The Pink Panthers
By David Samuels
The New Yorker
April 12, 2010
Below are excerpts from a long article about
diamonds, thieves, and the Balkans.
Included here are portions about the criminality of the Serbian state.
Criminal gangs became
dominant forces in Serbia during the Balkan conflicts of the
nineteen-nineties, and they were further empowered by Western sanctions,
which gave them a stranglehold on the markets for gasoline, cigarettes,
and other staples. After Slobodan Milosevic became President, in 1989,
smuggling operations directed by the Serbian state pumped billions of
dollars into the bank accounts of political elites. As Dejan
Anastasijevic, an investigative reporter for the Belgrade newsweekly
Vreme told me, “Milosevic, apart from being a very brutal autocrat,
essentially criminalized the state completely.” Things got so bad that,
by the late nineties, the Zemun clan, one of Serbia’s top drug-peddling
gangs, had essentially merged with the J.S.O. — an elite
special-operations unit that had its own artillery, armored vehicles,
and helicopters. Together, the Zemun clan and the J.S.O. moved each
month about a hundred million dollars’ worth of heroin and other drugs
provided by Bulgarian, Albanian, and Bolivian cartels. When Milosevic
was removed from power, in 2000, the climate of corruption that he had
fostered remained remarkably intact. Meanwhile, a generation of young
people, who had grown up in a state run by thieves, murderers, and other
criminals, went looking for work outside Serbia’s borders.
…
[The movie] “Gorilla”
channels the rage that many voting Serbian men must have felt for the
European Union, which tantalized them with its wealth yet forbade them
legal entry. The E. U. failed to stop the carnage in the Balkans, and
then it applied sanctions to the recalcitrant Serbs and curtailed
immigration. The invisible wall erected by the West kept the criminal
elites of Serbia rich and the rest of the defeated country poor.
…
The hunger induced by
hyperinflation led ordinary Serbs to draw out foreign currency from
pillowcases and bank accounts. Meanwhile, Milosevic set up a parallel
banking system, funded by worthless bills printed on state presses. On
the street, these bills were instantly exchanged for Deutsche marks,
dollars, and other forms of legal tender through teams of street-level
money changers, who funnelled the proceeds to private savings
institutions and six state-run banks. Many currency dealers worked
directly for the state, in a vast system of theft organized by the
Serbian government. The foreign-currency reserves accumulated by the
Serbian state did not go to fund the regime’s program of ethnic
cleansing in Bosnia or warfare in Kosovo, as one might have expected.
Rather, as Zlatan Perucic, a director of the Belgrade Bank under
Milosevic, has said, “much of it went abroad.” Every week, briefcases
and duffelbags stuffed with foreign currency were sent from Belgrade to
banks in Cyprus, Greece, and Israel. Before sanctions, the state shipped
off tens of millions of Deutsche marks packed into diplomatic baggage
marked “Do Not Open.” After sanctions, it spirited the cash across the
border into Romania, then flew it to Cyprus.
Once the Serbian state had
transformed itself into a criminal enterprise, many Serbs turned
themselves, willingly or reluctantly, into criminals. The ex-detective,
when asked about the Panthers, said, “The recruitment centers are here
in Serbia.” When I brought up the idea that many Panthers seemed more
like ordinary Serbs than like specialized thieves, he mentioned Djordje
Rasovic, who led the 2004 Tokyo heist. Rasovic was not exactly a rich
man, he said, laughing: “For a living, he grows blackberries in Arilje.”
Later that day, I met Milos
Vasic, who joined the Belgrade police force in 1967. “Belgrade was such
a peaceful city then,” he recalled. After two years as a cop, he became
a reporter. One of the founders of Vreme, he often writes about
organized crime. Milosevic’s wars, he said, contributed to the
criminalization of Serbia. “In my local police station, fifteen cops out
of fifty got themselves killed in Croatia and Bosnia,” he told me, as we
sat outside and drank beer. “You went for a three-month shift or else
you were fired.” Felons, meanwhile, were released from prison to join
the front lines; those who survived were allowed to remain at large.
