As with the investigation of Ewert, the Cobb County probe of Manown shed light on matters that Gaston Glock could not have wanted anyone to know about. For one thing, Manown told prosecutors, Glock, Inc., had arranged illegal political campaign contributions—with the approval of Gaston Glock.
Manown told the district attorney’s office that he and Jannuzzo had withdrawn tens of thousands of dollars from corporate bank accounts and distributed it to fellow employees and spouses with the understanding that the recipients would make individual donations to candidates favored by the company. As described, this activity, undertaken over a decade, would have been illegal for two reasons. Federal law prohibited Glock, Inc., as a foreign-owned entity, from making any direct contributions to US political campaigns. Using employees as fronts did not make the donations legal. Indeed, disguising corporate contributions by breaking them up and funneling them through third parties constituted a separate crime.
The contribution conspiracy was not a rogue operation, Manown told prosecutors under oath. “This was all done … with Mr. Glock’s blessing.” He detailed how he withdrew money from a Glock account in increments of $9,000, “so it would stay under the reporting radar of the bank,” referring to the federal anti–money laundering rule that requires banks to report to the US Treasury any cash withdrawal of $10,000 or more. Purposely evading the cap is yet another federal crime.
Federal campaign donation records show that from 1991 through 2004, Glock employees made more than one hundred individual contributions to congressional candidates, worth a total of at least $80,000. Manown kept a handwritten ledger enumerating some of these transactions. A November 1, 2000, entry shows $60,000 designated for “Bush election campaign per GG and PJ 4 RF.” It appears that “GG” stood for Gaston Glock, “PJ” for Paul Jannuzzo, and “RF” for Richard Feldman, the company consultant. It is not clear what happened to that $60,000. (Feldman said he knows nothing about it.)
Among the congressional recipients of Glock employee donations were Representatives Bob Barr and Phil Gingrey and Senator Saxby Chambliss—all Georgia Republicans. Those three beneficiaries of Glock largesse said that they were unaware of unlawful contributions, if any had been made. Chambliss’s office said in 2009 that, just to be on the safe side, it would return all Glock-affiliated donations from that period.
The Glock Monopoly money flowed in other, even less likely, directions. One was the promotion of Jorg Haider, the right-wing anti-immigrant Austrian politician from Carinthia. Having earned a reputation for pro-Nazi sympathies, based on his comments praising Hitler and SS officers, Haider traveled in the United States during this period, seeking to repair his public standing. Glock introduced the politician to Richard Feldman over dinner at Canoe, a fashionable Atlanta restaurant. At Glock’s behest, and with Glock money, Feldman arranged transportation and hotel accommodations for Haider in New York in 1999 and 2000. “Glock urged me to help Haider overcome some of the [image] problems,” Feldman told me.
In Austria, Glock continued to deny that he backed Haider. The industrialist sued both an Austrian newspaper and a politician there for describing him as a supporter of Haider, and the litigation had the desired effect: The Glock-Haider relationship thereafter received little attention in Austria or anywhere else.
The following January, Feldman arranged for Haider to attend a banquet in New York that marked Martin Luther King’s birthday. The Austrian sat on the ballroom dais with other dignitaries. Various Republican notables also attended the King dinner, including New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani, then running against Hillary Clinton for an open seat in the US Senate. When she learned that Giuliani had shared the dais with Haider, Clinton used the juxtaposition to condemn her opponent. “Mr. Haider’s record of intolerance, extremism, and anti-Semitism should be a concern to all of us,” she wrote in an open letter to the World Jewish Congress. Haider, she noted, had “spoken positively” of Hitler’s employment policies, referring to former “Waffen SS members as ‘men of character’ and concentration camps as ‘punishment camps.’ ” The New York media eagerly amplified Clinton’s message. Giuliani, who ultimately dropped his Senate bid, complained that he had been blindsided and did not know who Haider was.
