Lethal Passage: The Story of a Gun

by Erik Larson

  From 1969 through 1970, WerBell and Ingram took the military version of their machine pistol on the road, demonstrating it to U.S. authorities at Forts Benning, Gordon, and Belvoi and at the Quantico Marine Base. (Historian Nelson notes that military policemen at Fort Gordon even fired Ingram’s pistol on full-auto underwater in the base swimming pool.)

  The gun attracted enough interest to convince a group of New York investors that it might replace the standard .45 pistol as the military sidearm of choice. The investors, acting as Quantum Corp., renamed the company Military Armament Corp. from which the acronym MAC derives. It was not a match made in heaven. Within a year Quantum had ousted WerBell and Ingram from their jobs as manager and chief engineer. Conflict between the investors and the founders grew; the company suffered production delays and had difficulty raising money.

  About the only good news was a welcome burst of free publicity from none other than John Wayne himself, in his starring role as Lon McQ in McQ, a 1974 movie about a tough Seattle police detective who sets out to solve the murder of a colleague, only to discover the colleague was involved with a notorious drug ring. It was McQ, according to ATF officials, that put the Ingram in the public eye and made it the gun most favored by America’s drug gangs—although ironically the bad guys in the movie used only revolvers and shotguns, mere toys compared to the arsenals deployed by today’s drug cartels.

  The company could not have hoped for a better advertisement. At one point big Lon McQ visits the shop of a gun dealer he knows. The screenwriter wasted little energy on subtlety in introducing the weapon.

  “Hey, Lon,” the dealer says, “what are you doing?”

  McQ offers a wry grin. “Buyin’ a gun.”

  “Got a minute? I got somethin’ I want to show you out back.”

  McQ lumbers after him into the back room of the gun shop where a small shooting range is conveniently equipped with a water-filled garbage can raised on two sawhorses.

  “Lon,” the dealer says, “I have a little equalizer here. We’re going to try to sell it to the department.” He holds up the gun. With an unmistakable touch of reverence, he says, “The Ingram.”

  “The Ingram, huh?”

  “Nine millimeter,” adds a gunsmith seated nearby. For some reason the gunsmith is wearing a white lab coat, about as alien to most gun shops as an autographed photo of James Brady.

  McQ hefts the gun. “Six or seven pounds?”

  “Six point two five,” the gunsmith says. He screws on a silencer. “Silencer makes a good handle.”

  “Lon,” the dealer says, “this can here is filled with water. Go on. Squeeze off a burst.”

  “Why not?” McQ says.

  McQ blasts away, filling the can full of holes as water spurts from all sides. The camera cuts to McQ’s face and an expression that comes as close to awe as John Wayne could muster.

  McQ looks down at the gun. He looks back at the pail.

  “How about that?” the dealer says. “Those thirty-two slugs came out in a second and a half.”

  Ruggedly, slowly, McQ says, “Yeah.”

  “You ever see anything like it?” the dealer asks.

  McQ, who by now has quit the police force in order to work the case more efficiently, walks off with the gun without paying a penny or signing a single document. (Doing so anywhere but in a movie would constitute an immediate felony.) He uses it later to mow down a band of dope dealers and grind their car to steel mulch. Afterward, of course, he gets his badge back from a grateful department. True to the traditions of cinematic gunplay, no one asks about the gun or the corpses strewn over a Pacific beach.

  Just in case anyone in the audience had any doubt about where to buy this wondrous weapon, Warner Brothers provided a fullscreen credit that read, “Special Weapon: Military Armament Corp.”

  This enthusiastic bit of advertising wasn’t enough to save the company, however. Military Armament Corp. filed for Chapter 11 protection under federal bankruptcy laws in mid-1975, without ever having produced a semiautomatic Ingram for the general consumer. The remains of the company, including ten thousand submachine guns and two thousand silencers, were sold at auction, most to a group of investors who had formed another Atlanta company called RPB Industries Inc. They too planned to bring Ingram’s weapons to full-scale commercial production, but in 1978 sold out to yet another group of investors, this one headed by Wayne Daniel, the son of a Georgia minister.

