Outlaws Inc. (32 page)

For his part, party-hungry Leonid Minin no longer looks quite as impressive, or as much like the Lord of War on whom Nicolas Cage partly based his character Mickey Orlov in the 2005 film of that name. Released after serving two years on relatively minor offenses, he was acquitted of charges relating to arms trafficking because, of all things, the Italian courts felt they lacked the appropriate jurisdiction. Like Bout in jail in Thailand, he looked smaller and thinner and was rumored to be embarrassed by the coverage of his arrest. In 2006, he tried unsuccessfully to appeal against the freezing of his funds as a person associated with the now former Liberian president Charles Taylor. Delivering its judgment in 2007, the Court of First Instance of the European Communities noted the applicant's name, date of birth, and nationality:

Leonid Minin (alias (a) Blavstein, (b) Blyuvshtein, (c) Blyafshtein, (d) Bluvshtein, (e) Blyufshtein, (f) Vladimir Abramovich Kerler, (g) Vladimir Abramovich Popiloveski, (h) Vladimir Abramovich Popela, (i) Vladimir Abramovich Popelo, ( j) Wulf Breslan, (k) Igor Osols). Date of birth: (a) 14 December 1947, (b) 18 October 1946, (c) unknown[)]. Nationality: Ukrainian. German Passports (name: Minin): (a) 5280007248D, (b) 18106739D. Israeli Passports: (a) 6019832 (6/11/94–5/11/99), (b) 9001689 (23/1/97–22/1/02), (c) 90109052 (26/11/97). Russian Passport: KI0861177; Bolivian Passport: 65118; Greek Passport: no details. Owner of Exotic Tropical Timber Enterprises.

Then the court rejected his appeal and ordered him to bear his own costs and that of the Commission, and I can't help but read his statement, brief though it is, and feel a little sad on his behalf. “The applicant adds that all his funds and economic resources in the Community were frozen following the adoption of Regulation No 1149/2004, so that he was not even able to look after his son or pursue his activities as manager of a timber import-export company.” Perhaps the pathos was intended; perhaps he got off lightly with two years in jail and the quiet life of a small citizen in Israel. Still, it's not the life he once enjoyed in Odessa, Ukraine, or Milan or Africa or any of those other countries. As a man, like Bout he's clearly highly intelligent, talented, and, well, he knew how to enjoy his old life. He's disappeared now—some claim he was strangled in Kiev, the death hushed up; others claim that he's alive and well. But if anyone ever pondered wasted career choices, the forks in the road that led him to this, I wonder if it might be him.

Tomislav Damnjanovic seems to have disappeared even more completely than Minin since the
New York Times
kicked up a stink about his work for the Pentagon back in 2007. Hugh Griffiths's guess is that he's still “sharking about somewhere”; Peter Danssaert reckons he simply became too hot for anyone to touch him, at least for a while. As I write this in spring 2011, a picture looking very much like him still haunts a MySpace page in his name that lists him as “Male, 56, Serbia,” but the page is dormant, and his only friend is the social network's customer-support avatar. Milos Vasic, talking to me fifteen years after the Belgrade crash investigation he still calls his “greatest moment,” even finds it hard to recall much about the man in the piece he calls “the broker.”

Igor Salinger tries for a while to get me in touch through a go-between, but the go-between either can't trace him, or he doesn't want to be traced. A former employee of Damnjanovic's tells Salinger he could pop up in Sharjah any minute. After all, he's a businessman, one who may have become involved in things most of us would try to avoid, but who is just as innocent of any crime as you or I.

I want to find him again; he seemed happy to chat openly with the guy from the
New York Times
back then, in those pre–Viktor Bout bust times, despite a few memory lapses and his feeling that it was all official, all a matter of record, so why the fuss? I chase shadows for months, but it's as if he's just faded away. I tell Danssaert, who just says with a grim laugh, “Of course. He's a small, small fish.”

Even Milos Vasic, whose article named him in the wake of the Surcin crash, pauses. “I'm sorry, I can't … this name, it doesn't play any music to me,” he sighs, finally. Then he too is gone, and I'm overcome with the creepiest feeling that I've gone crazy and the man I call Tomislav Damnjanovic is no more substantial than the words I'm now writing on this flickering screen.

