![]() ![]() Navy opened a factory to build Mark 3 torpedos in 1918. 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.Ī few blocks further north, the U.S. Historically, Interarms’ presence marked a reprise role for the Alexandria waterfront as an arms depot. 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. Moreover, a Finnlines freighter loaded with Scandinavian newsprint for The Washington Post regularly sailed from Helsinki to the docks of the Robinson Terminal Co. 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. 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. The Alexandria waterfront quickly emerged as an ideal alternative. 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. 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.Ī warehouse on Staten Island that he had previously rented for smaller purchases in Central America was not an option. 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. 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.īut Interarms’ rise to become the world’s largest private arms dealer started with Cummings’ storage problem for the Scandinavian load. First, however, armies from Sweden to South Africa needed to dispose of a mountain of aging left-overs from World War II. 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. inside the Alexandria warehouses, with the company’s global headquarters just around the corner at 10 Prince Street.Ĭummings, whose career began as an arms buyer for the CIA, founded Interarms in 1953 with a clear vision. This “Arsenal on the Potomac,” as it was described in Guns magazine in 1959, filled up over 100,000 sq. ![]() 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.Īt 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. 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.Ĭummings’ 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. The answer to that problem would soon become a significant, if nearly forgotten, piece in the long history of the Alexandria waterfront. 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. ![]()
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