Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 324 Viktor Bout, The Merchant of Death: Part 1

Episode Date: August 12, 2024

GET LIVE SHOW TICKETS: https://www.universe.com/events/lions-led-by-donkeys-podcast-live-in-belfast-tickets-belfast-83V5QD SUPPORT THE SHOW, GET THE CONCLUSION TO THIS SERIES RIGHT NOW: https://www.patreon.com/posts/109935474?pr=true Check out Failure to Launch: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/failure-to-launch/id1585592962 *since the time of recording, all prisoners involved in a possible exchange for Viktor Bout have been released. Once upon a time the film Lord of War was made about the international arms dealer Viktor Bout. They had to tone it down in order to make it more believable. Bout, a possibly, maybe GRU operative became the premier arms smuggler for anyone in the world who needed it, contributing to the deaths of untold millions and fueling wars that continue to rage to this day. sources: Estulin, Daniel, Shadow Masters Greg Cambell. Blood Diamonds: Tracing the Deadly Path of the World's Most Precious Stones https://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/17/magazine/arms-and-the-man.html https://archive.globalpolicy.org/intljustice/wanted/2008/0624convenience.htm https://www.cbsnews.com/news/viktor-bout-russia-arms-dealer-merchant-of-death-brittney-griner/ https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/mar/09/armstrade.internationalcrime Douglas Farah, Stephen Braun. Merchant of Death: Money, Guns, Planes, and the Man Who Makes War Possible.

Hey everybody, if you ever wanted to see us live but you missed the other shows, well, you have another chance. Me and the boys are hitting the road once again. The Lines Led by Dunkies podcast is coming live to Belfast at the OYE Music Center Saturday, October 26th. So get your tickets while they last. You can find the link in our show notes. So get them now.

Do it. Hey everybody, welcome to the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast. It's 1992, I'm Joe. Tom and I are standing in front of an old Hupolev Soviet transport plane. The metal on its side has long since rusted through and we're pretty sure the engine is smoking, even though it hasn't even been turned on yet. We have spent the last several hours loading unmaintained explosives into the back while Nate continues to argue with us that yes, the a drunken Ukrainian pilot that he found in a bar in The Congo was technically wanted on an Interpol arrest warrant

But that didn't matter because we're flying into Kabul, but most importantly according to the Transnistria Ministry of Aviation Sergey's pilot certification is completely legit. Hey guys Even though we will going to Congo You know, I will say this, what would you rather trust your life with? An MI-17 that's got soot on it for some reason and a guy with a bottle of vodka and a Russian Hawaiian shirt who does know how to fly it and make it fly? Or an American aircraft like a Chinook or a Boeing with exactly one loose bolt? It's the bolt that kills you.

Which one do you think is going to get you? Were you alive? I'm trusting anything that is rusted and Russian. My question is, assuming the pilot of that helicopter is not Armenian. I was about to say, depending on which one of them. Brian taught me anything is don't fly with Armenians. Yeah, Armenians, they're, you know, they are God's most perfect children, not for the air, not for the sea. We have a are God's most perfect children, not for the air, not

for the sea. We have a guest today. Oh no, not for space. Not for space. Armenians can't go to space. And the one Armenian that did went to space lost his one superpower and went bald. Quinn from failure to launch is here. Thank you for having me. How you doing buddy?

Am I supposed to give the show answer? Am I supposed to give the real answer of how we're all feeling right now? You give the show answer or am I supposed to give the real answer of how we're all feeling right now? You give the show answer or you don't get your passport back. I am doing great. It is nice weather. It is very cool inside of this studio and air conditioned and wonderful. Look, it's not my fault that the one weekend where everybody's in town for our live show tomorrow is the one weekend in the Netherlands where we've had hot weather and the Lion Studio does not have air conditioning. I feel like when I entered the Netherlands I picked the strange encounter perk in Fallout

because last night after we got back from dinner and I went to bed there was a guy who was in the room above me fucking like a jackhammer and making sounds like an uruk-eye. And then me and Joe were walking back from the shop this afternoon, a guy cycle past us with a speaker on his bike listening to Africa by Toto with a parakeet on his shoulder. Yeah. And the parakeet was like bobbing its head. You know, I got to say this completely left field comment, but not exactly a huge fan of Vladimir Nabokov's writing. But I will say that the reason why Lolita is considered a really classic work of literature is primarily because he understood that the Euro-perv is

just a thing that occurs throughout human history and that the weird eccentric Euro-pervert will always be there in some form. And as a result, he was one, he was of that class and he knew how to represent it. And so when I think of the Netherlands, I'm not explicitly saying that parakeet guy was a pervert. I'm just saying that the parakeet. Exactly. Exactly.

But I will say that there's always the eccentricity. It goes lots of different ways. And sometimes you just see a guy with an exotic bird. Sometimes you see a Euro cowboy. Those guys are out there. There's a couple of those floating around then, huh? Alarmingly young girlfriend always seems to be the case. You know, I can't wait until later when I go to the pub and the bartender's gonna somehow turn

around while not moving the lower half of his body and saying, Hey smooth skin, what do you have? Well fellas, I've gathered you all here and wrote that weird arms trafficking based fan fic because we're talking about weapon smuggling. Now everybody put on your time machine hats, I't know and go back several years where we talked about Lord of War for a bonus episode Hell yeah and that movie is kind of sort of based on the life of Victor boot a man that I said I would eventually cover and do a series on and that's what we're doing and

Then I kind of forgot about it for a while He was released from federal prison in exchange for WNBA basketball star named Brittany Griner. She was arrested for having a weed vape. More on that later. Then Victor Boot went on Russian TV to complain about all the genders in American prisons and then he washed up on Infowars with Alex Jones which brought him back to my attention because of our friends over at the podcast Knowledge Fight. So now here we are.

BD The most pressing question about the equality of that trade is can Victor Boot dunk? BD Looking at how Victor Boot looks now, I'm gonna say his ups are limited. He doesn't have good fundamentals. BD How is he from the 3 point line? BD Well I'm gonna assume that since he got arrested by the DEA in fucking Thailand, not very good. Wait it was the DEA that wound up getting him? More on that next episode. So Victor Boot, the man who would eventually lead a globe-spanning, arms-smuggling empire

dealing in double-dealing in virtually every conflict in the world before his arrest in 2008, who would earn himself the nickname The Merchant of Death is a bit of a mystery admittedly for every story about his childhood his early life and even his adult life there are three other possibilities and backstories and this is something that boot himself did on purpose and he is a horribly unreliable narrator in his own life story so I will do my best to use a lot of different sources, all of which of course will be in our show notes to kind of piece all of these together into a cohesive narrative because Victor Boot has been interviewed multiple times throughout his life and every single

time he gives a different life story. Even today his life is different. So I just want to point out Victor Boot is 5' So he's not real MBA height, but then that prompted a question in my brain because I'm a fundamentally broken person is if we're going to have war criminal basketball, who's the starting five, who is the Harlem Globetrotters of war criminal basketball? We got Victor boot. I feel like Charles Taylor would be really good on the inside because you don't want to get fucking near him. Yeah. Gaddafi?

