Lethal Passage (10 page)

Six months later, Joseph T. Wesbecker packed himself a small arsenal, including two Cobray pistols, and marched into a Louisville, Kentucky, printing plant where he killed eight people and wounded twelve. Wesbecker never used the Cobrays, according to the Louisville homicide detective in charge of the case; he carried them in a gym bag, which he tucked under a stairway apparently because the bag interfered with his ability to handle the AK-47 he used in the shootings.

In February 1990 the Cobray came up for review by Maryland’s Handgun Roster Board, which had been created by legislation designed to restrict the sale of Saturday night specials. The S.W. Daniel handgun passed muster, but only because of the law’s strict limits on what characteristics can allow the board to ban a gun. Cornelius J. Behan, then chief of the Baltimore County police and a member of the board, found himself forced to vote for
the gun. “
It’s a terrible killing instrument that has no business meeting quality standards. But our law … doesn’t cover that weapon.”
The day before, Behan had appeared in a full-page ad in the Sunday
New York Times
paid for by Handgun Control Inc. holding the gun under a bold headline that asked, “Who Goes Hunting With a MAC-11?”
The third speaker, Elmer H. Tippet, also a board member and at the time head of the Maryland State Police, said he “echoed” Behan’s assessment. “I certainly question the legitimacy of a weapon like that for sporting or self-defense or anything else, but as the law is written I have no alternative other than to vote what the law says I must do, and that’s what I will do.” The gun joined the twelve hundred other handguns on the roster.

The list of killings involving MACs and Cobrays continued to grow; the crimes often achieved national notoriety.

At about midnight, September 27, 1990, an Iranian immigrant named Mehrdad Dashti fired into a popular bar in Berkeley, California, with a Cobray and two other weapons. He killed a university senior, then began a seven-hour standoff during which he wounded four other students. He was shot dead by a police SWAT team. California had outlawed the Cobray in 1989.

In May 1990 police in Vancouver, British Columbia, became profoundly alarmed after discovering three MAC submachine guns in six weeks. One officer predicted that soon a police officer or bystander would be injured or killed by such weapons. “They’re a recipe for disaster,” he told the
Vancouver Sun
.

His remarks were prophetic.
On October 20, 1991, a Chinese immigrant, Chin Wa Chung, humiliated by the failure of a restaurant he had opened with his partner, Sheng Cheung, went to Cheung’s Vancouver house early one morning and used a Cobray M-11/9 to kill Cheung, Cheung’s wife, their seven-year-old son, and their fourteen-month-old baby before at last killing himself.

The same month a disgruntled ex-postal worker named Joseph M. Harris walked into the Ridgewood, New Jersey, post office clad in battle fatigues, a bulletproof vest, and a black silk face mask and shot and killed two of his former colleagues. Earlier he had stabbed his former supervisor to death at her home after first killing the woman’s boyfriend with a single gunshot to the head as the man sat watching television comfortably nestled under a blanket. Harris carried two fully automatic weapons: an Uzi and a MAC-10.

The Cobray was involved in an odd lot of other incidents.
In 1991, New York City police were astonished to find that the sniper who had just barely missed hitting a clerical worker in a Bronx office building was a nine-year-old boy wielding a Cobray. Asked how he learned to operate the gun, the boy answered, “I watch a lot of TV.”
The following year, in Denver, a sixteen-year-old boy used a Cobray M-11/9 to kill a fifteen-year-old with whom he had argued a few
moments earlier. His mother, involved in a live-in relationship with a Denver police officer, had bought the boy the gun. “She’s certainly guilty of not having good sense,” a Denver police spokesman told the
Denver Post
, “but that’s not a criminal act.”

