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A soccer hooligan, a gangster and a policewoman walking together in a ski paradise, all recorded by public cameras.
It might even start as a joke, but it’s not a joke, but rather the beginning of a rather bloody and dramatic article published the other day by the authors of an organized crime portal called OCCRP. The gangster who walked with the hooligan and the police officer is Davorin Baltić, a member of the Kavač clan. Nine hours after the ornate company was captured by one of the surveillance cameras, Baltić was shot dead in Belgrade. The police woman was with him at the time of the attack. He was lucky, he escaped alive.
Baltić is one of the victims of the war between the Kavač clan and the Škaljari clan. And not in some remote place in Mexico, but in neighboring Serbia, in the Balkans, and not once in Western Europe.
Both Kavač and the Škaljari clan come from the picturesque coastal town of Montenegro, surrounded by mountains 1000-1700 meters high. It is not a big city, with just over 22,000 people living there, one of the most beautiful and popular vacation destinations in Montenegro.
In the past, both clans were part of the same drug smuggling gang that smuggled drugs from South America to Europe.
In 2014, however, the two clans fought over a poor cocaine business in Spain. We will come back to that. They have been at war with each other ever since, and other Serbian and Montenegrin criminal groups have also been involved in this conflict. The main organized criminal groups generally had to choose which clan to join.
But it wasn’t just criminals who got involved. The Kavač clan clashed with Serbian soccer hooligans and politicians in high office, while the Škaljari clan clashed with a Serbian mafia group led by a gangster named Filip Korać. The Korać-led criminal organization is considered the most dangerous by Serbian authorities, and it is then clear why.
At least 41 people have died in the war between the two clans since 2015, none in bed, among pillows.
The victims include gangsters, family members, gangsters’ business partners, including lawyers, and a former Montenegrin MP.
In addition to them, a completely innocent man who was in the wrong place at the wrong time also died. But so far this fight has had far more deaths than 41 people, we don’t know the exact number because some of the murders remain secret.
As the OCCRP writes, the bloody conflict is not only taking place in the Balkans: there have been murders related to this war in Spain, Germany, Austria, the Netherlands and Greece. In January, a Škaljari clan leader and a gang member were shot dead in an Athens restaurant in front of the eyes of their wives and children, and a woman was more easily injured in the murder.
Most of the killings were carried out professionally, well planned in advance. This professionalism is also evident in the January murder in Belgrade, which was recorded by a security camera: the assassins followed the Volkswagen into the underground garage, then surrounded the car, which could no longer escape, and shot only Davorin Baltić. , Kavač the gangster of the clan died, the hair of police officer Marija Nikolić did not curl.
The female police officer is now awaiting a criminal trial after being accused of throwing Baltić’s gun into the streets of the attack. The police officer defends himself in surprise at the attack, so he has no idea why he dropped the gun. In his testimony, he claimed that when the car was attacked, the gangster asked him to take his gun out of his pocket to have the gun added. Neither the prosecutor nor the judge asked him what he had been looking for in the Baltić ski paradise a few hours earlier. He was sitting in the car in the underground garage because Baltić had a friendly relationship with his wife, and when Baltić went home, he was with him, he says. And it was recently revealed to the press that Baltić and the police woman had met Uroš Ljubojević, a member of the soccer hooligan group considered one of Kavač’s allies, in the ski paradise.
But the January showdown is just one of many.
More recently, a Škaljari clan member died on March 4 when his partner had just transported a bomb in his car to the Montenegrin capital, Podgorica. The gangster’s partner and an innocent woman who worked at a nearby store were injured in the explosion.
Two enamels were lost in queue
Bezzeg used to be a smooth business and the two teams, now in opposition, worked together successfully. Before 2014, they formed another large gang, Škaljar, which established and operated a highly lucrative international cocaine smuggling ring. They did so well that they made their way through the world’s largest cocaine smuggling gangs. They were also able to obtain medications from local drug cartels in the United States and South America and deliver them in Europe.
Montenegrins have practically become specialists in how to deliver cocaine to Europe under legal shipments.
To do this, they were able to build small relationships with large international legal companies (more precisely, their people). (Anyone wondering how cocaine gets to Europe by covering legal stores should watch the fictional but realistic series Zero Zero Zero running on HBO.)
But Montenegrins were not only at the forefront of drug travel, logistics. They also had sophisticated techniques on how to launder the money they made from drugs.
But let’s go back to the history of the breakdown of the organization! In 2014, Škaljari members found 200 kilos of cocaine in a warehouse in Valencia that used to store the drug. The Kavač faction admitted that this was their drug, and they really wanted to summon this business. They also knew that they were geese, so they were willing to pay the Škaljari for their mistake. But the Škaljari leadership said no and said threateningly: the Kavač clan would be punished and the two enamels would swallow cocaine.
No wonder, in a situation like this, war became inevitable.
The bloodshed of the two clans, Kotor, also did not escape. In April 2019, for example, the father of the Škaljari leader, Jovan Vukotić, was killed. Of course, Kotor’s local police and political leadership also knew of the guilt of the two clans, but they were helpless and received no international help. Montenegro is interwoven with organized crime, but in 2017 the country became a member of NATO. In fact, as the authors of the OCCRP article point out, NATO considered it an internal matter of the country that organized crime in the Balkan state plays an active role in international cocaine trafficking.
WHILE, drug deals by Serbian-Montenegrin criminal gangs are taking place in Europe as they ALREADY play a central role in drug supply across the continent.
