Gun Guys (12 page)

R
obert had a terrific childhood. His family was midwestern Jewish royalty, grown wealthy beyond measure by processing worn-out milk cows into hamburger. Robert and his brother, Justin, had the run of a sprawling operation, from the wood-paneled office where his dad and grandpa sat at facing desks to the macabre excitement of the killing floor. At the cooperage, gray-bearded craftsmen hammered iron staves to bind wooden barrels; they taught Robert the trick of spinning thirty-five-pound monsters across the floor on their edges. Everybody knew little Robert. Everybody loved him.

Home was a gigantic Southern colonial with a pool, not far from Lake Michigan. Dad had a den to himself, with a big wooden desk and glass cabinets that held a fine collection of early U.S. military pistols. He’d call Robert over and invite him to run a finger along the page of a musty-smelling reference book. “This .65-caliber light dragoon pistol was important at the Battle of New Orleans,” Dad would begin, settling into an action-filled history lesson. He often took Robert with him to gun shows. While Dad inspected Scottish Highland flintlocks, Robert bought trinkets—a Nazi armband for two dollars, a bayonet for a buck, cartridge belts, holsters, insignia—nothing that cost more than a few dollars. His parents eventually let him take the bookshelves out of his bedroom and install glass cases like Dad’s for his collection.

Weekends were the best. Robert would sit on a split-rail fence while Mom and Dad swung shotguns skyward from their lakeside gun club, scattering clay-pigeon fragments across the water, laughing and joking like best friends. Few women shot at the club, but Mom had a more expansive sense of fun than most. She was Texan—the granddaughter of Jewish covered-wagon pioneers—and lived her heritage large. When she built her house in the cold, flat North, Texas governor Allan Shivers sent her a box of Kinney County dirt to pour into the foundation so that she could raise her boys on Texas soil. Once a year, the family boarded the Texas Chief, and Uncle Buddy would flag the train down at the hamlet of Sugar Land, where, between Hanukkah and New Year’s, Robert Justin lived the cowboy life with a slew of cousins on the family ranch.

That Uncle Buddy—he was a character. He’d commanded a Negro machine-gun unit during the war and would have made the Army his life but for a car accident that locked his knee. During one visit, when Robert was nine and Justin eleven, Uncle Buddy took the boys for a bumpy ride on his tractor—always a treat—and they chugged along until they reached a big cottonwood. At its base stood a rusted fifty-five-gallon drum. Uncle Buddy hopped down awkwardly, with his stiff-straight leg, and, with a tug that would change the course of little Robert’s life, opened a wooden box bolted to the tractor. From a tangle of tools and rope he brought up a submachine gun.

It was an M3—a short, crude weapon made entirely of stamped steel. The Army had bought them by the thousand during the Second World War, for a few dollars apiece; soldiers called them “grease guns,” because they looked more like mechanic’s tools than weapons.

Uncle Buddy loaded up a long magazine with .45-caliber cartridges and stood behind Robert, wrapping his arms around him, helping him tuck the bent-wire stock into his shoulder. Robert tightened his right hand around the pistol grip and his left around the magazine. “Okay,” Uncle Buddy said, and the short, fat gun bucked wildly in Robert’s hands, with the roar of Robert’s future splitting open.

It clicked empty in two seconds, the fifty-five-gallon drum thoroughly perforated.

Even with the copious spending money Robert was earning in the cooperage by then, he couldn’t buy a shootable machine gun; he was only nine years old. But he could buy one that was deactivated, and the next
time he went to a gun show with his dad, he found a Sten—a British submachine gun made of cheap stamped steel, much like the M3—with a bolt welded through the receiver to render it harmless. The price was $125—a lot of money in 1963, but Robert had it. He mounted the Sten proudly in his display case. Robert was hooked.

Reading gun magazines, he learned that until 1934, anyone could walk into a hardware store and buy a live Thompson submachine gun for about $250, with no paperwork to fill out and no questions asked—which helped explain why the only figures Robert could name from the twenties and early thirties were the likes of Al Capone, Baby Face Nelson, Machine Gun Kelly, John Dillinger, Bonnie Parker, and Clyde Barrow. Then came the National Firearms Act, which placed the same background-check requirement and two-hundred-dollar tax on machine guns as it did on silencers.

