Angry Planet - Who Is Viktor Bout?

Episode Date: August 5, 2022

WNBA star Britney Griner is imprisoned in Russia and, apparently, the U.S. is making Russia an incredible offer to get her out. Last week Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that America had “put a substantial proposal on the table.”That proposal? The return to Russia of convicted international arms dealer Viktor Bout. This so-called Merchant of Death’s story is an amazing one. It even inspired a 2005 Nicolas Cage movie, some six years before Bout’s arrest. With us today to talk about it is Sean Williams. Williams is a journalist and the co-host of the excellent Underworld Pod, a show about the worldwide phenomenon of organized crime.Angry Planet has a substack! Join the Information War to get weekly insights into our angry planet and hear more conversations about a world in conflict.https://angryplanet.substack.com/subscribeYou can listen to Angry Planet on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Our website is angryplanetpod.com. You can reach us on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/angryplanetpodcast/; and on Twitter: @angryplanetpod.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. People live in a world with their own making. Frankly, that seems to be the problem. Welcome to Angry Planet. Hello, welcome to Angry Planet. I'm Matthew Galt. And I'm Jason Fields. WNBA star Brittany Greiner is imprisoned in Russia and, apparently, the U.S. is making Russia an incredible offer to get her out. Last week, Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, said that America had put a substantial proposal on the table. That proposal? The return to Russia of convicted international arms dealer Victor Boot. The so-called Merchant of Death's story is an incredible one. It even inspired a 2005 Nicholas Cage movie some six years before Boots arrest in 2011.

With us today to talk about it is Sean Williams. Williams is a journalist and the co-host of the excellent underworld pod, a show about the worldwide phenomenon of organized crime. Sean, thank you so much for joining us. It's a pleasure, yeah. So I'm excited to learn about all things boot that weren't covered in the documentary I saw a few years ago about him. You want to learn all about it? Yeah, oh, we're going to do that all episode, I think.

Yeah, number one. Yeah. Okay, so who is Victor Boot? That is a good question in itself. He has a lot of different, a lot of different faces and reputations depending where you're coming from. If you've seen that documentary, you mentioned an incredible collection of sort of home videotapes and the like that he accrued over the years. There's also that Lord of War movie with Nicola's Cage, which despite the provenance of the main character, which is a bit shifted around from what Boots Life was, actually does detail his career pretty accurately in many ways.

But we do know the following. He was born in Dushanbe, Tajikistan in 1967, which is then the Soviet Union, of course. he goes to work for the Soviet Air Force. He goes off to study in Moscow and he majors in Portuguese linguistics, which might sound a little bit random, but this is when Lucifer states in Africa are shaking off colonialism. There are civil wars and wars for independence going on in Angola, Mozambique. So that's where he starts off.

It gets a bit shady after that, British Sparthe. has claimed that throughout the mid-80s he was actually stationed in Rome. But by 1988, he's definitely in Mumputo, Mozambique. That's where he meets his wife, who's already married at the time. So he's a little bit of a sneaky guy, starts writing poetry and bringing her onto the boot. I can't think of a pun at the top of my head. That's not going to be sound horrible. You make sure of all a boot it?

Oh, brilliant. Yeah. That's way better than anything I could have come. But Boots' arms-dealing empire really kicks off when the Soviet Empire falls apart. So in the early 90s, obviously, the former Soviet unions are getting carved up by gangsters, oligarchs, turning into the wonderful kleptocracy that we all know and love today. And Boots sees an opportunity, right? So there is a huge, huge number of banks and banks of ammunition, weaponry, transport. You've got these huge cargo planes, you know, like the Aleutians and the Antonovs,

just sitting mothballed in warehouses all over the former Soviet Empire. Boots also got good contacts in the Soviet or former Soviet intelligence community. And he knows a lot of people in the developing world in Africa, Asia and South America. who are quite keen to get their hands on whatever he can provide. So between those three points, he kind of builds this arms-dealing empire. He starts off in the early 90s. He sets up camp in Sharjah, where I believe there is still an old Russian cargo plane sitting in the middle of the desert that's one of his main transport vehicles back then.

