It Could Happen Here - Who is Viktor Bout and why might the US trade him for Brittney Griner

Episode Date: August 31, 2022

James, Gare, and Shereen talk about the “merchant of death,” prisoner swaps, the international arms trade, and Bout’s weird home videos.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadowbride. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about how the world is falling apart, and sometimes about how to put it together. But today, mostly about the people who are accelerating the falling apart. Garrison's with me,ireen's with me we are talking today about the merchant

of death the lord of war victor boot uh so we should probably start off by talking about why we're talking about victor boot uh victor boot's always an interesting topic of conversation, but he's come up recently because he's one of the people who has been proposed to be exchanged for two US citizens who are being held by Russia, one being Brittany Griner and one being Paul Whelan. So I'm guessing folks are pretty familiar with the Brittany Griner situation. If not, what's the

TLDR on that? Yeah, TLDR is Brittany Griner is a two-time Olympic gold medalist. She's a basketball player and she often plays off-season basketball in Russia, which tells you a lot about disparities in wages

between men and women in professional sport. And unfortunately, when she was traveling to Russia, I guess she had a weed vape cartridge in her bag. And so she was arrested and accused of drug smuggling. Oh my God. Yeah. Which, yeah, like it's, as you as as we go through this it will become very clear that i don't think it's controversial to say that the russian state engages in hostage taking right

oh for sure yeah i i don't think that's like a controversial statement this lady is not drug smuggling yeah i too would probably want to take drugs if i had to spend my off seasons in russia but like it's so transparent what they're doing it's like they don't even attempt to not it's just yeah it's they're not being sneaky about it they're very clearly being like we're taking this person hostage yeah and we will hold this person hostage until you give us the person that we want back right like and even uh so there was a previous guy um he was a marine held by russia so there's paul wheeler that's the other guy right uh paul wheelen was a marine he had a he didn't have a dishonorable discharge uh he had what's called, I think, an other than honorable discharge.

He was doing a couple of things. He was embezzling shit from the United States government, which is pretty based. Yeah, yeah, we should all be so lucky. And he was also writing bad checks. His checks were bouncing. So he got booted from the marine corps for that and was doing some kind of private security work it seemed like so he was arrested in russia in 2019 another former marine uh called trevor reed was arrested and his case is just almost comic like well it's not comic

but the guy was driving with his girlfriend at the time they've been on a big night out they were in a car he got drunk got belligerent started getting fighty uh and they pulled over and some of his mates were like look if you don't calm down we're gonna have to call the police like you keep fighting with us they called the police the police were like right we'll take you in you'll sleep it off deal with you in the mornings kick you out and then at some point the next morning the fsb turned up uh which is like the inheritor of the legacy of the kgb and we're like oh trevor why did you attack the cops last night why why did you do that why would you assault the police the russian police and he was like what are you talking about bro and uh they were like yeah you're going to jail you're a spy uh yeah so they the u.s government

biden under biden swapped him out uh and the two who are left well there are other people left obviously but uh who was swapped out for for the other guy trevor reed uh i'm not sure who was traded uh for trevor reed i should look it that real quick it's the most like weird i mean nothing is too strange at this point but like when you really think about it these countries like trading people yes so strange to me yeah he was uh he was uh he was uh traded out for someone who was in here on drug crafting charges i guess um so they they switch out reed right but reed and wheelan have become close in their captivity and reed's been a big advocate for having wheelan released uh wheelan's kind of yeah you're taking the piss if you think britney grinder's a drug

trafficker but wheelan does have like five different nationalities uh i think he's he's got american he's got canadian he might only have four i think he's got American, he's got Canadian. He might only have four. I think he's got British and Irish. So he's a former service member in the United States. And like this guy was broke, right? He was bouncing checks. As we'll learn in this episode,

one of the things intelligence agencies tend to like is people who are bouncing checks like those of those people are easy to recruit right like if you're if you're if you're trying to buy shit that you can't afford uh you might be easier to recruit if you uh if they offer you money right so uh it's i'm not saying he's a spy i've got no idea whatsoever i've got no unique insight into that but uh i am saying that like his case is a little bit more interesting so the united states has proposed trading victor boot for both grinder and wheelan that was kind of doing the rumor wheel for a while but a russian source confirmed it last weekend so that's why we want to talk about uh victor boot today it's spelled b-o-u-t

by the way if anyone's looking it up if people are familiar with uh victor boot at all it will be probably from the nicholas cage film lord of war uh have you seen that either of you i have not no i subjected chris to it uh it now Chris can't make the podcast so that's good we'll be Nicolas Cage free in this episode it is a pretty epic film it's a good film wait does Nicolas Cage play boot?

oh fuck yeah I need to see that I wish I wish I could share with you just the scene where he just turns to the camera and says something like, there's 550 million guns in the world. That's one for every 12 people. And my only question is, how do we arm the other 11?

