By his own account, Dale Sutherland is an avid shapeshifter, assuming the role of drug kingpin, arms dealer, and mafia boss as he led elaborate undercover sting operations for the police in Washington, D.C., during a nearly 30-year career. As a young cop, Sutherland says, he even jabbed needles in his arm so that he could pass as an addict when making drug buys. Much of his most ambitious undercover work was aimed at getting guns off the streets.

On October 8, the Supreme Court is hearing a case that could weaken the government’s ability to regulate home-produced, unserialized ghost guns, which are currently banned in D.C. Many in law enforcement consider such untraceable firearms a grave threat and have reported surges in the number of ghost guns used to commit crimes. Sutherland, who retired from the force in 2013, established a nonprofit five years ago that has funneled millions of dollars in anonymous cash to the law firm and gun rights groups that drove the ghost gun suit to the Supreme Court. 

“I don’t understand why he would do that,” retired D.C. Police Sergeant Gerald Neill, who once worked with Sutherland, said when told about his former colleague’s nonprofit. “From my point of view of the world, and probably Dale’s, we don’t want people to have ghost guns.”

The Office of Attorney General for the District of Columbia is among the law enforcement agencies urging the court to allow the regulation of ghost guns. In a statement about the case that his office released over the summer, D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb said that “ghost guns have been flooding into communities across the district at an alarming rate over the past decade. These untraceable weapons were bypassing existing gun laws — like background checks — and increasingly became the weapon of choice for those who commit violent crime.”

The Metropolitan Police Department, Sutherland’s old employer, seized 25 ghost guns in 2018. That number rose to 524 in 2022, a nearly 2,000 percent increase. The same year, the Biden administration enacted a rule — the focus of the challenge before the Supreme Court — that requires manufacturers of “ready to build” gun kits to add serial numbers to their products and conduct background checks of buyers. Law enforcement agencies have since reported a decline in the number of ghost guns seized. The Metropolitan Police Department, for instance, collected 407 such firearms in 2023 and 151 through June of this year.

Sutherland served on the force before the rise of ghost guns, but knows the risks that officers take when trying to seize illegal firearms and stop those who traffic in them. In April, a French documentary series, “Dale L’Infiltre” or, in English, “Dale Undercover,” was shown at an international television festival in Cannes. It tells the story of how Sutherland, a middling student and athlete, became a lawman and, inspired by “The French Connection,” discovered his knack for undercover work. Sutherland is also a pastor and the series explores the unease that he sometimes felt over his lies and deceptions, particularly when they led to the justice system coming down hard on low-level addicts. “As a pastor and as a policeman, you have conflict inside of you,” he says in the series. “So, many times, I would turn off my faith to do my job.”

He seemed to have no reservations about gun stings, and the series treats one such operation as a career turning point. In the early 90s, Sutherland and a partner, Joe Abdalla, were running an informant, Arvell “Pork Chop” Williams, who was shot and killed. (Abdalla now sits on the board of the Constitutional Defense Fund, the nonprofit Sutherland founded that’s acting as a passthrough for the anonymously funded campaign to challenge firearms restrictions.) In the series, Sutherland says that supervisors in the department needed somebody to blame for Williams’ killing, and that he was blackballed. “It seemed like I was never going to get a good job again,” Sutherland recalls. “I was going to be on patrol the rest of my career.”

So Sutherland embarked on a daring venture. He’d pose as a Philadelphia mobster named Richie Giovanni, who was in the market for guns, drugs, and other illicit merchandise. “My commander knew, but he only knew so much,” Sutherland recalled. “We tried to tell him only what he needed to hear, and not too much of the other.” Sutherland put a Rolex on his wrist and diamond rings on his fingers. He decorated the body shop office used in the operation with a Virgin Mary figurine, slicked back his dark hair, and, cigar in hand, began giving audiences to drug and gun peddlers. “Suddenly, there’d be these designer brands all over the house, Gucci, Versace,” Sutherland’s daughter recalls in the series. “And when he went to go get a pedicure and manicure with clear nail polish, that’s when I was like, ‘OK, he’s really going all in for this case.’”

Most of the targets were Black, but included three white men described in the series as being “from the mountains” who were looking to unload guns. “We had these guys that were bringing guns to the city,” Sutherland recalled, “and we thought maybe they are like these other drug addicts who are selling guns to drug dealers and making our streets unsafe, and they’re killing policemen and killing people and killing normal citizens, and so we had to catch these guys.” In one deal, 10 guns were purchased from the men, including three fully automatic firearms.

After the targets were rounded up, the operation drew praise. “At that time, we were just arresting drug dealers right and left,” Sutherland says in the series. “And everybody loved that we had gotten guns from a white group that was bringing guns into an African American city.” 

The series notes that Sutherland took heat from foes in the department and federal prosecutors. A department ally and former boss allows that “questionable” stuff occurred with Sutherland and his team. “People had guns in the drawer that they forgot to put into evidence,” he states.

But Sutherland’s gifts were immense. “I ran across a lot of very good undercover officers, but Dale was that much better than all of them,” former D.C. Police Chief Peter Newsham says in the series. In an interview for this story, Newsham, who now leads the Prince William County Police Department, said Sutherland had a “remarkable” ability to gain trust and remain composed in situations where his life was on the line, work for which you need to be “close to fearless.” 

Newsham said that he does not remember Sutherland ever expressing support or opposition to the district’s gun laws, but would have enforced them regardless of any personal convictions. “If he left policing and decided to support any cause,” Newsham said, “that would not change my opinion of what he did when he was with the department.”

In addition to the ghost gun case, the law firm and gun rights groups funded by Sutherland’s nonprofit have mounted some 20 legal challenges to firearms restrictions nationwide, intending to advance cases to a now-receptive court in hopes of scuttling gun laws.

It’s unclear whether Sutherland is personally committed to this effort, or just acting as a middleman in exchange for compensation. He did not respond to requests for comment. At the end of the series, Sutherland expresses concern that some who hear his story may think, because of his roles as cop and pastor, that he never struggled with doubts. “They have some idea that I had it all figured out, that I did it all right, or that I was always in balance. that’s ridiculous,” he says. “My mind is as devious and rotten as everybody else’s.”