Viktor Bout was convicted today on all four counts by a federal jury in the Southern District U.S. Courthouse in Manhattan. He had been charged with four conspiracy counts: Conspiracy to kill Americans and U.S. officials, conspiracy to deliver anti-aircraft missiles and conspiracy to aid a terrorist organization. The first alert of a verdict came from AP at 2:11 p.m. Wednesday. The federal jury deliberated less than six hours before returning with the decision.
Bout’s global arms network operated unfettered nearly two decades before he was netted by a sting operation run by U.S. DEA agents. At its peak, the arms trafficking enterprise headed by the “Merchant of Death” spanned from Kabul to Monrovia, arming and aiding Taliban mullahs, African warlords and a rogue’s gallery of dictators who included Libya’s Moamar Gadhafi, Liberia’s Charles Taylor and Zaire’s Mobutu Sese Seko. They are all gone now, dead or under arrest, all out of circulation.
“This is a great victory for American justice and perseverance,” said Lee Wolosky, the former Clinton administration national security deputy who led the first U.S. effort to scuttle Bout’s operation and arrest him abroad.
On Feb. 8, 2012, Bout will be sentenced by U.S. District Court Judge Shira Scheindlin. Facing the possibility of a life term, he, too, may soon be out of circulation.
—AP, By Tom Hays and Stephen Braun, “A notorious Russian arms dealer accused of evading authorities for years while fueling violence in war zones around the globe was convicted Wednesday in swift fashion in a U.S. courtroom on charges he conspired to sell weaponry to South American terrorists.”
—AFP, “Bout, dressed in a grey suit with a white shirt, looked despondent as he listened to the jury forewoman read out the verdict reached after less than eight hours of deliberations over two days.”
—NYT, “Even Mr. Bout’s arrest and extradition were theatrical: he was taken into custody in Bangkok in March 2008 after getting ensnared in a foreign sting operation run by the Drug Enforcement Administration; his extradition to the United States, which Russian officials strenuously opposed, took more than two and a half years.”
—Wall Street Journal, “A suspected Russian arms dealer was convicted Wednesday of conspiring to sell surface-to-air missiles, machine guns and other weapons to government informants during a U.S. sting operation.”
—The Guardian, “Bout’s dealings have included the US, the Taliban, the Northern Alliance and various groupings in Africa from Congo to Sierra Leone. His career became so notorious that the Yuri Orlov character played by Nicholas Cage in the 2005 film Lord of War is believed to have been partly based on Bout.”