A South Side man who joined the Army at 18 has been sentenced to more than nine years in prison after being convicted of trafficking guns to Chicago — where authorities say the weapons helped fuel a gang war.
Brandon Z. Miller, 25, pleaded guilty to participating in a conspiracy with other soldiers at Fort Campbell, the Army base on the Kentucky-Tennessee border where they were stationed.
Miller and his crew were accused of buying more than 100 guns in Tennessee in 2020 and 2021 and selling them to Chicago gang members for a street war on the South Side that left at least a dozen people dead and dozens more wounded. One of the weapons, a 9mm Glock 17 handgun, was used in four killings and a mass shooting, according to prosecutors.
Miller was able to obtain the guns because of Tennessee’s “permissive firearm laws,” according to prosecutors.
They say four pending federal criminal cases also accuse people of buying guns in Middle Tennessee and trafficking them to Chicago.
In a separate case, Miller had been accused of recruiting a girlfriend, also a soldier, to steal money from the federal Paycheck Protection Program, established to help businesses struggling during the COVID-19 pandemic. That case was dismissed when he was sentenced in late November for gun trafficking.
Miller was sentenced in military court in 2023 to 30 months of confinement for the sexual assault of a woman in Clarksville, Tennessee. His gun trafficking sentence and military sentence are to be served back-to-back.
In court papers, Miller’s lawyers disputed prosecutors’ contention that he was a street gang member, saying he wouldn’t have gotten an Army security clearance if he was. They had asked the judge for a lesser sentence, eight years in prison, citing his “extraordinarily difficult childhood.”
Soldiers Jarius Brunson and Demarcus Adams, who lived with Miller at his house in Clarksville, Tennessee, near the Army base, pleaded guilty last year to firearms trafficking charges and are awaiting sentencing.
More than a dozen reputed members of a South Side alliance of gangs have been charged with illegally buying guns from Miller and his crew. Four of them — Blaise Smith, Raheem Johnson, Bryant Larkin and Terrell Mitchell — have pleaded guilty. Each has been sentenced to five years in prison. Dwight Lowry was sentenced to probation. And Dreshion Parks and Lazarus Greenwood got time-served. The rest of the cases are pending.