Chapter 20: Weapons Firm (Historical)

In the late 1800’s cocaine was legal in the US, it was used in a successful well-known soft drink marketed to children. (Note: this is true.) Despite the small amount of cocaine used in production (“just a pinch” said the secret recipe) they featured the “pinch” ingredient in the name of the cola. Buyers came to the Amazon and bought the ingredient which essentially grew wild.

That cola is an American success story. You might have had some this week, but before you get excited you should know they stopped using cocaine some time ago.

The Patron at the time had a large amount of the weed, was able to mobilize his people, and had access to the “river highway” so he made a great deal of money selling the product for a bonus price at the ocean ports of Manaus in Brazil and Iquitos in Peru.

But what to do with the money? Most growers used it as a down-payment to expand their farms. Then when the US government changed the law and banned the ingredient those growers got caught with debts they could not pay. But the Patron never depended on one product. Instead, when he made his first sale, he asked himself what a long-term, recession-proof investment might be. He picked a firm in Brazil that made weapons and ammo for the military forces around the world, unless peace broke out nations would always need more bullets and bombs.

When peace did break out everyone would want to rearm with new weapons and ammo. Unlike cocaine, war would never become illegal.

This munitions company specialized in customers seeking low-cost products - more bang, less bucks. Perhaps all royalties on the sales were not always paid, giving the Brazilians a profit advantage in their competition with the primary merchants of death: Germany, France and England. Plus, they could supply some unconventional nasty products, like exploding bullets, to folks who could not be bothered with international conventions.

It got to be that whenever the Patron had some extra cash, he invested in in this munitions company. He used holding companies to avoid attention, he was no Daddy Warbucks.

In the US, since the 1930’s there are strict reporting requirements for corporate ownership. There are exceptions, but essentially anyone with significant constructive ownership (5% or more) must file a report each month of their activities. These reports are available to the corporation and the public. So it is difficult to sneak up on, or sneak out of, a US corporation. If you do it is probably a crime.

At the time nations like Brazil did not have the same rigor about such things. The successive Patrons kept investing in the munition firm for a century, using a web of holding companies under the watch of their Cousins, to keep things quiet. When the not-so-legal version of cocaine trade started again there was much more cash to invest. By the 1980’s the Patron’s various holding companies owned a controlling interest in “BrazArms.” They did not take an active role in ownership, but when the “Conquistador” group of stockholders requests something the CEO is very receptive. The firm provides hard-to-get items like big bullets for my tank, AP rounds for various rifles, rounds for the Carl Gustav recoilless rifles and the 105 mm German naval guns the “Cousins” have on their two Q-ships. The most recent purchase was a bargain price on the Mark 25F mortar rounds originally ordered by a African warlord who only took delivery on a fraction of the production run. The remaining inventory was now nearing the end of its shelf life so the company was glad to sell at a steep discount.

Think of a shotgun pointed down, firing from directly above the target. The pellets, which are the size of a bullet from a large pistol, are coated with “willie-pete” a.k.a. flaming white phosphorus. The mortar shell is the shotgun, it explodes over the target on the way down, firing a cloud of flaming bullets aimed straight down on the Aztexs during their human sacrifice party.

Fire and steel wound rain down from heaven on the Aztexs during their human sacrifice. Is that ironic?

It felt rather righteous to me, and that is something I am usually unfamiliar with.

The targets in this case deserved the surprise, they were real low-life’s, unscrupulous bastards who would hand automatic weapons to drugged-out crazies for an attack on women and children in their homes at the Pablo.

A quick death was too good for them, but what else could we do? Tony agreed, it was better than divorce via open the heart surgery in public.

Tony did cancel his wife’s main life insurance, with no death certificate there would be no payout. He did not know it but there was a second policy, and Tonto was named in a third policy.