentencing, his lawyer told the judge he was an accessory to the crime and got caught with the stolen vehicle but wasn’t involved in the robbery.
“There was no factual proof that I in fact had committed that alleged carjacking,” he told the Sun-Times. “A juvenile took the vehicle and passed it down to me. Yes, I was young and stupid. I regret many things, especially my past criminal convictions.”
Cortez-Gomez was on parole in that case when he was arrested for gun-trafficking.
That investigation stemmed from a tip from a woman who became an informant for the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
She was facing a misdemeanor child endangerment charge in Cook County criminal court, but was out of jail in lieu of bail.
The woman contacted a Cook County sheriff’s investigator, saying she knew someone who was buying guns in Indiana and selling them to gang members. The investigator contacted ATF agents who interviewed the woman on July 21, 2020, and launched the case against Cortez-Gomez.
The woman told the agents she and Cortez-Gomez traveled to Indianapolis every few days and bought as many as 10 guns on each trip.
The original plan was for the woman to arrange for Cortez-Gomez to sell guns to an undercover ATF agent posing as a gang member. But that plan fell apart when he drove to Indianapolis to buy guns on July 27, 2020 — before ATF agents could set up a sting.
The ATF agents felt they needed to keep Cortez-Gomez from putting those guns on the street in Chicago, so they set up surveillance and followed him from his home in Englewood.
Agents tailed him to Interstate 65 in northwest Indiana, then parked and waited for him to return.
Hours later, a U.S. Customs and Border Protection helicopter spotted the blue Dodge Charger that Cortez-Gomez was driving. Four unmarked ATF vehicles followed him back to Chicago.
At the 59th Street exit ramp on the Dan Ryan Expressway, ATF agents boxed in the Charger, broke the driver’s side window, pulled Cortez-Gomez from the car and arrested him. They said they found five semiautomatic handguns and two revolvers in the trunk.
ATF paid the informant $1,400, and the child-endangerment case against her was dropped, though federal authorities say that wasn’t part of their deal with her.
Among the key evidence in the case was a series of Snapchat messages between the informant and “Bennie Blanco,” the name Cortez-Gomez used on his Snapchat account.
Though Cortez-Gomez pleaded guilty to the gun-trafficking charge, he says the informant gave false information to the agents about the kind of car he drove and lied that she accompanied him on his gun-buying trips.
He also says the ATF agents didn’t follow him all the way to where he bought the guns in Indiana, so they didn’t see the transaction take place.
“That is a gray area that the feds had in my investigation,” he says.
Federal authorities acknowledged that they sped up their investigation because Cortez-Gomez unexpectedly decided to buy guns that day. They also said the informant’s story was wrong in parts.
Over the past five years, Cortez-Gomez had repeatedly asked the courts to release him from jail until his case was resolved, but judges denied his requests, saying he was a danger to the community and a flight risk.
“My previous prosecutor and attorney are the ones to blame for moving the case at a snail’s pace,” Cortez-Gomez says. “Nothing was being filed, and everything was being stalled even after post-pandemic court proceedings. My personal thought is that it shouldn’t have taken five years to resolve this plain and non-complex criminal case.”
Prosecutors disagree, saying in a court filing that Cortez-Gomez “explicitly declined to invoke his right to a speedy trial.”
Cortez-Gomez is suing the ATF agents who arrested him, saying they didn’t have probable cause and used excessive force when they smashed his car window, causing a cut on his hand that required stitches to close.
Cortez-Gomez says that, since his 2020 arrest, he’s been studying criminal law and hopes to become a paralegal, open a legal aid office and help incarcerated people. He says he used his legal knowledge in his own defense, which the judge acknowledged.
He says he regrets his involvement in gun-running and what he describes as a poor decision to make a quick buck during the pandemic.
“There are severe penalties for the conduct I pleaded guilty to — transporting firearms from one state to another,” Cortez-Gomez says. “In a sense, I can clearly understand why such gun crime penalties are becoming harsher in the state of Illinois. And, as a result of my experience in the federal legal system, it’s simply not worth the trouble, and I’ve learned a lot from it.”