Law enforcement for the day

Mosi Secret (definitely a name to conjure with) has an article in The New York Times about crime in the Big Apple:

During the secret meetings at their clubhouse in Brooklyn, the members of an outlaw motorcycle gang named the Forbidden Ones secured themselves with assault rifles, pistols, and even grenades to protect themselves from intruders, the authorities said. But their first— and most imposing— line of defense was a cannon, at the ready with fifty-caliber rounds, aimed at the door should anyone dare to infiltrate their ranks.
But what the men did not know was that despite their fortifications, one of their own had turned on them. Their very own “enforcer”, responsible for ensuring that they were all well-armed with guns and explosives, was a confidential informer working with the NYPD and federal agents to uncover the sale of a huge cache of weapons.
In predawn raids recently, law enforcement officials arrested seven members of the Forbidden Ones and two other Brooklyn-based motorcycle gangs, the Dirty Ones and the Troublemakers, and charged them with trafficking high-caliber weapons. An eighth man charged was already in prison.
Among those discovered, in fifteen locations, were AK-47 assault rifles, homemade bombs ,and a .410-caliber revolver, the police said.  Some of the guns were kept at a gang member’s home, where his wife ran a daycare center.
The men arrested had nicknames like Spider and Afro, and some literally wore their accomplishments on their sleeves. The one-percent patch they wore declared that they had rejected society and lived outside the law. And the bangout patch, showing two handguns crossing each other, signified that the member had assaulted or had another confrontation with the police. Most of the gun sales were made in tattoo parlors, the police said.
The defendants, ranging in age from 33 to 61, were scheduled to be arraigned in Federal District Court in Brooklyn, but only three made court appearances. Four others were taken to the hospital for heroin detoxification and treatment for high blood pressure. The men face up to five years in prison if convicted.
Officials said the leader of the trafficking scheme was Scott Brannigan, known as the Spider. Prosecutors said Brannigan, 61, sold sixteen firearms and about fourteen hundred rounds of ammunition, including armor-piercing rounds, to an undercover officer. The most expensive of the arms, at $2,000, was the cannon, which came with ammunition and the black powder necessary to fire it.
The first undercover gun buy was in October of 2010. The confidential informer led an undercover officer to a tattoo parlor on Rockaway Beach Boulevard in Queens. At a nearby house, the informer paid a thousand dollars for a Yugoslav assault rifle and ammunition, while the undercover officer looked on. It went on like that, the police said, for the next two years.

Rico says besides being criminally stupid, which should be obvious, these guys have so little imagination; really, the Forbidden Ones? The Dirty Ones? The Troublemakers? (Ooohh, scary.) And that nasty cannon is available on-line (probably for less money) from reputable Civil War-era cannon vendors, and isn't even illegal: According to United States Federal Regulations, a cannon that is not capable of firing fixed ammunition (fixed ammunition refers to a projectile and powder charge than can be loaded as a single unit) and manufactured on or before 1898, and replicas thereof, are antiques and not subject to the provisions of either the Gun Control Act of 1968 or the National Firearms Act of 1934.