Lethal Passage_ The Story of a Gun - Erik Larson [32]
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.