Prosecutors contended that he built a kingdom of corruption around him to further amplify his wealth. He racked up charges of more than $270,000 for clothing from a Zegna boutique in Beverly Hills and also billed the N.R.A. for lavish travel, including vacations in the Bahamas and Europe on superyachts owned by one of the organization’s top contractors. And there was prodigious spending on charter flights, some solely for his relatives. The N.R.A. sometimes paid a stylist, who has worked on Hallmark movies, more than $10,000 a session for hair and makeup for Mr. LaPierre’s wife, Susan LaPierre.
He surrounded himself with pliable staff members. His close personal aide, Millie Hallow, had once pleaded guilty to a felony related to the theft of money from an arts agency she ran in Washington. Once at the N.R.A., she was kept on after being caught diverting $40,000 in N.R.A. funds for her son’s wedding and other personal expenses.
Mr. LaPierre installed a general counsel with scant experience, John Frazer, whom he once said he wouldn’t use “for my parking tickets,” according to a former aide. Even though Mr. Frazer was ostensibly the N.R.A.’s top lawyer, he was not informed in advance of the N.R.A.’s 2021 bankruptcy filing in Texas, a failed stratagem to forestall the case in New York, where the N.R.A. was registered as a nonprofit in 1871. (On Friday, the jury voted against removing Mr. Frazer, one of the defendants, but found that he had signed off on misleading tax filings.)
In recent years, it all started coming apart. The N.R.A. was hobbled by the corruption allegations and prominent insiders, who themselves were reaping lucrative benefits, turned on Mr. LaPierre as the scandal surfaced. Membership plummeted to 4.2 million from nearly six million around five years ago, and revenue is down 44 percent since 2016, according to internal audits.
Still, as a lobbyist, Mr. LaPierre could claim a significant measure of success. Politically, he transformed the N.R.A. into a Republican kingmaker, to the point that federal gun control has become largely a nonstarter, despite a numbing parade of mass shootings. Even the 2012 massacre of 20 first graders and six educators at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut did not bring significant policy changes in Washington. If the N.R.A. was once known for advocating for responsible gun ownership and training, Mr. LaPierre yielded to hard-line activists and successfully backed laws requiring no permit or training to carry a gun in public, now the norm in more than half of the states.
