Lethal Passage: The Story of a Gun

^{CHAPTER FIVE} THE GUN

THE BALTIMORE COUNTY POLICE SHOOTING RANGE occupies a wooded area just north of Towson, Maryland, where the broad six-lane strip roads of Baltimore city taper to rolling two-lane highways. I heard the range the moment I stepped from my car, the sound like something you would get if you put a microphone beside a package of microwave popcorn in midpop. The range was a flat plane carved from a hillside so as to leave an earthen cliff at one end, which serves as a backstop to keep stray rounds from bounding north into Baltimore County horse country. Colonel Supenski arrived carrying a gray attaché case and led me onto the range where a group of county corrections officers was undergoing pistol training. He asked their instructor to have the group stand down for a few minutes, even though he and I were headed for the far end of the range roughly one hundred yards away. His caution was a measure of the deep respect police officers have for the quirky dangers of bullets and guns. During my pursuit of Nicholas Elliot’s gun, I often observed a subtle dance that law-enforcement people do whenever an amateur in their midst handles a gun, whether the gun is loaded or not. As the gun shifts, they shift, but ever so slightly in an instinctive, drilled-in twitch meant to ensure that if an imaginary line were drawn outward from the muzzle, it would never intersect their bodies.

Supenski occupies an at-times uncomfortable position in the gun debate. On the one hand, he is a big fan of guns. I accompanied him to a gun show in Westminster, Maryland, one Sunday morning. Despite his constant contact with guns he still could not resist handling some of the handguns we encountered, especially the old collector’s guns and the “tricked out” competition guns with their scopes, compensators, and hand-checked grips. “I grew up in the era of the B westerns,” he told me. “Loved them, still love them. My single most prized possession is an original Colt single-action ‘cowboy’ gun. Nickel-plated, hand-engraved, ivory stock.” But the Colonel, as everybody calls him, also believes in reasonable controls to force a heightened level of responsibility in the sale and use of firearms. This has not won him many friends among the gunslingers of America. He received a lot of sober stares from dealers at the gun show. One pro-gun group twice threatened to kill him, prompting a mischievous female assistant to don a bulletproof vest before joining him for lunch. “If I want to go sit behind the wheel of a fifteen-foot powerboat, I’ve got to get certified,” Supenski said. “I’ve got to go through a nine-week course, take a take-home exam, and have a natural-resources exam, and go through every conceivable aspect of safe boating—to sit behind the wheel of a boat.” He pointed to a handgun. “To buy one of those I don’t have to do squat. Now you tell me that’s sane.”

His is a pragmatic stance. He worries that irresponsible behavior by gun dealers, manufacturers, and the National Rifle Association may soon lead to truly restrictive controls well beyond the simple, yet crucial, regulations sought by moderate gun-control proponents, such as the 1993 Brady law’s mandatory waiting period and background checks. “My concern as a person who enjoys the shooting sports is that unless some reason comes in, things will get worse, and when that happens, those three million people in the NRA are going to find out what the fifteen million in the AARP [American Association of Retired Persons] are all about. Right now the other side hasn’t been mobilized.”

He considers the Cobray pistol made by S.W. Daniel Inc., and the means by which Nicholas Elliot came to own it, a study in irresponsibility in the gun marketplace, and he testified to that effect. The gun, he argues, serves no useful purpose—certainly none of the purposes traditionally cited by the gun camp when opposing new controls. It’s not useful for hunting, Supenski said. “First of all, you couldn’t use it to hunt. Most states have a limit on magazine capacity for hunting, three to five rounds. [The Cobray has a thirty-two-round magazine.] Second, most states have a minimum-caliber rule—clearly nine millimeter is not something you would use. It’s too big a cartridge to be used to hunt small game, it’s too small to hunt big game.”

Nor is the Cobray a target gun. Its two-inch barrel sharply reduces accuracy. It is a clumsy, heavy weapon, prone to rock up and down when fired. “It’s almost impossible to shoot one-handed, except at point-blank distances,” Supenski said. “It is a hands gun, plural, because you need both hands to employ it effectively. About the only thing you can do with it is hold it someplace in front of you, pull the trigger as fast as you can, put as many bullets out as you can, and hope like hell they’ll hit something. Now that may be nice on a battlefield. It isn’t so nice in an urban environment where that bullet may go through your bedroom into your child’s bedroom or into your neighbor’s bedroom, or may go outside and kill a passerby.”

Supenski opened his attaché case. Inside, against a thick layer of foam, was a Cobray pistol and a magazine packed with gleaming nine-millimeter cartridges. His department had confiscated the gun during an arrest; it was the same gun he had brought with him to Virginia Beach to show the jury in a civil trial against the dealer who sold a Cobray to Nicholas. He passed it to me.

Black, functional, it had none of the gleaming machined beauty of more expensive weapons. It was a brick of black steel with a pistol grip jutting from the center of its bottom face and a tiny barrel protruding from the front. To cock it, you need a good deal of strength. You pull back a black knob on top, which forces the bolt against a spring. When you pull the trigger, the bolt springs forward, stripping a fresh cartridge from the magazine and firing it. The pressure of the gases released from the cartridge forces the bolt backward, ejecting the now-empty cartridge case. An internal mechanism prevents the bolt from automatically coming forward and holds it cocked for the next shot. The gun’s ancestor was a submachine pistol, in which the bolt would immediately leap forward after each shot to fire a new round, repeating the process over and over at incredible speeds until the magazine was emptied or the shooter released the trigger.

It was undeniably, if darkly, appealing in its lethality. It was heavy, the weight of a six-pack of beer. Its grip had none of the warm, close-fitting contours of more costly guns, such as the expensive Smith & Wesson nine-millimeter Supenski carried. I held the Cobray out in front of me with one hand and tried to “acquire” the sights—that is, to line up the sight at the rear with the stub of metal at the front. The bolt knob, which protruded from a point midway along the frame, made this virtually impossible. My arm sagged. The gun was cumbersome. As trite as it sounds, however, the gun did look evil. It was a Darth Vader among guns.

