The Merchant of Death: Arms Dealer Viktor Bout
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Welcome back to the Underworld Podcast, where we dive into the worlds of organized crime and criminals and fun things like that. I am your host, Danny Gold.

And I am Sean Williams. And we have a pretty fun episode today. We apologize if Sean sounded a little off. His studio guy, he got the Rona, so he's recording in his Berlin bathroom right now. Yeah, there might be some Berlin bikers coming streaming down the road, but I think we're going to manage it. And yeah, more serious matters.

We should address Sean's gambling problem. He right now is in debt with a bunch of Moldovan gangsters who operate out of Copenhagen, I think. They're a bunch of coke dealers. Sean owes them a lot of money. You know, he's in...

He's in the worst kind of trouble with the worst kind of people. For us to keep doing this, we need you to go to the Patreon, patreon.com slash the underworld podcast. Support us, $3 a month, $5 a month to get bonus episodes just to make sure that Sean keeps all his fingers. Otherwise, he can't really push the recording buttons and we're in trouble. I've got like a week to go, but yeah, I'm pretty confident. This isn't an intervention. I think it's on brand that this guy is addicted to betting on women's ice hockey and he's really bad at it.

So now he owes Moldovan Coke dealers a lot of money. And I think it really helps. But we want to pay them so we can keep recording. Please, yeah. I mean, cool, whatever. But please, yeah. And just, Sean, get better at gambling. I will. I mean, those ice hockey games don't fix themselves, man. So I'll figure it out. All right, so who are we talking about today? Yeah, today we're talking about Victor Boot. This is a guy, you might have heard of him. He's an arms dealer. He's sometimes known as the Merchant of Death.

And for most people listening to this who've heard of him, maybe this is probably their first port of call. Enjoy it. What? This. Tell me I'm everything you despise. That I'm the personification of evil. That I'm what? Responsible for the breakdown of the fabric of society and world order. I'm a one man genocide. Say everything you want to say to me now. Because you don't have long. Are you paying attention or are you delusional?

You have broken every arms embargo written. Okay, so that's Nick Cage being amazing, as he always is. That's 2005's Lord of War. Great film, by the way. Really, really fun. Boo actually said he liked the movie, and he even kept a copy in his Moscow home. Jared Leto, man. Hell of a performance there. And, you know, I think next week we're doing the Brighton Beach episode about the Russian gangsters of Brighton Beach, and that kind of plays into it.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, in the film, they kind of grow up there, right? And they pretend to be Jewish to get by coming from the Soviet Union. It's kind of a cool story. But this might shock you, actually. The movie's kind of...

A bit bullshit. There's no Brian Beach in the real Victor Booth story. Actually, the fact he kept getting denied a U.S. visa became a thing for him, actually. And there's no supermodel love interest for Booth. No Jared Leto sniffing coke off the back of a limousine. Okay, hold up. I'm pretty sure both of those things have probably happened. Like, I'm pretty sure Victor Booth has slept with supermodels and Jared Leto has sniffed coke off the back of a limousine.

Well, I'm going to go with one of them, right? I'm pretty sure the Jared Leto one has happened. And I think Jared Leto might have slept with the supermodel. But from what you're going to learn about Victor Boot, you might be a little bit surprised. He's not kind of the supervillain that he's portrayed in the film. There's actually a much better film out there for learning about Victor Boot, but I'm going to get into that in a bit. But the weird thing is Lord of War kind of helped get Victor Boot sent down in the end.

For years before that, he was a complete mystery, this ghost. No one could find him. No one could track him down. Until the early 2000s, there were actually only two known pictures of the guy offloading weapons in a DR Congo. Yeah, it's a common crime boss mistake. Like, never let them make a movie about you. Don't give Rolling Stone an interview. You know, it kind of flaunts your immunity to prosecution when you do that kind of thing. And law enforcement agencies don't look kindly on that. They kind of take it as a slap in the face.

Yeah, for sure. And we're going to get into that in a little bit. He did a New York Times piece that was just like hilarious. Cage's boot is this kind of stern villainous guy stepping over bullet casings in the world's worst war zones. The real boot is much, much more interesting, actually, and way bigger. Cage's Merchant of Death is to Victor Boot what your local FedEx guy is to Santa Claus, basically.

So, Victor Boot, I'm pretty sure some of you listeners will have heard of this guy. Got his break in the chaos of the Soviet Union collapse, sold arms to some of the most shady characters on Earth, got stung by the feds in the end. He's kind of become a stand-in for the illegal arms trade. When he was caught 12 years ago, American prosecutors lay on so thick, it's kind of laughable these days, that he was

This head of the DAA, who spoke about himself in the third person all the time on this 60 Minutes, I think it was, he called Boot, quote, the most dangerous man on the face of the earth, selling weapons to, quote again, a potpourri of human scum. You reckon they wanted to catch him much? Yeah, but isn't that kind of true? Like he did all those things, right? Yeah.

