Outlaws Inc. by Matt Potter

falling. Never mind the bloody conflicts from Nagorno-Karabakh to Rwanda. Unfettered movement of goods across borders had to be applauded, not hindered. These were birth pangs for a new universal order of peace and prosperity in which the angels of the free market would make this the best of all possible worlds. In America, the Clinton administration was so sold on this vision that even when they were told about the mafia takeover in Russia, they dismissed the evidence: One report was returned from the desk of Vice President Al Gore with “a barnyard epithet”—reportedly the word Horseshit —scrawled across the front.
    At the same time, across starved, bankrupted early-to-mid-1990s Russia, a phenomenon called “shuttle trading” was taking shape. Using the newfound freedom to travel and the last few rubles they could scrape together, Russians took overnight buses to Turkey, Greece, or Italy to buy cheap, but to many still impossibly exotic, tablecloths, dresses, plates, whatever, and sell them back home at a small profit, having paid off the customs men at the border. It was a return to the Middle Ages; a Silk Road stalked by killers. The casualty toll was enormous: In the yellow light of the night stations and coach terminals, muggers and cutthroats picked off the traders, and bent police and border guards would routinely steal the gear and the money. Rapes, beatings, and killings of shuttle traders were common.
    Mickey’s team, he cheerily admits, were a bit like shuttle traders. The difference was they had the plane, so they could sidestep the hassles and turn it into a high-volume business. The fact that transport costs were soaked up by the shipper of the stated cargo and they could cover distances their grounded compatriots could only dream of made their business within a business irresistible and devastatingly profitable—especially since new orders could be telephoned through often at a moment’s notice, and practically any time before the plane doors shut.
    Others were having the same idea. Suddenly, demilitarized crews and their Candids were flying weapons and contraband in and out of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus for everyone and anyone—including the newly named Taliban, whose fighters had only a couple years ago been shooting Il-76s out of the sky but who now reportedly became valued customers for arms and ammo shipments.
    Rumors of official toleration of, even involvement in the booming illicit and sanction-busting arms trade—by government, big business, the foreign intelligence GRU, the KGB, or its successor the FSB—have never completely disappeared. Throughout the 1990s, the authorities in Russia, Ukraine, and Byelorussia appeared to have bigger fish to fry: Simply regaining control of their armies and maintaining civil society took precedent over chasing down smugglers. Besides, weren’t they clearing the former Red Army’s own stockpiles, and emulating the best capitalist tradition of entrepreneurship in doing so?

 
    CHAPTER SEVEN
    Rogue State
    Yugoslavia, 1994–1996
    RUMORS OF OFFICIAL, even governmental, collusion with the arms pipeline that had opened up all along the former Soviet lands seemed just that—rumors, the ravings of conspiracy theorists and ousted politicos with axes to grind. But as fate would have it, the world would soon get its smoking gun. The events of the stormy small hours of August 19, 1996—and the dogged, even foolhardy persistence of a small group of local reporters-cum-snoopers determined to uncover the truth—would alert the world to just how influential some of Mickey’s paymasters are. And just how far they were prepared to go to avoid detection.
    The Il-76 screams through the humid blue night, a black shape slipping over the Belgrade Hyatt and through the low clouds on the edge of town. It’s silhouetted against the lightning, clearly visible for a split second to drinkers, late diners, and