CHAPTER TWO
Serbia, 1998
THE FREEZING NIGHT RAIN COMES IN DRIFTS, smashing onto the driveway of the Hyatt Regency Belgrade with the force of an airborne tsunami. There’s no point pulling my collar up against the roaring night, but I’m relieved to have made it out of the boozy, pistol-packing driver’s cab. For a few seconds, the universe is chaos. Then the glass moves and I cross into the bubble of warm-blown air and light music.
Inside, cops are everywhere, flashing sidearms, smoking cigarettes, and drinking with mobsters. The atrium is crawling with “security”: some state, some private, some mafia, some uniformed, some not. Packing the lobbies, restaurants, and business centers, press, diplomats, and NGOs bide their time, flipping between CNN and BBC World and swapping stories about how close we are to the inevitable backlash against Milošević’s campaign of ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, his increasingly flagrant disregard for international diplomatic efforts to defuse the crisis, and his mafia-sponsored grip on Serbia itself.
Right now, this hotel is the branded international heart of Belgrade: a relatively safe environment where diplomats and anchormen stay and work, and where Serbia’s own VIPs play. The once-proud Hapsburg city and former capital of Yugoslavia has by 1998 become the tattered gangland capital of a state now consisting solely of Serbia, its tiny mountainous neighbor Montenegro, and whatever claims on Kosovo it could make stick. Even now, it’s obvious to everyone but the regime itself that these are its final days. Just like the Moscow I’d left in 1992, this freewheeling, broken Belgrade is a honeypot for the new rich, the scene of almost daily mafia assassinations, and home to an honest, increasingly desperate majority still grimly holding on for better days.
It’s also the playground of the Milošević regime’s cultivated army of cronies, mobsters, and mercenaries, and the black-market heart of the remaining economy: the town’s official structures are ruled by “Red Businessmen”—gangsters given carte blanche by the regime to kill and traffic to their hearts’ content, in return for their loyalty to Milošević when it’s head-cracking time. Only now, they are falling too—blown up in cars, machine-gunned by ski-masked assailants, stamping desperately on sabotaged brake pedals, having outlived their usefulness to the regime or simply aroused the paranoid suspicions of an ever-shifting inner circle around the president. Even the most feared aren’t safe: Before long, regime favorite, Serb militia commander, color-supplement pinup, and war criminal Arkan will be gunned down in the lobby of the InterContinental next door.
“One of theirs got assassinated upstairs,” nods my young, slick-coiffed, and Italian-shoed fixer Sasha (not his real name) across the room at a smart young American Psycho look-alike. “A man called Knele in room 331. Checked in, left strictest instructions that nobody was to be allowed up to his room without the front desk calling to announce the visitor. Then a visitor walks straight into his room and blows his brains out.” His hands trace an imaginary room layout on the table. “Think too much about that and you will become very paranoid. Because if somebody let the killer up to do his work, then you know nothing is forbidden.”
It’s a while before I figure out just why his phrase is nagging at me so badly.
Serbia is, to all appearances, isolated in the world. The government is careering into its last madness, ordering hit after hit, crackdown after crackdown. Someone on the hotel TV is talking about the latest arms embargo passed against Belgrade by UN Security Council resolution 1160, aimed at forcing what was still officially Yugoslavia to open a dialogue with Kosovo Albanians. Amid the economic collapse and stop-start hyperinflation at home come varying degrees of sanctions, downgrades, embargoes, and censures applied over the past few years by the EU, the United Nations, the United States, and other individual states and organizations in a list as long as your arm.
On paper, Belgrade is a city in which a great many things are forbidden. Outside the glass bubble, ordinary Serbs pick through rubbish, sell off their last belongings, teeter between poverty and desperation. Yet among the chosen out here in New Belgrade’s luxury palaces, champagne corks pop. International news teams eat fresh fusion cuisine and get whatever protection, transport, and kit they need at the click of a finger. Cash is showered about with ostentatious largesse—no weak Yugoslav dinar here, just fresh deutsche marks and U.S. dollars. All over Belgrade, for the favored few, cocaine is freely available. Guns, luxury goods, and substances that should be scarce are ubiquitous. Where’s it all coming from?