He kind of did it right, but again, there's this kind of gray area, and we're going to get into that a bit later on in the story. But I mean, for a while, this guy was untouchable. The U.S. government even said so openly. It's kind of the Scarlet Pimpernel of the arms trade. Each time someone got a lead, he'd disappear.

I'm sorry, but this is exactly like the movie. I think you owe the screenwriter an apology for your earlier comments. Okay, an official apology is his or her's way. But yeah,

And there's also this amazing book called Merchant of Death that's by the journalists Douglas Farrow and Stephen Brown. And that came off the back of a foreign policy article that helped make him this kind of celebrity in the mid 2000s, right when America was dealing with Iraq, Afghanistan, 9-11. There's this great quote from the original story that goes a bit like this. In an age where the US president has divided the world into those who are with the United States and those who are against it, boot is both.

In the 1990s, Boot was a friend and supplier to the legendary Ahmed Shah Massoud, leader of the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, while simultaneously selling weapons and aircraft to the Taliban, Massoud's enemy.

His fleet flew for the government of Angola, as well as the UNITA rebels seeking to overthrow it. He sent an aircraft to rescue Mobutu Sese Seko, the alien and corrupt ruler of Zaire, even though he supplied the rebels who were closing in on Mobutu's last stronghold. He's catered to Charles Taylor of Liberia, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, and Libyan strongman Muammar al-Qadhafi. Wait, so the DEA guy was right as well. I mean, for once, the DEA was right. So I think you owe him an apology too.

Okay, I'm going to do a little glossary down the bottom of the apologies. I'm going to have to dish out after this one. But anyway, suffice to say that this guy is not normal, right? And pretty much everything about Victor Boot's life is a maze at first. So his story starts in 1967 in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, then part of the Soviet Union, although some sources have said he was born in Turkmenistan or even Ukraine, which kind of tells you everything about the guy's early years.

Yeah. You know, from one thing I've learned from doing research for the Brighton Beach episode is that all these gangsters who came out of the former Soviet Union, there's just completely fluid stories about them, where they were born, how old they are, what their backgrounds were. Like, it's a really hard thing to crack.

Yeah, and I mean, like, for those guys in Boot, it really served a purpose, right? Because it just sent people off on different tangents for years and years trying to figure out who the hell this guy was. Like, Dushanbe is where most people think that he's from, right? So at the time, it was a scratch on the Soviet landscape, backwater. It kind of is now, I guess. And Boot's father was an auto mechanic and his mother a bookkeeper. It's hardly an auspicious start for the guy.

But he really gets into languages, and he learns English by listening to ABBA and Chicago records, which is actually how I did it as well. I mean, this sounds like a proper rag to Rich's story, you know, a son of the working class. Oh, he is. He is. I mean, it gets way better as well. I mean, by all accounts, Boo is a bit of a linguistic genius, right? So even as a young guy speaking fluent English, French, Uzbek, and he soon picks up some African languages too. According to a 2012 New Yorker feature by Nicholas Schmiedl,

Boot can read 15 or 16 languages, go to the market in 9 or 10, and fluently speak 5 or 6. It's, like, amazing how many international crime lords are, like, switched on to languages in this way. That's a great point. I mean, if you remember in our Irish Gang War episode...

Kinahan, who runs one of the biggest cartels in Europe, he spent time in prison learning languages to expand his business. It's just such a useful business skill, speaking multiple languages, especially if you're doing logistics internationally and making deals with groups from all over the world. Yeah, I mean, if you're behind bars, it's probably better to learn a language for your business than it is just doing loads of setups and like...

right? I mean, I think you can do both and it might be the only way I can actually get in proper shape and learn a language would be to be locked in prison. So, you know, you should have the gambling there. That's the problem.

The young boot, he works for the Soviet Air Force and he heads off to Moscow to work for this prestigious language institute that's like a primer for guys heading into intelligence work. He majors in Portuguese, which might sound a bit weird, but at the time, two of the Soviet Union's proxies, Mozambique and Angola, are going through civil wars and the Kremlin wants Russian hands on deck.

Boots denied he was actually ever a secret agent at all, but the evidence kind of speaks otherwise. British spies have claimed he was stationed in Rome for the KGB between 85 and 89. It would make sense he was a spook when so many were focused on funneling funds and guns to guerrilla fighters in a developing world during the Cold War. Sounds like he's basically functioning as an arms dealer for the state, which is perfect training to become an arms dealer for yourself.

