The biography of Victor Bout, a former Air Force officer, inspired Hollywood figures to make the film, as a result of which he was entrenched with a formidable nickname - the merchant of death.
Arrest and Extradition
In 2010, Viktor Bout (photo presented later in the article) was extradited to the United States from Thailand after a targeted operation by the United States Drug Enforcement Agency. DEA employees impersonate buyers representing FARC, the armed forces of the Colombian revolutionaries. The United States classifies this group as a terrorist organization.
Booth claimed that he was just an entrepreneur engaged in legitimate international transportation, mistakenly accused of trying to arm South American rebels and become a victim of American political fraud.
But a jury trial in New York did not believe in its history.
Who is Viktor Bout really?
In April 2012, he was sentenced to 25 years in prison after being convicted of a conspiracy to assassinate U.S. civil servants and citizens, to supply anti-aircraft missiles, and to collaborate with a terrorist organization.
During a three-week trial, it was stated that Booth knew that the weapons would be used to kill American pilots collaborating with the Colombian authorities. To this he replied that they had one enemy.
Russian citizen Viktor Bout (photo in the article) began his business career in the field of air transport after the collapse of the USSR in 1991.
According to the 2007 book, The Merchant of Death, written by security experts Douglas Farah and Stephen Brown, Booth built his business using military aircraft left at the airfields of a decaying Soviet empire.
The sturdy Antonovs and Ilyushins were sold together with the crews and were ideally suited for the delivery of goods, since they could use the bumpy runways of countries in which hostilities were fought.
Victor Anatolyevich Bout: biography
Booth was born in Soviet Tajikistan presumably on January 13, 1967, although the exact date and place of his birth are unknown. For example, South African intelligence ascribes to him Ukrainian origin.
After serving in the Soviet army, he graduated from the Military Institute of Foreign Languages. On the personal website of the airline owner, it is alleged that he worked as a military translator and quit the Armed Forces with the rank of lieutenant colonel. But the biography of Victor Bout is not so clear. According to other sources, he rose to the rank of major of the GRU and in the 80s of the last century participated in Soviet military operations in Angola.
Contrary to international sanctions, through a series of shell companies, he began to supply weapons to the war-torn regions of Africa.
UN accusations
Victor Booth, whose biography is closely associated with former Liberian leader Charles Taylor, who committed war crimes, has been indicted by the United Nations. According to UN statements, he was a businessman, seller, and carrier of minerals and weapons, supporting the Taylor regime to destabilize Sierra Leone and illegally obtain diamonds.
According to Middle Eastern media reports, he supplied weapons for the Taliban and Al Qaeda.
Booth was also charged with arming both sides of the civil conflict in Angola and selling weapons to field commanders and governments from the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of the Congo to Sudan and Libya.
On the run
Booth himself categorically denied his connection with the Taliban and al Qaeda. However, he admitted that weapons were transported to Afghanistan in the mid-1990s, claiming that they were used by commanders to fight the Taliban.
He also claimed that he helped the French government transport goods to Rwanda after the genocide, and also transported UN peacekeepers.
But law enforcement harassed him throughout the 2000s.
In 2002, when the authorities issued a warrant for his arrest, Victor was forced to leave his home in Belgium.
Under various pseudonyms, Booth traveled through the United Arab Emirates and South Africa and reappeared in Russia in 2003.
In the same year, British Foreign Minister Peter Hein came up with his famous nickname. After reading a report on Bout, he said that he is a leading dealer in death, the main intermediary in the supply of arms from Eastern Europe - Moldova, Ukraine and Bulgaria - to Angola and Liberia.
The UN has called Bout the centerpiece of a web of shadow arms dealers, diamond brokers, and other war-raisers.
Tango lessons
Throughout the 2000s, the United States took steps against Booth by freezing his assets in 2006, but there was no law under which he could be held accountable in the United States.
Instead, U.S. agents waited until 2008, identified themselves as buyers from Colombian rebels, and were introduced to the death trader through one of his former associates. Soon after DEA officials discussed secret arms shipments with him, the Thai authorities arrested Bout and, after a lengthy trial, began the extradition process to the United States.
Booth said the United States’s actions against him were politically motivated, and his wife said her husband’s only relationship with Colombia was tango lessons.
Russian authorities supported the death trader. The foreign minister promised to fight for his return to Russia, calling the Thai court’s decision “unjust and political.”
In the 2005 film finale, “Lord of the War,” which uses Victor Bout’s biography as a script, the anti-hero escapes justice. But in life, the Happy End slipped away from the arms baron.
Sentence
On 02/11/11, the death trader was found guilty, and on 04/05/12 he was sentenced to a minimum term of 25 years in prison on charges of conspiracy to sell weapons to terrorist groups. Prosecutors demanded life imprisonment, arguing that Bout’s arms trafficking sparked conflict around the world.
In response, Russian authorities in 2013 included US citizens investigating the case of Viktor Bout and drug dealer Konstantin Yaroshenko in the list of people who are denied entry to the Russian Federation. These included: former federal prosecutor Michael Garcia, his deputies Anjan Sahni, Brendan McGwire, Christian Everdell, Jenna Debs, Judge Jed Rakoff and investigators Michael Rosenzaft and Christopher Lavigne.
The biography of Victor Bout is described in the book by Douglas Fahr and Stephen Brown, “The Merchant of Death: Money, Weapons, Airplanes, and the Organizer of Wars” (2007). But there are no words that the death trader told a New Yorker journalist: "They will try to plant me for life. But I will return to Russia. I don’t know when. But I'm still young. Your empire will collapse, and I will get out of here." .