A Chelsea man has copped to peddling illegal machinegun conversion kits to a covert fed in Boston, it was disclosed Wednesday. Michael Williams, 50, entered a guilty plea to charges of transferring or possessing machineguns and being a felon with ammo, per the U.S. Attorney's Office. Williams, previously convicted of a felony which bars him from gun ownership, now faces up to 20 years in the slammer and might be fined half a million bucks.
According to a statement by the U.S. Attorney's Office, Williams had hatched a deal in January last year to sell several conversion devices that could turn pistols into automatic fire guns; this, he sold to an undercover agent, then was slapped with an indictment by a federal grand jury after a previous arrest in July. U.S. District Court Judge Denise J. Casper is slated to drop the gavel on his sentence May 15, putting the final note on a saga that began with under-the-table deals and cloak-and-dagger meetups.
Williams met with the undercover fed, whose identity remains under wraps, twice to trade the illicit items – the first exchange took place on Jan. 12, 2023, where Williams handed over one conversion kit and an assortment of bullets, and the follow-up deal went down the next day with two more gadgets changing hands, officials said.
The gravity of the offenses could land Williams a decade-long stay behind bars for each charge, alongside supervised release and the hefty fines; sentences that underscore the hard line U.S. courts and law enforcement agencies take on gun trafficking, especially when it involves enabling weaponry to rain bullets at the squeeze of a trigger. Acting U.S. Attorney Joshua S. Levy, Special Agent in Charge Jodi Cohen of the FBI's Boston Division, and Chelsea Police Chief Keith Houghton were the trio that announced the guilty verdict, with Assistant U.S. Attorney John T. Dawley leading the charge in the courtroom.