But then he branches out and he has front companies holding firms, all kinds of shell outfits in pretty much every country you could imagine on the planet. He doesn't just ship illegal arms shipments. He actually transports all kinds of stuff under which the arms shipments go. So he ships seafood, rare flowers, orchids, even ships UN peacekeepers to various, conflicts in the world. And in 1993, he actually ships a lot of the US soldiers who were then part of the mission in Somalia. So everyone was using this guy. He has this huge business network. And throughout that decade, he just grows and grows and grows. By 1999, he's a multi-millionaire, 30 planes, hundreds of staff, possibly billions. We're not really sure exactly how much.

then he gets called the merchant of death. He gets this moniker by the then British foreign minister. 9-11 happens. And the whole world changes suddenly this. He was sort of viewed as a sort of mystery scarlet pimpernel almost character. It wasn't seen as a very, it wasn't seen as a scandalous character in the world. I mean, this is people were using. arms dealers legally, illegally all over the planet.

But then it changes. He becomes sort of public enemy number one. And by 2007, he gets snagged in a DEA sting in Bangkok, where he is caught trying to sell various arms and rocket systems to men who are posing as Colombian FARC officers. So that's where he gets screwed over. Actually, that was a pretty standard DEA sting at the time. There was a guy that was a Syrian arms dealer that got stung in exactly the same way in Madrid just months before he did. And this guy, Monza Alcasa, by the way, he'd been used by the US to ship arms during the Iran-Contra affair.

So these guys were, there was not, they were getting used by the so-called good guys and bad guys. And it was a really sort of gray, mucky area. But by 2012 he was convicted. And yeah, he's sitting in Germany. now. Why do you think that he, his name got involved in this prisoner transfer at all? Why, why has he come up? I think that a lot of Russian foreign diplomacy, if you can call it that at the moment, is it's kind of tub-thumping, saber-rattling. It's more about the optics than any serious attempt to sort of closed doors diplomacy. So I think Russia was just trying to go for the most higher profile

character they could think of and somebody who could, let's say perhaps, represent some of the shiftier elements in the foreign policy of all countries at the time, not least the UK and the US, who had used Boot for their own purposes at one point or another in his illustrious or otherwise career. So I think that it's the notoriety more than anything else. I don't think that he really represents anything seriously harmful if he were to be released per se. I'm not sure. I mean, I'm not a international arms dealer, so I'm not sure how easy it is just to pick up where you left off if you've been in prison for the best part of two decades, but, or one decade, rather. But I think that it's headline grabbing,

it's attention grabbing. I think that's what Russia is trying to do, especially when it's trying to maybe take some attention away from some other pretty big things that it's doing at the moment. No idea what you're talking about. It's a pretty wild end

of the week in that story, but that's a different podcast entirely. One of the things that I always really felt was fascinating about him, and this really comes to light in that documentary is charting his success out of the collapse of the Soviet Empire. You talk a little bit more about how that collapse kind of creates the conditions

in which a person like him can rise to prominence. Yeah, I guess it's multifaceted, really. So from the top down, I mean, there is almost no control from the top of, former Soviet future slash current Russian Federation from the Kremlin really. It's such a huge gigantic empire. When it collapsed, it turned in, it was so many vassal states with so many different cultures and so many different governing structures, when that all kind of fell apart from the top, from Moscow.

You had infighting and attempted coups. There was all kinds of crazy shenanigans going on in Moscow itself. You've got Boris Yeltsin coming to power who's essentially an alcoholic and very incapable of leading

some of the people directly below his command who were the kind of tectonic place of power of just shifting at a crazy rate. Then you've got a country which had one of the biggest armies and militaries in human history suddenly disappearing.

And those officers and colonels and people involved in the money side of that, they're not just going to give up their only chance of making a buck, especially in a country where there's hyperinflation and the entire economy is just falling to pieces. So it's almost like, I guess, it's just a web with absolutely it's like a kind of, I don't know, like a pile on with nothing on it. It's just a bare frame of an infrastructure of a country at the time. And it just left the door open for musclemen, really, of all different stripes and backgrounds

to take over various different industries. I mean, there are people involved in the highest levers of power in the Kremlin now, like Abramovich, for example. people might know him from Chelsea but he made an absolute fortune and various, I think it was mining. He sort of took over back then. And for Boot, he was able to link together

very quickly these very informal networks of arms storage, you know, the arms that are in storage and the people who could get their hands on them and the people who wanted them. And there was a lot of money to be made there. So because there's also, in addition to the personnel, kind of as you alluded to at the end, there's warehouses full of weapons. Yeah.

All over in countries that are in dispute now, like that are former Soviet countries. So, yes, there's, it's a commodity that needs to be moved and someone can make money doing it. Yeah. But was in a position to do that. A lot of that was in Ukraine as well. A lot of that, the munitions and the arms. The small arms were in Ukraine. And a lot still are.