If we're talking like- I mean Osama Bin Laden was really tall. I feel like you're going a little hard on people from Sub-Saharan Africa when we all know that everyone from the Balkans can play basketball and there's like a trillion war criminals from there too. And we don't know which one of them could be the war criminal Muggsy Bogues. Hey and to be fair Slobodan Milosevic played a phenomenal final game about a kilometer away from this studio. It wasn't Milosevic. It was another guy, but I know

exactly. Yeah, it was a day. And I mean Osama bin Laden, not a big basketball guy. He was six, seven though. He loved volleyball. He didn't ball. He didn't ball. Much like modern basketball players. Osama bin Laden loved anime. He was the Jimmy Butler of his time. That's true. I do find it very funny that among the contents of Osama bin Laden loved anime. He was the Jimmy Butler of his time. That's true. I do find it very funny that among the contents of Osama bin Laden's hard drive was a download video of Charlie bit my finger, the YouTube sensation and also a porn JPEG called ass.JPEG but it was spelled a S S S S dot JPEG. That means it's extra ass.

Not much at extra ass. He was into the badass. I mean whatever. Extra ass that much I mean whatever now with that Victor and a tolia bitch boot was born somewhere. I was from Brighton Beach Who's born like an RSI or some shit? You once again, you're just referring to the movie Lord of War He's just Nicolas Cage. He's just gun of Rambo. He's just... Nicholas Cage's character in Lord of War was a Jewish man who was Ukrainian, born in Brighton Beach, New York. Oh, okay. None of those things are true about Victor Boot.

He was born on January 13th, 1967. Now depending on who you talk to, he's either born in Tajikistan, which is what his Russian passport says, or Turkmenistan, which is what Victor Boot himself says sometimes, or Smolensk, Russia, which is what his Interpol arrest warrant says. Oh god, his arrest warrant says he was in Smolensk? According to his arrest warrant, that was his birthplace. And there was at least two other birth dates listed at various points of his life. But what we do know is his family was, his dad was an auto worker, so I guess that makes me the Victor Boot of this podcast, and his mother kept books for the local government

offices. After that, everything is kind of up in the air. He vanishes until early adulthood and reappears as a graduate of the Moscow Foreign Language Institute, graduating with a degree in economics and a decent fluency of at least 9 or 10 languages, including near fluent English, French, Spanish, Zosia, Zulu, Afrikaans, and also probably Dutch, German, Portuguese, Farsi, and Urdu. Did he have a plan from the start? Because this sounds like I can imagine no other use for these languages. The Zulu is like the real fucking outlier. There's a reason for all of this. Oh god. That's

because the language institute is pretty much considered of a feeder school directly into Soviet intelligence, specifically the GRU or military intelligence. For people unaware, the GRU is charged with servicing the various Soviet proxy wars and deals boiling across the world during the late stage of the Soviet Union, many of which are in Africa, which is why he speaks so many languages spoken widely in Africa. Most importantly when it comes to Boot though, he made his killing arming countless revolutionary groups in Africa, but specifically Angola. Yeah, makes sense.

Now the GRU guys would normally be put in normal military sounding units to do their job rather than be like plain clothes spook types. That's KGB guys. And they were given a normal military rank. For Boot, he was assigned to military aviation units in Angola, where the Soviets were heavily involved at the time, and Boot acted as the main GRU man coordinating imported Soviet goods into Luanda. Namely, weapons. And TVs that explode. Soviet weapon exports were a massive, massive part of the Soviet economy, and it was pretty much second place right after vodka.

I was going to say oil and gas, but vodka, perhaps. I do know that when Gorbachev did the anti-drinking campaign it cut Soviet fucking revenues by the third. Yeah, that's why vodka was a huge part of their economy and they didn't touch it for the longest time. And like virtually every other superpower playing empire games, it had virtually nothing to do with politics when it comes to weapons. And I shouldn't have to point this out, but I will anyway.

The Soviets supported leftist revolutions, everybody knows that. But these leftist revolutions always happened to be where there was massive amounts of natural resources to exploit. You're describing Luand, Angola, and Angola is a huge oil producing nation, so yeah, Roger. Mr Gorbachev, please help me with weapons to depose Joe. I mean, of course, every empire does these things, but a lot of people don't seem to know that the Soviet empire did the same thing.

The flag looked different. Do you reckon there's a photo flown around of Victor Boot in a dashiki? I mean, I imagine he's probably got one of him with the leopard hat that Mobutte wore and then the big sunglasses. Hold that thought for later. I was gonna say the fucking pregozian photos of him in every single disguise. And every disguise is worse than the last? Just fucking Victor Boot just looks like the fifth member of Krasovia Sils, Nash and Young,

but he's wearing a dashiki and a mamutu hat. But also I was thinking about the Soviet Empire and Angola and them deploying troops and stuff and also deploying Cuban troops to Angola and imagine is there like a Cuban Vietnam War movie where they're playing like a fucking salsa version of Freebird while the helicopters are flying over. A depressing salsa beat as you get your leg blown off by a bouncing Betty. Fortunate son, but it's like it's played with trumpets. Meanwhile there's just a guy sitting in the back eating the world's best Agousi and goat

stew. I mean, that's Nigerian food, but I got, who knows, maybe. To be fair, he also was in Nigeria a lot. I mean, there's not an African country that This meant to not sell at least one AKM But we'll get there the reason why the Soviets did this is because it's important to remember their money was effectively worthless the second it Crossed the border of the Soviet Union so they traded weapons for cash that was in the international You know movement of money basically getting foreign reserves so yeah liquid riches It's effectively the same thing that North Korea does today because their currency is worthless outside of North Korea

But also oil minerals diamonds anything that they could flip through shell companies like people like boot They could then flip those for liquid cash and other things worth money for the Soviet Union and about his rank We don't know what it was Boot does say he was an officer. Intel reports say he was at least a major, but the amount of things that he was doing in the GRU tells us he was significantly higher ranking than just some random major in Angola. So basically this is, he's the real life version of what the people from the Americans would have been.

If he could have gotten rid of his like incredibly thick Russian accent in English, yeah. He's just trying to do like Leonardo Leonardo DiCaprio in blood diamond, but sounds really weird. I think South Africans probably and white Zimbabweans probably thought Leonardo DiCaprio sounded like shit too. They had other problems with that movie, namely that he dies at the end. Also, I got to say, I don't know if, uh, if I'm wrong, but I will say the reason why I thought Agusi was a,

was Nigerian is because I saw a 2007 vintage YouTube video of guys doing Soulja Boy tell them Soulja Boy or Crank Dad except it was the Niger Boy version and they were talking about Agusi soup so I'm just saying I think it is. I think it is West African. I'll concede that. Angola, South West Africa. It's okay though. Next to South Africa. Got invaded by South Africa. This seemed to be his job for years within the GRU. One of the many Soviet men in Africa, mostly staying in Angola, but he also made short trips to the Congo, apartheid era South Africa despite the attested Soviet embargo, hence why he spoke fucking Afrikaans, and pretty much everywhere else that even would look at Soviet weapons regardless of the side of the conflict

Which is a trait that boot would become famous for but it's interesting He also so he spoke he said he spoke Zoja like yeah I don't know how to say exactly because the South African language like and Zulu and Zulu yes He was fomenting discontent and discord and also trading with white Afrikaners and also the Soviet government gave weapons to apartheid era South Africa, but also the ANC's militant way and like the Soviet government gave weapons to apartheid era South Africa but also the ANC's militant way and like the Zulu militant wing as well. Yeah they were doing political bisexualism play both sides never lose. They hadn't invented oxcords yet but if they had you would not want you are you are Victor Booth. It would have been Al

Keno. Victor Booth putting on Ethel Cain. He's putting on I'm not doing this. He's putting on Phoebe Bridgers putting on imaginaryel Cain. He's putting on... I'm moving on. I'm not doing this again. He's putting on Phoebe Bridgers. He's putting on imaginary shit nobody cares about. He's posting vague stuff on his Instagram story. All I'm saying is there's that video of the documentary that the American film crew got to embed with the Soviet Union, Soviet unit in Afghanistan in like 1988. Oh, the guy riding on top of the APC aviator sunglasses.

