Acorporation does not have a soul. Its character reflects that of the people in charge. Gaston Glock was very much in charge of his company, and he was a man with a complicated soul.
Even those who came to have grievances against Mr. Glock did not dispute his drive and tenacity. Well into middle age, he discovered a reservoir of ambition that fed the design of a truly innovative handgun. He then had the temerity to try to sell his invention in the United States, a country in love with its homegrown firearms. To a remarkable degree, he succeeded, and no one can gainsay that feat.
Was Glock a visionary engineer, covertly sophisticated in his understanding of the American gun market? That is how he and his handlers crafted his image in retrospect. And fair enough: In the 1850s, Sam Colt, too, cultivated a personal mythology to move his handguns.
A more realistic perspective, though, suggests that Glock was a late-blooming tinkerer whose breakthrough came at exactly the right moment. He had the common sense to hire an inspired marketer in Karl Walter, a man willing to do whatever it took to make a deal. At the beginning, Gaston Glock had no feel at all for the United States, or much of anything outside of Austria. He evolved from a provincial manager of a radiator factory to a world-traveling industrialist. He met celebrities, flew on private jets, and had minions at his beck and call. He showed visitors a photograph of him shaking hands with Pope John Paul II at the Vatican, feeding an apocryphal notion that the two were friends. Brushes with Hollywood distorted Glock’s sense of his personal status in America. In the mid-1990s, a Los Angeles movie prop master introduced him to Sharon Stone. Glock arranged for the elegant actress to receive one of his pistols as a gift. About a week later, Stone sent a bouquet of flowers to Glock—in all likelihood, a routine thank-you gesture. Glock, then in his mid-sixties, was so pleased by this interaction that on a subsequent trip to Los Angeles, he showed up at Stone’s gated home for an unannounced visit, accompanied by one of his West Coast sales representatives. The actress did not make an appearance, and Glock was not invited into her mansion. He eventually got back into his car and left. When word of the embarrassing misadventure filtered back to Smyrna, it became a watercooler favorite among those employees prone to gossip.
The owner’s amusing pretensions did not inhibit his company’s performance. Glock built a veritable cash machine, with margins in the neighborhood of 70 percent—the kind of performance that would warrant a Harvard Business School case study were Glock not so secretive about his decision making. Few outsiders knew how he had accomplished what he had done.
As often happens in business, the profit imperative over time propelled the company and its owner into morally ambiguous territory. Glock’s crafty response to the assault weapons ban provides one example of the manufacturer’s deftness at outmaneuvering lawmakers and regulators.
The slogan “Glock Perfection” was not puffery to Gaston Glock. He believed it. His organization projected coolness, certainty, even arrogance. In public, the founder was capable of beguiling charm, as he demonstrated when testifying before the jury in Knoxville. At other times, he struck people as distant and condescending. To his German-speaking aides, he expressed disdain for Glock, Inc.’s, American employees, based on nothing more than their nationality. His all-purpose complaint concerned the prevalence of “crazy people” in the world, by which he meant incompetents, fools, and crooks.
He had an unforgiving management style, which, one day, he summarized for Monika Bereczky, the head of human resources for the American subsidiary. Bereczky, a Romanian native of Hungarian descent, spoke German fluently and for a number of years served informally as a personal assistant to Glock and his wife, Helga. “Every morning,” he told her, “you have to slap everyone on the head, just in case they did something wrong.”
Bereczky first met Gaston Glock in 1995, when she worked days as a hotel concierge in Atlanta and nights as a hostess at an upscale seafood restaurant. The Austrian businessman sometimes stayed at the hotel and ate at the restaurant. He stopped to speak to Bereczky, a slim, attractive young woman with a pale complexion and short dark hair. “He spoke to me in German,” she recalled. “He was this kind old man who paid attention to me.”
