Glock: The Rise of America’s Gun (25 page)

During one visit to Austria, Paul Jannuzzo recalled, Glock told him they would “take a beer” before dinner and meet some local friends. At the restaurant where Glock took him,
“there was a bit of an unidentified buzz in the air,” Jannuzzo said, “and it reached its crescendo when the star arrived”: Jörg Haider. The politician shook hands and exchanged pleasantries with Glock and the others.

“It was the Beer Hall Putsch Redux,” Jannuzzo said ruefully. Uncomfortable mixing with the Haider crowd, the American lawyer decided to step outside—“in case the Israelis decided to use this occasion to take out Haider and his group with a cruise missile.”

Over the years, Glock vehemently denied Austrian media reports linking him to the Freedom Party. But several employees were aware of his friendliness with Haider.

By the late 1990s, the gun business had made Gaston Glock a billionaire. Estimating the size of his fortune was (and is) difficult, because most of it remains tied up in his privately held corporation. The shares of Glock GmbH do not trade on an exchange and therefore do not have a price. Valued conservatively, the company and its offshoots are probably worth $500 million, according to executives and investors familiar with the gun industry. Glock has invested in real estate in Atlanta and southern Austria worth tens of millions of dollars more. He has two corporate jets worth eight figures and a helicopter that ferries him around Austria (probably worth another $3 million or $4 million). He owns expensive show horses. It is impossible to say how much cash he has stashed away.

For all his wealth, though, Glock has spent his money awkwardly, in fits and starts. He has never seemed entirely comfortable living large. His ostentation has been tentative.

When his senior American employees traveled to Velden
for consultations, Glock often had them stay at his villa, an enormous structure decorated in pink-and-white Italian marble, glittering crystal chandeliers, and heavy brocade curtains. The home cost millions to build, but guests wiped their shoes on tacky black-and-silver Glock-branded doormats. Inside the front door were withered houseplants turning shades of yellow and brown. The parlors were filled with expensive white couches and divans, but some were wrapped in transparent plastic, presumably to prevent stains. A garish fake leopard skin was draped across one living room sofa. Guest room beds were made up with slippery silk sheets the color of Pepto-Bismol. Glock did not obsess about thread count.

The master of the mansion spent much of his time in a windowless basement room, according to visitors. From this underground bunker, he could control the villa’s security cameras and alarms, as well as the air-conditioning and elevator. He could even set the temperature of the heated tile floors in the many bathrooms upstairs. “He was down there alone for hours,” Jannuzzo said.

Glock employed a cleaning staff and a computer technician but no other household servants. He drove his own BMW and never graduated from the $80,000 car to a Rolls-Royce or a Bentley. He frequented pricey restaurants, but typically those popular with tourists, rather than the most exclusive establishments. He insisted on caviar for the whole table and plentiful bottles of Gray Goose vodka, yet he demonstrated unease ordering from an elaborate wine list. One of his favorite spots was Essigbratlein, a dining establishment in Nuremberg, Germany, where Glock traveled for business. Originally a sixteenth-century meeting place for wine merchants, the tiny restaurant is famous for its roast loin of beef. But it is hardly
extravagant by the standards of corporate titans or movie stars. A six-course dinner of Franconian cuisine can be had for $120.

When visiting Austria, Glock employees ate all their meals with their hosts. Mr. Glock dominated the conversation, often holding forth on physical fitness and human longevity. On occasion, he discussed his intention to live to the age of 120. The key to his biblical durability, he said, was a substance called megamine, which he consumed daily. Just what he was ingesting is not clear. There are various dietary supplements of dubious value that are marketed under names similar to megamine. A company called NaturalMost sells Megamino Amino Acid Complex “for the satisfactory maintenance of physiological functions.” Glock described megamine as a derivative of volcanic ash, which when ground finely and taken orally, could enter human cells and purge them of impurities.

Business meetings with Mr. Glock in his large office in the villa at Velden lasted hours at a time. Typically, executives presented him with a decision—whether to move ahead with a hiring, firing, or scheduling of a promotional event—followed by extended periods of silent rumination. Glock stared out his window at the broad lawn and tall trees surrounding the villa. “One hundred words per hour is probably a high estimate,” Jannuzzo said, speaking of Glock’s verbal contributions. Another Glock in-house lawyer, Peter Manown, occupied himself by surreptitiously conjugating verbs in German, scribbling on a pad as if he were taking notes about company matters.

Visiting executives were at the Glocks’ command twenty-four hours a day. Jannuzzo recalled an autumn Sunday morning in Velden: “At about six thirty a.m., there was a knock at my door, and it was Mrs. Glock: ‘Time for swim.’ ” The villa had a heated indoor pool, but this day’s exercise would
commence outdoors in the Wöthersee. Wearing a bathrobe, Gaston Glock led the way down to the dock. He signaled for the others to enter the frigid water first, which they did. Upon surfacing and looking back up at the dock, Jannuzzo saw his employer disrobing. “All you could see from the rear was a long skinny body, some semblance of ass, and a ball sack.” While Mrs. Glock and the executive were clothed conventionally in swimsuits, Glock himself took his constitutional au naturel.

A
merican gun owners express enthusiasm for firearms in distinct and varied ways. Would-be cowboys dress up in Old West costumes, assume the identities of frontier marshals and gunslingers, and collect single-action Colts. They compete in target shoots that feature re-created nineteenth-century saloons and poker games gone bad. The more serious single-action shooters display the intensity of Civil War reenactors.

