The Merchant Of Menace

The telephone rang on the desk of Sam Cummings in Alexandria, Va. "Yes, this is Colonel Saito," Cummings said into the mouthpiece, his eyebrows rising and plunging with satisfaction. "I have a bit of advice for you, dear chap. Stop sending coded messages to the director after you've been drinking at lunch. The one that said 'They're closing in on me, I can't hold out much longer' all but finished your career." Cummings chuckled, then chatted a moment more and hung up the phone, still smiling.

"That was a friend in the State Department," he said. "He's among the few over there who know Saito was the Japanese colonel in The Bridge On the River Kwai. Too bad all governments don't have more people who appreciate a joke. There's so much to laugh at."

Cummings, who gives the appearance of being amused an uncommon amount of the time, may greet visitors to his office by crying, "Welcome to the devil's smithy!" or may glance at an enormous oil painting of the Battle of Austerlitz behind his desk and say gleefully, "Don't think this reflects my Freudian dreams of conquest. It merely covers a hole in the wall." Once in Monaco he sent a postcard to an associate in the United States, urging the defeat of proposed gun legislation SO I CAN CONTINUE MY LUXURIOUS LIFE ON THE RIVIERA WITHOUT WORRY. He is liable to sign such communiqués with names like Strangelove, Rasputin or The Virginia Knave. In Cummings' trade, this kind of behavior is not thought of as unusual.

The trade that permits Sam Cummings these macabre flights of imagination is armaments. In an old, quiet neighborhood in Alexandria, where the cobblestone streets go down to the Potomac River, Cummings runs the largest private independent weapons dealership in the world, a firm called Interarms. As president and proprietor, he controls 10 Interarms warehouses in Alexandria that feature triple-locked doors and alarms wired directly to police headquarters. At one time these warehouses contained enough rifles, pistols and machine guns to outfit 40 infantry divisions, or more combat soldiers than the United States had in the field in Korea or Vietnam at any one time.

Although Cummings' operation has a distinctly military feel about it, Interarms enjoys a brisk civilian trade. Until passage of the 1968 gun-control law—which controls guns chiefly by making them more expensive—Cummings had sold more rifles to American sportsmen and collectors than most of the large domestic manufacturers. Practically every one of these rifles was a military weapon that Interarms bought as surplus from one country or another and sold in the United States by mail order or through chain stores and small dealers. (One of these was not the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle, serial no. C2766, purchased by Lee Harvey Oswald in 1963.)

Since it is now forbidden to import military surplus, and now that peddling guns by mail order is restricted, Cummings' livelihood, or at least its civilian side, might seem in jeopardy. But Cummings has enough surplus arms stored in Alexandria to supply his customers until he can add to his cache with the purchase of the new, commercial foreign sporting guns that have started reaching the market.

Cummings is amused by what he sees as the irony of gun legislation. "It does nothing to prevent crime," he says. "It is purely commercial in intent, aimed at putting me out of business. When the law was passed, there was a wild dance of corporate joy in New England, where most American guns are made. Olin Mathieson, which owns Winchester, and Du Pont, which owns Remington, have been leaning on me for 15 years, trying to remove me from the action, because my guns are cheaper than theirs.

"But they passed the law too late!" Cummings says, laughing again, as if the joke were getting richer. "Senator Dodd missed the boat! My import business would have ended by 1975 anyway, because the grand old bolt-action military rifles have been phased out in favor of automatic weapons that were already illegal and are not practical for sportsmen. I'm still one of the country's leading sellers of big-bore rifle ammunition. But when anybody calls and asks for military weapons after my warehouse stocks run out, I'll play them a recording of a Texas jackass braying, and then I'll ring off." He laughs again.

Many of Sam Cummings' weapons-dealing colleagues are characterized by such peculiar notions of humor, as was the one who sent out Christmas cards bearing a photograph of himself beating plowshares into swords. Levity, in the arms trade, is the soul of commerce.

"There is an Arab proverb that the three eternals are God, human folly and laughter," said Cummings. "The first two are incomprehensible. One must make what he can out of the third. In my profession I see boundless human folly. This 50-year arms race, this constant undeclared war, is the greatest folly in the history of man. Every nation demands the newest arms for its survival, and every beloved leader of the people needs them for his own protection. Civilization has been and always will be: 'Open fire! Let 'em have it before they get us!' The arms business is idiocy, it's lunacy without bottom, but it will last as long as man, however long that may be. The world will never disarm. So what should I do but laugh?"