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Acknowledgments

Some information has been given to me “off the record,” and therefore will not appear in this publication unless the verification comes from another source. For instance, I won’t name the executives at other gun companies who privately admitted to me that they knew damn well that Beretta had won the U.S. military contract fair and square.

Some input has been given “not for attribution.” This means a promise to the speaker that his or her identity will not be revealed. If that compromises credibility, so be it. Let the reader be the judge of the information.

I would like to thank the many executives at Beretta, past and present, who kindly shared information with me. They include Cathy Williams, PR manager extraordinaire; Gabriele de Plano, Jeff Reh, Todd Green and Brian Felter. And to the many I can’t name, you who know who you are, I am also grateful.

I would like to thank Ernest Langdon, who knows more about winning combat pistol championships with Berettas than anyone else because he has done it more than anyone else. Ernest’s work is also the gold standard for combat Beretta pistolsmithing, and his comments were invaluable to this effort.

Thanks also to master Beretta armorers Bill Pfeil and Rick Devoid. Their intimate knowledge of how Berettas work was particularly valuable to the chapter on maintenance. Huge thanks to the men of the U. S. Marine Corps RTU and the U.S. Army Marksmanship Training Unit for their insights into the accurizing of the Beretta M9 into a match-winning bull’s-eye pistol.

And finally, thanks to my editorial assistants: Herman Gunter III, Anna Gunter, and Gail Pepin. Without their efforts, the unforgiving deadline never would have been met.

It is a monumental task to review all the modern Beretta pistols and not one that can be undertaken in short order. To that end, portions of a number of the reviews that appear within this book were first published as magazine articles when those guns were first brought to market. In all cases, my assessments of the pistols in question still stand as they did when I wrote the original reviews. We gratefully acknowledge and thank the publishers of American Handgunner, Shotgun News, Combat Handguns, Gun World, Guns, and Guns and Weapons For Law Enforcement for their permission to use that important material in this book.