Sniper-rifle disciples gather in groups of two or three at un-decorated rural ranges. They speak softly and peer through high-powered scopes before squeezing off a shot at a plywood bull’s-eye six hundred yards away. They assess their accuracy with binoculars and recalibrate for another go. Machine-gun enthusiasts, who must register their automatic weapons with federal and local authorities, gather for a twice-yearly festival at a Kentucky gun club called Knob Creek. Participants fire at abandoned washing machines and refrigerators, although more emphasis is placed on quantity of ammunition expended than on accuracy.

At the more conventional end of the gun-owning spectrum, hunters track everything from gray squirrels to white-tailed deer to grizzly bear. Some use bolt-action rifles based on the 1903 Springfield; others prefer AR-15s with flash suppressors
and thirty-round mags that resemble the rifles American troops carry on patrol in Kandahar or Kabul.

No brand of modern firearm commands greater loyalty than Glock. “Glockmeisters” see themselves as rugged, un-romantic, and above all, lethally effective—like the gun they love. The website Glock Talk (
glocktalk.com
) sponsors scores of online forums where Glock “fanboys” (and the occasional interloping “hateboy”) dissect a range of topics connected to the pistol. The obsession and vituperation characteristic of the Internet are often evident. Virtual symposia parse the qualities of the Glock, usually in service of proving its superiority over rival handguns. One rambling group discussion in 2010 addressed the similarities between the Glock and the AK-47 semiautomatic rifle. The two firearms share a reputation for reliability in the field, even in the absence of diligent maintenance. The reason? “Loose tolerances and a simple design with few parts,” noted a participant from Colorado using the screen name Voyager 4520. “More room for dirt before the friction becomes too much for the slide to cycle,” agreed Ambluemax. The AK-47, invented in Russia, does not incorporate polymer, but its lack of delicacy made it a favorite of the militaries of the old Soviet bloc. It can last for decades and rarely jams. Children can be taught to use it, as demonstrated by the youthful ranks of African guerrilla armies. Glock, wrote Vis35 of Alaska, “is the AK-47 of handguns.”

Glockmeisters who stray even momentarily from slavish devotion risk ostracism. Dean Speir, the Long Island firearm dealer and gunzine writer who helped break the Suffolk County ban on Glock in the late 1980s, made a habit of pointing out that “Glock Perfection” was a marketing device not to be taken literally. He used his own website, The Gun Zone
(
thegunzone.com
), to compile instances when substandard ammunition, improper shooting technique, or a factory flaw led to Glock malfunctions. Glock Talk regulars pilloried Speir for his apostasy and effectively banished him from their site. “Speir has very little knowledge about firearms; does not tell the truth; lies; prevaricates,” ranted WalterGA. “I have from a reliable source that his I.Q. is less than that of an unborn rhinoceros.”

In fact, Speir is a meticulous if prickly gadfly—and a loyal Glock owner. “All critical thinking skills are checked at the gate of the Tenifer Temple,” he told me. “Polymer is the highest power, and Gaston Glock is the combination prophet-and-deity.”

Nationally known guardians of the American firearm ethos early on helped define the Glock’s everyman (and every-woman) practicality. Marion Hammer, a legendary NRA figure from Florida, told a story in 1989 about why she switched from carrying a Colt revolver in her purse to a Glock. Several years earlier, she said, she had been cornered in a Tallahassee parking garage late one night by no fewer than six men. She brandished her Colt, and, thank goodness, the assailants fled.

“The revolver I was carrying had six shots, and there were six men,” Hammer noted. “What if I ran out of shots?” With seventeen rounds in her Glock pistol, she felt more secure. When it comes to ammo, in Hammer’s view, more is better, and more is what you get with the Glock.

Glock cultivates devotion to its product with the American
gun industry’s most diligent customer-loyalty program. The company-underwritten Glock Shooting Sports Foundation sponsors a series of target competitions limited to owners of the Austrian pistol. For a modest $25 annual fee, GSSF members gain access to events held at ranges around the country. “My whole family and I had a great time at the Beaver State Ballistic Challenge last week,” D.W. of Washington State wrote to the
GLOCK Report
in 2010 (correspondents to the newsletter are identified only by initials). “This year my wife, sister, brother-in-law, and son joined us. At eleven years old, it was my son’s very first match, and now I can’t get him to take his GLOCK cap off.… We experienced the same thing when my daughter started shooting at the same age. Very cool!” The letter was accompanied by a photo of a smiling boy in a Glock hat and sound-reducing earmuffs, pointing at a cardboard target punctured by bullet holes.

The gun manufacturer and the vendors that feed off its reputation supply all manner of Glock paraphernalia: clocks, key chains, playing cards, lamps, and custom license plates. Curvaceous pinup model Candy Keane grips a Glock in online lingerie photos. GSSF members submit images to the
GLOCK Report
of Glock-shaped birthday cakes and babies in T-shirts that read
FUTURE GLOCK OWNER
. A father from Florida submitted a snapshot of his blond daughter at her wedding, raising her gown to reveal a shapely thigh and a Glock 19 tucked snuggly in her silk garter. Her kneeling husband stares at the gun, enraptured. “He enjoyed the surprise,” the proud dad wrote in 2009, “and he promised to love, honor, and shoot GLOCKs with the princess.”