by Iain Overton
He handed me one of Canik’s pistols and showed me how to stand – legs apart, fixed arms, hips to the rear. I lifted the gun and fired ten steady rounds at the quivering target. The firearm was heavier than I had imagined it would be. By the end the sights were shaking in my hand.
My aim was poor. Years before, I had been able to get tight groupings when down the range, but now I was off. Perhaps I was just out of practice. Or perhaps I had lost interest in giving the gun my best – I had seen so much of the harm it had wrought that shooting it became a chore, and each sharp crack of the pistol brought back memories.
Utku took me back to the main building. The low hum of machinery had been a constant throughout our conversation, but, as he ushered me down a corridor to a door leading into the factory floor, the noise grew. Throbbing and vibrating machines stood on all sides – huge square mechanical beasts from Germany in black and grey, tended by sullen men in blue polo shirts. Utku employs 245 people – around two-thirds here on the production line.
‘Every second is money,’ he shouted above the noise. The forty-eight machines operate six days a week, and for five of those days they are on all the time. ‘Now you can do 98 per cent of the same job on one machine. It might cost €350,000, but it does the same job as twenty-five different machines,’ he said. Peering inside, you could see metal being lathed into barrels and stocks. Beside them lay thousands of finished parts. This truly was mass production in action. ‘Small-arms production is the automated industry of the defence market,’ shouted Utku.
We walked down to a storeroom – there thousands of specialist tools for cutting lay in neat, labelled rows. Tools from Germany, Israel and Italy, some costing as much as €1,000. It struck me how the gun industry doesn’t just affect groups like lobbyists and health-care units and morticians. It has a hidden financial impact on the manufacturing world.
‘If there is no defence industry there is no tool industry. If there is no tool industry there is no machine industry,’ Utku said. It was big money, too. He opened up one cabinet. ‘That whole cabinet,’ he said, leading me onwards, ‘was worth €100,000.’
We came to other tools needed to produce the gun. Here was the gauge room; on all sides stood fine-tuning devices from England. Utku explained. ‘Without gauges you cannot have the same performance for every gun. If you don’t have gauges then they cannot ask for a spare part – you need to make 2,000 exactly the same.’ The lathes here cut to an exactness of 0.01mm. ‘Precision,’ he said, ‘is everything.’
I asked him how guns had changed him in this regard. ‘It’s made me a control freak,’ was his answer. And it struck me that here everything was about control and detail – but what was produced could let loose such chaos and anarchy. I guess Pandora’s box had neat lines and straight corners, too.
I asked Utku about this – about the fact that the things he makes must kill. ‘I don’t care about this,’ he said with a forcefulness that surprised me. ‘If human beings were not the most dangerous thing in the world it would be different. If we could have a constant civilisation in the world, then gun control might work. But everything is not getting better in the world.’
His guns may well have played a part in that. He had once been contacted by Interpol to explain why one of his pistols had been used in a murder in El Salvador. It turned out it had been smuggled there from Guatemala. But here in this broiling and bustling factory it was hard to imagine the path these guns would take, the lives they would decimate. Here guns were just a product – benign, unfinished. They posed no threat.
Yellow fork-lift trucks busied around the painted demarcations on the floor, passing stacks of unfinished slides and trigger guards waiting to be dipped in chemicals or hardened in huge metal furnaces. Utku led me upstairs to one final room – where the guns were assembled. I walked in, and memories of Brazil came quickly back, because here the walls were lined with wooden slats. In each pigeonhole lay a new pistol, as yet untainted by the mark of Cain: hundreds upon hundreds of them. On a table lay handfuls of other handguns – in graphite black and chrome, in general police-issue slate and in ‘fancy Arab’ gold plate. They were called the Shark, the Piranha, the Stingray.
Here, in this wall-lined room of guns, I felt I was coming close to the end of my journey. I had been to places where I had seen the need for guns to keep the peace. I had been to places where the gun only seemed to disrupt things. I had met whole communities who gathered without bloody incident around the gun and its use, and yet had also seen cemeteries filled with the graves of those killed by them. For each truth I alighted upon, another seemed to run counter to it.
