Glock: The Rise of America’s Gun (31 page)

Nonetheless, Gaston Glock seemed unfazed. A mere five months after fending off the retired French Foreign Legionnaire, he issued his “Annual Message from the President” in a glossy promotional magazine called
Glock Autopistols
, which the company gave away at trade shows and in gun shops. “Another year has come and gone,” Glock observed, “and I am proud to say that our successes have far outweighed our shortcomings, and the company is continuing to grow and
aggressively take on all challenges with which it is faced.” The January 2000 message continued in a triumphal vein, without reference to the bloody attack in Luxembourg. The company carried on outwardly as if all were normal.

In commercial terms, Glock’s assessment was accurate. The pistols kept selling. The FBI concluded its long search for a replacement for the Smith & Wesson revolver, bypassing American manufacturers to choose the .40-caliber Glock. The DEA piggybacked on the FBI’s procurement contract. Thousands of agents for the agencies—like their brethren in Customs, the Marshals Service, the Border Patrol, and state and local police forces—were issued Austrian pistols as duty weapons. Glock, Inc.’s, annual revenue hit $100 million in the late 1990s, according to former executives.

Success in the marketplace did not, however, cause Gaston Glock to forget or forgive betrayal. His clash with Ewert spawned suspicion that Panama Charly was not the only subordinate attempting to rob the gun maker. Glock was determined to identify and punish the others, as well.

G
un manufacturers thrive on turmoil. For Glock, the American military response to 9/11 proved a bonanza. At the Pentagon, Beretta retained the main contract to provide handguns to the army, but elite US military units with the authority to choose their own small arms gravitated to the Glock.

Jim Smith, a veteran of Delta Force, the army’s premier special-operations unit, explained that highly trained commandos considered the Austrian-made gun more dependable. Most commandos carry handguns as well as rifles; conventional infantry fighters usually are issued only rifles. Smith spoke of the Glock with clipped reverence. “We put it in the sand, in water, extreme heat, fired thousands of rounds,” he said. “Pull the trigger, it fires. Reliable.”

I met Smith at a small arms trade show in Germany. After retiring from Delta Force, he started a consulting business in Texas where he tutored corporate executives, police SWAT officers, and even some Army Rangers. The Rangers were frustrated that their unit, though elite, was still issued Berettas, he said. They wanted what the secretive Delta Force carried.

After the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, US authorities outfitting local security forces turned primarily to the Glock. The American government bought more than 200,000 of the
Austrian pistols for distribution to Afghan and Iraqi police, national guardsmen, and soldiers. Spread over several years, those sales came on top of the company’s routine cash flow from police and commercial business.

The rush to award contracts and ship pistols caught American manufacturers unprepared. When they learned that Glock had cornered the post-9/11 market in the Middle East, some objected angrily. “As a US taxpayer and a US manufacturer, I am greatly offended that my tax dollars are being used to buy foreign weapons for the Iraqis when there were US companies that could have supplied that product,” Robert Scott, Smith & Wesson’s president, protested. Three members of Congress announced investigations of Glock’s procurement coup. The indignation drew media attention but had no substantive effect.

On the ground in Iraq, US military officers praised the Glock. “My personal opinion is that the Iraqi people respect power, and power is an AK-47 or a Glock nine-millimeter gun,” Captain Kevin Hanrahan of the Eighty-ninth Military Police Brigade told the
Los Angeles Times
. Hanrahan oversaw Baghdad police stations west of the Tigris River. Some Iraqi officers had abandoned their posts, he added, because they “were outgunned and outmanned” by insurgents. He sounded like an American police chief in the late 1980s.

Whether or not they instilled confidence in the Iraqi authorities, US-supplied Glocks definitely became hot items on the Baghdad black market. “The Americans gave us Glocks without registering the serial numbers and without receipts,” a former policeman named Yasser told Agence France-Presse. When Yasser quit his unit, he sold the Glock he had been given to “a friend” for $800. The American military eventually lost track of some 190,000 small arms in Iraq, including 80,000 pistols—mostly Glocks, according to US congressional
investigators. Insurgents appreciated a reliable weapon as much as anyone else, and the Glock became standard among Sunni militants who attacked Americans.

The story was much the same in Afghanistan. Large numbers of Glocks furnished to local army units simply vanished. Whoever ended up with its pistols, Glock prospered from the Bush administration’s global war on terror, just as it had from the earlier domestic war on drugs.

But Glock’s impressive sales figures were accompanied by intensifying disarray within its corporate ranks. It was almost as if selling pistols no longer required the close attention of the company’s top executives. The Glock sold itself.

In February 2003, Paul Jannuzzo once again collided with the NRA, this time as a result of an appearance on
60 Minutes
. The CBS newsmagazine broadcast a segment on “ballistic fingerprinting,” a digital technology that allows investigators to link bullet casings from shootings to suspected crime guns. NRA leader Wayne LaPierre told
60 Minutes
that the method, which matches the unique marks guns make on spent casings, was unreliable and would facilitate confiscation of weapons from law-abiding owners.

Less hasty to dismiss ballistic fingerprinting, Jannuzzo said in a separate interview that Glock had a pilot program under way with the government. “It has been expensive,” he said. “It slows production. To make certain that we’re getting the right cases to the right serial number, at this point, we now go through test-firing the guns twice.” Still, Glock would consider contributing information to a national database to aid police, if one were put together. “The people who right now are saying
there is no use for it,” Jannuzzo said, “that it’s an intrusion upon our freedom, have arbitrarily drawn a line too soon.”

