NRA lobbyist, arms dealer played key role in growth of civilian market for military-style guns
Tom Hamburger and Sari Horwitz, Washington Post, Saturday, May 4
Rene Carlos Vos, an arms dealer in Alexandria, began hanging around the Washington headquarters of the National Rifle Association in the mid-1980s. The NRA’s staff was intrigued to see the garrulous, back-slapping Vos in the group’s seventh-floor suite, home to its lobbying operation and the chief congressional lobbyist, Wayne LaPierre.
Vos and LaPierre struck those who saw them huddle together as an odd couple. Vos took to cowboy boots and neatly pressed western wear.
“He came off like something of a dandy and a hustler, glad-
handing with everybody,” recalled Johnny Aquilino, a former NRA communications director.
LaPierre, by contrast, was remote and quiet, a hand-wringer with an obsessive interest in the intricacies of the legislative process who wore wrinkled suits and carried sheaves of paper — the congressional record, vote counts, handwritten notes — around the organization’s 16th Street NW headquarters.
But the two men struck up a partnership. Vos would be temporarily hired as a lobbyist for the NRA, helping LaPierre press the gun lobby’s agenda on Capitol Hill. And when Vos formed the company Blue Sky Productions, which would become involved in importing tens of millions of dollars of military rifles, LaPierre signed on as his partner, state and federal records show.
Together, the two friends would play an instrumental role in the early growth of America’s civilian market for military-style weapons.
The legislative changes that LaPierre supported as the NRA’s chief lobbyist in the mid-1980s opened the door to the import of military-surplus weapons, which effectively had been banned for two decades. The legislation helped make a new, more powerful class of firearms more readily available to civilian gun owners and begin to shift the profile of American gun ownership.
The arms deal put together by Vos’s company — a $58 million venture to import 50-year-old American-made M-1 rifles from South Korea back to the United States — proved so lucrative that other gun merchants immediately tried to follow their lead. Other importers would seek to bring in more military weapons, not just American but also foreign-made arms such as Russian Kalashnikovs and Israeli Uzis, and new business associations sprang up to represent their interests in Washington.
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In June 1986, Vos traveled to South Korea to negotiate a contract to import the M-1 rifles. Murphy, Whitner and others in Washington monitored the effort from afar, Murphy said, and they grew concerned when they received reports from Seoul that Vos was changing the agreed terms of the deal to further benefit himself.
Two months later, a deal with the Koreans was signed and the first shipment of weapons was sent from Seoul, bound for Vos’s gun store in Alexandria, according to federal records.
But before they arrived, U.S. Customs officials seized the shipment of 40,000 rifles at the port of San Francisco. Federal records show that an anonymous tipster had reported that the weapons had been acquired through bribery and that the import records were inaccurate.
Customs officials found no evidence to support the bribery accusation. But they concluded that, even if the weapons were “curios and relics” under terms of the 1984 Dole amendment, their shipment to the United States would violate another law, the Arms Export Control Act of 1976, which prohibited the import of weapons provided to a foreign country under a U.S. military aid program. A deputy ATF counsel in Washington, Jack Patterson, sided with customs officials and revoked the Blue Sky import permit. The weapons were seized.
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