One is George A. Joulwan, who retired from the Army after serving as Supreme Allied Commander of Europe. http://www.snopes.com/politics/guns/freedom.asp.
“There’s much less competition for buying these companies,” says Steven N. Kaplan, a professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and a private equity expert. Inside, several dozen gunsmiths, working by hand, were fitting together 6,000 to 7,000 weapons a month. “That caused a lot of stir in the industry,” says Dean J. Lockwood, a weapons systems analyst at Forecast International, a market research firm.
“At 25 meters, if you are a decent shot,” Mr. Dyke says, “you can put it into a bull’s-eye that is the size of a quarter.”.
“You can see Freedom Group constantly expanding its manufacturing base,” Mr. Lockwood says.
With far less fanfare, Cerberus, through the Freedom Group, has been buying big names in guns and ammo.
Its most recent C.E.O., Theodore H. Torbeck, resigned in September 2010 and no replacement has been named. “It’s the big gorilla in the room,” he says, adding: “We don’t have to do $100 million. Whatever the reason, Cerberus, through the Freedom Group, is now a major player. What does mbs adj on a bank statement mean? Guess who controls Cerberus? CERBERUS is part of one of the signature Wall Street businesses of the past decade: private equity.
About a third of it comes from the Freedom Group, he says. By the 1870s, the brand was so popular that the company diversified into typewriters. He is evil reincarnated....Satan.s son. Richard Dyke, then the principal owner and chairman of Bushmaster, welcomed the visitors from New York. Today many gun makers have embraced military-style weapons, a major but controversial source of growth for the commercial gun market, says Tom Diaz, a senior policy analyst at the Violence Policy Center, a research group that backs gun control. Andrew Arulanandam, the N.R.A.’s director for public affairs, declined to speculate about why Mr. Kollitides lost. The chatter grew so loud that the National Rifle Association issued a statement in October denying the rumors.
In starting its buying spree in guns, it essentially had the field to itself.
Before the financial crisis of 2008, scores of well-known American companies, from Chrysler down, passed into the hands of private-equity firms. Some analysts say tactical rifles have peaked, that the market has topped out, and that small, concealable handguns are the way forward for the near future. Not long ago, Remington introduced the Remington 1911 R1, its first pistol in decades. When Cerberus embarked on its acquisition spree in guns, it essentially had the field to itself.
“We believe our scale and product breadth are unmatched within the industry,” the Freedom Group said in a filing last year with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
THE old Bushmaster factory in Windham, Me., doesn’t look like much. A blunt-spoken Korean War veteran and Republican fund-raiser, he had made a fortune himself by buying companies in trouble, including one that made poker chips. With a facade of brick and gray aluminum siding, it squats in an unassuming office park on the Roosevelt Trail. A Bushmaster Carbon 15 .223 semiautomatic is about three feet long. Mr. Soros, these people have warned, is buying American gun companies so he can dismantle the industry, Second Amendment be damned. The firm manages most of the multibillion-dollar real estate portfolio of the $13 billion Soros Fund Management, from which Grove Capital was spun off in 2006.
So large, in fact, that rumors about the Freedom Group — what it is, and who is behind it — have been circulating in the blogosphere. The George Soros controlled private equity company Cerberus Capital Management could cut off all gun and ammunition sales in the US. In recent years, many top-selling brands — including the 195-year-old Remington Arms, as well as Bushmaster Firearms and DPMS, leading makers of military-style semiautomatics — have quietly passed into the hands of a single private company. But, in an industry with few independent players left, the big question is this: What is Freedom Group’s long-term strategy?
The development would be good news for handgun makers like Colt and Smith & Wesson, but wouldn’t be much help to the Freedom Group, which focuses on long guns. In 1976, he bought a bankrupt gun maker in Bangor, Me., for $241,000, moved it to Windham and later changed its name to Bushmaster. It doesn’t have to be recocked after it’s fired: you just squeeze the trigger over and over.
Mr. Feinberg, a Princeton graduate who began his Wall Street career at Drexel Burnham Lambert, the junk bond powerhouse of Michael R. Milken fame, got into private equity in 1992. How long will the footprints on the moon last? For companies like the Freedom Group, the challenge is to expand the market. Bushmaster was among the first to sell ordinary people on weapons that look and feel like the ones carried by soldiers.
