Erik Larson - Lethal Passage - The Story of a Gun

Lund declined to tell me his company’s profit or revenue, other than to say that over the previous decade revenue had doubled. The company, which employed fifteen people full-time, seemed to provide him a comfortable living. He owned a $45,000 Range-Rover free and clear and said he customarily spent up to five months of every year at a cottage Paladin owns in Britain’s Cotswolds. For the rest of the year, he lived in a house in Boulder Canyon with a skeet and rifle range off one of its several decks and a one-story indoor waterfall.

Paladin’s books have exposed the company to business trials not typically faced by small companies. Printers have refused to print its books. Magazines have declined to accept its ads. Two different banks asked Paladin to take its business elsewhere.

Even Paladin betrays a certain lawyerly squeamishness about its books. The first page of Kill Without Joy , for example, disavows any responsibility for “the use or misuse of the information herein.” Most of Paladin’s books and catalog blurbs include the caveat “For Information Purposes Only.”

But surely, I argued, Lund knew that some customers would try out the advice and instructions included in his books, particularly Kill Without Joy .

“I understand someone could conceivably misuse the information,” Lund said. “I know that. Absolutely. There’s no question in my mind about it. But I am not responsible for someone misusing information.”

“Why publish the book at all?” I asked. “Does the world really need a five-hundred-page book on how to kill?”

For the first and only time during my visit, Lund flared with anger: “If you want to pin me down on moral culpability, I cannot accept it. I cannot accept it.”

Besides, he argued, Paladin published much more than books on how to kill and bomb. He cited books on military history and self-defense, and a handbook for law-enforcement officers.

Paladin’s eclectic tastes can lead to some odd juxtapositions in its catalog. For example, Streetwork: The Way to Police Officer Safety and Survival appeared on page forty-four of one of its catalogs. According to Lund, its author was a San Diego police officer. Kill Without Joy appeared two pages earlier.

Paladin readers are not crooks, Lund said. Many customers, he argued, buy his books as a “cathartic,” a means of harmlessly working off frustrations with bosses, ex-wives, and intractable institutions by imagining acts of violence and revenge. “I think there are many, many Walter Mittys on our mailing list, people who live in a fantasy world.”

Michael Hoy, owner of Loompanics Unlimited of Port Town-send, Washington, another mail-order publisher with a taste for handbooks on violence, told me he doubted Paladin’s books or his own triggered any crimes—although he was quick to add that a “couple hundred” of his own customers were already in prison. Once a week he prepared a special catalog just for them by tearing out pages on improvised firearms and other topics that prison officials tended to frown on. He did not believe that killers needed to read such books as Kill Without Joy , which Loompanics buys from Paladin and resells. “I just don’t think that’s how serial killers operate, reading books and all.”

One Loompanics offering is Physical Interrogation Techniques by Richard Krousher. The book, according to a Loompanics catalog, “tells you the best ways to tie and bind a subject for physical interrogation, where to obtain tools and devices needed, and even how to get the guy to torture himself while you’re out for coffee.”

Hoy’s own lead-stomached staff refused to proofread it, so he took on the task alone. “It’s a pretty gruesome book,” he told me. “I was pretty sick of that stuff myself by the time I was done.” Nonetheless, by the time we spoke in December 1992 he had sold 5,500 copies.

A big fan of Lund and his company, Hoy gushed, “It’s just a joy doing business with Paladin Press.”

Paladin seems to have a good many satisfied customers. Many write fan mail to the company, applauding both its efficient service and its daring. A San Antonio customer wrote: “I’ve got to give you credit, you offer controversial, often shocking literature that is invaluable to all Americans. It’s a pity that all mail-order companies don’t follow your example.”

Here are three of the five books this particular customer ordered, along with excerpts from their catalog descriptions:

Expedient Hand Grenades, by G. Dmitrieff. “Almost anyone can now master the art of constructing an effective hand grenade. One of America’s leading ordnance designers makes it simple with easily understood instructions that describe the equipment and methods needed to make two optimum models: the fragmentation and incendiary grenades.”

Improvised Explosives: How to Make Your Own, by Seymour Lecker. “With ease, you can construct such devices as a package bomb, booby-trapped door, auto (mobile) trap, sound-detonated bomb or pressure mine, to name just a few.”

The Mini-14 Exotic Weapons System(no author listed). “Convert your Mini into a full-auto, silenced, SWAT-type weapon that is capable of field-clearing firepower. Note that this conversion process requires no machining or special tools. Once completed, it takes just five minutes to drop in the Automatic Connector (the book’s secret) or remove it as needed. It’s that simple!” [The Mini-14, made by Sturm, Ruger & Co., is a semiautomatic rifle.]

An urgent need for revenge apparently prompted a customer in Valdosta, Georgia, to write for a copy of George Hayduke’s Get Even .

“I have a lot of people that need to get screwed for a change!” this customer wrote. At the bottom, he added: “Rush please! They are way past due!”

A Wallingford, Pennsylvania, parent was less than thrilled, however: “Take our son’s name off your mailing list immediately. You should be stopped from sending your publication through the mail to minors.”

Bomb squad members are some of Paladin’s most motivated customers. Joseph Grubisic, commander of the Chicago police bomb and arson section, told me he put himself on Paladin’s mailing list and bought any new book on explosives in order to be prepared for future encounters with the fruits of the book’s instructions. As a training exercise, members of each shift build hoax bombs (without explosives) and pass them along to colleagues on other shifts, who then attempt to defuse them. Often, Grubisic said, the shifts design their bombs using Paladin books as a guide.

Investigators often find books from Paladin and its competitors in the possession of bombing suspects. “Hundreds of times,” an ATF bomb expert told me.

Although a direct connection between the books and bombs is almost always difficult to prove, ATF agents now routinely look for such books in their searches of suspects’ homes and use them to buttress their cases in court. The connection can be close. A few years ago a religious zealot tried bombing an X-rated drive-in theater in Pennsylvania by attaching fourteen explosive charges to the posts that supported the screen. Only one charge went off. The ATF lab analyzed the remaining explosives and discovered the contents matched a formula from The Poor Man’s James Bond , published by Desert Publications of El Dorado, Arkansas, but sold both by Paladin and Loompanics. The lab was even able to cite the page. When agents searched the suspect’s home, they found the book.

These “burn-and-blow” books may pose the gravest danger to their own users. Any bomb recipe is dangerous, no matter how precise. Even a change in the weather can cause a devastating change in chemical reactions needed to make such explosives as nitroglycerin. Some published recipes are flat-out wrong, particularly, experts say, in The Anarchist’s Cookbook , published by Barricade Books of Secaucus, New Jersey, and sold by Paladin. (“It’s kind of like the Physicians’ Desk Reference ” one assistant U.S. attorney told me. “Every self-respecting terrorist has to have The Anarchist’s Cookbook .”) The experts won’t say exactly where the errors lie, preferring to pick up the pieces of wannabe bombers rather than innocent civilians.