A career criminal with a penchant for breaking into banks, driving drunk and concocting aliases for himself in crimes spanning a quarter-century is looking at a long prison sentence after being snared by cops in a gun-selling sting in St. Paul.
Roger B. Bugh, 43, of Fridley, was convicted Thursday in U.S. District Court in Minneapolis of being a felon in possession of a firearm.
Jurors agreed with the allegation that on Jan. 20 Bugh tried to sell a .357-caliber revolver in an apartment parking lot in the 1300 block of East 7th Street. His potential buyer was a St. Paul police officer.
Now Bugh faces 15 years to life in prison. Sentencing has yet to be scheduled.
This makes at least 11 felony convictions for Bugh since 1987, stretching from St. Cloud to the Twin Cities and into western Wisconsin.
Among his more notable crimes, Bugh admitted that he and a cohort used a sledgehammer in 1991 to break into a Lake Elmo bank. The pair were photographed by surveillance cameras and slowed in their getaway from the weight of the nearly $4,500 in coins that they'd taken. A police K-9 found Bugh about 30 minutes later, hiding in a woodpile.
Bugh's conviction scoreboard is dominated by burglary and theft. He's also been convicted twice of gross-misdemeanor drunken-driving.
Court records show his aliases have included Marshall Stewart Cover, Michael Eugene Bohm and Julian Fernandez Ranzel.
