Viktor Bout | Before They Were Criminal | Who Is Merchant of Dеаth

BEFORE being used as a bargaining chip in a one-for-one prisoner
swap that freed women’s basketball star Brittney Griner, convicted
arms dealer Viktor Bout otherwise known as the “Merchant of Dеаth”
-- was born on what’s believed to have been January 13th, 1967.
Douglas Farah, a senior agent at the International Assessment and
Strategy Center who once co-authored a book on Bout told CNN in
2010 that Viktor’s early days are still largely a mystery, even to
high-up government officials. That being said, according to
multiple passports, Bout was likely raised in Dushanbe, Tajikstan
as the son of a bookkeeper and an auto-mechanic. At the age of 18,
he was conscripted into the Soviet Army after having spent much of
his youth playing competitive volleyball according to a New Yorker
profile. After being forced into military service, Viktor served
two years in an infantry brigade in western Ukraine, before
graduating from the Military Institute on Foreign Languages, which
has a reputation for being a well-established feeder school for
Russian military intelligence. In other words – the likelihood is
that Viktor was a Soviet officer, ranking as highly as perhaps even
a Lieutenant. During his time in the Russian forces, Bout worked in
war-torn areas like Mozambique and Angola, where Russia had large
military presences at the time. He first landed on the radar of the
wider world at large when the United Nations began to investigate
him in the early-to-mid 1990s. That’s also right around the time
the United States began to get involved as well.