This anonymous piece from a longtime lawyer and NRA watcher covers some of the same ground as my previous NRA pieces, but with a lot more background.
It’s been an open secret for more than 20 years (since at least the 1990s) that an outside public relations firm, Ackerman McQueen Inc. (around NRA headquarters, commonly called “Ack-Mac”) enjoyed a favored and protected, if not inviolate, relationship with NRA. The owners of Ack-Mac were close friends and associates of NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre. He handed them major roles formulating, directing and performing many NRA operations for which Ack-Mac and its associated companies bill NRA millions of dollars annually — in 2017 alone, over $40 million. To ensure their position by enhancing his, Ack-Mac created a persona for LaPierre as NRA’s public face; his strident, increasingly right-wing rhetoric espoused in NRA’s name was shaped and scripted by Ack-Mac. In turn he fended off sporadic calls to reduce Ack-Mac’s penetration of NRA. LaPierre and Ack-Mac became practically indistinguishable.
This special relationship and its financial intertwining were largely opaque, fully appreciated only within inner circles of the 76-member Board of Directors. Though payments to Ack-Mac accounted for a large chunk of NRA’s budget until recently Ack-Mac was unmentioned in annual reports or minutes of the Board’s meetings, it was as if Ack-Mac didn’t exist. The full extent of Ack-Mac’s influence, participation, and responsibility for NRA’s high-level management decisions remains, to this day, obscure.
I knew Ack-Mac had been working for the NRA for quite a while, but I didn’t realize for how long, and how mention of Ack-Mac had been kept out of annual reports.
As Executive VP, LaPierre’s annual salary is $1.4 million. It’s hard to identify the value a non-profit association receives for that kind of money. The President of the United States is paid less than one-third of that; the Secretary of Defense gets only $210,700, and the base salary of a U.S. Senator is $172,000.
Also still on the NRA’s payroll is Joshua Powell, recently removed as director of General Operations (drawing nearly $800K) after being exposed in national media as a serial deadbeat. The most cursory vetting before he was hired would have disclosed his trail of failed businesses and bad debts. The architect of the crashed Carry Guard program and the spark that lit the legal fuse with New York sate, Powell is now a “senior strategist” and still LaPierre’s “chief of staff.”
More information gleaned from the NRA’s IRS Form 990:
This 100-page document, released by NRA only last November, was unusual; it contains unprecedented disclosures of where the money categorized as expenditures for “fund-raising” and “public relations” actually went. For example, it was revealed for the first time the Mercury Group, an Ack-Mac subsidiary run by LaPierre’s closest confidant, Tony Makris, received $5.8 million from NRA in that year; another Makris-run company, Under Wild Skies, got $2.6 million. Meanwhile, NRA has nearly exhausted its $25 million credit line (secured by a mortgage on its headquarters building), liquidated $2 million from an investment fund, borrowed close to $4 million from its officers’ life insurance policy and extracted about $5 million in office rent and overhead from the NRA Foundation.
This, in the same year that NRA’s 10 highest-paid executives received compensation aggregating over $8 million.
Snip.
If indeed, as [current NRA President a LaPierre backer Carolyn Meadows] claims, “the entire board is fully aware of these issues,” the issue of managerial dereliction takes on a new dimension. To claim that these controversial contracts, transactions, and expenses were “reviewed, vetted and approved” by the board is to ratify and accept liability for them.
It begs the next question: Is the Board doing anything to stop the financial hemorrhage? Does it even have a coherent plan? So far the membership has heard nothing but bland reassurances suggesting that “everything is on track”, coupled with whining about leaks to the press.
Can directors with a fiduciary duty to a non-profit membership association justify sports-star salaries, uncontrolled and unaccountable vendors and $100,000-a-day lawyers? The membership deserves credible explanations and plain answers. If these are not forthcoming, who could blame it for throwing out the entire board and starting over?
The author is particularly critical of William Brewer III’s legal briefs. “In over 50 years as a practicing attorney, I have never encountered a lawyer, or even an entire firm, whose services were worth $1.8 million in a single month — much less for ten consecutive months.”
Finally, there’s the revelation that Woody Phillips, the NRA’s just-retired Treasurer for 26 years, broadened the now-all-too-familiar profile of NRA’s salaried executives. The prior norm seemed to be enrichment through extraordinary salaries, conflicts of interest, double-dipping, sweetheart deals, and extravagant retirement schemes. Woody has added the word “embezzlement.” According to a June 19 article on The New Yorker website, his former employer asserts that before Woody came to NRA, he was caught stealing more than a million dollars by generating and paying fake invoices. Unless this story is a complete fabrication, the evidence seems incontrovertible: when he was confronted, the story discloses, Woody immediately returned $500,000 of it and started paying interest on the balance. This comes on the heels of separate reports of questionable payments made by NRA to Woody’s “significant other.” Was his earlier modus operandi revived with a slight twist?
The author ends, as I did, with a call for a forensic audit.
The more we find out about how the NRA has been run, the worse it seems. The crisis started out looking like a case of lax management, but the deeper you dig the more it looks like a case of systematic looting. The more I read about the NRA, the more convinced I am that the current leadership has to go.
(Hat tip: No lawyers – only guns and money. )