  Under Wayne Daniel, RPB had more success selling the Ingram line and by mid-1979 had made sales of varying amounts to some twenty countries, including seven Latin American nations, the United Kingdom, Saudia Arabia, and Israel. An operating manual for the RPB version of the Ingram M10 came in a camouflage cover and, on its first page, noted how “the compact size of the M10 makes it especially suitable for tank crews, gun and mortar crews, etc.” The manual also displayed a range of available accessories, including the RPB “Operational Briefcase,” an attaché case packed with a silenced M10 that could be fired with the gun still in the case. A business card inserted in a card holder on the side of the case obscured the muzzle.

  “Looks like an ordinary briefcase with your calling card in front,” the manual reads. “However, this case contains the world’s deadliest submachine gun, ready for action.” The blurb noted that anyone who bought the briefcase would have to register it with ATF, which had classed it as an “assassination device.”

  Under Wayne Daniel and his partners, the new RPB faced an array of business obstacles not typically included in the syllabi at Harvard Business School. One partner was convicted of bribing a prosecutor to drop a client’s drug charge. Two others, Robert Morgan and John “Jack” Leibolt, got involved in the narcotics smuggling operations of Pablo Escobar-Gaviria and the Medellín Cartel. Morgan was convicted in 1979 for smuggling two tons of marijuana into Florida and was sentenced to thirty years in prison. Leibolt, according to a sweeping 1989 indictment of the Medellín Cartel, once piloted a plane for the cartel and, in September 1979, supplied the group with six silencer-equipped machine guns. (He pleaded guilty in August of 1990 to conspiracy to import cocaine.)

  Despite all this, RPB succeeded in at last transforming the Ingram from a limited-circulation military weapon into a semiautomatic handgun for general use. Previously, the company had been restricted to selling its full-auto Ingram variations only through dealers specially licensed to sell machine guns, who in turn—if they followed the law—sold them only to buyers who had undergone an ATF background investigation and paid $200 for the necessary tax stamp. Now, however, any adult with a clean record could buy an Ingram look-alike, even a mock silencer to go with it. “It became available everywhere,” said Earl Taylor, a twenty-one-year ATF veteran who retired to become a vice president with Norred & Associates, an Atlanta security concern that as of 1992 counted among its varied assignments the protection of Kroger supermarkets and ex-colonel Oliver North. “All gun shops everywhere were selling it. Everywhere. The distribution of it became widespread.”

  Taylor is a tall, lean man whose courtly manner and slow, easy way of speaking suggest quiet authority. Over the years he came to know RPB and its successor, S.W. Daniel, intimately, first as resident agent-in-charge of ATF’s Rome, Georgia, office, later as supervisor of criminal investigation in the agency’s Atlanta office. He deployed undercover agents to order the guns from illegal suppliers. Demand was so high, they had to wait for delivery, Taylor recalled. “It was a hot item.”

  What made the gun particularly popular was its internal design, a delight to anyone interested in skirting federal restrictions on ownership of machine guns. “ATF was concerned because those damn weapons were so easily converted to full-automatic fire,” Taylor said. “An individual could convert one in a minute or two, or maybe even less time than that.” (“In seconds,” said another retired ATF agent familiar with the guns.)

  All a buyer had to do was file down a small metal catch—the “trip”—that caught the bolt after each shot, thereby
leaving the bolt free to spring forward and fire machine-gun style. Demand for the guns soared nationwide, and black markets formed as middlemen, including one Georgia policeman, bought large quantities, converted the guns, and resold them to the drug underworld. These weapons triggered the arms race that today confronts law-enforcement officers across the nation.

  In October 1981, Wayne Daniel married a striking Alabama woman named Sylvia Williams. In November, Sylvia, and Wayne’s son from a previous marriage, Wayne “Buddy” Daniel, became members of RPB’s board of directors. Sylvia would soon prove a feisty, outspoken opponent of ATF, bent on pushing the limits of the law in the name of the Second Amendment and free enterprise, at no small cost to society at large. She and Wayne made no secret of their loyalties. At one point, they produced little plastic badges that read BATF SUCKS.