Yeah, yeah. The sickest mustache anybody's ever seen. Looking like fucking Ignatius Riley and but the inside one of the APCs in that same scene You they're playing like horrible West German synth pop and they've got like Adidas and Bruce Lee stickers all over the inside of it So I can only imagine like what Victor Boots playlist would look like but it would have been weird is all I'm saying Like the band is modern talking which is not a good band, but they were German and I'm just saying, I bet you his Samizdat pop music shit would have been incongruous. You know what I mean? Yeah, either that or he's bumping just seven copies down simulacra of like, Fela Kuti's

Fear No Man. Yeah, exactly. He's playing expensive shit, but it's been re-recorded onto an old x-ray of someone's fucked up chest because like that's how they got bootleg records I'm dead serious. I know about that. I thought you were stupid fucking avant-garde band who did some fucking West African music from was it was it fella cootie that was like being Persecuted by the Nigerian state they tried to arrest him on Charges because he had weed so he ate the weed and they they like they held him in jail like we're gonna make you shit and then we're gonna search your shit to find the weed but he paid another prisoner to give him his shit instead so he handed them fake shit the old switcheroo and then they let him

go and then he was like but it cost him like $200 a lot of money so then he wrote an like a single about it called expensive shit basically and then he became best friends with ginger baker from cream Fair as everybody knows in 1991 the Soviet Union shit itself and died It isn't exactly known what boot was doing at that time if he was still in the GRU Or he was not but what is known is he can now do even more than he could do before you see What's important to remember here is boot is a plane guy He works in aviation effectively

That's what we're gonna be talking about for the next episode and a half But he had to get there at some point and the birthplace of that whole thing was the death of the Soviet Aviation Authority the civil air system as a whole the military air transport system all of that It was all interwoven and controlled and connected by the state which now suddenly did not exist functionally at least and they built so many goddamn aircraft civilian and military aircraft were dual badged because in the event of a war Soviet planners saw their civilian aviation air plot whatever as a reserve like hey if we need to we got all these civilian planes we can do something to them for the military It was massive, and it was so massive that the civilian aviation authority of all

of these various different countries that suddenly come to being have no fucking idea how many planes they actually have or even where they are. Overnight pilots, mechanics, all the regular people that make air transport possible, regardless of the kind of air transport, suddenly found themselves unemployed. Soon fights erupted between the various new companies that were being sucked up by all these oligarchs, airports, municipalities, new governments, all that shit. Everybody's trying to snatch up planes, replacement parts, ground crews, pilots, everybody's fighting over the Soviet Aviation Administration's dying corpse. Nobody was doing fuck all for paperwork or inventory.

Things were just vanishing. The men and the money involved in this is completely unknown and probably always will be but soon our boy Boot at only 25 years old was in the mix and snatched up three old busted Anatov cargo planes for the price of $120,000. Good deal. About that, how do you imagine a member of the Soviet GRU just had $120,000? Is the question nobody's been able to answer. Well, I mean, if he's the one doing arms sales to generate foreign currency reserves for the

Soviet Union, one imagines that he's also doing his own bookkeeping and can probably slush a little bit to himself here and there. That is the one version of events that some people believe or we can go off of what Boot told his friend who then told a journalist which was the GRU gave him $120,000 and said buy those three planes and he did. Wait so like the new Russian GRU at that point? Yes. Okay so is his story throughout all of this that he is consistently doing things at the behest of the Russian government? Not officially.

Like he told his friend that. Okay. He doesn't officially say anything. According to Boot he's never been an arms trafficker, he's never worked for the Soviet government. He's a simple and legit businessman. Oh sweet. Victor Boots just like hogging the boo in the blunt run.

He's like, yeah, can't be 120 to buy the plates. Yeah man, it's fucking sick. This good shit man. I fully believe either of these stories to be true. What is known simultaneously and not being known is how much he was working for the GRU at any point after the fall of the Soviet Union, how much he was working for the GRU at any point after the fall of the Soviet Union, how much he was working for himself. Because both things were happening at the same time.

Yeah, it's a certain level of plausible deniability. Yeah. He founded a company called SES-Air, which is where these three planes would fall under, and it was headquartered in Liberia. A place that does not ask a lot of questions. The entire company was under his name, and soon planes full of Soviet guns were once again landing anywhere and everywhere in the world as long as someone had something that could be exchanged for money.

Virtually as soon as CES-AIR was founded, its operation continued to expand. It's not like Boot said he was an arms trafficker, he was what was known as a cargo leasing company. He would supply his planes in a wet leasing arrangement as opposed to a dry leasing arrangement, which I assure you does not have anything to do with how fuckable the planes are. I've seen pictures of Victor Boot. I don't want either of those words ascribed to him at any time. Victor Boot has never made anything.

Victor Boot is doing the arms trafficking version of Woobistics from The Sopranos. I'm just laughing at the idea It's like the company you get yelled at you know hauled into the office because you use the company black card to pay for sex Workers you're like no no I wasn't paying for sex workers. I've just got a little wet leasing arrangement So what a wet leasing arrangement is is that he leases you everything it's not just the plane. It's the ground crew It's not just the plane, it's the ground crew, it's the pilots, it's everything. And that is what you would do. And so someone had show up like, I need three planes and he'd be like, perfect. And like, do you need to know what's in it? He's like, definitely not. It's kind of unknown how many of these

wet leasing arrangements he was leasing out to second companies with weapons he also purchased inside the planes to go to a third party. But officially he was a middle man. But more and more planes disappeared off the new Russian Air Industries books. Officially they were written off as scrap. Which to be fair, they were. These planes were unsafe to fly in any situation.

But Boot did not fucking care. He was never given good planes fucking care he was never given good planes and he was certainly never given good pilots they were just pilots that would fly no matter what as long as the check cleared he got the worst of the worst and made them fly the main benefit of a plane being written off as scrap even if it's still I won't say air worthy but capable of flight is that when say aeroflot says it's scrap in I won't say air worthy, but capable of flight, is that when, say, Aeroflot says it's scrap, in the International Aircraft Registry System, it is deleted. That

plane no longer exists. Ah, yeah, yeah, I know what you mean. Exactly. So, Boot could do with it whatever he wanted. And that's another question that comes when it comes to working with Boot. Because at this point, again, we don't know how much the GRU is doing and how much he's doing as a private business person. But what we do know at this early stage, he was making $30,000 per week per aircraft and at this point he had at least dozen aircraft. Holy shit. How much were the pilots making?

Not that much. Hell yeah. A couple hundred dollars? Maybe a thousand here or there. That's what you want. You want underpaid pilots, planes that are falling apart. These pilots could not fly for anybody else. I mean, there's something of like a tradition of like disgraced Soviet pilots flying incredibly unsafe aircraft and unlicensed airlines in Africa. He was also picking up those same people. Yeah. It's either, you know, you work for Victor Boot or you take a job where you have to fly

to an island that suspiciously is shaped like a skull that has a large gorilla on it. He trafficked that gorilla to be fair. Victor Boot is selling the gorilla to Charles Taylor. Oh, hold that thought about Charles Taylor. Oh, fuck off. Fucking King Kong with a stare the size of a skyscraper. Name a warlord operating in Afri- forget this time, we will talk about him. Oh, when does Gaddafi come up? Part two.

