Another gunwalker rounded up after a long investigation. Getting kinda boring, huh? Just how big IS Gunwalker?

"Major Strasser has been shot! . . . Round up the usual suspects."

This one from way down in southeast Texas.

Feds arrest man who purportedly sent scores of guns to Gulf Cartel

MISSION — Federal agents arrested a Pharr man who told investigators he recruited dozens of people to buy as many as 100 guns that landed in the hands of the Gulf Cartel.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers arrested Francisco Ramirez Jr. on Tuesday at the Anzalduas International Bridge.

Ramirez, 20, had been the target of an investigation by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives since the summer of 2010, according to a criminal complaint filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court in McAllen.

Five co-conspirators — whose names were not disclosed in court documents — told ATF agents last year that Ramirez recruited and paid them to buy guns.

Ramirez would recruit other so-called “straw purchasers” — people who buy firearms for others — from Hidalgo County and travel with them to gun shows in the San Antonio area, where they would buy the guns, according to the complaint.

Ramirez told agents Wednesday that he’d recruited about 25 people to buy the guns between January and the fall of 2010. The group bought about 100 guns that eventually were smuggled into the hands of the Gulf Cartel in Mexico, according to the complaint.

Ramirez told agents he’d receive as much as $15,000 from a Gulf Cartel member to pay the straw purchasers and himself, as well as to cover the guns sent south of the Rio Grande.

ATF spokeswoman Franceska Perot said Ramirez was arrested on a warrant Wednesday afternoon at the bridge.

Ramirez had apparently learned he was under investigation and fled to Mexico before agents could arrest him, Perot said. He had been there several months before agents arrested him on Tuesday.

“They had been waiting for him to stick his foot back in the U.S. so they could get him,” Perot said.

Ramirez’s purported gun running operation was one of hundreds of arms trafficking cases that fall under ATF’s “Project Gunrunner.”

The ATF initiative fell under scrutiny recently after a whistleblower within the agency revealed to CBS News that agents allowed thousands of guns to “walk” into Mexico — cross the border without arresting the traffickers to build larger criminal cases.

Along with several firearms recovered at crime scenes across Mexico, two of the rifles that agents allowed into the country were recovered after U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was murdered last year in Arizona.