Trigger Happy
by
Susan Adams
Forbes Magazine, May 12, 2003
Dealers in antique firearms resent rival Gregory Martin.
His sin seems to be that he's too successful.
Gregory Martin got his first gun when he was 12 years old. A muzzle-loading 1863 Colt revolver,
it was priced at 15 bucks in a San Jose, Calif. Junk store. If Greg could get it for 10, his mother
said, she'd buy it for him. Martin won his price. At home in his parents' walnut and prune ranch in
San Martin, Calif., he admired the stagecoach scene engraved on the cylinder. "I could envision cowboys
and Indians and the Gold Rush and all the places it had been," he recalls. He was hooked.
He taught himself to make bullets, melting lead on the kitchen stove and pouring it into molds.
He shot at targets, deer and rabbits. He researched what the gun was really worth: $125. Soon
he began combing flea markets, antique shops and junk stores for more deals. He'd pick up a
Colt dragoon revolver for $250, then sell it for $350. A Confederate revolver he found for $225
went for $400. He advertised in Shotgun News. Buyers sent him checks, and Martin
(still too young to shave) mailed out guns in cardboard boxes. Then, as now, no legal restrictions
impinge upon the buying or selling of guns made before 1898.
Today, Martin, 61, is dealing on a grander scale. A year ago he left his 16-year post as director
of arms and armor at San Francisco's Butterfields auction house to open his own shop,
Greg Martin
Auctions. His first auction brought in $5 million, with 90% of items sold. (Butterfields' competing
sale brought in only $1.3 million, with a third of its items unsold.) Three more Martin auctions
have since brought in $11 million, and he expects his June 16 sale, featuring Lloyd's of London
presentation swords, Lord Nelson's Battle of Trafalgar orders and a collection of memorabilia related
to Wild Bill Hickok, to keep heat on his competitors.
Martin divides his time between a Gold Rush-era house in San Francisco, where the theme is the Wild West
(racks of Colts and Winchesters, plus an 1880s roulette table with scrimshawed ivory chips), and a country
house in the Napa Valley. There he makes wine and displays his European arms and armor, including seven
16-th century pikes (8-foot-long spears) and halberds (pikes with hatchet blades). A hallway on the
third floor serves as a shooting gallery. "It's my own little world," he smiles. "I like to live with my toys."
These include a red Bentley with a license frame that reads, "My other car is a stagecoach." Artwork
includes nudes by western artist A.D.M. Cooper.
Martin's formal education ended when he dropped out of community college after six months. "It became
apparent to me that college merely trained people to work for somebody else," he says. When pursuing what
he wants, he can be single-minded, ingenious. He hadn't intended to make wine in Rutherford until the
local planning commission forbade him having a 16-foot-high gate on his property. Only a commercial outfit,
he was told, could have a gate that tall. So Martin planted 8 acres of grapes, hired a wine maker and got
himself bonded as a winery.
For years he coveted a shotgun in Harrah's Pony Express Museum in Reno that belonged to Black Bart,
the 19th-century robber famous for leaving poems at the scene of stickups. In 1986 Martin got a chance
to buy it, but there was one catch: Holiday Inn Corp., which had acquired Harrah's, was dumping the
whole museum; they wouldn't sell an individual piece. Martin ponied up almost $1 million, bought it all,
took what he wanted, and brought the remainder to Butterfields, where it sold for well over $1 million.
His relationship with Butterfields grew from there.
Martin built Butterfields' arms and armor business into the largest in the world, racking up sales of
$100 million. Ever the maverick, he never became an employee. If a sale were unsuccessful, he'd get
nothing. But that never happened. On successful sales, he got as much as half of the seller's commission,
which could range as high as 25% of gavel price. He enjoyed near-complete autonomy in making deals.
This sweet arrangement soured after Butterfields' owners, Bernard Osher and John Gallo, sold out to
Ebay in 1999 for $260 million. The new regime, Martin says, imposed a stifling bureaucracy. He bolted
to start his own business in June 2002, financed by Osher and Gallo. Two months later Ebay unloaded
Butterfields on Bonhams, a London-based auction house. Martin's departure, says a competitor, "devastated"
Butterfields.
Rival dealers are quick to cast aspersions on his tactics. "He's very predatory," says John Gangel of
Little John's Auction Service in Orange, Calif. "He has one friend, one god, and it's money." (Rejoins
Martin: "It's nice to know I can elicit such emotions.") For 20 years he pursued a piece that he wanted,
until the owner -- ill and facing surgery – at last agreed to sale. Unlike many other collectors. Martin
is prepared to part with even his most prized possessions – for a price.
Does a cocky attitude ever trip him up? In 1986 while in Tanzania to help make a documentary called
In the Blood, which retraced Teddy Roosevelt's 1909 hunting expedition, a bush fire burned up
a cache of antique guns Martin had supplied. Today he sports a $3 million policy.
Read the follow-up in the December 27, 2004 edition of Forbes Magazine.
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