  By the autumn of 1981, Wayne Daniel found himself struggling against increasing pressure from the FBI, ATF, and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, as all three agencies investigated the activities of John Leibolt, by now one of RPB’s three shareholders. (The other two shareholders were Wayne Daniel and Leibolt’s son.) ATF threatened to pull the federal license that allowed RPB to make and sell guns—its Federal Firearms License—because of Leibolt’s suspected criminal activities. Minutes of RPB’s board meetings show that Leibolt’s legal troubles had made it difficult for RPB to secure credit and, moreover, had left the company exposed to the threat of criminal charges.

  In a special board meeting held December 14, 1981, Wayne, according to the minutes, denounced “the general irrepute that the association of Mr. Leibolt” had brought to the company. Because of John Leibolt’s dabbling in the narcotics trade, Wayne said, he “personally did not want to be in business with either one of the Lei-bolts.”

  Two weeks later the board met again and resolved to buy back Leibolt’s stock and thus sever his ties to the company. Leibolt, however, had fled Georgia. The minutes of RPB’s January 20, 1982, board meeting noted that Leibolt “refuses to come to Atlanta and has stated he will not step foot in the State of Georgia due to fear of being arrested.” The board resolved to liquidate the company.

  ATF, meanwhile, classified RPB’s semiautomatic Ingram as a machine gun, arguing it was so easy to convert that even in semiautomatic form it should fall under the far stricter regulations that governed the sale of automatic weapons. The ATF technical branch in Washington made a videotape to show just how easily a buyer could convert the gun.

  RPB challenged the ATF decision. A federal judge backed the agency, but to reduce the fiscal hardship imposed on RPB by the ruling allowed the company time to continue manufacturing the weapon and selling off existing stocks. Any gun assembled before June 21, 1982, would be classed as a semiautomatic; the same gun made one day later would be a machine gun subject to federal restrictions.

  This delay, a surprise bonus for RPB, provided another example of the willingness within our culture to overlook the inherent deadliness of guns. The threat of a ban boosted demand for the gun, and according to Earl Taylor, RPB accelerated production and sales. “They knew that weapon was going to be outlawed, they knew it was going to be worth a hell of a lot more money once you couldn’t produce it anymore, so I guess it made sense to go for it.”

  June proved a profitable month for RPB. Gun consumers—far from being put off by the gun’s lethal reputation and the ATF ruling—rushed to buy the last of the weapons before the deadline. The company’s final after-tax profit doubled over that of May, for a profit margin—net income as a percentage of gross sales—of 37 percent.

  The next month, with the ruling in effect, the company’s net income plummeted to just one-sixteenth of the June total.

  In September, the RPB board approved a final plan for liquidating the company; in October, an auction house sold its assets for half a million dollars.

  A reasonable man might expect that at this point the gun, this weapon built to kill soldiers in close combat and adopted by dope peddlers and urban gangs, would be allowed to disappear from America’s arsenal and consigned to Thomas Nelson’s history books. But RPB Industries rose quickly from the tomb, this time as S.W. Daniel Inc., named for Sylvia Williams Daniel. After ATF’s ruling the Daniels set out in earnest to develop a weapon that could be sold readily to the public. They succeeded—introducing by 1983 the Cobray M-11/9—but nonetheless continued sending prototype after prototype to the ATF technical branch in Washington, as if probing for holes in the law. Once, for example, they sent a prototype of what they claimed was a single-shot weapon. It was the same weapon that previously had been ruled a machine gun, but with a plate over the bottom of the grip where the magazine would otherwise be inserted. ATF, however, found that the plate could be removed and classified this weapon too as a machine gun.

  The company also sold machine-gun “flats,” stamped and notched pieces of steel that could be bent to form the frame, or “lower receiver,” of a machine gun. Under federal law, a machine-gun receiver is treated as if it were a complete firearm. The flats, however, were legal, provided they were left unbent and certain holes were left undrilled. All a consumer had to do to commit an instant felony was to drill out a single hole—but that was the consumer’s problem.

