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Arms Trafficker Viktor Bout

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Arms Trafficker Viktor Bout Secrets Exposed?: Selective State Concern and the Prosecution of Notorious Arms Trafficker Viktor Bout Victoria Ellen Collins & Melissa Pujol Critical Criminology The official Journal of the ASC Division on Critical Criminology and the ACJS Section on Critical Criminology ISSN 1205-8629 Crit Crim DOI 10.1007/s10612-015-9281-8 1 23 Your article is protected by copyright and all rights are held exclusively by Springer Science +Business Media Dordrecht. This e-offprint is for personal use only and shall not be self- archived in electronic repositories. If you wish to self-archive your article, please use the accepted manuscript version for posting on your own website. You may further deposit the accepted manuscript version in any repository, provided it is only made publicly available 12 months after official publication or later and provided acknowledgement is given to the original source of publication and a link is inserted to the published article on Springer's website. The link must be accompanied by the following text: "The final publication is available at link.springer.com”. 1 23 Author's personal copy Crit Crim DOI 10.1007/s10612-015-9281-8 Secrets Exposed?: Selective State Concern and the Prosecution of Notorious Arms Trafficker Viktor Bout 1 1 Victoria Ellen Collins • Melissa Pujol Ó Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015 Abstract Criminological scholarship has long recognized that small arms are trafficked through large and complex international networks that involve a multitude of different actors. These actors include different buyers, sellers, brokers, intermediaries, corporations, and most importantly states. Despite this recognition, there has been little research on the duality of the role of states that are both perpetrators and controllers of this crime. Here we analyze the court transcripts and media accounts of the prosecution of notorious arms trafficker Viktor Bout. In doing so, we show that arms trafficking prosecutions fit within the realm of neo-liberal crime control policies where the focus is hyper-individualism and the protection of state legitimacy, which allows for the maintenance of a flourishing arms market. Introduction Estimates indicate that there are approximately 875 million small arms in circulation worldwide (United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairs 2013), manufactured by one thousand different companies, and located in nearly one hundred countries (Small Arms Survey 2013). Small arms are defined as ‘‘civilian, private, and military weapons that fire a projectile with the condition that the unit or system may be carried by an individual, a small number of people, or transported by a pack animal or a light vehicle’’ (United Nations General Assembly 1997). They are used by a wide array of actors involved in various criminal enterprises including, but not limited to, insurgents, drug lords, street gangs, pirates, as well as ‘‘traditional’’ street criminals (United Nations Office for & Victoria Ellen Collins [email protected] Melissa Pujol [email protected] 1 School of Justice Studies, Eastern Kentucky University, 521 Lancaster Avenue, Richmond, KY 40475, USA 123 Author's personal copy V. E. Collins, M. Pujol Disarmament Affairs 2013). Small arms have also been responsible for approximately 90 percent of all war casualties since World War II (Bassiouni 2010; Bohlander 2009). Small arms have been used in some of the bloodiest conflicts in recent history including Sierra Leone’s 11 year civil war (Schroeder and Lamb 2006), the genocide in Rwanda (Human Rights Watch Project 1994), and most recently the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq (Small Arms Survey 2013). Although some of these arms reach their destination through legal transactions (termed white market sales), a vast number of them are sold through illicit networks. This is due to the covert nature of transactions that occur on the gray and black market (i.e. the concealed and secretive transfer of arms for money), as well as the abstruse nature of gray market sales that originate with legal state to state transfers but result in arms being transferred to third parties in clear contravention of existing arms embargoes through the utilization of rogue brokers or insurgency groups (Rothe and Collins 2011; Rothe and Ross 2011). Despite this fact, there has been relatively little attention paid to the role of states as complicit or implicit facilitators of arms trafficking (with the exception of Rothe and Ross 2011). While arms trafficking prosecutions are relatively rare in relation to the totality of arms trafficking, they do remain focused on a select number of individuals rather than the broader system or the host of actors involved in making such illegal transactions possible. This is a similar approach that is taken to deal with street crime or the ‘War on Drugs.’ We suggest that through the analysis of the US prosecution of the international arms dealer Viktor Bout, the process of transforming the agenda and framing of Bout as a ‘lone’ arms trafficker further reveals this pattern regardless of the role of the United States and other countries in his illegal arms trafficking. This fits within the realm of neo-liberal crime control policies where the focus is hyper-individualism, selective enforceability, and the protection of state legitimacy. After briefly reviewing the literature on the issue of selective enforcement as it relates to state criminality, we lay out our method for this research before providing a brief history of Viktor Bout including the events that led up to his apprehension in Thailand in 2008. Selectivity of Enforcement: A Brief Review of the Literature As noted above there is relatively little literature that addresses the dual role of the state as both perpetrator and prosecutor of arms trafficking (see Rothe and Ross 2011 for the exception). There does exist however, an established literature so vast it is only possible to address in brief, that calls attention to the selective enforcement of crime control policies by law enforcement and the criminal justice system in general (Alexander 2010; Chambliss 1989; Currie 1998; Massoglia and Warner 2011; Pager 2008; Skolnick 2007; Spelman 2007; Sutherland 1940). Much of this literature draws attention to traditional street crime as it relates to the disparate enforcement of crime control policies that have adverse impacts on certain populations (i.e. racial minorities) (Alpert et al. 2007; Alexander 2010; Brunson 2007; Harris 2007; Mauer and King 2007; Glaze 2010). Other literature illustrates that some crimes, such as white collar, corporate and state crimes, due to the power and status of the offenders escape prosecution or are purposefully omitted from the focus of the criminal justice system (Chambliss 1989; Kramer and Michalowski 2006; Sutherland 1940). This is something that is especially pertinent to the perpetration of state violence 123 Author's personal copy Secrets Exposed?: Selective State Concern and the Prosecution… due to the highly politicized law-making process (Barak, Leighton and Flavin 2010; Chambliss 1989; Hagan 2010; Sutherland 1940; Rothe 2009). Scholars of state crime have long recognized the difficulties of controlling state crime when the state has authority over defining what constitutes criminal behavior (Iadicola and Shupe 2013; Michalowski 1985; Rothe 2009; Rothe and Ross 2011). As argued by Rothe and Ross (2011: 3) ‘‘defining state behaviors as criminal or illegal given the states position to self-define acts as legal or illegal and the concept of harm based definitions’’ is prob- lematic. This is especially true when the state is complicit in the criminal behavior of other states or in corporate offending in the case of state-corporate crime (Cruciotti and Mat- thews 2006; Kramer and Michalowski 2006; Rothe 2009). State crime scholars have argued that states are often complicit in some of the worst crimes such as genocide (Mullins 2009), torture (Smeulers and van Niekerk 2009), piracy (Chambliss 1989; Collins 2014), assassination (Bohlander 2009), drone warfare (Rothe and Collins 2014), as well as behaviors that fall under the umbrella of transnational crime (Andreas and Nadelmann 2006; Burns and Lynch 2004; Friedrichs 2007; Pickering 2007). What has clearly been established is that controlling state crime, whether implicit or complicit, is highly prob- lematic when the state has power over whether its behavior is defined as criminal and the agencies that are responsible for enforcing the law: i.e. the state provides the resources and political justifications for prioritizing the enforcement of some crimes over others as evidenced in the ‘War on Drugs’ and the ‘War on Terror’. It is from this perspective that we approach the issue of arms trafficking and the prosecution of Viktor Bout. Method Here we utilized a qualitative case study approach to examine the framing and presentation of arms trafficking charges against Bout for the 4 years following his apprehension on March 7, 2008. Discourse analysis was used to examine the role of state/s in the prose- cution of an international arms dealer paying particular attention to the power of the state in shaping the course of the trial, creating discourse about the crime itself, and the network of actors both involved in the sting and the charges being prosecuted. In this instance primary data were collected from the US court records of the trial which were accessed through the online electronic filing system (PACER) and through the court reporting service that provided the transcription
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