Donnie Reynolds Jr.
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Donnie Reynolds Jr. is a Tennessee businessman, an antique-firearms collector who ran four companies, including trucking and high-end car dealing, serving a life-plus-75-year federal sentence with no possibility of parole. He has spent the past decade at the Communications Management Unit (CMU) in Terre Haute, Indiana, a covert Bureau of Prisons unit created in 2006 under the George W. Bush administration's counterterrorism framework and intended for "the hardest of the hardcore", comparable, per John Kiriakou's description, to housing for El Chapo or John Gotti; Terre Haute also holds the federal death row. CMU prisoners are restricted to two 15-minute phone calls a week, subject to change at the facility's discretion, and experience severely delayed mail.

The 2008 raid

On June 19, 2008, federal agents led by IRS agent Brian Grove and Assistant U.S. Attorney Tracy Plowell, together with Knoxville, Tennessee police, raided Reynolds's home and his parents' home searching for drugs; they found none of the evidence they expected. Reynolds's father, Donald Reynolds Sr., says the search warrant presented at the house was unsigned by a judge, and that a warrant later filed differed from the one shown to the family: "They made the search warrant up at my kitchen table."

Reynolds's son, Adonis Reynolds, then eight years old, recounts being made to lie on the ground while a federal agent pressed a nine-millimeter handgun to the back of his head during the raid.

Fast and Furious connection

Marty Gottesfeld, a fellow federal prisoner who has taken up Reynolds's case, theorizes that informants from the ATF's Operation Fast and Furious learned of Reynolds through his firearms permits, via his high-end car business, at a time when investigators were seeking straw purchasers. Operation Fast and Furious (originally the ATF Gun Walking scandal) began in 2006, when Arizona ATF agents allowed licensed dealers to make illegal straw sales in order to track guns to Mexican cartels; by 2011, after roughly 2,000 gun sales, no cartel members had been arrested and only 710 of the guns had been recovered. Several of the missing guns were later found near the murder scene of a Border Patrol agent, prompting Congressional demands for accountability; the Justice Department responded by reverting to prosecuting low-level dealers under gun-sale law, with sentences mostly ranging from probation to eight years.

Gottesfeld alleges Reynolds became a Justice Department scapegoat for the scandal's fallout, in part because framing him for a case connected to the Border Patrol agent's death was politically convenient. He further alleges the Obama administration asserted executive privilege to block a House subpoena investigating Fast and Furious, and suggests Joe Biden, then in the Obama administration, may have had some involvement. Gottesfeld's theory is that Reynolds, as an antique firearms collector already in the high-end car business, was an ideal candidate for the government to use undercover as a weapons source to Mexican cartels, but that Reynolds refused to "play ball," and that this refusal, not any drug or violence finding, led to his prosecution.

Sentence

Reynolds refused to cooperate or testify against others despite plea offers. Prosecutors sought roughly 15 to 20 years; he ultimately received a life sentence plus 75 years, with federal law providing no parole (only up to 15% off for good behavior). Gottesfeld notes the sentence, despite Reynolds having no prior criminal record and no drug or violence findings, exceeds that given to cartel boss El Chapo, and theorizes Reynolds is viewed as more dangerous to prosecutors than El Chapo because his case could implicate powerful people.

Adonis Reynolds

Reynolds's son Adonis was a multi-sport athlete, AAU track, football, and soccer, with four state championship rings and XFL trials with the Orlando Guardians, but says his father's prosecution cost him college scholarship offers. Adonis says he has since been repeatedly targeted by local Knoxville-area police, including being pulled over by undercover officers, and left the area over fear of being killed by police. He describes communication with his imprisoned father as unpredictable: emails take one to ten days to arrive or vanish despite tracking numbers, and phone privileges are limited to about once or twice weekly.

See also

- Marty Gottesfeld
- FCI Loretto
- Private prison system