Utku spoke. ‘I believe it is not possible to control guns. We are animals. When we are poor we are worse animals. Humans don’t care about others. They want their own success, that’s all. To stop gun violence is just a dream. Guns are a very necessary evil.’
Perhaps he was right, but I did not want to believe in such a bleak view of the world. I wanted to feel that good comes from making a stand; doing nothing was part of the problem. We should, if anything, confront evil face to face.
I was back in New York. I had one final thing to do: to meet the men whose investments backed these gun manufacturing companies. To chase the money to its end.
The building at 875 Third Avenue rises anonymously. It has the discreet, banal architecture of a thousand other bland officer towers just like it. Beneath, in its bowels, there dwell the sort of shops you would expect in any large New York office building. A sushi bar for those alpha males who want to stay slim. A Baskin Robbins ice cream parlour for those not so alpha. A Subway for the rest. But the shop that caught my eye was the one that sold edible arrangements – fruits dressed up as flowers. I wondered whether some of these flower-fruit-themed baskets had been delivered to the boardrooms of the tenth, eleventh, twelfth and fourteenth floors that rested in chrome and glass, high above me. Whether there stern men in suits, discussing profits and losses and balance sheets, may have paused for a moment and, with poised fingers, plucked at a ripe strawberry from a ‘Delicious Daisy®’. Then, mouths savouring the lightness of the fruit, I wondered whether they went back to talking about how the latest gun massacre could have a positive impact on sales. Because high above me were the offices of Cerberus Capital Management.
Cerberus are a big-player private investment firm. ‘Dedicated to distressed investing,’ they say. Dedicated indeed – they have over US $25 billion of investment on their books. They deal in things like ‘non-control private equity’, ‘distressed assets’ and ‘corporate mid-market lending’ – all of which are carefully constructed words that hide the hard realities of what this company actually does.
What is more tangible than these oily words is that, in April 2006, Cerberus Capital Management had decided to get into the gun business in a big way. Their first major purchase was for the semi-automatic rifle maker Bushmaster Firearms. Cerberus took them on for around $76 million.40 The next year the asset group formed what they called the Freedom Group41 and set upon a gun company buying-spree, snapping up Remington and a slew of other firms including ammunition, silencer and body armour makers.42
Today, by Freedom Group’s own count, they are the world’s largest manufacturer of commercial firearms and ammunition.43 In 2012 they made over $1,250 million, of which about 60 per cent was just from selling firearms. The next year they sold 1.8 million firearms and 3.1 billion rounds of ammunition.44
I walked back upstairs and checked my phone for the fifth time that day. Nothing. The PR company that handles Cerberus Capital Management’s media – Weber Shandwick – had not returned my call.45 I was not surprised, mainly because Cerberus’ CEO, Stephen Feinberg, once reportedly said at a shareholder meeting: ‘If anyone at Cerberus has his picture in the paper and a picture of his apartment, we will do more than fire that person. We will kill him. The jail sentence will be worth it.’46
The entire gun industry is shrouded in secrecy. Only a small fraction of gun companies ar
e publicly listed on stock exchanges, and most are not obliged to publish detailed accounts or annual reports. All but one of the US major domestic gun manufacturers – Ruger – are privately held companies. And there hasn’t been a whistleblower in the gun sector as seen in other industries such as the tobacco, pharmaceutical or financial sectors. Some have even called the gun industry ‘the last unregulated consumer product’.47
The handy thing about Cerberus and the Freedom Group, though, is that they are one of a few who have actually published their accounts.48 These reveal that the Freedom Group sold 400,000 more guns in 2013 than they did in 2012 and that their ‘work in shaping International requirements’ led to ‘an estimated $50 million carbine contract with the Republic of the Philippines’ – a country where about a fifth of the population live beneath the poverty line.49
It was enlightening reading, but I had a very specific set of questions I wanted to ask Feinberg, so I walked over to the reception desk computer and typed in his name.
‘Sorry, there is no further information listed under Stephen Feinberg,’ flashed up the answer.
