From arms dealer . . .

. . . to renaissance vegetarian guru man.

I was going to laugh at this story in today's paper:

Apparently, a diet is a diet, even if you are Viktor Bout, accused of being an international arms trafficker.

After Mr. Bout appeared at a pretrial hearing in Federal District Court in Manhattan on Thursday, his wife and his new lawyer suggested that Mr. Bout was suffering miserably in federal custody — largely because he was not getting enough food to satisfy his vegetarian lifestyle.

Mr. Bout, 44, was extradited from Thailand in November and is being held in the maximum-security wing of the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan. His wife, Alla Bout, said he contracted tuberculosis while he was detained in Thailand — where he was arrested — before he was extradited and, as a result, required a very specific nutritional intake.

But then I read further in the story:

Ms. Bout, who is living in New York and visits her husband for three hours each Monday, said he awoke daily at 5 a.m. to exercise in his cell. The remainder of his day, she said, is spent in pursuit of language and culture. Mr. Bout studies foreign languages, like Farsi and Hindi, for several hours, routinely translating foreign texts; he has taken up drawing and produces artwork that Ms. Bout, a designer, said she critiqued. All the while, classical music echoes in Mr. Bout’s small cell.

Clearly society stands to gain from Mr. Bout's continued incarceration and self-improvement. I say give him all the broccoli he can eat.

(Original story here.)