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The Missouri Supreme Court declines to hear Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft's appeal about the wording of an abortion ballot issue.

Someone broke into an O'Reilly Auto Parts store overnight.

One person is dead and another is in custody after an overnight murder at a south St. Louis apartment building.

For as long as Jason Moughton can remember, he wanted to open a restaurant. But it wasn't until 2019 when that dream kicked into high gear — because that's when Moughton found Dungeons & Dragons. In falling in love with the tabletop game, Moughton and his wife, Ruth Camburn, were just a bit ahead of a very big curve.

GCS Credit Union has rebranded as Revity Credit Union and opened a new location in Edwardsville.

“We are all alien,” the motto of St. Louis band Mobile Alien Research Unit (M.A.R.U.), invites listeners on a spiritual journey filled with existentialism, space rock jams and frogs. Michael Quintero, Steve Lewis and Ryan Koster began the band in 2021 to offer audiences an otherworldly music experience.

St. Louis Circuit Attorney Gabe Gore has farmed out approximately 100 post-conviction relief cases filed with his office to an unusual assistant — Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey. These cases, which in Missouri are technically civil litigation, represent a convicted person's challenge to either their conviction or sentence in a criminal case.

Missouri Gov. Mike Parson clearly doesn’t know what to do about Eric DeValkenaere, the former Kansas City police officer convicted of killing a 26-year-old Black man, Cameron Lamb. Parson, forever a county sheriff at heart, hates the thought of a cop sitting in prison and he’s under pressure from the extended brotherhood of law enforcement […]

The post A jailed ex-KC cop is a problem for Mike Parson. Blaming the prosecutor won’t solve it appeared first on Missouri Independent.

Almost one out of every 10 voters who cast ballots in Missouri’s two largest jurisdictions during recent elections lacked the identification now required at polls in the state, an expert testified Monday at a trial over the voter ID requirement. Kenneth Mayer, a political scientist from the University of Wisconsin, estimated that about 175,000 votes […]

The post Missouri voter ID trial digs into purpose, results of strict 2022 law appeared first on Missouri Independent.

Graduates of the computer coding program can start out making as much as $60,000 a year.

by James Bandler and Doris Burke

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Outside Healy Chapel on the campus of Saint Joseph’s College of Maine, the American flag swayed at half-staff. Inside, candles flickered, and the dying autumn light filtered softly through stained glass. A nursing student sobbed as a small group of mourners read aloud the names of the 18 people slaughtered with an assault-style rifle in late October at a bowling alley and a restaurant up the road in Lewiston. The college had shut down for two days as police sought the killer, whose body was found in the woods after he turned a gun on himself.

Saint Joseph’s is sponsored by the Sisters of Mercy, a 192-year-old society of nuns that has accused the firearms industry of “profiting from these killings.” Toward the end of the vigil, a graduate assistant asked the mourners to pray for political leaders.

“Give them insight, wisdom and courage,” she implored, “to address the epidemic of gun violence.”

Several months earlier on the same campus, as fog enveloped Sebago Lake and rain poured down in sheets, a larger crowd celebrated the life of a man who did as much as anyone to make assault-style rifles — like those used in Lewiston and other massacres — ubiquitous in America. After cocktails and crudites, they bid farewell to one of Maine’s own, Richard E. Dyke.

As a digital photo tribute flashed images from his life, family members, friends and former employees praised Dyke’s kindness and generosity. Beside a framed proclamation by Maine’s state Legislature declaring that Dyke would be “long remembered and sadly missed,” they recounted his rise from mill-town poverty to multimillionaire philanthropist and friend of powerful politicians.

“When he walked into a room, it became his room,” a former colleague told the packed hall. “It’s difficult to drive around Maine and not see something that Dick touched. … He touched thousands of people’s lives.”

What the heartfelt tributes to Dyke that day omitted were the human costs of the industry that allowed him to be so generous — costs that the fellow residents of his beloved home state would soon be the latest to bear.

When the public asks, “How did we get here?” after each mass shooting, the answer goes beyond National Rifle Association lobbyists and Second Amendment zealots. It lies in large measure with the strategies of firearms executives like Dyke. Long before his competitors, the mercurial showman saw the profits in a product that tapped into Americans’ primal fears, and he pulled the mundane levers of American business and politics to get what he wanted.

Dyke brought the AR-15 semi-automatic rifle, which had been considered taboo to market to civilians, into general circulation, and helped keep it there. A folksy turnaround artist who spun all manner of companies into gold, he bought a failing gun maker for $241,000 and built it over more than a quarter-century into a $76 million business producing 9,000 guns a month. Bushmaster, which operated out of a facility just 30 miles from the Lewiston massacre, was the nation’s leading seller of AR-15s for nearly a decade. It also made Dyke rich. He owned at least four homes, a $315,000 Rolls Royce and a helicopter, in which he enjoyed landing on the lawn of his alma mater, Husson University.

Although his boasts of military exploits and clandestine derring-do caused associates to roll their eyes, he was actually no gun enthusiast. As a teenager, he dreamed of becoming a professional dancer. Once, when his brother Bruce persuaded him to go deer hunting, Dyke sat in his Jeep reading The Wall Street Journal, rifle out of reach as a deer ambled safely past.

Along the way, Dyke and his team capitalized on the very incidents that horrified the nation. Sales typically went up when a mass killer used a Bushmaster. After a pair of snipers in the Washington, D.C., area murdered 10 people with a Bushmaster rifle in 2002, Dyke’s bankers noted that the shootings, while “obviously an unfortunate incident … dramatically increased awareness of the Bushmaster product and its accuracy.” A decade later, a 20-year-old wielding a Bushmaster murdered 20 children and six educators at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. Last year, a Bushmaster was used to kill 10 Black people at a market in Buffalo, New York. The murderer painted racist taunts on the rifle, including “Here’s Your Reparations!”

