Julian Crowley
Viktor Anatolyevich Bout, the most notorious arms smuggler on this list, currently faces seeing out the rest of his life behind bars. Extradited from Thailand to America in 2010 following a five-year operation by the DEA, the Russian national stands accused of illegally arming the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia in their operations against US forces. The jury found him guilty and he will receive sentencing in early 2012, when he could stand to receive a life sentence. Bout is reported to have made substantial amounts of money shipping goods in Africa and the Middle East in the 1990s and 2000s, and the former military translator for the Soviet Union may well have fed the flames of various African civil wars by supplying vast quantities of arms during the Nineties. He has also been dubbed a “sanctions buster” because of allegations that he violated UN arms embargoes in trading with Angola, Liberia, Sierra Leone and the Congo during the same decade. In 2001 Bout was furthermore implicated in the movement of gold and cash out of Afghanistan. The charges against him make Bout’s future prospects fairly grim indeed.
