The last honest mercenary in the business
International arms dealer Samuel Cummings blanketed the Western Hemisphere with guns
Hi. I’ve written about gun politics and gun culture for The Times, but I also have a cache of stuff I could never place anywhere. I decided to run some of it here. This is the beginnings of a historical profile of International Armament Co. (Interarmco)’s founder Sam Cummings, who, among other things, sold a hell of a lot of AR-10s.
In 1949, the Luger Howard Unruh bought might have come into the country with a returning G.I. In 1959, when rival gangs in the Bronx amassed an arsenal for a bloody gunfight only narrowly averted by police, the bulk of the guns had almost certainly been brought to the United States by Samuel Cummings, the largest private arms dealer in the world.
Samuel Cummings didn’t care about black hats or white hats when it came to buying from the lowest bidder and selling to the highest. Yet he still considered himself a man of principle. As an international arms dealer, he sold guns to Batista, to the Nicaraguans, to the Domincans—or tried to, anyway; sometimes shipments were canceled or, in Cuba, confiscated by Castro’s men. But he had standards: later in life, he liked to remind people that he would never have worked with Muammar el-Quddafi or Idi Amin. He had declined to do business with them because of hurdles in export licensing. The principle was that he always followed the law.
Samuel Cummings founded the International Armament Corporation in 1953, when he was 26 years old. The company’s motto—this was back when CEOs chose Latin phrases, rather than engineering them by focus group—was Esse Quam Videre: to be rather than to seem to be. In this age of perpetual wars run by opaque multinational military contractors—Blackwater, Cerberus, General Dynamics—Sam Cummings may have been the last honest mercenary in the business.
He did not operate in the shadows. Every shipment was accompanied by the appropriate paperwork. He did business in embassies all over Washington, though he was no partisan. “The arms business is by its nature apolitical,” he told People magazine. “We like to say whoever wins, we win. We can supply the loser with new material or we can buy the captured material from the winner.” Perhaps. One of the rare clients who would not sell to him was the government of Switzerland.
Like all the famous corporate titans, his life was performatively modest, fourteen-room apartment in Monte Carlo notwithstanding; Cummings hawk-eyed his airline miles statements, wore his Sears suits to bare threads, swam laps in the ocean every day. Even that Monte Carlo apartment was in its way a measure of his frugality: the small country has long been a notorious tax haven; outfitted with top-of-the-line office equipment, he worked from home, where he was his own secretary. Mrs. Cummings did all of the housework and cooking herself. It was, somehow, as one biographer put it, “a blameless and uneventful life.”
And like many of the corporate titans, his story began with hard luck. The family’s fortunes were decimated during the Great Depression, and his father died when he was eight. He was raised by a single woman who white-knuckled her children back into the upper echelon the same way so many people sought to do after the global financial crisis in 2008: she flipped houses. She and the children moved into a series of dilapidated houses, renovating them and putting them up for sale. Her success in the real estate game is how she paid for Sam to attend the prep school whose motto he later swiped for Interarmco: to be, rather than to seem to be.
Cummings was as obsessed with firearms as Unruh had been. His preoccupation began in 1936, when he was ten years old. He found a Maxim, the machine gun that had subdued the British empire, in an empty lot in Philadelphia. He would later deal in hundreds of thousands, even millions, of war souvenirs, but this was his first. It had probably been brought home twenty years earlier by a veteran of the First World War, and the weapon might have been even older than that: the Maxim had been in production since the 1880s. Guns can stick around for a long time. Little Samuel toted it home with the help of a kind passer-by. He took the gun apart and put it back together, took it apart and put it back together. Firearms would fascinate him for the rest of his life.
Unlike Howard Unruh, he never learned to kill. He knew how, and he could have, but he’d only enlisted in 1945. He spent his year and a half of service at Fort Lee in Virginia training other GIs to do it—that’s how much he had taught himself about guns by age eighteen. But he’d never been subjected to the battlefield test that so fascinated SLA Marshall.
As with the rise of all good titans, the rest was a great deal of luck and pluck. He bought and sold guns to pay the law school tuition the G.I. Bill wouldn’t cover. That business also helped send his sister to college and funded a jaunt through the ruins of Europe with the boys. He finished law school in 1949 and became a clerk for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. That, he told a biographer, was why he was able to duck into the House chambers to hear the reading of the declaration of war against Korea. He wasn’t—one of the controversial legacies of the Korean War is that President Truman, in an unprecedented exercise of executive power, never officially did so. If there’s no declaration, there’s no war; no war, no surrender; no surrender, no peace treaty; no peace treaty, well, technically the U.S. “police action” in Korea continues today.
All the good titans like to put themselves at the center of history.
Regardless, his skills were suddenly of great interest to the CIA. Allan Dulles himself sent Cummings to Europe to buy up surplus weapons with which the U.S. could covertly arm the recently deposed Chinese nationalist Chiang Kai-shek. Cummings was the one who’d told Dulles, against the received intelligence, they were there in the first place: he’d seen piles of abandoned weapons when he’d toured Western Europe with his friends. Under the guise of buying props for Hollywood movie studios, he went back and bought hundreds of thousands of guns from dealers all over Britain and the Continent. Only the Swiss refused to buy the ruse and sell the arms.
He also liked to say, “He who harms no one, fears no one.” When he took his last breath at that house in Monaco at the age of 71, was Samuel Cummings afraid?