Nothing for Mahboob

Sam Cummings is a large, loquacious, twinkly man who is never very far from a joke or an ironic aside. "Human folly," he says, "guarantees the perpetuity of arms trading, the second-oldest profession in the world." Cummings, 54, is intimate with this deadly folly: he is by far the largest private arms seller in the world. Interarms Corp., which he founded 28 years ago and wholly owns today, has 250 employees in Britain, Panama, Monaco, Argentina and the U.S. Sales in a good year can top $ 100 million. On the world arms market, that sum is a trifle, as Cummings is quick to note: "Let's be honest, the only arms dealers that really matter are the governments." Yet when governments or retailers (or shadier entities) want light arms -- pistols, rifles, machine guns and the like -- they most often come to Cummings.

"Arms," he says, "have always been my hobby."

Indeed so: at age five, Sam Cummings, the son of a Philadelphia Main Line family, found an old German machine gun behind the local American Legion post and dragged it home. He rebuilt the gun and started collecting others. As a student on a term abroad at Oxford University, Cummings toured the armament-strewn battlefields of Europe, and there resolved to become a weapons dealer. Between college (George Washington University) and achieving his vocation, he spent three years working for the CIA, identifying guns captured during the Korean War.

"My first deal," Cummings told TIME'S Robert Kroon in London last week, "was with the Panamaniau government.

The chief of the national guard showed me a collection of about 7,000 old weapons straight out of the cavern of Ali Baba. He wanted Browning light machine guns, which I managed to get out of Canadian surplus stocks, and we clinched the deal." The Panamanian antiques were sold to U.S. gun collectors, and Cummings was launched as an international gun barterer. He recycled 26 Vampire jets from Sweden to the Dominican Republic, swapped field equipment for Guatemalan arms, sold 80,000 machine guns to Finland and got a cache of old collectibles in return.

He also sold "a few hundred" automatic rifles to Fidel Castro in the late 1950s: "Fidel was wild about the Armalites," Cummings recalls.

A naturalized British subject, Cummings lives with his Swiss wife Irma in Monte Carlo (twin daughters, 19, are U.S. undergraduates) and their life is not ostentatious. Unremarkable, too, Cummings claims, is his business: "Like any other trade," he says. "We don't sell anything without official British or American export licenses. I am not a gun runner." Cummings regrets the U.S. ban on arms sales to Iran ("lost business").

Says he: "We won't do anything surreptitiously.

I don't deal with Ahmed the Betrayer or Mahboob the Redbeard, unless they are documented by their governments."

Cummings maintains his deadly stock at two large but unobtrusive warehouses, in Alexandria, Va., and Manchester, England. Visiting the Manchester branch, TIME'S Kevin Dowling noted an elaborate system of files on the desk of a secretary: a folder for every country in the world, explained Cynthia Wixey, including one for Vatican City. Was there, ah, much demand from the Pope? "Mr. Cummings is very thorough," she answered. "And he's an optimist. Maybe one day they'll need new halberds for the Swiss Guards."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.