For a long time after the gangster era, most people had no idea that it was legal to buy a machine gun. The government certainly didn’t publicize it. Machine-gun enthusiasts were a small, quiet club, selling each other guns for a few hundred dollars apiece, buying their two-hundred-dollar tax stamps, and keeping out of trouble. At age nine, Robert parted the curtain on this hidden world.

The tax, background check, and restrictions didn’t apply to deactivated guns, and little Robert was interested in any he could get for two hundred dollars or less. He supplemented his income at the cooperage by bringing back from Texas for his private-school friends two treasures unobtainable in the upper Midwest: fireworks and Fritos.

In 1964, when Robert was eleven, he placed a person-to-person call to the dean of American machine-gun dealers: J. Curtis Earl. Robert wanted to buy a deactivated MP40—a German submachine gun from the Second World War—but he knew that Mr. Earl might hang up the phone as soon as he heard a squeaky prepubescent voice. So he did his homework carefully and got a lot of in-the-know language into his first sentences. He was looking for a DEWAT, he said—collectors’ jargon for a deactivated war trophy—and while he’d love an MP38, because of its machined receiver and the longitudinal grooving on the receiver and bolt, he’d settle for the less expensive MP40, with its stamped-steel parts. Oh, and he didn’t necessarily need the Bakelite foregrip.

There was a pause on the line. “Yes, I can help you,” Mr. Earl said.

As soon as Robert had the MP40, he wanted the MP44, another Nazi
weapon, and Mr. Earl sent him one, deactivated, for another two hundred dollars. “I know you can’t put a drum on the A-1 Thompson, and it has the fixed firing pin,” Robert said in his next appeal, “but does it still have the Blish lock in it?”

A Thompson, it turned out, was too expensive, but no sooner had he recited his Torah portion at his bar mitzvah than he unwrapped a DEWAT M1 Thompson, the wood-and-steel queen of submachine guns. Mom was the best.

Robert skipped college. He didn’t want to be an architect or a veterinarian; he wanted to work in the family business and enjoy the good life. He put in time at unpleasant jobs in the rendering plant, on the killing floor, and in the blood room, where ring driers desiccated blood for the fertilizer shop. No matter how long you showered after working in the blood room, the odor would leach out of your pores the minute you began to perspire. He learned to tell a sick cow from a healthy one: Is her head swinging? Is she salivating? Does she have lumps in her brisket? He went to Burger King’s Whopper College and spent a year running a Burger King in London, to see how the downstream industry operated. He worked for months on a gigantic deal to sell hamburger meat to the Moscow school system and walked away without clinching it, disgusted with the breathtaking graft.

By the mid-1970s—married, with small children—he was earning only eighteen thousand dollars a year. But his salary was irrelevant. Standing behind him was a slaughterhouse empire that he and his brother were in line to inherit. He could ladle up endless amounts of money for whatever he liked. What he liked was machine guns.

The more he read about them, the more fascinating their hold. Not so much the killing they did—military history wasn’t his thing. What he loved was their gorgeous engineering, which said worlds about the mentality, technology, metallurgy, and international patent law of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although Hiram Maxim of Maine had invented the machine gun (and the mouse trap!), it was John Browning of Ogden, Utah, who had pretty well perfected it by the time World War I broke out. His design was so simple, reliable, and elegant that it was still being used in Vietnam.
^*
The other great powers of the turn of the century couldn’t—for reasons of patent law, national security,
and jingoistic pride—simply copy Browning’s design. So Britain, France, Germany, and Russia each went to sometimes comical lengths to dance around Browning’s patents. The French, for example, created, in the St. Étienne Mle 1907, a
blow-forward
mechanism that used a pinion to transfer energy. It was ridiculous, guaranteed to foul in muddy conditions, but it was France’s own design, and the French military proudly fielded it.

Robert loved all the Brownings and all the copies, the ones that worked and especially the ones that didn’t. For him, the joy of collecting was seeing the march of technology through time. But he was also ready to move beyond DEWATs, to dip into the family fortune and buy a live machine gun. He called a man he knew at a police supply business and for $2,250 bought a never issued Model 1921 U.S. Navy Thompson with a fifty-round drum.