Vasic had spent years
documenting the Milosevic regime’s corruption. He told me that in March,
2001, soon after the regime’s collapse, six hundred and sixty kilos of
ninety-three-per-cent-pure heroin, with a street value of more than a
hundred million dollars, was discovered in a Belgrade bank, in a vault
rented by state security officials. “Why the hell would somebody sit on
so many kilos for so many years?” Vasic asked, before answering his own
question. “It was their bank account.”
Even more lucrative was the
trade in cigarettes, Vasic said. By 1993, cigarettes, which were subject
to excise taxes, had become so expensive in Serbia that legal sales
effectively vanished. The black market offered consumers a cheaper
alternative, but one that was still highly profitable for the seller.
Vasic described how the scheme worked. A Serbian dealer purchased
cigarettes wholesale in Western Europe, for a few cents a pack. Then, he
explained, “You load your legally chartered Ukrainian or Russian plane
in Rotterdam.” The cigarettes were shipped to Montenegro, where fake
excise marks were applied to the cigarette packs, to make them look like
a legitimate product. The cigarettes were then sold for about three
dollars a pack, with the government and its gangster friends pocketing
the profits.
Western governments were
complicit in the Serbian corruption. German troops and other
peacekeepers on Serbia’s borders were notorious for turning a blind eye
to smuggling, and even for profiting from it. I recently communicated
with a former British Royal Marine who had served in the Balkans. The
marine often visited the city of Nis, and he said that his superiors
regularly provided him with a thousand dollars to elicit intelligence
from local Serbs. A decaying industrial city, Nis was strategically
important for its proximity to Kosovo and to the main smuggling route
connecting Serbia to Asia Minor and Western Europe.
The marine, who had
participated in peacekeeping operations in Bosnia, said that he
accompanied NATO officers to several meetings with Serbian officials in
Nis and other cities. NATO commanders, he claimed, regularly traded
information about the disposition of secessionist forces inside Kosovo;
in return, the Serbs asked NATO to overlook shipments of fuel oil and
other commodities whose importation violated Western sanctions. Some of
those requests were formal, he said; others involved cash changing hands
at much lower levels of authority.
While in Nis, the marine
said, he often hung out with Serbian recruits and paramilitaries: “We
would go, shoot off a few rounds, and talk about tactics.” The Serbs
used derelict apartment towers in Nis for sniper training, he said, and
he occasionally gave them tips. Many of the men he trained did not
strike him as normal soldiers. “They would pick your pocket as a joke
and then give you your wallet back,” he said, laughing. (Milos Oparnica,
the head of Interpol in Belgrade, dismissed the marine’s account as
“Hollywood nonsense.”)
The man eventually left the
Royal Marines and got a job as a bodyguard at a luxury hotel in Paris.
One night, he claimed, he went out drinking and ran into some of the
Serbs he had traded war stories and tactical advice with in Nis. The
Serbs told him that they were now in the business of robbing jewelry
stores. They seemed serious - sober, even - and the improvement in their
appearance and demeanor was striking. “When I knew them in uniform, they
acted like criminals,” he said. “When they were criminals, they acted
more like soldiers.” He gave them his phone number and agreed to stay in
touch.
A few years later, the man
said, he was living in London, when he got a call from two of the Serbs.
They went out drinking again. “Then Graff got robbed,” he explained. Two
of the people involved in the robbery contacted him, and stayed with him
before they fled the country. In exchange for his hospitality, they gave
him a diamond brooch, which he offered to a jeweller in Brighton,
through a middle man. The jeweller, he said, gave him what he described
as a “nice piece of money.” The middleman affirmed that the transaction
took place. The jeweller has declined repeated requests for an
interview.
To better understand how
young men from the south of Serbia might find their way to luxury
shopping districts in Tokyo and Dubai, I decided to drive to Nis.
According to Miles Oparnica, of Interpol, three main groups of Panthers
came from Serbia. The Nis faction was, apparently, the most foolhardy:
many of its first generation of operatives are currently imprisoned in
Western Europe.