Its reputation matched the look. A 1989 study by the Cox Newspapers found that the pistol ranked fourth among assault guns most often traced by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF). A study of all guns confiscated in Detroit from January of 1989 through April of 1990 put the Cobray first among assault guns, fifth among all models—higher in the rankings than guns made by Beretta, whose production dwarfs that of the S.W. Daniel company. The head of ATF’s Atlanta office told me early in 1992 that his agents conducted twenty to thirty traces involving S.W. Daniel guns each month.

The Cobray and its ancestors became the favorites of drug rings, street gangs, and assorted killers throughout the 1980s. Shortly after nine P.M. on June 18, 1984, a member of the Neo-Nazi Order used the Cobray’s ancestor, an Ingram MAC-10 machine pistol, to assassinate Denver talk-show host Alan Berg as he stepped from his car. Within seconds Berg suffered a devastating array of bullet wounds—thirty-four entry and exit wounds in all from a dozen .45-caliber bullets that crushed one eye, destroyed his brain, and caused massive injuries throughout his upper body. During a sweeping investigation of the Order, federal agents seized eight MACs and MAC successors. Later, on April 15, 1988, another member of the Order allegedly used a nine-millimeter MAC, converted to full auto, to kill a Missouri state trooper.

A note on terminology is in order here. A machine gun fires rifle-caliber bullets; a submachine gun fires pistol calibers. Both are fully automatic or “full-auto” weapons, meaning that they continue to fire for as long as you pull the trigger. The MAC-10, therefore, is a fully automatic submachine gun. The Cobray, which closely mimics the MAC-10 and is often described as a MAC, is a semiautomatic. A semiautomatic fires one round per pull. That the term automatic is sometimes applied to a pistol like the Colt Army .45 confuses the issue. When used to describe a pistol, automatic is simply the short form of “automatic reloading,” which means the gun uses the explosive force of each cartridge to load and cock itself after each shot. Such pistols are in fact semiautomatics.

The popular TV series “Miami Vice” fanned interest in the MAC family of weapons. “It slices, it dices,” one character said as he used a MAC to shred two female mannequins that had been chained to a wall. In March 1989, a Colorado man used a MAC-11 (a smaller cousin to the MAC-10) to kill two women and wound two deputies. The same month, Modesto, California, police arrested Albert E. Gulart, Jr., for illegal possession of explosives and found he possessed a semiautomatic variant registered to his half brother, Patrick Purdy. Two months earlier, Purdy had killed five children and wounded thirty others when he sprayed a Stockton schoolyard with an AKS rifle, a semiautomatic version of the AK-47. While investigating Purdy’s background, Stockton detectives paid Gulart a call in Modesto. The investigators said Gulart told them that before the schoolyard shootings he and Purdy had planned to kill at random a member of the Modesto police force. Gulart, according to the police account, also made a chillingly cryptic remark: “Patrick was successful in what he did, and I have a hard time driving by any school.” Although unsure just exactly what Gulart meant, Modesto police began round-the-clock surveillance, which led to the explosives arrest.

Six months later, Joseph T. Wesbecker packed himself a small arsenal, including two Cobray pistols, and marched into a Louisville, Kentucky, printing plant where he killed eight people and wounded twelve. Wesbecker never used the Cobrays, according to the Louisville homicide detective in charge of the case; he carried them in a gym bag, which he tucked under a stairway apparently because the bag interfered with his ability to handle the AK-47 he used in the shootings.

In February 1990 the Cobray came up for review by Maryland’s Handgun Roster Board, which had been created by legislation designed to restrict the sale of Saturday night specials. The S.W. Daniel handgun passed muster, but only because of the law’s strict limits on what characteristics can allow the board to ban a gun. Cornelius J. Behan, then chief of the Baltimore County police and a member of the board, found himself forced to vote for the gun. “It’s a terrible killing instrument that has no business meeting quality standards. But our law… doesn’t cover that weapon.” The day before, Behan had appeared in a full-page ad in the Sunday New York Times paid for by Handgun Control Inc. holding the gun under a bold headline that asked, “Who Goes Hunting With a MAC-11?” The third speaker, Elmer H. Tippet, also a board member and at the time head of the Maryland State Police, said he “echoed” Behan’s assessment. “I certainly question the legitimacy of a weapon like that for sporting or self-defense or anything else, but as the law is written I have no alternative other than to vote what the law says I must do, and that’s what I will do.” The gun joined the twelve hundred other handguns on the roster.

The list of killings involving MACs and Cobrays continued to grow; the crimes often achieved national notoriety.

At about midnight, September 27, 1990, an Iranian immigrant named Mehrdad Dashti fired into a popular bar in Berkeley, California, with a Cobray and two other weapons. He killed a university senior, then began a seven-hour standoff during which he wounded four other students. He was shot dead by a police SWAT team. California had outlawed the Cobray in 1989.

In May 1990 police in Vancouver, British Columbia, became profoundly alarmed after discovering three MAC submachine guns in six weeks. One officer predicted that soon a police officer or bystander would be injured or killed by such weapons. “They’re a recipe for disaster,” he told the Vancouver Sun.

His remarks were prophetic. On October 20, 1991, a Chinese immigrant, Chin Wa Chung, humiliated by the failure of a restaurant he had opened with his partner, Sheng Cheung, went to Cheung’s Vancouver house early one morning and used a Cobray M-11/9 to kill Cheung, Cheung’s wife, their seven-year-old son, and their fourteen-month-old baby before at last killing himself.

