Afterword
Gaston J. Glock Jr. greeted me with a wary half-smile and a noncommittal handshake. The older son of the billionaire firearm magnate wore a narrowly tailored dark suit and pointy long-toed shoes in the European fashion. His lank brown hair fell boyishly into his eyes, but the eyes were weary, and he seemed older than his fifty-or-so years. Glock ushered me into a conference room in the corporate offices of his newly opened online clothing company.
Members of the Glock family, through various intermediaries, had refused for years to meet or talk with me. Now that my book had appeared, however, Gaston Jr. had had a change of heart. He asked me to sign a copy, which I happily did.
Gaston Jr. complimented me on the depth of my research. He objected, however, that I had written about private family matters. He had marked the troubling pages with Post-its.
Some of the revelations about his father must have been painful, I acknowledged. There is even more you don’t know, he indicated obliquely. He could not, he said, talk about family matters because of the litigation involving his parents back in Austria.
Instead, Gaston Jr. wanted to discuss his new company, Gaston Glock Style, which sells high-end hunting and shooting apparel and accoutrements ($419 plus tax for a moose-leather backpack). The clothing company, he emphasized, had nothing to do with his father’s gun business, even though it traded on the famous family name and had offices just down the road from the Glock Inc. firearms plant in suburban Atlanta. Despite this proximity, Gaston Jr. wanted to make it clear that he had stepped out from his father’s shadow.
In fact, Gaston Sr. had given his children, and his former wife, Helga, little choice about going their own way. He had fired them all, adding a new chapter to the strange family saga.
In December 2011, after the first edition of Glock had gone to press, Helga, Gaston Sr.’s wife of forty-nine years until they divorced earlier in 2011, filed a civil lawsuit in an Austrian court seeking to regain a significant stake in the Glock corporate empire. The former Mrs. Glock claimed her interest in the lucrative company had been improperly taken from her by advisers to her eighty-three-year-old ex-husband. Helga, seventy-two, alleged that the trouble began in October 2008, when Gaston Sr. suffered a stroke. One of his nurses, Kathrin Tschikof, “seemingly developed a close personal relationship” with the patient, the fifty-eight-page suit said. Soon, it added, Helga was denied access to Gaston Sr.’s hospital room and locked out of the family mansion in southern Austria. Helga claimed it took her a year to recover her clothes and personal items from the lakeside villa.
The drama intensified in 2010, when the Glocks’ three adult children were let go from positions they held with the family firearm company, the suit stated. Then, in the spring of 2011, Gaston filed for divorce from Helga, and she, too, was notified that she would lose her role with the company, according to the suit. In July 2011, Gaston Sr. married his former nurse, Tschikof, thirty-one at the time. “In the course of 2011,” the suit asserted, Helga “learned that Gaston Glock obviously had had extramarital relationships for years (both with Ms. Tschikof and with other women).”
These were the matters that Gaston Jr. yearned to tell me more about but declined to do so, for fear of imperilling his mother’s lawsuit. Apart from the obviously hurt feelings, the family dissension raised serious questions about future control of the Glock firearm fortune.
Ownership of the holding company, Glock GmbH, originally had been divided 85 percent to 15 percent between Gaston Sr. and Helga, her suit asserted, a claim consistent with internal corporate documents I reviewed while preparing this book. In 1999, the suit added, the couple created a joint trust intended to perpetuate Glock family ownership of the gun-making business, with each spouse contributing “considerable assets” to the trust. In 2011, the trust allegedly was amended to preclude any continuing corporate role by Helga or her three kids. Helga now sought to undo these changes and to recover her 15 percent stake.
The suit described how Helga and her offspring—Brigitte, Gaston Jr., and Robert—spent decades helping expand the family company from a garage metal shop into a global powerhouse. Robert, for example, gave up his ambition to become a lawyer because his father insisted that he work for the gun manufacturer in preparation for running it one day. By pushing aside Helga and her children, Gaston’s inner circle has undermined the purpose of the family trust, the suit alleged. The trust, the suit said, was set up with the understanding that the Glock children would “work in the Glock group in leading positions, and the trust’s assets should only be used for the Glock spouses and their joint offspring.”