I did this for a number of Cerberus employees until the security guard, fierce and suspicious, glared at me. ‘Is there anything I can help you with, sir?’
I explained I was a writer and had been trying to get hold of Feinberg, and he looked even more furious. I walked away, his eyes on my back. I called the PR company – no reply. Perhaps they rarely reply to journalists calling about guns. After all, Weber Shandwick is one slick PR company, which lists clients such as the Colombian government,50 the US army and BAE systems,51 the sort of company that hires people who write articles called ‘Reputation Warfare’.52 It’s certainly reputation warfare that Cerberus is forever waging.
The asset company has had its fair share of PR disasters. There was the matter of the mass recall of a Bushmaster Adaptive Combat Rifle because the semi-automatic function could turn into a fully automatic one.53 Then there was the time when CNBC aired the documentary Remington Under Fire. The reporters looked into allegations that the Remington Model 700 rifle had an unsafe trigger that could cause accidental discharges, reportedly leading to ‘multiple deaths and hundreds of serious injuries’.54 The company called the claims ‘baseless and uproven’.
But their biggest PR disaster was Sandy Hook. The weapon used by Adam Lanza in the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre was a Bushmaster AR 15 assault rifle – the one they marketed with the line: ‘Any gun will make an intruder think. A Bushmaster will make them think twice’.55
It was also not just Lanza. The DC snipers who haunted Washington’s beltway did so with a Bushmaster, using it for eleven of the fourteen shootings,56 while William Spengler, the killer who shot four and killed two volunteer firefighters responding to a fire in Webster, New York, in 2012, was also said to have used one.57
But there was another concerning thing: Cerberus owns a health-care company. It is called Steward Health and has 17,000 employees serving over 1 million patients in New England,58 which means that, with almost 46,000 cases of violent crime in New England in 2011, Cerberus almost certainly runs a business that has to treat gunshot victims.59
Think on it. The biggest firearms company in the world, one that makes immense profits selling guns, some of which are used in mass shootings, is also a company that seeks to profit from treating the victims of gunshot wounds.60
These ugly truths caused such an uproar that, in December 2012, in response to the Sandy Hook massacre, the company announced it would begin selling its investment in the Freedom Group.61 Perhaps it was Stephen Feinberg’s father, who actually lives in Newtown, who urged his son to get rid of the companies.62 Perhaps it was the pressure from investors such as the California State Teachers’ Retirement System (which had invested $600 million in the Cerberus funds) that sparked the announcement.63
Or perhaps it was just PR talk. Cerberus never did what they said they were going to do. A year after Sandy Hook the company that made the guns that killed those kids declared its profits. They had made about $240 million – a 35 per cent rise in Freedom Group’s earnings on the year before those children died.64
I had looked for the words ‘Sandy Hook’ in the Freedom Group’s annual report. Nothing. Instead it had phrases like ‘amortize actuarial gains and losses’ and ‘supplemental financial metric for evaluation of our operating performance’. No Sandy Hook. But there was mention of $3.4 million of state and federal tax credits. US taxpayers, it seems, subsidise the manufacturers of US guns.65
Above me then, inaccessible, were their clean and well-lit offices. In there sat Cerberus’s CEO, Stephen A. Feinberg.66 A fifty-four-year-old father of three, he reportedly keeps an elk’s head on his wall and rides a Harley. He calls himself ‘blue collar’ yet brings home as much as $50 million a year, has an apartment on the Upper East Side and went to Princeton.67
But I was not surprised that Feinberg would think of himself as just an ordinary working guy. His company’s words are similarly oblique. ‘We are investors, not statesmen or policymakers,’ their statements read.68 Yet money in the US is always a gateway to politics and policy, and Feinberg certainly has a key to the hearts of the Republicans. He has donated over a third of a million US dollars to them in the last ten years. And, for a man who does not see himself as a policymaker, he’s pretty selective which politicians he gives his wealth to: men like Utah Senator Orrin Hatch,69 a man with an A+ rating by the NRA for ‘opposing any international treaty by the United Nations . . . that would impose restrictions on American gun owners’,70 or Montana’s Max Baucus, one of four Democrats who voted against the amendment to extend background checks to private gun sales – and whose vote helped kill the bill.71 So of course he’s an investor, not a policymaker. Just as his wife donating to the National Republican Congressional and Senatorial Committees and a host of other NRA A+ rated politicians is also in line with Cerberus’s humble position that he’s just an apolitical investor.