She had left her native Romania in 1989 as the Soviet bloc crumbled. Eventually she followed her divorced mother, a former ballet dancer, to the United States. Mother and daughter lived in a dingy, insect-infested apartment in Atlanta. Monika worked seven days a week from five a.m. until late at night. After several conversations, Glock invited her to visit his gun plant in Smyrna. Monika’s suspicious mother told her not to go. The older woman did not trust Glock and assumed he had lecherous intentions.
Monika was torn. In her mid-twenties at the time, she knew nothing about guns or the firearm business and was not particularly interested in learning. But she wanted a better life and sensed that Glock was offering her something. “I didn’t know how to say no,” she said.
The tour of Glock, Inc., turned into an offer of an administrative job, which Monika accepted. The post evolved into overseeing human resources: hiring and firing lower-level employees and complying with regulatory paperwork. Glock sponsored her work visa, allowing her to remain in the country with her mother, who had become a citizen. The pay was generous compared to hotel and restaurant jobs, and the hours were more reasonable.
At first, Bereczky enjoyed being a favorite of the company’s owner. When he was in town, Glock went out of his way to talk with her privately about how other employees conducted themselves in the office. Glock did this with a number of German-speaking underlings, creating resentment among the Americans. “I was awful to the Americans,” Bereczky admitted. “This was how Mr. Glock liked it. We spoke in German. The Americans were ‘stupid.’ ”
Her coworkers returned the favor by calling her a spy and gossiping about her relationship with the boss. Glock encouraged the hostile talk with his tactile manner of showing affection for his slender young employee. “He would come out of a conference room or a meeting with his hand around my waist,” she said. “He laughed and let them know he owned me. I was something like a fool.… I went along with this to keep my job, keep my visa, and to make the money, which was good.” Bereczky said she rebuffed Mr. Glock’s more amorous advances and never slept with him. “I hated that the Americans thought I was Mr. Glock’s bimbo.”
Her duties, meanwhile, progressed in two very different directions: She gained responsibility and influence in the office, while at the same time Glock demanded that she carry out highly personal errands. The Glocks purchased, among other Atlanta real estate, a luxurious home in a wealthy neighborhood called the Vinings. When Glock was in town, it fell to Bereczky to clean the house, stock it with food, make the beds, and place candy on the owner’s pillow. He sometimes called her in the middle of the night to bring him toiletries or batteries for the television remote. When she arrived, she said, Glock greeted her on some occasions in his underwear. “I don’t know what he thought I would do when I saw him half-naked,” she recalled. “I just wanted to get out of there as fast as possible.”
Despite Bereczky’s resistance to what she saw as his romantic overtures—or perhaps because of her reluctance—Glock expected her to look after other women with whom he socialized. Over the years, according to Bereczky, she took several of these women to lunch and on shopping trips to upscale stores in Atlanta. This occasionally led to awkward scenes. Once, the day after Bereczky accompanied one of her employer’s female friends to the local Saks Fifth Avenue, Glock’s wife, Helga, arrived in town and asked to visit the same store. Bereczky worried about returning to Saks but could not come up with an excuse to steer Helga Glock elsewhere.
“Welcome back!” a Saks salesperson greeted Bereczky, who signaled desperately for the retailer to stay quiet and play dumb. Mrs. Glock seemed not to notice the exchange, and the shopping trip proceeded without further incident.
Gaston Glock traveled in luxury and dropped thousands of dollars on visits to the Gold Club. His female friends had carte blanche at Atlanta’s most expensive stores. But he could explode in rage when underlings bought what he considered unnecessary office supplies. On one occasion that lived long in company lore, he became furious that the front-desk receptionist at the executive offices in Smyrna used a $29 headset to answer the phone more efficiently. In Austria, he bellowed, we pick up the telephone the old-fashioned way!
American employees, not surprisingly, came to anticipate his visits with dread. They fretted when the convoy of BMW and Mercedes sedans carrying him and his entourage pulled into the company parking lot: “Mr. Glock is here, Mr. Glock is here.”
