Sarkis Soghanalian, an arms dealer who aided U.S.

Published 5:00 am Friday, October 7, 2011

Sarkis Soghanalian, a larger-than-life arms dealer who provided weapons to Saddam Hussein and many other dictators and rebels, worked closely with U.S. intelligence and later told his story on television, died early Wednesday in Hialeah, Fla. He was 82.

The cause was heart failure suffered at Hialeah Hospital, his son said. He lived in Miami.

In a career that might have provided material for a shelf of thrillers, Soghanalian became a major arms supplier to Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, operated a fleet of cargo planes and owned homes in a dozen countries.

In 1981, he pleaded guilty to fraud in the sale of .50-caliber machine guns to Mauritania. But a judge granted him probation, saying the case “involved international affairs conducted by the State Department.”

In 1993, he was sentenced to 61⁄2 years in prison for smuggling 103 helicopters to Iraq in violation of United Nations sanctions. But he managed to have his sentence reduced to two years after informing U.S. officials of a place in Lebanon where high-quality counterfeit $100 bills were being printed.

Soghanalian was charged with wire fraud a few years later. But he was released after being held for 10 months in order to travel to Jordan to assist in another investigation, of the former Peruvian intelligence chief Vladimiro Montesinos. In return for his help, a judge sentenced him to time served.

He worked with the CIA off and on for years; after a falling out with that agency, he cooperated with the FBI, drawing on information about the dark corners of the global arms trade, said Lowell Bergman, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and an acquaintance of his for more than 30 years.