The following is a long article that I copied instead of posting the link as it may allow you access. I had to put in two parts as it was to long to put in one post.
Trouble At The NRA Which May Drive Them Out Of Business
This is the first I've heard of this and I've been a life member for years. It raises a ton of serious questions including why Wayne is making +$1,000,000 per year and why he has a lifetime contract even when gone. Where has the money been blown and why they are $30,000,000 in debt, their retirement fund $60,000,000 in the hole and why is their PR Firm making $40,000,000 a year????
NRA’s Dirty Laundry Exposed as Pro-Gun Group Cleans House
Ammoland Inc.
Posted on April 20, 2019 by Jeff Knox
NRA's Dirty Laundry Exposed as Pro-Gun Group Cleans House
USA – -(AmmoLand.com)- On April 12, the National Rifle Association filed suit in a Virginia court, accusing their long-time PR company, Ackerman McQueen, of failing to provide detailed billing, and failure to disclose contracts with NRA staff and officers that might demonstrate a conflict of interest, including an Ack-Mac contract with NRA President Ollie North.
As the news of the shocking lawsuit made the rounds of mainstream media and was just sinking in – especially to most of the members of the NRA Board of Directors, who had no advance warning about the suit – a new exposé on the shady dealings of NRA insiders was published by The New Yorker (
http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-d...ed-at-the-nra/). That article, shedding new light on lousy business, showed that this isn’t just NRA leaders in a nasty mess of their own making, but a deeply embedded cancer that has metastasized, putting the NRA itself in serious jeopardy.
Over 20 years ago, my father, Neal Knox, as First Vice President of the NRA and just one year away from taking the reins as President, threw a red flag on the practices of Ack-Mac and Wayne LaPierre. He questioned the expensive, intrusive, and heavy-handed fundraising tactics, such as constant, over-hyped letters, phone calls, and fundraising letters sent by registered mail, and the exorbitant sums being paid to the PR company. He demanded reforms in the association’s fundraising methods and specifics on contracts and billing details involving Ack-Mac and other vendors. Both he and Second Vice President Albert Ross refused to sign the hefty, monthly checks being cut to Ack-Mac, and a major battle for control of the NRA ensued. It wasn’t like the 1977 Cincinnati fight for the soul and destiny of the organization. The new dust-up was between the Board and the staff for control of the organization’s checkbook.
The upshot of that battle was that Wayne won, Dad lost, and the fast-and-loose money games continued and just got worse. Charlton Heston was brought in to bump Dad from the leadership, and Wayne’s compensation rose rapidly from about $250,000 a year to almost $1,000,000.00. In the latest available IRS report from 2017, LaPierre’s total compensation was reported at $1.4 million, or about $117,000 per month, and a couple of years before that, he also got a distribution from his retirement fund of about $4 million, for a total compensation of more than $5 million that year. It’s worth noting that he’s receiving this at a time when the NRA is over $30 million in the red, and the retirement fund is in negative numbers to the tune of almost $60 million. Ack-Mack’s take from the NRA in 2017 was over $40 million.
For nearly a quarter of a century, we – Dad, my brother Chris, and I – have returned to this topic again and again.
Our goal has never been vengeance or retribution, but to alert NRA members and rouse the members of the NRA Board of Directors to fulfill their moral and legal obligations to the members, and put a stop to the chicanery.
Those efforts have, to a great extent, fallen on deaf ears. We have been vilified, belittled, and ignored by the majority of the board, and we’ve been publicly attacked by NRA leaders accusing us of trying to tear down the organization that we have been working so hard to save.
That’s why the lawsuit against Ackerman McQueen gave me a smile of vindication. It confirms many of the things that we have been saying for so long. But the celebration was tinged with concern about the harm the whole debacle would cause our historic organization. Then all of that turned to anger and a sense of doom as I read the exposé in The New Yorker.
Reporter Mike Spies works for Bloomberg’s anti-rights propaganda outlet The Trace and has collaborated with reporters and editors from a variety of mostly anti-rights newspapers and magazines like Mother Jones and the New York Times. Those connections and affiliations will cause many to dismiss this latest article as just more anti-gun propaganda. That would be a mistake. Spies did a thorough job of digging up sources [he clearly has a someone leaking him info at NRA or maybe Ackerman] and documentation to back up the critical points in his article, and he presents them with little spin or distortion. Calling on NRA members to ignore the message and focus on the messenger, won’t work this time. The article and its sources are too well documented and credible for that, and enemies of the NRA will undoubtedly pursue these leads with bulldog tenacity.
NRA members should be furious, and the Board of Directors should be terrified.
Even with my 40-year history in the NRA, I never imagined the abuses and neglect were so outrageous and rampant. The most significant revelation is that NRA employees and attorneys brought many of these issues to the Audit Committee of the Board of Directors, and the members of that committee did nothing to correct the problems. They didn’t alert fellow directors about the issues. They didn’t call executives and contractors out on the carpet for the abuses. They didn’t call for contract reviews, investigations, or disciplinary actions. Instead, they retroactively approved past actions that should only have been taken with their prior approval and did their best to contain the damaging information, helping to drive away dedicated NRA employees who did nothing other than try to inform them of problems.
“The emperor has no clothes!” – “Someone slap that kid!”
To get an idea of the depth and breadth of the theft, corruption, and abuse that has been going on at the NRA for the past 25-plus years, you need to read the entire article in The New Yorker, but here are some highlights:
Remember that 1.4 million dollars being paid to Wayne LaPierre? At some point, a clause was added to his employment contract guaranteeing him payment as a speaker and consultant after he retires from NRA, at the full base salary he is being paid as Executive Vice President.
Multiple NRA executives have left the organization and walked into $600,000 and $700,000 dollars a year consulting contracts for NRA.
Wives, children, and other relatives of NRA executives and NRA contractors have routinely crisscrossed between the NRA and various vendors, drawing exorbitant salaries.
Key vendors – like Ackerman McQueen – have been routinely paid on invoices that were incomplete or unspecific, and NRA employees questioning such payments were retaliated against.
The dollar figures involved are in the hundreds of millions, but the most critical paragraph in the article is this one:
