Word: bout
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Bout was both a product of the post-Cold War era and a master of its chaos. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the industrious 25-year-old saw an opportunity to turn dozens of military cargo planes that were sitting unused on military runways into a multimillion-dollar transport business...
Amid one of his first big shipments - sending crates of fresh-cut South African gladiolas into the United Arab Emirates - Bout realized it was wasteful flying into Africa with empty planes. According to Merchant of Death: Money, Guns, Planes and the Man Who Makes War Possible, a book on Bout written by Douglas Farah and Stephen Braun last year, Bout began to fill his Africa-bound aircraft with stockpiles of Soviet weapons to sell to some of Africa's most notorious regimes and rebel groups. As his business expanded, Bout found himself selling weapons on both sides of the conflicts...
...book. And a screenplay. He gave radio interviews in Moscow. Nevertheless, in the 1990s, there were few known photographs of him. In 2003, however, he agreed to an interview with the New York Times Magazine and stood for a portrait dressed in a nappy tan suit. In the interview, Bout tried to paint himself as a hard-working entrepreneur, vegetarian and nature lover who just happened to spend a lot of time flying into African conflict zones...
...meantime, law enforcement agencies were catching up to Bout. In 2002, the Belgian government charged him with laundering $325 million. In 2005, the same year Nicolas Cage played a character based on Bout in the Hollywood film Lord of War, the U.S. Treasury placed Bout in the Specially Designated Nationals list, an action that threatened to impose economic sanctions against anyone conducting business with Bout. U.S. officials believe Bout is worth hundreds of millions of dollars. A 2007 email that is part of the investigation that lead to Bout's arrest said the sanctions effectively froze about $6 billion...
...freeze may explain why Bout was willing to stick his neck out for new business. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency's (DEA) sting operation came together relatively quickly. According to the charging documents filed with the Southern District of New York, a confidential source working for the DEA emailed an associate of Bout in November to arrange for an arms shipment FARC. Using the code words "farming equipment" in the emails, Bout's intermediary allegedly planned for 100 Russian-made Ingla surface-to-air missiles to be air-dropped into FARC territory inside Colombia. After meetings in Curacao, Copenhagen...