The latest news on Russia's "merchant of death"

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Regular readers of FP will no doubt remember a story we published last year in our November/December 2006 issue with the headline, "The Merchant of Death." The profile was of the world's most notorious arms smuggler, Viktor Bout, a 40-year-old Russian national with several passports and several dozen aircraft who's made a fortune by transporting illicit and licit goods all around the world. That article was written by Douglas Farah, a terror finance consultant and former West Africa bureau chief for the Washington Post, and Stephen Braun, a national correspondent for the Los Angeles Times. 

The FP piece was but a teaser for their newly-released book, also called Merchant of Death. Farah and Braun's 308-page book goes into more detail about the rise of Bout's network in the 1990s, using old Soviet airplanes leftover from the Cold War. They detail how Bout was able to deliver weapons to everyone from FARC in Colombia to child soldiers in Sierra Leone to the Taliban in Afghanistan. Even the U.S. government has unwittingly received supplies transported by Bout. Consider this book full of details that we wanted to print in FP, but didn't have the space for.  

If you're in DC, you can hear Farah and Braun speak at Politics & Prose bookstore on Thursday, Aug. 2 at 7pm, or you can check out their website to see where else you can learn more.