When I learned about the litigation, I contacted the Glock companies and spokesmen for the family. Alfred Autischer, Gaston Sr.’s public relations representative in Vienna, responded via e-mail: “We ask for your understanding that Gaston Glock won’t comment on ongoing proceedings in Austria,” he wrote. “The proceedings only affect the private life of the Glock family. The companies of the Glock group are affected in no way.”
In a statement to the newspaper Die Presse in December 2011, Gaston Sr. denied any wrongdoing and said that he “won’t allow that allegations, falsehoods, and speculation damage my reputation or that of my company.” The new Mrs. Glock also declined comment, according to Autischer. She has embarked on a new career as managing director of the Glock Horse Performance Center, an equestrian complex in southern Austria sponsored by her husband’s gun company. In that role, Kathrin Glock has presided over world-class competitions and numerous philanthropic ventures for such causes as treatment of children with brain tumors and care for sick and abandoned animals.
The new Mrs. Glock, a vigorous woman with long blond hair, has attracted fresh attention to the family from the Austrian media. In July 2012, this attention led to a bizarre confrontation at a beach volleyball tournament in Klagenfurt, near the Glock mansion. A professional photographer seeking images of celebrities at the tournament told the Austrian Times that members of the Glock entourage interfered with his work and detained him. Gaston Glock then allegedly held what appeared to be a Glock pistol to the photographer’s head and pulled the trigger. The pistol turned out to be a realistic-looking squirt gun. “I bet you’re glad that this is not a real gun,” Gaston Glock reportedly said to the shaken photojournalist, Daniel Raunig. Damp and not at all amused, Raunig hired a lawyer; Austrian police opened a criminal investigation, the Times reported. Glock “may have a lot of money, but the same law applies to him as it does to everybody else,” Raunig’s attorney, Alexander Todor-Kostic, said. “I’m looking forward to the case.”
While their father enjoys renewed romance in his eighties, the Glock children, of necessity, are finding new paths. Gaston Jr. has his clothing company, which employs several former executives from the gun business. Brigitte has opened a pet store near Vienna, according to a knowledgeable former Glock employee. Robert owns restaurants in Austria. In late 2011, Robert gave an interview to the Austrian publication Krone, in which he mourned recent family developments. “It is not about the money,” he was quoted as saying. “We’re talking about a life’s work, which is now ruined and broken.”
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The Glock commercial legacy seems far from ruined or broken. In January 2012, the company played a starring role, as it usually does, at the gun industry’s annual SHOT Show in Las Vegas. The National Shooting Sports Foundation, the industry group that organizes the exposition, named a one-of-a-kind Glock 22 the Official Handgun of the Year. Engraved with an image of the Statue of Liberty, recognizing Glock’s 25th year in the United States and the 125th anniversary of the statue greeting arrivals to New York Harbor, the commemorative pistol sold for $15,025 at a charitable auction, a mark of how much the Austrian brand means to some firearm aficionados.
Yet another Glock topic kept the SHOT Show gossip mill humming: the unhappy fate of Paul Jannuzzo, the fallen prince of the American gun industry. In Las Vegas, former industry colleagues and rivals told me they couldn’t believe Jannuzzo, Glock Inc.’s ex–chief operating officer, was actually going to trial in Cobb County, Georgia, accused of stealing from the company. Whatever he had done in the past, these generally sympathetic executives said, Jannuzzo had already spent years behind bars. Wouldn’t a plea deal get struck?
