The conspiracy trial of a U.S.-Syrian accountant accused of aiding Viktor Bout’s financial empire is underway in New York, with federal prosecutors alleging that Richard Chichakli conspired with the Russian arms merchant to buy cargo aircraft and evade government financial sanctions.
Prosecutors told a newly-empaneled jury that Chichakli and Bout tried to buy two Boeing cargo planes from a Florida aviation dealer in 2007, transferring $1.7 million through banks in New York and through several front companies, including Samar Airlines, a firm Bout and Chuichakli set up in 2004.
Both men were under U.S. and United Nations sanctions and the transaction was detected and frozen before it could go through. Bout and Chichakli had been targeted for the financial sanctions for allegedly arming the authoritarian Liberian regime of Charles Taylor, who was convicted in an international court in 2012 for war crimes and sentenced to 50 years in jail.
Bout himself was convicted in 2011 for conspiring to sell arms to a narco-terror group after he was arrested in 2008 in Thailand at the climax of a world-spanning U.S. law enforcement sting. Bout was sentenced to 25 years in prison in 2012 and is serving a 25-year term at a medium-security federal prison in Marion, Ill.
Chichakli represented himself during opening arguments at this week’s trial, arguing that the government had concocted the case against him. “A whole lot of this story is fiction,” he said.
A former Dallas-area accountant who claims U.S. Army service and has a penchant for assembling culinary fruit plates, Chichakli fled the U.S. in 2005 after he was targeted by sanctions and his office was raided by Treasury and FBI agents. Chichakli used frequent flyer miles to gain passage abroad, showing up for a period in Moscow, where he again worked with Bout.
After Bout’s 2008 arrest, Chichakli went silent for a long period until he turned up in Victoria, Australia, arrested by authorities after he had applied for a government law enforcement post. Australian media reported Chichakli had used false documents several years earlier to emigrate to Victoria, where he set up a carpet cleaning business.
Like Bout, who is still paying a Russian lawyer to find a legal route to freedom, Chichakli has alleged he is a victim of prosecutorial vengeance. That argument was recently undercut by the presiding judge, US District Court Judge William H. Pauley III. Pauley ruled against many of Chichakli’s pre-trial motions earlier this week, turning down Chichakli’s attempt to have the case dismissed for vindictive prosecution, as well as ruling against his efforts to use “Merchant of Death” and other media accounts and documents as evidence, saying their use would be “inadmissable hearsay.”
—Reuters: “A U.S.-Syrian citizen conspired with convicted Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout to buy aircraft, using fake names to get around sanctions that had been imposed against him, a government prosecutor told a jury on Wednesday in New York federal court.”