Patched together on the fly, the company evolved into a prodigious moneymaker powered by excellent product design and a fearful desire not to displease Mr. Glock. And the reserve of the reticent engineer at the helm gradually gave way to capricious grandiosity. “He started out pretty humble and unassuming,” said one former American sales manager, who recalled that on his first trip to Austria, Gaston Glock picked him up personally at the Vienna airport. “Then he began believing his news clippings.”
Karl Walter took tremendous pride in his role as Glock’s top executive in the United States and architect of the company’s marketing success. Gaston Glock found ways to remind all his employees that they were subordinates, but for a time Walter enjoyed special standing. Most visitors to the Glock factory in Deutsch-Wagram were left to fend for themselves at midday, while Gaston Glock went home to be served lunch by his wife. Walter, by contrast, broke bread with his boss at the Glocks’ kitchen table, while Helga laid out the meat, bread, and beer. The Glocks sometimes invited him to the family’s villa in Velden and took him along when they went swimming in the large lake nearby. In the late 1980s, before the Glocks knew their way around Atlanta or had bought a house there, they stayed with Walter and his family in their suburban home.
Success, however, eroded this camaraderie. “My contract was signed the day after the [American subsidiary] was incorporated,” Walter recounted. “I had a very small salary, like $50,000 a year, plus a small percentage on net revenues.” He would not reveal his exact commission, but others familiar with the company speculated that it was 1 percent. “If you came close to $100 million [in company revenue], this small percentage is quite something,” Walter said. The “super gun” stood to make him a wealthy man. “Initially,” he said, “Mr. Glock had no difficulty. Then some of his coworkers and managers became envious.”
Wolfgang Riedl, Glock’s Vienna-based marketing chief, recalled the jealousy growing in Austria among other executives, as they questioned why Walter was so much better compensated than they were. “They started to poke Mr. Glock in the side, I believe, and said, ‘He is making too much money. I want to make this money,’ ” Walter said. His colleagues failed to acknowledge, he added, that “whatever money they made, most of it was generated in the United States.” And it was largely, Walter thought, because of his sales acumen. “Karl was very sure the Glock organization would not work in the United States without him,” Riedl said.
Richard Feldman saw more at issue than money, however. Ego, too, was a factor. The industry operative met Gaston Glock for the first time at the 1992 SHOT Show, held in New Orleans. For the third year running, the Glock booth was mobbed. “Everybody treated Gaston like a celebrity, and he enjoyed being treated that way,” Feldman said. He picked up chatter from within the company about Walter’s compensation. Feldman also noticed that when the Austrian company received industry awards at the show, it was Walter who went up to the stage to accept them. To Feldman, that was a big mistake. Studying Glock’s body language, Feldman could see that Gaston seemed annoyed not to be the one in the spotlight. “Rule number one,” said Feldman, “is you always let the guy who pays the bills take all the credit.”
In late 1992, during a visit to the Smyrna facility, Glock proposed changing Walter’s contract to cut drastically his percentage commission. The owner had no intention of making Walter a millionaire.
Taken aback, Walter refused. He and his wife, Pam, had lived and breathed Glock pistols for seven years. Was this to be his reward for all the sacrifice—to be cheated by the man he had made rich?
Glock remained unmoved. “He gave me an ultimatum,” Walter said: “ ‘Accept it, or …’ I took the ‘or.’ ” Without hesitation, Glock fired Walter, the man widely credited with establishing the company in America.
“I didn’t believe he did it,” Walter said, “because not only did I put a huge effort into it; I picked some of the best people that I could find in the industry to make it happen.”
Walter continued to work in the US gun industry as an executive and consultant, but he never regained the prominence he had at Glock.
Over the next eleven years, Gaston Glock would run through seven US sales managers. Distinguishing oneself within the company became a career-killer, and longtime employees learned to keep their heads down. Wolfgang Riedl realized that his own goal of one day directing the European branch of the company was futile. Herr Glock intended to pass control to his children. Before he could be fired, Riedl left the company for another industry job, eventually becoming a successful independent military arms broker with government clients in Asia.
