The seemingly limitless availability of guns, and their low cost in a market flooded with them, made guns into another mass-market commodity. So what could you do with them? Storage was only a temporary solution—without regular maintenance, the guns would deteriorate in government warehouses, which needed round-the-clock security. You could dispose of them, of course, but that was expensive: the cost of shipping and dumping hundreds of thousands of guns in the middle of the Baltic Sea was enough to bust the budget of a recovering country like Finland. The price of guns, in both lives and national treasure, was already beyond counting. Tens of thousands of Finns died bearing them, fighting off first Soviet invaders and later the Finns’ erstwhile allies, the Nazis. And now these guns were quite literally Finland’s, and Europe’s, trash.
This is where a young American enters the scene. Chubby, boyish, disarming, looking like a scoutmaster or Sunday school teacher, Samuel Cummings—not Uncle Sam but “Arms Dealer Sam”—arrives at the Finnish Ministry of Defense keen to make a deal. He comes bearing not just cash—though he’s got that, in his trademark crocodile briefcase—but something even better: a solution to the problem of old guns. In return for cash and new military hardware, he wants 300,000 of them, mostly Mauser bolt-action rifles. Though increasingly obsolete in an era of automatic rifles, these relics would effectively suit the needs of suburban American men looking to escape to the woods for a weekend. For the low price of less than one US dollar per rifle, Cumming is willing to take the lot of them, along with 70 million rounds of ammunition, guns and bullets manufactured not only in Finland but also in Italy, Germany, Russia, and everywhere else in Europe, before and during the Second World War. Packing and shipping included, of course. What did a war-weary country have to lose?
Sam Cummings had seen firsthand how Europeans treated the refuse from the Nazis’ continental war when he toured France and Germany as a college student in 1948. Small arms and large littered the landscape. “The tanks had that new car smell,” he later said, flashing his characteristically dark humor. “All they needed was a battery recharge to start ’em up and reconquer France.” But the secondhand market for lightly used tanks was tricky, and he opted to start more modestly. Fresh out of the George Washington University and an eighteen-month stint with the Central Intelligence Agency as a Korean War weapons analyst, he set about acquiring small arms for pennies on the dollar—“arsenal-fresh” rifles and sidearms, as he described the guns, “with Hitler’s fingerprints still on them.”