Oh yeah, he's got all the connections by the time he gets into business. Whatever the truth of his background, by 1988...

Boot is definitely in Maputo, Mozambique, and he's at some party at the Soviet embassy when he starts chatting to this woman called Alla Protosova. I'm going to screw up all the Russian names in this. Who's there with her husband, who's a translator too. So she's got something for languages. Boot falls in love with her right away and he starts sending her all these self-penned poems when she goes back to Moscow to date dog. We got to get our hands on those poems. Oh man, I bet they're amazingly shit.

No, I bet they're good, man. Yeah, he speaks all these languages. I mean, he's probably writing it in Hindi or something, so we're not going to know either way. I imagine they're amazing. But anyway, keep going, sorry. She tells a reporter later that, quote, he drags you in, which is kind of, that sounds like love to me. Anyway, definitely dragged Ella in because by 1991, she's left her husband and she's married Boop and they're living in Moscow together.

So as you can imagine, 1991 is a mad time to be living in Russia. The wall's down, Europe's breaking up, and the Soviet empire in Moscow is crashing down too. Boris Yeltsin's talking about freedom, but people can't eat. And the country's wealth is getting eaten up by all these robber barons and gangsters. We're going to get into a bunch of these guys further down the line too, I know. And a lot next week in the Brighton Beach episode. Definitely, yeah.

So Boo decides, hell, I'm going to be one of them. And he's got a plan, right? So this whole time, old Soviet cargo planes, the massive ones, the Ilyushins and the Antonovs, they're just laying around gathering dust. Guns, grenades, RPGs, the lot. They're laying about in warehouses too.

meant for Soviet client states in Africa, Asia, Latin America, wherever. Warlords and rebels still want these things, and Boot knows where they are. He's also got contacts in Soviet intelligence, and he knows guys on the ground in Angola, Mozambique, I mean, pretty much everywhere else that's on fire at the time. This is his niche.

One guy says Boot was given three planes in 1992 by the GRU, the USSR's intelligence network, in return for a cut of his profits. Another guy said he bought them for 120 grand and flew a maiden crew to Denmark. Either way, the merchant of death is up and running, and he's barely 25 years old. I think I was in New York working as a receptionist when I was 25, actually, so that's goals. Yeah, it sounds like they just kind of Americanized the movie a bit and made him an American immigrant, but I got to tell you, man, it sounds pretty spot on for right now.

Yeah, I'm starting to come around now. Shit, I'm seeing the similarities. By 1993, and this doesn't happen in the movie, so screw the screenwriter here, Booth moves to Sharjah, which is one of the UAE's emirates. And there's a specific reason for that, right? So it's this conservative desert two-horse town right next to Dubai with none of Dubai's glitz or glamour. I actually lived in Dubai for a year myself and Sharjah's still this weird...

driftwood kind of sprawl. It's populated by Pakistani laborers, shipping companies. It's still dry as well, so you can't get a drink there.

Like, Dubai definitely is not, by the way. I lived in a hotel there for a couple of months and every weekend morning we'd go down to the bar for breakfast and there were like dozens of Saudi guys in dish dashes like sprawled across the bar stools and tables, still wasted from the night before. So that's where they all come to get hammered. What were you doing in a hotel in Dubai for a few, I mean, that's like one of the shadiest sentences a man can utter.

Yeah, yeah. That's 2008. That's the financial crash. So some people ended up like in Amazon warehouses and I ended up at some weird trade publication in Dubai. So that's how my amazing sterling career got going.

So, Boots' reasons for being in charge are plenty, right? So, first, it's got secretive banking laws, and the UAE is one of only three states worldwide to recognize the Taliban, alongside the Saudis and Pakistan. Boots started building this dense web of shipping firms, which I'll get into soon, but Afghanistan was one of his biggest target areas. It fought with the Soviets in the late 80s, and its government was battling against the ultra-conservative Taliban in the civil war.

That just shows dollar signs for Boot pretty much. And he hires his brother, Sergey, as an ops manager and he goes to work. Jared Leto, man, seriously. But also Boot just seems like- You're going to see a lot of differences between Jared Leto and this guy's brother if you watch the documentary. Boot just sounds like he is a man with a plan, you know, and some serious logistics skills, like very, very smart. There's like loads of people who say that he's like pretty much just a business genius, right? He's

knows all of these languages. He just knows how to get all of these dense company sheets on the books and like,

Yeah, I mean, that unravels in a bit, but it's probably first worth going back to the global arms trade, which is probably one of the shadiest industries on Earth, as you might imagine. So first, the global defense market, which is basically everything including planes, that's worth $1.6 trillion. So that's almost an apple. Arms is small weapons and munitions. That's worth $95 billion. That's in 2017.