The arc of Dyke’s journey illustrates the often misunderstood story of “assault rifles” — a now-politicized description that Dyke, for a time, embraced. Mainstream American businesses, financiers and politicians abetted the rise of AR-15s. Banks loaned money to make them, Wall Street invested in them, video games and Hollywood movies glamorized them, and Congress shielded their manufacturers from liability for shootings.

As Dyke’s company seeded its guns into American society, paving the way for imitators, he relied on those same institutions to largely insulate him from scrutiny or retribution. He carefully cultivated political connections, including with the Bush family; William S. Cohen, a former Republican senator from Maine and U.S. secretary of defense; and Susan Collins, a Republican senator from Maine since 1997. “Dick Dyke’s influence at the senior most levels of the U.S. military and political establishment has created numerous revenue opportunities,” Bushmaster’s bankers wrote.

“Dick was a longtime friend of mine,” Collins told ProPublica in a statement. “He was a vocal advocate for small businesses in Maine and America.” Collins called Dyke to wish him well when he was diagnosed with cancer and sent her condolences to the family after he died, said her spokesperson, Annie Clark.

Today, more than 24 million AR-15s are in circulation. Because of their accuracy, light weight and low recoil, they are the most popular rifle in the U.S. But while they accounted for less than 3% of homicides in 2020, they’ve become a favored weapon of mass shooters. Both fetishized and demonized, they’ve also emerged as a potent symbol of defiance. Gun rights activists have flaunted semi-automatic rifles at counter-protests against Black Lives Matter, on social media and at rallies at state capitol buildings. In 2022, President Joe Biden called for banning AR-style weapons, saying too many schools and workplaces “have become killing fields, battlefields here in America.”

(Illustration by Clay Rodery for ProPublica)

Richard Earl Dyke was born in Wilton, Maine, in 1934, in the depths of the Great Depression and one of Maine’s coldest winters on record. His father, Earl, worked in a shoe factory and later became a police officer. His mother, Gladys, had a series of jobs, including as a burler in a woolen mill. Foreshadowing her son’s career of fixing damaged companies, she repaired imperfections in fabric.

One day, Dyke came home from school to find his mother weeping at the dinner table. Her per-piece pay had been cut while her employer raised the price of health insurance. The memory, he later told friends, shaped his generosity toward employees at Bushmaster, whom he would reward with lavish bonuses, 100% health care coverage and holiday dinners served on china.

The same year Dyke was born, the Roosevelt administration enacted the first federal gun control legislation, registering and taxing machine guns, sawed-off shotguns and silencers. The furious response, led by the NRA, to a tougher early version of the bill anticipated modern legislative battles over Second Amendment rights.

During Dyke’s boyhood, New England was the heart of the firearms industry. Its spine stretched from Winchester in New Haven, Connecticut, to Colt in Hartford to Smith & Wesson in Springfield, Massachusetts, and north to machine-gun maker Saco Lowell in Maine. Much of the industry has since moved south, but some firearms companies remain in New England, including Sturm, Ruger, which made the rifle used in the Lewiston shootings.

In Wilton, almost every young boy hunted and fished. Dyke killed his first deer when he was 11. A photo in his biography shows him proudly cradling his rifle as he stands beside a slain buck strapped to the hood of the car with its legs stretching to the sky.

But dancing and acting were Dyke’s teenage passions. In 1951, he starred in a church-sponsored production of a musical-comedy, “Crazy Daze,” according to a newspaper account at the time. “Who is it that makes everyone laugh with his jokes and crazy antics and who is always willing to do his share of the work? Why Dicky, of course!” read his yearbook blurb.

After a stint in the Army, Dyke earned a degree in accounting from Husson College (now Husson University) in Bangor. He worked for the IRS, started his own firm and began investing on the side. A self-described “bottom fisherman,” he demonstrated a knack for seeing future profit in present disasters. Tom Kent, a longtime friend and former Maine state trooper, recalled driving by a dilapidated marina with Dyke. Kent saw a bunch of rotting cabins, but Dyke smelled opportunity. He bought the marina and turned the cabins into condos, Kent said.

Over the decades, records show, Dyke bought or started scores of other businesses, sometimes owning as many as 10 at a time. There was an inn on the Caribbean island of Antigua, a candle company, a restaurant called Mr. D’s, a nursing home and an apartment building in Portland, Maine, that he named after his father, “The Earl.” He invested in a Windham, Maine, firm that made poker chips and sold them to Trump casinos.

“He was somewhat a Donald Trump. In that it was always ‘I, I, I’ with him and not ‘we, we we,’” Kent said. “If we were in a meeting and someone disagreed with him, you better not pick up that rope because you were gone.”

In the late 1970s, Dyke called Kent with a proposition. “I was just at the bankruptcy court,” Dyke told his friend. “There’s an interesting gun company there. I don’t know the first thing about guns, but you do.”

Dyke wanted to buy the company and offered Kent a stake for a $25,000 investment. That was almost every penny Kent and his wife, Joan, possessed. “Dick has always been good to us,” Joan told him. “So let’s take a chance.”

Dyke also confided his plans to his younger brother, Bruce.

“You don’t even hunt,” Bruce recalled telling him.

“Well, this guy in Bangor has this little outfit,” Dyke replied. “I think it could really do something. He doesn’t have any idea how to get (the guns) out and sell them.”

The “little outfit” made a futuristic weapon, the Bushmaster Arm Pistol, named after a Central American viper. It was designed for Air Force pilots whose planes had been downed. The automatic version could rattle off 550 rounds a minute, its founder Mack Gwinn boasted to a local reporter. An early reviewer for Guns & Ammo noted, “for civilian use, it will provide knock-down power far exceeding many heavy pistol calibers,” and it was “light enough for a woman to handle.” On the flip side, the writer warned, “Its production, I believe, will create considerable controversy and certain uneasiness by (federal) Agents! Its deadly appearance is against it in the eyes of the man on the street.”