The Cobray and its MAC progenitors became icons of America’s inner-city gun culture.
A Baltimore rapper called himself MAC-10, although when his group posed fully armed for a photograph, he held a .45 semiautomatic pistol with a laser sight. He was later shot and seriously wounded. Another member of his group was arrested for allegedly ordering the murder of a teenager; a third member was shot dead at a phone booth.
At least two gangs, one each in Las Vegas and Jacksonville, Arkansas, also took the name MAC-10.
Detailed renderings of the weapon periodically turn up in gang graffiti in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. In 1992, police in Indianapolis, as a warning to the city’s officers, posted rap lyrics written by a local group:

Let me get my toys and play
Sit down mother fucker, and watch the MAC-10 spray
Better close up shop
Cause we teaching Indy how to kill a cop
.

The best evidence of the admiration accorded the killing power of these guns by would-be felons came late in 1992 when Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents in Boston videotaped a conversation between Edward Gaeta, a Massachusetts man suspected of conspiring to deal narcotics, and a DEA agent posing as a Colombian drug trafficker. Gaeta had previously arranged the sale of two MAC-10 submachine guns complete with silencers to a DEA informant and hinted that he could get more.

“
I’ll make it up like a story,” he told the agent. “Once upon a time, one week ago … I saw some MAC-10s go by with silencers on them.… That’s a nice, that’s an interesting weapon.”

“Very!” the agent said.

“With subsonic bullets. It sounds like a cat pissing.”

The dream guns “were beautiful,” Gaeta said. “You’ll go through your whole clip in, ah, one and a half seconds. Thirty-two rounds. And I’ll tell you what, I could kill thirteen people in the bathroom and you wouldn’t even know I had it.”

In Towson, Maryland, Supenski hefted the Cobray he had brought in his briefcase. “
When you look at the utility or purpose for those weapons as balanced against the potential harm they can do to society, to the police who have to protect society and to the public themselves,” Supenski said, “the risks far outweigh the benefits. If there was a gun industry with a conscience—if there was a gun industry out there that would understand that even though they have a right to make these things and put them into the commercial mainstream, it may not be the right thing to do—we wouldn’t be here talking about this issue, and gun dealers wouldn’t be selling these things legally or illegally.”

Where did the Cobray come from? How did this weapon, designed for use in close combat by commandos, paratroopers, tankers, and, yes, Latin American guerrillas on a tight budget, become a mass consumer product?

The gun’s direct lineage begins in the stormy 1960s when Gordon Ingram, an engineer with Police Ordnance Co. of Los Angeles, paid a visit to an illegal machine-gun company operated by a friend and former colleague named Juan Erquiaga Azicorbe, a former officer of the Peruvian Army who had emigrated to America. Erquiaga was struggling to fill an order for five hundred machine guns of his own design and five hundred silencers for anti-Castro exiles training in Costa Rica. During this visit, according to Thomas Nelson, an authority on the history of machine pistols (ATF technicians often consult his dictionary-size volumes), Erquiaga explained the qualities
his rebel customers demanded of a gun. According to Nelson these qualities included “small size, to facilitate concealment; sound suppression, to deter detection; and low cost.”

Ingram saw a way to improve on Erquiaga’s gun and built the first prototype, the M10, which looked very much the way the Cobray M-11/9 looks today. About this time, according to Thomas, Erquiaga hired Ingram to be his chief engineer and to help speed production of the Cuban order.

The United States had given Erquiaga’s effort tacit approval, granting him the necessary tax stamp to make machine guns despite the fact that until that point he had been making machine guns illegally and, on a previous occasion, had fled the country just ahead of a federal raid on a machine-gun factory he ran in his garage. The political winds shifted again, however, and in 1965 federal agents swept down on Erquiaga and confiscated all the weapons he had produced for the Cubans. Erquiaga, however, managed to escape to South America.