The same month a disgruntled ex-postal worker named Joseph M. Harris walked into the Ridgewood, New Jersey, post office clad in battle fatigues, a bulletproof vest, and a black silk face mask and shot and killed two of his former colleagues. Earlier he had stabbed his former supervisor to death at her home after first killing the woman’s boyfriend with a single gunshot to the head as the man sat watching television comfortably nestled under a blanket. Harris carried two fully automatic weapons: an Uzi and a MAC-10.

The Cobray was involved in an odd lot of other incidents. In 1991, New York City police were astonished to find that the sniper who had just barely missed hitting a clerical worker in a Bronx office building was a nine-year-old boy wielding a Cobray. Asked how he learned to operate the gun, the boy answered, “I watch a lot of TV.” The following year, in Denver, a sixteen-year-old boy used a Cobray M-11/9 to kill a fifteen-year-old with whom he had argued a few moments earlier. His mother, involved in a live-in relationship with a Denver police officer, had bought the boy the gun. “She’s certainly guilty of not having good sense,” a Denver police spokesman told the Denver Post, “but that’s not a criminal act.”

The Cobray and its MAC progenitors became icons of America’s inner-city gun culture. A Baltimore rapper called himself MAC-10, although when his group posed fully armed for a photograph, he held a .45 semiautomatic pistol with a laser sight. He was later shot and seriously wounded. Another member of his group was arrested for allegedly ordering the murder of a teenager; a third member was shot dead at a phone booth. At least two gangs, one each in Las Vegas and Jacksonville, Arkansas, also took the name MAC-10. Detailed renderings of the weapon periodically turn up in gang graffiti in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. In 1992, police in Indianapolis, as a warning to the city’s officers, posted rap lyrics written by a local group:

The best evidence of the admiration accorded the killing power of these guns by would-be felons came late in 1992 when Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents in Boston videotaped a conversation between Edward Gaeta, a Massachusetts man suspected of conspiring to deal narcotics, and a DEA agent posing as a Colombian drug trafficker. Gaeta had previously arranged the sale of two MAC-10 submachine guns complete with silencers to a DEA informant and hinted that he could get more.

“I’ll make it up like a story,” he told the agent. “Once upon a time, one week ago… I saw some MAC-10s go by with silencers on them…. That’s a nice, that’s an interesting weapon.”

“Very!” the agent said.

“With subsonic bullets. It sounds like a cat pissing.”

The dream guns “were beautiful,” Gaeta said. “You’ll go through your whole clip in, ah, one and a half seconds. Thirty-two rounds. And I’ll tell you what, I could kill thirteen people in the bathroom and you wouldn’t even know I had it.”

In Towson, Maryland, Supenski hefted the Cobray he had brought in his briefcase. “When you look at the utility or purpose for those weapons as balanced against the potential harm they can do to society, to the police who have to protect society and to the public themselves,” Supenski said, “the risks far outweigh the benefits. If there was a gun industry with a conscience—if there was a gun industry out there that would understand that even though they have a right to make these things and put them into the commercial mainstream, it may not be the right thing to do—we wouldn’t be here talking about this issue, and gun dealers wouldn’t be selling these things legally or illegally.”

Where did the Cobray come from? How did this weapon, designed for use in close combat by commandos, paratroopers, tankers, and, yes, Latin American guerrillas on a tight budget, become a mass consumer product?

The gun’s direct lineage begins in the stormy 1960s when Gordon Ingram, an engineer with Police Ordnance Co. of Los Angeles, paid a visit to an illegal machine-gun company operated by a friend and former colleague named Juan Erquiaga Azicorbe, a former officer of the Peruvian Army who had emigrated to America. Erquiaga was struggling to fill an order for five hundred machine guns of his own design and five hundred silencers for anti-Castro exiles training in Costa Rica. During this visit, according to Thomas Nelson, an authority on the history of machine pistols (ATF technicians often consult his dictionary-size volumes), Erquiaga explained the qualities his rebel customers demanded of a gun. According to Nelson these qualities included “small size, to facilitate concealment; sound suppression, to deter detection; and low cost.”

Ingram saw a way to improve on Erquiaga’s gun and built the first prototype, the M10, which looked very much the way the Cobray M-11/9 looks today. About this time, according to Thomas, Erquiaga hired Ingram to be his chief engineer and to help speed production of the Cuban order.

The United States had given Erquiaga’s effort tacit approval, granting him the necessary tax stamp to make machine guns despite the fact that until that point he had been making machine guns illegally and, on a previous occasion, had fled the country just ahead of a federal raid on a machine-gun factory he ran in his garage. The political winds shifted again, however, and in 1965 federal agents swept down on Erquiaga and confiscated all the weapons he had produced for the Cubans. Erquiaga, however, managed to escape to South America.

Ingram continued refining his ideas and developed several more prototypes, all having essentially the same look. The Army bought one and tested it at the Frankford Arsenal in Philadelphia. Soon afterward, the gun caught the eye of an Atlanta soldier of fortune, Mitchell L. WerBell III, founder of the Sionics Co., which made “counterinsurgency” equipment and an efficient silencer. WerBell, who wore a uniform of his own design and called himself an “international general,” bought a nine-millimeter prototype of Ingram’s machine gun and took it with him on a sales trip to Southeast Asia. In 1969 Ingram left his job as an engineer for Fairchild Hiller to become chief engineer at Sionics, which was by then based in Powder Springs, Georgia, just outside Atlanta, where WerBell established a paramilitary training camp. To best capitalize on Ingram’s designs, WerBell and Ingram decided to produce two weapons: an open-bolt fully automatic machine pistol for military markets, restricted for sale to civilians since the National Firearms Act of 1934, and an unrestricted semiautomatic version for civilian buyers—the first glimmer of the weapon’s emergence as a mass-consumer product.

From 1969 through 1970, WerBell and Ingram took the military version of their machine pistol on the road, demonstrating it to U.S. authorities at Forts Benning, Gordon, and Belvoi and at the Quantico Marine Base. (Historian Nelson notes that military policemen at Fort Gordon even fired Ingram’s pistol on full-auto underwater in the base swimming pool.)

