Merchants of death: in a booming business, small-arms brokers make a killing.

• Author: Kruger, John A.

Late one balmy evening in August 2000, Italian police, acting on an anonymous tip, burst through the door of room 341 at the Hotel Europa outside Milan. Inside they found Leonid Minin, a notorious Ukrainian arms dealer, partying with prostitutes--accounts differ as to whether there were two or four--more than 50 grams of cocaine, packets of heroin, $150,000 cash and half-a-million dollars in diamonds. But what really interested law enforcement officials were the nearly 1,500 documents they found detailing Minin's business in drugs, oil and lumber. And guns. Lots of guns.

Among the documents were details of a just-concluded deal involving Minin, a former Russian Air Force officer Valery Cherny, and several ruling political leaders from the Ivory Coast and Liberia. The sale was typical of today's illicit arms transfers.

According to the papers, in June 2000 Minin facilitated a shipment of arms at the behest of General Robert Guei, then the leader of the Ivory Coast. Some of the weapons were meant to stay in Guei's country, but the bulk of the shipment was to be passed on to Liberia--then, as now, under an international arms embargo. Guei had signed an end-user certificate, a customs document "legitimizing" the transnational shipments of goods. The following week, the cache of papers showed, Minin had arranged for the million-dollar purchase from Cherny of Kalashnikov rifles, rocket-propelled grenades, night-vision goggles and other equipment, as well as five million rounds of ammunition. The money was deposited into two accounts controlled by Aviatrend, a company owned by Cherny.

As part of the deal, Cherny also supplied the plane that in July flew from Moscow to Kiev, where 113 tons of weapons--only a part of the total package--were loaded and ferried to the Ivory Coast. While records showed that Guei kept some of the weapons, the remainder was transported to Liberia by a smaller aircraft, leased through another set of middlemen. Minin's arrest halted the transfer of the remaining weapons.

Arms, like the rest of the economy, became a global enterprise in the 1990s. The collapse of the Soviet Union, the rise of new producers, and the drive toward the privatization of security forces and trainers have led to a new generation of suppliers and brokers acting in countries where political troubles may be simmering. According to various estimates, state-sponsored small-arms trade represents 13 percent of all arms sales and constitutes anywhere from between $3 billion and $6 billion annually.

Whatever the amount is, the number of arms trading on the gray and black markets is growing. Since the end of the Cold War, the number of companies producing small arms and light weapons has exploded. In Western Europe, the number of production firms rose from 88 to more than 135, while in Eastern Europe the number of production companies quintupled to more than 60. Today, there are nearly 100 firms in the United States, compared with just 42 in the 1980s. New sales of weapons in the legitimate market have steered ever larger numbers to the secondary markets, simultaneously pushing prices down. Even weapons on the black market can be less expensive than those purchased legitimately--sometimes for as little as $15, a bag of maize or a chicken.

In addition to the lives lost, resources expended on arms and the destruction caused by the conflicts'...