Dyke bought the company out of bankruptcy. At his first gun show, an angry customer confronted him. “I got one of your goddamned guns and it’s no damned good,” the man barked, according to Kent. “It sure isn’t,” Dyke admitted. “But we will soon have a gun that is.”

Vincent Pestilli, a garrulous bull of a man who trained U.S. special forces members in the use of Russian-made automatic rifles, was Bushmaster’s head of sales. To improve the crudely made Bushmaster pistol, Pestilli got help from legendary firearms designer Uziel Gal, inventor of the Uzi submachine gun. He still keeps a sheet of Gal’s stationary on which Pestilli scrawled suggested improvements.

The early going was hard. Pestilli recalled getting a call from a man with a thick Spanish accent, seeking Bushmaster guns. Pestilli said he thought it was a crank call and hung up, but soon two Mexican Federales were touring the new Bushmaster factory. The problem: Bushmaster had not started production and had few workers. Pestilli frantically hired the workers’ relatives and friends to pretend to be making guns. Bushmaster didn’t get the contract.

In the 1980s, Connecticut-based Colt was the only major seller of AR-15s to civilians. Decades earlier, it had purchased patents to the design from Armalite, for which the AR was named. (The AR-15 was the 15th iteration of the rifle Armalite developed for the military.) In 1964, Colt introduced the semi-automatic civilian version, which fired a single shot with each trigger pull, marketing it as a sporting rifle.

But imported assault-style guns, like the Uzi and the AK-47 known as the Kalashnikov, were increasingly popular. With scant commercial interest in the arm pistol, Dyke focused on selling rifles and parts. Instead of investing in expensive stamping, machining and forging equipment to manufacture guns in house, he reduced costs by buying rifle uppers, lowers, barrels and stocks from other, mostly local, suppliers and having employees assemble them.

In marketing materials, the company boasted that its new solid wood stock, semi-automatic “Assault Rifles,” a hybrid of the AK-47 and Colt’s AR-15s, weighed just 6.25 pounds. Dyke even had the words “Bushmaster Assault Rifle” stamped on the guns. You could buy one in 1981 for $484.95. Eventually, Bushmaster made AR-15 clones. Years later, Dyke told a New York Times journalist he had been impressed by the AR-15’s accuracy. “At 25 meters, if you are a decent shot, you can put it into a bull’s-eye that is the size of a quarter.”

Bushmaster marketed “The Lady,” a tan AR-15, to women. (Courtesy of Vincent Pestilli)

Dyke periodically contributed to gun designs, coming up with “The Lady” Bushmaster in a tan color to match a purse style he’d seen, Pestilli said. For years, during the summer lull in firearms sales, Dyke offered dealers a free Maine lobster for every rifle they sold. “It pushed up his numbers considerably,” recalled Richard Thurston, then Bushmaster’s chief financial officer.

Two mass shootings in the 1980s put semi-automatic rifles in the spotlight. In a 77-minute spree, a California man with a 9 mm Uzi murdered 21 people and wounded more than a dozen at a McDonalds near the Mexican border. Another gunman used a Chinese-manufactured AK-style rifle to kill five schoolchildren and maim more than two dozen in Stockton, California.

In 1989, California banned 44 models of rifles and pistols it branded as assault weapons, including the Bushmaster Assault Rifle and the Bushmaster Pistol. Soon after, President George H. W. Bush stopped the importation of Uzi and AK-style weapons. Although its domestically made guns weren’t affected by the federal ban, Colt stopped selling AR-15s to civilians. It would jump in and out of the civilian market over the ensuing decades.

Dyke had no such qualms. Bushmaster sales climbed.

Five years later, President William J. Clinton was pushing for a national ban on manufacturing assault-style rifles for civilian use. Worried about Bushmaster’s future, Dyke and Kent turned to a political ally: U.S. Sen. William Cohen of Maine.

Kent and Cohen had known each other since high school, when they competed in baseball and basketball. Dyke had appeared in 1980 before a Senate subcommittee scrutinizing the IRS’ treatment of small businesses. Testifying before the committee, Dyke was hailed by the senator as one of “Maine’s leading citizens.”

With a flourish that recalled his student days as a touring thespian, Dyke made a perfect small-town foil against an impersonal and spirit-crushing tax collection agency. He played up his “meager” origins as “the son of shoemakers in a very small town in Maine.” He addressed Cohen as “Bill” and “Billy.” Dyke described a conflict he’d had with the IRS that could have spelled disaster for a company he had just extracted from bankruptcy. It was Bushmaster.

Now, Kent met with Cohen. “Billy, we’ve got over a million dollars’ worth of parts, and this assault weapons ban is going to put us out of business,” Kent recalled saying. From Kent’s office, Cohen started making phone calls, Kent said. The final bill, which six Republican senators including Cohen supported, grandfathered in manufacturers’ existing inventory. So Bushmaster ramped up production in advance of the ban, helping make 1994 the hottest-selling year yet of civilian AR-15s.

Cohen, who now chairs a consulting firm, did not respond to requests for comment.

Clinton signed the 10-year ban into law in September 1994. But Dyke and his team found workarounds. With just a few tweaks, a very effective AR-style weapon could still be legally sold. All the company had to do was remove a bayonet lug and stop selling folding rifle stocks and threaded muzzles. “The rest of the rifle is unchanged,” Bushmaster’s website assured customers. It noted that the removal of threaded muzzles made the rifles even more effective: “Target shooters will notice some accuracy gains.” And lest customers be deterred by a new federal ban on making magazines capable of holding more than 10 rounds of ammunition, Bushmaster noted that the restrictions did not apply retroactively: 20-round and even 40-round magazines were still “out there for sale.”

