BY STEVE TRIMBLE
Illustration by Jessie Leiber
Sam Cummings had a big problem on his hands in 1955: He was deep in the process of acquiring a lucrative load of 300,000 surplus Scandinavian military weapons, but he had no place to store all of them.
The answer to that problem would soon become a significant, if nearly forgotten, piece in the long history of the Alexandria waterfront. Cummings — a man labeled the “Merchant of Menace” in a 1970 profile by Sports Illustrated — quickly transformed a mostly-vacant section of waterfront property into the main hub of his global arms dealing operation from the mid-1950s until the end of the last century.
Cummings’ International Armament Corporation, also known as Interarms, would ship millions of surplus military arms and ammunition to and from the waterfront pier and about 10 warehouses stretched along South Union Street between Prince and Wolfe streets — a location since redeveloped into luxury condos, trendy restaurants and scenic public spaces. Weapons would come in from the surplus stocks of military armories all over the world and go out to a wide-ranging clientele, including dictators, rebels and private American sportsmen and collectors.
At the peak of its Alexandria operations in the late-1960s, Interarms had stored up possibly the largest privately-owned arsenal in history: 700,000 weapons, which Cummings estimated was enough to equip about 40 infantry divisions. This “Arsenal on the Potomac,” as it was described in Guns magazine in 1959, filled up over 100,000 sq. ft. inside the Alexandria warehouses, with the company’s global headquarters just around the corner at 10 Prince Street.
Cummings, whose career began as an arms buyer for the CIA, founded Interarms in 1953 with a clear vision. As President Eisenhower’s first term began, the United States and Soviet Union already seemed locked in a nascent Cold War and militaries around the globe were modernizing with the latest equipment. First, however, armies from Sweden to South Africa needed to dispose of a mountain of aging left-overs from World War II.
With his CIA contacts, self-taught gun expertise and a knack for garrulous self-promotion, Cummings saw a perfect opportunity to cheaply buy-out these obsolete arsenals, then sell them at higher prices in foreign lands or — thanks to famously looser restrictions on buying imported, military-grade weapons, especially before 1968 — to American citizens.
But Interarms’ rise to become the world’s largest private arms dealer started with Cummings’ storage problem for the Scandinavian load. In 1955, Cummings was just beginning a three-year process of clearing out the arsenals all around the Baltic Sea, including 150,000 weapons from Finland, 100,000 more from Denmark, 60,000-70,000 from Sweden and 25,000 from Norway, plus millions of rounds of ammunition. It was the first of what would become a string of blockbuster purchases by Interarms of surplus arms all over the world, but now Cummings needed to find storage — and lots of it.
A warehouse on Staten Island that he had previously rented for smaller purchases in Central America was not an option. The New York location was too far from his home in Georgetown to be convenient, and he didn’t like how much Staten Island’s unionized warehouses cost.
The Alexandria waterfront quickly emerged as an ideal alternative. Today’s prime real estate on the Potomac River was still an industrial wasteland in the mid-1950s, dotted by a jumble of mostly vacant warehouses that Cummings realized he could rent or buy for cheap. It helped that all of the world’s diplomatic missions, including their arms-buying military attachés, could be found in the embassies a few miles up the river from Alexandria in Washington DC.
Moreover, a Finnlines freighter loaded with Scandinavian newsprint for The Washington Post regularly sailed from Helsinki to the docks of the Robinson Terminal Co. in Alexandria, and the Finnish sailors were “only too willing to bring in arms from Europe,” according to Cummings’ biographers, Patrick Brogan and Albert Zarca, who published, “Deadly Business: Sam Cummings, Interarms and the Arms Trade,” in 1983.
Historically, Interarms’ presence marked a reprise role for the Alexandria waterfront as an arms depot. During the Revolutionary War, Robert Townshend Hooe, the town’s mayor, used a warehouse in the same location to store muskets and gunpowder, which he had acquired from the French garrison at Martinique by trading goods from Alexandria.
A few blocks further north, the U.S. Navy opened a factory to build Mark 3 torpedos in 1918. After five years, the factory (now the Torpedo Factory Art Center) was converted into a munitions storage facility until 1937, when the Navy resumed manufacturing in Alexandria for Mark 14 torpedoes through the end of World War II.
Perhaps these historic links to the arms business helped smooth the way for Interarms’ arrival on the waterfront in the decade after the Navy’s torpedo station closed in 1946. Nine years later, nothing of similar scale had replaced the plant’s 16 buildings and 5,000 jobs, creating an atmosphere of industrial decay in the historic heart of the city. If city officials had any qualms about the waterfront becoming the operational base for a privately-owned arsenal that rivaled the firepower of many European militaries, they kept it quiet.
The city’s emergency services, however, were on full alert. Although the doors to Interarms’ warehouses featured elaborate triple-locks, the intruder alarms included a wire directly to police headquarters, according to the Sports Illustrated story. The last thing city officials wanted was a police stand-off with the world’s most well-armed burglars deep in one of their most densely populated neighborhoods.
To Cummings, Interarms was just another business, creating jobs and opportunity through legitimate trade of legal goods. In frequent interviews with the likes of 60 Minutes, National Public Radio and The Washington Post, Cummings spent decades defending his role in a global arms trade dominated by governments rather than individuals, often employing his world-weary and wry sense of humor to make his point.