The industry's now worth the most since the end of the Cold War, by the way, which is totally cool and fine. How much do you reckon the illegal market's worth, by the way? I mean, billions, like 15, 20, something like that. Yeah, now apparently one, like just one billion. I mean, I'm not even sure I believe that. That's crazy, right? Yeah, it sounds way, way lower than I expected. This is when we should be like sounding the klaxon for people to come and like fact check. I miss fact checkers, God. Yeah.

Spoo was definitely a really rich guy and we're going to get into wine a bit, but

The idea these illegal gun runners are like massive oligarchs is basically untrue. By the way, one thing I learned, like this is really interesting, the AK-47, the world's most common gun, how many of them do you think there are in the world right now? I think actually a lot because I think that they talked about that in the movie or I've seen numbers that, you know, it's way more than there should be. Well, you'll be surprised to hear it's 200 million. So there's one for every 35th person on earth.

Today, AKs are so cheap, between 75 and 150 bucks, arms dealers, they can't really make any money off them. Their margins are too thin. So they just throw them into sales for free, use them as promos, lost leaders. Anyway, arms dealing is definitely not an illegal industry. Sellers need something called an end user certificate, which is basically just a piece of paper proving the guy they're selling to is legit and not on some terror or sanctions list.

That's like one of those chef's kiss quotes, I guess, the writer got.

So in the earlier days, Boot comes off a bit of a noob when it comes to the weapons themselves, and he relies on a bunch of old pals to help him out in the former Soviet Union. But he was this brilliant man in management, and he knew logistics really well. He was a businessman, basically. In his early days, Boot was shipping everything, food to mining camps,

flowers to South Africa, furniture into the former Soviet Union. He sent crayfish to Europe, transported UN peacekeepers to East Timor. He even ferried soldiers to the US-led operation in Somalia in 93. A colleague told a reporter that, quote,

So he's basically a shipping transport magnet at first, which, you know, it's how a lot of these guys get started. It's smuggling goods. It's procuring things. It's shipping things. It's logistics. Like a lot of kingpins get started as logistics guys. And, you know, the murdering too, I think helps. But my question is, why do you decide to attract attention with trafficking arms? Like if you're going to go illegal, why not cocaine, which seems like it's much more profitable?

Well, he seems to have like a bit of an issue with drugs. Like again, a lot of the stuff about his career is pretty cloudy, but as we'll find out when he kind of gets his comeuppance, he has an issue with drugs throughout his career. I think he just went for the margins, man. Like he was transporting these rare gladioli from South Africa into Europe or something like these rare flowers. And he kind of like every time he went to somewhere, he just saw an opportunity and just started shipping tons of stuff the other way. Cause like,

I guess he just pretty much had a monopoly on these old Soviet planes and he just quickly became like the world's leading supplier of any old shit anyone wants pretty much. And that's going to become guns.

So, yeah, his planes are like these chameleons too, right? He changes their call numbers. He changes their colors to avoid authorities. He used Liberian registration a lot for his connections with Charles Taylor, the leader and warlord. And I actually went through this guy in the very small British seaside town of Whitstable who could switch out Boots registration plates in hours way ahead of the feds with like little more than a phone call. Shout out for Whitstable, by the way. That's near where I grew up.

It was just like gangsters pretty much switching car plates just on this giant, giant scale. And it worked really, really well. So anyway, back to Afghanistan. Boot's first known weapon drops were there in 92, where he tooled up the Northern Alliance fighting the Taliban. But there's this big moment in 1995 where that kind of changes everything for Boot. And he actually sort of puts him on a collision course with cops that lasts over a decade.

That year, one of Boot's planes is downed by a Taliban fighter jet near Kandahar while it was shipping 30 tons of weapons for Albania. Its seven-man Russian crew is held hostage by Taliban soldiers. It becomes this huge international incident. A U.S. congressman even steps in to try and negotiate, but he fails. Boot goes into bat for these guys, and he even meets with Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader. Then almost a year, the guys escape in this comically Hollywood way.

The militants let them carry out maintenance on the plane every two months to keep it in shape. But one time, three of them out of six go off to pray and the crew overpowers the other three and tie them up on the plane. Then the captain basically jumpstarts one of the engines with a battery, fires up the others and takes off past all these speeding Taliban lorries towards the UAE. It's this crazy story. Obviously makes headlines everywhere. There's even a 2010 Russian movie with a bunch of stars in it, like the Russian Captain Phillips, only probably better. Yeah.

Yeah, this is amazing. This is one of the craziest stories I've ever heard. I can't believe I hadn't heard of it before. Yeah, I know. I couldn't believe that I'd never heard of it before, researching this thing. It's like, it's insanely Hollywood style. I mean, the things you learn on the Underworld podcast, it's just... I know, right? So educational. We're true lecturers here. Yeah. Yeah.

