Lord of War

"There are over 550 million firearms in worldwide circulation. That's one firearm for every twelve people on the planet. The only question is: how do we arm the other eleven?"

"You don't have to worry. I'm not gonna tell you a pack of lies to make me look good. I'm just gonna tell you what happened. My name is Yuri Orlov. When I was a boy, my family came to the America, but not all the way. Like most Ukrainians, we congregated in Brighton Beach. It reminded us of the Black Sea. I soon realized we'd just swapped one hell for another. Even in hell, an angel sometimes makes an appearance. I'd worshipped Ava Fontaine since I was 10 years old. Of course, she didn't know I existed. I was starting to think she had a point. For the first twenty-odd years of my life, Little Odessa was to me what it is to the Q train: the end of the line. Oh, I did lie about my name. It's not really Yuri Orlov. There have been few occasions in the 20th century when it's been an advantage be a Jew. But in the '70s, to escape the Soviet Union, our family pretended to be Jewish. Little about my life has been kosher ever since."

"That's Vitaly, my younger brother. He was as lost as me. He just didn't know it yet."

"My father took his assumed identity to heart. He was more Jewish than most Jews. Which drove my Catholicism mother crazy."

"Growing up in Little Odessa, murder was in everyday part of life. Russian mobsters had also migrated from the Soviet Union and when they came to America, their baggage came with them. There is always some gangster getting whacked in my neighborhood, but I have never seen with my own eyes. I had the knack of showing up five minutes before something went down or five minutes after, not that day. It hit me. It couldn't have hit me harder if I was the one who was shot. You go into the restaurant business because people are always going to have to eat. That was the day I realized my destiny laying for fulfilling another basic human need."

"The next sabbath, I went to temple with my father. However, it wasn't God I was trying to get close to. My contact at synagogue landed my first Israeli-made Uzi submachine gun."

"The first time you sell a gun is a lot like the first time you have sex for the first time. You have absolutely no idea what you're doing, but it is exciting and one way or another it's over way too quick."

"Gentlemen, the new Uzi machine pistol. Big firepower in a small package. This little baby uses 9 mm hollow points, 20, 25-round extendable mags, rear-flip adjustable sights. Silencer comes standard. Excellent recoil reduction, muzzle jump reduced forty percent, sixty percent improved noise suppression. You could pump a mag into me right now and never wake the guy in the next room. [client points Uzi at Yuri's chest] Of course, that would eliminate your opportunity for repeat business."

"Fortunately, back then a video camera was a big as a bazooka. Here, I've been running away from violence my whole life, and I should've run towards it. It's in our nature. The earliest human skeletons had spearheads in their rib cages."

"The first and most important rule of gun-running is: never get shot with your own merchandise. The second rule of gun-running is: always ensure you have a foolproof way to get paid, preferably in advance, ideally to an offshore account. That is why I choose my customers so carefully. Say what you like about warlords and dictators. They tend to have a highly developed sense of order. They always pay their bills on time."

"I don't know what was going through Vitaly's head that day. What I do know is that Vitaly broke the cardinal rule of gun-running: never pick up a gun and join the customers."

"The problem with gun-runners going to war is that there's no shortage of ammunition. This was the chaos that the Old Guard had always feared. As far as they were concerned, I was giving arms dealers a bad name. But they could hardly report me to the Better Business Bureau. And Ukraine wasn't the only former state with an unpaid army and stockpiles of guns. There was Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, Belarus all there for the taking. Of all the weapons in the vast Soviet arsenal nothing was more profitable than Avtomat Kalashnikova model of 1947, more commonly known as the AK-47, or Kalashnikov. It's the world's most popular assault rifle, a weapon all fighters love. An elegantly simple nine pound amalgamation of forged steel and plywood. It doesn't break, jam, or overheat. It will shoot whether it's covered in mud or filled with sand. It's so easy even a child can use it, and they do. The Soviets put the gun on a coin, Mozambique put it on their flag. Since the end of the Cold War, the Kalashnikov has become the Russian people's greatest export. After that comes vodka, caviar, and suicidal novelists. One thing is for sure: no one was lining up to buy their cars."

"The end of the Cold War was beginning of the highest time in arms dealing. The arms bazaar was open: Guided missiles, Unguided missiles, mortars, mines, armored personnel carriers, whole tank divisions."

