By SCOTT SHANE

WASHINGTON-? Accused of being one of the world’s biggest arms traffickers, Viktor Bout is thought to be a consummate deal maker. Now his future may depend on whether he can strike one last bargain: trading what American officials believe is his vast insider’s knowledge of global criminal networks in exchange for not spending the rest of his life in a federal prison.

The legend of Mr. Bout, 43, a former Soviet Air Force officer and gifted linguist , may have outgrown even the facts of his career, the basis for the 2005 movie “Lord of War.” Operating a web of companies, at times using pseudonyms, he rose in the global arms underworld after the Soviet collapse freed aging aircraft and huge weapons supplies.


We will go to court in
America and
we will win.”


“What you have in Viktor Bout is a prime figure in the globalization of crime,” said Louise I. Shelley, director of the Terrorism, Transnational Crime and Corruption Center at George Mason University in Virginia. “He epitomizes the new type of organized crime, in which the person is educated, has international ties and operates with the support of the state.” A Thai appeals court on August 20 approved the extradition of

Mr. Bout from Bangkok, where he has been incarcerated since 2008. On October 5, a Thai court dismissed proceedings surrounding new charges, removing a major obstacle to his extradition to the United States. “We will go to court in America and we will win,’’ Mr. Bout told a reporter after the Thai ruling. Immersed since the early 1990s in globalization’s dark side, Mr. Bout has mastered the trade and the transport that fuel drug cartels, terrorism networks and insurgent movements from Colombia to Afghanistan, according to former officials who tracked him.

Mr. Bout has shown no inclination to cooperate . He has portrayed himself as an honest businessman . He has labeled as “ridiculous” American charges that he agreed to sell shoulder-fired missiles to United States Drug Enforcement Administration agents posing as members of a Colombian leftist guerrilla group . “I have never traded in weapons,” he said in a statement .

His wife, Alla, has told reporters he traveled to South America “for tango lessons.” But if the bravado falters when he faces prosecutors in New York, he has plenty to tell, said Douglas Farah, coauthor of a 2007 book about him, “Merchant of Death.” “He knows a great deal about how weapons reach the Taliban, and how they get to militants in Somalia and Yemen,” Mr. Farah said.

“He knows a lot about Russian intelligence as it’s been restructured under Putin,” he added, referring to Vladimir V. Putin, the Russian prime minister. At a meeting in a Bangkok hotel in March 2008, according to court records, Mr. Bout told his ostensible customers “that the United States was also his enemy.” “It’s not, uh, business,” Mr. Bout said on tape, the records say. “It’s my fight"