leader Wayne LaPierre told
Less hasty to dismiss ballistic fingerprinting, Jannuzzo said in a separate interview that Glock had a pilot program under way with the government. “It has been expensive,” he said. “It slows production. To make certain that we’re getting the right cases to the right serial number, at this point, we now go through test-firing the guns twice.” Still, Glock would consider contributing information to a national database to aid police, if one were put together. “The people who right now are saying there is no use for it,” Jannuzzo said, “that it’s an intrusion upon our freedom, have arbitrarily drawn a line too soon.”
Characteristically, Jannuzzo positioned Glock as an independent-minded friend of law enforcement—but without making any concrete concessions to new regulation. His ambiguity did not mollify activist gun owners. Glock was inundated with demands for Jannuzzo’s head. Perceived apostasy against NRA gospel required excommunication. And sure enough, within the space of a few weeks, Jannuzzo announced that, after twelve years at Glock, Inc., he would step down as chief operating officer, general counsel, and, for all practical purposes, the US gun industry’s best-known executive.
Second Amendment websites lit up in celebration. “Glock Exec Resigns Because of Us!!!” proclaimed one contributor to a gun discussion group on TheHighRoad.org. “We got pissed, we made calls and wrote letters, the guy resigned,” agreed a colleague. “A message was sent here. And someone heard it loud and clear. Sell us out, and sell your last handgun.”
In fact, Jannuzzo’s departure involved even more drama than the online rabble-rousers assumed. Since the July 1999 attack on Gaston Glock, executives throughout the company had been looking over their shoulder—and with good reason. Private eyes hired by Glock combed company documents, scanned e-mail, and even conducted physical surveillance, ferreting out evidence of financial misbehavior.
As if this did not create sufficient tension, romantic jealousy heightened apprehension in the American subsidiary. Jannuzzo had split with his second wife and become involved with Monika Bereczky, Glock’s human resources manager. Bereczky, the former hotel concierge, had remained an object of the owner’s affection. Unaware of Jannuzzo’s relationship with her, or, more likely, indifferent to it, Glock continued to flirt with the much younger Bereczky. He routinely put his arm around her waist in public, she said, or suggestively grabbed her thigh while she was chauffeuring him to appointments. Jannuzzo, who had a temper to start with, took offense when his employer treated Bereczky as a plaything and, in Jannuzzo’s view, implicitly encouraged others to gossip about her sex life. On one occasion, when an Austrian-based Glock executive referred to Bereczky as a loose woman in Jannuzzo’s presence, the combustible American jammed a lit cigar into the visitor’s forehead. A bigger blowup seemed inevitable.
In the wake of the
Jannuzzo had brought an armful of corporate files with him to the Glock home. He dropped these on the kitchen table and threatened that unless he received a sizable severance payment—something in the millions—he would expose the company’s unflattering secrets. By this time, Jannuzzo knew quite a lot about Charles Ewert and the network of shell companies constructed to lessen Glock’s tax liabilities. He also knew about the A-Team’s investigation, which had turned up evidence linking Ewert and the Glock affiliate in Panama with the notorious Turkish financier Namli. Did Glock want this dirty laundry hung out for the world to see?
Gaston Glock was not used to being threatened. “Why are you doing this to me?” he demanded.
Jannuzzo said he was through being pushed around. He had been running the company in the United States, where Glock, Inc., made most of its money, and now he wanted his rightful share of the profits.
At this point, Glock stood up and left the room. Remaining with Jannuzzo in the kitchen was Peter Manown, the German-speaking American lawyer who handled Glock’s personal business in the United States. The next thing Jannuzzo and Manown heard was the racking of the slide of a semiautomatic handgun. Gaston Glock had loaded a round into the chamber.
“Paul, did you hear that?” asked a rattled Manown.
Jannuzzo didn’t seem scared. He patted his ankle, allowing Manown to see that he had a holster there and a pistol of his own. It might have been a scene out of a bad thriller, if not for the fact that the guns and the clashing egos were real.
