Glock: The Rise of America’s Gun (9 page)

Rutherford’s allegiance never wavered. Twenty-two years later, the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office, which he now presides over as the popularly elected sheriff, has seventeen hundred officers. It still arms them with Glock pistols.

Emanuel Kapelsohn’s recommendation of the Glock wasn’t happenstance. In mid-1986, Karl Walter began putting some of the country’s most admired shooting instructors on contract to spread the word about the Austrian pistol. This melding of training and marketing, motivated by a keen sense of customer needs, became a Glock hallmark. Kapelsohn was one of the specialists Walter hired.

In some cities, the Glock gun instructors were paid by the local authorities; that’s the way it worked in Jacksonville, where the sheriff’s office hired Kapelsohn. In other situations, usually after a department indicated it would make a purchase, Glock dispatched Kapelsohn or another trainer as part of the procurement deal—a freebie for the new customer.
Strictly speaking, Kapelsohn’s role as an expert hired by the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office had a built-in conflict of interest. During the plastic pistol debate before Congress, he testified in Washington with notable eloquence on Glock’s behalf. Nevertheless, he insisted he “did not have an axe to grind” and endorsed Glock on the merits.

After the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office placed their order for the Glocks, the company sent Kapelsohn back to north Florida to provide transitional training on the company’s dime. “Karl Walter had the genius at that time to take the training programs on the road,” Kapelsohn said. “You had to go to the Smith & Wesson Academy [in Springfield, Massachusetts] if you were going to use the Smith & Wesson. If your agency was going to adopt the Glock, [Walter] would send some training your way.” Many times, instructors from neighboring agencies attended these sessions out of curiosity, or Glock would sponsor an open-house seminar for all federal, state, and municipal trainers in a given region. “The effect of it was to get Glocks in the hands of instructors all over the country,” Kapelsohn explained. “This was just a brilliant way to sell this gun.”

Making customers’ encounters with Glock memorable was one of Karl Walter’s talents. He showed up to close big deals, zooming into town from Smyrna in a Porsche roadster stocked with boxes of Austrian pistols and free ammunition. (He switched to the sports car from the RV once he became a full-time Glock employee.) Walter also made a habit of inviting police customers and wholesale distributors for all-expenses-paid visits to the Glock facility outside of Atlanta. The cops were treated to steak dinners at a downtown restaurant, expensive liquor, and imported cigars.

On occasion, a visiting Gaston Glock put in an appearance. “He looked very European, smoked like a chimney,” one law
enforcement official recalled. “He knew his stuff. You could not ask him anything he couldn’t tell you about that gun.” Glock enjoyed showing off the Glock 18, a fully automatic version of the pistol. Depressing the trigger of the Glock 18 unleashes a stream of bullets in the fashion of a machine gun. It can hold a capacious thirty-three-round magazine that sticks out of the gun’s grip and empties in a matter of seconds. Unless the user is familiar with the Glock 18, its enormous recoil results in the barrel jumping upward. Many an embarrassed police officer inadvertently peppered the ceiling of the company shooting range with rounds. Unavailable on the civilian market, the Glock 18 is designed for police SWAT squads and military special-ops units. Rolling it out for visitors to Smyrna remains a Glock marketing practice.

Using imaginative financing and trade-in arrangements allowed Walter to sign up police departments on tight budgets. In Marietta, Georgia, he won over Police Chief Charles Simmons in 1988 by promising to arm his hundred-person force without any money changing hands. The Marietta PD simply exchanged 126 old handguns for 100 new Glock 17s. The
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
published an article about the transaction, noting that the Glock “would be an easy gun to switch to since officers train quickly with it and gain better accuracy than with the present revolver.”

Such publicity introduced the brand to a wider audience at no cost to Glock. The deals worked financially because of the company’s startlingly low manufacturing costs, which Glock was able to push down even further—to less than $100 a unit—as its production volume grew. When it did trade-ins, Glock sold the used police handguns to wholesalers, who refurbished them for sale at firearm shops and weekend gun shows. Overhauled police weapons became a staple on the used-gun
market throughout the United States, and trade-ins emerged as an important aspect of the Glock modus operandi.

As the company’s reputation and revenue grew, Walter began hiring full-time employees from the agencies that bought his guns. These revolving-door recruits became some of his most effective evangelists. The New York State Police, a 4,500-person force, initiated its move to semiautomatic pistols in 1988. The veteran sergeant in charge of the review process, Frank DiNuzzo, was known throughout the Northeast as a firearm trainer and author of instructional manuals. At first inclined toward Smith & Wesson, DiNuzzo ultimately recommended the Glock for reasons similar to Rutherford’s in Jacksonville. Glock sweetened the deal by arranging for a $1,246,000 credit when the agency traded in 4,550 old handguns. New York received 4,310 new Austrian pistols for an additional payment of only $40,000. The used police guns were later resold by a Massachusetts gun wholesaler. After DiNuzzo retired from the department in 1990, Walter hired him as Glock’s first full-time in-house trainer. Retirees from the US Drug Enforcement Administration, the Detroit PD, and the special-operations Navy SEALs went to work for the company as well.

