Samuel Cummings

Samuel Cummings was born in Philadelphia in 1927, served briefly in the United States Army, and worked for the Central Intelligence Agency as a weapons specialist in the early 1950s before leaving to found International Armament Corporation in 1953 ^[1] Source 1 Brogan & Zarca, Deadly Business, 1983 Book . The company — always known commercially as Interarms — specialized in the purchase, storage, and resale of surplus military small arms from around the world.

By the early 1960s Interarms had consolidated its operations on the Alexandria waterfront, with offices at 10 Prince Street and a warehouse complex along South Union Street that grew to hold, at various times, hundreds of thousands of rifles, pistols, and carbines. Cummings lived principally in Monaco and traveled extensively in pursuit of surplus contracts with foreign governments ^[1] Source 1 Brogan & Zarca, Deadly Business, 1983 Book . He granted interviews to Guns magazine in 1959 and Sports Illustrated in 1970; those profiles, together with the 1983 Brogan and Zarca biography, remain the principal published sources on his career.

Cummings died in Monaco in 1998. Interarms operations at Alexandria wound down in the years after his death and the waterfront warehouses were converted to other uses.