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

Before They Were Famous

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.