Okay. Now, it's also important to know here, several of these planes are owned by Boot and a shell company, which mind you, all of his companies are owned by fully victor boot. He never tries to hide his name yet. Victor boot LLC. Kinda. Just looking victor boot up on companies house so you can send him hate mail. But other things that he was doing, this is one of the questions that comes in is how

much is the russian state involved, because a lot of the planes he's using were still fully and legally owned by aeroflot and simply leased out to him legit and in the open. They weren't even trying to hide it. There's just some Russian holidaymakers wondering why their airliner has stopped in the middle of the desert. Why are we diverting to Kandahar? Here, hold these AKs. Now flush with cash, Boot dove back into the system of collapse and theft that remained

within the former Soviet Union. As a guy entrenched with the government, and more specifically, within arms trading within said government, can endless number of contacts. The same chaos that left planes vanishing off the books, also applied for the entire Soviet arms manufacturing industry to include nuclear weapons. It was the entire former Soviet everything. Yeah virtually every former state in the Soviet Union had some kind of weapons manufacturing going on within it. It could be replacement parts, it could be ammunition, it could be guns, tanks,

aircraft, anything. Each turned out whatever it was that they produced endlessly because they didn't do it by need, they did it by quota and the quotas were endless. I'm trying to think, obviously the oligarchs in Russia rose out of the most inauspicious kind of industries. What's the funniest oligarch you could be in the late 90s in Russia? I mean it's Progogen. Yeah, the catering. He got into fucking catering and turned into a warlord. I'm the toilet oligarch.

I sell all the gold toilets to other oligarchs. Now most of these factories, when the Soviet Union collapsed, closed down. Some of them weren't quite mothballed yet, but they were shut down and all of the workers were still just like hanging around all day trying to figure out if they had a job or if they didn't if this new state, whatever state it happened to be, was going to exist or collapse the people guarding these massive stockpiles of weapons were not getting paid so what's gonna happen with all that? and just because the Soviet Union died didn't mean the craving and want for Soviet equipment did.

The various regional proxy conflicts of the Cold War survived past the Soviet Union and in many cases expanded because of the Soviet Union collapsing. And the Soviets had dumped weapons on most of them, as had the US of course, but that left generations of conflict full of people who had been trained on Soviet gear, only wanted Soviet gear, and only could afford Soviet gear because it was cheaper and most importantly the Soviets would take fucking anything in payment. I'm just getting a phone call here it says it's from the Serbians. Well also you think about it too it's like no one's getting their paychecks and people are working

in things you know these industries it's like you just statistically speaking economists have noticed a strange preponderance of things falling off of trucks somehow. When these conditions are met a lot more, the falling off of a truck and people finding it rate just skyrockets. Also the truck has fallen off the back of a larger truck. Well, when trucks- Which also had a helicopter on top of it. I was going to say when trucks can fall off the back of trucks, I mean like, hey, now

you have the post-Soviet economy. Victor Boot is just doing like Paul Walker in Need for Speed one and, but instead of like DVD players, it's like mass amounts of AKs and planes. Kinda, though we don't know how old Victor boots girlfriend was. Where was Vin Diesel at this time? He had gotten past the point in his career where he was break dancing and making break dancing videos and he hadn't yet. He's drifting through an arms factory in Bulgaria screaming at Victor boot about brothers and family.

Well, I'm thinking about this too, that it's like at a certain point, you know, early in the Afghan war, there was a situation where a CH 47 broke down on a mountain top and they had to commission of like private company out of like Tajik standards, Becca stand to come in with an MI 26. Listen to me, let me get to the point. Do you want to know know who owned that company? This is what I'm trying to say. What's funny to me is that in the minds of helicopter geeks, it's like an MI-26 came out and literally did a sling load

on a Chinook and carried a Chinook away. And everyone's like, oh wow, isn't this cool? Me, I'm thinking, so why does a random ass guy own an MI-26 and just has it? It's because that company- It's just a whip. It's just its weekend driver. No, that company was owned by Victor Boot and we'll talk about that in a little bit operation enduring freedom for Victor boot apparently that helicopter is just

like pimped out like a fucking car in Houston just has like a wood grain stick just for a sneak peek on our next episode if you were deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan between the years of 2001 and 2007 and you received a care package from home, guess who delivered it? Boot Aviation? Yes. Now, that's a sneak peek for our next episode. Can't wait to get my divorce papers delivered by Victor Boot.

Yep. Doing the Russian government's work by exclusively delivering bad mail to US troops, breaking up families. Now, when the Soviet Union is dead and all these arms manufacturing plants are still full of weapons and some of them are still functioning, remember, the market is wide open and boots slid right in there greasing some palms and the doors to these vast stores of old dusty equipment of all kinds just short of a nuke were open to him. And virtually every single Russian military unit and

you know other non-Russian post-soviet countries, militaries, rapidly turned into organized criminal organizations. Their commanders became mob bosses, padding their pensions and whatever, becoming wildly rich. Their soldiers just turned into their capos effectively. Virtually overnight literally hundreds of thousands of AKs disappeared but that was not all. Tanks, APCs, MIG fucking fighter jets all gone from Russian and other post-soviet country stockpiles reappearing in places like Angola, Congo, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. In case you've ever wondered how Angolan rebels got a fucking jet air force, Victor Booth. In case you're wondering how the RUF in Sierra Leone had a MIG, Victor Booth.

It's all Victor Booth the whole time. Just like black bagging some random Russian pilot, dragging him out there to like, no, this is a wet deal, you are part of this now. Yes. I hope you enjoy spicy food for the first time in your life. You're not getting thin gruel and aspic anymore. They were poured into African conflicts at a rate that would make the former Soviet Union jealous.

All of them being shipped by Boot, who now had six different air transport companies in different names flagged out of different places targeted for their lax corporate oversights in places like the UAE, Liberia, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Swaziland, Switzerland, the Central African Republic and Texas. Hey, okay. Of all the US states to be included on that list, I feel like Texas makes the most sense. We eventually would also open an office in Delaware as well.

Once again, also on the list for a reason. Joe Biden's support of Victor Booth. Unironically yes, but mostly because he was part of the government that was contracting out to Victor Booth. How high does this go? Literally everywhere, to everyone. It's just doing the- Victor Boot is the octopus of the world. It's the Charlie Day Pepe Silvia thing but the whole board is red string. It's Boot all the way down. Was he trying to do like

cover stories at this point? No. Okay so they weren't dealing with like Yevgeny Gorteks or something? No. They were Victor Boot. He had five different Russian passports, but the thing is all of them were Russian passports. They all had his same picture on it and every single name and every single one of those passports began and ended with the letters V and B. My personal favorite was Vincent Butt. But he wasn't even trying. It's like these companies like, oh, this is SES Air owned by Victor Boot. This is SES Air 2, Electric Boogalow, also owned by Victor Boot.

This one is not SES Air, owned by Victor Boot. Like he wasn't hiding anything. He just created different shell companies in different places to keep money moving around. And he boots the house down mama. Because nobody's looking for him, and more on that in a little bit. The thing that probably made him so profitable was that he would trade weapons to anybody for literally anything that he could resell. It didn't matter if it like you're probably thinking like blood diamonds, oil, which

yes but not everybody is precious metal or drugs like which of course he was selling weapons in Afghanistan in exchange for drugs which he then brought to Russia, sold to the Russian mafia, they dispersed through Europe. But what if you have none of those things? I got a half-eaten sandwich, what can you give me? He would figure out something. What if you had like a palette full of B-grade toasters? He would find a way to sell them.