Somehow, something about all these men, and I can't be sure what it is yet, is making me uneasy. For one thing, as Moisés Naím told me, “Just imagine! If we'd only found a way, back when it mattered, to offer strategists like them worthwhile leadership or business roles on the legitimate side!” Arthur Kent, a veteran Canadian TV newsman who reported the first Gulf War, flew into Afghanistan with the cinemas during the Soviet-Afghan conflict, and now reports on the Afghan heroin connection for his own independent news agency Sky Reporter, puts it another way: “The irony is if you put people like [Bout or] your friend Mickey in charge and told them, ‘The objective is actually total success and peace with the Afghans, plus you'll make a lot of money on the side,' they'd do a lot better than Karzai, NATO, the UN, and Obama anytime. Because those guys fool themselves into thinking that they are decent and God-fearing and honest, but it's their inability to monitor and audit properly that has the bad guys making money hand over fist but not really getting an opportunity themselves to contribute!

“All the decent buccaneers that
I
know would love to see things get better for the ordinary people. They don't want to make money on other people's backs
entirely
; they want to make
more
than other people, sure, but many buccaneers I know—smugglers and black marketeers—they are still critical, even while they are flourishing in the black market. They still point the finger at your politicians and say, ‘Man, they're so full of shit, the stuff that's going on.' ”

Maybe he's right. Maybe right now we need more pragmatists. In these times of extremism and idealism, just maybe Mickey's guys, with their can-do attitudes and their realism, are the closest thing we have to hope of reconstruction, despite—or perhaps because of—the things they carry.

But there's more to it, and it's making me itch badly now. Somehow, men like Bout, Minin, even Mickey make me feel, whether they are guilty or innocent or all shades in between, like we're all missing something very, very big. Only I don't know what it is yet.

Maybe, just as with Mickey, it's the nagging sense that Bout, Minin, and the rest of these Lords of War are just links in a bigger chain; that their champagne lifestyles and poster-boy statuses are somehow partly constructs, the very thing we need to believe cogs in the illicit arms trade should look like; just as we need to believe that fundamentalism looks like Osama bin Laden, or Mickey looks like Han Solo. Maybe Bout and Minin are just like Mickey, men trying to handle the lethal pressures someone makes it worth their while to handle.

And as one comment on a pilots' chat room said the day after the Entebbe crash that killed Evgeny Korolev: “If that plane was overloaded, I hope that the commercial guy is unable to sleep for a long, long, long time.”

MICKEY TELLS ME he has never crashed (crash-landing doesn't count, nor does clipping a telegraph pole, having things fall off the plane, or turning round and landing immediately after takeoff with an engine problem). But the life's left visible scars on him nonetheless. Even the younger ones like Dmitry and rookie part-timers like Pavel, an African-trained copilot I only ever meet once, who must have been at elementary school while Mickey was undergoing his baptism of antiaircraft fire over Soviet-occupied Afghanistan, look permanently drained; pallid even through their tan in the heat of Africa and the Middle East.

They smoke way too much, just like they drink, just like Sergei loved his government-issue East African reefer—to unwind, to find common ground with strangers and with each other after twenty years of flying a sitting-duck target. Talk radio jabbers through the night, and all those off-the-leash nights in Entebbe and Sharjah start to make sense. The trashing of the same restaurants week after week and the wads of cash good-naturedly handed over; the “local wife”; the drinking; the drugs; the hijinks in six-to-a-room company doss-houses all cover a gaping absence of real family.

It's a gap otherwise filled only by Mickey's crumpled, cardboard-framed picture of his two daughters and his worries about his elderly mother back in western Siberia; regular barbs about Dmitry's Ukrainian ex-wife; and a mischievous look from Sergei when I ask if Lev's Ugandan “wife” was really his wife.

Sergei told me once with a weary smile that of course they all have families, but they became used to being away; life in the armed forces wasn't great for partners, what with all the deployment, and “coming back from something like the Afghan war is worse.” Not everyone's divorced, he says. But like oil-rig workers, they're forced to base even enduring relationships on absence and paychecks.

“It's a different life,” he nods. “If you are stationed somewhere for a period of months, they sometimes move over. But then they're all alone, with no job or families around them, and for the kids, well …” He shakes his head and winces. Mickey agrees—this is no life for kids.