Perhaps Feinberg’s most direct link to the pro-gun Republican caucus, though, is the one-time vice president of the United States. J. Danforth Quayle is chairman of Cerberus Global Investments.72
Then there is George Kollitides – chairman and CEO of the Freedom Group.73 Unlike Feinberg, whose online presence amounts to a fleeting picture of a mousy-haired man with a small moustache, Kollitides’ online profile reveals a life of self-regarding pleasure. At forty-three, he has the trim appearance of a military man, hair shorn hard at the sides, a face showing more pride than humour. Photos catch him posing with the antlers of downed stags74 or crouching behind a freshly killed bear.75 Other snaps show him at New York charity events.76 Mixing with the moneyed east coast elites he seems to aspire to the diary pages of New York high society.
His wife, Karen Kollitides, seems aspirational, too. Blonde, groomed in a specific way, she is captured in the glare of high-society events such as ‘Models 4 Water’, a charity that provides clean water to remote parts of Africa.77 It makes you wonder whether the guns her husband produces have been involved in displacing refugees in Africa and causing untold families to eke out dry-mouthed lives in endless scorched deserts.78 Certainly his company’s guns have been found in the hands of militants murdering for the Islamic State.79
Like Feinberg, George Kollitides is also a major donor to politics and lobby groups. In December 2013, the NRA inducted him, along with the Freedom’s Group vice chairman and president, into the ‘Golden Ring of Freedom’, a group of individuals who have given the NRA at least $1 million.80 He has also recently made political donations to plenty of the Association’s top-rated Republicans.81
If you want me to believe these men give their money freely, without agenda, to the US political elites – that they are just humble investors – then I guess I might as well believe that guns have nothing to do with killing people as well. Just as I might as well believe that Wayne LaPierre’s comments about media manipulation and undue political influence does not also happen at the NRA.
Not surprisingly, then, neither Feinberg nor Kollitides nor LaPierre would speak to me. So I left those pristine, well-lit, comfortable offices and wandered outside.
Cerberus. It was called after the three-headed dog that guards the gates of Hades. Feinberg apparently liked the idea that one of the dog’s heads was always on watch, just as his firm would guard its clients’ investments around the clock.82 For me, the name had different overtones. After all, part of me felt that I had been to parts of Hell. I’d heard the cruel silence of Sandy Hook. I had seen the horrors that American guns had wrought in Honduras and Mexico. I may have even been shot at by one of Cerberus’s weapons.
Now, an age since setting off on this journey, I had come up against Cerberus – the dog that guarded the entry into Hell – and it wasn’t letting me any further.
16. THE FREE
Freedom and a world without guns considered
The Statue of Liberty rose above me, a chlorine-green giant, a silent presence. People walked around its base, glancing up at it, but it dominated that small island so much that people focused on little things. Mainly on each other, for here was the world: teenagers flirted, children ran and called into the drifting wind. From east to west, north to south, it was, as it had been for so many years, a meeting place of nations.
I had come here after the stonewalling of Cerberus. If the dog at the gates of Hell wasn’t going to talk to me about the inner workings of the Freedom Group, then a ferry ride to the most famous symbol of freedom in the world seemed an appropriate response.
So there I stood, gazing at the swooping gulls, and felt the Atlantic wind pick up. The New York skyline twinkled on the horizon. I looked up at the statue. They had called her ‘Liberty Enlightening the World’; she was the ‘Copper and Iron Colossus’ whose carapace was as thin as two American pennies. Their choice of metal – copper, not bronze – was deliberate. The French designer, Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, did not want a statue ‘cast from cannon captured from the enemy’. The European military tradition had been to create their victory statues from the bronze guns of the defeated, but copper was the metal of coin and commerce. She was a symbol of liberty from the repression of the gun.