The gun attracted enough interest to convince a group of New York investors that it might replace the standard .45 pistol as the military sidearm of choice. The investors, acting as Quantum Corp., renamed the company Military Armament Corp. from which the acronym MAC derives. It was not a match made in heaven. Within a year Quantum had ousted WerBell and Ingram from their jobs as manager and chief engineer. Conflict between the investors and the founders grew; the company suffered production delays and had difficulty raising money.

About the only good news was a welcome burst of free publicity from none other than John Wayne himself, in his starring role as Lon McQ in McQ, a 1974 movie about a tough Seattle police detective who sets out to solve the murder of a colleague, only to discover the colleague was involved with a notorious drug ring. It was McQ, according to ATF officials, that put the Ingram in the public eye and made it the gun most favored by America’s drug gangs—although ironically the bad guys in the movie used only revolvers and shotguns, mere toys compared to the arsenals deployed by today’s drug cartels.

The company could not have hoped for a better advertisement. At one point big Lon McQ visits the shop of a gun dealer he knows. The screenwriter wasted little energy on subtlety in introducing the weapon.

“Hey, Lon,” the dealer says, “what are you doing?”

McQ offers a wry grin. “Buyin’ a gun.”

“Got a minute? I got somethin’ I want to show you out back.”

McQ lumbers after him into the back room of the gun shop where a small shooting range is conveniently equipped with a water-filled garbage can raised on two sawhorses.

“Lon,” the dealer says, “I have a little equalizer here. We’re going to try to sell it to the department.” He holds up the gun. With an unmistakable touch of reverence, he says, “The Ingram.”

“The Ingram, huh?”

“Nine millimeter,” adds a gunsmith seated nearby. For some reason the gunsmith is wearing a white lab coat, about as alien to most gun shops as an autographed photo of James Brady.

McQ hefts the gun. “Six or seven pounds?”

“Six point two five,” the gunsmith says. He screws on a silencer. “Silencer makes a good handle.”

“Lon,” the dealer says, “this can here is filled with water. Go on. Squeeze off a burst.”

“Why not?” McQ says.

McQ blasts away, filling the can full of holes as water spurts from all sides. The camera cuts to McQ’s face and an expression that comes as close to awe as John Wayne could muster.

McQ looks down at the gun. He looks back at the pail.

“How about that?” the dealer says. “Those thirty-two slugs came out in a second and a half.”

Ruggedly, slowly, McQ says, “Yeah.”

“You ever see anything like it?” the dealer asks.

McQ, who by now has quit the police force in order to work the case more efficiently, walks off with the gun without paying a penny or signing a single document. (Doing so anywhere but in a movie would constitute an immediate felony.) He uses it later to mow down a band of dope dealers and grind their car to steel mulch. Afterward, of course, he gets his badge back from a grateful department. True to the traditions of cinematic gunplay, no one asks about the gun or the corpses strewn over a Pacific beach.

Just in case anyone in the audience had any doubt about where to buy this wondrous weapon, Warner Brothers provided a fullscreen credit that read, “Special Weapon: Military Armament Corp.”

This enthusiastic bit of advertising wasn’t enough to save the company, however. Military Armament Corp. filed for Chapter 11 protection under federal bankruptcy laws in mid-1975, without ever having produced a semiautomatic Ingram for the general consumer. The remains of the company, including ten thousand submachine guns and two thousand silencers, were sold at auction, most to a group of investors who had formed another Atlanta company called RPB Industries Inc. They too planned to bring Ingram’s weapons to full-scale commercial production, but in 1978 sold out to yet another group of investors, this one headed by Wayne Daniel, the son of a Georgia minister.

Under Wayne Daniel, RPB had more success selling the Ingram line and by mid-1979 had made sales of varying amounts to some twenty countries, including seven Latin American nations, the United Kingdom, Saudia Arabia, and Israel. An operating manual for the RPB version of the Ingram M10 came in a camouflage cover and, on its first page, noted how “the compact size of the M10 makes it especially suitable for tank crews, gun and mortar crews, etc.” The manual also displayed a range of available accessories, including the RPB “Operational Briefcase,” an attaché case packed with a silenced M10 that could be fired with the gun still in the case. A business card inserted in a card holder on the side of the case obscured the muzzle.

“Looks like an ordinary briefcase with your calling card in front,” the manual reads. “However, this case contains the world’s deadliest submachine gun, ready for action.” The blurb noted that anyone who bought the briefcase would have to register it with ATF, which had classed it as an “assassination device.”

Under Wayne Daniel and his partners, the new RPB faced an array of business obstacles not typically included in the syllabi at Harvard Business School. One partner was convicted of bribing a prosecutor to drop a client’s drug charge. Two others, Robert Morgan and John “Jack” Leibolt, got involved in the narcotics smuggling operations of Pablo Escobar-Gaviria and the Medellín Cartel. Morgan was convicted in 1979 for smuggling two tons of marijuana into Florida and was sentenced to thirty years in prison. Leibolt, according to a sweeping 1989 indictment of the Medellín Cartel, once piloted a plane for the cartel and, in September 1979, supplied the group with six silencer-equipped machine guns. (He pleaded guilty in August of 1990 to conspiracy to import cocaine.)

Despite all this, RPB succeeded in at last transforming the Ingram from a limited-circulation military weapon into a semiautomatic handgun for general use. Previously, the company had been restricted to selling its full-auto Ingram variations only through dealers specially licensed to sell machine guns, who in turn—if they followed the law—sold them only to buyers who had undergone an ATF background investigation and paid $200 for the necessary tax stamp. Now, however, any adult with a clean record could buy an Ingram look-alike, even a mock silencer to go with it. “It became available everywhere,” said Earl Taylor, a twenty-one-year ATF veteran who retired to become a vice president with Norred & Associates, an Atlanta security concern that as of 1992 counted among its varied assignments the protection of Kroger supermarkets and ex-colonel Oliver North. “All gun shops everywhere were selling it. Everywhere. The distribution of it became widespread.”