As a fuming Karl Walter departed, another Glock lieutenant was ascending within the company. Charles Marie Joseph Ewert met Gaston Glock in 1985, when the Austrian traveled to Luxembourg to set up a holding company, also known as a shell company, as the partial owner of his manufacturing operation. Luxembourg does not tax holding companies on income or capital gains, making the tiny principality a popular haven for this sort of arrangement. As far as Luxembourg is concerned, shell companies are a legitimate means of sheltering business revenue (or a personal fortune) from taxation. But from the perspective of other jurisdictions, such as the United States, routing revenue generated elsewhere through a Luxembourg shell corporation may constitute fraudulent tax evasion.
Charles Ewert earned his living operating along this murky line. He served as a financial adviser to wealthy individuals and had worked for the Luxembourg stock exchange. Glock told Ewert that he was seeking to expand his firearm corporation while minimizing its tax liability.
“I am your man,” Ewert said.
Asked in 1995 during a legal deposition about his relationship with Ewert, Glock explained defensively: “I was not a salesman. I am a technician. I had no experience, no English, so I had to find a partner that helps me to sell the pistol.”
Ewert was not really a salesman or a conventional business partner. Rakish and multilingual, he had connections all over the world. He acquired the sobriquet “Panama Charly” in recognition of his activity in Latin America. He was a financial fixer. At Glock’s request, Ewert set up a web of paper corporations intended to insulate the gun business from government taxing authorities in the United States and Austria, and from American product-liability lawyers who thought about suing a profitable firearm manufacturer. With Ewert’s assistance, Gaston Glock purchased a Panamanian shell called Reofin International. Reofin, in turn, bought Unipatent Holding, a Luxembourg entity that Ewert owned. Unipatent received a 50 percent stake in Glock’s unit in the United States, where the company generated the vast majority of its revenue. Half the wealth from American gun sales ended up flowing to Glock’s putative co-owner, Unipatent, which, in fact, Glock controlled via the paper company in Panama. The complexity, though seemingly gratuitous, made following Glock’s money more difficult.
Ewert also formed shells for Glock in Ireland, Liberia, and Curaçao. These corporate entities issued bills for various “services” to Glock headquarters in Austria and to operating units that were established in Latin America and Hong Kong. One effect of the various arms of Glock owning and billing one another was to decrease the profits that had to be reported in Austria and the United States, which are relatively high-tax jurisdictions. Many companies seek to lessen their tax bills in a similar fashion. Tax attorneys at the most prestigious law firms in Manhattan devote their working lives to corporate tax minimization. Whether all of this is accomplished within the letter and spirit of the relevant laws is sometimes a close question.
Vociferously proud of his pistol and its commercial success, Gaston Glock was shy about publicly discussing the maze of shell companies constructed by Ewert. During the 1990s, he was asked repeatedly in the course of civil lawsuits in the United States about the convoluted ownership structure of his companies. He gave answers that, at best, seem uninformative. On various occasions, he testified that he did not own—or did not know who owned—Unipatent, the shell that theoretically controlled fully half of Glock, Inc. In one case, an injury-liability suit called Shultz v. Glock , filed in state court in New Jersey, Gaston Glock was asked in a deposition, “Do you know who owns Glock, Inc.?”
“Glock, Inc., is owned by Glock Austria and Unipatent,” he responded.
“Do you know who the principals of Unipatent are, who owns the company?”
“I don’t know,” Glock said.
“Do you have any ownership interest in that entity?”
“No.”
In fact, Reofin International owned Unipatent, and Gaston Glock owned Reofin. Glock either suffered from acute and conveniently timed memory loss, or he did not want to share this information with a plaintiffs’ lawyer who might have cause to track down Glock assets. (Since the company rarely suffered a courtroom defeat, the issue was largely academic.)
