Is the 'Merchant of Death' more Hollywood than fact?
A view from the federal Judge who sentenced him to 25-years in prison.
I got a couple of hundred emails and DMs yesterday after Forbes published my article that confirmed the U.S. and Russia were in talks that could bring WNBA star Brittney Griner home in return for sending arms trafficker Victor Bout back to Russia. A surprising number of people wanted to know about Victor Bout. On the internet they had found sensational accounts of Bout as the “Merchant of Death” and references to how Nicolas Cage had used Bout as the basis for his bloody 2005 film, Lord of War. Is Bout, many of you asked, the villain that a Google search turns up?
I had long been interested as a journalist in Bout. I met him in late 2010, early 2011, when he was incarcerated at the Manhattan Metropolitan Detention Center, awaiting trial. At the time, I was considering a book about him, or at the very least a very long magazine article. Ultimately, I never wrote about Bout, instead going off to do a 200-year history of the finances of the Vatican (God's Bankers, 2015). In Nicholas Schmidle's wonderful New Yorker profile of Bout in 2012, he referred to me and said that "Posner, a journalist and lawyer...recalls that when they first met Bout hadn't wanted to discuss his case; rather, he wanted to "talk about black holes and how Stephen Hawking was overrated."
I followed Bout’s trial closely. And the one thing that became crystal clear was that the presiding judge, Shira Scheindlin, was careful that the government should not unduly prejudice the jury by referencing Bout’s reputation. Judge Scheindlin warned against using terms such as “Lord of War” or references to Libya and Rwanda.
After a federal jury convicted Bout, Judge Scheindlin rejected the government’s request that he be sentenced to life without parole in Florence, America’s supermax. She instead sentenced him to the mandatory minimum, which was 25-years.
Earlier this week, when I interviewed the now retired justice, she was one of the few people associated with the Bout case who was willing to go on the record.
“I was not happy to sentence him under the mandatory minimum of 25 years,” she told me. “There were no arms, none were sold, and no one was hurt. He was being punished for what the image was of him as a big deal arms dealer, terrorist, ‘merchant of death'.’ But that was not the case for which he was tried and sentenced.
That was a Hollywood version, and I like a good movie as much as anyone else. All good movies take a kernel of truth and embellishes it to make a good story. But that was what he was sentenced for.”
Judge Scheindlin pointed out to me that “Arms dealing is not something I like or admire, but it is done. And as an arms dealer, he probably violated various laws and restrictions, but when our government targeted him, he had not been in that business for a number of years.”
This is not an opinion Judge Scheindlin only came to years after the trial was over. Her comments during the sentencing hearing, on April 5, 2012, are required reading for anyone wanting to know more about “who is Victor Bout?”
The entire transcript, attached below, is only 15-pages, and the highlights are mine.
Amazing. Compelling. Thank you.
Amazing. Compelling. Thank you.