Taylor is a tall, lean man whose courtly manner and slow, easy way of speaking suggest quiet authority. Over the years he came to know RPB and its successor, S.W. Daniel, intimately, first as resident agent-in-charge of ATF’s Rome, Georgia, office, later as supervisor of criminal investigation in the agency’s Atlanta office. He deployed undercover agents to order the guns from illegal suppliers. Demand was so high, they had to wait for delivery, Taylor recalled. “It was a hot item.”

What made the gun particularly popular was its internal design, a delight to anyone interested in skirting federal restrictions on ownership of machine guns. “ATF was concerned because those damn weapons were so easily converted to full-automatic fire,” Taylor said. “An individual could convert one in a minute or two, or maybe even less time than that.” (“In seconds,” said another retired ATF agent familiar with the guns.)

All a buyer had to do was file down a small metal catch—the “trip”—that caught the bolt after each shot, thereby leaving the bolt free to spring forward and fire machine-gun style. Demand for the guns soared nationwide, and black markets formed as middlemen, including one Georgia policeman, bought large quantities, converted the guns, and resold them to the drug underworld. These weapons triggered the arms race that today confronts law-enforcement officers across the nation.

In October 1981, Wayne Daniel married a striking Alabama woman named Sylvia Williams. In November, Sylvia, and Wayne’s son from a previous marriage, Wayne “Buddy” Daniel, became members of RPB’s board of directors. Sylvia would soon prove a feisty, outspoken opponent of ATF, bent on pushing the limits of the law in the name of the Second Amendment and free enterprise, at no small cost to society at large. She and Wayne made no secret of their loyalties. At one point, they produced little plastic badges that read BATF SUCKS.

By the autumn of 1981, Wayne Daniel found himself struggling against increasing pressure from the FBI, ATF, and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, as all three agencies investigated the activities of John Leibolt, by now one of RPB’s three shareholders. (The other two shareholders were Wayne Daniel and Leibolt’s son.) ATF threatened to pull the federal license that allowed RPB to make and sell guns—its Federal Firearms License—because of Leibolt’s suspected criminal activities. Minutes of RPB’s board meetings show that Leibolt’s legal troubles had made it difficult for RPB to secure credit and, moreover, had left the company exposed to the threat of criminal charges.

In a special board meeting held December 14, 1981, Wayne, according to the minutes, denounced “the general irrepute that the association of Mr. Leibolt” had brought to the company. Because of John Leibolt’s dabbling in the narcotics trade, Wayne said, he “personally did not want to be in business with either one of the Lei-bolts.”

Two weeks later the board met again and resolved to buy back Leibolt’s stock and thus sever his ties to the company. Leibolt, however, had fled Georgia. The minutes of RPB’s January 20, 1982, board meeting noted that Leibolt “refuses to come to Atlanta and has stated he will not step foot in the State of Georgia due to fear of being arrested.” The board resolved to liquidate the company.

ATF, meanwhile, classified RPB’s semiautomatic Ingram as a machine gun, arguing it was so easy to convert that even in semiautomatic form it should fall under the far stricter regulations that governed the sale of automatic weapons. The ATF technical branch in Washington made a videotape to show just how easily a buyer could convert the gun.

RPB challenged the ATF decision. A federal judge backed the agency, but to reduce the fiscal hardship imposed on RPB by the ruling allowed the company time to continue manufacturing the weapon and selling off existing stocks. Any gun assembled before June 21, 1982, would be classed as a semiautomatic; the same gun made one day later would be a machine gun subject to federal restrictions.

This delay, a surprise bonus for RPB, provided another example of the willingness within our culture to overlook the inherent deadliness of guns. The threat of a ban boosted demand for the gun, and according to Earl Taylor, RPB accelerated production and sales. “They knew that weapon was going to be outlawed, they knew it was going to be worth a hell of a lot more money once you couldn’t produce it anymore, so I guess it made sense to go for it.”

June proved a profitable month for RPB. Gun consumers—far from being put off by the gun’s lethal reputation and the ATF ruling—rushed to buy the last of the weapons before the deadline. The company’s final after-tax profit doubled over that of May, for a profit margin—net income as a percentage of gross sales—of 37 percent.

The next month, with the ruling in effect, the company’s net income plummeted to just one-sixteenth of the June total.

In September, the RPB board approved a final plan for liquidating the company; in October, an auction house sold its assets for half a million dollars.

A reasonable man might expect that at this point the gun, this weapon built to kill soldiers in close combat and adopted by dope peddlers and urban gangs, would be allowed to disappear from America’s arsenal and consigned to Thomas Nelson’s history books. But RPB Industries rose quickly from the tomb, this time as S.W. Daniel Inc., named for Sylvia Williams Daniel. After ATF’s ruling the Daniels set out in earnest to develop a weapon that could be sold readily to the public. They succeeded—introducing by 1983 the Cobray M-11/9—but nonetheless continued sending prototype after prototype to the ATF technical branch in Washington, as if probing for holes in the law. Once, for example, they sent a prototype of what they claimed was a single-shot weapon. It was the same weapon that previously had been ruled a machine gun, but with a plate over the bottom of the grip where the magazine would otherwise be inserted. ATF, however, found that the plate could be removed and classified this weapon too as a machine gun.

The company also sold machine-gun “flats,” stamped and notched pieces of steel that could be bent to form the frame, or “lower receiver,” of a machine gun. Under federal law, a machine-gun receiver is treated as if it were a complete firearm. The flats, however, were legal, provided they were left unbent and certain holes were left undrilled. All a consumer had to do to commit an instant felony was to drill out a single hole—but that was the consumer’s problem.