"After the wall came down, thirty two billion dollars worth of arms were stolen and resold from Ukraine alone — one of the greatest heists of the twentieth century. The primary market was Africa: eleven major conflicts involving twenty three countries in less than a decade. a gunrunner's wet dream. At the time the West couldn't care less. They had a white war in what was left of Yugoslavia. I did the bulk of my business in Liberia — "land of the free" — originally established as a homeland for freed American slaves and has been enslaved by one dictator after another since then. The latest dictator is American-educated self-declared president Andre Baptiste Sr."

"It's not our fight."

"President Baptiste was my best customer, but I was in no hurry to meet him. He got the reputation for routinely hacking of the limbs those who opposed him. His seven years of civil war has been described as a relentless campaign of sadistic wanton violence. That kind of sums up Andy for me."

"Monrovia itself was like being on a new planet. Planet Monrovia. From the temperature, it was obviously planet close to the sun I rarely saw another white man. And, I never left town alone. Outside town was hell of the edge of hell. I didn't want to even gaze into it."

"In the most AIDS-infested region of the globe, where one in four is infected. Andre's idea of a joke was to put a young Iman and a young Naomi in my bed. And no condom within 100 miles."

"Conflict diamonds are a common currency in West Africa, also referred to as "blood diamonds" since bloodshed is what they generally finance. By the late '90s, my wealth had caught up to my lies about my wealth, even surpassed my lies. I could even afford to become a patron of the arts."

"I was now the best merchant of death alive. I didn't own my own plane; I owned a fleet running guns into Liberia, Sierra Leone, or the Ivory Coast at least once a week. Most trips I had phony paperwork. If the deadline was tight and I had to cut corners, I had no paperwork at all, but I wasn't overly concerned. There was hardly any radar over most of Africa and even fewer people to watch it."

"What a cargo crew at Heathrow Airport does in a day took a bunch of malnourished Sierra Leonean locals ten minutes. By the time Agent Valentine got there, you could find more guns on a plane full of Quakers."

"There are only two tragedies in life. One is not getting what you want. The other is getting it."

"I was an equal opportunity merchant of death. I supplied everyone but the Salvation Army. I sold Israeli-model Uzis to Muslims. I sold Communist-made bullets to Fascists. I even shipped cargo to Afghanistan when they were fighting my fellow Soviets. I never sold to Osama bin Laden — not on any moral grounds. Back then he was always bouncing checks."

"They say, "Evil prevails when good men fail to act." What they ought to say is, "Evil prevails.""

"Truce? What do you mean, truce? The guns are already on their way. Peace talks? All right, forget it. I'll reroute the shipment to the Balkans. When they say they're going to have a war, they keep their word!"

"Thank God there are still legal ways to exploit developing countries. The only problem with an honest buck is they're so hard to make. The margins are too low. Too many people are doing it."

"Where there's a will, there's a weapon."

"Most people are happy just to get out of jail. I expect to be paid to leave. I'm not a fool. I know that just because they needed me that day didn't mean they wouldn't make me a scapegoat the next. But I was back, doing what I do best."

"[last lines] You know who's going to inherit the Earth? Arms dealers, because everyone else is too busy killing each other. That's the secret to survival. Never go to war, especially with yourself."

"[to Yuri Orlov] You get rich by giving the poorest people on the planet the means to continue killing each other. Do you know why I do what I do? I mean, there are more prestigious assignments. Keeping track of nuclear arsenals, you'd think that more critical to world security, but it's not. No, nine out of ten war victims today are killed with assault rifles and small arms like yours. Those nuclear missiles, they sit in their silos. Your AK-47, that is the real weapon of mass destruction."

"[Referring to Jewish hat] I like it. I like the hat to remind us there is something above us. I like that. I'm going to temple."

"[to husband] You are not Jewish!"

"[to husband] You are not going to temple! You go to temple more than the Rabbi!"

"[Being told to step down from army helicopter by Yuri] I can take it apart with my eyes closed!"

"While private gun-runners continue to thrive, the world's biggest arms suppliers are the U.S., U.K., Russia, France, and China. They are also the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council."

"Nicholas Cage - Yuri Orlov"

"Bridget Moynahan - Ava Fontaine"

"Jared Leto - Vitaly Orlov"

"Ethan Hawke - Interpol Agent Jack Valentine"

"Ian Holm - Simeon Weisz"

"Eamonn Walker - Andre Baptiste, Sr."

"Sammi Rotibi - Andre Baptiste, Jr."

"The first and most important rule of gun-running is: never get shot with your own merchandise."

"He Sells Guns... And He's Making A Killing."