So he's basically dark energy only fools and horses. So you set up like, what if no one has anything to sell? Are we talking slavery? I don't know if he was ever involved in slavery, but it's not that he wouldn't be above selling a human being. That's where he drew the line, you know, he's a man of morals. For instance in Afghanistan, they had a frozen chicken processing plant and the Taliban wanted a dispersal of income. They didn't want to sell everything in drugs or buy everything in drugs and boo didn't want to just take only drugs so like we got frozen chicken and he's like yeah all right he imports so much frozen chicken from Afghanistan into South Africa that he becomes the premier importer of frozen chicken in

all of Africa of getting prego shin they're all getting it through food he opens up the first ever chain of BFC. It's just like him just drawn as the Colonel. Someone draw that. He had to build a refrigeration facility outside of the airport in Johannesburg to store all the frozen chicken that he was then setting to every corner of the continent. Thank you Victor Boode for my chicken tendies. This man is the patron saint of hustling.

I hope you feel good about that, that's blood chicken you're eating. Yeah it is. It's literally terrorist chicken. Everyone looks at Pusha T or someone if you're stupid like Andrew Tate. The real grindset is Victor Booth. If you wanna make something out of nothing aside from $125,000 from the GRU. Now, let's talk more about Afghanistan before we get into what he's more well known for that being Africa. Boot floated into Afghanistan just after the fall of the Soviet backed government

and prior to the outbreak of the Second Civil war, during that strange period of coalition between the various factions of the Mujahideen, we talked about this during our Soviet Afghan war series, so I won't rehash too much of it here. But just know that the hardline Islamists joined forces with slightly more moderate groups. A guy named Rabbani was president, Ahmad Shah Massoud was acting defense minister. Both Rabbani and Massoud loved Victor Booth, and paid him in uncut emeralds. Oh, he's like Sonic.

If you hit Victor Booth really hard, a whole bunch of rings and emeralds come flying out of him. That's what happened to the DA arrest of him. He got really scared, and just rings popped out of him. Progrosian is tails, Roman Abramovich is knuckles. Who's shadow? I don't know. Not sure.

Does Victor Boot have a nemesis? The DEA. The DEA is Dr. Eggman. Masoud and Boot also became very close friends in hunting buddies. They hunted sheep out of the door of a a boot supplied rickety shit bucket helicopter. Boot's friend would go with them and remarked quote, sometimes people would shoot at the helicopters, we would shoot back at them. It was okay, nobody cared. So occasionally you're out sheep hunting and then you're just hunting people. The greatest game. Yeah, the deadliest game. This chicken finger from BFC doesn't taste like

chicken. It tastes more like a long pig. If you have any complaints, go to our complaints department. It is out in the middle of this field in Afghanistan. Just stand still for a few hours and we will be right with you. It's like that prank from Nathan for you to file the fuel refund, you have to climb the top of a mountain. There's just like one guy with one phone in rural Uzbekistan waiting for one call for a complaint about BFC. I am the BFC customer service rep of Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. Nobody ever calls me. Yep. However, eventually this government would collapse, leading to the second Afghan civil

war roughly between Islamists of various forms eventually coalescing into the Taliban against Masood's Northern Alliance. Boot had friends on both sides of this conflict and continued to sell weapons to both of them. This eventually sparked an international incident one day when one of his flights bound for the Northern Alliance was forced to land in Kandahar due to, would you be surprised, the plane falling apart mid-flight. Rob- Victor Boot just doing a slice of life anime thing where he goes into a bar and he's dating both warlords and they're both there.

Jason- This is kind of what happened though, because he was supplying weapons to the Taliban, the Taliban don't know this. Masood kind of has an idea, but his plane is forced to land in Kandahar which is controlled by the Taliban. The Taliban don't know this. Massoud kind of has an idea, but his plane is forced to land in Kandahar, which is controlled by the Taliban. The Taliban arrest the crew, impound the plane and insist like, you were trading with the Northern Alliance while they're like, no, we were going to Pakistan, even though they're going in the complete opposite direction. And the Taliban is also like, well, you must work for the Russian government you're all Russian and they're like no we work for Victor boot and they're like it's like a meet-cute between Abdul Rashid Dossam and Mullah Omar betrayed by the same

man how could he just join forces. What's very funny is they crack open all the crates full of ammunition and they found all the ammunition is so corroded it's useless so they can't even steal it. The Taliban insist again this must be an official Russian government transport mission which they eventually contact Booth because they know him and he's like nah we don't work for the government and then he abandons the crew in Kandahar. That's so umbrah. What's funny is the Russian government then gets involved trying to secure the crew and

the plane to get back all but confirming that they did in fact work is the Russian government then gets involved trying to secure the crew and the plane to get back all but Confirming that they did in fact work for the Russian government The pilots probably would have no idea But either they worked for the Russian government or for the first time in human history The Russian government is suddenly concerned about the welfare of several of its civilians So we know which one that probably is right now these guys are detained in Kandahar for over a year and Finally the crew manages to escape Afghanistan Hijacking their own plane while their Taliban guards were out at prayer and flying it back to the UAE

So their own plane that had a year prior crashed because of no maintenance It didn't crash it was more of a careful landing. And did not get maintained at any time in that intervening. I mean, better than nothing. This is also why some people believe this entire thing was a setup by Boot to deliver a massive shipment of shit to the Taliban. Because the story about the crew like suddenly after a year seeing an opening and climbing into their plane that Boot insisted had to make an emergency landing to fly back

To Sharjah like Nate. What is this? Mgs3 I mean, yeah, basically it's just set in the Soviet jungle somehow I don't there is any jungle in the former so yeah now that I'm thinking about it the fact that it was fueled and ready To go exactly. Yeah, okay. Okay. Yeah Before D chest which is even funnier because like the Russian government didn't know they're doing it So the Russian government's talking to the Taliban boot has everybody convinced He abandoned them while also dealing with the Taliban to let his crew escape and also his crew like actually could have left months earlier But the Kibli Palau was so fucking good. Yeah

This isn't even the only time he would engineer deals like this, like on both sides of the conflict right in front of one another. It's what he does. It's a trend. During the first Karabakh war, he sold weapons to Armenia, to Artsakh, and Azerbaijan simultaneously, sometimes getting the deliveries incorrect and having some things saying like, for the Republic of Azerbaijan delivered to Yerevan in Armenia, and he's just like, whoops. But everybody knew he's doing it and nobody gave a fuck.

Because it's one of the reasons why people like him exist. There's a need for them. If you got something worth anything, you can get a gun. He won't ask questions, it's fine. Yeah, he's doing Jordan Belfort shit like sell me this AK, the rusted plane. You might be wondering, what about sanctions and embargoes? Because there's plenty of them. Every country I've listed pretty much so far has some form of embargo or sanction on

them when it comes to arms. Some of these countries do not even legally exist, yet he is somehow managing to get into them. Those who are a little more than red tape and paperwork that he just ignored But also like you were saying too that the international flight tag stuff where the planes didn't exist anymore like everything was off the books It's not as if there was nowhere near as much international cooperation back then between these new countries governments and like civil aviation military aviation Like tracking it was just not a thing where information was shared and so it's like yeah If he had flown over America, it might have been a problem. Like yeah, theory clear of the United but well Texas. I mean he had a business out of Texas

He never flew out of Texas. Okay, the first American branch of BFC One thing that he did do is like tail numbers and stuff You would just make them up Confuse people and he flew once or twice when people got like this tail number makes no sense You just change it even when that didn't work. he came up with other ways to do it for example the Balkans in 1990 well I was gonna say this man must have like Photographic memory of every airfield in former Yugoslavia. Well the thing is the man's not a pilot himself I know that what I'm saying in terms of like the logistics of it every single different faction needing weapons like hmm

Where are there a lot of warring factions? factions yeah he made a killing in the 90s for obvious reasons this area north of greece and uh south of italy yeah i'm getting another phone call this time it's from the albanians uh well yeah like during the balkans wars of the 90s he supplied every single side all of them under arms embargoes. Muslim countries rushed to try and supply the Bosniaks, namely Sudan, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. However, due to embargoes and sanctions, they could not just directly send weapons to them, so it's boot time. Yacko, Wacko and Dadovich. Every single person is trying to get involved in supplying their side. So now you're like the most peaceful village in Slovenia, like right across the Italian

border and you all get huge gold AK-47s for some reason. Slovenia is about to pop up. Listen, the people who like made the most money out of the fall of Yugoslavia are Victor Boot and whoever's making counterfeit Adidas tracksuits. And like transported by Victor Boot. I was also going to say yeah and also the Irish band U2 with their classic 90s hit Miss Sarajevo. Oh if there's anyone that I wish had been caught by a stray in fucking Sarajevo is Bono.

