From The Financial Times: The Broker
Hot Money: Agent of Chaos
Pushkin Industries & Financial Times
4.6 • 619 Ratings
🗓️ 17 February 2026
⏱️ 38 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this special bonus episode from The Financial Times, "The Broker" tells the story of how a failed baseball hopeful and disgraced stockbroker reinvented himself as one of America’s most consequential modern arms dealers.
From a family-run warehouse in Virginia Beach, Will Somerindyke built his company into a crucial conduit in the Pentagon’s covert supply chains — sourcing Soviet-era weapons for wars in Syria and Yemen before emerging as a central player in Ukraine’s fight against Russia.
As artillery shells became the most sought-after commodity of the war, he placed a multimillion-dollar bet on reviving crumbling Cold War factories in the Balkans, transforming himself from middleman to manufacturer.
Based on months of reporting, The Broker traces Somerindyke’s rise through the shadow world of privatized warfare — where geopolitics, profit and personal ambition collide — and reveals how modern conflicts are sustained not only by soldiers on the front lines, but by entrepreneurs who move the weapons behind the scenes.
This piece, written by the FT’s Miles Johnson, host of Hot Money Season 2: The New Narcos, was originally printed in FT Weekend.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an IHeart podcast. |
| 0:02.5 | Guaranteed Human. |
| 0:05.2 | A master murderer, Israel Keys lives between two worlds. |
| 0:09.8 | There's the person that everybody knows and loves, |
| 0:12.3 | and then there's the guy who spends every waking hour planning on how he's going to kill someone. |
| 0:16.7 | On Mind of a Monster, the cross-country killer, |
| 0:19.3 | we find out how this deadly predator went unnoticed for so long. |
| 0:23.6 | I've had some confessions in my history, but nothing to that detail. |
| 0:27.6 | I'll give it a little by boat if you want. |
| 0:29.4 | Listen to Mind of a Monster, the Cross Country Killer, wherever you get your podcasts. |
| 0:42.3 | Pushkin. The Broker by Miles Johnson. |
| 0:51.3 | The Pretus Weapons Factory sits in a narrow valley on the northern edge of Sarajevo, |
| 0:57.1 | pressed against the steep, forested slopes that rise behind the Bosnian capital. |
| 1:02.5 | Inside, Cold War era machines hammer a glowing steel, heated to more than 1,000 degrees Celsius. |
| 1:10.8 | Factory such as Pretes once produced hundreds of thousands of artillery. heated to more than a thousand degrees Celsius. |
| 1:15.8 | Factory such as Pretis once produced hundreds of thousands of artillery shells each year for a European land war that never arrived. |
| 1:19.6 | After the 1990s, many of the Bosnian production lines fell silent. |
| 1:24.7 | Skilled explosives workers retired and state-owned plants only survived by exporting |
| 1:29.6 | modest quantities of ammunition to far-away conflicts. Then, in the spring of 2024, a newly formed |
| 1:37.8 | American company began buying up shares in Pretis and another Bosnian Arms factory, Benas. |
| 1:52.8 | The company, Citco Acquisition LLC, had no website, no public staff, and no footprint beyond the US post office box. |
| 1:55.2 | Through a series of discrete trades on the Sarajevo Stock Exchange, Citco became the largest |
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