At times, his parents’ absence seemed to take a toll on him. “For me as a child, it was very difficult to understand why our True Parents have always been away,” he said in a speech to Unification members in the Philippines. “It is difficult not to be able to have time to share your difficulties with your parents.” Only after much “reflection,” he explained, did he understand why they “had to live their life.”

Justin attended Hackley, an elite prep school in Tarrytown, New York. Girls were verboten for the Moon boys; Reverend Moon had banned premarital sexual relations for all of the church’s adherents. The Moon brothers were athletic, good-looking, trained in martial arts, and suspicious of outsiders, according to former church members. Now and then, they got into scuffles on the playground, and on one occasion, Justin’s older brother Hyo Jin brought a BB gun to school and shot at students, for which he was expelled.

By the age of 14, Justin had become interested in guns. “My brothers introduced me to shooting,” he tells me. “We’d shoot pistols and rifles, go target shooting and hunting.” There was a range at the church’s seminary in Barrytown, New York, and the family took hunting trips to Alaska. “Hunting was a spiritual event for the Moons,” Graham Lester says. “The bigger the beast, the more evil killed.”

It was around this time that Tim Porter entered Justin’s life. From ages 16 to 20, Porter was considered one of Justin’s “expected” friends—local church members summoned to the Moon compound to keep the True Children company. “It was never friendship,” Porter recalls one night over drinks in Manhattan. “Think of it as a bunch of people meant to keep the prince happy. We were beneath him and there to serve, to laugh at his jokes, be abused by him, be his yes-men. It was a nightmare.”

Porter was born into the Moonie world, the son of high-ranking church members. When he was called to East Garden, he would join the Moon kids in target shooting, tackle football, wrestling. “Sometimes [Justin] would bring in his younger brothers and have them beat us up,” Porter says. “His point was that we were wussies and he wanted us to be stronger. It was like military training, getting us ready for the time when we would take on the unbelievers.” According to Porter, Justin regularly reminded him and the other members’ kids about his father’s elevated place in God’s drama. “He would always philosophize about the world ending,” Porter says, “and how great his father was. That’s why he did all this stuff with guns. He believes that they’re going to take over the world. He would say this all the time.”

Of the 13 children, Justin was considered the most transfixed by his father’s messianic claims—a view that would later make Moonie watchers think he could one day become the church’s leader.

Later on, there was the fight club. It was Justin’s idea, Porter says, and he held sessions at his parents’ compound in Seoul. “There were five or six of us, and we’d fight without gloves until we were bloody,” Porter says. Justin officiated and fought, but he didn’t always play by the rules. As one fight was starting, he unleashed a head kick. “This guy Isaac was just waiting for the fight to begin, and Justin leaped up and did this crazy swinging kick,” Porter remembers. “It landed in the guy’s face, and it looked like the guy was airborne forever, like he was levitating, until he finally dropped to the floor. It was cool. But it wasn’t an emotional thing with [Justin]. He was very calculated about his violence. He had to be the best.”

I ask Porter what would have happened had he refused to come one day when the True Family called. “You didn’t say no,” he says flatly.

Asked about the fight club, Justin acknowledges participating in martial arts training but says he “never officiated.” He adds that he isn’t sure about his brothers or sisters. “I’m one of 13 siblings. We all had our own lives, and I don’t know what they did.”

At 18, Justin got a license to carry a handgun, co-signed by one of his older brothers. He became obsessed with guns, especially the compact Walther PPK, the brand James Bond carried. Justin pored over trade magazines and sketched out his own designs. By his junior year of college, he had decided that he wanted to make his own weapons and that guns would be his future.

Over the next two years, he worked on the design and often traveled to Saeilo, the family’s precision-machine company in Queens, New York, where he began to build a prototype. He wasn’t an engineer, but that didn’t matter. In 1992, he graduated from Harvard magna cum laude, and soon after, the perfect pistol—the one that would get the tight-knit gun world talking—was complete. “He walked into the shop one day and said, ‘I got it, I got it,’ ” remembers David Konn, a longtime Kahr employee and a current member of the church. “That’s when it all started.” (Konn is no longer with Kahr. He now works in the alternative-medicine business.)