Enter a charity called the Third World Relief Agency or the TWRA. Now this name, if you're a little bit older, maybe paid way too much attention to the news in the early 2000s, this name is familiar to you because it was bankrolled by someone you may have heard of, Osama Bin Laden. Agents of all of those governments delivered suitcases full of money to this charity quote unquote organization to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. The TWRA would then purchase weapons from different boot contacts, charter his planes

for weekly flights between Sudan and Slovenia, after which the weapons which were labelled as humanitarian relief would be smuggled over the border in trucks to Bosnia. And all of this was done with the complete and total knowledge of the United States and pretty much every European power because they wanted to arm the Bosniaks and they're like, this is fine. What we want is happening. Because when you think about it, if you're going from Sudan to Slovenia, you're flying over the Eastern Mediterranean and you're going to be flying through definitely the surveillance area, if not the air traffic control area of Cyprus, also known as British airstrip number one and Israel, also known as American airstrip number one.

Like folks are going to know what's going on. The thing is, is people like boot do not exist because they're smart. They exist because everybody, like I said, they need boot to exist. They need this intermediary to do things like smuggle weapons to countries that are under an embargo that they're supposed to be enforcing. They might not even give him money directly. They might not even give him weapons directly, but the only thing that Boot needs to require to exist is for you to look the other way for 15 minutes.

He is Joe's Del Boy. I was going to say, this is just, Joe may not be as familiar with this, but there's this British sitcom called Only Fools and Horses about a guy who's like in the neighborhood that I live in. It's like this guy, a guy who lives in a basically public housing apartment with his family and like his job is he just like sells shit he acquires wholesale and it's just like wheeling and dealing stuff out of a van. Like did you have a container full of like fucked up Chinese toys with broken LEDs?

Like he's, he's trying to sell them and like At marked up prices and this show do that has basically been really like it's so popular all around Europe But it's not been like dubbed or subbed. They just recreate it in like the local version It's like Serbian only fools and horses Yeah, like Albanian only fools and horses because every country has a geyser with a white van who just like fucking sell shit It's just take that to the next level with Soviet planes and Soviet weaponry. And you've got that's exactly what he's doing. Yeah, it's only boots and horses.

Now, his closeness with the radical causes got deeper as Boots business expanded further and further into the UAE state of Sharjah, who of course did not give a single fuck about politics or the religious aspect of the entire thing. Rather, Boot knew they would protect his interests as long as he did theirs. And since this is the UAE we're talking about, that's just money. Sharjah was perfect for it because it lacked the pomp and mainstream appeal of something like Dubai, and the sheiks of Sharjah were desperate for someone like Boot to bring money that was legal or otherwise into the state to prompt them up so they can compete against their fellow Emirates.

Frozen chicken just becomes the main export of one part of the UAE for some reason. And Sharjah had a huge population of mysteriously wealthy Russians, so he fit right in. I will say this, every single bit of shelf stable dairy that we ever got in dining facilities in Afghanistan was from Sharjah in the UAE So I do wonder if the boot print of Victor boot is all over that stuff too. Depending on the year Yeah, we'll talk more about that at length in episode 2. Boot would find places with airstrips desperate for money to the point They wouldn't ask too many questions and he would move right in. In many cases like that in Austin, Belgium, his firms would be taking off from the same airstrips as American CIA linked companies doing the exact same thing he was doing. Nobody

cared. Cash was king and nobody wanted to fuck with the bag. Also the CIA knew exactly who he was the whole time and he knew who the CIA was because they would drink together. Yeah, he's doing the George Michael foot tap in the toilet. Just a knowing glance as two men pass each other on the way to the glory hole. Except that the glory hole is a whole Tupolev transport jet stick. I wonder if that hurt their professional pride, the CIA, that they can run all of these arms trade cover companies and whatnot, and here's Victor Booth just doing it privately

better. I mean to be fair, they were also doing business with Booth. Well yeah. It was nice to have a guy that... because there's certain groups that not even the CIA could be found to do business with. And when that was the case, they had Booth. Everybody had Booth for that. So it's basically the music video for George Michael's outside, except every single person fucking in public has a top secret clearance. You're just describing DC. Yeah, pretty much.

Yeah, pretty much. Though probably one of my favorite Looney Tunes ass stories about boot was what happened in Kissin' a Ghani Congo in 1997. Now locked in a massive regional and civil war. The biggest land war since World War II is happening at the moment. Congo was unfortunately and has been since independence beset by chaos and armed groups under the control of people outside of its borders. Innocent people, fighters, victims, victimizers all fled into the Kisunagani airport for safety

due to that's where the aid was going to come in and also if there was ever going to be an evacuation that would be how they got out. One employee of USAID was on the ground and charged with trying to find a way to coordinate aid for the people gathered at the airport. The airport is in such a shit state he knew only the old Soviet cargo planes and their half-drunk and idiot pilots would be able to take off and land there because the concepts of safety simply never existed in their head. So he reached out to a company that would be able to take off and land there, because the concepts of safety simply never existed in their head. So he reached out to a company that would be able to do it, and before long, old Soviet cargo planes were flying into the airfield,

given the green light by not only the UN, but the US government and the UN World Food Program. They even had World Food Program-like decals on the side of their plane as they flew in. They'd land, offload literally tons of UN labeled humanitarian aid, and then they would strip off the UN logos from the side of the plane and begin loading up weapons that they, unbeknownst to anybody else, cut deals with all the local rebels to then sell them. So they would fly in aid, fill the planes up with illegal untraceable weapons from the rebel groups in the area, and then leave.

As all as people were watching, like, what the fuck is going on? The thing is, is like, these guys obviously don't have anything to trade for these weapons. So like, they're just giving them anything. Like you want to watch? I mean, that's, it literally is George Michael's outside where the public restroom turns around, all the toilets flip around and become disco toilets and a disco ball flows except in this case it's the UN planes flip their signage and become like Arms International Express. My favorite part of it was one time they flew in and

they're like oh there's only half as much humanitarian aid on this flight why they offload all the pallets and there's a fucking Mercedes loaded in and they drive the Mercedes off give it to a rebel leader they then take all these weapons from the rebels, load them back up and take off. All the meanwhile, all the UN people like what war crimes are we now technically accessory to? Listen, it must be really fucking hard trying to cruise at a Congolese airport while there's a war going on. Sometimes they would take off with these new weapons and literally land an airstrip within

eyesight of that other airstrip, and then give them to the same or different rebel group and sell them to a different warlord. Well also you gotta realize, the plane was half empty because the load diagram is a little bit difficult when you've got the gun of Rambo on board. Do you want it in gold? Yes, yes please. He just has like, a fucking like, Pimp My Ride West Coast customs like crew in the back doing

