Viktor Bout, the convicted Russian arms dealer known as the “Merchant of Death,” is to be transferred from his New York jail to a supermaximum security prison in Colorado, his defense lawyer said Friday.
Bout, who was sentenced to 25 years in prison for conspiring to sell weapons to a Colombian terror group targeting Americans, is to move from the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn to the Florence Federal Correctional Facility in Colorado, his lawyer Andrei Garkusha told Russian news agency RIA Novosti.
Lawyers for the 45-year-old filed a formal request Thursday to Judge Shira Scheindlin, who presided over Bout’s trial, asking her to reverse the transfer decision.
The judge pledged to consider the request before the transfer.
The Colorado jail is the most secure prison in the US and most prisoners there are kept in solitary confinement. Its inmates include Ramzi Yousef, who was convicted for bombing New York’s World Trade Center in 1993.
Garkusha said that conditions prison were “even worse” than those in Bout’s previous jail, the Metropolitan Correctional Center in lower Manhattan.
His lawyers requested improvements to “barbaric” conditions at the New York jail in February, claiming Bout’s cell was similar to that of the Count of Monte Cristo, the fictional character who was wrongfully imprisoned for 14 years. The Russian was transferred to his current prison in late February.
The mustachioed Bout, who inspired the arms dealer played by Nicolas Cage in the film “Lord of War,” went on trial Oct. 11 on charges of attempting to sell a huge arsenal, including hundreds of surface-to-air missiles, to US agents in Thailand posing as members of Colombia’s leftist guerrilla organization FARC.
The weapons were supposedly being sought to enable FARC to shoot down American military helicopters helping Colombian forces.
Bout maintains his innocence and claims he only transported arms as part of a legitimate cargo business.