Bushmaster sent its rejiggered gun to the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.

“They called Dick and said, ‘You have a winner,’” Kent recalled. “‘It gets around the ban.’”

Criminal sprees continued. In 1997, in what became known as the North Hollywood shootout, two bank robbers wielding semi-automatic rifles including a Bushmaster were outgunning police, wounding 11 of them plus six civilians, until officers barged into a gun store. They pleaded for better guns that could penetrate bulletproof vests.The store lent them several rifles, including Bushmasters, and the robbers were killed.

The incident was free advertising for Bushmaster. Law enforcement and commercial sales spiked.

Two years later, Bushmaster executives noticed another uptick in AR-15 orders. They soon identified the cause: fears of the Y2K millennium bug. Media reports had warned that a software programming error could lead to bank shutdowns, power plant closures and even planes falling from the air when computer clocks shifted at midnight on Jan. 1, 2000. As Americans stocked up on survival gear, Bushmaster capitalized on the mania, selling its own Y2K rifle.

In 1999, Bushmaster sold 64,506 guns — more AR-15s than its 10 largest competitors combined. It also brought in a chief executive who, along with Dyke as chair, would assure its continued success. John DeSantis’ previous boss at Savage Arms, in Westfield, Massachusetts, tried to discourage him from going to work for a “black rifle” company. “He didn’t think that semi-automatic rifles had any place in the commercial business because they’re too lethal,” DeSantis recalled.

DeSantis said he had no such reservations. “I thought anything that sells is good,” he said. “You know, you go to a range, and you want (your rifle) to go ‘pop, pop, pop, pop, pop.’ That’s what I like.”

It was the year of the Columbine High School mass shooting, and Dyke decided to skip the NRA convention even though none of the guns used by the killers were Bushmasters. “We didn’t want to be picketed,” DeSantis recalled.

While recognizing Dyke’s decency to employees, DeSantis found his boss to be an incorrigible micromanager, firing off emails at all hours of the night. He was annoyed by Dyke’s penchant for exaggeration. “I don’t like people that are bullshit artists,” DeSantis said in an interview.

DeSantis said he was also irritated that Dyke used the company as a jobs program for family and friends. His son Jeff was a Bushmaster employee and board member, and he put four of his girlfriend’s children on the payroll. Jeff Dyke declined to comment.

During DeSantis’s first five years as CEO, Bushmaster’s distributor base doubled, leading to a 130% increase in sales. Gross margin — the percentage of company’s revenue left over after direct costs are subtracted — rose by 6 percentage points.

Dyke and DeSantis knew that wars, panics and presidential elections drove Bushmaster’s success. DeSantis kept a chart showing gun unit sales and gross profits, logging major events associated with spikes in sales. (The chart was first reported in the 2023 book “American Gun.”)

When 1999’s Y2K fears fizzled out, gun sales slacked. But after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, Americans panicked, once again buying up food and survival gear, including Bushmaster guns. To Dyke and DeSantis, the spree was illogical. The United States wasn’t about to be invaded. But as Dyke told a Maine Times reporter, guns made people feel safer, and so Bushmaster ramped up production again. Then the war in Afghanistan boosted interest in AR-15s. The company scored big contracts with foreign governments and with the private mercenary group Blackwater.

In October 2002, police captured a pair of men, known as the Beltway snipers, who gunned down 10 people in the Washington, D.C., area over several weeks using a Bushmaster XM-15 .223-caliber rifle that they fired through a hole in the trunk of their Chevy Caprice.

Dyke told a Maine journalist he was horrified that his gun could be used in such a “heinous crime.” But he noted that the gun was also used by law enforcement. “Do you think that you do more good than harm? Absolutely,” he said. He told Bushmaster employees they had nothing to be ashamed of, the Los Angeles Times reported. Sales of XM-15 rifles soared, and DeSantis noted the shooting and the uptick on his chart.

For Dyke, it was a difficult time. He was in a committed relationship with a much younger man in Las Vegas, whom he would hire to manage operations in a Bushmaster factory in Arizona. When word got out, he lost friends in the gun industry and even his own company, recalled Thurston, Bushmaster’s former CFO. Years later, Dyke confided to Thurston, “You’re one of the only originals that stuck with me.”

Dyke was also in a legal fight with two smaller investors, who alleged in a lawsuit that he was paying himself, his son Jeff and other family members lavish salaries. They also said he used company money to buy a fleet of Cadillacs, a Rolls Royce and a Bell helicopter that shuttled relatives to casinos and his lakeside house in Canada. Dyke denied the allegations and disposed of the case by buying the investors out.

(Illustration by Clay Rodery for ProPublica)

Bushmaster’s notoriety and profits made it an inviting target for tort lawyers. In 2003, families of the sniper victims sued. Dyke paid them $550,000 to settle the case. The company viewed bankruptcy as a “potential legal strategy” to be “employed to avoid the payment of substantial damages,” its bankers wrote.

The lawsuit was a warning, and Dyke and his fellow gunmakers needed help. They wanted Congress to give them protection from liability for shootings. Fortunately, Dyke had contacts in high places, including an up-and-coming Republican senator and the president of the United States.

Dyke was friendly with the Bush family, which summered in Kennebunkport, Maine. He raised money for Maine Medical Center, which ran the Barbara Bush Children’s Hospital. In 1999, a year after the hospital's naming, George W. Bush, Barbara’s son, announced he was running for president. Dyke became his Maine campaign chair. But his presence was perceived as toxic after an Associated Press reporter asked the campaign about its association with an assault weapons manufacturer. Dyke resigned, saying he didn’t want to be “any baggage” for “young Bush.”

