The Portland Expo Center hosted the Pacific Northwest Sportsmen’s Show earlier this year. It also hosted gun shows. (Chris Nesseth)

Two event promotion companies hosted nine gun shows at the Portland Expo Center in 2019. The following year, neither returned. One promoter had health issues, the other blamed poor attendance.

It was an opportunity for Metro, the regional government that owns the Oregon Zoo and two convention centers, to abandon a long-criticized revenue stream that was already drying up.

Instead, the agency signed a new contract with Rob Heller, a St. Helens-based weapons dealer convicted of federal tax evasion whose company manufactures ammunition and customized semi-automatic rifles.

The first two events, scheduled for March and May 2020, were canceled due to COVID. But Heller persevered. He has rented the Portland Expo Center from Metro to host the “Shooting Sports & Blade Expo” four times in the past eight months, records obtained by WW show.

It has not gone well. A trove of semi-automatic rifles and other guns was stolen earlier this year from under the nose of one of Heller’s employees as she and her son packed their bags in a hotel room overlooking the hotel parking lot.

Still, Heller’s company has been publicizing two more shows at the Expo Center later this year: one on Sept. 10 and the other Nov. 19.

WW asked Metro about these shows last Thursday, July 14. The next day, Metro sent Heller a letter informing him the Expo Center would no longer host his gun shows. The letter, dated Wednesday, July 13, cited “consistent communication issues” and missing paperwork as reasons for not renewing the contract.

Agency spokesman Neil Simon said the decision had been in the works for some time.

Metro is a regional government that regularly trumpets its progressive values. Those values seem to clash with the hosting of gun shows, which activists argue glorify violence even as the nation fails to stanch a tide of gun massacres.

“A gun show is a celebration of products that are poorly regulated and whose only purpose is ultimately to kill,” says Penny Okamoto, a longtime activist with Ceasefire Oregon.

But the Expo Center is currently short on cash. Tourism cratered in the wake of the pandemic, and records show the center has been unable to generate enough revenue from events to pay its bills.

Simon said Metro Council President Lynn Peterson was unavailable to answer questions prior to publication of this story. So WW reached out to the other six members of the Metro Council for comment. Only two replied.

“It is not an issue I have kept up with,” wrote Gerritt Rosenthal, who represents Portland’s Southwest suburbs on the council, in an email.

Duncan Hwang, who was elected to represent Southeast and Southwest Portland on the council earlier this year, said he was unaware that Metro had recently hosted gun shows: “That’s certainly not in alignment with the values I believe in.”

At a meeting in 2013, the Metro Council gathered to figure out a way to ban handguns at the Oregon Zoo. But the conversation derailed quickly: Someone pointed out that Metro seemed to be doing quite a lot already to encourage firearms on its properties. It was hosting gun shows.

Two councilors questioned the logic of banning guns at one property while selling them at another, WW reported at the time.

Then-Metro Council President Tom Hughes argued that gun shows were safer under Metro’s roof, according to an agency report on the meeting.

“I don’t know that you’re going to stop gun shows,” Hughes said. “They’ll probably move to the Clark County Fairgrounds or other places where the facility is not equipped adequately to deal with the kind of technology we can provide at our facility.”

Hughes was replaced by Peterson in 2019. And it was under Peterson that Metro went into business with Rob Heller.

Heller runs his businesses, Heller Enterprises, out of a beige St. Helens warehouse across the railroad tracks from Highway 30. Overlooking the highway is a large sign advertising his ball-bearing business: “Service is our specialty,” it reads.

In 2018, Heller celebrated his 30th year in business by hosting a cookout featured in the St. Helens Chronicle. Heller had been in the business since he was 21 years old, working with his dad, the paper said. The business specialized in bearings, but eventually expanded into ammunition and firearms. The shop had a computer numerical control machine, and Heller discovered he could use it to make extremely accurate semi-automatic rifle barrels.

For years, Heller made a lot of money selling ammunition for cash at gun shows. But he paid taxes on none of it. He owed $287,500 by the time the Internal Revenue Service caught on in 2014.

After federal agents raided his warehouse, Heller pleaded guilty to tax evasion in 2016 and spent six months under house arrest. But he did not lose his business.

At some point, Heller graduated from vendor to promoter. He hired a woman named Julie Zielke to run his new gun show business.

Zielke was in the office last Thursday. A flyer taped to the front door advertised a dozen gun shows, including two upcoming events at the Expo Center.

In 2020, she said, Heller took over the shows run by another promoter, Wes Knodel, who was ill and wanted out.

Conditions at the venue were deteriorating, Zielke said. Vandals have smashed truck windows in the parking lot and slashed tires, and vendors were complaining. “They don’t feel safe,” she said.

Last May, Zielke and her son drove his F-250 pickup truck from the Portland Expo Center with a trailer full of semi-automatic rifles and other guns that had been for sale at that weekend’s show. (Heller Enterprises is a federally licensed arms dealer. It acts as a middleman at its gun shows, holding weapons until buyers pass background checks, a process that can take months, Zielke says.)

The two were packing their bags in their hotel room at the Oxford Suites on Hayden Island when they saw their truck, gun-filled trailer in tow, drive away from the hotel parking lot, the son told The Oregonian at the time.

The thieves fled to Washington with the trailer, cops in hot pursuit. They didn’t make it far; police stopped the truck and trailer with spike strips, and they jackknifed in the middle of the Interstate Bridge, totaling another car. The cops arrested two suspects.

An agent for the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives told the news media that the guns, taken from a hotel parking lot after leaving the Portland Expo Center, were in the “wrong hands” and “a threat to the safety of the community.” The ATF did not respond to WW’s inquiries about whether the guns were recovered.

Despite security concerns, the shows were still profitable, Zielke said. Heller made a request to rent the Expo Center again this year.

It is not clear what Expo Center director Matthew Rotchford knew about the nature of Heller’s business when he signed Metro’s first contract with the company in March 2020. And it’s not clear what he told Metro leaders. WW left a voicemail for Rotchford, but did not hear back by press time.

Rotchford did know, however, that the Expo Center’s finances were in shambles. The pandemic eliminated event revenue the center relied on.

Gun shows are by no means the center’s biggest moneymaker, but they are not insignificant. They appear occasionally in monthly reports of the center’s “highest-grossing events” distributed among the center’s leaders.

Metro has consistently earned around $20,000 for each show, according to data Simon gave to WW. In the past five years, it hosted 29 shows and earned $637,000.

In 2020, that income disappeared and the Expo Center’s finances are still hurting. It is projected to lose money this fiscal year, according to a March budget report.

Still, Okamoto isn’t convinced that gun shows are the best method for Metro to keep the lights on.

“There’s got to be a better way,” she says, “than by selling arms.”

In a statement informing WW the upcoming shows were canceled, agency spokesman Simon said: “Metro takes very seriously issues related to gun safety.”

Simon said that a blanket ban on hosting gun shows by Metro Council would require a change in Oregon state law, which prohibits local government restrictions on firearm sales.

Zielke initially offered to make Heller available for an interview, but she stopped returning calls after WW initially contacted Metro for this story. A message left for Heller at his office was never returned.

Correction: This story has been corrected to clarify that a trailer of guns was not stolen from the Expo Center parking lot, but from the parking lot of a nearby hotel.

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