My colleague Tim Arango followed up on the massive cache of guns pulled over the course of hours from a multimillion dollar house in Los Angeles. Here’s his dispatch:
It reads like the plotline from an LA noir novel: A sprawling house in Bel-Air, close to the Playboy Mansion. An early morning raid. Stacks of bullets and guns of every sort. And a tantalizing connection to a wealthy and famous family.
In the early morning darkness Wednesday, Los Angeles police detectives and federal agents, working on an anonymous tip, moved on the mansion in the affluent Bel-Air neighborhood.
“Lo and behold, they found over a thousand guns of all makes, models and calibers,” said Lt. Chris Ramirez, a spokesman for the Los Angeles Police Department, who was at the scene Wednesday, after officers had spent hours cataloging the cache of weapons.
There was seemingly every kind of gun — shotguns, pistols, assault rifles, even Civil War-era weapons — along with more than 1,000 rounds of ammunition, he said.
“They were found just laid out in various rooms in the house,” he said. “There were piles of ammunition on one side of a room. There were piles of guns on the other side of a room.”
One man was arrested: Girard Saenz, 57, who was booked at the county jail and released several hours later after posting $50,000 in bail. Saenz, who The Los Angeles Times said possessed a license to sell firearms, was arrested on suspicion of unlawfully transporting and selling assault rifles, Ramirez said.
Ramirez said that agents with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives were also investigating, and that federal charges could be forthcoming. Officers were running the serial numbers of all the weapons to help unlock the mystery of why a man who lived in one of the country’s richest enclaves had so many guns.
“It obviously happened in an affluent area, which is kind of rare,” Ramirez said. “Neighbors were kind of shocked.”
According to The Los Angeles Times, the home where the guns were found is owned by Cynthia Beck, a Los Angeles real estate investor who was once in an extramarital relationship with — and had three daughters with — Gordon Getty, the son of the late J. Paul Getty, an oil baron who was once one of the world’s richest men and established the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. Beck was not in the home at the time of the raid, and it’s unclear what her relationship is to Saenz.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.