Free Outlaws Inc. by Matt Potter Page B

unsolved. Dmitry Kholodov was the last Moscow investigative journalist to launch an inquiry into the fake “scrapping” of large items of military equipment for black-market purposes, having written a series of articles about the possible involvement of none other than Defense Minister Pavel Grachev. He was passed a briefcase purportedly containing documentary evidence but the moment he clicked open the lock, he triggered a booby-trap bomb that blew him to smithereens and turned his office at the Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper a bloody shade of burnt. So nowadays, those who may know are understandably circumspect about naming names when it comes to “scrappage” stunts like the life-size Il-76 sculpture that simply flew away.
    But some names do keep rising through the murk. And whoever you ask—airmen or businessmen, cops or robbers, inside or outside the industry—you don’t ask for long without hearing the name of a one-time comrade of Mickey’s at the Vitebsk base whose career mirrors Mickey’s own in some ways, while showing the difference a white-collar background, impeccable connections, and boundless ambition can make: an officer and army translator named Viktor Bout.
    There are as many different biographies of this most controversial figure as there are people who’ll claim to have had a brush with him. But for such a cause célèbre, so frequently photographed, he’s still curiously difficult to pin down.
    As far as anyone knows for sure, he is, or may be, any one of the following: Vitebsk airbase veteran; model businessman; ex-colonel; fairly low-ranking military translator; maverick aviator; illicit arms trafficker; friend to dictators and warlords; philanthropist; conduit for Colombia’s FARC militia; black marketeer; Merchant of Death; innocent victim of a smear campaign on the part of embittered former business contacts, including ambitious arms-trafficking monitors, CIA-run rival cargo businesses, and the U.S. government; rogue FBI double agent; pawn in the Bush-Cheney administration’s war games; valued partner to the U.S. reconstruction effort in Iraq; embargo breaker; puppet; delivery man; elusive phantom. Some say it’s likely that at different times he’s been all of the above. And as one Guardian reporter wrote on his 2008 arrest, “If Viktor Bout did not exist, a thriller writer would have invented him.”
    It would be tempting to say that the only thing anybody really knows about Viktor A. Bout is that his name is Viktor A. Bout, but even that’s not always been true. He’s carried at least five different passports and could at any moment have been Viktor (or often Victor) Buyte, Butte, Butt, Budd, Bulakin, Boutov, Bont, or Byte. Or Vitali Sergitov, or Vadim Markovich Amonov. Or simply “Boris.”
    Though his Web site, one of his passports, and a home video he recently put online all locate his birthplace as Dushanbe, in the former Soviet state of Tajikistan deep in the Central Asian crossroads between Russia and Afghanistan, he’s claimed in a radio interview that he was born in Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, on the shores of the Caspian Sea. Then again, no less a source than Interpol had information (used in his arrest warrant) that he came from Smolensk itself. Another Interpol warrant put him down as a Ukrainian. Ukraine’s Director of Military Programmes Leonid Polyakov, meanwhile, calls him a Russian born in Kazakhstan. Even the Russian government, having identified him as a Russian citizen and cooperated with attempts to extradite him for years, turned around in 2006 and tartly announced he wouldn’t be extradited, as he’d never actually been a Russian citizen at all—then fought his extradition from Thailand to the U.S. and, after his extradition was finally ordered in 2010, announced it would do everything it could to “bring him home to his Motherland.”
    Ironically, the only thing one