Little of what the urban crime rappers sang about actually involved Glocks. Rick Washburn points to Juice , a 1992 film about down-and-out inner-city black life. It starred Shakur as Bishop, a young man who sought respect and credibility—“juice”—by means of firepower. Washburn was asked to arm the movie’s street figures. He went to the NYPD and asked what guns the police were taking from young black men at crime scenes. “The rappers would have you think it was Glock this, Glock that,” Washburn said. “That’s not the truth, at least not stickup guys and drug gangs in the ghetto. They used cheap revolvers and cheap American-made pistols, like they had since the 1960s and 1970s.” Glock, fast becoming the “it” gun in Hollywood, had a tough-sounding name that rhymed easily. It had acquired cachet. But in the early 1990s, it wasn’t common yet on the streets.
Worlds away from the one Tupac Shakur inhabited, Karl Walter was stoking demand for Glock with other promotional methods. Glock, Inc., the US unit of Gaston Glock’s company, was growing rapidly, adding salaried employees and signing up independent regional sales representatives who worked on commission. Walter retained an Atlanta advertising firm called Indelible Inc. to generate stark, simply worded display ads, mostly for gun magazines. “Set your sights on the handgun of the future. It’s here.…” declared one early ad, a full-page, text-only spread in the Shotgun News . “The Glock 17 ‘Safe Action’ 9mm semi-automatic pistol,” it continued. “Unprecedented performance and reliability. Revolutionary concept and design. Unsurpassed shooting comfort and durability.”
American handgun makers offered many diverse models, in the fashion of the Detroit car companies. Gaston Glock saw that as competing with himself and resisted the temptation. The fully automatic Glock 18 was a rarity sold to SWAT units. The Glock 19, a compact nine-millimeter pistol that held fifteen rounds, was marketed to detectives for concealed carry and as a more manageable alternative for women police officers with smaller hands. But the original Glock 17 remained the company’s mainstay.
In 1988 Glock, Inc., had moved to larger quarters on Highlands Parkway in Smyrna that included firing ranges and classrooms to accommodate training programs. The expanded facility became a gathering place, almost a clubhouse, for visiting cops and federal agents. Deputy marshals transporting prisoners through Atlanta would stop by to chat or squeeze off a few rounds on the Glock range. DEA, Customs, and Border Patrol agents on their way to or from Georgia’s Federal Law Enforcement Training Center did the same. Instructors from the London Metropolitan Police and law enforcement agencies from Australia, Canada, Venezuela, and Colombia made appearances as well. The regional wholesalers that distributed Glocks and the independent sales agencies that visited retail gun shops on behalf of the company were required to send personnel to Smyrna for a four-day course on the use and maintenance of the unusual handgun.
After a businesslike curriculum that began on Monday morning, by Thursday evening the group of cops, salespeople, and Glock employees was ready to unwind. Karl Walter hosted lavish dinners in Atlanta restaurants followed by visits to the Gold Club, the city’s best-known venue for exotic dancing and allied entertainment. Thursdays became known as “Glock Night” at the Gold Club. The group from Smyrna—as many as twenty-five or thirty men—was assigned its own VIP room on the enormous strip joint’s second floor, above the main pole-dancing stage. Guests could watch the action below from a wraparound balcony or retreat to the roped-off VIP lounge for a lap dance. Loud electronic music pounded; strobe lights pulsed. Professional athletes from the NBA and NFL ambled by. In shadowy corners, cocaine could be had. Full-on sex wasn’t on the official menu, but behind closed doors, who knew what transpired?
The girls, the liquor, the brushes with celebrity—to Glock it was all part of doing business. “For a lot of guys coming in from out of town, this was the best time they were going to have all year, or maybe in their entire life,” said one former police official. “You go to Smyrna, get laid at the best strip club in town, drink champagne, you’re not going to forget the experience when it comes time to choose between Glock and Smith & Wesson.”
Walter emphasized that he never paid for anyone’s drugs or hookers. If there was illegal activity, he didn’t know about it. As far as he was concerned, there were always plenty of cops at the Gold Club whose job it was to arrest any lawbreakers.
In the late summer of 1989, Walter had another marketing brainstorm. He convened a meeting for more than fifty independent regional sales reps and their managers. As Thursday evening approached, he gave the group a special assignment for their night out at the Gold Club: “What I thought was we should pick the best-looking, the best candidate, among the three hundred girls, to promote the product at the SHOT Show.”
The Shooting, Hunting, Outdoor Trade (SHOT) Show is the US gun-and-ammunition industry’s main conference of the year, often held in Las Vegas. In January 1990, Glock planned to unveil a new model, the Glock 20, a larger pistol that fired ten-millimeter rounds. Walter’s idea was that the company should export some of the Gold Club sparkle to the SHOT Show. This wasn’t entirely out of character for the firearms convention; it wasn’t unusual for gun or ammo makers to decorate their booths with provocatively attired young ladies. Hiring a professional stripper, Walter hoped, might turn heads.
The audition that evening lasted until midnight. The Glock delegation settled on a performer in her early twenties: Sharon Dillon, a blond, full-breasted, and strikingly tall young woman. When Walter asked Dillon if she would be willing to promote Glock in Las Vegas, she agreed. Next, he asked permission of the management of the Gold Club; the club was in no position to displease one of its steadiest corporate customers.
Walter told Dillon that she would have to go through a standard Glock four-day training. “We didn’t want to send someone stupid to the show,” he said. So the buxom stripper attended a program alongside personnel from the Defense Department and several federal agencies and police departments. Dillon’s presence in the Glock classes and on the company firing range caused a significant stir, to be sure. “The guys came in and asked, ‘Who is this girl?’ ” Walter recounted. He didn’t want to tell federal agents and police SWAT specialists they were training with an erotic dancer. So he didn’t. “I can’t tell you,” Walter said. “They all thought she was with the CIA.”
“To everyone’s surprise, she was the top shooter in this class and was the only one who finished all written tests 100 percent,” Walter recalled. “She was … no dummy.”
To heighten anticipation and draw maximum attention to the new Glock 20 ten-millimeter pistol, Walter had Dillon pose for a photographer and created an enormous billboard on the highway from the Las Vegas airport to the downtown Strip, featuring her comely image. Convention attendees were greeted by Dillon’s dazzling smile and head-turning figure, with the slogan: “THE HOTTEST ‘10’ IN TOWN. See the new Glock 10mm at the Shot Show (booth 1200).”
At the show, the aisles all around the Glock booth were jammed. Retailers and wholesalers jostled to get a peek at Dillon in her tight-fitting blouse. The Gold Club star posed for pictures with attendees and signed eight-by-ten glossy photographs; by general acclamation, she helped make Glock the hit of the SHOT Show. “A lot of guys from mom-and-pop gun shops had their ears pulled by the mom,” recalled Dean Speir, a federally licensed firearm dealer from Long Island who wrote for gun periodicals. “You’re talking real excitement—sex and guns.… The Glock reps must have taken a thousand orders the first day.”