I've recently seen the film 'Lord of War'. I thought it was very good, especially for a film from Hollywood starring Nicholas Cage. It's probably a very accurate film and noir as a French hat worn on a mafioso.
Curiously, I have met an arms dealer, though I am not going to go into details how, except to reassure my readers that I was not involved in any arms deals myself... I do not approve of gun-running, and would probably run a mile at the first hint of being involved in anything so squalid. However, this dealer shared some of the characteristics (and life) of Nicholas Cage's Yuri. A lot of what I can say about him is based on hearsay and a few whiskies, a drink I dislike but am prepared to swallow if it means getting a good raconteur to open up. The gun runner in question is now dead (of natural causes), but even so I am going to call him, say, George. Like Nicholas Cage's Yuri, he has a family and a wide circle of friends who are perfectly aware of what he did but pretend not to know.

George cut his teeth gun-running during the Second World War and shortly afterwards. He wasn't exactly lucky; he was trading in arms across the borders of Albania and Greece during the Albanian fiasco of '46 when Philby and Maclean and other double agents were in charge of British intelligence services. The Albanian Communists were tipped the wink that a group of British commandoes were on their way into Albania to nip Communist insurgents in the bud. The commandoes were rounded up by the Communists and shot, presumably with rifles not sold by George. Well, we all know what happened to Albania then.
George shipped arms for many years. Another spectacular failure was when he chartered a ship to transport arms to the Middle East to furnish the PLO. In the film, the cop Valentine tries legal methods of finding the weapons on Yuri's ship, and fails to uncover them. But real life is different for many people, and George had no such luck. The Israelis were having none of it when whispers reached them that this assignment of arms was on its way to their enemies. They sent in their air force to pepper the ship with holes, and the ship sank.
I would like to emphasise that this is all based on hearsay. If it is completely true, it's probably a secret. If it's apocryphal, it nevertheless illustrates the murky, nasty business gun-running is.