“If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em,” smiles one local businessman over lunchtime drinks at the Hyatt the next day. “Some stuff you can theoretically get legally, but it’s too difficult and costs too much to do it. I can tell you one thing: If anyone in this city tells you their business, their government ministry, their shop, their restaurant, whatever, could survive for a single week without some benefit, directly or indirectly, knowing or unknowing, from the smuggling pipeline, you can tell them from me they’re talking bullshit.”
Food and fuel, he confides, are smuggled by land on a nightly basis across the border from Romania and Hungary. Other more specialist items for shops arrive on unpoliceable successions of plain container barges up the Danube, where New Belgrade gets first shout. Some basics designated as “humanitarian aid” get diverted, either en route or upon delivery into the hands of black marketeers. Meanwhile Yugoslav- or Soviet-made arms and other goods are sold for hard currency abroad: dollars, marks.
“All that sort of thing comes and goes by plane,” he tells me, laughing at how cloak-and-dagger he sounds. “The dealers have their delivery men.”
Soviet planes have been coming and going with noticeable regularity for a couple of years now, says the businessman. This has opened up a black-market wormhole through which anything—guns, people, cash, black-market goods, drugs—can appear or disappear. It makes sense. When you drive through impromptu barricades all day, these mysterious giant Soviet-era planes begin to sound like no-brainers—no stickups, shakedowns, or quasi-military roadblocks at thirty thousand feet. But they also sounded expensive. The fuel for a journey from anywhere outside the Balkans would cost hundreds of thousands of (theoretically unavailable) U.S. dollars. Someone has to be flush.
It turns out that a man named Rade Markovic, one of Milošević’s most trusted secret-police chiefs and a regime assassin implicated in a series of unsolved gangland murders across Belgrade—for which he will later be sentenced to forty years in jail—is now liaising extremely closely with a man called Mihalj Kertes, head of customs at Belgrade’s Nikola Tesla Airport. And over the past couple of years, the routes on the flight plans have gone from interesting to downright suspect: mysterious midnight departures originating in Russia or the Emirates, making their way from Belgrade via the ’stans and Cyprus to Iraq and Libya. They’ve coincided with a spike in trafficking activity through the Balkans in drugs, guns, and hard currency to sustain the regime’s proxy militia armies down in Kosovo.
“Probably we know before anyone when war is on the way,” Mickey will remember years later, casual as an after-hours minicab driver running down the nightly routine. “Jobs change. A lot of jobs at one spot. Or maybe a different kind of job becomes popular very quickly. It always means something. And it means money.”
The Serb businessman and I finished our wine, paid the waiter in new U.S. dollars, and headed away from the hotel to our respective jobs, the next meeting.
BUT I DIDN’T forget what he’d told me, or what I’d seen. From that point, every time I traveled as a journalist, the airfields and terminals glowed with occult significance. I’d find reasons to separate myself, accidentally on purpose, from the press packs in places like Indonesia, Central America, the former Soviet states, the Balkans, Africa. I sat and watched the comings and goings of these giant cargo planes and the men who flew them. Mostly, I’d sit there for hours and nothing would happen; often, I’d attract the attention of the local security or military police. Either way, most of it was spent either explaining or wondering to myself what I was doing there.
But sometimes I’d catch a glimpse of some interesting planes, some interesting people. You got to recognize the crews: the worry lines, the likely hangouts, the incongruous overalls, Hawaiian shirts, and sports clothing. Even the way they’d walk across the asphalt, drink, and wait for their connection together, all watchful-casual just like military units. Watch them through the foyer window for long enough and you could almost feel their civilian clothes making them itch.
I’d spend the next decade and a half tracing these men and their movements and trying to get to the bottom of exactly what they were carrying, where, and for whom. And when I got my chance to hitch a ride with a crew of “delivery men” into Afghanistan in the wake of the U.S.–led coalition’s invasion, I made sure I took it.
As it turned out, the pilot and his crew of Soviet veterans would lead me into the shadowy side of the new global economy, from South American guns-for-cocaine drops to the Afghan heroin trade, from the warlord-controlled jungles of the Congo to parachuted suitcases full of cash for Somali pirates. But that was all in the future.
To understand Mickey and his business, I’d first have to hear his story. And to understand the cosmic rupture that threw him, his plane, and a tidal wave of deadly cargo unequaled in history out into the world, we have to go back to the USSR.