The war on drugs is really happening in the Balkans as in the worst category C action movies. In 2016, a leading man from Škaljari, who was in a prison near Podgorica for extortion, was killed in the courtyard of the prison, but the sniper opened fire on him from outside the building and then set fire to the car he used to escape from, so removing the traces after him. To this day, no one knows who it may have been.
The rookie killer failed.
But not all of his actions are so bloody. In 2015, for example, Aleksandar Marković, a member of Kavač, recruited a 24-year-old South African, Gregory Michael Ferraris. The former South African cocaine user wanted to join the French Foreign Legion, but was not recruited, he said, due to the past of his drug addict. Marković and Ferraris met and became friends with one of the Legion’s recruiting offices in the French capital.
The South Africans soon fell to Marković as a criminal. Once, for example, they ran into an American who claimed to have worked as a mercenary in Iraq and had an “ISIS Hunting Club” inscription tattooed on one hand. Markovic told South Africans that the Americans had been charged with a murder that was difficult to carry out and that he had to kill a house for trespassing.
Later, Ferraris also received a difficult offer to reject from a new Montenegrin acquaintance: someone would have to be killed for 50,000 euros. Since Ferraris did not have a penny, he accepted the job, although he had not killed anyone in his life. Not long after, he flew to Belgrade, blindfolded and traveled from one place to another. Eventually, he found himself in a settlement near Kotor, where Montenegrins presented fate, a host named Goran Đuričković. A self-proclaimed South African assassin told him to make sure to fire at least five bullets at Đuričković.
The time for the murder had not yet come, when Ferraris was already wondering how he could get away with it. Of course, he knew he had to do it all the time, because if he backed off, maybe it would kill him. In the end, he was “lucky” because the police confirmed this when he was driving a BMW X5. The car had a fake license plate, Ferraris had no papers, but was wearing a surgical glove that would remove the fingerprint. That was enough to bring him in and interrogate him. Ferraris broke down at the police station and told the police everything. They gave him five years, while Marković, who recruited him, was six. Although the Kavač clan did their best to give 24-year-old South Africans a better view, they even sent him a lawyer who advised him to withdraw the incriminating confession.
But host Goran Đuričković did not swim, even though the police turned Ferraris off. Just a month after the South African was arrested, he was setting tables on the terrace of his seaside restaurant when an assassin shot him and fell into the sea.
Murders are just that. It so happened that a member of Kavač, a soccer player, was shot in the fall of 2017 during the training of his killer, who was later captured in Serbia.
By the way, soccer! This story also beautifully highlights the fact that football in the Balkans is closely related to organized crime. Many of the ultras are acting as beaters and drug dealers in mafia groups, which of course is not only the case there, but also in Poland, for example. In the Balkans, the ultras are also often mediated by members of the mafia and the political elite. When the Kavač faction parted ways with the Škaljari after the Valencia cocaine scandal, the renegades allied with a soccer hooligan gang known as the Janissaries.
The Janissaries were led by a figure named Aleksandar Stanković, until he was assassinated in 2016.
The strong man who had ascending lines
Stanković was in direct contact with some members of the Serbian political elite. His team assured President Aleksandar Vučić, for example, of his inauguration, when the security people also abused several protesters and journalists. Vučić’s son Danilo, a friend of Aleksandar Vidojević, one of the strongest members of the Janissaries, is evidenced by images that in the summer of 2018 they saw the clash between Serbia and Costa Rica in Russian football, but they also appeared at other public or private events.
Aleksandar Vidojević and Aleksandar Stanković
Stanković is also linked to the Serbian president through a man named Novak Nedić. Novak Nedić worked in the Vučić secretariat when the president was still head of government. During this period, Nedić and Stanković fired shots together at a military shooting range. But the images also show that Stanković also had good relations with high-ranking police officer Nenad Vučković, they were photographed together in at least two matches.
Stanković’s political and police relationships became apparent after his death. Four years ago, one autumn night, he was boarding an Audi A6 in Belgrade when a machine gun opened fire on him. Although no charges have been filed against his killers, Serbian intelligence has appointed two Škaljari members, Stevan Stamatović and Milić Minja Šaković, as perpetrators. we are.
But instead of attacking organized crime as a whole, spectacularly only to one side, the Škaljari clan and its allied forces, including the Serbian mafia group led by Korać, began to be attacked while leaving the Kavač clan alone. The pro-government press generally only blames the Škaljari clan for drug trafficking, while Kavač is also active in the same area.
Descent to Škaljari
Škaljari leader Vukotić was extradited to Serbia in September 2018 after being arrested in Turkey; he traveled with a false passport. He defended himself in court using a pseudonym and a false passport because Montenegrin police released information about it to criminals. The Montenegrin prosecutor’s office accused an assistant to the Kotor police chief of disclosing confidential information to a member of Kavač via Viber. For example, planning a house search in the gang department. In February this year, Vukotić was extradited to Montenegro on suspicion of attempted murder and illegal possession of weapons.
If the police pressure was not enough, Škaljari would also be beaten by rival criminal gangs, so his members would take turns fleeing to other European countries, but some would also be caught and killed there, as they did in Athens in January, where two leaders of the criminal organization were killed.
As the Škaljari weakened, a space of power was created that other groups tried to exploit.
Škaljari’s Serbian ally, a criminal organization led by Filip Korać, has the best chance. It is no coincidence that Serbian President Vučić called Korać the most dangerous man in Serbia in January.
(Cover image: Kotor Bay. / Getty Images)
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