Lethal Passage_ The Story of a Gun - Erik Larson [31]
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