But Glock did not conceal his relationship with Panama Charly from employees. Executives in Smyrna sometimes addressed corporate correspondence to Ewert as a “director” or “managing director” of Glock GmbH, the Austrian parent company. Ewert occasionally visited the United States to meet with Gaston Glock. At the Smyrna offices, workers referred sneeringly to Ewert behind his back as “the Duke,” because of his aristocratic affectations.
Florian Deltgen, who worked briefly for Glock, Inc., as a sales manager in the late 1990s, was well aware of Ewert’s reputation. An experienced gun industry executive, Deltgen was born in Luxembourg. His father, decades earlier, had retained Ewert as a consultant but soon fired him. “My father realized this man was cheating him,” Deltgen told me. “Everyone in Luxembourg knew Charles Ewert as a thief.” Deltgen, who left Glock, Inc., after a falling-out with Gaston Glock, professed to know nothing firsthand about the Glock-Ewert relationship. He did know this: “If you deal with thieves, they may turn on you.”
As Glock continued to ascend in the American gun industry, the company’s rituals grew more elaborate. Sharon Dillon of the Gold Club was eclipsed by the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders. For a couple of years in the mid-1990s, the National Football League’s premier sideline sex symbols performed at the Glock SHOT Show party in midriff-baring tops and supershort white hot pants. Invitation-only guests watched the entertainment as they ate thick steaks or two-pound lobsters. The gun industry had not previously witnessed such razzle-dazzle. Chipper and athletic, the Cowgirls brought the crowd to its feet as they high-kicked and shimmied through a floor show backed by loud pop music.
“Gaston Glock was the king of that world,” Robert Ricker, a former NRA lawyer and industry lobbyist, said in an interview before his death from cancer. “The girls, the guns, the money and liquor—and at the center of it all was this Austrian engineer none of us really knew very well.”
In later years, the Glock party took a turn from American heartland-kitsch toward Turkish exotica. Glock imported an Austrian belly dancer as the main attraction at the SHOT Show. The dancer had impressed Glock when he saw her entertain in Vienna. During each of her visits in the late 1990s, she practiced for several days in the basement gym of the Glock residence in the Vinings, which was equipped with a dance bar and wall-length mirror, according to Bereczky.
The Middle Eastern–style diversion drew lusty cheers from the gun crowd. “You’ve got the Turkish harem music, and the spotlight on this belly dancer,” recalled Ricker. “A lot of people didn’t know whether it was a joke, or what. But, hey, it was the Glock party, so you went with it.”
Ricker for a time worked with Richard Feldman at the ASSC, which was eager to ingratiate itself with Gaston Glock. With Jannuzzo’s encouragement, the company agreed to give the trade group $1 for each gun shipped from Smyrna. The annual Glock donation grew to more than $120,000 a year—the largest contribution the ASSC received from any single company, according to Feldman.
Feldman sometimes accompanied Mr. Glock on outings to the Gold Club, where the usually taciturn Austrian was able to unwind. Some of the dancers knew the free-spending magnate by sight, and on a couple of occasions they brought him up on stage for a round of applause. One evening, Glock received a varsity-style Gold Club jacket, which the dancers autographed. On another visit, to celebrate Glock’s birthday, the erotic entertainers invited the gun maker to the stage and then playfully stripped him down to his boxer shorts, dark dress socks, and black shoes, according to Jannuzzo. Far from resisting, Glock helped remove his shirt and slacks, grinning broadly the whole time. He had come a long way from running his radiator factory in suburban Vienna.
In Austria, the date of Glock’s birth is known to his employees and admirers as “Glockmas.” Celebrants mark the event with the presentation of ice sculptures and toasts of praise. Champagne and wooden casks of wine accompany a spread of Wiener schnitzel, sausage wrapped in flaky pastry, and other traditional Austrian fare. And Glock thanks attendees in the style of a country baron blessing his peasants.