Dyke also had a longtime friend in the U.S. Senate, Maine Republican Susan Collins. She once called him “the most entrepreneurial person I’ve ever met. … This man has had one common theme throughout his life: commitment to the people who work for him, and his passion for creating jobs in Maine.”

Dyke had met Collins in the 1980s when she served on Cohen’s staff. In 1994, she ran for governor, with Dyke’s support. Collins won the Republican nomination but lost the general election. She wouldn’t be unemployed long. She secured a job at Husson College as executive director of the Richard Dyke Center for Family Business, which he had helped start by donating $250,000. Collins was “very qualified” for the job, and Husson’s president, not Dyke, approached her about it, said the senator’s spokesperson, Clark.

When Cohen didn’t seek reelection, Collins decided to run. While not a key adviser, Dyke instructed her over dinner at a Bangor restaurant “as to what it would be like working with other senators and how to leverage her strengths,” Clark said. “He also talked about the challenges facing small businesses across the country.”

With Dyke and other Bushmaster executives among her donors, Collins won. In July 2005, she voted for the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, which Dyke had pushed hard for. It prohibited lawsuits against firearms manufacturers, distributors and dealers for misuse of their products by others. That October, Bush signed it.

Collins “has always charted her own centrist position on gun issues,” her spokesperson said, pointing out that the senator supported a failed 2004 proposal to extend the assault weapons ban. Collins backed PLCAA because “she doesn’t think manufacturers of knives, guns, vehicles, etc. should be held liable for the crimes committed by people who misuse their products,” Clark said. After the Lewiston massacre, Collins has resisted calls for a new ban on assault weapons.

Bushmaster caught the attention of Cerberus Capital Management, a New York investment firm named after the three-headed dog that guarded Hades in Greek mythology. In 2006, Cerberus offered $76 million, twice Bushmaster’s own estimate of its value. “Holy shit,” Tom Tyler, then a Bushmaster executive, recalled Dyke telling him. “I never believed a good old boy from Wilton, Maine, would see that kind of money in his checkbook.”

The private-equity business model was a super-sized version of Dyke’s “bottom fishing.” Cerberus’ holding company, Freedom Group, gobbled up one gun manufacturer after another, notably Remington Arms. It also touted the bellicose aspects of its guns, using Bushmaster to cater to a new group of prospective buyers: not hunters and gun collectors, but “couch commandos” with fantasies of war and killing.

Freedom Group produced a series of print ads for its Remington-branded AR-style rifles, which were made at Bushmaster’s facility in Maine, with slogans like “Forces of Opposition, Bow Down. You are Single-Handedly Outnumbered,” and “Take Back the City.” It plugged Bushmaster guns with a novel “Man Card Campaign.” The gimmick was that owners had to be macho or their cards could be revoked. Cerberus declined to comment.

Dyke stayed on as a board member and consultant for the holding company for about a year. But he told New York Magazine he thought Cerberus was moving too fast, and he quit. But he wouldn’t be out of the AR-15 business for long.

In 2011, Freedom Group closed the Bushmaster facility in Windham, Maine, putting 73 people out of work. Dyke, who still owned the plant, was furious but saw a way to benefit, Kent said.

He summoned Kent to his home in Henderson, Nevada. Over cocktails, Dyke showed his old friend a business plan. “It makes sense to me,” Dyke told him. “We have the facilities. We have the workforce, and all the noncompetes are done.”

Dyke messaged his former Bushmaster employees. “Would you be crazy enough to go back into business with the old man?” he asked.

That August, the 77-year-old Dyke hosted a party to celebrate the launch of the family’s new company, Windham Weaponry. Among the attendees were several state legislators and Collins.

“We’ve got to get back in the game,” Dyke told them. “A lot can happen to it, but it cannot leave Maine because the Dyke family won’t let that happen.”

In its first month, Windham shipped 1,500 rifles. Soon the company had rehired most of its former employees and was producing nearly as many rifles as Bushmaster had at its peak.

In December 2012, Adam Lanza, a devoted player of a video game that featured an assault-style Bushmaster rifle, killed his mother and then went on a rampage with her Bushmaster XM-15 at a Connecticut elementary school. Like other mass shootings, Sandy Hook was good for sales. “Windham Weaponry is busier than a beehive this Spring! While we’re building rifles as fast as we can, be assured that we won’t sacrifice quality for speed!” Dyke’s company said in its newsletter.

Referring to “challenges resulting from recent events,” Windham encouraged its customers to contact their legislators and to attend the NRA annual meeting to oppose a new proposal to ban assault-style rifles after Sandy Hook. “Take action today, and make your voice heard!”

It didn’t mention that its own factory, under the previous owner, had made Lanza’s gun.

(Illustration by Clay Rodery for ProPublica)

On Jan. 16, Windham Weaponry employees flew into Las Vegas for the 2023 SHOT Show, the industry’s firearms palooza. Driving past the Trump International Hotel to the expo center, they posted photographs on the company Facebook page, saying, “We made it!”

They set up their booth, putting the rifles on racks with a sign proclaiming that they were “battle tested and warrior approved.”

Dyke wintered in Las Vegas. But he was too ill to visit the company’s booth. If he could have walked the floor, he would have heard the telltale sounds of his legacy: the unmistakable ratcheting of charging handles being pulled back and the metallic “thunk” of their release.

When Dyke first brought his rifles to the show, they were banished to backroom booths. Now hundreds of companies are emulating Dyke by selling either AR-style rifles or accessories and other tactical gear. Cerberus’ holding company lost investors and faced lawsuits after the Sandy Hook shooting. The unit eventually went bankrupt twice, and its gun businesses were auctioned off. A Nevada company now sells AR-style rifles under the Bushmaster name, along with a device that enables them to fire at double speed, not only with the pull but also the release of the trigger, according to its website. “Bushmaster is back,” the company crowed when it opened in 2021.

