For N.R.A.’s LaPierre, a Legacy of Guns and Money

 

For N.R.A.’s LaPierre, a Legacy of Guns and Money

 

Wayne LaPierre led the National Rifle Association for more than three decades. A civil court jury’s verdict on Friday underscored the extent to which he had enriched himself at the expense of the organization’s members.

 

Danny Hakim

By Danny Hakim

Feb. 24, 2024

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/24/nyregion/wayne-lapierre-nra.html

 

Wayne LaPierre, who led the National Rifle Association for more than three decades, had long been the face of the American gun rights movement, a Beltway Clint Eastwood who insisted that “the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is with a good guy with a gun.”

 

But on Friday, a civil court jury found Mr. LaPierre, 74, liable for misspending $5.4 million of the organization’s money, after a six-week corruption trial brought by Letitia James, the attorney general of New York.

 

The trial, and the years of revelations leading up to it, underscored that the N.R.A. had become as much about money as about guns during his tenure.

 

Inside the N.R.A., Mr. LaPierre was never seen as a gun enthusiast. In person, he comes across as a loquacious and absent-minded professor.

 

“This identity that I end up getting, it just kind of happened,” he said in a 2019 interview with The New York Times Magazine. He described himself as the group’s almost accidental chief executive who decided to start appearing on a safari television show choreographed by the N.R.A. because “one of the raps on me is I wasn’t going hunting enough” and the safaris would “show me out there walking the walk, talking the talk.”

 

But the image wore thin. Ackerman McQueen, the public relations firm that spent years building his implacable persona, reversed course after the N.R.A. sued the company in 2019, accusing it of refusing to comply with a request to justify its billings. Amid that bitter falling-out, Ackerman declared that Mr. LaPierre “knows little about guns or how to actually use them.” (The two sides eventually reached a confidential settlement.)

 

The New Yorker also published a video that showed Mr. LaPierre failing to hit an elephant at point-blank range in outtakes from one of his TV safaris, demonstrating that the nation’s foremost gun advocate could barely shoot.

 

In the end, Mr. LaPierre, who resigned on the eve of the trial, was a lobbyist who was hired to do a job. He was paid handsomely for it, with annual compensation that rose from less than $200,000 a year when he started in the mid-1990s to more than $2.2 million by 2018. His career demonstrated how lucrative a nonprofit organization could be, particularly one that stoked culture-war outrage.

 

Prosecutors contended that he built a kingdom of corruption around him to further amplify his wealth. He racked up charges of more than $270,000 for clothing from a Zegna boutique in Beverly Hills and also billed the N.R.A. for lavish travel, including vacations in the Bahamas and Europe on superyachts owned by one of the organization’s top contractors. And there was prodigious spending on charter flights, some solely for his relatives. The N.R.A. sometimes paid a stylist, who has worked on Hallmark movies, more than $10,000 a session for hair and makeup for Mr. LaPierre’s wife, Susan LaPierre.

 

He surrounded himself with pliable staff members. His close personal aide, Millie Hallow, had once pleaded guilty to a felony related to the theft of money from an arts agency she ran in Washington. Once at the N.R.A., she was kept on after being caught diverting $40,000 in N.R.A. funds for her son’s wedding and other personal expenses.

 

Mr. LaPierre installed a general counsel with scant experience, John Frazer, whom he once said he wouldn’t use “for my parking tickets,” according to a former aide. Even though Mr. Frazer was ostensibly the N.R.A.’s top lawyer, he was not informed in advance of the N.R.A.’s 2021 bankruptcy filing in Texas, a failed stratagem to forestall the case in New York, where the N.R.A. was registered as a nonprofit in 1871. (On Friday, the jury voted against removing Mr. Frazer, one of the defendants, but found that he had signed off on misleading tax filings.)

 

In recent years, it all started coming apart. The N.R.A. was hobbled by the corruption allegations and prominent insiders, who themselves were reaping lucrative benefits, turned on Mr. LaPierre as the scandal surfaced. Membership plummeted to 4.2 million from nearly six million around five years ago, and revenue is down 44 percent since 2016, according to internal audits.

 

Still, as a lobbyist, Mr. LaPierre could claim a significant measure of success. Politically, he transformed the N.R.A. into a Republican kingmaker, to the point that federal gun control has become largely a nonstarter, despite a numbing parade of mass shootings. Even the 2012 massacre of 20 first graders and six educators at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut did not bring significant policy changes in Washington. If the N.R.A. was once known for advocating for responsible gun ownership and training, Mr. LaPierre yielded to hard-line activists and successfully backed laws requiring no permit or training to carry a gun in public, now the norm in more than half of the states.

 

 

Guns are omnipresent in the United States, which has the most guns in the world, both in raw numbers and when adjusted per person. Mr. LaPierre frequently depicted gun violence as a problem of urban centers run by Democrats, like Chicago. But according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the states with the highest rates of firearms mortality are Mississippi and Louisiana, states that are also among those with the highest rates of gun ownership, according to a study by Rand, a nonpartisan research group. By contrast, states in the Northeast like New York and New Jersey, with lower rates of gun ownership and tougher gun control, have markedly lower gun death rates.

 

In addition to the ruling against Mr. LaPierre, Wilson Phillips, a former finance chief, was found liable for $2 million. (Their lawyers have not said whether they might appeal.)

 

The N.R.A. itself characterized the ruling on Friday night as vindication. The organization was on trial as a separate defendant and has said it has undertaken its own reform effort.

 

“The verdict confirms what the N.R.A. has contended all along — that it was victimized by certain former vendors and ‘insiders,’” Charles Cotton, the N.R.A. president, wrote in a note to other board members. Ironically, the money to be paid by Mr. LaPierre and Mr. Phillips will be returned to the N.R.A. itself. But the organization has been sapped by tens of millions of dollars in annual legal fees, much of it because of this case.

 

Now that the jury’s work is done, a second phase begins that could be more decisive for the N.R.A. itself, since State Supreme Court Justice Joel M. Cohen will decide on a number of additional penalties, including whether to appoint an independent monitor to oversee the organization and whether to bar the defendants from association with nonprofit groups that do business in New York.

 

Whether the N.R.A. recovers remains to be seen. Mr. LaPierre’s longtime allies are running the organization, and other gun groups have gained ground while it has struggled. In the end, even the organization Mr. LaPierre once dominated ultimately pivoted away from him. On the stand, under aggressive questioning from the association’s lead trial lawyer, Sarah B. Rogers, Mr. LaPierre conceded last month that much of his spending was improper and lacked board approval.

 

“That was wrong, and it shouldn’t have happened?” Ms. Rogers asked Mr. LaPierre, again and again, about his wife’s hairstylist, the charter flights, the limousines.

 

“Yes,” Mr. LaPierre responded. “Yes.”

 

Danny Hakim is an investigative reporter. He has been a European economics correspondent and bureau chief in Albany and Detroit. He was also a lead reporter on the team awarded the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News. More about Danny Hakim