Characteristically, Jannuzzo positioned Glock as an independent-minded friend of law enforcement—but without making any concrete concessions to new regulation. His ambiguity did not mollify activist gun owners. Glock was inundated with demands for Jannuzzo’s head. Perceived apostasy against NRA gospel required excommunication. And sure enough, within the space of a few weeks, Jannuzzo announced that, after twelve years at Glock, Inc., he would step down as chief operating officer, general counsel, and, for all practical purposes, the US gun industry’s best-known executive.

Second Amendment websites lit up in celebration. “Glock Exec Resigns Because of Us!!!” proclaimed one contributor to a gun discussion group on
TheHighRoad.org
. “We got pissed, we made calls and wrote letters, the guy resigned,” agreed a colleague. “A message was sent here. And someone heard it loud and clear. Sell us out, and sell your last handgun.”

In fact, Jannuzzo’s departure involved even more drama than the online rabble-rousers assumed. Since the July 1999 attack on Gaston Glock, executives throughout the company had been looking over their shoulder—and with good reason. Private eyes hired by Glock combed company documents, scanned e-mail, and even conducted physical surveillance, ferreting out evidence of financial misbehavior.

As if this did not create sufficient tension, romantic jealousy heightened apprehension in the American subsidiary. Jannuzzo had split with his second wife and become involved with Monika Bereczky, Glock’s human resources manager. Bereczky, the former hotel concierge, had remained an object of the owner’s affection. Unaware of Jannuzzo’s relationship with her, or, more likely, indifferent to it, Glock continued to
flirt with the much younger Bereczky. He routinely put his arm around her waist in public, she said, or suggestively grabbed her thigh while she was chauffeuring him to appointments. Jannuzzo, who had a temper to start with, took offense when his employer treated Bereczky as a plaything and, in Jannuzzo’s view, implicitly encouraged others to gossip about her sex life. On one occasion, when an Austrian-based Glock executive referred to Bereczky as a loose woman in Jannuzzo’s presence, the combustible American jammed a lit cigar into the visitor’s forehead. A bigger blowup seemed inevitable.

In the wake of the
60 Minutes
episode, and with personal antagonism mounting, the explosion finally came. One morning, Jannuzzo drove to Gaston Glock’s residence in Atlanta. He had decided to get out. With no preliminaries, Jannuzzo announced to his employer that he was quitting. Bereczky was leaving with him, Jannuzzo added. At that moment, she was cleaning out her office in Smyrna.

Jannuzzo had brought an armful of corporate files with him to the Glock home. He dropped these on the kitchen table and threatened that unless he received a sizable severance payment—something in the millions—he would expose the company’s unflattering secrets. By this time, Jannuzzo knew quite a lot about Charles Ewert and the network of shell companies constructed to lessen Glock’s tax liabilities. He also knew about the A-Team’s investigation, which had turned up evidence linking Ewert and the Glock affiliate in Panama with the notorious Turkish financier Namli. Did Glock want this dirty laundry hung out for the world to see?

Gaston Glock was not used to being threatened. “Why are you doing this to me?” he demanded.

Jannuzzo said he was through being pushed around. He had been running the company in the United States, where Glock,
Inc., made most of its money, and now he wanted his rightful share of the profits.

At this point, Glock stood up and left the room. Remaining with Jannuzzo in the kitchen was Peter Manown, the German-speaking American lawyer who handled Glock’s personal business in the United States. The next thing Jannuzzo and Manown heard was the racking of the slide of a semiautomatic handgun. Gaston Glock had loaded a round into the chamber.

“Paul, did you hear that?” asked a rattled Manown.

Jannuzzo didn’t seem scared. He patted his ankle, allowing Manown to see that he had a holster there and a pistol of his own. It might have been a scene out of a bad thriller, if not for the fact that the guns and the clashing egos were real.

Gaston Glock returned to the kitchen with a black plastic pistol grip protruding above his belt. “I didn’t know if we were going to have a shootout at the O.K. Corral, or what,” Manown said later.

There was more shouting and some finger-pointing, but in the end, neither man pulled his gun. Jannuzzo scooped up his files and left, bellowing at Glock: “You’re history!”

Word of the row in Gaston Glock’s kitchen naturally spread through the gun industry. Jannuzzo’s friend Richard Feldman heard about it directly from Gaston Glock. The Austrian called Feldman, a Glock consultant. “Richard, Paul has gone crazy!” Glock said. “What is wrong with Paul?”

“I was like, ‘Oy,’ ” Feldman recalled. “It was really about Monika more than anything else.”

Amorous rivalry doubtless played a role. Feldman also suggested that his friend Jannuzzo’s behavior in general had
become erratic. On several occasions over the years, Jannuzzo had gotten drunk and passed out during trade shows or other industry gatherings. Once, hotel security found him late at night asleep under a banquet room table, his suit jacket and slacks folded neatly beside him, Feldman said. Another time, Jannuzzo blacked out in a hotel elevator and was discovered with the elevator doors bouncing against his outstretched legs. “As a result of this problem, I guess you’d call it, I don’t think he was always thinking at his best,” Feldman commented.

And perhaps also weighing on Jannuzzo’s mind in 2003 was his anxiety over his role in some unconventional internal company financial dealings. He and Manown, it turned out, had been taking advantage of Glock’s sales success to supplement their paychecks beyond officially agreed-upon salaries and bonuses. While they were less ambitious in this regard than Ewert, the two Glock lawyers for some time had used a variety of accounting tricks to siphon company cash into their pockets.