The Russian criminal Viktor Bout may be offered in a prisoner exchange to free Brittney Griner. Read Nicholas Schmidle’s 2014 report on the rise and fall of the world’s most notorious weapons trafficker.
As Dayan stepped onto the podium that first morning, he appeared solemn and tired. “The very profound truth is that Viktor Bout never wanted, never intended, and was never going to sell arms to anyone in this case,” he said.
“Everything will be laid out before you.” In Dayan’s telling, Bout wasn’t negotiating an arms deal with theof arms,” hoping to sell two cargo jets “gathering dust” in Congo. In other words, Bout and the D.E.A. had been trying to trick each other—it was a “two-way, real-life con game.” Dayan said that Carlos and Ricardo were disingenuous, and described them as acting “desperate” and “stupid.” He didn’t call a single witness. There was one potentially winnable argument: questioning the notion that Bout was a terrorist bent on killing Americans. Bout may have clung to a certain Cold War provincialism and cynicism about American foreign policy, but his behavior was too pragmatic to be ideologically tagged. Sanjivan Ruprah, a former associate of Bout’s, told American authorities in 2001 that Bout was prepared to facilitate the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan by providing arms to the Northern Alliance. Dayan contended that Bout, in his statements against America, was merely telling Carlos and Ricardo what he thought they wanted to hear: “If you’re selling a five-million-dollar object to people who are wearing Yankee hats, you are not going to tell them, ‘I’m glad they lost in the first round of the playoffs.’ ” Dayan spent the rest of the proceedings seeming lost and overwhelmed. He questioned the possibility of a fair trial ; suggested that Bout was a victim ; got discombobulated ; and struggled to show confidence before the press corps . After one ineffectual cross-examination, he told me, “This is not like ‘Matlock’ or ‘L.A. Law,’ where the witness is going to break down and say, ‘Yes, I lied about everything.’ ” As the trial progressed, Bout increasingly flipped through binders and whispered in Dayan’s and Kaplan’s ears. Andrew Smulian took the stand on the eighth day. In a tale of multiple deceptions, his betrayal was the starkest. He wore a dark blazer over his navy prison jumpsuit, with large, thick glasses that, from a distance, clouded his face. As he answered questions, he hardly lifted his gaze from his transcript binder, and never looked directly at Bout. During a break, I asked Alla Bout whether her husband might have turned state’s witness had he been in Smulian’s predicament. “It all depends on what a person considers their principles,” she said. “Your soul? Or money and physical world? I know Viktor has moral principles.” When Smulian stepped down, after three days of testimony, Bout’s eyes followed him to the door. Smulian stared at his feet. He will be sentenced this spring. In all likelihood, he will receive “time served” and enter a witness-protection program. Closing arguments began on Halloween. Bout’s wife and daughter, now a teen-ager, sat in the second row. Dayan began the defense’s statement by saying, “First of all, I would like to thank God for everything,” as if he were giving an Oscar acceptance speech. He then thanked the jury, the judge, Kaplan, and Bout for “trusting me with the most important decision of his life.” Dayan cleared his throat. “Although I believe that the truth is really with me, I am a little bit nervous.” When he tried to pour himself a cup of water, he knocked over the pitcher, sending ice cubes skittering across the defense table. Anjan Sahni, the Assistant U.S. Attorney prosecuting the case, told the jurors that “the central premise of the defense theory is illogical.” He focussed on the falseness of Bout’s testimony in Thailand: his claims that the meeting had lasted only fifteen minutes, that the men had never identified themselves asDayan brushed this off with the pronouncement “Words are like wind,” and repeated the argument that Bout had simply wanted to trick Carlos and Ricardo into buying airplanes. “The Chinese have an interesting tale about this,” he said. “The tale says to dress and sound like a swine to catch a tiger. It’s an old hunting technique where the hunter would dress like a swine and make sounds like a swine, and then when the tiger would come for the kill, as Viktor Bout did, to dump his planes, it was the hunters who would have the last laugh. And that’s exactly what happened.” It was time for the jury to deliberate. Bout turned and, facing Alla, put his fists in front of his chest—telling her to be strong. The next day, Bout was found guilty on all counts. He and Dayan hugged, then marshals escorted Bout from the courtroom. Outside, Alla told reporters that, as far as she was concerned, her husband had not been convicted: “They just found Nicolas Cage guilty.” For the past fifteen months, Bout has been living in solitary confinement, in the “special-housing unit” of the Metropolitan Correctional Center in lower Manhattan. His cell consists of a concrete bed and a window of frosted Plexiglas. The room contains a desk, a shower, and a toilet; standing in the center of it, Bout says, he can reach out and touch both walls. He is seldom let out to exercise. Most of the voices he hears come from a shortwave radio that picks up Voice of Russia and National Public Radio. He can read paperbacks that his family and his lawyers have ordered from the publisher, but hardcovers are considered potential weapons. The impact of Bout’s arrest remains under dispute. Louise Shelley, a professor at George Mason University and an expert on corruption and organized crime in the former Soviet Union, told me, “We act like getting rid of Bout gets rid of the problem. Sure, he was bigger and better. But he was not unique.” A Lebanese arms dealer recently told Reuters that, owing to the rebellion in Syria, he was busier than ever. I asked Peter Mirchev—who was not implicated in the sting—if the weapons business had changed in recent years. He shrugged. Profit margins, he said, were about the same. The community of dealers was “a little bit bigger.” He conceded that pressure from the United States had affected arms supplies; an American initiative in 2005 had effectively wiped out Bulgaria’s stash of Iglas. When I asked Mirchev whether he was still in touch with Bout’s former associates, he smiled and said that he had recently spoken to Sergei Bout and Sergei Denissenko. One morning in late December, I went to the prison to meet Bout. In a conference area, a few prisoners, wearing brown jumpsuits without handcuffs, sat in plastic chairs, holding legal documents. When word reached the guards that Bout was headed downstairs, they cleared out the other prisoners and covered the room’s sole window. The sound of chains and jangling keys heralded his arrival. Surrounded by two guards, Bout inched forward, shackled at his ankles, wrists, and waist. The guards unfastened his cuffs, then left Bout and me alone. He wore an orange jumpsuit, navy slippers, and orange socks. Gesturing toward the guards, he said that watching over him had “become almost a religion for them.” We sat at a circular table. His voice was soft, his sentences punctuated by wan smiles. “The special-housing unit?” he said. “Solitary confinement? Even the U.N. says that solitary confinement is torture.” “I am being tortured twenty-four hours a day.”
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