|
|
“
|
Gaston Glock, an Austrian curtain-rod manufacturer, designed the Glock 17 in his garage outside Vienna in the early 1980s. Soon it was a global bestseller. Alarmed by aspects of the pistol’s revolutionary polymer design — including the lack of a conventional safety mechanism — Congress held hearings on the Glock in 1986 and New York City banned it. Yet the Glock remains by far America’s most popular pistol — carried by two-thirds of police officers, immortalized by hip-hop and Hollywood and wielded by the perpetrators of the Virginia Tech, Tucson, Aurora and Charleston massacres.
Gaston Glock resides in an opulent Austrian villa. He has two corporate jets worth eight figures and a $3 million helicopter to shuttle him around Europe. In the 1980s, some of Glock’s biggest law-enforcement contracts were allegedly won with the help of Gold Club strippers near the company’s US headquarters in Smyrna, Georgia. “For a lot of guys coming in from out of town, this was the best time they were going to have all year or maybe their entire life,” a former police official told journalist Paul Barrett for his book Glock: The Rise of America’s Gun. “You go to Smyrna, get laid at the best strip club in town, drink champagne — you are not going to forget the experience when it comes time to choose between Glock and Smith & Wesson.”
By the 1990s, Gaston Glock was a billionaire and had hired New Jersey attorney and gun-rights activist Paul Jannuzzo to help combat a rash of claims by shooting victims. Jannuzzo, who eventually became the CEO of the US subsidiary, convinced Glock to donate $1 to the American Shooting Sports Council for each gun shipped from Smyrna. But ties between Jannuzzo and Gaston Glock began to fray over an amorous rivalry for the company’s young human-resources manager. Jannuzzo was convicted in 2012 of diverting profits into his own bank account; an appeals court later found the statute of limitations had expired and overturned the verdict.
In 1999, at the age of 70, Glock survived a hit job in a Luxembourg parking garage carried out by a mallet-wielding former French legionnaire nicknamed Spartacus. Glock knocked out several of his attacker’s teeth before rendering him unconscious. The police linked the attack to an embezzlement scheme by Glock’s business associate Charles Ewert, who’d earned the nickname Panama Charlie for helping Glock set up foreign shell companies to evade Austrian and US taxes. Investigators hired by Glock later alleged that Ewert had misappropriated $103 million in corporate funds.
According to a lawsuit filed against Glock by one of those investigators, Glock knowingly participated in the scheme — allegedly paying himself royalties for nonexistent trademarks and laundering money with phony payments, rents and loans. When the investigators confronted Glock, he convinced state and local officials in Georgia to indict them instead, on charges that they’d overbilled him for legal services. The charges, later dropped, “were fabricated based on falsified evidence, influenced witnesses and evidence either destroyed or withheld,” according to the suit.
Glock also faces allegations stemming from his 2011 divorce, in which he left Helga, his wife of 49 years, for Kathrin Tschikof, a 31-year-old nurse who’d helped him recover from a stroke. Tschikof now directs the Glock Horse Performance Center, overseeing the couple’s 50 dressage horses and jumpers. In May 2014, Glock bought Tschikof a $15 million Olympic silver-medal-winning show horse, one of the most expensive ever. Six months later, Helga Glock filed a $500 million lawsuit accusing her ex-husband of bamboozling her and their three adult children out of a stake in the company and concealing hundreds of millions in profits. Gaston Glock called the suit a shakedown scheme. Helga’s attorney insists she, not Gaston, is the victim.
“He’s got a lot of skeletons,” former Glock executive Peter Manown said in court after pleading guilty to stealing from the company. “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.”
|
„
|
|