like Call of Duty skin mods on the guns. It's one of those things where I'm like, should the outro music of this episode be outside or should it be a huge gold AK-47 by the Blood Brothers? Like there's so much stuff here where it's just like, Victor Boop, whether or not it was intentional just became so fundamentally part of the landscape here. It's just like, every sort of like weird armed conflict in the 90s where everyone has Soviet weapons is like, oh, there's just this one guy. Well, some people knew what they were doing,

but other people had no idea that they had hired Boot until they suddenly realized like, okay, bag of rice, bag of rice, box of hand grenades. Fuck, it's Victor Boot again. There's just a guy in the back whose lungs are about to explode because he's powder coating AK's like luminous ping Well, it's just also wild too because it's like imagine you're like doctors without borders trying to do a relief light and then usually there's Unload some of the cargo and you look inside you're like, oh child-sized guillotine blades. Where are y'all going? He did give all the machetes to the Interahamwe in Rwanda But look at there

machetes to the inter a home way in Rwanda. But look at there. So sometimes people knew that they hired boot and other times they didn't. And this was now the humanitarian aid portion was a built in part of his business effort. He was feeling each side of a war and then the humanitarian relief effort that those two sides of the war would cause. Ordering BFC off just D and instead of the location, it's like you look it up on Google maps and it's just like, why are they frying chicken in the back of a Soviet cargo plane? Like it's not a secret either. Everybody knew he was doing it at this point, but they knew that they couldn't do any of this without him. He was the main airlift arm of the Rwandan military now under the control of Paul Kagame's

RPF government, allowing the small country to project their power far beyond what anybody else thought was possible, namely causing the first Congolese war. Namely invading the Congo. Yeah, causing what was called the African World War. To go further than that, before Boot was hired by the RPF, he'd been hired by the Interahamwe, the main death squad of the Inter Ahamwe, the main death squad of the Rwandan genocide, which we will cover in a series soon. But it goes even further than that. During the Rwandan genocide, France would launch

Operation Turquoise, an airlift of soldiers into the country that would kinda accidentally on purpose make the genocide worse. The planes that the French government used to deliver those soldiers? Victor fucking Boot. It's all boot. It's always all boot. It's boots all the way down. I was gonna say exactly that.

I'm just picturing like this fleet of planes coming in and like these horrible black contrails behind them like it's the animatrix and they're blacking out the sky. Yeah, he would do that if someone paid him to do it and according to that same American USAID worker and Kiss Nagani he was like oh god damn it we hired Victor Boot and he alerted his superiors who told him to forget about it. Three months later a boot charter flight flew into the Congo and whisked out Mabutu Sese Seko, the bloodthirsty tyrant of Zaire, an American ally, to safety after he was toppled.

But in the aftermath of the first Congo war, the entire continent had changed. I don't need to explain to you how Africa is the playground of imperial fuckery, but even during those times, there was at least a general understanding of regional and geopolitics and why you would support one group over another, why you're giving one group weapons, why you're giving one group trading. I mean, it didn't matter who was exploiting who, but there was some kind of general ideology behind it at some length. Not saying that's a good thing, I'm not saying that in any defense of it, but there was some

level of basic control in some ways. But by 1997, that was gone. Victor Boot and his vast network of shell companies radically altered what instability and chaos looked like in a place, all without the guidelines of state players. Even though the Russian state is of course working with him at some level, they're not doing all of this. Yeah, it's reached like a level where it's so far outstripped whatever influence they

might have had over him in the beginning. He outgrew them. Boot dumped so many weapons into Africa, it makes what the US and the Soviet Union, what they were doing before Boot was on his own, literally look like child's play. And the reason for that is very very simple. The US and the USSR, despite their penchant of arming criminals, they were people looking to control, so people wanting to be the government at some point, or there was a reason why they support one over the other.

They weren't just going to dump weapons into anyone's lap for the fuck of it. Yeah they were generally supporting one side or the other whereas Boot is like playing like 17d chess. There was a tangible goal right? Boot would sell weapons to anyone for anything like we've said. He would flip anything for profit and the results of that are terrifying. And it's one of the reasons why I find like some people say calling him the merchant of death is kind of hyperbole. It's 100% on brand. For example, in the remote areas of Uganda, inter-tribal conflict was really, really common, but mass violence was not. Someone might get killed here or there, but generally, traditionally, out with words Mm-hmm, they'd have a meeting between the two sides and they'd squash the beef

But within a few months of boot getting his boot in that area He traded tens of thousands of AKs for livestock Which they had plenty of and now every single tribe in the area had the ability to not only kill one another at a rate Never before seen, but also fight the government when they came to disarm them. He turned something that had once been a normal regional beef into effectively a low intensity civil war. In short, the easy access to advanced firepower turned spinning up a militia no matter their

aims, goals, ideology, anything. This would cause mass human misery in a short amount of time much easier than ever had been before ever and you've recorded human history and also more affordable he's now he's partnering with clarina you can get your weapons and three easy payments yeah he would do things on debt as well I was gonna say before he sounds like I'm putting this together in my head and it honestly sounds like he's the Amazon for like mercenary and rebel groups like pretty much he can handle your shipments you can sell stuff to

him he can get you your groceries and he started off in a simple garage in Seattle he can do your logistics for you too he can get you instructors he can get you training he's got a whole Air Force I can do that If you have ever fired a weapon in anger, you are somehow dealing with Victor Booth somewhere down the line Forming a militia no matter what the reason is in at least Africa at this point Boot is involved at some somehow another example This can be tied directly to boot in the same time was the revolutionary United Front or the RUF in Sierra Leone The RUF will eventually do a series on them at some point But I feel comfortable saying that they're the most psychotic group to ever inflict themselves on

Humanity falling maybe just short of the Khmer Rouge But not because the lack of trying but just from the lack of a victory in their civil war if the RUF had actually been In charge of Sierra Leone, they would have made the Cambodian genocide look like a blip in history. They're legitimately the most fucking evil revolutionary rebel group that's ever existed and not been victorious. They raped, tortured, mutilated, and murdered their way across Sierra Leone using an army of child soldiers and slaves to extract diamond wealth. And thenoth would trade those for those diamonds of course and this is where Charles Taylor comes into play. Charles Taylor of Liberia was the main backer of the RUF but in reality Taylor himself was a middleman because it was Booth who got

Taylor everything he was giving to the RUF and he in turn was paid in the blood diamonds the RUF paid Charles Taylor. Was this a boot initiated thing with Charles Taylor as the middleman or was boot like a middle middleman to someone further down the line? Charles Taylor was supporting the RUF and the RUF obviously needed weapons and Charles Taylor knew about boot. Oh okay. So he was the connecting tissue between the two. Without boot Taylor could not have done what he did

He was so well known in the Liberians inner circle like in Monrovia. He was such a common figure They just called him mr. Vic and there's so many pictures of like a random white guy hanging out with Charles Taylor It's always Victor boot Jesus Christ all the war crimes and humanitarian suffering you can imagine, but I bet that lunch fires hell. Aww, you know a fucking slap. It's pretty much specifically because of Boot that the world came together in 1996, about 30 minutes down the road in Vosinart.

