A Changed Market for Arms Smugglers

July 10, 2002 -- When Italian police burst through the door of Room 341 of the Milan-area Europa Hotel on Aug. 4, 2000, they found a startling scene of debauchery.

In the room was Ukrainian-born Israeli Leonid Minin — naked, his abundant, pasty flesh flanked by four naked prostitutes, along with enough cocaine to supply all of them.

In addition, police found $150,000 in cash and the equivalent of a half-million dollars in diamonds — as well as nearly 1,500 pages of documents detailing the activities that allowed Minin to enjoy this good life.

Today, Minin is in jail in northern Italy on charges of drug possession. In October, he is expected to stand trial for arms trafficking. He faces up to 12 years in prison.

Minin's lawyers say that their client is a simple timber merchant. But prosecutors say the papers found with Minin nearly two years ago show that he arranged the shipments of nearly 200 tons of small arms from his native Ukraine to war-torn West Africa.

Authorities allege Minin is only a small part of the vast world of the illegal arms trade involving billions of dollars and many of the bloodiest places on earth. It is also a world that is getting more attention after Sept. 11.

Harder to Sell …

While much attention has been given to keeping weapons of mass destruction out of the hands of terrorists, the increased efforts are also believed to be keeping the more mundane instruments of death out of the wrong hands.

Dean Boyd, spokesman for the U.S. Customs Service, said Sept. 11 had caused "dramatically increased enforcement efforts."

Customs initiated "Project Shield," intensifying its investigations into illegal exports — which has "generated a lot of leads and criminal investigations and helped set up investigative efforts," Boyd said.

Since December 2001, customs agents have visited nearly 3,000 U.S. firms, looking for leads and asking for cooperation in stifling the efforts of smugglers. Last year, customs agents made only 300 visits.

Experts admit the illicit nature of arms smuggling also means that it's hard to tell if there has been any real change in the brokering of weapons. However, Aarin Karp, an international studies professor at Old Dominion University in Virginia, said there was probably a net decline.

Speaking from Small Arms Survey, a Geneva-based think tank, Karp told ABCNEWS, "The trade has declined but our sensitivities have also grown and there are obvious reactions to that."

"We haven't seen [Osama] bin Laden over here trying to buy guns," Boyd said.

But he was also careful to point out that the United States was not the only place to get small arms. "AK-47s are easy enough to get here but they're all over the place. There are few controls on them," Boyd said.

The AK-47, known in many parts of the world as the Kalshnikov, is produced in as many as 50 countries, according to Karp.

… And Harder to Buy

While enforcement is making it harder for gunrunners to make sales, the post-Sept. 11 environment is also making it harder for rogue groups to make buys, experts said.

"Business has been terrible since Sept. 11," arms dealer and alleged arms smuggler Jean Bernard Lasnaud told PBS' Frontline by telephone earlier this year. "I'm going to give it up and buy a hot-dog stand in New York City," he joked.

Not long after he spoke to Frontline, Lasnaud was arrested in Switzerland on long-standing allegations of brokering sales of Argentine arms to Croatia and Ecuador in violation of U.N. arms embargoes. He faces 22 years in prison.

Karp said many of the markets for illegal arms have dried up. Authorities are obviously on the lookout for members of bin Laden's al Qaeda terrorist group, but Pakistan is also clamping down on fighters in the contested area of Kashmir, and the Philippines is aggressively going after its own Muslim Moro rebels, he said.

"It's risky for insurgents to come out in search of armament right now," Karp said. "People are lying low. For the Kasmiri militant, the Moro guerrilla, the Chechen warrior, this is a bad time to be politically active."

Meanwhile, diplomatic success in West Africa has quelled tensions, and therefore the need for weapons there. The bitter war between Colombia and the leftist FARC militia is the only active market, he said.

Fearing the Stinger

Few people are taking comfort from the increased vigilance, however. Much of the concern about illegal arms since Sept. 11 comes over the Stinger, the U.S.-made shoulder-fired missile launcher that could be used by terrorists to bring down civilian aircraft.

U.S. officials were alarmed when a device similar to the Stinger was discovered this spring near the Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia, which is used by U.S. military planes.

In June, Russian media reported that rebels in Georgia's Pankisi Gorge may have received Stinger missiles. Those rebels are believed to be affiliated with rebels from Russia's breakaway republic of Chechnya, who have close ties with al Qaeda.

Dave DesRoches, spokesman for the Defense Security Cooperation Agency, which oversees much of the Defense Department's military assistance programs, said he hadn't heard of any unauthorized transfers.

He said the controls on Stingers are "very rigid," and every state that has them is subject to annual inspection by serial number. Even the ones used by NATO allies are closely monitored — when Italy fires one during exercises, for example, that, too has to be reported, he said.

Defense Department officials have said that any Stingers existing outside the legal realm are probably very old and in disrepair.

After the alarm in Saudi Arabia earlier this year, the FBI said in a statement: "The FBI possesses no information indicating that al Qaeda plans to use Stinger missiles or any type of MANPAD weapons system [man-portable air defense system] against commercial aircraft in the United States."

However, the concern about stray Stingers is so intense that several years ago, the United States launched a multimillion-dollar buyback program, buying them back for as much as $150,000. It is unclear how many remain unaccounted for.

Blowback — Part Two?

The Stinger also haunts the post-Sept. 11 arms market in another way.

While individual gunrunners may face a stricter environment nowadays, the states that may have at one time used them may have easier access to arms, said Scott Jones, a researcher with the Center for International Trade and Security at the University of Georgia.

Jones pointed out the Bush administration is offering weapons to states it might have at one time denied — like Azerbaijan, India, Pakistan and Tajikistan — in exchange for assistance and support in the war on terror.

He fears that Washington may be setting itself up for another episode of blowback. Many of the stray Stingers that are causing so much worry today were distributed to the Afghan mujahideen during the 1980s to help them defeat the invading Soviets.

And if there's anything the post-Sept. 11 environment has shown, it is that the world is more interconnected than ever.

Earlier this year, some publications even alleged a link between Minin's deals to West Africa and bin Laden's al Qaeda network. Many of Minin's weapons were shipped to Liberian President Charles Taylor, according to reports.

While Minin's weapons kept Taylor in power, Taylor helped sponsor al Qaeda's efforts to buy cheap diamonds from Liberia and neighboring Sierra Leone, according to The Washington Post.

Al Qaeda then sold the diamonds in Europe, turning a profit and creating a safe haven for their funds after the Sept. 11 attacks — and supporting the continued turmoil in West Africa.

"There's been a lot of talk about weapons of mass destruction" — but the issue of arms smuggling was equally important, Jones said.

"On a working level, those things don't kill people on a daily basis."