So Booth's role in this isn't really exposed back then. I was actually looking at all the kind of paper clippings and he's not even mentioned once, but he runs the plane, right? And it's highly rumored that alongside all the negotiations that he's doing, he agrees on the side to supply weapons to the Taliban through Omar, always the businessman, this guy. The Taliban is thought to have paid Booth over 50 million bucks during his time in power, by the way, and that's going to fuck him up down the line.

but not yet. Throughout the 90s, Boot just builds this giant behemoth of shipping firms. He's got offices in, all right, this is a big list, Angola, Belgium, Bulgaria, Switzerland, Texas, Congo, Uganda, Ivory Coast, Cyprus, Rwanda, Gambia, Liberia, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Kazakhstan, Moldova, the UAE, and nobody knows who he is. And there's way more, by the way.

There are no photos. He leases planes through friends and randoms, and he never puts his signature on anything ever. You find one company, it shuts down. Another one pops up. He's a total apparition, and the authorities just pretty much give up on bringing him to justice. The laws are pretty weak anyway, right? So they're made that way to protect countries who want to tool up rebels and whoever.

I like how, you know, he's in every shady place in the world and then Texas. Like that's the place he chooses to be in the US. Yeah, and I think that Syrian American guy that I mentioned earlier that I'm going to try and not to butcher his name. He's from Texas as well. So a lot goes down around there.

I kind of like too how he does the exact opposite of posting photos of himself on Instagram, pointing rifles at the camera and holding up stacks of $100 bills. He just kind of stays out of the limelight, not in the magazines. And it's probably why he didn't get caught.

Well, I mean, if he was in today, I wonder whether he would have been some kind of weird arms dealer influencer because he was basically a bit of a tourist. I'll get into that in a second. But yeah, for now, he's pretty much untouchable, right? So boot planes get Sese Seko out of Congo, like I said. They arm rebels in some of the craziest wars, Sierra Leone, Liberia, all over. He ships British troops into Kosovo, aid to tsunami victims, Americans into Iraq.

By all accounts, Boot doesn't think he's doing anything wrong at all. So later he tells a reporter, quote, why should I be afraid? In my life, I did not do anything that I should be concerned about. And this is kind of one of the lessons of Boot's story, The Uncomfortable Truth. Ultimately, we're kind of fine with the idea of good or evil, but he's basically amoral. He's just doing business and that's what the system is all about. We set it up so that people can make money and we hope they'll more or less choose to do the right thing.

There's this amazing documentary in 2015 called The Notorious Mr. Boot, and it's just all his home videos, right? The guy was obsessed with recording things throughout his life. He wasn't publishing them, but he was like always on his camera. Just comes off as this like fat Pollyanna, taking tourist pics in Congo, getting pissed on vodka with his arms dealer friends in Russia. He's devoted to his family, loves his business. He's got a lot of friends in Russia.

It's not really the portrait the cops want and everyone should watch it actually to learn more about it. It's a fantastic film. How did the filmmakers get the videos? Was this something that was released to the court? Like how did they go into that at all?

Yeah, this, I think it was a Russian filmmaker and he, when Boot was getting screwed by the feds, I think he went to Allah's home in Moscow and she showed him into a back room and it's just piles and piles of old VHSs and stuff like this. And she's like, oh, I never even thought it was interesting. And then this film is like, it's all stitched together. It's a Storyville documentary, like the BBC stuff. So, you know, it's like really, really good.

Um, yeah, everyone should watch that and watch Lord of the War and like see how this guy is portrayed in different lights. So Moscow businessman Mikhail Belozersky, who's a friend of Boots, told a reporter that, quote, I would think a person who brings death to people should look somewhat different from ordinary people. However, there was nothing of the kind in Victor. That's always the case though. I mean, that's the whole banality of evil thing, right? Yeah. I mean, like,

But with this guy, I think it's even more so, right? He just looks like, I mean, he just looks like a salary man. Like he doesn't look like anything more than just like an overweight office worker. Dude, think of another amazing Nicolas Cage movie, 9mm, right? There's that scene where he's investigating like the guys who make snuff videos and he finds the one guy and he catches him and he's about to kill him and he takes off his balaclava that he's wearing and the guy, and like he's like surprised to see he looks like a normal guy and the guy's just like, what did you expect? Yeah, totally. Yeah.

But that movie rules. I mean, every Nicolas Cage movie rules. There's not a single bad one. Actually, no, I take that back. There was one last year I watched that was fucking terrible. I tried to watch the National Treasure one. I couldn't. I had to turn it off. Oh, man. I can watch anything with him in it. Seriously. Absolutely anything. He's the best actor on the planet. But anyway, boot, ship guns to governments, rebels, whomever. It was just business for him. So whatever...