In late February, Dyke was stung by a scorpion and had to be hospitalized. On Feb. 28, he chatted with Pestilli, Bushmaster’s former head of sales, by phone, thanking him for his help over the years. The next day, Dyke watched a Los Angeles Lakers game on television. He was about to go to bed when he had a heart attack and died, at the age of 89.

After his death, Windham Weaponry shut down. Then some of Dyke’s former executives stepped in. They leased the facility and plan to resume assembling and selling AR-15s, even as Mainers mourn the Lewiston victims.

At Dyke’s memorial service, Thurston credited him with rescuing more than a firearms company. “Bushmaster after 9-11 did a lot of things for this country,” he said, his voice rising. “Richard made sure that every employee at the end of the month understood that if it looked like a gun, it was going in a box and then going in a truck” to customers.

He pointed at the mourners nodding in agreement. “Because you might need it.”

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In late 2015, Dodge & Cox, one of the nation’s largest mutual fund managers, began buying large quantities of shares of a cloud-computing company called VMware. Over three quarters, Dodge & Cox amassed almost $700 million in shares. That was good news for anyone who already owned shares of VMware, since big purchases tend to push a stock price upward.

One such shareholder was David Hoeft, a member of the Dodge & Cox committee that made the decision to buy the shares and an advocate for investing in technology companies. Hoeft, who has spent 30 years at Dodge & Cox, is now the company’s chief investment officer.

Hoeft bought millions of dollars’ worth of VMware shares in his personal account before his employer’s purchases started to be publicly disclosed.

He purchased $3.6 million in shares in November 2015.

During the same quarter, Dodge & Cox started buying millions of shares in VMware. (Neither the company nor Hoeft appears to have invested in VMware before then.)

Dodge & Cox then dramatically amped up its purchases of VMware stock over the next two quarters, bringing its holdings up to nearly $700 million.

VMware shares ballooned in value, reaping Hoeft $8 million in profit when he sold his shares in 2018 and 2019.

For decades, regulators have tried to clamp down on front-running, the term for when investment professionals make personal purchases or sales of securities when they know that their employers or clients are about to buy or sell the same securities. But a massive assemblage of confidential stock trading data obtained by ProPublica reveals that the practice may be continuing on a notable scale.

Hoeft is one of dozens of investment managers at hedge funds and mutual funds who personally traded the same securities that their organizations were buying and selling, ProPublica found. He stood out in this group for the volume and fortuitous timing of such trades. From 2011 to 2019, Hoeft traded stocks on at least 31 days in the same quarter or the quarter before Dodge & Cox traded the same securities. The transactions were worth nearly $50 million. (All told, Hoeft’s personal trades, most of them in stocks his employer was not trading, totalled more than $725 million during the period.)

Knowing that a fund is going to buy or sell stock can qualify as the sort of confidential information that’s unlawful to trade on. And Dodge & Cox’s ethics policy is unequivocal. It tells employees, “You may not front-run any trade of a Fund or Client Account.” An employee, it explains, “may not … purchase a Reportable Security if you intend, or know of the Dodge & Cox Group’s intention, to purchase that Reportable Security or a related Reportable Security on behalf of a Fund or client.” The same goes for a sale. Employees are warned to “avoid any actual or potential conflict of interest or any abuse of an employee’s position of trust and responsibility.”

Dodge & Cox’s chair at the time, Charles Pohl, excoriated front-running, explaining how it hurts customers in a 2022 comment to the Securities and Exchange Commission. “Trading by free riders,” Pohl wrote, “often drives the price of a security up (when we are trying to buy a block) or down (when we are trying to sell a block) and results in direct harm to our clients and Fund shareholders.”

Imagine essentially that just before a well-informed high roller puts down a large bet on a particular horse, which has the effect of making the odds for betting on that horse less favorable, someone who works for the high roller slips in and makes their own bet on the same horse.

The managers of investment funds have a distinct edge when trading in their personal accounts. Because they control billions of dollars’ worth of their clients’ funds and can deploy a staff of analysts to unearth reams of data and insights about companies, they can sometimes foresee how demand for a stock will change before the public does.

This kind of trading also creates a potential conflict of interest if, for example, employees are advocating internally for the fund to hold or buy more of the stock they personally own. And by trading the same securities as their fund, employees personally profit from research that is owned by their employer and that their clients essentially paid for.

In a statement, Dodge & Cox said that the firm had given advance approval for all of the trades identified by ProPublica, and a review of Hoeft’s trades after ProPublica asked about them found none violated the firm’s policies. “There is no evidence that he engaged in front-running or any other improper trading activity,” Dodge & Cox said. The firm declined to discuss the specifics of trades.

The statement also included comments from Hoeft, who said, “Throughout my career, my highest priorities have always been seeking the best investment opportunities for our clients and fully complying with my legal and ethical responsibilities. For all the trades ProPublica has questioned, I have adhered to the firm’s Code of Ethics and our strict policies on personal trading.”

David Hoeft in 2009 (Nati Harnik/AP Images)

A Dodge & Cox spokesperson acknowledged that Hoeft was part of the small committee that was making investment decisions for the firm but declined to specify how large a role he played in any stock decisions or to discuss the timing of those decisions. “It’s the committee that decides” by majority vote, the spokesperson said. “Not David.”

Hoeft (whose last name is pronounced “hayft”) seems an unlikely person to skirt even the most modest of rules. He has a longstanding reputation as ethical and self-effacing. And unlike the vast majority of those who showed up in ProPublica’s analysis, Hoeft does not work at a hedge fund, where the rules around personal trading are typically more lax. Hoeft’s employer is a mutual fund company that has cultivated a reputation for caution and business practices that are above reproach.