Even with Peter Manown’s confession, Gaston Glock did not immediately go after Jannuzzo for embezzlement. After quitting the company and marrying Monika Bereczy, Jannuzzo spent several years spiraling downward without Glock’s help. His drinking got worse. His driver’s license was suspended for a DUI bust. Business ventures did not pan out. And his temper turned violent.
Shortly after midnight on August 26, 2007, the Atlanta police received a 911 hang-up call from the Jannuzzo- Bereczy residence in the upscale Prado neighborhood. Officers dispatched to the scene found Bereczy, who had made the abortive 911 call, outside the house with “a large gash on the left side of her forehead, cuts on her left ear, and bruises on her face, hands, upper and lower arms, neck, and both legs.” Bereczy said she and Jannuzzo had fought, that he was inside, and he had “many weapons.” When Jannuzzo opened the front door, he insisted everything was fine. “Mr. Jannuzzo was bleeding from a large gash on the back of his head, was slurring his speech, and had an odor of alcoholic beverage emanating from his person,” the incident report stated. Police handcuffed and arrested him.
Bereczy said an argument had escalated and that her husband had “punched her in the forehead, opening a wound from a previous beating, and pushed her in her chest, causing her to fall backwards and hit her head on the armoire.” She threw a lamp at him. In the ambulance, Bereczy told emergency workers: “He is going to kill me for this. I am a dead woman.”
Police found seventeen guns in the house, including an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle and a Remington shotgun. Jannuzzo’s ex-wife, Karen Dixon, “stated that when she was married to him, he was very violent. She also stated that it was only a matter of time before this happened,” the police report said.
Despite the harrowing bloodshed, Bereczy did not press charges. Jannuzzo, soon released from custody, was never prosecuted for the attack. As happens surprisingly often after domestic abuse, the couple stayed together. But Jannuzzo’s troubles with the law were not over.
In late January 2008, police returned to Jannuzzo’s home and arrested him again, this time for stealing from Glock. Acting through his American attorneys, the gun maker had urged Cobb County authorities to use Peter Manown’s confession, combined with company documents, to prosecute Jannuzzo. “The implications were that approximately $5,000,000 had been embezzled from the Glock Group by Mr. Manown, Paul Jannuzzo, and others,” according to a Smyrna Police Department investigative report. The formal indictment of Jannuzzo, filed in May 2008, referred to the theft of far smaller amounts, but sums that could not be written off as incidental withdrawals from the petty cash drawer.
Prosecutors claimed, for instance, that Jannuzzo and Manown had pocketed $177,000 in payments to the phony Cayman Islands insurance company they created. The pair allegedly skimmed another $98,633.80 from a company bank account in Atlanta. And in September 2001, Jannuzzo had a law firm holding Glock funds pay a $16,000 bill for custom cabinetry installed in his home, according to the indictment. All told, prosecutors accused Jannuzzo of having a hand in the theft of more than $300,000. For good measure, the indictment said that Jannuzzo stole a single handgun from his former employer. The pistol—not a Glock—was among the weapons confiscated from Jannuzzo’s house the evening he was arrested for beating his wife.
I caught up with Jannuzzo in June 2009. He had been released on bail, pending trial, as the wheels of criminal justice were turning slowly in Cobb County. He was not in good shape. He had gained weight, and his face looked puffy. Rather than the neat business suits I recalled when he was flying high with Glock, he wore rumpled trousers and a Hawaiian-style short-sleeved shirt. His wife, Monika, had moved to Holland to take a job there, he said. He was traveling back and forth to Europe, but now was short on money. His car was in the shop, and he could not afford to pay the repair bill.
We met at a noisy downtown restaurant in Atlanta, along with my
He admitted that he and Manown had routed corporate funds to themselves. Some of that money flowed with Glock’s approval into the shadow political contributions, Jannuzzo said. He blamed Manown for devising other stratagems, such as the payments to the fake liability insurance company in the Caymans. Jannuzzo insisted that if