I arrived in Nis midmorning.
The highway leading into town was empty, and lined with stores selling
motorbikes and diet supplements. The city felt far re moved from
Belgrade, with its Austro Hungarian façades and well-ordered
criminality. Nis was wilder, and had more of an ethnic mix: Albanians,
Macedonians, Gypsies. The city’s most famous landmark is the Skull
Tower, which was built by the Turks, in 1809, out of quicklime, sand,
and nine hundred and fifty-skulls of Serbian fighters. On the uneven
sidewalks, girls in heavy makeup tottered along in high heels, their
loutish boyfriends following closely behind.
Across the Nisava River were
the decaying apartment blocks where Serbian snipers had once practiced
with the former Royal Marine. The buildings, fifteen stories high, were
concrete slabs daubed with soccer graffiti and nationalist slogans.
Groups of young men drank beer in the street. One of them, a Serb, had a
T-shirt emblazoned with a brace of pistols and the word “Wanted” in
gaudy silver lettering. A brand-new Audi was parked nearby. Audis are
favored by young Serbian gangsters, which may explain the rented cars in
the video of the Dubai heist.
Men between the ages of
twenty-five and forty-five appeared to be missing from the city. Aside
from the motorcycle-repair shops, the busiest places in town were the
slot-machine parlors. I counted four of them within a hundred feet of
the mayor’s office, which is in a handsome, decaying stone house near
the river.
The mayor, Milos Simonovic,
is a bright-eyed thirty-six-year-old. He grew up in Nis, which used to
be the center of the electronics and engineering industries in
Yugoslavia, employing thirty thousand engineers and skilled
manufacturing workers. “We had cooperation with Philips, with Siemens,
with I.B.M., and all other famous companies of the world,” he recalled.
‘We produced a personal computer called—I can’t remember the name, but
it was two years after Commodore 64.”
Now, out of a total
population of three hundred thousand, thirty-three thousand adults in
Nis are unemployed. The anchor of the local economy is a cigarette
plant. Drug smuggling is also popular. “Nis was really a good place to
have this merger between authorities and criminals,” Simonovic
explained. Man younger citizens of Nis, having watched their parents
lose their jobs, and growing up in an atmosphere of wholesale
corruption, have embraced the idea of going to Western Europe and
becoming thieves. They think, Simonovic said, that “it’s really good to
be a criminal, because you can go in E.U. or some other country to make
some money. Then you get back here and you have cars, you have buildings
and other things. It’s really, really good.”
Zoran Zivkovic, who is
forty-nine, was the mayor of Nis under Milosevic, as well as a leader of
the opposition movement that eventually toppled the regime. After
Milosevic’s successor, Zoran Djindjic, was assassinated, in 2003,
Zivkovic became Prime Minister, and put into action a plan called
Operation Sabre, designed to decapitate the Serbian Mafia and sever its
connections with the state. Nearly four thousand suspects were charged
with criminal activity, and tens of thousands of weapons were seized,
along with hundreds of kilos of explosives. I met with Zivkovic, who is
now a businessman, in his clean, modern office, where bottles of wine
from a vineyard that he owns were on display. He wore a navy-blue
blazer and had a burnished complexion, looking less like a politician
than like a Mediterranean yachtsman who had somehow got marooned in the
middle of Serbia.
“By definition, organized
crime is connected with the state,” Zivkovic said, in a charmingly
pedantic way. For years, he said, criminal clans in Serbia had their own
police officers, lawyers, judges, doctors, journalists, and financial
advisers. He spoke of a doctor in Belgrade: “If somebody was to be
eliminated from the gang and survived the shoot-out, the doctor’s job
was to give him a lethal injection when he reaches the hospital.”
Zivkovic readily admitted that few of the people who were picked up in
Operation Sabre remained in prison. He told me that obdurate forces
within the Serbian establishment “are determined to keep Serbia in this
Balkan state of isolation, because this is the only Serbia that suits
them.”
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