But at some point, he just puffs on a fat cigar in the middle of that. Does he have an accent? No, he doesn't do a Russian accent, actually. That's disappointing. Allegedly, that's a real quote from from victor boot by the way well if you can find a clip we can slice it in yeah i can find a clip i got one uh i got one lined up on my computer i will uh send it to our fair editors there are over 550 million firearms in worldwide circulation. That's one firearm for every 12 people on the planet.

The only question is, how do we arm the other 11? It's great. It's classic Nicolas Cage. He can't do anything wrong. So true. Ghostwriter never happened. I don't know what you're talking about does it does not matter nope it's been erased from my memory so aside from uh nicholas cagey's excellent betrayal the film isn't shockingly isn't that accurate uh notably he didn't actually grow up in brighton beach old victor um he grew

up in dushanbe in uh that's uh it was in the tajik province of the union of soviet socialist republics right now it's in tajikistan it's the capital uh and we know well there's a lot of stories about this guy it's very hard to confirm which of them is true uh there are he's clearly told as many background stories as he's met new groups of people when he's moved around the world and as his mom is on the scene uh so we do know that his mother is still alive i think she's 85 uh she will occasionally pop up in the russian press uh and ask joe biden to let her poor innocent son go, which is very amusing.

His dad, we know, was a car mechanic. So he's not like a child of privilege, particularly. But at some point, he seems to have joined the Soviet military, probably the Air Force, and he trained at their military academy of languages. And this guy's capacity for language is insane like he can go down the shops in like 15 different languages he can speak fluently in half a dozen uh he he can you know order a sandwich in like 20 languages um yeah i want that power yeah don't we all it seems to be like um these people who like thrive uh in in like non-state activities in crime and stuff like do seem to like having a capacity for language

seems to be a massive benefit in that world and you hear about quite a lot um later on when he's in prison in thailand he learns sanskrit um he doesn't bother to learn thai like he doesn't want people to think they can understand what he's saying but so he's like uh fuck it i'll learn sanskrit while i'm here like i'm running out of options so yeah he's got this amazing capacity for language which probably ends up with him being a spook uh it's not we like we it's not cast iron that he worked for the kgb but it seems that way we know that he was bouncing around in angola as part of the civil war there so um it's it's unlikely that he was a pay clerk or like the guy who changed the tires on the airplanes uh They didn't send him to Angola.

And when the Soviet Union collapses, Victor is in Angola, right? Or at least he gets to Angola pretty quickly. Not, I think, because it's the place he wanted to be, but because it was one of the places that had the least regulations on civilian use of military aircraft so this is where he goes from kgb dude who speaks a lot of languages to beginning to be this international arms dealing sort of uh god uh and he does that by buying these antonov planes a people might not

be familiar with antonov It's just a giant plane. It's a huge cargo plane. Obviously a little bit outdated now, but you'll still see them. But this is like the Russian big hauler, right? It carries a lot of stuff to a lot of places. And by getting those and having absolutely zero morals,

he launches his career. And he's not just selling weapons certainly to start with he's um american people don't get this like we have this british stereotype of like the wheeler dealer um as epitomized by like delboy in the tv series called only fools and horses but he's like a market trader he'll buy whatever he thinks he can score cheap and take it wherever he thinks he can sell expensive right take it wherever he thinks he can sell expensive right so he's moving like frozen chicken at one point he's moving flowers from south africa and like throughout his career is this massive international arms dealer he'll just be like oh chicken over there is super cheap right let's move that chicken over here we can make a killing like

uh he doesn't i think like we should stress he's not like a guy who's obsessed with uh with like guns and weapons and killing people i don't think i think he's a guy who has absolutely zero morals and it's just like well there's a high profit margin on guns so that's what i'll move but i don't think it's like there's there seems to be no moral angle to his his existence um like very quickly after doing that he's selling weapons into democratic republic of congo he's selling into liberia in the conflict there sierra leone uh rwanda after the genocide he's there right um but he's also like transporting french troops to rwanda uh later he will be

doing contracts for united states government for the british government for most of the western governments that participate in the forever war right and it's very funny actually like if you're in the phase when the united states is looking for him which is a bit later when he becomes like a wanted man uh he keeps doing these different shell companies right to avoid things like sanctions and the way that he uh the way that the united states department of justice publishes their list they'll be every year or six months so i'll be like right no one can do business with these companies they're're bad. They're connected to arms dealing. And then the United States Department of Defense will go down its list of people it does business with

and be like, oh, shit, there's like six of them who we're like integrally relying on. And then he'll just change the name. And so it's fine because they change the name. And then it's like Tom and Jerry or Whack-A-Mole. You know, he keeps popping up with these new companies. and Jerry or Whack-A-Mole. You know, he keeps popping up with these new companies.