Ingram continued refining his ideas and developed several more prototypes, all having essentially the same look.
The Army bought one and tested it at the Frankford Arsenal in Philadelphia. Soon afterward, the gun caught the eye of an Atlanta soldier of fortune, Mitchell L. WerBell III, founder of the Sionics Co., which made “counterinsurgency” equipment and an efficient silencer.
WerBell, who wore a uniform of his own design and called himself an “international general,” bought a nine-millimeter prototype of Ingram’s machine gun and took it with him on a sales trip to Southeast Asia.
In 1969 Ingram left his job as an engineer for Fairchild Hiller to become chief engineer at Sionics, which was by then based in Powder Springs, Georgia, just outside Atlanta, where WerBell established a paramilitary training camp.
To best capitalize on Ingram’s designs, WerBell and Ingram decided to produce two weapons: an open-bolt fully automatic machine pistol for military markets, restricted for sale to civilians since the National Firearms Act of 1934, and an unrestricted semiautomatic version for civilian buyers—the first glimmer
of the weapon’s emergence as a mass-consumer product.

From 1969 through 1970, WerBell and Ingram took the military version of their machine pistol on the road, demonstrating it to U.S. authorities at Forts Benning, Gordon, and Belvoi and at the Quantico Marine Base. (Historian Nelson notes that military policemen at Fort Gordon even fired Ingram’s pistol on full-auto underwater in the base swimming pool.)

The gun attracted enough interest to convince a group of New York investors that it might replace the standard .45 pistol as the military sidearm of choice.
The investors, acting as Quantum Corp., renamed the company Military Armament Corp. from which the acronym MAC derives.
It was not a match made in heaven. Within a year Quantum had ousted WerBell and Ingram from their jobs as manager and chief engineer. Conflict between the investors and the founders grew; the company suffered production delays and had difficulty raising money.

About the only good news was a welcome burst of free publicity from none other than John Wayne himself, in his starring role as Lon McQ in
McQ
, a 1974 movie about a tough Seattle police detective who sets out to solve the murder of a colleague, only to discover the colleague was involved with a notorious drug ring. It was
McQ
, according to ATF officials, that put the Ingram in the public eye and made it the gun most favored by America’s drug gangs—although ironically the bad guys in the movie used only revolvers and shotguns, mere toys compared to the arsenals deployed by today’s drug cartels.

The company could not have hoped for a better advertisement. At one point big Lon McQ visits the shop of a gun dealer he knows. The screenwriter wasted little energy on subtlety in introducing the weapon.

“
Hey, Lon,” the dealer says, “what are you doing?”

McQ offers a wry grin. “Buyin’ a gun.”

“Got a minute? I got somethin’ I want to show you out back.”

McQ lumbers after him into the back room of the gun shop
where a small shooting range is conveniently equipped with a water-filled garbage can raised on two sawhorses.

“Lon,” the dealer says, “I have a little equalizer here. We’re going to try to sell it to the department.” He holds up the gun. With an unmistakable touch of reverence, he says, “The Ingram.”

“The Ingram, huh?”

“Nine millimeter,” adds a gunsmith seated nearby. For some reason the gunsmith is wearing a white lab coat, about as alien to most gun shops as an autographed photo of James Brady.

McQ hefts the gun. “Six or seven pounds?”

“Six point two five,” the gunsmith says. He screws on a silencer. “Silencer makes a good handle.”

“Lon,” the dealer says, “this can here is filled with water. Go on. Squeeze off a burst.”

“Why not?” McQ says.

McQ blasts away, filling the can full of holes as water spurts from all sides. The camera cuts to McQ’s face and an expression that comes as close to awe as John Wayne could muster.

McQ looks down at the gun. He looks back at the pail.

“How about that?” the dealer says. “Those thirty-two slugs came out in a second and a half.”

Ruggedly, slowly, McQ says, “Yeah.”

“You ever see anything like it?” the dealer asks.

McQ, who by now has quit the police force in order to work the case more efficiently, walks off with the gun without paying a penny or signing a single document. (Doing so anywhere but in a movie would constitute an immediate felony.) He uses it later to mow down a band of dope dealers and grind their car to steel mulch. Afterward, of course, he gets his badge back from a grateful department. True to the traditions of cinematic gunplay, no one asks about the gun or the corpses strewn over a Pacific beach.