THE MAN cutting a swathe through America’s defence industry is ready to rumble. Short and stocky, wearing tinted glasses and a top-dollar suit, with a gold bracelet glinting under his right cuff, Frank Lanza waves me into his new London office with a grin and a growl.

At 73, with his jowelly face and watchful, lizard-like eyes, Lanza looks every inch the Sicilian-American patriarch. But he is also a boss in a hurry. Since leaving America’s biggest defence contractor, Lockheed Martin, in 1996, he has put together his own electronics group, L-3 Communications, which has leapt from $500m (£275m) to $8 billion (£4.4 billion) in sales, snaffling up smaller defence suppliers along the way.

Last week news leaked of L-3’s negotiations to take over Titan, another sizeable American contractor, pitching Lanza’s firm yet further up the tree. Shortly before that, Lanza, L-3’s chairman and chief executive, was passing through London, casting his eye over British firms. The acquisition spree won’t stop with Titan, that’s clear.

He wants a foothold here, he explains, because Britain is now L-3’s biggest overseas customer. The group is already involved as a partner in programmes such as the Airborne Standoff Radar (Astor) and sells its explosive-detection equipment for use at British airports.

Next he wants to buy a slice of production in Britain. “I’m looking for a UK deal worth somewhere between $200m and $400m,” he says in his gravelly voice. “A company that is underperforming, where we can put in financial and human resources, and give them the name recognition to grow them. It could be smaller than $200m, but it ain’t gonna be a gorilla.”

He laughs. A “gorilla” is his term for the prime contractors that dominate defence — groups such as Lockheed and General Dynamics in America, BAE Systems, Finmeccanica and Thales in Europe. These giants gobble up the huge contracts handed out by governments, then oversee work bought in from smaller suppliers.

Lanza has built his empire in the second tier, where he shrewdly figured he could make bigger profits away from direct political scrutiny. Hence L-3, named after its three founders: Lanza, finance director Robert LaPenta and backer Lehman Bros, has swept together more than 60 smaller suppliers, specialising in lucrative niche areas such as secure communications, training simulation and aircraft modernisation. L-3 is now the top maker of defence electronics and communications in America.

Why has it been so successful? Probably timing, says Lanza. “After the cold war, when all the big defence contractors were consolidating, the smaller-product companies were left floundering. Before that, the quantity of weapons being ordered kept them in business. Then the world changed. We just thought, why not consolidate that vendor base?”

Sitting in L-3’s new office in the West End, he makes it sound deceptively simple. In fact Lanza, the son of a Sicilian immigrant father and Brooklyn-born mother, is steeped in defence-industry know-how.

He grew up near California’s Silicon Valley when it was the heart of America’s military industrial complex, served in the US Coast Guard and cut his teeth as an engineer working on space-industry programmes for a Nasa subcontractor. He later rose to become president of Loral, one of America’s biggest contractors before it was merged with Lockheed.

He hated the bureaucracy there, and was determined to create his own empire. “But I always love to stay technical. Nobody’s gonna take me and make me a manager with just paperwork. I still to this day get involved with the technology.”

Others who work with Lanza say he combines an encyclopedic knowledge of high-tech with a knack for dealing with people.

“Frank can go from talking to bankers, communicating the company ethos, to visiting the workers at a small company and engaging with those who build the products and make the technology,” says L-3’s London vice-president, Ron Cook, a former RAF air commodore. “He loves what he does day-to-day and that joy is transmitted.”