Edwin P. Wilson, 1928–2012

Edwin P. Wilson was larger than life—and not just because he stood 6 foot 4, with the build of a former Marine. The CIA operative turned arms dealer lived large, too, using private planes to travel between homes in Switzerland, England, Libya, and Washington, D.C., and boasting that he knew the Concorde flight staff by name. But Wilson’s colorful life eventually landed him behind bars, labeled a traitor and a “death merchant.”

Born into an Idaho farming community, said The New York Times, Wilson joined the Marines and served in the Korean War. Soon he was hired as a CIA agent. After an early job guarding U-2 spy planes, he became an expert in communist union-busting. In Corsica, he paid mobsters to “keep leftist dockworkers in line”; in Soviet Russia, he released cockroaches into the hotel rooms of labor delegates. In 1964, Wilson started a maritime consultancy that the CIA used as a front to monitor shipping, bolstering his income by “nudging up costs and skimping on taxes.” Setting up such firms to benefit his employers while enriching himself became Wilson’s specialty—and when he left government, in 1976, he kept doing it. “He grew rich, and lived lavishly.”

Wilson soon moved into arms dealing, said The Washington Post, and defied international sanctions to sell weapons to Muammar al-Qaddafi’s regime. But the U.S. government was on his trail: Wilson was “lured from a safe haven in Libya” in 1982 and arrested in the Dominican Republic. He was convicted of illegally exporting 20 tons of plastic explosives to Libya—the largest cache of contraband explosives known at the time—and of paying to have prosecutors and witnesses killed, along with his wife, Barbara, to whom he owed millions in a divorce settlement. Despite claiming that he was ordered to sell arms to Libya by the CIA, Wilson was sentenced to 52 years in jail.

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In prison, Wilson “worked to clear his name,” said the Associated Press, and in 2003 he succeeded, at least partially—unearthing government documents proving that prosecutors had knowingly used false testimony to convict him. Released after 22 years behind bars, he maintained his innocence until his death. “I can’t think of one thing I did that I have any guilt about,” he said in 2006.