Gun Baby Gun: A Bloody Journey Into the World of the Gun (48 page)

This belief in the right of self-protection led him to sell weapons to Cameroon, Burkino Faso, Thailand, Zambia, South Africa, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Tanzania, Peru and Chile.

‘If a CEO sits at home, they are not doing their job,’ he said. Last year over 100,000 Turkish pistols were sold into the US. The long arm of the Second Amendment was there again: ‘If the US says “no more” to gun imports, then small-arms manufacturers all over the world are nothing.’

I asked about corruption in the arms trade. He was surprisingly frank. ‘Corruption exists in our sector as it exists everywhere. Whoever says that is not the case is lying.’ The problem, he said, was when governments were involved in the deals. ‘Yesterday I had a meeting over Libya. There is a UN arms embargo on Libya at the moment, so we can’t export there. But Russia, China – they don’t care about UN decisions.’

I wondered if this was just smugglers taking advantage, and he shook his head. ‘Everything is done by governments. Taking guns from someplace to somewhere else without control can’t easily be done. It has to be done by a government.’

He explained how things work. ‘We go to Ghana and we say we want to sell them guns. But Ghana asks for a soft loan from me and says if I give this loan to them they will buy my guns.’ This is how it is – he said – governments secure these big arms deals but then finance them through the back door. ‘This is the game.’

We spoke for hours, and then, sensing I was keen to see the guns in action, he led me downstairs and out to the testing range. At that moment his biggest buyer was the Turkish police, ordering some 30,000 pistols from him a year, but that contract was hard to win. The police take his pistols and test them, drop them onto concrete from a height, put them into deep freeze and ovens, and then do what is called a ‘torture test’ – leaving them in a salt bath for twenty-four hours and then firing 10,000 rounds from them in a row. They fire 30,000 more rounds if the pistols are being sold to Turkey’s Special Forces units. The men who do the testing are so muscle bound from shooting they can cock their pistols with the strength of their arm movements alone.

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.
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The next year the asset group formed what they called the Freedom Group
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and set upon a gun company buying-spree, snapping up Remington and a slew of other firms including ammunition, silencer and body armour makers.
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Today, by Freedom Group’s own count, they are the world’s largest manufacturer of commercial firearms and ammunition.
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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.
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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.
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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.’
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The entire gun industry is shrouded in secrecy. Only a small fraction of gun companies are 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’.
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The handy thing about Cerberus and the Freedom Group, though, is that they are one of a few who have actually published their accounts.
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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.
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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,
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the US army and BAE systems,
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the sort of company that hires people who write articles called ‘Reputation Warfare’.
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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.
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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’.
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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’.
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