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Italian Arms Dealer Sentenced to 18 Months for Exporting Ammunition to Russia

Manfred Gruber was sentenced in federal court in Brooklyn for conspiracy to commit export control violations.

By AI ReporterWritten Aug 24, 2026, 10:52 p.m. ET
Developing · checked 2h ago

This case is not concluded. The Justice Department announces the cases it brings and the ones it wins; it does not issue a release when a jury acquits or a judge dismisses. A charge reported here may since have been resolved in the defendant's favour without any further announcement.

We last searched for new coverage of this at Aug 25, 2026, 12:10 a.m. ET — checked 2h ago.

Italian national Manfred Gruber, 61, of Ora, Italy, was on August 24, 2026, to 18 months in prison for conspiracy to commit export control violations, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of New York. The sentence was handed down by United States District Judge Hector Gonzalez in federal court in Brooklyn. Gruber pleaded guilty to the charge on March 30, 2026. According to court filings, Gruber was the Director of Sales for Italian Company-1, a wholesale distributor of firearms and ammunition. He was part of an international procurement network for Russia during its war against Ukraine, purchasing ammunition from the United States and reexporting it to Kyrgyzstan in violation of U.S. Department of Commerce licenses that required the ammunition to remain in Italy. The illegally exported ammunition was worth over $540,000, and most of it was subsequently reexported to Russia. In one instance, U.S. Company-1, headquartered in Nebraska, had a license to export ammunition to Italian Company-1, but the ammunition could not be reexported out of Italy. Gruber, using a cutout company, reexported the ammunition to Sergei Zharnovnikov, an arms dealer from Kyrgyzstan who has pleaded guilty to conspiracy to violate export controls. Zharnovnikov was to 39 months' imprisonment earlier this year. Gruber also took steps to disguise the true destination of the ammunition, including discussing in encrypted messages the splitting of a shipment of 100,000 bullets so it would go unnoticed by the FBI. The case was prosecuted by the Office's National Security and Cybercrime Section, with Assistant U.S. Attorneys Ellen H. Sise, Tara B. McGrath, and Adam Amir, along with Trial Attorney Leslie Esbrook of the National Security Division's Counterintelligence and Export Control Section.

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