Viktor Bout, 41, a former Soviet air force officer, allegedly built his contacts in the post-Soviet arms industry into a business dealing arms to combatants in conflicts around the world. He is believed to have been a model for the arms dealer portrayed by Nicolas Cage in the 2005 movie "Lord of War."
Bout's best-documented activities have been in Central and West Africa, where he has been accused of funneling weapons into various civil wars since the early 1990s. He built his business on the drawdown of weapons and aircraft in the former Soviet bloc of eastern Europe as the Cold War waned.
A 2005 report by Amnesty International alleged Bout was "the most prominent foreign businessman" involved in trafficking arms to U.N.-embargoed countries.
Ruslan Pukhov, director of the Moscow-based Center for Strategies and Technologies, described Bout as a rich "adventurist, one of these guys who emerged at the start of the 1990s and started pumping weapons from the former Soviet Union into Africa."
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