by Erik Larson
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 s
choolyard 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:
Let me get my toys and play
Sit down mother fucker, and watch the MAC-10 spray
Better close up shop
Cause we teaching Indy how to kill a cop.
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.