After decades of supplying weapons to vicious armies and militias around the globe, the world’s most notorious arms dealer has been brought to justice – though his wife is still pleading his innocence
VIKTOR BOUT has spotted me looking at him, and stares back. His mouth broadens into a bright smile and he raises his right arm high over his head, palm inwards, in a dramatic Russian greeting. Then he nods his head with mock formality and turns back to his lawyer.
For years I have been following the career of the world’s most notorious arms dealer, and now he is finally in front of me, as theatrical and intense as neighbours and former colleagues have described him.
After UN sanctions and a decade-long manhunt involving the CIA and the US drug-enforcement agency, Russian-born Bout was convicted on Wednesday of trying to sell anti-helicopter missiles to Farc rebels in Colombia.
This, presumably, put an end to a career that was as ruthless as it was efficient. Dubbed “the merchant of death” by the British government for flooding the world’s conflict zones with weapons, Bout had become a legend in the shady world of international arms trading. Over the past 20 years, whenever the TV news showed images from around the world of child soldiers, genocide, psychotic warlords and millions of displaced people rushing to escape rape and plunder, it was likely that Bout had been somewhere in the weapon-distribution chain. Liberia, Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, Colombia, Afghanistan – wherever oil, diamonds or drugs fuelled wars over resources – Bout was willing to supply all sides and glut the market with speedy deliveries of guns, rockets and grenades.
One pilot who gave evidence at the trial recalled watching Bout supervise a transport plane in east Africa as it loaded up with weapons and soldiers bound for one of the many rapacious armies slaughtering millions of people in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Bout’s rise to global arms tsar was brought about by an unlikely combination of circumstances. When the Soviet Union collapsed, a huge stockpile of weapons was left behind in the former Soviet states, just as the post-cold war geopolitical free-for-all was throwing up conflicts from Yugoslavia to Afghanistan. Bout, a former Russian military pilot, rushed to buy up former Soviet weapons at bargain prices, but he needed someone to hook him up in Africa, which was especially hungry for new weaponry.
Enter star witness Andrew Smulian, a British-educated South African with a Super Mario Brothers moustache to match Bout’s, who helped him find cash-rich warlords across the continent.
Bout also needed a convenient airport somewhere between Africa and Russia, where he wouldn’t be asked too many questions. He found the perfect hideaway in Sharjah, in the United Arab Emirates, which, like neighbouring Dubai, had a laissez-faire attitude to international human rights. Bout moved his family to the UAE in 1993 and began shipping thousands of tons of weapons a month to Africa and Afghanistan.
Often, giant Russian cargo planes left Sharjah airport without a call sign to identify where they were coming from, such was the ease with which Bout was allowed to conduct his weapons business. An Arab woman who worked at the airport described what went on: “There were always big Russian guys around the airport with skimpy little blond women around them. It was always shady. They were moving everything through there. It was the Wild West.”
When I was living in the UAE I called a Russian transport company in Sharjah to ask about its alleged involvement with Bout, but a company official hung up the phone. The next month a group of Russian men abducted the company’s chief executive from his Sharjah home. He was shot and dumped in the boot of his sports car. Nobody knows whether Bout was responsible, but the milieu of expatriate Russian gangsterism was the one in which he was operating.
As millions of civilians continued to be slaughtered by militias in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda and Liberia, the UN moved in on Bout’s operations, imposing financial and travel sanctions on him and his huge network of holding companies.
The pressure was intense. Two investigative journalists published a book called Merchant of Death, which was the basis for the 2005 film Lord of War, starring Nicolas Cage as a ruthless arms trader based on Bout.
The US government, too, was deeply concerned about Bout’s dealings in the post-9/11 world, as he was believed to be supplying both the Taliban and al-Qaeda-supporting militias in Africa. The US drug-enforcement agency got two agents to pose as Farc negotiators and set up an arms deal with Bout. The agents wore recording devices at various meetings with Bout and Smulian in Europe and Asia.
At a final meeting, in Bangkok in 2008, one of them thumped the table and shouted that his people wanted revenge against those “gringo bastards” in the US. He complained that the IRA had far superior missiles, which could take out helicopters from kilometres away, and that Farc had nothing to match them.
