Court Watch
to acquire, transfer, and use anti-aircraft missiles; and (4) conspiracy to provide material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization. In No- vember 2010, Thai authorities extradited Bout to New York where he was subsequently arrested, tried, and convicted of all four counts.
Bout graduated from Moscow’s Military Institute of Foreign Languages, a feeder program for Rus- sia’s military intelligence arm, and then spent time as a military translator in Mozambique and Angola. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Bout began building an air-freighting empire by purchas- ing and refurbishing old military cargo planes. He filled the planes with an array of goods – some legal, some not – and typically registered them in countries like Equatorial Guinea to avoid having to disclose his clients or the contents of his cargo.
12
Throughout the 1990s Bout deservedly acquired the nickname “Merchant of Death” due to his willingness and ability to supply large shipments of weapons to hostile corners of the world.
By the mid-2000s, Bout’s support of Charles Tay- lor’s ruthless reign of terror in Liberia had landed him on the U.S. Treasury Department’s Specially Designated Nationals list, effectively freezing all his assets and prohibiting any transactions with U.S. citizens. Interpol had issued warrants for his arrest and the United Nations (UN) Security Coun- cil had passed resolutions condemning his viola- tions of arms embargoes in Angola, thus heavily restricting his travel. But because of his alleged ties with Russian intelligence, Bout remained in- sulated from prosecution in Moscow.
In November 2007, the DEA decided to go after Bout. Since the laws governing the sale of arms vary from nation to nation they choose instead to employ a terrorism-related ruse that had recent- ly been successful in netting another infamous weapons trafficker, Monzer al-Kassar.
Carlos Sagustume, an undercover informant working for the DEA, approached Bout’s busi- ness associate, Andrew Smulian, and asked if the
Russian was interested in selling a large cache of weapons to representatives of the FARC, a U.S.- designated terrorist group. Bout was interested, but unbeknownst to him, the FARC representa- tives he thought he was doing business with were undercover DEA agents.
Over the next several months, the DEA worked in conjunction with Dutch, Danish, and Romanian authorities in obtaining judicial authorization for wiretaps used to record the meetings that took place in those countries between the undercover operatives and Smulian, as well as phone calls be- tween Smulian and Bout. The recorded conversa- tions provided more than enough evidence for an arrest warrant, but unless authorities could draw him out of Moscow and into a country with a fa- vorable extradition treaty with the U.S. they would be unable to execute it.
In February 2008, the undercover informants were finally able to convince Bout to fly to Thailand to finalize the deal in person. During a meeting in Bangkok on March 6, authorities recorded Bout expressly agreeing to sell weaponry that included armor-piercing rockets, combat helicopters, and surface-to-air missiles. They also captured Bout confirming his understanding that the weapons were going to be used by the FARC against Amer- icans in Columbia. Shortly after making these statements, Thai police officers stormed the con- ference room and arrested Bout.
Despite Thailand and the U.S. having a favorable extradition treaty, it took almost two years of legal wrangling, and significant diplomatic pressure, be- fore Bout was extradited. He arrived in November 2010, and was charged in the Southern District of New York with conspiracy to kill U.S. nationals and officers and employees of the United States, conspiracy to provide anti-aircraft missiles, and conspiracy to provide material support to a desig- nated foreign terrorist organization.
Bout’s trial began on October 12, 2011. His defense argued that Bout had only been playing along with
ILSA Quarterly » volume 20 » issue 4 » May 2012
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