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(Howard Zinn certainly gets around.)
Last fall, a former Remington executive, who asked that his name not be
used for fear of a backlash, opened the door to his house in Huntsville
and beckoned me into his study, where we sat on either side of a
fireplace. A four-volume edition of “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”
bound in dark green leather sat on the mantle, next to Howard Zinn’s “A
People’s History of the United States” and a copy of the United States
Constitution.
I had met the executive in a bar in Huntsville, where I was looking for
a different Remington executive, one who ultimately refused an interview
because I couldn’t satisfy his condition of getting a prominent American
war journalist to send him a personal email. This one told me he would
talk if I showed up at his house the next morning with a Dunkin’ Donuts
pumpkin latte, which I now set in front of him on his Oriental rug.
He was hired, the executive explained, as the plant was coming online,
and he was tasked with wrangling together some scattered acquisitions.
The business was, according to him, “in shambles.” It seemed that the
companies Cerberus had moved to Alabama had been “bought and forgot.” He
explained that he was “a realist” about business, a game in which not
everyone gets “a shiny rose at the end,” but even so he sensed that
something had gone deeply wrong. Executives were fired at a fast clip.
Line employees came and went. Parts piled up on the factory floor. Most
worrying, Cerberus, which was trying to integrate disparate brands — the
father-son pastoralism of Remington with the urban-militia aesthetic of
AAC, for instance — seemed to him miserly when it came to marketing.
“The decisions were all about: Where can I save another dime?” he told me.
Despite all this frenzy, he was certain that Cerberus had somehow made a
great deal of money on Remington even before opening the Huntsville
factory. According to him, Cerberus had made “hundreds of millions of
dollars” almost immediately. “They pulled out all that money up front,
took as much cash as they could.”
“How?” I said.
He squinted cryptically. “They get their money.”
I realized he didn’t know. I went back and reread Remington’s public
filings. It was obvious when the debt appeared, in 2012. What wasn’t
clear was where the money went. I showed the filings to a professor of
finance. He said it looked as if Cerberus had wound up in debt to
itself. “Seems like they did something stupid,” he said. “But that can’t
be right, because they’re not stupid.”
full:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/05/01/magazine/remington-guns-jobs-huntsville.html
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