On a blustery night in December 1999, Danny Guzman left his house in Worcester, Massachusetts, and headed downtown to Tropigala, his cousin’s nightclub. Tropigala occupied a bunkerlike, one-story brick building on Main South, a street that was home to shuttered storefronts, rooming houses, and a creeping underworld of drug dealing and prostitution, punctuated by the occasional shooting. Despite the upcoming holiday, Tropigala was packed with its usual, mostly Hispanic, crowd, and Guzman, a handsome 26-year-old with a muscular build and deep-olive complexion, settled in with a drink.

Just before 2 a.m., as the club shut down and crowds spilled onto the street, a man named Edwin Novas—a 20-year-old heroin dealer from the Bronx who sported a boyish mustache—started causing a disturbance. Details about what happened are murky, but Guzman was somehow drawn into the scuffle. Novas allegedly drew a 9-millimeter pistol from his waistband and fired, and Guzman was hit. Novas fled, followed by two friends. And at 2:12 a.m. on December 24 at Saint Vincent Hospital, Guzman was pronounced dead.

Four days later, in an empty, weed-choked lot around the corner from Tropigala, a four-year-old child found a loaded 9 millimeter with no serial number. Ballistics linked it to the shooting, and prosecutors, armed with eyewitness reports, accused Novas of murder. Immediately after the killing, his trail went cold, which is how it remains today. Years later, America’s Most Wanted featured the Tropigala murder, describing Novas as the Christmas Eve Killer, but the exposure didn’t help solve the case.

With no one in custody for the murder, investigators turned their attention to the murder weapon, and people in Worcester began whispering about the gun’s local manufacturer, Kahr Arms. We now know that the gun used to kill Danny Guzman was one of dozens that had been either lost or stolen and then sold into the underworld by rogue Kahr Arms employees, at least one of whom was a drug addict. Guzman’s family has since sued Kahr, accusing the company of negligence in connection with his death. A trial is pending. The $2 billion-a-year gun industry is watching the case with trepidation, fearing that a successful suit could prompt other victims’ families to bring similar cases against other gunmakers.

But Kahr Arms is more than just the manufacturer of some of the smallest and most lethal weapons on earth (including the tommy gun, made famous by Al Capone). It is run and mostly owned by a son of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, the billionaire and self-proclaimed messiah who founded the Unification Church and controls a sprawl of businesses presumably intended to sustain and defend his followers when the world as we know it ends. The gun business, along with food companies, real estate, and other holdings, will serve to protect the fortress and keep sinners at bay, according to former members, as well as supply necessary provisions after the arrival of the new world order.

Not much is known about Moon’s 37-year-old son, Justin, or how Kahr Arms fits into the church’s teachings and the reverend’s plans for world domination. People who know Justin say he travels a lot, has a penchant for fast cars and big-caliber pistols, and spends stretches of time at various family and church mansions around the globe. He is also vigorously business-minded and has personally designed most of his company’s guns. He has grown Kahr Arms into one of America’s top privately owned handgun manufacturers, with sales of around $20 million a year and climbing at an annual rate of 30 percent.

Kahr’s success could influence the future of the church itself. With the True Father, as followers call Reverend Moon, slowing down, speculation about his heir has begun to emerge. Church watchers say the fact that Justin has built a company from the ground up makes him a front-runner in any possible succession race to lead the Moonies and run a church business empire valued in the billions of dollars.

But the son of the messiah doesn’t talk much, and the inner workings of Kahr are a jumble of shell companies. Like his father and the church, Justin Moon prefers to be an enigma, never granting a face-to-face interview—until now, finally unfolding his strange story of God and guns.