So he sort of really gets this massive boost around 2001, right? With 9-11. So 9-11 is a big win for him. Well, that's the episode, everybody. That's the soundbite. That's the soundbite, yeah.

So he's super tight with Ahmed Shah Massoud. People are familiar, presumably, with what we call the Northern Alliance, right? The people in Afghanistan who the United States backed to fight the Taliban. He'd been selling weapons to Massoud for a while. And he seems to actually genuinely be friendly with Massoud.

He talks about him, and we'll get on to how we know him talking about him in a little bit he talks about him very fondly he he's he's a big masood guy and so he claims he doesn't trade with the taliban and he he holds his claim up for a long ass time until a crew his plane and crew are held by the taliban uh at an airport in afghanistan which like how did they get there victor um there's two really like there's two stories about how they escape the one story is that like the taliban require them to maintain this plane every so often because they want to be able to use the plane right so um these these russian guys or these these contractors for victor for boot are doing maintenance on the plane and then they like in sort of like a michael cain movie style like cosh their guards over the head

jump start the plane and just pin it to the end of the runway take off and fly to freedom and that's the narrative that was like popular until victor boot was like nah like i know all those people i just called and was like do you want to do business with victor boot or do you want to hold this plane hostage because it's one or the other and you're fucked without me and seem yeah it's a shame i like i like story one better i like story two story two is objectively in my opinion a little bit more badass on his part you know what i mean yeah that's the power he has yeah oh yeah i think when this this guy clicks his fingers the world uh the world listens like i certainly did until he was in prison learning sanskrit right yeah uh if you're the pilot there's

there was an interview i found on youtube with one of his pilots as well he's like yeah man you can't do that for very long he's like we're constantly landing like we're being shot at when we're landing we're being shot at when we're taking off like we get on the ground and just like yeet everything out the back and then just take off again and like we make a ton of money because no one else is prepared to do that but probably isn't great for your long-term wellbeing. So he's, by like this sort of peak of his career in the early 2000, he's got hundreds of employees. He's got 60 aircraft and he's moved his operation

to Sharjah, which is a very sort of conservative emirate. We're still one of the dry emirates, right? But it has what's called a free trade zone. So on top of all his other shit, he's also not paying import-export taxes. So he's based there, which seems to allow him to operate pretty much without impunity. He's moving a ton of small arms from Ukraine.

So at the end of the Soviet Union, Ukraine makes a big thing of being like, we're returning our nuclear weapons, right? People will be familiar with this. They don't want their nukes anymore. And but they also amassed just an incredible amount of small arms right so that's like guns bombs grenades things like that right machine guns and because a bunch of of the what was the soviet military small arms are stored in ukraine that becomes like the nexus for the black market and we think the boot is ethnically ukrainian and he certainly seems to

have just been shoveling weapons out of ukraine to conflicts in largely in africa right like if there's a civil war that you know about in africa or one that you don't know about probably both sides were using his weapons like that's a that's a fair assumption to make and by the late 90s early 2000s he's selling everywhere um and using his business to launder money for other legal activities and he was he was linked to the qaddafi regime he was also selling to rebels in libya um so it's a huge operation he's the go-to guy for uh weapons right and he sort of comes they they interpol go after him in 2002 uh like there's a belgian warrant for him but belgium ends up having to drop their case because it's unclear where he lives they can't be like yeah he's a resident here he's a belgian resident because interpol are like now this this guy keeps moving around like he it's not clear if you have

jurisdiction um central african republic also i think had a warrant out for him but um they haven't i guess been successful uh in serving that warrant um and in the belgian when they dropped their case they noted that it would be impossible and very time consuming to prosecute him uh which is kind of funny given that he's doing a lot of crimes but despite this in 2003 he does this incredible piece with the new york times like this thousands of words profile interview of the world's largest arms dealer uh it's like a relic of another era of journalism like they send this writer all around the world to like look for victor boo to try and find victor wow what year

was this 2003 um that was a different era that was completely different yeah yeah that is uh yeah it's a shame you look at i look i looked at it and i just couldn't help but being like this but they just let this person expend a shit ton of flights. Wow, like this doesn't happen anymore. Such a shame. I would love to go to a Russian nightclub and drink carrot juice with arms dealers. On the job.

