A Somers Point man was ordered held in jail Friday after drugs intercepted by Homeland Security led to a cache of drugs and weapons inside his Colwick Drive home.
Michael John James, 30, was arrested last week, after Homeland Security found two FedEx packages were filled with pills sent from South Africa to his home, according to the affidavit.
A search of his home found 82 firearms, explosives and fireworks along with even more drugs, Chief Assistant Prosecutor Allison Eiselen told the judge during a detention hearing Friday.
The defense claims James was a gun collector with a license to carry and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives permit.
But the judge disagreed in ordering James held.
"This was not a collector," Judge Patricia Wild said. "This was a person who was amassing both an armory and a drug store, frankly."
Eiselen painted a picture of a man who had turned his home into "his armed fortress" with dangerous mixes of chemicals "strewn about" in unsafe conditions and a surveillance system that was next to a room with "racks of long guns (and) ammunition."
"Here he was flying under the radar, amassing a stock of high-powered weapons, ammo, every room of the house," she said. "Magazines, explosive devices, completely undetected by law enforcement.
"How can we possibly return him to the community and expect our pretrial services team to adequately supervise him and insure the safety of the public?"
But defense attorney Lou Pintaro said his client is a gun collector with a permit to carry, and that much of what James had in his home was legal.
That included an M69 practice grenade, an RPG rocket launcher that he said was demilitarized and an M1919 weapon on a tripod purchased from a dealer in the state.
"We don’t know that any of these weapons were possessed unlawfully at this point," Pintaro said. "There is no restriction on the number of firearms that the man’s allowed to own."
He also said the state's focus on several ham radios and that there were cameras protecting his home was overreaching by the state.
"So what he’s a ham radio operator?" Pintaro said. "It's basically nonsense. There's nothing there."
He also said there was no evidence that his client was dealing drugs, saying the amount of pills that included generic forms of xanax and valium were consistent with personal use.
There were 1,000 pills intercepted that day, Eiselen said. The affidavit said that there had been three prior shipments sent to the home in the previous three months.
If James did have that amount of pills "on this one day, this one snapshot of a day in his life for personal use alone ... that would be a drug dependence at such a high degree it would completely invalidate any claims on those firearms applications that he was not a drug-dependent person," she countered.
The judge ordered James held, pointing to distribution levels of drugs and a caches of guns that presented "an overwhelming and, I have to say, absolutely chilling picture."
Wild told Pintaro if any new evidence arose, he could make an application to reopen detention.
But, she said, it must be "information that was not available today."
James will remain in the Atlantic County Justice Facility.
The investigation is ongoing.
“This investigation is the result of hard work and great cooperation among many law enforcement agencies,” Atlantic County Prosecutor William Reynolds said. “That work will continue to ensure that this case is charged and prosecuted thoroughly, and our agency will keep up its aggressive pursuit throughout Atlantic County of illegal drugs, illegal weapons and the deadly combination of the two."