So what separates him from our governments, really, right? So I'm in Germany. It's approved about a billion dollars of weapons to Saudi Arabia, which is bombing Yemen into extinction. 2017, Trump signed that $110 billion with the Saudi king. Governments literally just justify this in economic terms. It's just business for them. So who's the bad guy? And as a good example, Iran-Contra literally happened because the US funneled weapons to Iran via middlemen just like Boo, actually illegal.

just like him we're going to get into that in a bit and it happens all the time yeah yeah yeah just just take it easy AOC we're making a crime podcast like uh yeah so I got all political for a second I'm gonna calm down yeah

Yeah, rant over. But authorities became fixated on Boot as this kind of international bogeyman. By 1999, he's a millionaire running 30 planes and about 300 staff. And he's fueling all of these bloody conflicts around the world. One official says, quote, on their best days, other arms dealers couldn't influence a war either way. They were peanuts. Boot could make or break a country.

To be fair, he definitely gets the fact he's shipping all this blood around. And he tells a journalist he knows that if he pipes up about who he deals with, he'll get, quote, the red hole right here. He points at his forehead, by the way. The British foreign minister coins him as the merchant of death in 2000. Top-notch nickname. It's great. They know exactly what they're doing there. Yeah.

And then 9-11 happens and all bets are off. It's all axes of evil, black versus white, that kind of stuff. By this time, Boot has moved from Sharjah. He's living in a gated community in Johannesburg with Ella and a young daughter. They become friends with this British former military pilot called Andrew Smullyan. Remember his name, by the way, because it's going to come up big time later on. How could you forget a name like that? How can you pronounce it? Smullyan? Smullyan. Smools. Smullyan? Smools. Oh, Smully, Smooldog. Yeah.

So here's where the hunt for Victor Boot really begins, right? In 2002, Belgian officials issue an arrest warrant accusing Boot of laundering over 300 million. But he moves to Moscow and he allegedly gets shelter from some higher-ups there.

Yeah, he's also neighbors with Semyon Mogilevich, who's this Ukrainian who's one of the world's biggest gangsters. I've seen him described as the head of the Russian mafia, which, you know, the most powerful gangster in the world. Things like that, which all sound a bit hyperbolic. I don't think there is a quote unquote head of the Russian mafia, but he's definitely extremely powerful and super well connected around the world. And again, we talk about him in the Brighton Beach episodes that are coming up. Yeah, he's a real, real kingpin either way. Yeah.

There's also this really weird moment that year when MI6 plans a sting in Athens, but Bounce tips off at the last minute and the Brits blame the CIA for letting him get away. And it's a pretty credible claim as well. They say that only one other intelligence authority knew about the sting and that was the CIA. And I guess that's referenced in Lord of War, right? There's some stuff towards the end that kind of like gets into this.

Maybe that's because US officials realized that Boot's helping them too. His tentacles are basically everywhere at this point. He's running guns into Iraq for American troops, oil-filled stuff for Halliburton. And those flights carry on until 2005, right? So, whoops, not good PR.

He's embarrassed the Americans by this point, and that rarely goes down well. And then he's going to come out of hiding. So in 2003, when the US is going all world police on the world and Washington sanctions 30 of his companies for doing business with the Taliban, they link it with al-Qaeda, they raid his mate Chachli's house in Texas and they find bank records, a copier's boots, passport, one of them, and over 200,000 bucks worth of diamonds stolen.

She exactly flees to Russia after that. And boot just keeps on selling shit. He even spouts off in Moscow about how he's totally innocent and it's all an anti-Russian conspiracy. A bunch of journalists do features on him, including New York times, which does a photo shoot of boot looking like some sort of two bit wise guy putting shapes on an armchair. Reminds me, there's this old footage of Mogilevich playing chess with a reporter on a roof. Uh, like both of them just standing there in the middle of nowhere. That's, I think it's a BBC documentary, but that's just, that's just good TV. Yeah.

I mean, I've got a lot of respect for the photographers who are getting these guys to pull these shapes because it's pretty nuts. You should check out some of the pictures, actually. I've got it in the reading list that we're going to publish. But then Lord of War comes out and then suddenly a guy who barely had any photos of him is public enemy number two behind Osama bin Laden.

All right, so it's 2007 now, and we're into the plot to bring down Victor Boot. But first, we're going to back up the previous year when a DEA unit posing as members of the Colombian rebel group, the AFARC, brokered a phony deal with Syrian arms dealer Monse Alcázar in Madrid. He was actually the guy involved in Iran-Contra, by the way. So he had his use, and now they kind of wanted him out of the way, the authorities.

