Christopher Monbelly and Nigel Crosby

THE OPEN BORDER -- Two young St. Croix men recently took advantage of a loophole through which thousands of guns flow into the Virgin Islands. They bought 49 firearms from a legal dealer in Miami and brought them to St. Croix in their airline luggage. It was easy: nobody inspects what's coming into the territory, just what's leaving. What came in with those two included a gun used for murder a few weeks later.

After getting the best of Robert Petersen in a barroom brawl, Victor Aviles was sure his Hess Oil refinery co-worker had learned a lesson and would leave him alone.

He was dead wrong.

Later that week in August 1993, Petersen, 22, still smarting from his public beating, took his 18-year-old brother's Tec-9 semiautomatic pistol to work and shot Aviles, 33, as he stepped out of a portable toilet.

The bullets hit Aviles in the chest. He died less than an hour later on an operating table.

The gun that killed Aviles was one of 49 weapons that police say Christopher Monbelly and Nigel Crosby smuggled into the territory between August and October last year. The two have just been convicted of illegally bringing the weapons to St. Croix from Miami.

They had the guns in their suitcases.

Police have recovered 11 of the weapons, 10 from the scenes of crimes.

The case highlights the ease with which anyone can bring illegal weapons into the territory, law enforcement officials say.

The open border between the Virgin Islands and the U.S. mainland makes transporting guns to the territory as hassle-free as carrying in a bottle of suntan lotion.

If gunrunners are actually arrested, mishandled prosecutions and lenient sentences effectively undermine the territory's gun laws.

And that helps keep the Virgin Islands armed and dangerous. Consider:

• At least 14,000 illegal guns are in the territory, many in the hands of people the police consider dangerous.
• Since 1991, police have recovered 620 weapons from crime scenes in the Virgin Islands. But in hundreds of cases each year the weapons are never recovered.
• Guns were used in 79 percent of the 33 murders this year.
• Guns were used in 28 of the 36 violent deaths, including suicides.
• Police say reports of gunfire are so numerous they don't even bother to count them and very few are checked out.
• Gun dealing is so loosely regulated that one dealer, fully licensed, sells guns out of the trunk of his car. Another had his license revoked just this year, although he has been in prison in Atlanta for drug possession.

• Violations by legal gun dealers are commonplace. Of the 53 Virgin Islands residents who had firearms dealer licenses at the beginning of the year, 47 were cited for long-standing violations of federal or local laws. Some dealers were in violation for more than five years, but nobody checked on them.
• Police officers get caught up in the brisk gun trade. Law enforcement officials say they are investigating two police officers suspected of selling guns while on duty in the police station.
• A V.I. Police Department recruit was among those arrested in a recent gun raid on St. Croix. He was charged with possession of an unlicensed firearm.
• The ready availability of guns turns simple disagreements into deadly encounters. In the last five years, 34 percent of all homicides in the territory resulted from arguments that got out of hand.

One such case was the murder of Miguel Davis, 17, in August 1992. Another 17-year-old, Carlos Greer, shot him in the head in an argument over a girl.

Greer, a senior at Central High School on St. Croix, was irked because Davis began dancing with his ex-girlfriend, Heather Gordon. Greer's temper got hotter as the two danced, and witnesses said Greer started pointing his finger at Davis and pretending that he was pulling the trigger of a gun.

Greer got so worked up he ran to a truck, took out a .38-caliber revolver and shot Davis dead on the spot.

"In cases like this, it is very likely that had there been no gun, there would have been no murder," says Territorial Police Chief Delroy Richards.

"The finality of guns is what makes them so frightening."

But keeping guns out of the territory won't be easy, police and federal officials say, because:

• U.S. Customs does not examine personal luggage coming into the Virgin Islands from the U.S. mainland on commercial flights. This has allowed smugglers to move large quantities of guns into the territory undetected.

• U.S. Customs seldom checks boats coming into the Virgin Islands to see whether illegal weapons and other types of contraband are aboard. Records show that of the thousands of boats that docked here last year, Customs inspected fewer than 10 percent.

Police can't keep Virgin Islanders from arming themselves to the teeth.There are now 7,000 licensed guns in the territory. Combined with the 14,000 illegal guns estimated to be here, that makes one gun for every three adults in the territory.

The guns that worry police the most are the unlicensed ones, especially those in the hands of criminals and unpredictable, volatile youths.

Since 1989, juveniles have been involved in more than a hundred shootings in the territory, 22 of them fatal.

During the same period, convicted felons -- who are banned by federal law from carrying guns -- shot and killed more than 50 people in the Virgin Islands.

The ready availability of guns has turned St. Thomas housing projects like Bovoni and Thomasville into shooting galleries where residents hear gunfire so often they are afraid to let their children go outside.

And they have turned neighborhoods like William's Delight on St. Croix and Donoe housing project and Hospital Ground on St. Thomas into death zones.

This year alone, 20 youths from Hospital Ground have been shot and three have died.

Few taxi drivers are willing to go near Donoe after dark, their fear heightened by the shooting of a fellow taxi driver who went there Oct. 11 to pick up a passenger.

Even the police want to stay away.

"There are places some police officers don't want to go to unless they must," says a St. Croix forensics officer. "Things have gotten very rough."

Pete Anderson heads the Police Intelligence Unit created on St. Croix this year to try to stem the flow of illegal guns. Already, Anderson's unit has made several arrests --including those of Monbelly and Crosby --but he says the battle is all uphill.

"This is one of the biggest problems facing these islands," Anderson says. "As long as illegal guns are out there, no one is safe."