So, yeah. Do we, can you elaborate also on his before the collapse of the Soviet Union, like, what his job exactly was? And then what did his connection to Russian authorities continue, or what was the nature of it, as far as we know, continuing into the new era? that is a good question so he his history as a Soviet mediator translator slash spy in Africa at the time and allegedly Rome there's not a huge amount known about that everything's quite secretive he definitely has very very high up contacts within the people who were in power back then, whether he's closely tied to them throughout the 90s. I mean, it would be very difficult for him not to work within that kind of economy of patronage

and shaking hands and that kind of informal economy that the kleptocracy grew out of in Russia. So it's fair to surmise that he does have extremely high up contacts within the current Kremlin power structure as regards actually saying he is linked to, say, Putin, here and here. That's pretty much impossible, which makes it interesting that he's been used as a bargaining chip now because I wonder what he knows and who he knows and what he knows about. because he seemed to think that at one point after he, when he did a New York Times feature that sort of bumped up his profile weirdly around the world, I think he said to the reporter something like if people knew what I knew, I would have a hole right here and he points to his forehead or something like this, I think it was. So yeah, he probably knows a lot. What did Boot want? What does he want? Does he like money? Does he like power?

I think that's an interesting part of his character, right? So if you see the documentary about him, he kind of presents him, he presents as this sort of almost bumbling Chevy Chase dad-on-tore kind of character. He's just a sort of happy-go-lucky entrepreneur. I think that neither that nor the nickname Merchant of Death really fits him. I think he's completely amoral. I think he was just a businessman making money where he could. He didn't ever express any regret or moral concerns for where these arms were going

and what it was doing around the world. You didn't get your Hollywood, Nick Cage, moment of self-reflection in that character that you kind of need for the movie. he just seems like he was completely he was just a businessman and he didn't really care about anything else what were some of his greatest hits so to speak

well he was he was he he funneled a lot of arms into the huge and devastating war in the Democrat Republic of the Congo he was funding both sides of that he was he was close partner with Cessusseco

and with the rebels at the and that's one of the bloodiest conflicts in history, all over Africa, really. I think in the Hollywood movie, he's with Charles Taylor or a kind of fictional representation of Charles Taylor. I think it might be. I'm not sure if it's a real character of him. But yes, Boot was very big there as well.

Liberia, that is. Liberia, sorry, yeah, yeah. I was thinking I always get Sierra Leone Liberia. Yeah. So it was, in Africa is where his so-called greatest hits might have played out. But he did ship weapons to South America as well and some parts of Southeast Asia. So he was an equal opportunities merchant of death. I have a weird kind of a side here for us.

I wanted to get you to explain this really comes across. You've talked about it a little bit. It really comes across in the documentary. His kind of personality and his physical appearance. But as an aside, very quickly, I was looking at, I was like, how tall is he again? Looked up his height. And the first thing that comes up on Google is celebrity news from The Focus. Victor Boot Height is the merchant of death taller than Brittany Griner?

Ah, that's the need to hear. Yeah, absolutely. not to spoil it for anyone who wants to look it up, but Brittany Griner is 6-9. Victor Boot is 6 feet, so she is 9 inches taller than he is. But I'm sorry, please tell me what he looks like and kind of what his persona is.

I thought we were talked about that. There was a purely pound for pound sort of exchange. Right. We got to make sure that everyone's the right height when we're doing prisoner exchanges. So he has kind of two he has sort of two eras he has this

I mean when he's making his name he's this sort of dumpy guy in a safari shirt he really does look like a sort of 1980s hapless dad character from a movie and he's just sort of getting a strong with his pilots and stuff yeah exactly big mustache you know could be down your local bowling team

that kind of character And then when he gets arrested, I'm guessing that in a Thai prison, they don't give you the best food because he loses about half of his body weight. And he kind of looks like a bit of a hunk. He's like a big guy. He sort of looks quite sinewy almost. And I think if you've seen the pictures of him in a sort of, you know, prison jumpsuit, he looks almost the opposite of what he looks in those early videotapes. I don't know where he is on that scale these days. I don't know what the prison food is like in the U.S.,

but I'm guessing he didn't get a chance to eat and drink as much as he might have done back in the day. What made him specifically, was it just 9-11 and that the world changed? Or was there something specific he did that made him a target of the U.S.? I think he was also an embarrassment. I think he was quite keen to play the media card throughout the late 90s. anyone who's looking into his financial deals or his business holdings at the time was just finding, you know, brick wall after brick wall.