“The arms business is idiocy, it’s lunacy without bottom,” Cummings told Sports Illustrated, “but it will last as long as man, however long that may be. The world will never disarm. So what should I do but laugh?”
Despite the risks inherent in the arms-trading business, Cummings was careful to avoid breaking any laws. At the same time, he refused to apologize for selling weapons to any legal buyer, even if they were known as brutal dictators or in some cases the violent enemies of his other clients.
For example, Cummings sold 100 ArmaLite AR-10 rifles — the progenitor of the U.S. military’s M-16 rifle — to Cuban President Fulgencio Batista in December 1958, but the shipment did not arrive in Havana until a month later.
By then, Cuban rebel leader Fidel Castro had captured Havana — and Cummings’ cargo of AR-10 rifles. Not letting a sales opportunity pass by, Cummings pressed Castro to pay for the shipment ordered by Batista, which the Cuban leader approved. Since the U.S. trade embargo would not be imposed on Cuba until 1962, Cummings’ small arms export to Castro’s regime in 1959 was legal.
But Cummings’ bold plans sometimes forced Alexandria officials to say “no.” A notable example involved a purchase by Interarms of 50,000 hand grenades from Denmark. Cummings’ plan did not call for selling the grenades, but harvesting and repackaging them for resale for their high explosive TNT, which is useful in mining and other industries. But that idea meant Interarms needed to establish a dangerous TNT-harvesting operation on Alexandria’s waterfront. A standard grenade contains 180g of TNT. Collectively, a load of 50,000 grenades contains nearly 10 tons of TNT. For perspective, an explosion at an ammonium nitrate facility in Texas in 2013 created a force equal to 7.5-10 tons of TNT, killing 15 people in the small town and damaging more than 150 buildings.
Understandably, city officials did not share Cummings’ enthusiasm for the TNT-harvesting operation inside his waterfront warehouses. “They ordered him to clear his warehouse of high explosives,” Brogan and Zarca wrote in the 1983 book. Cummings’ attempts to find other locations or other uses for the grenades came to nothing. He finally paid the U.S. Coast Guard to collect all 50,000 hand-portable explosives, haul them out to sea and dump them overboard.
The stash of weapons on the waterfront was not limited to only small arms, which caused other problems. Among the arms sold to Interarms by Finland were 999 copies of Lahti L-39s. During World War II, the Finnish army used these 7-ft.-long, 20-mm.-caliber rifles to penetrate the armor of Soviet tanks and shoot-down Soviet fighters.
Cummings sold these to private citizens in the United States with a sinister advertising slogan, asking: “Why be under-gunned?” A group of bank robbers in Canada thought Cummings was onto something and obtained one, along with shells for $1 each. Then, the group used the powerful rifle to blow open a Brinks safe in Syracuse, New York, pocketing $415,998. “It was undeniable that the Canadian robbers’ task was facilitated because Cummings was selling cannon on the open market,” Brogan and Zarca wrote.
Interarms’ warehouses in Alexandria also played a key role in the explosion of U.S. domestic gun sales after World War II. For the U.S. market, access to guns was broadly legal, but still very expensive, costing $100-$150 apiece for new models by Winchester and Remington. By dumping hundreds of thousands of surplus foreign military rifles in the U.S. market for $20-$40 each, Cummings’ company helped define a seemingly inexhaustible demand by American sportsmen for cheap, powerful guns. Even after the 1968 Gun Control Act banned imports of most foreign military rifles and mail-order sales of rifles and shotguns, domestic suppliers stepped up to continue filling that demand.
“Cummings alone had the wit to marry European surplus and American demand,” Brogan and Zarca wrote. “He bought cheap in Europe and Latin America, and … he charged prices that domestic manufacturers could never hope to meet.”
Interarms’ business grew so quickly that Cummings decided to split the operation. Starting in the early 1960s, Richard Winter took over as manager of operations in Alexandria. Cummings decided to focus on purchasing and moved to Europe, setting up a permanent residence in Monte Carlo and a winter home in Switzerland. The 1968 law limited the arms he could send to his warehouses in Alexandria, but Interarms’ trade in surplus weapons continued through an acquired storage and refurbishment complex in Manchester, U.K. In fact, the U.S. operation expanded beyond Alexandria, with the opening of a factory in Midland, Virginia to make a copy of the 1873 Colt Peacemaker revolver.
But Interarms could not out-live its creator. The company dissolved less than two years after Cummings died in 1998 from a series of strokes at 71. Since then, the city’s redevelopment efforts have wiped away all traces of shabby warehouses that only a generation ago bristled with foreign weaponry.
If it was up to Cummings, the city might have been left with an enduring reminder of its unsung role in the global arms trade. As an enthusiastic, wealthy arms buyer, Cummings had amassed a private collection of rare and valuable weapons, including the sword carried by French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte at the Battle of Waterloo.
Cummings offered to establish a museum in Alexandria to display his private collection of 1,600 weapons, one of the largest in the world. Nothing came of the offer, however. All that remains of Cummings’ presence in Alexandria is a single artifact in the Alexandria History Museum’s War of 1812 collection at The Lyceum: A smoothbore, cast-iron cannon called a “carronade.” Cummings donated the artifact to the museum from his private collection.
