Bout had been in US custody since 2008, when an undercover sting operation led by the Drug Enforcement Agency arrested him in Thailand. Bout’s greater reputation makes it difficult to separate fact from fiction when it comes to the arms dealer’s biography. Much of his early life is unknown, but he is believed to have been born in 1967 in then-Soviet Tajikistan. Booth trained as a linguist at a Moscow military institute before serving in the Red Army as a translator in Angola. Like many of the rising oligarchs and tycoons that emerged from the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Bout took advantage of the economic chaos that followed. When the Soviet Union dissolved, the superpower’s military equipment ended up scattered across the 15 new nations created by the breakup. These countries had neither the money with which to pay an army, nor the infrastructure to maintain the stockpile of weapons they had just inherited. Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout could be involved in a prisoner swap to bring Brittney Griner and Paul Whelan back to the US.REUTERS Victor Booth saw an opportunity. Bout assembled a fleet of ex-Soviet cargo planes—huge Antonov and Ilyushin craft—and began shipping weapons and other goods around the world. Bout came to American attention in the late 1990s as he supplied weapons to the war zones of Congo, Liberia and Sierra Leone, the New York Times reported. But Western intelligence agencies, including the CIA, were tracking him in the early 1990s as his African transport routes carried everything from flowers and chickens to UN peacekeepers and African heads of state. Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout was taken into US custody in 2008. REUTERS In the decades that followed, his client list grew prolifically. According to the Guardian, Bout allegedly supplied weapons to Hezbollah. He reportedly dropped weapons on both the Taliban and their enemies, the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan. Through a front company, he reportedly even won a contract to deliver FedEx packages to Baghdad. Booth’s film exploits are occasionally cited as the inspiration for Nicolas Cage’s 2005 film Lord of War, which follows Yuri, a fictional Russian-born arms dealer who runs a massive arms supply business around the world. Bout was arrested in Thailand in 2008 after being lured there by US DEA agents posing as Colombian guerrillas. He was extradited to the US in 2010 over Russian objections and eventually convicted by a Manhattan jury in 2011 of conspiring to sell weapons to a designated foreign terrorist group.
