It's 2004. Do You Know Who Your Chairman Is?

If the first rule of business is to know your customer, the second should be to know your board of directors. In an ironic admission for an industry that has embraced customer background checks, the parent company of Smith & Wesson, the second-biggest handgun maker in the U.S., last week acknowledged it recently named James Minder, 74, chairman of the board without knowing he had spent 15 years in Michigan prisons for a string of armed robberies and an attempted prison break. Although his days as a sawed-off-shotgun-toting college student are long gone — he has had a clean record since 1969 — by law Minder can't own or even handle a firearm. Asked why he didn't disclose his past to Smith & Wesson earlier, he said, "Nobody asked."

Minder, who described himself to the Arizona Republic as "the epitome of rehabilitated," in 1976 founded a nonprofit group to help delinquent youths, which now has a multimillion-dollar budget. Last week, amid a barrage of criticism, he resigned as chairman but will stay on Smith & Wesson's board. Anti-gun lobbyists hope this embarrassment will help them defeat a bill in Congress that would shield gunmakers from crime-victim lawsuits. Says Mike Barnes, head of the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence: "Only in the N.R.A.'s America can a company chaired by a onetime violent hoodlum be on the verge of being given a license to behave negligently."