Viktor Bout, the world’s most notorious arms dealer was just caught in Thailand. Bout was the subject of a recent book, Merchant of Death, and was also the model for the arms dealer in the Nicholas Cage movie, Lord of War.

Anyway, I’ll be interested to see what is learned about Bout, as arms dealers as a rule are very colorful characters. On that note, it’s a shame that Lord of War didn’t do him justice — as a movie it was preachy and generally bad, though I think its heart was in the right place.

I would however, love to see a movie about Samuel Cummings — the biggest arms dealer in the world for almost half a century. I don’t think I could do his life justice in any brief description, though one can get a flavor here and this book is a good primer. In short, Cummings was an ex-CIA officer whose rise neatly parallels that of the growth of the Military-Industrial complex in the Cold War, during which time he was always at the crossroads of intrigue in Washington.

It’s odd he’s not remembered much considering influential he was — he doesn’t even have a wikipedia entry, (Though there is an entry for his daughter’s murder trial, a very splashy affair that made it into Vanity Fair et. al.) Anyway, I keep meaning to write something about arms dealers and Cummings in particular, who’s life story is beyond belief. But I’ll just throw out this bit of trivia — Cummings ran most of his business out of the Port of Alexandria, Va. for decades. Much of the arms Cummings trafficked in were the vast stores of WW II arms stockpiled in Europe that Cummings went around buying up. Now one of the few other major companies doing a lot of business in the same port at the same time as Cummings and his company Interarms, was The Washington Post. As it happens, The Post bought their newsprint from a Finnish company that shipped it over. So to save money, Cummings struck a deal with the Finnish shipping company. For decades, the same ships that brought the paper the Post was printed on were also responsible for shipping a huge percentage of the world’s arms trade. Who knew?