I want to tell you a little bit about the merchant of death, Victor Bout.

Now, his origins are a little murky.

He was born probably in Soviet Tajikistan, so in Soviet Central Asia, in 1967.

No one's quite sure of the day.

We're not quite sure exactly what he was doing as a young man in the in the 80s. But by the time the 90s

rolled around and the Soviet Union fell apart, he found a very profitable business in selling

illegal arms. Ukraine at the time, for example, was just a hot mess. They had all of these

top flight Soviet weapons because most of the Soviets good stuff

was in places like Ukraine closer to NATO than in Russia itself. So Ukraine had all of these

high-tech weapons, state-of-the-art stuff that they had no use for, and they had no money.

They couldn't even pay their military officers. So if a guy like Victor Bout shows up with some cash

to some former Soviet army base in Ukraine,

and a general who hasn't been able to feed his family that week has given a sizable offer

for whatever it is he can pass along. Yeah, something like $32 billion worth of weapons were

stolen by Bout out of Ukraine in the 90s. Just a significant number of things.

He spent the 2000s, the early part of the 2000s, getting heavily involved in Africa,

selling whatever it was to whatever thug, kleptocrat, warlord, whoever it was.

This guy, Victor Bout, was getting him weapons. He finally got arrested

in Thailand in 2008. It was part of a DEA sting. He was trying to sell, he thought, Soviet

anti-aircraft missiles to the FARC, communist revolutionary guerrillas in Colombia. So we're talking about our backyard here. He was finally

extradited the U.S. in 2010 after two years of negotiations with Thailand. And he was

convicted in 2012 of approximately everything and sentenced to 25 years in prison.

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