Yuri Orlov was a Ukrainian-American arms dealer who built an empire from supplying weapons, ammunition, and other military hardware to various sinister dictators and regimes. He was involved in conflicts in Lebanon, Sudan, Liberia, Cambodia, Afghanistan, Colombia, and Sierra Leone, among others.
Biography[]
Yuri Orlov was born in Odessa, Ukrainian SSR, in the Soviet Union to a Ukrainian Catholic family, but his family moved to New York City when he was young. His father pretended to be Jewish in order to facilitate his entry into the United States, and his father eventually adopted Judaism as his own religion, which his Catholic mother disapproved of. During his childhood, Yuri became obsessed with model Ava Fontaine, who grew up in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn. Yuri and his younger brother Vitaly worked at the Crimean Restaurant in the Brighton Beach neighborhood of Brooklyn, but Yuri grew up in a neighborhood where Russian Mafia shootings were common. He was either at the scene of a crime five minutes before or five minutes after until one time when he entered a cabaret club and two hitmen were gunned down by a Russian mobster before his eyes. Orlov figured that restaurants were businesses because people needed to eat, so he decided that he could capitalize off of the human need to fight by selling weapons. At his temple, his father introduced him to an Israeli man who sold Yuri Uzi submachine guns, and Yuri was able to sell these guns and make a living. He convinced his brother Vitaly that they could go into business together, and Vitaly overcame his reluctance to do so, joining Yuri as a partner. At a gun convention, he attempted to make a deal with the arms dealer Simeon Weisz, who had supplied both Iran and Iraq during the Iran-Iraq War. However, Weisz saw Orlov as immoral, stating that he gave guns to both sides because he wanted both sides to lose. He urged Yuri to take sides, rather than sell weapons regardless of the customers or their intents.
In 1982, their big break came during the Lebanese Civil War, when the Orlov brothers made arms transactions with various factions. At one point, they came under fire during a massacre of Muslim teenagers by soldiers, and Yuri told Vitaly not to intervene, as it was not their fight. Orlov developed his business, learning several languages and selling communist-made weapons to fascists or American weapons to communists. He made a living by selling the Mujahideen weapons to fight his fellow Soviets, although he did not sell weapons to Osama bin Laden, whom he claimed did not pay his customers on time. Orlov attracted the attention of Interpol, and one time in 1989 he had the crew of the Panamanian-flagged cargo ship Krystol change its flag to the flag of France flown sideways (as the flag of the Netherlands) and re-paint its name as Kono. The trick succeeded in fooling the Interpol agents that boarded the ship, as well as the covering of the weapons with potatoes that rotted due to the tropic heat.
On a visit to Colombia to sell guns to the drug cartels, Yuri was shot in the right part of his chest after he argued with the buyer over his payment, as the buyer gave him cocaine for his guns instead of cash. However, Yuri found out that cocaine was worth more, and he made lots of money by selling it back in the United States. Vitaly eventually became a cocaine addict and took a kilogram of it for himself, and only twelve days later would Yuri find him in a house in Bolivia snorting cocaine in the shape of Ukraine while in the company of two prostitutes. Yuri convinced his brother to check into rehab on multiple occasions, giving him some cocaine in the limousine before he left each time. Yuri himself used cocaine on some occasions, but not to the extent that his brother did; Vitaly was also losing his mind, and he was always in the company of prostitutes and/or drugs and alcohol.
Yuri decided to pursue his childhood dreams by luring Ava Fontaine into a fake photoshoot on an island in the Caribbean, spending time with her while she believed that she was stuck on the island due to a hurricane that prevented her photographer from arriving. They bonded, and they later married and had a son, Nikolai, whom Yuri called "Nicky". On Christmas of 1991, Yuri kissed the television as Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev announced his resignation as Premier, dissolving the Soviet Union. He travelled to Ukraine to meet his uncle, General Dmitri Orlov, where he convinced him that his arms for the former 1,000,000 Soviet troops stationed in Ukraine could be sold to him. Dmitri agreed to help his nephew, and Yuri sold everything from 30,000 Kalashnikov rifles on his first purchase to gunships, tanks, armored personnel carriers, and explosives. However, Weisz became a rival of Orlov in the business, and Orlov refused to work with him. Weisz arranged for his uncle to be killed in a car bombing one day, and Orlov felt saddened. Despite his uncle's death, business went on, and he headed to West Africa, where the self-declared President of Liberia Andre Baptiste, Sr. was waging a civil war against rebels. Baptiste was known to sever the limbs of his opponents and massacre innocent people, and his son Andre Baptiste, Jr. had a golden AK-47 that he killed random people with. Yuri decided to work with them despite their cruelty. Yuri became very rich, and he could afford to live up to the riches that he claimed to his wife that he possessed. As a matter of fact, he became a patron of the arts, and spent his money lavishly, buying a beautiful apartment and expensive presents.
His operation was interrupted when an F-16 fighter jet demanded that he divert to Kabala International Airport and land there, where he would inevitably be arrested for illegal arms smuggling. However, he ordered the pilot to land the plane on a dirt road instead, and the F-16 left, believing that the plane was going to the airport, 15 minutes away. The plane landed, but Yuri's pilots fled from the evidence. Without a way to get the arms to his buyers, he decided to give all of the supplies to scores of Sierra Leonean villagers that crowded around the plane and took his wares. Soon, Interpol agent Jack Valentine arrived, and he had him arrested. He could not press charges, but laws allowed for him to detain him for 24 hours, so he handcuffed him and had him sit near the plane's landing site for a whole day. He firmly believed that holding Orlov for a day would give many innocent people one more day to live because he was not selling guns to their eventual killers. Orlov watched as villagers tore down the plane to use as scrap metal, and the next day, he was released.
While Yuri was abroad, Valentine and his team searched his apartment back in Brooklyn, and Valentine attempted to convince Ava that Yuri was an arms dealer. Eventually, she figured it out, and she confronted Yuri about it one night. She sat on the bed naked, saying that she could not wear her clothes, go in their car, or do anything in their house, as it was "covered in blood". Orlov put her clothes on and promised her that he would change his ways, and for six months he went legitimate, selling timber and oil. In 1999, President Baptiste stopped by the apartment while he was in New York City to attend a United Nations meeting, and he bribed Yuri to continue selling weapons. Eventually, his wife caught on and left him with their son.
In 2001, Orlov convinced his brother Vitaly to accompany him back to West Africa for business. Vitaly was reluctant, as he had just come clean and had a girlfriend with whom he wanted to settle down. However, Yuri told him that there would be good money in the trip, and he could use it for his future life. They arrived in Sierra Leone after the younger Andre Bishop told them that they were going to make a deal with the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) rebels, but Vitaly saw a refugee camp down the hill, where a massacre would take place if Yuri sold his guns to the rebels. The two briefly debated, and Vitaly feigned surrender. However, he headed to the trucks, where he picked up a grenade and blew up one of the trucks, killing Bishop. However, as he ran with another grenade to blow up the other truck, he was gunned down, and Yuri prevented a dying Vitaly from throwing the other grenade. Yuri gained half of the diamonds from the deal, as he sold half of the products. However, his life crumbled; his parents disowned him, his brother was dead, and his wife and child left him, but Yuri was able to fake Vitaly's death certificate. Jack Valentine found a bullet in the body and briefly detained Orlov, and Orlov told him that he was not evil like Valentine viewed him, but a necessary evil; the biggest arms dealer in the world was the President of the United States, and the president needed him to sell guns to the enemies of his enemies, people whom he could not be seen together with. Yuri bribed Colonel Oliver Southern to secure his release, and he eventually decided to give up dealing arms.