The name Dodge & Cox may be largely unknown outside the investing world, but the company manages $337 billion. That includes the retirement accounts of thousands of Americans. It raises the question: Is Dodge & Cox’s chief investment officer putting their interests — or his own — first?

In the 1970s, the SEC proposed what seemed like a modest rule: Employees at investment management companies would be barred from trading a stock in their personal accounts if they knew their employer was considering trading the same stock.

Industry players opposed the proposed regulation. Commenters warned that it was “dangerously ambiguous” and “impossible” to apply. At what point in the research phase, for example, would a firm cross the threshold into officially considering a transaction?

Wall Street fended off the SEC. In the decades that followed, scandals involving the personal trading of investment advisers have bubbled up periodically. The concerns reached new heights in the 1990s. As mutual funds became the primary way Americans saved for retirement, some fund managers were accused of enriching themselves at the expense of their clients. One technology fund manager was accused of trading dozens of stocks in his personal account within days of his employer doing the same.

The incidents got the attention of the public and Congress. Amid concerns that investors would lose faith in mutual funds, the SEC pledged a broad investigation. The commission reviewed a year’s worth of personal stock trades for hundreds of managers at 30 mutual fund companies.

Their review, which was publicly released in 1994, found “potentially abusive” trading and instances of fund managers purchasing or selling securities shortly ahead of their funds. But the SEC concluded that a government-imposed ban on trading by fund managers — or even a partial ban, prohibiting trades in securities the fund held — wasn’t necessary.

Their rationale was that abuse was rare. More than a third of the managers hadn’t traded at all, and the median number of trades for the year was just two. The SEC also considered the arguments made by industry: that funds wanted employees who lived and breathed the market, and that if they banned personal trading altogether, they would have to pay their employees more. And the agency reasoned that a ban would not stop bad actors from continuing to front-run.

The agency opted to leave it to each investment company to determine its own guardrails, but it pleaded with firms to act. The SEC chair at the time, Arthur Levitt Jr., implored mutual fund companies to curb personal trading, saying “this industry can hardly afford even the appearance of conflicts” of interest.

The SEC does require investment firms to maintain codes of ethics, and to collect and review their employees’ personal trades. But otherwise how firms self-regulate varies widely. Some ban personal trading in particular industries. Others require employees to refrain from trading stocks only when the investment fund is actively considering buying or selling them.

The SEC can get involved if regulators believe a trade violated the law. As with any potential insider-trading case, federal authorities have to prove two main elements. First, they must show that the trader had what’s known as “material nonpublic information”: a significant fact, not yet publicly known, that would affect the company’s share price. Second, they must show that the employee who traded on that information, or provided the tip to the person who did, had a duty not to disclose it or use it for personal benefit.

In the context of front-running, a big future transaction in a company’s stock can count as material. That’s particularly true, securities experts said, when that transaction is informed by proprietary research conducted by the fund, as any reputable firm’s moves usually are.

“You’re trading while in possession of information that is not yours,” said Donald Langevoort, a Georgetown law professor and former SEC attorney. “If you are aware the fund is going to trade, and it’s a block big enough to move the market, that’s insider trading.”

People who know Hoeft today describe him much the same way his childhood friends do: quiet and humble, but with a piercing intellect. Hoeft grew up in rural Wisconsin. His father was a manager at a plastics plant for the American Can Co.

Hoeft was an industrious teen, working at a Ponderosa steakhouse after school during the academic year and spending his summers doing everything from mowing grass at a local airport to checking the packaging of Keebler Sandies Pecan Shortbread at a production plant. He also read encyclopedias and dictionaries to expand his vocabulary. And in a sign of what was to come, Hoeft turned in a stellar performance in a stock-picking contest at school.

His academic prowess landed him at the University of Chicago, where friends say Hoeft stood out for keeping to himself even among a student body with a reputation for being introverted. But alongside Hoeft’s kind and tranquil demeanor was intensity and discipline. He spent long hours in the library and was relentless in long-distance races for the school’s track team. The same trait has persisted in adulthood. Hoeft, a cyclist in his free time, has persisted in pedaling to work even after he got hit by a car, according to one friend.

Immediately after graduating from Harvard Business School in 1993, Hoeft joined San Francisco-based Dodge & Cox. The firm, founded in 1930 with a focus on cautious value investing, suited his Midwestern sensibilities. Far from Wall Street, a genteel culture prevails. Raised voices are frowned upon, as are swaggering star traders. Instead, investment decisions are made by committee. Dodge & Cox styles itself as a methodical and conservative player, picking fewer stocks and maintaining fewer funds than its rivals.

“Everything about it felt like a place from the 1950s,” one former staffer said. “You weren’t wearing jeans there.”

Hoeft’s specialty became the technology sector. Trendy new software and flashy young companies were not the purview of Dodge & Cox in the 1990s and early 2000s. Persuading the stodgy organization to invest in tech companies was a challenge. As a value investor, the firm typically based valuations on free cash flow, but many tech companies were not profitable by traditional accounting metrics. Hoeft framed tech stocks in a way that resonated with value investors. “If you roll the tape forward far enough,” he said years later, “you can get to a point where the valuation could look attractive. You aren’t necessarily buying the company that you see today, if you’ve got a five-year-plus time horizon. You’re investing in what you think the company is going to look like in the future.”

As tech companies matured, what initially started as a disadvantage worked to his favor. Hoeft’s expertise became more prized internally. He was also popular in a workplace multiple former staffers described as polite but awkward. In comparison, one said, Hoeft “was the most normal.” He was quick to sit more junior employees down for talks about their futures, taking them under his wing.

Over three decades, Hoeft steadily rose to his current role as chief investment officer. And along the way, he became incredibly wealthy. His tax records show he went from making a few hundred thousand dollars a year in the 1990s to earning hundreds of millions at Dodge & Cox in the years since. In 2018 alone, he made $74 million at the firm.

