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.”