Yeah, yeah. And then bill that to the New York Times. Yeah, in the piece he drinks carrot juice. He's vegetarian. He calls himself a scapegoat uh and a family man uh he's what a hero yeah he's just an everyday joe trying to sell some kalashnikovs to people who are doing genocide um he is go ahead is this interview how we know a lot about him yes that and his uh this man loves a handy cam he loves a home video right international crime spree is the best idea we ever had yeah quirky little dude but he's not doing crimes in his videos he just just looks like the guy from The Office

who is just like the most mundane dude in an ill-fitting suit. He just looks like a salaryman who drives a regular car and on the weekends likes to go to Buffalo Wild Wings and watch sports events. He goes on the water slide with his like white ass body and pot belly at one point in one of these home videos and like he just yeah he just strikes you as the most boring family guy like he's not he seems to be like morally opposed to doing drugs uh at one point like it's fascinating and bizarre and i'm assuming he has children if

he's a family man i think he does have children he certainly has a wife his wife is out there uh his wife is pretty vocal about uh let let let my man go right right right yeah so i'm pretty sure he does have children yeah probably more than we know about. But maybe not. Maybe he's a wife guy. Well, I just think it's funny in these home videos, he's in them. Like he's, you know what I mean? But like no one else, no family members. It's just him on a slide or something.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That would be pretty, yeah, that would be pretty, pretty entertaining. entertaining. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora.

An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters, to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian.

Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom.

At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly.

I am talking to a felon right now, and I cannot decide if I like him or not. Those were some callers from my call-in podcast, Therapy Gecko. It's a show where I take real phone calls from anonymous strangers all over the world as a fake gecko therapist and try to dig into their brains and learn a little bit about their lives. I know that's a weird concept,

but I promise it's pretty interesting if you give it a shot. Matter of fact, here's a few more examples of the kinds of calls we get on this show. I live with my boyfriend and I found his piss jar in our apartment. I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails. I have very overbearing parents. Even at the age of 29, they won't let me move out of their house.

So if you want an excuse to get out of your own head and see what's going on in someone else's head, search for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's the one with the green guy on it. So, 2003, the article clearly has these 2003 vibes like it's named after a george bernard shaw play called arms and the man uh and it's just like epic and meandering and very long uh and he talks about in the article he's like look they're using me as a scapegoat like this is a thing that like the reason they that it's very hard to prosecute victor boot is because

there are not that many laws against arms dealing and the reason there are not that many laws against arms dealing is because it's integral to how we do foreign policy. We are hosed without people like Victor Booth. And that's the other side of this coin that, yeah, we need a Nicolas Cage bad guy to pin this stuff on. And yeah, he did some pretty horrific things uh but he what he's doing is not that like abnormal and it's not that always illegal um as we'll see when the u.s has to enter into like gross entrapment to arrest this guy uh and he is right that like is he really the biggest arms dealer in the world or is that like dick cheney or you know lockheed martin or uh friends of the podcast raytheon uh like is he really any more evil than like i live in san diego right or most of the companies i just mentioned have

offices here i rode past one of them today you know, and those people also go on the water slide with their kids. And he does have a kid. He has a daughter, one daughter or child. I don't know. Born in the Emirates and they're 28. So who knows where they are now? Yeah, but he's a great dad. He's been in jail for a lot of their life, actually.

That's sad. Yeah. He has a wife too ala is his wife uh uh just she was she's a fair bit younger than him um so also he's really lost weight in jail and he's looking pretty good uh if you've seen a recent picture of him but with a mustache and stuff uh he's really he's having a glow up uh i think in jail are you thirsty on an international arms dealer pretty thirsty for victor here yeah look at that mustache tell me you could say no to that and one of the things he says in his interview which is interesting is if i told you everything

i know i'd get the red hole right here and then points to the middle of his forehead so I wonder what he meant by that yeah this guy's a poet yeah he has a way with words yeah and he's got some of these great one-liners um which it's people have recently like reinterpreted that to be like does he know some shit about uh putin which uh is why russia is so keen to exchange him uh or is he just saying that like like he might possibly have something like signed by someone who's today a senator right like engaging in business with one of his companies or something like that because that's how this works and so yeah i don't know he's rich and powerful people have probably done business with him, whether they knew it or not. And he's aware of this.

