The story of “the world’s most notorious weapons trafficker”:
“The longer we sat in the small, musty room, the more the tempered side of Bout’s personality receded. I asked whether he felt any remorse. ‘I did nothing in my mind that qualifies as a crime,’ he replied. ‘Sure, I was doing transportation of arms,’ he said. ‘But it was occasionally. Three hundred and sixty days were normal shipments. For five days, I shipped arms and made a couple of hundred thousand dollars.’ (Mirchev, by contrast, recalls a period of ‘almost daily flights’ for UNITA.)”
Get the Longreads Weekly Email