Gaston Glock returned to the kitchen with a black plastic pistol grip protruding above his belt. “I didn’t know if we were going to have a shootout at the O.K. Corral, or what,” Manown said later.
There was more shouting and some finger-pointing, but in the end, neither man pulled his gun. Jannuzzo scooped up his files and left, bellowing at Glock: “You’re history!”
Word of the row in Gaston Glock’s kitchen naturally spread through the gun industry. Jannuzzo’s friend Richard Feldman heard about it directly from Gaston Glock. The Austrian called Feldman, a Glock consultant. “Richard, Paul has gone crazy!” Glock said. “What is wrong with Paul?”
“I was like, ‘Oy,’ ” Feldman recalled. “It was really about Monika more than anything else.”
Amorous rivalry doubtless played a role. Feldman also suggested that his friend Jannuzzo’s behavior in general had become erratic. On several occasions over the years, Jannuzzo had gotten drunk and passed out during trade shows or other industry gatherings. Once, hotel security found him late at night asleep under a banquet room table, his suit jacket and slacks folded neatly beside him, Feldman said. Another time, Jannuzzo blacked out in a hotel elevator and was discovered with the elevator doors bouncing against his outstretched legs. “As a result of this problem, I guess you’d call it, I don’t think he was always thinking at his best,” Feldman commented.
And perhaps also weighing on Jannuzzo’s mind in 2003 was his anxiety over his role in some unconventional internal company financial dealings. He and Manown, it turned out, had been taking advantage of Glock’s sales success to supplement their paychecks beyond officially agreed-upon salaries and bonuses. While they were less ambitious in this regard than Ewert, the two Glock lawyers for some time had used a variety of accounting tricks to siphon company cash into their pockets.
Asked years later during sworn testimony to explain his misdeeds, Manown offered this candid if illogical rationalization: “Glock is not Snow White. He’s got a lot of skeletons. He’s done, in my mind, a lot of things that are much worse than what Jannuzzo and I did. He makes roughly $200,000 a day—he personally. He spends money on mistresses, on houses, on sex, on cars. He bribes people. He’s just a bad guy. And with all this money laying around, he needed it like a hole in the head, and we just, you know, we let our greed and our ethical standards slip.” To underscore the point, he added: “It wasn’t like we were stealing from Mother Teresa.”
At the time he quit, Jannuzzo was hoping he could walk away without negative consequences. His attempt to squeeze his employer for a fat severance payment in exchange for keeping his mouth shut illustrated just how cocky Jannuzzo had become.
Manown was a far less confident individual. He learned in fall 2003 that Glock suspected his lawyers in America of impropriety. Seized with fear and guilt, Manown descended into a paralyzing state of depression. Then he decided to come clean. Manown flew to Austria and confessed everything to Gaston Glock, begging not to be sent to prison. He admitted that he and Jannuzzo had skimmed money from company real estate transactions. They pilfered other funds, he said, by having Glock, Inc., pay phony insurance premiums to a bogus liability carrier they themselves created in the Cayman Islands. They routed tens of thousands of dollars that was not theirs to personal accounts. They did it because they thought no one would notice. “There was so much money flying around in this company,” Manown later said. “It was like Monopoly money.”
Glock certainly did not absolve Manown, but he suggested a deal. In exchange for a degree of lenience, the lawyer would tell all, repay what he could to the company, and help ensnare Jannuzzo. Manown agreed.
Gaston Glock had his outside lawyers bring Manown’s tale of fraud to the authorities in Cobb County, Georgia, where Glock, Inc., was a prominent corporate citizen. Local prosecutors debriefed a chagrined Manown, and eventually he was permitted to plead guilty to low-level embezzlement charges. He received a notably light sentence: no time behind bars, ten years probation, and surrender of his law license. He turned over $650,000 to Glock in restitution. There was no press conference, sparing Manown public embarrassment.