Had Bout done his homework he might have noticed that Farc wasn’t having much trouble catching up with IRA technology, but he had other concerns about the Colombian rebels. With the UN and the CIA pursuing him, he didn’t want to supply a militia as blatantly involved in the drugs trade as was Farc.
Smulian reassured him that Farc “trimmed their moustaches upwards”, meaning that they were genuine leftists. Smulian later told the court that Marxists and socialist groups tend to trim and comb their moustaches in an upwards direction, whereas conservatives and right-wing militias tend to comb their moustaches downwards, a description that brought laughter from the public gallery.
Bout was happy with Smulian’s political explanation of Farc’s moustaches, and the Bangkok meeting with the undercover drug-enforcement agents was set up to finalise arrangements. In Bangkok the agents were struck by Bout’s efficiency: he marched into the room, snapped open his briefcase and immediately began discussing weapons and aircraft he could deliver in the war against US interests in Colombia.
“We have a common enemy,” he told the agents, using his old tactic of showing sympathy with whichever militia he was supplying.
As soon as the meeting ended, the agents gave a signal, and Bout and Smulian were arrested and later extradited to the US to face trial at Manhattan Criminal Court.
In court, Bout looks every bit the driven, charismatic businessman remembered by former workmates and neighbours in Sharjah. He tries to conduct his own defence, gesticulating wildly to his lawyers, barking instructions in English, poring over legal documents and writing furiously in a notepad whenever prosecution witnesses say something that angers him.
Through it all sits his wife, Alla, listening from the public gallery through a headset to a privately funded Russian translator. Occasionally, Alla uses a twirling-spaghetti fork-to-mouth gesture to ask her husband if he has eaten that day, to which he invariably nods yes and makes a downward movement of his hand to tell her to relax.
On Monday this week I follow her out into the corridor, where she agrees to talk through a translator. Guarded at first, she gives a wry smile when asked if her husband truly flew roses and tulips from Africa to the UAE, as he has suggested.
“It wasn’t just flowers,” she says. “He imported and exported many things: ostriches, liquor, bathroom tiles, bathroom accessories.”
So he was busy with the ostriches and the vodka, then? “Yes,” she says, unfazed.
I ask why the world keeps picking on her husband. Does she know that he was portrayed by Nicolas Cage in Lord of War?
She smiles. “Yes. This is at the root of the problem. I liked the movie; it was good, but it is entertainment. It has nothing to do with the real Viktor Bout. I would sue the Hollywood studio, but I don’t have the energy and it requires a whole new set of lawyers.”
So Nicolas Cage is responsible for all of this? “Well, he is the one who is on trial,” says Alla Bout. “It is impossible for the Americans to separate the image in the film from the reality of my husband. They have put Nicolas Cage on trial and it is my husband who must suffer.”
In this alternative universe, she was busy raising their children in the UAE, starting up her own clothing-design business (though finding Sharjah “dull for sophisticated people”), while her husband was a short distance away at the airport, persuading confused African ostriches on to cargo planes bound for a new home in the Caucasus.
I look at her carefully. She is wearing a store-bought white blouse and red tie, with a plastic necklace. As her husband’s defence rests on the unlikely explanation that he was broke and was merely trying to scam cash from Farc, I wonder if the plastic necklace and high-street clothes are an affectation.
“No, nothing special. This is how I dress,” she says, though her husband’s wealth has been estimated at €4.4 billion.
After the closing arguments in court, there is little doubt which way the decision will go, and Bout looks increasingly agitated. His former pilots, his business partner and his own wiretapped voice have betrayed him. The jury members offer sympathetic smiles and nods during the prosecution’s closing statement, then fold arms and stiffen their expressions during the defence’s final attempt to disprove the case against their client.
In the end, they convict Viktor Bout on all four counts in just six hours. Alla Bout gives her husband a last wave and leaves the court with a shake of her head.
“Why don’t Americans go to Mexico now?” she asks in the corridor. “Because Mexicans have all the American guns down there now, sent over the border to sell to the drug dealers. That is America. I hope they are happy with what they have done to Viktor Bout, an innocent man with a good heart.”
