Then people started making the connection, and the conversation turned to God.

Larry Zilliox was one of the first to connect Kahr Arms to Reverend Moon’s Unification Church. A private investigator from Bristow, Virginia, with a knack for the hardboiled, he’d spent almost two decades sniffing around the church’s kingdom—first for a cult-awareness group and then out of his own curiosity. “I became obsessed with finding out how Moon’s businesses all fit together,” he tells me. “It was a big puzzle, with lots of interlocking and moving parts.”

Exploring Reverend Moon’s empire is a lot like embarking on an archaeological dig—with the prospect of finding stuff that you’d never imagine and stuff that makes no sense at all. But Zilliox was diligent. He marshaled hundreds of pages of documents, business papers, press clippings, and government filings. He found that Moon’s business world is one vast, byzantine, global network of cultural, religious, and for-profit companies that includes (among other things) manufacturing, publishing, fishing, and real estate concerns, as well as enormous tracts of land in Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay. The empire could be worth hundreds of millions, but more likely billions of dollars. “There are hundreds of companies,” Zilliox says. “Some are active; some are dormant and then active and then dormant again. Every time I look, I find out something new.”

Zilliox traced Kahr, one of more than a dozen Moon family companies in the U.S., through an intricate chain of firms to a mothership holding company called ­ Unification Church International, which he says was formed to support and perpetuate the Unification movement. U.C.I. shares a building in Falls Church, Virginia, with its single subsidiary, One Up Enterprises, the central holding company of some of Reverend Moon’s most prominent and influential businesses. Among these are True World Group, a global seafood business run by Motoo Furuta, a church member; News World Communications, owner of U.P.I. and the Washington Times, led by Chung Hwan Kwak, another Moon follower; and Saeilo, which has offices in Japan and the United States, among other places. Saeilo lists Justin Moon as its C.E.O. and president.

How much money passes from Kahr to the church is hard to pinpoint, mainly because business names and relationships shift, and untraceable rafts of cash are sometimes used for major transactions. The unorthodox use of cash in the family businesses was highlighted in Nansook Hong’s tell-all memoir, In the Shadow of the Moons, published in 1998. Married to Justin’s older brother Hyo Jin for 15 years, she went underground after filing for divorce. In her book, she described beatings, emotional abuse, and days when Hyo Jin would stay locked in the master bedroom “snorting cocaine and watching pornographic videos.” But she also recalled how one day her husband came to her with Bloomingdale’s shopping bags filled with a million dollars in cash. The money was earmarked for his recording studio, Manhattan Center, though Hong alleges that Hyo Jin skimmed off $400,000 for his drug addiction. (While the Moon family has long disputed Hong’s allegations, many former members have corroborated her claims. A lawyer for Hyo Jin denied the accusations.)

When I question former church members about Reverend Moon’s conglomerate, they say he seems to have four goals in mind: He wants to disseminate his spiritual program; elevate his global status as messiah; buy power in myriad cultural, political, and business spheres; and procure the necessary resources to create a self-sustaining, economically viable sanctuary for himself and his believers when the world crumbles. In other words, he means to create a world according to Moon. “When I was a leader in the group,” claims Steven Hassan, a former member who says he now counsels ex-cultists, “Moon talked about how when the global economy falls apart, then we’ll have the infrastructure—we’ll have the food, we’ll have the media, the businesses, the banks, and everyone will need to come to us.”

So how do Justin’s guns fit into Reverend Moon’s plans? One theory is simple and innocuous: The reverend is just a rich father indulging his kid. One Moon daughter got a horse farm; another, the private Kirov Academy of Ballet. Hyo Jin got the New York recording studio. Yet a number of former church members sense something more sinister. “The church says it’s for peace, but that’s all a part of the deception,” says Hassan. He notes that another Moon company, Tongil Group, produces M16s and antiaircraft guns. Justin is now the chairman of Tongil Group. Among other things, the South Korea-based Tongil is in the business of making cars in North Korea, once the ideological enemy of the True Father. Reverend Moon years ago “told us he was making air rifles,” ­Hassan says. “He’s a liar. Kahr Arms is a part of Moon’s plan for taking over the world.” Of Tongil, Larry Zilliox adds, “Can you imagine what the conservative guys buying Kahr guns would think if they knew that the owner of Kahr is doing business with a communist country in the axis of evil?”