So the DEA thinks, all right, if we've got Kassar, why not just do exactly the same with Boot? And they do exactly the same. They need a way to lure him out of Moscow, where he's supposedly being protected by people in Putin's regime. You'd think the so-called merchant would therefore be a bit wary of some

Like if some massive drug smuggler is being stung in a DEA operation, right? Well, remember what I said about Boot being this kind of dumpy, ingenue, tourist, come arms dealer guy? There's a great moment in that documentary I mentioned before where they basically say he's just like so used to success. He just walks straight into all this. He never thought he'd get done ever.

Overconfidence, man, it brings many people like that down. They slip up once and it's the end. It's kind of why I'll never make it. Things go right for a while, you get lazy, you stop doing things that you're supposed to do to be careful. And it's just a common story. Yeah, I mean, that's why I'm going to be a great journalist because I get turned down for like a thousand pitches for every one that gets through. So that's a good sign, right? That's a really good sign. Lack of confidence?

or skill yeah um so the dea searches around for a weak link in boots network of associates and they find andrew smooley and his old pal from johannesburg small small small dogs yeah he's washed up and he's working at a hypodermic needle factory in tanzania that's not a good cv no uh he says he's in in his words he's broker than broke so that's their in

DEA gets a Congo-based asset, a businessman called Mike Snow, to contact Boot about a deal for, quote, agricultural stuff. Never trust a guy named Mike Snow. I mean, come on. Wasn't there a bank called Mike Snow? Maybe that's a Congolese businessman. I think it had two I's and it was kind of like spelled. It was, you know, something Scandinavian and it was like Mike or something like that. All right. Okay. So that wasn't a DEA asset. Or maybe it was. I don't know. Who knows?

So Smoolean flies to a Hilton Hotel tiki bar in Curacao in the Caribbean. Nice gig for that guy, right? So, like, how much do these DEA agents have to spend on these things? They're selling some two-bit needle salesman to Curacao.

But when he's there, Smulian meets two guys there who say they're FARC. Actually, they're both convicted drug smugglers the DEA has turned into assets. They tell Smulian they want Russian-made Iglas, which are these shoulder fire surface-to-air missiles, which are banned. Smulian says he knows a, quote, top dog in Moscow who is, quote again, protected at the very top.

I mean, look, these guys are, they're horrible people doing horrible things, but this does sound kind of fun. You know, like shady meetings in a fancy hotel tiki bar in the Caribbean. Like I want in on that. Yeah. I mean, what bad things could ever happen at a tiki bar?

Sounds like a great place to do an arms deal. They're kind of ruining the spirit of tiki bars, though. You know, you can't. I'm with you on that. Nothing bad should be discussed at a tiki bar. Only positivity. This is the only bad thing that's ever happened at a tiki bar, ever. I mean, tiki torches kind of had, you know, a bit of a, their brand kind of got ruined for a bit, but that's another story. People can bring them back. They can be reappropriated.

According to Boots defense, he's skeptical of these guys. But ever the businessman, he reckons he could sneak through some sales of old cargo planes under the veil of the arms deal. So he agrees until Smooly and he can get the igloos from Ukraine, which is like basically the Fort Knox of arms. It's just like packed full of them. It still is. I think it's like the world's biggest place for illegal arms deals.

Just like with Alcacer, the DEA tries luring Boot to Romania because that country lets you tap wires, right? But just like Alcacer, Boot refuses, so he's passed step one. Eventually, they decide to meet in Bangkok, whoops, and on March 5th, 2008, Boot gets on a plane for Thailand. The next day, he meets with Smoolian and the two supposed militants in a hotel conference room.

boots switching between Spanish and English, and he's even bold enough to write down all of the arm stuff on a notepad. This stuff's all on video, by the way. It looks like so hammy, it's incredible he fell for it.

Anyway, after a while, all these Thai agents burst in and Boot just sits there looking calm as hell. He turns to the DE officer in the room and just goes, the game is over. Great. I mean, great last line, but it kind of sounds like he was expecting to get caught. You know, if I was his jailhouse therapist, I'd be all, Victor, do you think maybe subconsciously you wanted to get caught? You know? Yeah, I mean, maybe he had a therapist in Thai jail. I think everyone in Thai jail gets a therapist, right? Yeah.

I'm just saying in general, like at this point, maybe he's tired of running. I'm just going to psychoanalyze him right here. Like he wants to get caught at this point. I think, yeah, I mean that documentary just says that he's so blithe and like confident that he just doesn't even realize. But I mean, if you didn't realize you're going to get caught, would you just sit there quoting one liners? Maybe not. I don't know. Mr. Bond, I see the game is over. I don't know what accent that was. That's just how I imagine he talks. I think that was your accent. Yeah.

