Viktor Bout had resolved to take his punishment like an officer and a gentleman. He was going to speak only a few well-chosen words at his sentencing in New York, an intimate said. But four years of rage welled up, four years spent pent up in a dank Thai jail and then isolated in an American prison, four years watching helplessly as he was isolated from his global arms empire, from his family and from safety in Moscow by a team of U.S. narcotics agents.
He stood up, head erect, and declared his innocence. And then Viktor Bout whirled around and pointed at the U.S. agents sitting only a few feet away in the oak-paneled courtroom. Bout’s arm swiveled back and forth like the muzzle of a Kalashnikov as he snarled at them in Russian. He was not guilty, he insisted, had never intended to kill anyone or sell weapons to anyone. This, Bout said, was the truth.
“They will go to bed with this truth. They will get up with this truth. They will raise their children with this truth…God knows this truth!” As he glared, the DEA men sat staring back, faces reddened and steely.
Bout turned back to the judge after his “J’accuse” moment, but he was hardly finished. Moments later, as prosecutor Brendan McGuire began to weave the government’s version of Bout’s history as an arms merchant, the Russian erupted again. “It’s a lie!,” he shouted in perfectly growled English.
When Judge Shira Scheindlein finally pronounced sentence on the Russian on Thursday, both sides wound up with a semblance of satisfaction as well as bitterness. Prosecutors had already won Bout’s conviction last November on four counts of conspiracy, and now had the judge’s agreement that he would be sent off to a maximum security prison for 25 years. But at the same time, Scheindlin spurned the government’s request for a life term, saying that the Russian may have been lured by the bait of the U.S. sting and committed crimes, but he had not set out to threaten Americans or consort with terrorists.
Scheindlin’s skepticism about the government’s case had been apparent since the outset of the November trial, and while her legal rulings had limited the defense’s ability to claim malicious prosecution by the government, she also hamstrung the prosecution’s effort to delineate Bout’s apparent attempts to sell weapons in Libya and his terror ties. The judge’s skepticism about the government’s case became clearer Thursday as she explained why she was disregarding pre-sentencing guidelines that called for tougher sentencing. She said she was dubious about his long-suspected dealings with terror groups or even his work for the U.S. in Iraq — despite clear evidence outside the courtroom that Bout’s operation had aided the Taliban in Afghanistan in the 1990s, and that the US government had hired Bout’s firms to fly supplies into Iraq in the mid-2000s (a fact conceded even by Bout’s lawyers in their post-trial appeals to the judge — which cited reporting in “Merchant of Death” as their evidence).
For Bout and his attorney, Albert Y. Dayan, there was still the bitter pill that Bout had been convicted in an American courtroom and that prospect that the Russian could not emerge from his U.S. prison until he turns 66 (Under sentencing guidelines, he would not have the prospect of early release until he completes 21 years of his sentence). But there was the small victory that the judge sided with Dayan’s plea to minimize Bout’s sentence. And Dayan still plans an appeal against the government’s case.
For Bout, there was only the rage of a prisoner whose already-wearying stint behind bars was being extended for a third of a lifetime. His wife, Alla, and young daughter sat behind him, dry-eyed and sad. The court’s rows were packed with reporters, many Russian, some independent, some government lapdogs. Already, some of them were whispering about what they presume is the inevitable trade, some time down the line, when Bout could be sprung and traded for an American asset held in Russia.
But that day was far off. When Bout left the courtroom for the final time, he pumped his fists towards his wife and daughter and supporters and told them he loved them. In Russian, as he was led away, he quoted a line from “Varyag,” a Russian patriotic song about a ship of that name from the Russo-Japanese War of 1905, a song about banding together to ward off the enemy.
“We will not surrender…”
—AP, “A defiant Russian arms dealer dubbed the Merchant of Death was sentenced Thursday to 25 years in prison, far short of the life term prosecutors sought for his conviction on terrorism charges that grew from a U.S. sting operation.”
—Los Angeles Times, “A federal court judge sentenced convicted Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout to 25 years in prison on Thursday, but in a swipe at prosecutors said there was no convincing evidence that he would have committed crimes they alleged if he had not been the target of a sting operation.”
—Reuters,”Bout’s capture came less than a year after the publication of “Merchant of Death: Money, Guns, Planes, and the Man Who Makes War Possible,” written by investigative journalists Douglas Farah and Stephen Braun. The 2007 book chronicled Bout’s life as an arms dealer and how he evaded capture for years.”