Glock spent an increasing amount of his time in Velden in the southern state of Carinthia. A favorite spot for the bourgeoisie of Austria and Germany, the resort featured water sports, pricey jewelry stores, restaurants, and boutique hotels. Here the once-shy engineer carried himself like the mogul he had become: imperious, proud, demanding of respect. “A person changes when they make a lot of money, and they go to America and see they are famous there,” observed Wolfgang Riedl, the former Glock executive. “Suddenly, everyone wants to know what they can do for Mr. Glock. He thinks he is important. In a way, he is.”
Glock became a more expansive host. He no longer left guests without so much as a glass of water while he ate lunch alone. He held court at sumptuous dinners and took his senior employees for rides on his boat across the Wöthersee, a large and scenic lake down the hill from his villa. Sometimes the destination was the village’s main lakeside casino. Upon the entrance of Glock and his entourage, the casino manager would signal to the conductor of the house jazz band, and the musicians halted whatever they were playing. After a moment’s pause, the band would swing into a brassy rendition of Frank Sinatra’s “My Way.”
“This was the Glock theme: ‘I did it my way,’ ” explained Florian Deltgen. Gaston Glock sat at his reserved table, and one by one, members of the serving staff came by to pay homage.
Glock’s three adult children remained in his close orbit but fit awkwardly into his social and business life. The patriarch cast a long and intimidating shadow. Gaston Jr. worked as an engineer for the family company, without enjoying significant executive responsibilities. Introspective and unassuming, the middle child rarely asserted himself. Brigitte, the eldest, had a more outgoing personality, but her father restricted her to low-level administrative tasks within the company. She joked bitterly that he treated her as a personal slave. For a time, she was married to a Glock marketing executive.
Robert, the younger son, had a confident swagger. He wore his jet-black hair slicked back and favored tailored leather jackets. His father dispatched Robert as a front man to trade shows and for a while set him up as the company’s top representative in the United States. But eventually Robert was called back to Austria. He never had much real authority in the company. American executives with Glock either laughed at him behind his back or expressed sympathy for the patronizing way his father treated him.
Deltgen recalled that Robert was a reckless driver whose fender benders kept local mechanics busy repairing his sports cars. With a gun, he could be even more of a menace. “On a visit to Deutsch-Wagram, I was with someone else from the US, and Robert was going to demonstrate the latest modifications on the Glock pistol,” Deltgen said. “Suddenly the gun goes off, and we’re ducking for our lives.”
A former Socialist Party loyalist, Gaston Glock mixed with the politically powerful of Carinthia, a stronghold of Austria’s right-wing Freedom Party. The region was known for its residents’ animus toward immigrants and for pockets of nostalgia for the Third Reich. The Freedom Party’s charismatic leader, Jörg Haider, who served for many years as the governor of Carinthia, was notorious internationally for making a series of provocative pro-Nazi statements in the 1990s. He praised elite SS troops as “men of character,” and he hailed the wisdom of Hitler’s “orderly employment policy.”
During one visit to Austria, Paul Jannuzzo recalled, Glock told him they would “take a beer” before dinner and meet some local friends. At the restaurant where Glock took him, “there was a bit of an unidentified buzz in the air,” Jannuzzo said, “and it reached its crescendo when the star arrived”: Jörg Haider. The politician shook hands and exchanged pleasantries with Glock and the others.
“It was the Beer Hall Putsch Redux,” Jannuzzo said ruefully. Uncomfortable mixing with the Haider crowd, the American lawyer decided to step outside—“in case the Israelis decided to use this occasion to take out Haider and his group with a cruise missile.”
Over the years, Glock vehemently denied Austrian media reports linking him to the Freedom Party. But several employees were aware of his friendliness with Haider.
By the late 1990s, the gun business had made Gaston Glock a billionaire. Estimating the size of his fortune was (and is) difficult, because most of it remains tied up in his privately held corporation. The shares of Glock GmbH do not trade on an exchange and therefore do not have a price. Valued conservatively, the company and its offshoots are probably worth $500 million, according to executives and investors familiar with the gun industry. Glock has invested in real estate in Atlanta and southern Austria worth tens of millions of dollars more. He has two corporate jets worth eight figures and a helicopter that ferries him around Austria (probably worth another $3 million or $4 million). He owns expensive show horses. It is impossible to say how much cash he has stashed away.
