A Greenville man is headed to federal prison for more than five years after a jury found he spent years running a massive “straw purchasing” scheme that funneled dozens of firearms from the South to the streets of Maryland. Kelsey Antonio McCallum, 32, was sentenced by U.S. District Judge Mary Geiger Lewis to 63 months behind bars, a decision that marks the end of a multi-year investigation into a pipeline of illegal weapons.
The case against McCallum centered on a busy four-year window between March 2018 and June 2022. During that time, investigators found that McCallum made 52 different trips to licensed firearm dealers across South Carolina and Georgia.
In total, he walked away with 93 guns.
On each of those federal forms, McCallum checked the box claiming he was the actual buyer. In reality, he was acting as a middleman, immediately hauling the weapons up to Maryland to sell them to people who hadn’t gone through the legal background check process.
The consequences of those sales eventually stretched far beyond Maryland. While some of the guns were sold for profit, others began appearing at crime scenes across multiple states, linking McCallum’s purchases to active criminal investigations. Following a two-day trial in 2024, a federal jury convicted him of the charges.
Because there is no parole in the federal prison system, McCallum will have to serve the vast majority of his 63-month sentence before starting a year of court-ordered supervision.
The prosecution was handled under the umbrella of Project Safe Neighborhoods, a Department of Justice initiative revamped in 2021. The program aims to curb violent crime by focusing on the illegal flow of firearms and building stronger ties between law enforcement and local communities to prevent violence before it starts.
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