Glock: The Rise of America’s Gun (29 page)

In tactical terms, the settlement overtures communicated weakness and uncertainty on the part of the municipalities. The NRA sensed this lack of resolve and pressured gun companies not to give ground. The moderation exemplified by the industry’s visit to the Rose Garden in 1997 eroded. Feldman, the advocate of compromise, lost the support of major companies other than Glock. With the NRA’s encouragement, the
industry summarily fired him in early 1999 from his job as executive director of the ASSC. Soon thereafter, his conciliatory trade group was abolished. Jannuzzo lacked the muscle to protect his friend; he tried to mitigate the dismissal by quietly hiring Feldman to do consulting work for Glock. Most other gun makers migrated back to the NRA fold, unwilling to risk the ire of the lobbying group, in no small part because of its ability to influence consumer attitudes toward their products.

The Clinton administration tried to salvage the stalling anti-gun litigation by threatening in December 1999 to organize a class-action suit to be brought on behalf of more than three thousand federally subsidized public housing authorities across the country. Andrew Cuomo, Clinton’s secretary of housing and urban development, said he would lead this audacious litigation unless gun makers came to the negotiating table. Cuomo tried to force the manufacturers to talk by simultaneously forming a coalition of local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies that vowed to buy guns only from companies that signed a code of conduct restricting manufacturing and marketing practices.

Jannuzzo reacted nimbly to the administration’s intimidation. He jabbed and feinted, coordinating courtroom efforts to get the municipal suits dismissed while quietly talking to emissaries from the cities and Washington. Glock and Smith & Wesson, more than other manufacturers, depended on the patronage of government customers buying their handguns. Both Glock and S&W also had foreign owners hesitant to antagonize the White House. Tomkins, the British conglomerate that had acquired Smith & Wesson in 1987, was particularly keen to resolve the liability issues because it wanted to sell the struggling Massachusetts-based company. Jannuzzo suspected that S&W’s American CEO, Ed Shultz, might try to cut a deal with
the Clinton administration in exchange for government contracts. Keeping an eye on Shultz, Jannuzzo attended a number of secret settlement talks with administration lawyers in Washington, including sessions held in an unoccupied wing of the United States Mint.

As a legal-affairs reporter at the
Wall Street Journal
, I tried to decipher the increasingly puzzling gun litigation and backroom negotiation. I spoke frequently with Jannuzzo, Shultz, and their government contacts as they maneuvered for advantage. For public consumption, Jannuzzo sounded patient and open to a deal. “There are undoubtedly … commonsense solutions that take a crime-fighting approach without affecting law-abiding citizens,” he told me at the time. “We are still weighing the idea of bleeding to death with legal bills versus the cost of complying with government demands,” he said on CNN. Privately, the Glock lawyer worried about offending the NRA and being seen as appeasing Clinton, Cuomo, and Democratic big-city mayors.

The covert negotiations culminated on March 17, 2000, when Smith & Wesson’s Shultz met with Cuomo in a Hartford, Connecticut, hotel room to sign a twenty-five-page agreement. Smith & Wesson would obtain immunity from government suits at all levels, in exchange for agreeing to a long list of restrictions, well beyond what the law mandated. The company committed to designing all of its guns so that small children could not operate them—for example, increasing trigger-pull resistance to at least ten pounds. Smith & Wesson also promised to stop making guns that could accommodate magazines with more than ten rounds. And S&W was to allocate 2 percent of its annual revenue to R&D on smart-gun technology. In a move viewed as even more far-reaching, the gun maker said it would impose a series of requirements on its
distributors and retailers. These included limits on customers seeking to buy more than one gun at a time and new obligations for keeping computerized records and locking up inventory every night to prevent theft. For the first time in history, a gun manufacturer—in fact, the largest maker of handguns—agreed to serve as a quasi-regulator of the entire supply chain, from factory to distributor to retail store.

