Wayne LaPierre was always a contradiction. And that's what he made the NRA

Wayne LaPierre always seemed a bit of a dweeb, a technocrat in cufflinks and smartly cut suits far removed from the macho, heat-packing Marlboro Man image more befitting the leader of the National Rifle Association.

A jury last week indeed found him liable for improper enrichment and ordered him to repay $4.3 million to his former employer. But this puzzle piece merely completes the picture of the greater fraud that transmogrified the NRA from a healthy sportsmen's club into a sociopathic political arm of America’s far-right extremists.

Perhaps we have learned this: When Ollie North turns whistleblower, your organization has far greater problems than Wayne LaPierre.

LaPierre, now utterly disgraced, was finally brought down by his profligate spending — millions on private jets, clothing, luxury vacations and the like. You expect that from an American Supreme Court Justice, but not from the leader of a national nonprofit.

Just guessing here, but LaPierre probably saw it as his due. The price of an act that no person with a human heart would ever perform: Standing up in the wake of mass killings, before the blood was even dry, protesting that the problem wasn’t too many guns, but not enough. In a very real sense, LaPierre sold his soul for a Zegna suit.

After dropping $274,695.03 at a Beverly Hills clothier over the years, he somehow had the gall to stand up and rail against the “elites” who “threaten our very survival” by, presumably, agitating for gun laws that would allow more Americans to, well, survive.

LaPierre insisted he was just doing the bidding of the NRA’s former marketing team, Ackerman McQueen, which ultimately balked at footing the bill for LaPierre’s wardrobe, which cost more than most NRA members’ houses.

LaPierre would bill Ackerman McQueen and Ackerman McQueen would in turn bill the NRA, a rather effective money-washing mechanism that lasted until some in the NRA began accusing the ad firm of overbilling and the whole house of cards fell, with three multi-million-dollar, Gucci-upholstered entities — the NRA, Ackerman McQueen and Wayne LaPierre — all pointing fingers at each other in court, coming up for air only long enough to warn Americans to be on guard against the elites.

The attraction of swindlers to designer clothing was not lost on a bemused GQ Magazine, which wrote that “Men like LaPierre, Trump, and (Paul) Manafort fund their luxury lifestyles by drumming up fear of, and anger at, the kind of people who wear designer suits.”

LaPierre, who began his career as a Democratic aide, seemed to fall upward into leadership of the NRA much the way Sir Joseph Porter became ruler of the Queen’s Navy in Gilbert and Sullivan’s “Pinafore.”

It was Ackerman McQueen, the NRA now contends, that pushed the organization away from sport into the dark world of culture wars and race baiting. Guns as such weren’t even the point. They were the emotional flashpoint, sure, that allowed the NRA to raise big money by convincing half the nation that its constitutional rights were under attack.

But the real goal was to elect politicians, Trump included, who would return America to the days when it was run exclusively by white, male CHINOS (Christians In Name Only). Ackerman McQueen made LaPierre into what he was, telling him what to wear, where to go and what to say. LaPierre himself was so terrified by this world of his creation that he insisted he needed bodyguards and a gated palace.

The thin NRA-LaPierre-Ackerman McQueen veneer was peeled back in video footage obtained by the Trace newspaper of a hunting trip in Africa that was supposed to show the tough and fearless LaPierre out in the bush stalking big game.

The footage was destined for the NRA’s TV channel, but it never aired after it became obvious LaPierre had no idea how to handle a gun. He fires three times at point blank range at a stricken elephant and misses, forcing a guide to put the poor, moaning creature out of its misery.

The guides exchange nervous glances behind LaPierre’s back and at one point push the barrel of his rifle skyward to keep him from shooting one of their own. His wife Susan proves the better shot, dropping a beast standing a short distance away looking curiously at the hapless hunting party.

The whole scene is deeply uncomfortable and interminably sad. You feel sad that two magnificent animals had to die for some political hack’s photo-op. You feel sad for the guides who have to buck up LaPierre in the face of his failures and assure him that he’s the second coming of Teddy Roosevelt. You feel sad for Susan and her uncertain bloodlust.

But mainly you feel sad for the thousands of Americans who have lost their lives just so a diseased political movement could try to wrest power from those who hold democracy so dear.

Tim Rowland is a Herald-Mail columnist.

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This article originally appeared on The Herald-Mail: LaPierre helped turn the NRA into a diseased political movement