The Daniels knew their market well, said Earl Taylor. “I’ve always had a hunch that Wayne and Sylvia were not so much believers in all the pro-gun propaganda that goes on and that they so freely talk about, but that they were more interested in making money than anything else.” Of Wayne, he said, “He’s got a reputation for testing the waters, so to speak. He’ll come close to the edge of the envelope—maybe not blatantly doing something illegal, but he’s very anxious to test and see how far he can go in the weapons field.”

Wayne’s attitude, according to Taylor, made his products all the more attractive to gun buyers. “He can kind of feel the pulse of this gun culture out there and kind of say things and do things and market things that appeal to those people.”

Indeed, far from embarking on a PR campaign to sweeten the gun’s reputation, Sylvia and Wayne played up its bloody history, marketing the Cobray as “The Gun That Made the Eighties Roar.”

The company’s marketing ideology soon led it to begin a business venture that provides a case study in how powerless our society is to control the easy traffic in the tools of murder. This new venture would trigger a nationwide ATF investigation that exposed widespread illegal sales of weapons to neo-Nazis, the IRA, and assorted felons; exposed the illegal practices of federally licensed gun dealers; and resulted in the arrests of hundreds of the company’s customers—yet left Sylvia, Wayne, and their corporation virtually unscathed.

Wayne Daniel may have felt it a personal affront to work alongside John Leibolt, but he felt no such moral reluctance when in January 1983 he and Sylvia invited two men, Joseph Ledbetter and Travis Motes, to their home to make the men a proposition.

Ledbetter and Motes had installed air-conditioning in the RPB offices and had wired S.W. Daniel’s corporate headquarters. The Daniels suggested that their two visitors diversify into the business of making the outer tubes for silencers. S.W. Daniel would make the interior parts. The two companies would advertise in the same gun publications and travel to the same gun shows. By selling only parts, both would stay on the right side of federal laws requiring registration of completed silencers. Indeed, no law barred the sale of silencer parts. In the eyes of the law, however, any consumer who accepted delivery of both internal parts and tubes would automatically possess a completed silencer—regardless of whether he put them together to produce a working silencer or not. If the consumer had not first acquired the ATF approval and tax stamp necessary to own a silencer, he would be guilty of a felony. But again, as far as S.W. Daniel was concerned, that was the consumer’s worry.

Wayne Daniel went so far as to give Ledbetter and Motes a measuring gauge to guide them in fashioning the tubes, according to government affidavits. He also allowed them to use S.W. Daniel’s slogan, “Silence is golden,” which the Daniels had used to sell a line of completed silencers through Shotgun News, a thick tabloid containing only firearms advertising. Ledbetter and Motes founded L&M Guns and likewise began selling their tubes through Shotgun News and at gun shows around the country. The Daniels, meanwhile, began advertising their internal-parts kits and displaying them at the same gun shows. On at least one occasion, according to a statement by Ledbetter, the two companies found themselves facing each other across an aisle.

Details of this arrangement emerged in February 1984, when ATF agents received a tip from the sheriff’s department in Mono County, California, that its officers had discovered silencers while searching the home of a Bridgeport, California, man named Frank Wedertz. Wedertz, who had not registered his silencers, told ATF he had bought them from a licensed gun dealer in Tehachapi, California. ATF agents then searched the dealer’s home and found records indicating he had bought the components from L&M Guns and S.W. Daniel, had assembled the silencers, and then sold them. The dealer said he had seen ads for the parts in Shotgun News and had been able to assemble the completed silencers in minutes.

The investigation began gaining momentum. On April 27, 1984, ATF special agent Peter Urrea, posing as the president of the Widow Makers Motorcycle Club, telephoned L&M Guns. He first told the company’s order taker that he had received kits containing the internal parts for a silencer from S.W. Daniel, then asked whether or not the parts would fit the L&M tubes. The operator assured him the S.W. Daniel parts would indeed fit. Urrea ordered three tubes. He also ordered machine-gun flats from S.W. Daniel and L&M.

On April 30, Agent Urrea called S.W. Daniel and ordered three sets of internal parts for silencers, one kit containing the operating mechanisms of an S.W. Daniel nine-millimeter machine gun, and one the frame flat. He expressed concern about the kinds of records S.W. Daniel kept, explaining that he was concerned because he had a criminal record. The company assured him it only kept shipping invoices.

Urrea also ordered a machine-gun flat from L&M Guns and persuaded Travis Motes to bend the frame for him. Motes mailed the shaped frame to Urrea. In the process, according to ATF documents, Motes violated provisions of the Gun Control Act of 1968 prohibiting any company from manufacturing a lower receiver without an ATF license. ATF charged, moreover, that by mailing the frame to California, moreover, Motes violated the act’s provisions against shipping firearms across state lines directly to consumers. (Companies can sell guns to out-of-state residents by mail but must ship them first to a licensed dealer in the buyer’s home state.) Urrea also asked Motes whether he could provide twenty-five more machine-gun kits with already-shaped flats so that he could make twenty-five machine guns and sell them to friends in South America. Motes said he might be able to accommodate him.

Urrea continued buying silencer parts and machine-gun kits from S.W. Daniel, L&M, and a third company, La Vista Armaments of Louisville, Kentucky, gradually building enough evidence to convince a federal judge to grant search warrants to allow ATF agents to search the companies. On July 19, 1984, ATF agents raided L&M and S.W. Daniel, seizing firearms, firearm parts, and, most important, customer lists and shipping records. Urrea and a colleague spent a month examining these records and found that in California alone some twenty-four consumers had received all the components necessary to build a silencer—and thus possessed the equivalent of completed silencers—but none had bothered to register the device.

The bureau used the seized records to launch some four hundred individual criminal investigations relating to arms trafficking and illegal possession of restricted weapons. In June 1985, ATF agents arrested Sylvia and Wayne and, using an experimental tactic, charged them with conspiracy to sell illegal silencers. (By now Sylvia and Wayne had divorced but continued a close working relationship.) In formal court arguments, they claimed they were simply trying to fill a valid need for replacement parts for silencers owned by legitimate users.

The ATF investigators found a rather different story.

All in all from November 1983 to July 1984, the government charged, S.W. Daniel had mailed six thousand silencer kits and machine-gun kits. Only four buyers had bothered to register the devices. When ATF checked the customer lists through the FBI’s National Crime Information Center, it found that more than fifty customers had prior criminal records or were believed to be involved in drug peddling and other forms of organized crime. Posing as IRA gunrunners, Mexican narcotics smugglers, and assorted ne’er-do-wells, undercover ATF agents were welcomed by international arms traffickers, narcotics smugglers, and assorted ne’er-do-wells.

An ATF agent posing as a member of the Irish Republican Army ordered $15.6 million of silencer-equipped machine guns, hand grenades, and rocket-propelled grenades from a group of New York arms traffickers who, according to Treasury documents, illegally manufactured and sold firearms and explosives to countries forbidden by U.S. law from receiving domestically produced weapons. A Treasury case report noted that the leaders of the group “were dealing directly with Sylvia and Wayne Daniel… for the purchase of the machine guns and silencer kits, which were then sold to the ATF undercover agent.” The leaders were convicted of violating federal firearms laws.

Agents also arrested an Oregon man who sold machine-gun lower receivers to the Neo-Nazi Order, the group whose members assassinated Alan Berg in Denver and allegedly murdered a Missouri state trooper. After his initial arrest, the man bragged to friends that ATF had failed to find his real stash of weapons hidden underneath his water bed. A tipster leaked the secret to ATF. Agents returned to the man’s house, drained the bed, and found two S.W. Daniel machine guns and five silencers, all made from kits.

Another investigation captured a Texas man after he sold seven S.W. Daniel machine guns, with silencers, to an ATF undercover agent who had posed as a Houston narcotics dealer. The suspect had received forty-four silencer kits from S.W. Daniel and twenty-five tubes from L&M Guns.

In Ohio, agents arrested a convicted felon named Joe Canatelli, who had also sold machine guns and silencers to an ATF undercover agent. Canatelli had purchased silencer tubes and internal components directly from L&M and S.W. Daniel, and from a federally licensed firearms dealer in Youngstown, Ohio, who had agreed to order the silencer kits and machine-gun kits for Canatelli. The dealer, in a formal affidavit, stated that Canatelli “had previously told me that you can make a buck by putting the kits together, and that he knew some guys that wanted to buy some M11s with silencers for the mob. He further explained that they ‘would be used only once for hits.’” Agents seized three machine guns made from “flats,” and three silencers. Canatelli and an associate were convicted and sentenced to prison.

The growing list of arrested S.W. Daniel customers included a San Jose man who made machine guns and silencers and distributed them in Mexico; an Aurora, Illinois, man found during a search to possess an arsenal of more than thirty weapons and a large supply of cocaine, marijuana, and amphetamines; two Tucson narcotics dealers who had sold two machine guns and three silencers to an ATF agent posing as a Mexican narcotics smuggler; and a federally licensed firearms dealer in Florida found during a search to possess one and a half pounds of uncut cocaine and ninety-four blank Granadian passports. The dealer told the ATF agents a child had found the passports “in the road.” When the agents asked the dealer to open a safe in his closet, he hesitated and asked, “What if there’s something in here other than guns that I don’t want you to find?”

Agents found the cocaine.

“There are literally thousands of persons now in the United States and probably outside the United States who have a fully operable silencer which is not registered to them and which is possessed unlawfully,” wrote Brian C. Leighton, the assistant U.S. attorney assigned to prosecute the Daniels, in a pretrial statement. “It was incredibly easy for these people to receive the silencer; they merely had to order the internal-parts kit from SWD and order a tube from one of the many tube distributors—all of whom advertised in Shotgun News.” These were “assassin-type weapons,” he said, and posed “a definite danger to the community.”

As the case approached the trial phase, however, the government found itself compelled to abandon its conspiracy strategy and admit that no law forbade the sale of silencer components or the machine-gun parts as sold by S.W. Daniel. Indeed, federal law expressly excluded silencer parts from ATF regulation. The Daniels pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor for failing to pay taxes in the sale of two firearms. They were sentenced to six months’ probation and forced to pay $900 in taxes and fines, but because they had escaped felony charges, they were allowed to retain their Federal Firearms License.

The investigation had not cowed the Daniels. On May 1, 1985, Shotgun News ran an ad placed by Wayne Daniel titled, “Now It’s Happening in AMERICA,” and featuring a large photograph of Hitler and Mussolini. The ad recounted the ATF raid on S.W. Daniel and listed the names and home cities of the agents involved. Wayne referred to them as the “Gestapo” and likened their search to a Nazi search for Polish gun owners in 1939. “The uniforms of this new ‘Gestapo’ may not be taylored [sic] and bear the eagle and swastika on the sleeve, rather they choose to wear a business suit or sport jacket and slacks from the racks of a cut-rate department store—but their purpose is the same, they want total control and YOU, as an American citizen, DISARMED!”

The agents named in the ad, among them Earl Taylor, demanded that Daniel retract the advertisement. He refused.

In a handwritten letter he replied: “I am at a complete loss of words perhaps from bending over laughing. No malice was intended by the ad…. It is my opinion that nothing in the ad is anything but the truth, as you know nothing is libelous or slanderous if the truth is published with no malice.”

The agents filed a private libel suit against Wayne Daniel and Snell Publishing, the publisher of Shotgun News. “It wasn’t the fact that he was attacking ATF, because ATF was accustomed to being attacked,” Taylor told me. “It was the fact that he mentioned the ATF agents by name. I was offended by it and so were most of the other agents.”