So that article really bounces him up in the sort of world bad guys list, which is when Nick Cage steps in, reads that, makes a whole just does a whole vibe about it that moves the person to brighton beach um because i guess american audiences don't know to where tajikistan is yeah tajikistan no less uh so if you're looking for a film uh the notorious mr boot 2014 that's the home videos uh sundance film festival award Sundance Film Festival Award winner just depicting his dad adventures I think it's worth a wait are you serious it was at Sundance yeah it's classic yeah I'm pretty sure

I can't tell if you're fucking with me I remember this all the time and I will believe anything at this point so that sounds crazy to me 2014 film yep screened at Sundance Film Festival I will believe anything at this point. So that sounds crazy to me. 2014 film. Yep.

Screenshot at Sundance Film Festival. Holy shit. Yep. It's a classic. It's got some real scenes. Seriously. 80% on Rotten Tomatoes. Yep.

And then if you watch the trailer, actually, there's some pictures of him dad dancing with his partner at the time. It's good stuff. I would recommend it. There's pictures of him around, lots of weapons. The notorious Mr. Boot. The notorious Mr. Boot. It's a goodie.

It's very, very bizarre. This guy is just a quirky little dude. What a little yes war crimes is a quirky little dude yeah yeah yeah there's a picture in return you know what i mean it's not like he's just i don't know uh-huh do you expect him to be like evil and i don't know smoking in a dark room all the time? No, this is how they get away with it. They're quirky little dudes. Yep.

Yeah, like you would see this guy, right? Like you go to the lounge, like I've spent a decent amount of my life at lounges in like small airports in like, I don't know, Middle East, Africa, whatever, trying to fly cheap. You would see this dude in the lounge and you wouldn't be like, oh, there goes an international arms dealer. fly cheap you would see this dude in the lounge and you wouldn't be like oh there goes an international arms dealer it'd be like that man is in uh semiconductors or you know yeah that works in his favor yeah yeah like he's not he's not the joker um and no he he is a joker though you can see him having some good old japes in this film. Highly recommend. When Nicolas Cage plays him, he doesn't even have a mustache.

I know. That's disappointing, isn't it? Because that is his trademark feature. Well. Oh, okay, okay. So technically the character Nicolas Cage plays is a fictional illegal arms dealer. That's correct. Based on the stories of Victor Boat and other real life arms dealers and smugglers.

Okay. They want to play it both ways. Yeah. So I've just got to bit in a trailer where he's just like eye contact with the camera, hip thrusting, and it's troubling. Wow. Okay. Well, thank you for that description. That's alright. That's alright, guys.

On the cutting edge of journalism here. Yes, that's right right all right so we should return to uh to the narrative and not my description of um of victor beat uh dancing so um his arrest is kind of fascinating and again like his arrest is one of those things where you're like oh this is terrible and then you realize that again we do this shit all the time right um so he to understand his arrest you've got to first understand this guy andrew smoolean uh former he's british he's born in britain but he's a south african air force officer uh then he goes into commercial flying but at some point he's turned by their intelligence agency so he's

delivering shipments of stuff and then doing a little bit spying on the side spying on the side yeah yeah it's who's among us hasn't found themselves doing a little side hustle yeah everyone has their side hustles a bit of side spying for the uh i don't know if he was doing in the apartheid era but probably he's certainly in their military in the apartheid era yikes yeah smooly is not not a man with morals i don't think uh as we'll find out so uh smoolyan uh has fallen on hard times by 2007 and is working in a hypodermic syringe factory in tanzania and that's just a fact that I found without context and I haven't felt any need to research further.

And at that point, Smoli is contacted by two FARC generals, right? Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, FARC, right? Left wing Marxist guerrilla group that have been fighting in the jungles for,

I think they're one of the world's longest insurgencies for decades. So these FARC generals are like, hey, Smolian, come and meet us in a tiki bar in Curacao. And we will have a chat. Smolian, right, he wants to get out the syringe factory. So he's all about it. have a chat uh smillian right he wants to get out the syringe factory so he's all about it he hops on the plane and uh they meet in a tiki bar right which is obviously a good place to do an arms deal um very i mean movies are right about that then a lot of movies have stuff going down

in tiki bars yep that's uh that's the one thing that was factually correct in the whole cinematic universe of victor boot so um they're in the tiki bar. Now, it should be noted that these two FARC generals, shockingly, are not really FARC generals. They are DEA assets. In fact, they have been high-ranking officers in the Colombian Armed Forces, but they've decided to pivot to a career in selling cocaine.