The answer was no. The Glock company wanted a trial, and a trial it would get—not to mention in a local courthouse in the gun-friendly county where Glock was a major employer. Later that winter, I traveled to that municipal building, a spotless modern structure, and watched as Jannuzzo and his defense attorneys tried to persuade a jury of his innocence. It was an uphill battle. Once a robust and forceful man, Jannuzzo looked gaunt and haunted. Having once fled the jurisdiction, requiring extradition from Amsterdam, he was being held in jail during the trial. The business suit and white dress shirt his family had bought for him did not fit well. He nodded gravely in my direction when I caught his eye.
The evidence was damning. Fellow former Glock executive Peter Manown testified under oath that he and Jannuzzo had diverted millions of dollars from the company during the 1990s, using phony bank accounts, forged documents, and fraudulent loans. Manown had pleaded guilty in 2008 and received the notably light punishment of ten years’ probation in exchange for his willingness to cooperate in the prosecution of Jannuzzo. (When criminal conspiracies go south, it pays to be the first person to make a deal with the authorities.) Because of the intricacies of the Georgia statute of limitations and state racketeering law, Cobb County had also charged Jannuzzo, fifty-six, with stealing a pistol that had been loaned to him by the company—a seemingly frivolous charge, given that Jannuzzo owned numerous guns, and claimed that he had attempted to return the one he was accused of swiping.
The trial turned into a swift slide toward conviction, announced by the jury on March 2. A couple of weeks later, while the judge was considering what sentence to impose, I received an unexpected phone call from Vienna. Robert Glock, Gaston Jr.’s younger brother, was on the line. I had never spoken to Robert. A mutual acquaintance had made the connection. Robert wanted to tell me that Paul Jannuzzo had been unfairly convicted, at least on the gun-theft charge, and did not deserve a long prison term. “Paul tried to give back the pistol,” Robert said. “He has suffered enough.”
This was odd (but then again, everything about the Glocks is at least a little bit odd). If Robert Glock wanted to help Jannuzzo, why had he not testified at the trial? Now it was too late.
“My attorneys told me, ‘Don’t come to Atlanta,’ “ he said. “The prosecutor there would make me look bad in court and things like that.”
Was Robert’s belated and half-hearted gesture on Jannuzzo’s behalf related somehow to the Glock family feud? After all, the three children stood to lose many millions of dollars because of the father’s excluding them from the company and possibly their inheritance. Was this a convoluted form of payback?
No, Robert insisted. “I don’t want to harm my father.” The son simply did not want to see a former employee punished excessively. “It was for me unbelievable to see Paul Jannuzzo under prosecution, after all the years he worked for my father and all the things he did for my father.” Indeed, but a phone call at the eleventh hour to a writer in New York was not going to make any difference.
In April, Cobb Country Superior Court Judge LaTain Kell showed no sympathy in sentencing Jannuzzo to seven years behind bars. “You were entrusted basically with keys to the kingdom,” the judge lectured the defendant, now dressed in prison clothes. “You were given the opportunity to write checks, form corporations on behalf of the company, and take all manners of action on behalf of the company. By placing that amount of trust in you, they allowed you—much to their detriment—to steal from them.”
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Jannuzzo’s harsh sentence, combined with the Glock family discord, seem appropriate markers for the company’s initial quarter-century in the United States. Founder Gaston Glock has exacted ruthless revenge on yet one more former subordinate whom the industrialist believed had taken advantage of his largesse. Success in the Glock corporate hierarchy comes with great risk.
So does membership in the Glock family. Under Austrian court rules, Helga Glock’s lawsuit, at this writing, is proceeding in secret. Precisely how and when it will reshape control of the firearm empire remains uncertain. In July 2012, Glock made one of its all-too-common appearances in connection with a mass shooting, this time at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, where a deranged graduate student used two of the company’s pistols, among other weapons, to kill twelve people and injure nearly sixty more. Amid all the turmoil, though, the Handgun of the Year for 2012 will continue its reign for years to come. For better or worse, Glock has no serious challenger as America’s Gun.
—Paul M. Barrett
August 2012