They signed the Vosinart Agreement. This forced signatories to obtain actual paperwork, including shipment, trans-shipment, and end-user certificates that would hypothetically track arm shipments and stop black market sales. Of course it didn't, but it meant that there was a paper trail from the point of manufacture to the point of sale with effectively a chain of custody through every middleman documented along the way. It also banned third-party reselling of weapons, which is now today why you see news stories that say like, you know, Germany isn't allowing a country to sell Ukraine weapons because

they have German weapons. It's because of this. It doesn't allow third party resellment without the agreement of the first party. However, Boot immediately defeated these. He did so by creating a series of shell companies and forgeries through a chain of countries so far apart as Bulgaria and Togo. He popped these up overnight. Within months he set up an entire distribution network so thoroughly fake it could pass as real. Not to mention nobody was looking into anything. For example, hundreds of tons of weapons were flown to the tiny nation of Togo.

Enough weapons to arm literally every single man, woman, and child in the entire country with at least one AK-47 in order to be smuggled into Angola. But because the end user certificates matched Togo, everyone was like, this is legal. Jesus Christ. Now obviously, Boot made his money where the world was actively burning, but those same places aren't the best for regional storage and travel hubs. Which is why he became best friends with, you guessed it, Momar Gaddafi. YEEEEEEEE cargo guy, both illegal and otherwise, so he created a company registered in the Bahamas out of an airstrip flying out of Tripoli.

He did the same thing in Sudan, basing the company of Khartoum, where he would not only supply government militias, which you might know better as the Janjaweed who were committing the Darfur genocide, but also, yes you know where this is going, the same humanitarian relief efforts going to the Darfur victims. Pocketing money from both sides meaning George Clooney has given Victor Boot money. Imagine how disappointed you would be as a soldier in Darfur hoping to get weapons to massacre people and you crack open the crate. Chicken. No,

it's literally just so many copies of the little green book. I was like, sorry, I got the boxes mixed up. I was supposed to dump those in the ocean. Momar is just like, this will raise their morale. They'll fight so much harder with these. Yeah. It's just look, look, you know, like we try and track everything, but you know, we have to get rid of the serial numbers and has to go to Togo. Then it has to go somewhere else. I've already dumped so many of Gaddafi's book and the Togoese people. I can't do this anymore. There's just like loads of people in central St. Martin's who just get AKs instead of Gaddafi's little green book. Now, despite boot blowing through sanctions and arm embargoes like they were nothing, there was simply no will to shut him down. UN investigators pretty

quickly linked to boot to everything despite him having faked a real network of places in order to facilitate his business. It took 5 seconds of looking into them to find out that they were bullshit. What Booth was, was incredibly well known. He was so well known that Booth employees laughed in the face of UN investigators, like literally to their face, when they came around one of his offices. As one UN investigator that worked on the boot case said, the UN is only as powerful as the member states want it to be and in this particular case they want it to be powerless.

However people like boot survive in an economy of temporary benefit. You're useful until you're not or more than likely in the realm of international arms dealers who flit on the edges of everyone, just accepts you as the price of doing business in the reality of the world. People had known who Boot was for years, and they knew where all of his fingers were spreading for the most part, from Russia to every corner of Africa to the Middle East. Even if countries didn't want to do explicit business with him, they would, just because they didn't have a choice really.

Or they even didn't know. Or they didn't know, one or the other. They wanted into these countries markets, and if you wanted a transportation company that could get you there without issues, and you could by no means let anything connect you to said deal, well, Boot was your guy. He was plausible deniability personified. No, I wasn't working with Boot Airlines out of Tripoli, I was working with Butt Airlines out of Belgium, or South Africa, or Russia, or Delaware, fuck it, I don't care. There is in the case of the US and other countries, the fact that a lot of people knew about these shady transport companies, but had no idea exactly who Boot was.

Boot, as a man, popped into the US intelligence radar in around 1995. However, according to their own admission, they just didn't care. Not because they were employing him, more on that in a little bit, but because they were more focused on conflicts themselves rather than the source of weapons fueling said conflicts. They were interested in political dynamics, not the things that made it possible. Also remember, one of the main problems with US intelligence prior to 9-11 was various different departments did not talk to one another, they held their intelligence close to the chest, not because they were using it, but because fuck those guys down the hall

pretty much. So while the CIA and the NSA picked up on Boot rather quickly, they just didn't tell anyone else. And because their disarmament or arms control wasn't a big policy issue for various administrations, nobody cared to ask. Also Boot is something of a revolutionary, and I do not mean that as a compliment. He is a revolutionary character insofar as someone like him had never existed before. Yeah.

The US and everyone else, because like the Netherlands, the UK, and France are also trying to figure him out around the same time, they saw arms dealing as a function of the state, not something that could just be bootstrapped up by a guy. Ha ha ha ha ha ha! You know, flying shitty twin fan trash cans with drunken pilots and a small government loan, right? There's another small little detail as well. The intelligence gathering institutions of world powers, namely the ones that actually have the ability to project those things, just didn't give a fuck about Africa. Still don't. Straight up. I mean, that's the easiest explanation

and they'll say it, they'll admit that themselves in the Boot case. They're like, we weren't paying attention, why aren't you paying attention? I don't really care about it that much. Yeah, we just don't care. They were still looking toward Europe mostly, but that did not mean a collection of people like police agencies and intel spooks weren't investigating him and before long Boot would have more than one country after that ass and that is where we will pick up next time on Victor boot part 2 the

conclusion bootaloo. It just keeps getting better and better. I will say part 2 has a lot of curves to it. After that booty was right there. Gotta get that booty that's what mystical was always singing about. Shake your boot. Watch yourself. Riding inside of a Tupolev, what is it? An AN-20 or AN-120 that's never been maintained and everything is falling all over the place. All every bolt is rattling, every plate is falling off and all you can think of is, shake it fast, watch yourself.

And also someone mistakenly gave Victor Booth the aux cord and you're hearing an endless stream of Stevie Nicks b-sides. Nobody can mend that man's broken heart. Fellas, that's a podcast. Everybody, thank you so much for joining me in this increasingly hot studio. You all have podcasts. Plug your other podcasts. I am a host of the failure to launch podcast

where we talk about dumb space history Soviet rockets exploding all kinds of stuff like that I am the host of and producer of trash future podcast about why the tech industry is great and not bad at all what a hell of way to die a podcast about well what a hell of way to dad at this point a podcast about being why you shouldn't join the military and also about parenting and I'm'm the producer of kill James Bond, a very, very funny movie podcast that you should check out. I am the cohost and producer of beneath skin show, but the history of tattooing told through the history of everything. And I'm also the producer of glue factory, which is a show

that's hard to describe because there's literally no theme. So it's imagine five comedians locked in a room for an hour and a half. It's hotter and hotter and hotter much like I can't imagine what that's like at all. Imagine like if you did word association on crack that's what glue factories like you get to leave the sauna when I laugh enough and this is the only podcast that I host to support us via Patreon. It keeps everything running. It makes what we do possible. Just five dollars a month gets you multiple bonus episodes a month.

It gets you Discord access, it gets you every episode early, it gets you first dibs on live show tickets and merch. And speaking of live shows, we have a live show in Belfast. It's the largest live show that we are going to do so far. So please check out the tickets so we can sell it out and not feel really bad for booking such a large room. Yeah, come to Belfast October 26th in the OEM music center if you don't buy a ticket

Joe and Nate will be haunted by the ghost of Ian Paisley senior. Oh I don't like that. I don't care if you like it or not it's supposed to be bad. That's why it's a haunting if you're haunted by someone you like it's just a friend. Okay what if I was friends with Ian Paisley huh? What if I understood him? Yeah you would be wouldn't you? I don't know he's had a funny accent. Who the friends with Ian Paisley huh what if I you would be wouldn't it I don't know he's had a funny accent who the fuck's Ian Paisley the people of all star you will find out very soon everybody thank you so much for listening and until next time register a shell corporation in Belgium and do war crimes sounds about right bye bye goodbye