Despite his fortune, Hoeft, now 56, has maintained his Midwestern aversion to flashiness. He and his family live modestly — his sons grew up wearing hand-me-down clothes and shoes from their cousins — and he applies his value-investing philosophy to his personal life. For example, Hoeft determined that a slightly used car has far more value than a new one, so he has tended to drive pre-owned vehicles. (He made an exception recently, for a hybrid Toyota RAV4.)

And Hoeft doesn’t own his home, opting instead to live in the Presidio of San Francisco, a former Army post now maintained by the federal government as a park at the foot of the Golden Gate Bridge. The onetime military lodging there is available to rent, and Hoeft lives in the house once used by a commanding general. (In a rare splurge, he recently paid to build an addition to the 1940s home, a futuristic-looking space with floor-to-ceiling glass walls that one of its designers dubbed The Presidio Glasshouse.)

Among friends, Hoeft keeps the focus on his wife, an academic. She “was the amazing neuroscientist,” said Nicole Kontrabecki, a former neighbor. “He took a backseat. The most distinctive thing about him is there was nothing distinctive about him.”

The scale of Hoeft’s personal trading certainly qualifies as distinctive. In recent years, the annual dollar value of his transactions has regularly exceeded $100 million.

Among the other stocks that Hoeft traded in proximity to trades by Dodge & Cox were tech companies HP, Xerox and DXC. The transactions followed trajectories that resembled Hoeft’s VMware trades, with Hoeft buying or selling during the same quarter or the quarter before a comparable transaction by Dodge & Cox. Hoeft’s sales, all of them seemingly profitable, generated proceeds that ranged from $2.8 million to $7.8 million.

Another striking example involved NetApp, a data storage company.

Hoeft bought at least $1.47 million in shares in February 2016.

That same quarter, Dodge & Cox added about $32 million in shares to its already sizable stake.

Hoeft sold over $2 million of his NetApp stake in March 2018.

That same quarter, Dodge & Cox made a major cut to its stake in NetApp (but the sale wasn’t made public until after Hoeft also cut his stake).

In September 2018, Hoeft sold more shares — giving him a total profit of $5.2 million. Dodge & Cox continued to shed the stock the following quarter.

Dodge & Cox declined to provide details about Hoeft’s role in making decisions about NetApp. But at the very least it was a company on his radar: He spoke publicly about NetApp in 2015, saying it was undervalued in a Barron’s article about his firm’s investment strategy.

Trades like Hoeft’s may push the bounds of what his firm’s ethics policy and the law allow, according to securities experts.

ProPublica compared his personal stock transactions to the holdings reports Dodge & Cox is required to publicly file at the end of each quarter. Because changes in a firm’s holdings are disclosed only at the end of each quarter and do not specify the dates of each trade, the precise sequence of events is often unclear. ProPublica identified at least 31 days, from 2011 to 2019, in which Hoeft traded a security the firm also traded during the same quarter or the quarter after. (The number of coinciding trades may be an undercount because ProPublica’s data does not include all stock purchases.)

Dodge & Cox consistently emphasizes the need to act ethically, according to former employees. Staffers are regularly reminded to be careful about their personal trades. They’re told to avoid making moves they’d be embarrassed to see on the front page of a newspaper. A compliance staff reviews their personal brokerage statements and preapproves their stock trades.

“The view at Dodge & Cox is we built our reputation for doing the right thing for our clients, and you can blow that in one day, and we don’t want that,” one former employee said. “You never felt like you could cut corners.”

Dodge & Cox is perhaps even more sensitive about the notion that its data or research would be used by others. It is so guarded about the value of its real-time trading data — and the harm its use could do to its investors — that it opposed a recent proposed regulation that would have required more disclosure on the grounds that it “strikes at the heart of our business.”

“We frequently trade large blocks of securities, and because we are price sensitive investors it can … sometimes take weeks or months to fully implement an investment decision,” Dodge & Cox’s Pohl wrote to the SEC in 2022. “Earlier reporting deadlines and more frequent reporting will provide greater opportunities for front-running and other predatory trading by market participants looking for a free ride.”

Still, Dodge & Cox goes only so far in policing its own employees. Employees are generally allowed to trade securities the company holds. Stocks are placed on a restricted list, which means personal trades are prohibited, when employees officially designate them as stocks they think the firm should consider making a move in.

That could leave weeks, if not months, during which a potential investment is being scrutinized, with multiple stages of vetting and discussion before a potential move is formalized and a vote by committee is set in motion. And during that period, there’s little to prevent an employee from buying or selling the same stock, beyond the ethics policy, which applies to “contemplated” transactions. At that stage of the process, the controls essentially amount to the honor system, a former high-ranking employee told ProPublica.

In its statement, Dodge & Cox objected to what it called the “unfair and false suggestion that our compliance policies are akin to an honor system. To the contrary, we have strict and robust compliance policies that are designed specifically to prevent front-running, profiting from short-term trading, and other types of improper trading behavior.”

At the time of his 2015 VMware trades, Hoeft was associate director of research, tasked with examining investment opportunities for the company and managing analysts who were doing the same. He was also a member of the committee that selected stocks for Dodge & Cox’s marquee fund.

It’s unclear how involved he was in the firm’s decision to buy VMware shares. But public statements he made around that time suggest it was a stock and sector he was watching. In a 2014 interview about Dodge & Cox, for example, he said that he was attracted to a separate data storage company, in part because it held a large stake of VMware stock. And a former colleague recalled that Hoeft looked at VMware for the firm in the early 2010s.

Dodge & Cox’s spokesperson declined to say whether Hoeft was advocating for the company to invest in VMware.

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