As the journalist Connie Bruck recounted in her 1988 best seller, “The Predators’ Ball,” Drexel was a feral place in the early ’80s. He was born in the Bronx, N.Y., in 1960, went to Princeton, where he studied politics, then after graduation, took a job at the brokerage house Drexel Burnham Lambert. Stephen Feinberg, co-founder and chief executive of Cerberus, came of age alongside his field. The firm, Cerberus Capital Management, takes its name from the three-headed, dragon-tailed dog who, in Greek mythology, stands guard at the gates of Hades.Ī Remington assembly room in 1917. Seven years before Remington came to Huntsville, it was purchased, at a relative bargain, by a private-equity firm that controlled tens of billions of dollars from its offices in Manhattan. While the guns were still stamped with the thick-footed Remington R, the company no longer existed as a fully independent entity. “Those assault rifles,” one employee told me, “they couldn’t make them fast enough.” That year, Remington earned $191 million in gross profit on $809 million of revenue.Īt the top of the employees’ checks, the name “Remington Arms” was printed, along with the address of the company’s new facility at 1816 Remington Circle SW in Huntsville. When Remington forbade employees to speak to outsiders about their jobs or fired a person who removed a smartphone from his pocket in the vicinity of the line, the explanation was assumed to be that the company was protecting its secrets, including the pace of its production. agents looking for weapons that have gone missing. Workers in the gun industry endure a special kind of scrutiny, like metal detectors at the exits and visits to their homes from A.T.F. News from the inside was scarce, but this was more or less to be expected. “Locked and Loaded,” ran the headline in The Huntsville Times, for an article describing how the factory would ultimately create more than 1,800 jobs.ĭoors opened in spring 2015. In the display cases at Larry’s Pistol and Pawn, Huntsville’s most respected gun shop, managers made room for Remington pistols stamped with “Huntsville, AL”: It was a point of pride to carry a weapon made in-state. In early 2015, wearing a shirt and hat from Remington could even score you the best table at a restaurant. Huntsvillians take pride in their economy, and when a new company comes to town, good will cascades toward it. These companies are drawn here partly by the benefits that Trump cited, but most forcefully by the generous tax-incentive packages doled out by officials in Montgomery, the state capital, in concert with pro-business mayors. Airbus produces A320 jetliners Toyota makes engines for Rav4s and Tundras Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’s “spacefaring” company, recently broke ground on a rocket-engine plant. Since 1993, when the state gave Mercedes-Benz $253 million to build its first American auto plant in Tuscaloosa County, Alabama has refashioned itself as a kind of foundry for the rest of the country and the world, first courting automakers and then becoming an all-purpose workshop and technology hub. “Cutting taxes and simplifying regulations makes America the place to invest!” President Trump tweeted in January 2018 he was talking about Huntsville. Car companies from Japan, an electronics manufacturer from Korea and many other concerns churn out goods for the domestic market. Orbiting the Army base are military and aerospace contractors: Raytheon, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman. Southwest of downtown, in a facility that synthesized chemical weapons during World War II, the Army maintains a major research center and garrison. The unemployment rate is lower than the country’s, and educated workers are in high demand. Huntsville is a boomtown in the Southern mold. He calculated the typical annual salary as $42,500. The city’s mayor wrote in a newspaper column that he was thrilled that Remington’s quest for a new factory space had ended in Huntsville. Workers at the new plant, the company said, would earn a minimum average of $19.50 an hour assembling shotguns, pistols, hunting rifles and AR-15-style semiautomatics. Remington, the country’s oldest gun maker, had decided to expand from its historic home in upstate New York to a gigantic former Chrysler factory near the airport.
The news spread around Huntsville, Ala., in the winter of 2014.