War Dogs in the service of organised crime: the “Tigers” and the “Scorpions” are now fighting for dominance in the drugs market

Sasa Cvjetan, arrested in Athens for drug smuggling, was a member of the “Scorpions” paramilitary formation and was sentenced to 20 years in prison for the war crime in Podujevo, when he participated in the killing of 14 women and children, members of one family. He is not the only war veteran and criminal to have found refuge in the cartels.

In a Greek police operation in Athens, 11 members of the “Serbo-Croatian cartel” were arrested and cocaine, marijuana, precision measuring scales, weapons, explosives and other compromising evidence were seized. The group is suspected of having smuggled and sold drugs worth at least €250,000 into Greece. Among those arrested is Saša Cvjetan, a convicted war criminal, a member of the notorious paramilitary unit “Scorpions”, which was a reserve unit of the then State Security Service.

The “Scorpions” are notorious in the region and, in addition to Cvjetan, four other former members of the “Scorpions” were tried for the crime in Podujevo, when 14 women and children, members of an Albanian family, were shot dead. “The Scorpions were also involved in the shooting of the Srebrenica prisoners in 1995, and footage of their monstrous execution was leaked to the public.

During the break-up of the former Yugoslavia and the wars of the 1990s, numerous paramilitary formations emerged and committed horrific crimes, especially in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Many of them dispersed around the world after the war and, according to information from various national police forces and police agencies, found refuge in organised crime, where they contributed to the emergence of the now powerful Balkan cartel.

In 2005, one of the most brutal criminals from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Milan Lukić, commander of the Avengers paramilitary unit, was arrested in Argentina. Interestingly, at the same time, a Balkan crime ring was operating in Argentina, trafficking cocaine. The “Avengers” („Osvetnici“) were not only on the rampage in Podrinje, but were also responsible for the kidnappings and liquidations of Bosnians from Serbia. Milan Lukic not only killed an unknown number of people, but his unit stood out for the brutality of the way it killed its victims. Milan Lukic was sentenced to life imprisonment.

Another unit whose individual members became notorious was the Special Operations Unit, which was not a paramilitary unit but an armed formation of the then State Security Department. The first commander was Milorad Ulemek Legija, who is serving a 40-year prison sentence for his role in the assassination of Prime Minister Zoran Đinđić in 2003.

Members of the Zemun clan, whose leaders Dusan Spasojevic and Mile Lukovic were killed in a shoot-out with police, were also convicted of this murder. It is hard to imagine that the Zemun clan would have gained the upper hand in the underground if it had not had the direct support of individuals from the Special Operations Unit, the so-called “Red Berets”. Several other former Red Berets have been convicted for their involvement in the murder of Prime Minister Đinđić and other crimes, but the direct perpetrator was Zvezdan Jovanović. JSO members were also convicted for the attempted murder of SPO leader Vuk Drašković, when four of his colleagues were killed, and for the liquidation of Ivan Stambolić.

While the murders of Zoran Đinđić, Ivan Stambolić and four members of the SPO were motivated by mixed political and criminal motives, some of the Red Berets were involved in purely criminal acts.

In 2017, Boris Stevanović was sentenced to 40 years in prison for a triple murder in Novi Belgrade in 2000. Then, Stevanovic shot Nenad Bukinac, his Greek wife Penelope Papanakoui and his secretary Slađana Jevtić with a pistol in a shoe import company. It was a paid murder, but Stevanovic never betrayed the man who paid him for this crime.

Predrag Dangubic, also a former member of the JSO, was sentenced to 15 years in prison in 2021 for the murder of Radovan Laketic. Laketić, originally from Pljevlja, had just been released from prison where he was serving a sentence for heroin trafficking when Dangubić ambushed him on 1 June and fired the fatal shots.

Another former JSO member, Zeljko Simeunovic, was also sentenced to 15 years in prison for the 2004 murder of Dalibor Mateovic, the birth brother of Arkan’s bodyguard, in the centre of Belgrade. It was suspected that it was also a contract attack on the victim’s brother Zvonko Mateović, the bodyguard of Željko Ražnatović’s bodyguard Arkan, but that the killer had confused his brother and killed Dalibor.

It was Arkan who was the commander of the Serbian Volunteer Guard, a paramilitary unit backed by Serbian intelligence, which later became the Special Operations Unit. The first commander of the JSO, Milorad Ulemek Legija, was first an officer under Ražnatović, but later paradoxically acquired the rank of colonel of the JSO, which was then under the command of the MUP. In the Serbian Volunteer Guard (SDG) there were many people on the other side of the law, such as their commander, Željko Ražnatović Arkan. For some of them, the war was just a break in their confrontation with crime, and they were only getting better at it. Arkan’s SDG included Luka Bojović, who was identified as the leader of the so-called “new” Zemun clan, which is close to the Scaljar clan.

After participating in a real armed conflict, many members of Arkan’s “Tigers” took part in street wars in the 1990s and early 2000s. SDG colonel and Arkan’s bodyguard Rade Rakonjac was killed in April 2014 in a clash between rival criminal gangs. Another Arkan “colonel”, Nebojša Đorđević Šuca, was killed immediately after the war in 1996, when he was executed on a Belgrade raft. Vukašin Gojak, slightly lower in rank, a major in the SDG and owner of the “Ric” discotheque, was killed by sniper fire in Koštunjak in September 1997.

It is not possible to establish how many people were killed by Arkan’s former “Tigers” after the war./Nova.rs/