For all his wealth, though, Glock has spent his money awkwardly, in fits and starts. He has never seemed entirely comfortable living large. His ostentation has been tentative.
When his senior American employees traveled to Velden for consultations, Glock often had them stay at his villa, an enormous structure decorated in pink-and-white Italian marble, glittering crystal chandeliers, and heavy brocade curtains. The home cost millions to build, but guests wiped their shoes on tacky black-and-silver Glock-branded doormats. Inside the front door were withered houseplants turning shades of yellow and brown. The parlors were filled with expensive white couches and divans, but some were wrapped in transparent plastic, presumably to prevent stains. A garish fake leopard skin was draped across one living room sofa. Guest room beds were made up with slippery silk sheets the color of Pepto-Bismol. Glock did not obsess about thread count.
The master of the mansion spent much of his time in a windowless basement room, according to visitors. From this underground bunker, he could control the villa’s security cameras and alarms, as well as the air-conditioning and elevator. He could even set the temperature of the heated tile floors in the many bathrooms upstairs. “He was down there alone for hours,” Jannuzzo said.
Glock employed a cleaning staff and a computer technician but no other household servants. He drove his own BMW and never graduated from the $80,000 car to a Rolls-Royce or a Bentley. He frequented pricey restaurants, but typically those popular with tourists, rather than the most exclusive establishments. He insisted on caviar for the whole table and plentiful bottles of Gray Goose vodka, yet he demonstrated unease ordering from an elaborate wine list. One of his favorite spots was Essigbratlein, a dining establishment in Nuremberg, Germany, where Glock traveled for business. Originally a sixteenth-century meeting place for wine merchants, the tiny restaurant is famous for its roast loin of beef. But it is hardly extravagant by the standards of corporate titans or movie stars. A six-course dinner of Franconian cuisine can be had for $120.
When visiting Austria, Glock employees ate all their meals with their hosts. Mr. Glock dominated the conversation, often holding forth on physical fitness and human longevity. On occasion, he discussed his intention to live to the age of 120. The key to his biblical durability, he said, was a substance called megamine, which he consumed daily. Just what he was ingesting is not clear. There are various dietary supplements of dubious value that are marketed under names similar to megamine. A company called NaturalMost sells Megamino Amino Acid Complex “for the satisfactory maintenance of physiological functions.” Glock described megamine as a derivative of volcanic ash, which when ground finely and taken orally, could enter human cells and purge them of impurities.
Business meetings with Mr. Glock in his large office in the villa at Velden lasted hours at a time. Typically, executives presented him with a decision—whether to move ahead with a hiring, firing, or scheduling of a promotional event—followed by extended periods of silent rumination. Glock stared out his window at the broad lawn and tall trees surrounding the villa. “One hundred words per hour is probably a high estimate,” Jannuzzo said, speaking of Glock’s verbal contributions. Another Glock in-house lawyer, Peter Manown, occupied himself by surreptitiously conjugating verbs in German, scribbling on a pad as if he were taking notes about company matters.
Visiting executives were at the Glocks’ command twenty-four hours a day. Jannuzzo recalled an autumn Sunday morning in Velden: “At about six thirty a.m., there was a knock at my door, and it was Mrs. Glock: ‘Time for swim.’ ” The villa had a heated indoor pool, but this day’s exercise would commence outdoors in the Wöthersee. Wearing a bathrobe, Gaston Glock led the way down to the dock. He signaled for the others to enter the frigid water first, which they did. Upon surfacing and looking back up at the dock, Jannuzzo saw his employer disrobing. “All you could see from the rear was a long skinny body, some semblance of ass, and a ball sack.” While Mrs. Glock and the executive were clothed conventionally in swimsuits, Glock himself took his constitutional au naturel.