Soros wants to keep people in the dark so that he can control them. (Chrysler later had to be rescued by taxpayers). You’re not alone. He uses it as a mechanism to buy companies without the public What is George Soros interest in Cerberus Capital Management? On another rack rests a Teflon-coated Prairie Panther from DPMS Firearms, a supplier to the United States Border Patrol and security agencies in Iraq. Many private investment firms shy away from such industries to avoid scaring off big investors like pension funds. Here at Cabela’s, Mark Eliason, the vice president for sales and marketing at Windham Weaponry, a new competitor of Bushmaster that was established by Bushmaster’s founder, surveys the racks. This site uses cookies to help personalise content, tailor your experience and to keep you logged in if you register. All Rights Reserved. In the realm of consumer rifles and shotguns — long guns, in the trade — it is unrivaled in its size and reach. It is called the Freedom Group — and it is the most powerful and mysterious force in the American commercial gun industry today. In a Gallup poll conducted in October, only 43 percent of respondents said they supported stricter gun laws — an all-time low since the company first asked the question in 1990. The Freedom Group does not own the Smith & Wesson Holding Corporation or Sturm, Ruger, both publicly traded. After Bushmaster, the Freedom Group moved in on Remington, which traces its history to the days of flintlocks and today is supplying M24 sniper rifles to the government of Afghanistan and making handguns for the first time in decades.
The world is a crock pot of lies and George How can I get in touch with Denzel Washington's mother lenox? Now if you do some digging you will see that The Freedom Group is owned by a company called Cerberus Capital Management.
Some gun enthusiasts have claimed that the power behind the company is actually George Soros, the … The material on this site can not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with prior written permission of Multiply. Buyout kings like Mr. Feinberg, 51, try to acquire undervalued companies, often with borrowed money, fix them up and either take them public or sell at a profit to someone else. Cerberus brings some connections to the table. Mr. Soros isn’t behind the Freedom Group, but, ultimately, another financier is: Stephen A. Feinberg, the chief executive of Cerberus. Randy Miller, left, of Cleveland, Tenn., examined a Remington shotgun with Bob Cabral, a salesman at the Cabela's store in Scarborough, Me.
“N.R.A.
He estimates that roughly 20 percent of the long guns for sale here are made by Freedom Group companies. Mr. Feinberg has a history of investing in companies that other people may not want, but that Cerberus believes it can turn around.
Despite rumors, George Soros is not an officer of the company.
It may come as a surprise to many people, given the prominence of guns in American culture, the national conversation and politics, but the commercial firearms market in the United States is actually relatively small. Meantime, the Freedom Group, despite its place atop the industry, appears to be operating without an official chief executive of its own. It began with Bushmaster, which until recently was based here in Maine.
Unlike military counterparts like automatic M-16’s, rifles like those from Bushmaster don’t spray bullets with one trigger pull. The more the company diversifies its portfolio, analysts say, the more it has to offer to firearms distributors and leading retailers like Wal-Mart and Cabela’s. But he’s not planning to go head-to-head with the Freedom Group. has had contact with officials from Cerberus and Freedom Group for some time,” the N.R.A.
For the financiers, the rewards were often enormous.
$1,975,128,000. But, with gas-powered mechanisms, semiautomatics can fire rapid follow-up shots as fast as the trigger can be squeezed. Cerberus also does not own Winchester Repeating Arms or Browning, both part of the Herstal Group of Belgium. Neither The High Road nor any of its directors, members, managers, employees, agents, vendors, or suppliers will be liable for any direct, indirect, general, bodily injury, compensatory, special, punitive, consequential, or incidental damages including, without limitation, lost profits or revenues, costs of replacement goods, loss or damage to data arising out of the use or inability to use this forum or any services associated with this forum, or damages from the use of or reliance on the information present on this forum, even if you have been advised of the possibility of such damages. “It’s clear that the militarized stuff is the stuff that sells and is defining the industry,” Mr. Diaz says. Behind this giant is Cerberus Capital Management, the private investment company that first came to widespread attention when it acquired Chrysler in 2007.
It has sold weapons to the governments of Afghanistan, Thailand, Mexico and Malaysia, among others, and obtained new business from the United States Army, including a contract worth up to $28.2 million, to upgrade the M24 sniper weapon system. REMINGTON has been producing guns since 1816, when, according to lore, a young man named Eliphalet Remington made a flintlock rifle in his father’s forge in Ilion Gulch, in upstate New York.
Today, Mr. Feinberg presides over a private empire that rivals some of the mightiest public companies in the land. It acquired Barnes Bullets, which makes copper-jacketed bullets popular with precision shooters and police departments.
General Counsel and Managing Director, Cerberus Real Estate Capital Management Cerberus Capital Management, Sandy Hook Elementary and the Hunter.
realizing his backing. Remington, for its part, announced earlier this year that it was expanding its manufacturing capacity and hiring new employees to make Bushmasters.