“In some ways you just think the world’s gone mad — but the world’s always going mad,” says Warren Kanders, turning a complaint about the activists who chased him from the Whitney Museum of American Art’s board last summer into an explanation of what attracted him to the business that drew their attention.
The one-time acquisitions adviser who took his dealmaking skills and built a $450m chain of spectacle stores describes himself in his official biography as “an American investor, industrialist and philanthropist”.
His main job these days, though, is running Safariland, a KKR-backed supplier of equipment to police forces, bomb disposal units and crime scene investigators. And the reason his position as vice-chairman of the New York museum attracted scrutiny is that some of its $500m-a-year revenues come from selling tear gas.