None of the agents hoped to get rich from the suit, Taylor said. They knew that at the time Wayne Daniel had few personal assets. “It was, by God, to let them know that they couldn’t do that to law-enforcement officers who were doing their mandated duty.”

The court ruled in the agents’ favor and ordered Wayne Daniel to pay each agent $1,000 in damages, a symbolic victory. The court found Snell not liable.

Undaunted, the Daniels branched out into other firearms. They introduced a pistol-grip shotgun with a high-capacity drum magazine and a forward grip and called it the Street-Sweeper, best described as resembling a shotgun version of a tommy gun. “Delivers Twelve Rounds In Less Than Three Seconds!!!!” one ad proclaimed in Shotgun News. “Time for spring cleaning,” the ad continued. “Why try clean-ups with inadequate equipment?? Buy the machine designed to clean thoroughly on the first pass.”

The company’s latest innovation is the Ladies’ Home Companion, apparently intended for use by women to protect themselves and their homes. A variation on the Street-Sweeper, it is just under two feet long, has a twelve-shot revolving drum, and fires a heavy rifle-caliber .45–70 “government” cartridge that causes explosive recoil—yet the gun has only a rear pistol grip and no other handle. A gun dealer submitted the weapon to the Maryland Handgun Roster Board for consideration as a “revolver.” The trigger requires thirty to forty pounds of pressure, according to tests by Don Flohr, a Maryland State Police firearms expert who tests weapons for the board. S.W. Daniel advertised the gun as being “ideal for use in confined spaces,” yet Flohr refused to test-fire it for fear of damaging the backstop to the state’s indoor pistol range. With the degree of understatement common to forensic investigators, Flohr noted that anyone shooting this gun “may be somewhat disturbed by the force of escaping gases, noise, and recoil experienced.”

The board ruled the gun had no valid use, thus making it one of the precious few handguns awful enough to be banned for sale in Maryland. An official with the Maryland board described the gun as “a sick joke.”

I would have liked to ask Sylvia and Wayne why they seemed hell-bent on skirting firearms laws, but neither returned the many calls I made—and the faxes and overnight letters I mailed—to their Atlanta headquarters. I asked Earl Taylor whether the Daniels were driven in their corporate antics by some kind of Second Amendment fundamentalism.

“Shit no,” he said. “I think Wayne’s strictly in it for the money. That doesn’t make him a bad guy—he’s a sharp businessman. And Sylvia’s a sharp businesslady.”

Sylvia in particular makes an appealing character for America’s gun lovers—“those assholes” in the NRA, as Taylor put it. “Here’s a woman who’s a manufacturer of a submachine gun. She brings lawsuits against the government all the time for mistreating us gun owners. She’s just a person they can identify with.”

In Towson, Colonel Supenski had me slip on pistol earmuffs and safety glasses, then handed back the Cobray, now fully loaded with a thirty-two-round clip. He invited me to fire away.

I fired slowly at first, trying to accustom myself to the trigger action and the roll of the weapon. The trigger action was uneven, but quick. I fired with abandon, trying to aim at a series of steel man-shaped targets named Pepper Poppers after their inventor. The targets are designed to fall backward when struck by a bullet. The cliff came alive as if a tribe of beetles had suddenly decided to decamp. I downed all four targets and then turned the gun on a loose piece of wood embedded in the earth behind them. Shards blew off in all directions. Shell casings rocketed past me, one striking the rim of my safety glasses and bouncing off my eyebrow. In a matter of seconds I’d used up all thirty-two rounds.

Watching the dirt fly, one can be lulled into believing this is, after all, just fun and games. I wanted to fire off another clip; hell, I wanted to “rock and roll,” the gun culture’s euphemism for firing a machine gun in full auto. This was fun. Remote destruction is a dynamite rush.

As I drove home, however, I was struck by the dissonance between the innocent clink of the Pepper Poppers and the deadly power of each bullet. What cost, this fun and games? Any one of those bits of lead invisibly traversing the space between me and the target would have been enough to blow a man’s brains out.

“You put a gun like this in the hands of a juvenile,” Supenski testified at the civil trial that examined how Nicholas Elliot acquired his gun, “and you’ve got death waiting to happen.”

The judge struck this and most of Supenski’s testimony from the record as prejudicial and inflammatory.

“Well, I should say so,” Supenski told me, nodding fiercely. “Damn right! It should have been inflammatory. A whole lot of people should have heard it and they should have been inflamed.”

At his office, Supenski placed two weapons on a conference table, one the Cobray M-11/9, the other the new Smith & Wesson nine-millimeter he carries each day, a beautifully machined weapon with a wood grip and three different safety mechanisms designed to prevent accidental shootings. “The gun industry, unlike any other, is allowed to run amok,” he said. “If you had industry regulations, or if you had safety regulations or product-liability regulations, you better believe they’d see the light, you’d see a lot more of those”—he pointed to the Smith & Wesson pistol—“and none of those. And you wouldn’t need the California assault-weapon ban, you wouldn’t need a New Jersey ban, a Maryland Saturday-night-special law. You wouldn’t need them because that kind of garbage would never be released into the mainstream.

“Could Nicholas Elliot have killed people with this?” Supenski said, touching his own pistol. “Yeah, he could have. That’s true. But he wasn’t drawn to that one. He was drawn to this one.” The Cobray lay on the table, dull and black. The only gleam came from the holes left where the previous owner had drilled out the serial numbers. “The sad part of it is, you look at what happened and you ask, is that something that with a little bit of foresight and a little less greed or maybe stupidity, or whatever the hell it was—is that something that could have been prevented? The answer, quite simply, is yes.”

He pushed his glasses higher on his nose. “You know the part of that case that really bothered me—the clerk who sold the kid that goddamn gun. He was an ex-cop.”