New York City had, and has, the biggest police force in the United States, with thirty-five thousand officers—more than twice the size of the FBI. Other departments take cues from the NYPD, and no municipality sees its officers depicted more often in movies or on television. At the same time, New York City is not a gun-friendly jurisdiction. It has strict local gun-control laws. And while the state troopers based upstate in
Albany were receptive to Glock, the leadership of the NYPD imposed a brand-specific ban on the Austrian gun in early 1986, based on the terrorism fears fanned by Jack Anderson.

None of this stopped Walter, who had sold Steyr sniper rifles to the NYPD during his pre-Glock days. In May 1986, a contingent of New York police trainers invited him to make an unofficial presentation at the department’s range at Rodman’s Neck. To Walter’s surprise, twenty firearm instructors showed up; he had brought only a handful of sample pistols. Not to worry, his hosts told him. Several had privately obtained Glock 17s and retrieved them from their lockers.

Walter took this as a promising sign: Some of New York’s top in-house firearm trainers were curious enough about what he was selling to spend their own money on the gun, and in the process violate the ban on possessing a Glock within city limits. That summer, with the prohibition still in place, the Emergency Services Unit of the NYPD, what other cities called SWAT, quietly ordered seventy Glock pistols—another hopeful development. Walter continued to press for a broader hearing in New York.

In June 1986, the limitations of the six-shot revolver were convincingly illustrated in a gunfight in Far Rockaway, Queens. Rookie NYPD officer Scott Gadell and his partner chased a gunman who opened fire on them. Gadell leaped for cover behind a stoop and shot back, emptying his .38-caliber Smith & Wesson. As he tried to reload, the gunman stepped forward and fired a fatal shot into the left side of Gadell’s forehead, just above the ear. The gunman fired a total of nine shots from a nine-millimeter semiautomatic. “Every cop knows about Scott,” a fellow officer later said. “He’s an example of a cop who did everything he was supposed to but ended up dying because of second-rate equipment.”

Then, in September 1988, the Associated Press landed a scoop that ricocheted around the city’s media and beyond: New York Police Commissioner Benjamin Ward was carrying a Glock 17 beneath his suit jacket! The
New York Post
teased the story on its front page and ran this punning all-caps headline:

“Police Commissioner Benjamin Ward is licensed to carry a controversial plastic super-pistol that is banned in New York City,” the
Post
reported. “Ward can carry a state-of-the-art nine-millimeter Glock pistol, according to a copy of a renewal of Ward’s carry license, dated July 6.”

Caught flat-footed, the NYPD told the
Post
that “the Glock issued to Ward was ‘part of a controlled test.’ ” Since the department wasn’t very responsive, the newspaper sought others to describe the “super gun.” One was Dr. David Mohler, an orthopedic cancer specialist at Sloan-Kettering who said he had owned a Glock in California but had been discouraged from bringing it with him to New York because of the licensing ban. “The Glock,” Mohler told the paper, “is one of the best combat pistols you can find.”

“ ‘Super gun,’ can you imagine?” Karl Walter would muse more than two decades later. Shaking his head, he chuckled. “You can’t buy that kind of attention, not for $50 million, not for $100 million.”

A day after the Ward disclosure, the NYPD ended the Glock ban. A deputy police commissioner explained that research had demonstrated that the gun “could not be defined as an undetectable weapon, and in fact can be detected with today’s present technology in the security field.”

“From that moment on, everything started to roll,” Walter
said. Soon hundreds of NYPD narcotics detectives, organized crime investigators, and other specialized units were carrying Glocks. Today the brand is one of three that New York authorizes, and about twenty thousand of the city’s officers carry a Glock.

Gaston Glock was not the first firearm designer to promote a handgun to Americans in uniform as a means of developing a lucrative market. “The first was Samuel Colt,” Karl Walter noted. Nor is there any evidence that Gaston Glock was consciously inspired by the mid-nineteenth-century impresario of the revolver. But the strategy that the Glock-Walter team pursued 140 years later uncannily resembled that of Sam Colt. The similarities illuminate lasting themes in the American gun business.

Born in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1814, Colt was a mechanically inclined boy who grew bored working in his father’s textile mill. At fifteen, he shipped out as an apprentice seaman, and, according to most biographies, it was on this youthful voyage that he got the idea for his version of a repeating firearm the cylinder of which revolved, wheel-like, around the barrel. Some accounts say the design came to him while he fixated on the operation of the ship captain’s wheel; others, that he got the idea while focused on the capstan used to raise anchor. More prosaically, according to historian Chuck Wills, young Colt may have seen early flintlock revolvers in India, where they were used by British troops. “By the time he returned to the US, he had carved a working model out of wood.”

Colt hired two experienced gunsmiths to advise him on the details and fabricate experimental models. Like Glock, he required the assistance of specialists. Revolvers had been in use for decades. Colt’s advance was to link the cylinder to the firing mechanism, eliminating the need to manually rotate the cylinder. The user pulled back the hammer, which caused the cylinder to turn and lined up the chamber containing the ammunition with the barrel. To fire, the shooter then simply pulled the trigger.