The crew sleeps like this, on the plane, “sometimes, maybe too much,” whenever they're away and there's an option to keep the money they're given for accommodation; when they're in the arse end of nowhere, when they fall behind and the whole damn airfield is shut, locked, and dark by the time they arrive, when it's too dangerous, too expensive, or just too much hassle to find a room; or when whoever they're flying for doesn't lay anything else on.

“We get expenses for every payload,” says Alex the Ukrainian. “Seventy-five or a hundred dollars for a hotel, some extra for food. But it's better to have the money.”

Fuck 'em, snarls Lev: For more or less anyone but the pilot and navigator of the hour, it's “perfectly possible” to sleep on the wing through RPG fire and storms too, once you get used to it. Besides, stocking up on the hours like that means the loadmaster and a couple of other crewmen get more time out and about at destination turnaround, which in this case they use “looking for more business,” he laughs, “or on ladies missions.”

Brian Johnson-Thomas's eyes light up with admiration as he remembers one crew who, even when paid to sleep in a nice hotel in the Emirates, preferred to spend it on something more worthwhile and see the dawn in shopping instead. Flight managing an International Red Cross relief run from Sharjah into Mogadishu back in 1993, he'd just paid one recently privatized Candid crew their money plus the seventy-five dollars per diem. “We were in Sharjah, having returned from a relief cargo run into Mogadishu, and I'd paid them their five days' subsistence each on landing in Sharjah. So we parted and I went off to my hotel for a shower. I was lying in my bed draped in a towel, enjoying the air-con and thinking of home, when the concierge called. She said, ‘Shall I put the lorry on your room bill, sir?'

“I said, ‘Lorry? What the hell? What lorry?' So I got dressed and came down on the double, and it turned out that instead of checking into a hotel, relaxing, sleeping, having a meal, or freshening up, the crew had immediately gone down to the duty-free shops and spent all their per diems
—
their hotel expenses, subsistence money,
everything
—on washing machines, TVs, microwaves, and luxury consumer kit they thought they could sell on somewhere else at a profit. They'd had to hire a truck to get it all to the plane and started stuffing it into the belly—charging the truck to me, of course. Then they were going to sleep on the plane. I mean, there was this whole convoy of brand-new goods in there.

“I said, ‘How the hell are you going to get all that into that plane as well as the cargo?' It's only a small belly space on the Il-76, and it just wasn't going to fit. It was impossible! So I just laughed, y'know, ‘Good luck with that.' But sure enough, two of the loadies went down there in the very early hours of the morning, and by takeoff time the whole lot had miraculously vanished as usual.”

Even Mickey laughs at that one: a short, wheezing shake, then a lick of the cigarette paper. I look at him from the corner of my eye while we smoke. The great first generation of ex-Soviet airmen are nearing retirement age, but as Evgeny Zakharov says, there are few enough left who can train the next generation on these Antonovs and Ilyushins. Pilots like Mickey can still make good money instructing, if they want to—better and better as their numbers dwindle. But the numbers are dwindling fast, and the worry is that there'll be a shortage of apprentices for sorcerers like him. Of course, the old Soviet-Afghan warplanes may be falling apart, but the Ilyushin factory has just announced a new model. Even so, I can't shake the idea that I'm looking at something passing, and that we'll never see men like this again.

The plastic around a cardboard tray of Heineken is torn open. Cigarettes, horrible oversugared Ugandan cake, and rolling papers are thrown around, but nobody says much, and after a quick walk round the plane with Mickey in a futile attempt to get him into conversation while he distractedly checks the look of nothing in particular and kicks some grass, we head back “indoors.” There's a radio somewhere, playing an Arabic-language talk-radio station.

“It helps with sleep,” says Dmitry with a disarming half smile. It is the first time I've seen his face do anything but glower. “We always just hear work talk and each other. Not so interesting.” One of the other guys he used to fly with would put the TV on in his hotel all night. That drove them all crazy.

The radio chatters to itself until someone turns it down, but not off. It's unexpectedly touching to see them flattening out their mattresses and unrolling pajamas. I haven't brought any of that, so I just shift my bag under my head and stare at the insides of our giant tin can. My thoughts are going at a thousand miles per hour and there's nothing I can do to slow them down. It's said that Sudan is the latest country, even down here, to join Angola, Iran, and much of Europe in banning these old planes, the Antonovs and Ilyushins that have worked their skies for two decades. Rumor on the
avialegionery
grapevine says Sharjah, the very bosom on which the business was suckled, will be next.