And in that career pivot, they've unfortunately come into contact with the DEA, which is generally not good. Yeah. Right. They just trying to sell cocaine and do war crimes. Yeah. Yep.

They're just vibing and killing indigenous people. Probably they, they have a pretty rough record in the Colombian military. It's fair to say. Yikes. Uh, so DAC salmon is like, yep,

those are our people. Uh uh and gives them a ton of money citizenship amnesty for their families i believe and turns them right asked him to pretend to be fark generals which they're like yep can you can you spell the word you're saying what is the what is that word yeah f-a-r-c fuerzas armadas revolucionarios de colombia thank you yeah like sorry f yeah f-a-r-c fuck i might have got the act i am i am someone that does not know what that is so i will be honest about that sorry i yeah no there's no reason to unless you're like a i don't know a global conflict understander slash dork uh they're very nice people some of them actually um they've started a microbrewery now um what yeah they have

a microbrewery i don't believe anything you say fucking i will send you a story i wrote on their microbrewery i'm like scarred by robert he just tells me all these crazy things that are not true and i believe i'm not like ro. I'm a man of the truth. I'm going to, I will drop it in the chat. Like, yeah, they definitely have started a microbrewery. These are such weird little doofs. That's what I'm saying. Okay.

Actually, the person who runs a microbrewery is a woman. Oh, good. Good for her. We love. Feminism. We love a girl yeah yeah yeah they they love a girl boss so fuck we're very committed to gender equality they had women there in their uh in their military uh yeah we'll do an episode of robert and i want to go to their microbrewery it's one of our goals why not sure yeah we've we've got far. No one's called us out. Yeah.

Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. with supernatural creatures.

I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba.

He looked like a little angel. I mean, you look so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian.

Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Cuba. Mr. González wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom.

At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian González story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly. I am talking to a felon right now, and I cannot decide if I like him or not. Those were some callers from my call-in podcast, Therapy Gecko.

It's a show where I take real phone calls from anonymous strangers all over the world as a fake gecko therapist and try to dig into their brains and learn a little bit about their lives. I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's pretty interesting if you give it a shot. Matter of fact, here's a few more examples of the kinds of calls we get on this show. I live with my boyfriend, and I found his piss jar in our apartment. I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails. I have very overbearing parents. Even at the age of 29, they won't let me move out of their house.

So if you want an excuse to get out of your own head and see what's going on in someone else's head, search for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's the one with the green guy on it. so anyway interestingly the u.s government had just done exactly the same thing to monza al-qasa who's a syrian arms dealer they've done the same we're two fuck generals we would like to buy these weapons and in the discussion the quote-unquote fuck generals are like we would like to buy these weapons and in the discussion the quote-unquote fuck generals are like we would like to buy these weapons to kill yankees we want to kill americans it would be great to have this gun with a sniper scope so we could see if they're american before we shoot them uh just like this is where this is where we get to like the entrapment right and swilliam's like yeah whatever bro like you want guns i know a guy uh and they're like right? And Smoolyan's like, yeah, whatever, bro. You want guns? I know a guy.

And they're like, to kill the American, sir? And he's like, yeah, dude. Oh my god. Whatever you need. Okay, it's getting weird. But then Smoolyan, master of stealth that he is, goes, okay, so my guy is Victor Boot.

V-I-K-T-O-R-B-O-U-T. Oh my god. That is a poor move on smoothie's part um so smoothie drops a minute they organize a meeting right the two generals quote-unquote generals and victor in a hotel in bangkok and that is where uh the the vict Boots story sort of ends, at least the free Victor Boots story ends. So they go through the deal, and again, he's being like, I can't believe he conducted his whole life like this

because his degree of concern with security is minimal. He'll be like, you guys are getting 5,000 AK-47s, also some surface-to-air missiles and like writing it on the hotel notepad. Amazing. Yeah, like normally this isn't, like the DEA rolled a Yakuza arms dealer recently and they had to explain in court

that like when he was talking about cake and ice cream, he meant like surface-to-air missiles. Wow. same for me actually yeah yeah i'm just gonna head down to the uh to the cake shop uh that guy fucked up by sending a selfie of himself with an anti-tank weapon to the jesus christ yeah yeah uh it's good it's a good picture this i'll send you that picture because he does look like an international supervillain. Okay, yes. He has blue aviators, I think.

Oh my gosh. Some people know they're playing the part, you know what I mean? Yeah, you got to lean in. He leans in. So, Bout is in this room, right? He's negotiating with his two Colombian friends. And in come the Thai police, right? He's negotiating with his two Colombian friends and in come the Thai police, right? It's interesting.