There's this constant whack-a-mole of companies everywhere from Moldova to Mozambique that he's setting up and no one could really crack it. And he kind of started taking the piss a little bit. He called to journalists and the, I think the New York Times piece that I mentioned before, he's sort of pictured seating in a sort of. sort of throne wearing a kind of cheap, shiny gangsters two-piece suit. And he just, I think that in that post-9-11 era where there was a, for better or worse, there was a, it was a lot more black and white in the morality of this world then.

I don't think that people either in the media or in the government could try to paint this guy as a sort of gray area rogue. He was either good or he was evil. And obviously being a Russian arms trafficker, he was the latter. So I think that kind of put a massive target on his back and he became a bigger priority for the authorities and that's. Yeah, a few years later, he gets mad. Do we have any idea how much money he made? And did he get to keep any of it? yeah no and possibly no so um you would imagine that someone that builds an empire like that can screw away a few million in a in a caveman islands account but it's really unclear how much he made and it's really unclear how much the illegal arms market is worth um it's like like you were

saying before, there is so much stuff being either left around or sold around the world. It's really hard to get a really accurate number on what that's worth. I read something at the time when I was really researching him hard, I saw one billion, but that seems incredibly low. And obviously, he was making legal deals and illegal deals. So it's hard to kind of put together how much his his business empire was worth. I would imagine that he's got a bunch of it left somewhere. His wife is pretty outspoken. She seems to always be dressed pretty well.

So she might have her hands on the account number. Yeah, that's one of the fascinating things about the documentary is that she's featured prominently and there's so much archival footage and home movie stuff. It really feels like a media hit that they engineered a little bit, right? Just to kind of keep his name. kind of floating around out there? Possibly so.

Yeah. I mean, once he gets busted by the feds, I think, you know, they want to just put him in a black hole and hopefully people forget about him. So, Allah, his wife, I think, yeah, there's a fair deal of keeping things in the headlines at that point. And I guess this isn't going to hurt him either. Can we talk a little bit more about the bust, the one, though, where, he got caught. This was like a setup kind of from the beginning, right? Yeah. I mean, they first,

they get to him through a guy in his entourage at the time he's living in South Africa and there's a guy who's fallen on hard times. I think he was a Brit and he ends up working in Tanzania at a hypodermic needle factory. So the authorities get to boot through him and he'll basically do anything for a few pounds at the time. So they get into his, they get basically contact with boot through this British guy. And then they try and set up a deal, I think first in Romania, they try to lure him to because Romania, they can basically whisk him away from there. But he calls their bluff. And then they set something else up in Bangkok. This is where it gets a bit weird because this guy that I mentioned before, the Syrian arms dealer, Monzaal, he was called

very high-profile Sting the previous year, like 2006, this is 2007, exactly the same thing. And US agents love posing as the FARC because they can claim that whoever gets caught trying to sell things or do deals with the FAR is attacking US citizens because the US is, I think, currently officially at war with the fuck or it's it's a live conflict so boot really should have seen this one coming um he doesn't or he he does it's so strange this is all caught on CCTV as well they're talking about it's so weird the way it's presented in the dock is it's like if i recall correctly and it's been a while since i've seen it it's like he he was on his way out but he's you know They pulled him back in for one more deal and he knew it was kind of shady, but it was so much money that they went for it anyway.

It was something like that, right? There's a way that he sits there. He can't not know that he's being filmed, even by people he's doing business with. And he just pours all this information out about the business and what you can give them. And, you know, he's talking about helicopters and surface-to-air missiles and whatever, like really heavy equipment. And he takes this thing so blithely that it's almost like he knows it's about to happen. He doesn't really care. I think at that point he felt a bit invincible that no one was really going to nail him.

Either that or he genuinely was pulled out of sort of summary of time and to do this one last job. But it is really strange. It's worth looking at that footage actually because it's something completely off about it. maybe he felt an enormous regret and just wanted to pay his sentence to society. So, yeah, that script is right in itself, yeah. So after that, he was tried and sentenced. How long was he stuck in jail for? Is he supposed to be there the rest of his life?

I think he's there for, is he done? 25 years is his prison sentence. So, I mean, for a guy born in 1967, yeah, that's a pretty long time. I guess that's 2012, so he's not going to be due out until 2037. So, yeah, he's due to spend a lot more time behind bars. So, yeah, this could be his big break, Brittany Grin. And the political turmoil, the war in Ukraine as well. So, yeah, we'll see.