So there's Bhutanabh and he spends nine months in a Thai prison protesting his innocence. He also learns Sanskrit, Hindi and Persian. Just get the fuck out of here at this point. Like lock this guy up for just making us all, everyone who tried to learn a language during quarantine, like just making us all feel like assholes. I can get a coffee in German. That's pretty good, right?

By the way, he doesn't learn Thai because he doesn't want people to think that he can understand what he's saying. It's pretty switched on. He just wants people to think of him as a foreigner. So he learns three other languages instead, standard. Sanskrit. So when he goes to court for extradition to the US, there are guys flogging copies of Lord of War outside the courtroom. It's really bizarre.

Anyway, 2012, Booth is convicted in a U.S. court. Because the two guys were posing as FARC, which America says is a terror outfit, he gets done on four counts, right? Conspiring to kill American citizens, conspiring to kill American soldiers, conspiring to acquire anti-aircraft missiles, and conspiring to provide material to terrorists.

I mean, it's pretty weak, right? Like he wasn't conspiring to kill Americans. He's just selling weapons. And the guys weren't actually in the FARC. Like it's pretty entrapment-y. What are so-called legit arms dealers doing anyway? Like conspiring to kill Yemenis? I think at this point it's safe to say that Sean supports illegal gun running and terrorism and also hates America. Yeah, all right. That's on record. Yeah, sure. That's never going to come back.

Even the judge, right? So I'm going to side with the judge. So the judge is on my side here. And she sentences Boot for the minimum 25 years. And she says, quote, but for the approach made through this determined sting operation, there is no reason to believe Boot would have ever committed the charged crimes. So that's a bit of a spiky quote at the end of the court case. And outside the court, Alla has a better quote. The man they sent down wasn't her husband, she says, adding, quote, they just found Nicola's cage guilty.

I mean, that's another solid quote, but, you know, I know you said otherwise, but except for some biographical details, he really does sound a lot like the character in the movie. Yeah, I mean, watch the movie, guys. It's a good movie. I mean, it's a fucking good movie. They should be paying us to advertise. Jesus, man, we could be raking in the dough. Yeah, I mean, we will. We will. Yeah.

I mean, Nicolas Cage is guilty of nothing, of course, but being the best actor in the world. But there it is, right? The merchant of death, glued into a sting and spending his days in an American prison. It didn't do much to the arms industry, by the way. Prices stayed about the same and weapons are still as freely available as they've ever been. In fact, some think Boot's high-profile case actually helped advertise the illegal arms trade around the world. It was probably more to do with the agency guys battling for cred. And someone says here...

The way you rise in that particular system is through high-profile cases. That's one guy who's telling the documentary director. And he adds, and Victor was high-profile. Whether he was deserving of that high profile is another question. So there's Victor Boot. Was he an evil guy with blood on his hands, a patsy for the feds, or just a guy without a conscience doing stuff that governments do every day?

I don't know, man. I mean, it kind of sounds like he did a lot of bad things that I guess governments do as well. But, you know, he probably should have been arrested. What happened to his brother?

So, I mean, I think his brother got off. And like the weirder one is that this Chachakli guy, the Syrian-American, he now does a load of like speaking on how Boot and him are innocent of doing anything bad. He has like a YouTube channel where he has all of these like weird interviews where he's just like, he's turned into like a grifter basically online. And he has like one interview from years ago where he's sitting down with Boot

some kind of like crappy 90s sofa and he's talking about how they're going to get all these trumped up charges it's just before he gets stung I can't remember exactly what he says now but it's basically saying like I mean like the Americans are after me it's all a conspiracy but it's like

He's a weird guy. And he pops up in loads of stories about Boo as well. The last refuge of the damned YouTube channels. We should get him on, man. We should do a little... Yeah, he's booked. He's booked. Yeah, I'm kidding. Yeah, so that's Boo. I mean, he's an incredibly interesting guy. And if you want to learn more... We're going to have the reading list, obviously, that goes up with our Patreon stuff. But I mean...

The sort of difference in the way that he's portrayed in the media is incredible. He's either evil or an idiot and pretty much nothing in between. So you can make your mind up. He's definitely not an idiot. I mean, the guy learned Sanskrit. No matter what you say about someone, if they learn Sanskrit, they're not an idiot. That's true. But yeah, I think that about does it. I want to thank, as always, our audio producer, Dale Isinger.

who makes us sound halfway decent when we sound zero ways decent most of the time recording this. So thanks to Dale for that. And thanks to everyone who's supporting us, who's listening, subscribe, Patreon, all that good stuff. And thanks again for tuning in.