Cuomo told Shultz that he was confident he could persuade Jannuzzo to sign the pact on behalf of Glock—if for no other reason than that the Austrian company would fear Smith & Wesson becoming the favorite with American government. “We thought that there would be two names on that agreement—Ed’s and Paul’s,” Cuomo said in a later interview.

But Cuomo miscalculated. While the Clinton administration trumpeted its breakthrough with Smith & Wesson, the media provided saturation coverage, and gun-control groups celebrated, Glock headed in the other direction. Jannuzzo denounced the agreement, giving the impression that he had never seriously considered signing. At his direction, Glock employees did a quick straw poll of all customers who called the company for any reason in the days after the S&W settlement was announced. The reaction was overwhelmingly negative. Gun owners thought Smith & Wesson had sold out to political forces hostile to firearms and the Second Amendment.

The NRA, meanwhile, signaled to its four million members that they should boycott the traitor. “Smith & Wesson, a British-owned company, recently became the first to run up the white flag of surrender and run behind the Clinton-Gore lines,” the NRA declared in one of a salvo of Internet alerts and mass faxes. Gun enthusiasts got the point, and many obeyed, swearing off Smith & Wesson.

Glock Talk and other websites buzzed with condemnation
of Smith & Wesson. L. Neil Smith, a science-fiction author popular in gun-owner circles, wrote a widely distributed e-mail that repeated thirteen times “Smith & Wesson must die.” The switchboard at S&W headquarters in Springfield nearly melted down. CEO Ed Shultz, a former army sergeant and firearm-rights advocate, received death threats. Gun shops in many states canceled purchase orders and sent S&W inventory back to the factory. The company announced a monthlong employee furlough in July 2000, and sales dropped 50 percent for the year. Some in the industry wondered whether Smith & Wesson would survive.

Watching his strategy backfire, Cuomo personally called Glock, Inc., headquarters in Smyrna. “What percentage of Glock’s business is derived from law enforcement?” the cabinet secretary asked Jannuzzo.

“About 30 percent,” Jannuzzo answered.

“You know, Paul,” Cuomo continued, “I have a lot of push with the big-city mayors. Your business is likely to suffer unless Glock agrees to the terms of the March 17 agreement.”

“The decision has already been made,” Jannuzzo said.

Cuomo did not give up. He telephoned again to let Jannuzzo know that he was going to arrange for the American ambassador in Vienna to speak directly with Gaston Glock.

“Fine,” said Jannuzzo. “I didn’t know the ambassador corps answers to HUD, but I guess they do in this administration.”

Kathryn Walt Hall, the US emissary to Austria, did take a message to Gaston Glock, inviting the industrialist to meet with Secretary Cuomo. Glock was polite but noncommittal, saying perhaps they could arrange something the next time he was in the United States. That meeting never happened.

Further undercutting Cuomo’s credibility, police chiefs across the United States did not abandon their Glocks and buy
Smith & Wessons. And as S&W sales to civilians plummeted, Glock gained market share. “This will probably be our best year in history,” Jannuzzo told the
Hartford Courant
in June. “Guns sales go up, dramatically, as soon as gun owners feel threatened by gun control.” While this was true for Glock, it was decidedly not true for Smith & Wesson.

A particularly painful rebuke to the Clinton administration came from the Inspector General’s Office of Cuomo’s own department. The IG at Housing and Urban Development was scheduled to buy seventy new pistols for its investigators in mid-2000. Rather than switch the purchase to Smith & Wesson, the HUD IG went ahead with a preexisting deal to buy the guns from Glock. In the future, Michael Zerega, a spokesman for the IG, told the
Wall Street Journal
, “We will probably continue to purchase Glocks.” The Austrian pistol was simply the better gun for the money.

By flirting with a settlement and then pulling back at the last moment, Glock had isolated S&W and further entrenched itself as the dominant pistol maker in America. And it was largely Jannuzzo’s doing. The attorney had played a risky game of firearm poker and won.

