Outlaws Inc. by Matt Potter

can really be sure of is that at the time of this writing, Bout had never been convicted of a single crime; even his harshest critics admit that, while they’d rather he didn’t do what he does, none of it has been illegal. Whether that will still be the case when his trial is concluded is for others to decide. But only a fool would bet with the odds on a man like Viktor.
    Bout is prominent enough to have enjoyed Armani-clad lifestyle-shoot treatment in the New York Times Magazine as well as having the world’s most august intelligence agencies on his heels for over a decade. Which makes the degree of uncertainty about him incredible. Either Interpol, the CIA, the UN, and the U.S. and Russian governments are all comically inept (which is by no means out of the question), or someone’s been constructing a pretty big smokescreen.
    In fact, Bout’s story is a white-collar version of Mickey’s own: an operation founded with the purchase of ex-Soviet military Antonov An-8 planes in the same Big Bang that spun and spat Mickey, Sergei, and the rest across the globe. “Upon the collapse of the Soviet Union,” says his Web site, “Victor decided to leave the military service and start his own aviation business, the field he was always fascinated by. And with some help from his family and his wife, Victor was able to purchase four Antonov-8 cargo aircraft that became the core and starting point of his fleet and his business.”
    That sudden acquisition of a fleet of cargo planes in those straitened times has raised many questions over the years, and recalls Mickey’s words about simply “liberating” a plane down to Kazakhstan. Sure, there was a fire sale, but even then, with the reported price for these aircraft a bargain $300,000, that must have been an awful lot of money for an army translator from Tajikistan and his “friends and family” to scrape together. Then again, it depends on the friends—and unanswered questions about the nature and identity of these people will cast an ever-present shadow over my time with Mickey.
    Bout’s network of planes—a patchwork of Antonovs and Il-76s, purchased, begged, “liberated,” and borrowed from different sources, which some claim include a plinth in front of a certain Missile Academy—grew throughout the maelstrom of the early 1990s, as did his influence. Soon he would be running those giant military-spec cargo birds throughout Africa, Central Asia, and the Arab world from his base in Sharjah, supplying arms to the likes of the Taliban, African warlords, and the Pentagon alike.
    There are odd echoes of that first casual chat with Mickey on a dusty runway in Bout’s self-description as “the typical and ideal picture of the new generation of Russian businessmen.” Only where the blue-collar pilot seemed sheepish with the terminology of the New Russians and biznesmeny , to the polyglot, designer-double-breasted, coiffed, almost yuppielike Bout, aspiration and achievement are nothing to be ashamed of. He is, if he says so himself on his personal Web site, “dynamic, charismatic, spontaneous, well-dressed, well-spoken, highly energetic [and able to] communicate in several languages including Russian, Portuguese, English, French, Arabic, among several others … a born salesman with undying love for aviation, and eternal drive to succeed.” That is where he and Mickey differ. Because where the cataclysmic end of the Union meant working men like Mickey had to find some way to survive, for Bout it was all about seizing a great business opportunity.
    But there are more similarities than differences. Like Mickey, Bout contends he’s just a simple cargo guy: a postman, not an arms trafficker, and that whatever customers might be sending through his postal service is for them to sort out. Indeed, in an unexpected, and indignant, 2002 phone call to the Los Angeles Times by a man claiming