Luddly Neddite
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- Sep 14, 2011
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Glock Family Goes Down, Guns Blazing
King Lear, strippers, and show horses: Inside the $500 million lawsuit that could bring down Gaston Glock’s gun empire.
Guns, money, sex, and betrayal: Rarely do the news gods smile down on us with such charity. But Helga Glock, ex-wife to Gaston Glock Sr., the gun industry’s most successful and secretive tycoon, has given us all that and then some with a new lawsuit filed in an Atlanta federal court earlier this week.
In the complaint—filed in Georgia, where the Austrian company’s U.S. headquarters is based and most of its business conducted—Mrs. Glock’s attorney accuses the 85-year-old gun manufacturer of a racketeering scheme that spanned decades and the globe, all in an elaborate plan to steal the business that Mrs. Glock and the rest of their family had helped to build from a mom-and-pop machine shop into a company with $400 million in sales each year. An enterprise so successful—it supplies U.S. police with two-thirds of their firearms and dominates the civilian market—that Mr. Glock’s criminal dealings have cheated her out of around $500 million, the suit claims, making the case one of the largest civil suits ever under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act.
This isn’t the first time the Glocks’ legal dramas have played out in the media.
Helga Glock and her adult children are gathered in a private lounge of the elegant Hotel Palais Hansen Kempinski on a stately boulevard in central Vienna. Dressed in a tasteful gray suit and pearls, Helga, 78, has bright copper-red hair. She sits on an easy chair that’s upholstered in white leather. Her daughter, Brigitte, and two sons, Gaston Jr. and Robert, perch knee-to-knee on an adjacent couch. China cappuccino cups clutter the coffee table between us. Speaking in German via a translator, and with a lawyer listening from a seat a few feet away, they’re discussing how their lives changed in 2011. That’s when Gaston Glock Sr. cut all ties with Helga and his sons and daughter.
The four have an agenda. Helga is locked in bitter litigation against her ex-husband. She accuses him of hiding hundreds of millions of dollars of the family’s money outside Austria and cheating her out of a substantial ownership share in Glock GmbH, the company they built together. At stake, apart from an awful lot of money, is the future of one of the best-known brands in the world.
Note that, in hopes of cutting down on the whining, I've included two sources.
King Lear, strippers, and show horses: Inside the $500 million lawsuit that could bring down Gaston Glock’s gun empire.
Guns, money, sex, and betrayal: Rarely do the news gods smile down on us with such charity. But Helga Glock, ex-wife to Gaston Glock Sr., the gun industry’s most successful and secretive tycoon, has given us all that and then some with a new lawsuit filed in an Atlanta federal court earlier this week.
In the complaint—filed in Georgia, where the Austrian company’s U.S. headquarters is based and most of its business conducted—Mrs. Glock’s attorney accuses the 85-year-old gun manufacturer of a racketeering scheme that spanned decades and the globe, all in an elaborate plan to steal the business that Mrs. Glock and the rest of their family had helped to build from a mom-and-pop machine shop into a company with $400 million in sales each year. An enterprise so successful—it supplies U.S. police with two-thirds of their firearms and dominates the civilian market—that Mr. Glock’s criminal dealings have cheated her out of around $500 million, the suit claims, making the case one of the largest civil suits ever under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act.
This isn’t the first time the Glocks’ legal dramas have played out in the media.
Helga Glock and her adult children are gathered in a private lounge of the elegant Hotel Palais Hansen Kempinski on a stately boulevard in central Vienna. Dressed in a tasteful gray suit and pearls, Helga, 78, has bright copper-red hair. She sits on an easy chair that’s upholstered in white leather. Her daughter, Brigitte, and two sons, Gaston Jr. and Robert, perch knee-to-knee on an adjacent couch. China cappuccino cups clutter the coffee table between us. Speaking in German via a translator, and with a lawyer listening from a seat a few feet away, they’re discussing how their lives changed in 2011. That’s when Gaston Glock Sr. cut all ties with Helga and his sons and daughter.
The four have an agenda. Helga is locked in bitter litigation against her ex-husband. She accuses him of hiding hundreds of millions of dollars of the family’s money outside Austria and cheating her out of a substantial ownership share in Glock GmbH, the company they built together. At stake, apart from an awful lot of money, is the future of one of the best-known brands in the world.
Note that, in hopes of cutting down on the whining, I've included two sources.
