“Merchant of Death” Viktor Bout appears on far-right American radio show
When BINJ reporter Nate Homan was researching his epic feature on Liberian war criminal Charles Taylor, the primary subject’s old weapons hookup Viktor Bout was unavailable for an interview. The notorious arms dealer was doing 25 years in the federal pen in Marion, Ohio for “conspiring to sell millions of dollars worth of weapons to the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) – a designated foreign terrorist organization based in Colombia – to be used to kill Americans in Colombia.”
The “Merchant of Death” struck the lucky lotto last July, however, after he was famously swapped for US basketball star Brittney Griner in a prisoner exchange with Russia. They gave us our WNBA star; we gave them their WMD star.
If that wasn’t remarkable enough, Bout, who was the inspiration for the Nicolas Cage character in the 2005 film “Lord of War,” is now a Russian politician, and recently showed up on the syndicated psychodrama Infowars with embattled pseudo-media fabulist Alex Jones.
The appearance, which is as loathsome as one might imagine, was overlooked by most media, but we noticed since Bout is a hard guy to forget. As Nate wrote in Part V of his book-length feature on Taylor:
Viktor Bout made fortunes selling former Bolshevik armaments, artillery, ammo, and intel to the highest bloodthirsty bidders in South Africa, Angola, Rwanda, Congo, and the Balkans, among a long list of combatant nations.
According to the US Treasury Department, the 50-plane armada of Bout’s Air Cess Cargo Airlines was registered in Monrovia. The traveling salesman even reportedly hired a gemologist to accompany his chartered artillery bound for Liberia and Sierra Leone.
The goods that Bout flew into Liberia bolstered Taylor’s power, but also led to an inflated lust and hunger in the diamond-dealing daimyo to conquer everything in his path—from the bloody to the beautiful.
After his release, CBS News described his background and reputation: “Before his arrest in 2008, Bout helped fuel civil wars across the world by supplying sophisticated weapons to fighting factions — sometimes to both sides in bloody conflicts. His arms-dealing work earned him his infamous nickname.” Similarly, a former DEA chief called him “one of the most dangerous men on the face of the Earth.”
Those characterizations were largely framed on account of his dealings with Taylor. In 2022, the New York Times wrote, “In Liberia and Across Africa, Viktor Bout’s Bloody Legacy Is Still Felt.” Nate’s feature may primarily be a history piece, but even with Taylor serving a 50-year sentence for his crimes against humanity, the story seems all too present with such a key nefarious character in the story making a guest appearance on American conspiracy radio.
Read Diamonds & Guns: An Infamous West African Warlord’s Bay State Jailbreak here.