So we're supposed to get Greiner back and also a U.S. Marine. They had accused of espionage, if I remember correctly. I'll ask an unfair question, pound for pound. Is this a good trade? Yeah, I mean, how tall is the U.S. Marine? right um that depends on whom you ask i mean the two it's almost like it's almost like bowing to the demands of terrorists in a way because the two people who have been imprisoned by the russian authorities uh were if you look at their cases even if you're

even if you are the most pro-Russian person on the planet and you are best friends with Vladimir Putin, I think that you have to concede that those are ridiculously harsh sentences for extremely minor, if not, non-existent offences. To compare those two people with... To compare those two people... So now I'm talking about the... There's a teacher as well. there's a guy, there's a guy from Ohio, I think, who was also locked up for marijuana use or something like this. Then there's a former US Marine espionage whether or not that's true.

We probably won't know ever. It's hard to compare the importance of someone that the whole world has chased after for years and has indirectly led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people with Britney Griner. And from a purely statecraft point of view, I think it's a pretty poor deal. I don't think that I don't want Brittany Griner to spend another day in prison. I'm not saying that at all. But I think that it's hard. It's really hard because I think Russia is doing it for the optics.

I don't think it's a, if there can be such thing as a good faith negotiation in this case. I think that if I had to, I tell you what, instead of my opinion, what I think will happen is that this deal idea will fizzle out and something else will take its place because I don't see the US in good faith having a negotiation about Victor Boot. I think that there was too big a mark on his head for too many years to let him go now. There's been a load of other people thrown into this mix as well. There's the guy that Germany currently has in a prison just outside here where I'm in Berlin, who committed a sort of political assassination in the city a couple of years ago. the Germans have reportedly been asked whether they're going to go in on this deal. And from a couple of pieces I saw, they've said absolutely not.

So I don't know. It's really, really hard to say what's going to happen here. But I would imagine that the US will push for getting a lot, lot more than a one-for-one or even a two-for-one deal for like a guy who was the biggest arms deal at the era, at least. you make a good point here actually please tell me if I'm getting something wrong here but as far as I could tell as I was reading into this the past week

nobody has officially said the name nobody in an official capacity said the name Victor Boot right is one of those things that's kind of like Blinken and others have said that a substantial proposal has been made and then through other sources

the name Victor Boot has gotten out been floated and that's why we're talking about him right yeah it's it's it's it's anonymous sources speaking in what's that messages to journalists i think um no one's going to say anything right at the top i doubt they will unless it happens right towards you know when they're both running across from opposite sides of a bridge somewhere outside finland or whatever um so yeah we don't know for sure if it's victor boot it's by the law of average is it's probably him. But yeah.

Let's say, let's say Victor Boot could set up prison. What does a 55-year-old international arms dealer that's lived in the Soviet empire and in the Russian Federation do when he gets out of prison? I think the first thing he does is speaks to a nationalist Russian screenwriter about doing a documentary or a film about. his wonderful life serving the nation. I think the second thing he does is probably hire a couple of bodyguards because

I think he'll have to live pretty much in lockstep with the Kremlin if he does get out and he will be as Mark's man checking that he's not causing any trouble as it's possible to be. I don't, like I said before, I don't really see him just like picking up the old gang and going for a joyride in Sharjah and dropping off some A-bomb somewhere. Like, I think that he will be put out to pasture if he is let out. And you'll probably see him take on his former shape a little bit more. He's probably drinking a lot of vodka and eating some lovely liny or whatever.

Sean Williams, thank you so much for coming on to Angry Planet and talking all about it with us. I'm so sorry. That's the last one. I just had to fit one last one. I just had to get one more in. Yeah. Thanks, guys. That's all for this week.

Angry Planet listeners, as always. Angry Planet is me, Matthew Galt, Jason Fields, and Kevin Nodell. It's created by myself and Jason Fields. He recently pointed out that it's been about seven years since the show first started over at Reuters under the name of War College. It's been a wild ride. You like us and you want to support us. Please go to Angry Planet pod.com or AngryPlanet.substack.com. Kick us $9 a month.

You get commercial-free versions of the mainline episodes and bonus episodes as they come out. We just released one a little bit earlier. check in on Afghanistan and how that's been going since America left. Spoilers, not well. We've got another one we've recorded that will be a bonus that is about war crimes and the Nuremberg trials. And how we even got to a place in culture where we thought of things that happened in war as crimes. That'll be releasing a little bit later this month. We will be back again next week with another conversation about conflict on an angry planet.

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