The way the DEA say it, they're like, he put his hands in a bag and we all pointed our guns at him and we're like, Victor, no! It's over! And like,

they thought he was going to pull a gun on them. But like, in the video, he kind of is just like, oh. And then he goes, I think he says the game is up he has some like bond villain like line wow of course is he the poet what did i say yeah man of words flowery yeah yeah that's

why they're letting him out for his contribution to art i do what if there's ever like an obituary i want he was a poet shereen just like hey i i yes quote me on that sure acclaimed podcaster who says red dot to describe a gunshot come on on his gravestone he was the poet nothing else yeah just a booth poet had no other gigs i was aware of water slide enthusiast um so they arrest him right uh they hold him in thailand for a while he fights the extradition he's like i'm just a businessman i don't know what you're talking about i just want to sell you cake and ice cream or whatever uh and eventually they bring him back to the united states they try him in this federal jurisdiction in New York where they try nearly every big terrorism case like this, right?

Like the recent 09A case was in the same jurisdiction. So like... That makes sense. Yeah, they always do it in New York. I think that his trial was like September or October. Like in the... You know know you're trying someone like seven years after 9-11 six years after 9-11 in new york around the anniversary of what happened of 9-11 right so people are pretty uh and then you're like and this dude sold weapons to the

taliban and he moved gold out of afghanistan for al-Qaeda. And he's pretty screwed. Cancel culture strikes again. Yeah. The work mob came for Victor. His wife says outside the court, which I thought was interesting, that they're trying Nicolas Cage, not my husband. Oh, shit. That's actually a really interesting statement in terms of media perceptions of people.

No, 100%. I agree with that. Yeah, they do not go after this guy until the New York Times and then, what's it called? The Nicolas Cage movie, Lord of War. Yeah. And then you can't separate, I don't think, the like, look, he's a piece of shit.

I mean, he did make a movie about himself though well he didn't make that no someone else got that they already said 2014 like seven years after he gone down oh okay i didn't look at the date the uh yeah oh no sorry i was like i that's why i was imagining him completely different up until just this second oh yes no my mistake no no that's outstanding the sundance film was yeah like seven seven years later the notorious uh victor boot it would have been amazing if he'd made tomatoes yeah get that up with our listenership we could get it up to the 90s i reckon um get in there give it the thumbs up uh so i think they probably did right like in in organizations like the dea and these big federal uh law enforcement agencies there are a lot of people who want top

jobs and i think one of the ways to advance is getting one of these big busts right i i have very little federal law enforcement understanding but it strikes me that they kind of, they had the DEA agent in charge of his arrest on ABC, I think, or on 60 Minutes or something. The guy talks about himself in the third person at one point on there. It's a bit weird. Ugh. One of those.

It's clearly like a career-defining thing, right? And I really don't think it would have been if like, no one made a film about Montserrat montreal casa right he was selling a lot of weapons too and they didn't you know they didn't trap him in the same way actually but it's not such a big thing um so boot goes to jail uh he's been in jail about 12 years now and now the biden administration seems to want rid of him or at least know that he's worth offering. They offered him in trade for Snowden, apparently. Yeah, and Russia didn't take that. I think it's probably that they see more value in Snowden.

But they seem to have offered him again in this Griner-Wheelan trade. It's still unclear if Russia will accept him or not. Like we said before, it's a very weird practice to be like Pokemon cards. Yeah, or literally like the NBA, the thing that Brady Griner works for. It's like you're literally creating a fantasy team or whatever the shit of of prisoners and or people that you want like hostages yeah and it's it's interesting to see like russia kind of just like i don't know if they sort of want to be like look how much we owned you like we made you trade the world's most notorious arms dealer for a basketball player like if they if they just see the kind of uh i don't know the ridiculousness of what they've

done is somehow a win for them uh or if russia wants him back because he has some kind of intel that they're afraid of i'm not sure if that's the case he lived in moscow for a while but he uh i don't know how close he was to the Russian state. I'm sure he knows some stuff. It's almost, there's not much of a state in the world that he doesn't have something on. Right. So it's possible.