  The Daniels knew their market well, said Earl Taylor. “I’ve always had a hunch that Wayne and Sylvia were not so much believers in all the pro-gun propaganda that goes on and that they so freely talk about, but that they were more interested in making money than anything else.” Of Wayne, he said, “He’s got a reputation for testing the waters, so to speak. He’ll come close to the edge of the envelope—maybe not blatantly doing something illegal, but he’s very anxious to test and see how far he can go in the weapons field.”

  Wayne’s attitude, according to Taylor, made his products all the more attractive to gun buyers. “He can kind of feel the pulse of this gun culture out there and kind of say things and do things and market things that appeal to those people.”

  Indeed, far from embarking on a PR campaign to sweeten the gun’s reputation, Sylvia and Wayne played up its bloody history, marketing the Cobray as “The Gun That Made the Eighties Roar.”

  The company’s marketing ideology soon led it to begin a business venture that provides a case study in how powerless our society is to control the easy traffic in the tools of murder. This new venture would trigger a nationwide ATF investigation that exposed widespread illegal sales of weapons to neo-Nazis, the IRA, and assorted felons; exposed the illegal practices of federally licensed gun dealers; and resulted in the arrests of hundreds of the company’s customers—yet left Sylvia, Wayne, and their corporation virtually unscathed.

  Wayne Daniel may have felt it a personal affront to work alongside John Leibolt, but he felt no such moral reluctance when in January 1983 he and Sylvia invited two men, Joseph Ledbetter and Travis Motes, to their home to make the men a proposition.

  Ledbetter and Motes had installed air-conditioning in the RPB offices and had wired S.W. Daniel’s corporate headquarters. The Daniels suggested that their two visitors diversify into the business of making the outer tubes for silencers. S.W. Daniel would make the interior parts. The two companies would advertise in the same gun publications and travel to the same gun shows. By selling only parts, both would stay on the right side of federal laws requiring registration of completed silencers. Indeed, no law barred the sale of silencer parts. In the eyes of the law, however, any consumer who accepted delivery of both internal parts and tubes would automatically possess a completed silencer—regardless of whether he put them together to produce a working silencer or not. If the consumer had not first acquired the ATF approval and tax stamp necessary to own a silencer, he would be guilty of a felony. But again, as far as S.W. Daniel was concerned, that was the consumer’s worry.

  Wayne Daniel went so far as to give Ledbetter and Motes a measuring gauge to guide them in fashioning the tubes, according to government affidavits. He also allowed them to use S.W. Daniel’s slogan, “Silenc
e is golden,” which the Daniels had used to sell a line of completed silencers through Shotgun News, a thick tabloid containing only firearms advertising. Ledbetter and Motes founded L&M Guns and likewise began selling their tubes through Shotgun News and at gun shows around the country. The Daniels, meanwhile, began advertising their internal-parts kits and displaying them at the same gun shows. On at least one occasion, according to a statement by Ledbetter, the two companies found themselves facing each other across an aisle.

  Details of this arrangement emerged in February 1984, when ATF agents received a tip from the sheriff’s department in Mono County, California, that its officers had discovered silencers while searching the home of a Bridgeport, California, man named Frank Wedertz. Wedertz, who had not registered his silencers, told ATF he had bought them from a licensed gun dealer in Tehachapi, California. ATF agents then searched the dealer’s home and found records indicating he had bought the components from L&M Guns and S.W. Daniel, had assembled the silencers, and then sold them. The dealer said he had seen ads for the parts in Shotgun News and had been able to assemble the completed silencers in minutes.

  The investigation began gaining momentum. On April 27, 1984, ATF special agent Peter Urrea, posing as the president of the Widow Makers Motorcycle Club, telephoned L&M Guns. He first told the company’s order taker that he had received kits containing the internal parts for a silencer from S.W. Daniel, then asked whether or not the parts would fit the L&M tubes. The operator assured him the S.W. Daniel parts would indeed fit. Urrea ordered three tubes. He also ordered machine-gun flats from S.W. Daniel and L&M.