Lost in the process was a unique opportunity for an industry, or at least some industry leaders, to agree to police their conduct more vigorously. Although not a panacea for gun violence, the Smith & Wesson settlement contained a number of constructive elements. As the company retreated in the face of NRA and consumer attacks, the concessions it had made became irrelevant. In September 2000, Ed Shultz resigned as CEO. Tomkins soon thereafter sold Smith & Wesson to a group of American investors, who formally renounced the pact with the Clinton administration.

“The firearms industry is a family,” said S&W’s new
president, Robert Scott. “We need to be part of that family.” The NRA, in turn, heaped honors on Scott, letting it be known that Smith & Wesson was absolved of its sins. Gun shops began selling the company’s products again. The yearlong boycott ended.

After the 2000 presidential election finally ended in victory for George W. Bush, Andrew Cuomo left Washington to prepare to run for office in his home state of New York. The new resident of the White House made it clear that the litigation war against the gun industry was over. As governor of Texas, Bush had signed a state statute barring municipal lawsuits against gun companies. In his second term in the White House, he signed a similar law passed by Congress. The federal measure marked the official end of the city suits. Those that had not already been dismissed by judges were extinguished by the federal statue. Apart from keeping a lot of lawyers busy, the campaign to restrict gun manufacturing and marketing via the courts had accomplished nothing.

G
aston Glock arrived in Luxembourg in July 1999 for an urgent talk with the shell company artist Charles Ewert. In ordering the meeting, Glock had told Ewert he wanted to discuss company finances—matters best addressed in person. Glock did not sound pleased.

For fifteen years, Ewert had served as a director of Glock GmbH and a corporate trustee. Ewert sometimes suggested to others—out of Glock’s presence—that he was the Austrian’s partner in the firearm business. Glock saw Ewert as more of an adviser and international representative. Hearing the stern tone of Glock’s voice, the Luxembourger had to worry about what was on the company owner’s mind.

Ewert picked up his guest personally at the airport. Before proceeding to their meeting, he suggested that Glock take a look at a new sports car he had just acquired. It was parked in a garage on the Boulevard Prince Henri. Glock agreed.

At the car park, Ewert guided Glock to the third underground level, where they found themselves alone. Ewert pointed out the snazzy roadster, and Glock approached on foot to take a closer look.

Suddenly, a tall man stepped out of the shadows, lunging at Glock. The Austrian raised his arms defensively. The attacker,
his face obscured by a stocking mask, swung a large rubber mallet of the sort normally used to install bathroom tile. With a vicious overhand motion, he struck Glock on the top and side of the head.

Rather than intervene to help Glock, Ewert turned and ran for the stairwell. “I am a coward,” he would explain later.

Glock, meanwhile, was fighting for his life. The gun maker, who usually carried a pistol, lacked one on this day. With no other option, Glock fought with his hands. He swung his large fist into his attacker’s eye and mouth. Though seventy, the industrialist put up a stout defense. His frequent swims in the frigid lake near his villa in Velden had helped him maintain a younger man’s stamina. Glock drew blood and knocked out several of his attacker’s teeth. Despite the hammer blows to his skull, he gained the advantage.

Apparently summoned by Ewert, the police soon arrived. They found a bizarre scene, according to John Paul Frising, Luxembourg’s deputy attorney general: The bloodied aggressor lay collapsed on top of Glock, “with his arms outstretched like Jesus.” The bleeding victim was pinned to the ground but not mortally wounded. Glock’s attacker was unconscious.

The mallet-wielding assassin was identified as Jacques Pecheur, a sixty-seven-year-old former professional wrestler and member of the French Foreign Legion, whose nickname was Spartacus. With credentials like his, and with the benefit of surprise, one might have expected a more effective performance from Pecheur. The police assumed that the attacker had not been prepared for the fight Glock put up.

Whatever the reasons for Pecheur’s failure, the real question was “For whom was he acting?” noted the local newspaper
Luxemburger Land
, and “for what reason?”