It was a blast to grind through cases of .45-caliber ammo at the gun club, until he realized with horror that he’d shot a virtually new gun down to about 93 percent condition. He hung the Thompson on the wall, retired. Collecting still mattered more than shooting.

He wangled himself an invitation to the exclusive York Arms and Armor Museum auction, in Las Vegas, where, at twenty-five, he was by far the youngest person in the room. He stood in the back, listened, kept his mouth shut until the right moment came to bid, and walked out the owner of a Browning Model 1917A1—the tripod-mounted, water-cooled .30-caliber machine gun on which the U.S. Army relied from the first World War through Korea. Not long after, he snagged a Vickers gun from Britain—another tripod-mounted, water-cooled giant—for a mere $2,500, and he followed that with a pair of 1920s-vintage water-cooled Swedish Brownings, each emblazoned with the king’s crest and mounted on an anti-aircraft stand.

Taking the guns apart was pure joy. Their designs were ingenious, their internal parts beautifully wrought, and every gun had a universe of accoutrements to track down: ammo belts, ammo cans, carts, tripods, canvas covers, sights, cleaning kits, and manuals. He collected voraciously and gradually amassed a fully automatic arsenal worth many millions of dollars: an 1895 Argentine Maxim gun with a gleaming brass water jacket; an Austro-Hungarian Schwartzlose 07/12, which used the weight of the bolt to delay blowback; a nineteenth-century Nepalese Bira, a huge two-barreled, crank-operated contraption, seemingly of pig iron and covered with Devanagari script; a Soviet-made Maxim “snow gun,” with its signature white-painted ricochet plate in front; a rare seawater-cooled
.50-caliber Browning, from the deck of a U.S. World War II destroyer; an Italian Fiat-Revelli that looked as though it would fall apart if sneezed on; Uzis; Schmeissers; a 1930s Soviet Pulemyot Degtyaryova Pekhotny, its round pan of ammunition mounted on top like a Frisbee. He arranged them in a bunker the size of a tennis court and decorated like an English gentlemen’s club—pale yellow carpet, leather easy chairs, oak-paneled walls. But Robert was just about the only person who went down there. His guns were not for public display.

Robert’s stack of machine-gun licenses grew as thick as a Manhattan phone book. The passport-size photos affixed to each license testified to the passage of his years, from a smooth-cheeked young scion to a jowly baron of commerce. Machine guns were an expensive hobby: Plugging gaps in his huge collection meant buying rare guns that cost $50,000 or more, sometimes
lots
more. He was becoming what machine-gun collectors call a “black hole,” a guy who never sells a gun. He prided himself on being a true collector, not just an accumulator. He didn’t hoover up every gun he found to demonstrate how rich he was, the way some people did. Each had to represent a unique moment in the technology’s advancement.

Money wasn’t a problem. Robert and his brother sat at the face-to-face desks their father and grandfather had used and grew a big business into a gigantic one. They diluted their shares to raise capital, packaged meat for Costco under the Kirkland label, expanded into deli meats and precooked dinners, and became the meat supplier for the McDonald’s Steak, Egg & Cheese Bagel.

With bigger money, though, came bigger headaches. The science of looking for
E. coli
had gotten better since Robert and Justin had taken over, and the harder the government inspectors looked, the more they found. One week, the grinding line was closed; the next week, the killing floor. One government inspector would tell the plant to do one thing; another, the opposite.

Robert and Justin built a million-dollar laboratory to do their own testing and stay ahead of government scientists, but it wasn’t only the scientists they had to watch; it was also regulators, who seemed to come up with a new requirement every fifteen minutes, and lawyers. The business never had a serious
E. coli
violation, thank heaven, but you never knew when it might come. Even a small violation could cost a fortune, exposing the company to the caprice of FDA inspectors or the mercy of plaintiff’s attorneys.

The ATF, with its persnickety rules about machine guns, seemed to Robert a lot like the FDA; between the hobby and the business, he had no peace. There came a day, late in the Clinton years, when Robert and Justin looked at each other across the pushed-together desks and asked, “Who needs this?”

Justin was fifty, Robert getting close. They had all the money they would ever need. To continue the business would mean expanding yet again—there is no standing still in American industry—and that would mean starting all over: diluting shares and selling stock to raise capital, inventing new products, and finding new customers.