I guess he's kind of served his purpose to the United States, which was this like, you know, we can find you anywhere. We can come after you anywhere. We can arrest you. And I don't want to be like like pro arms dealer uh on on the podcast but like on the pod yeah off the podcast completely different yeah on mic james is gonna say that yeah yeah we're not technically pro arms dealing yeah this is not not a pro-arm

stealing podcast technically yeah that would be a good place for an ad pivot wouldn't it but do you know who is pro-arm stealing yeah yeah the based on i don't know how long we have left so an ad may not make sense here but we can leave the joke in to prove that we're funny yeah exactly that we sometimes think about it yeah yeah yeah we're considerate and funny yeah yeah and kind and uh i'm not pro arms dealer and most importantly yeah yeah so victor is uh in prison he's been in prison for about 12 years uh he's got he got 25 years the judge actually was like look you've not proved he was going to do any crimes other than the ones you kind of talked him into like a fair yeah yeah woke judge

um so because again when they're meeting him they're like we want to kill americans can you make sure the scopes are high enough magnification so we can see they're americans there's some specific dialogue about the sniper scopes to like to to ensure and they're trying to get surface to air missiles as well right and surface to air missiles are one of the harder things to acquire in the international arms market and so he's gonna supply those and they claim they're gonna shoot down american airliners and do a terrorism yeah that'll definitely get them mad yeah that'll get well but he only says that because the two dea plants ask him for that yeah yeah i don't think the dude would have batten either way i mean typical fed behavior right like yeah they walked in there in their cool

uh flannel shirts and he did hey who's excited about doing crimes i don't want to do a crime let me escalate the level of crime so he's in prison they've offered to trade him uh it remains to be seen like i don't know how relevant he will be if he comes out it's interesting like the area i'm most familiar with um off the books firearms transactions is in Myanmar right Robert and I've spent some time writing about that and the price of weapons going small arms going to rebels in Myanmar is insane right now like it's incredibly high and so maybe taking him out has changed that market a bit I don't know you'd think someone would have stepped in

to fill that gap in the time that he'd been out of the game you'd think especially after the giant clusterfuck of leaving Afghanistan by the United States

a year ago we'd have dumped a lot more weapons onto the market so what you're saying is there's a job opening yeah yeah yeah

get your resume ready listeners yeah you know learn those languages that's what i'm saying go to these other applicants yeah yeah learn sanskrit put on your resume no one will call you on it it'll be fine it's okay to lie about sanskrit unless you're i guess going to theological college and but yeah he's learned sanskrit he's learned a bunch of other languages in prison he's probably writing poems in there right now oh 100 yeah he's probably dropping a book is what he'll do he'll come out he'll drop a book honestly i'm not i wouldn't be surprised by

that if that was true i would read a book written by one of the world's most famous international arms dealers yeah and poets and that's right and poets yeah hey based on what the quotes are that he's given so far i'm sure he has really good writing so yeah yeah who knows we don't know how much money he has no one seems it doesn't seem very clear he's done a good job of hiding it uh we don't know what the state of his business is. It seems like he has just kind of peaced out, hang out in jail, and maybe now we'll be going back to Russia

to live in his dacha and just write poetry and go on water slides all day. We can dream. We sure can. Yeah, if they offered him for Snowden already and now they're offering him again, is he he's either the only like quote-unquote good russian hostage like worth worthy russian hostage

or they in my head i feel like they're trying to make a big statement like britney griner is so important to us here you could have this man does that make sense yeah it does yeah i hope i mean look what's happening to her is disgusting right and every day she spends yeah abhorrent and so like yeah you hope that that they i think yeah i think he's he's a big name and there's no real i don't know it doesn't really serve the interest of the state to keep him in prison right like the big win was getting him there and that I think showed people doing what he does that like the US will come after you and and so like that was what they wanted really I think 12 years is a long enough time you know like so I don't know I don't understand the motivations of world leaders, but hopefully we get some updates.

I don't know. Hopefully Brickley Grinder doesn't have to spend any longer in what I'm sure is a pretty terrible Russian prison for having a vape pen, because that is bollocks. And I just want to say before we finish up here that we are indebted to our friend Matt, who is at, I think, Black Flag Enjoyer on Twitter or Raccoon Liberation Front.

Black Flag Enjoyer is Matt's handle. Matt actually came on to help us do an interview with this. Matt has worked in a lot of these places, not as an arms dealer, I should add, but doing some civil engineering and even thinks that he ran into Victor Boot in a bar in Somaliland once and because of we discussed you would not know that this dude was an arms dealer unfortunately Matt's audio was unrecoverable and so we're very much in debt for his help

and you should follow him on Twitter if you want to anything else we should plug shereen garrison no i think i think that does it for us today so just google victor boot poetry and yeah enjoy your weekend You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. Join me, Danny Trails, and step into the flames of riot. of right an anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lord of latin america listen to nocturnal on the iheart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast