Avenger - Page 30

‘Because when it comes to computers, he’s the best. He’s proved it. He sliced through a security system that cost you a mint to install, and he did it with a fifty-dollar sardine can. He could install for you a totally impenetrable system. You could make a sales point out of it: the safest database west of the Atlantic. He’s much safer inside the tent pissing out.’

Washington Lee was released twenty-four hours later. He was not quite sure why. Neither was the ADA. But the bank had had a bout of corporate amnesia and the District Attorney’s office had its usual backlog. Why insist?

The bank sent a stretch limo to the Tombs to pick up their new staffer. He had never been in one before. He sat in the back and looked at the head of his lawyer poking in the window.

‘Man, I don’t know what you did or how you did it. One day maybe I can pay you back.’

‘OK, Washington, maybe one day you will.’

It was 20 July 1988.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The Killer

When Yugoslavia was ruled by Marshal Tito it was virtually a crime-free society. Molesting a tourist was unthinkable, women safely walked the streets and racketeering was non-existent.

This was odd, considering that the seven provinces that made up Yugoslavia, cobbled together by the Western Allies in 1918, had traditionally produced some of the most vicious and violent gangsters in Europe.

The reason was that post-1948 the Yugoslav government established a compact with the Yugoslav underworld. The deal was simple: you can do whatever you like and we will turn a blind eye under one condition – you do it abroad. Belgrade simply exported its entire crime world.

The speciality targets for the Yugoslav crime bosses were Italy, Austria, Germany and Sweden. The reason was simple. By the mid-1960s the Turks and the Yugoslavs had become the first wave of ‘guest workers’ in richer countries to the north, meaning that they were encouraged to come and do the mucky jobs that the over-indulged indigenes no longer wanted to do.

Every large ethnic movement brings its own crime world with it. The Italian Mafia arrived in New York with the Italian immigrants; Turkish criminals soon joined the Turkish ‘guest worker’ communities across Europe. The Yugoslavs were the same, but here the agreement was more structured.

Belgrade got it both ways. Its thousands of Yugoslavs working abroad sent their hard currency home each week; as a communist state Yugoslavia was always an economic mess but the regular inflow of hard currency hid the fact.

So long as Tito repudiated Moscow, the USA and NATO remained pretty relaxed about what else he did. Indeed, he ranked as one of the leaders of the Non-Aligned countries right through the Cold War. The beautiful Dalmatian coast along the Adriatic became a tourist Mecca, bringing in even more foreign exchange, and the sun shone.

Internally, Tito ran a brutal regime where dissidents or opponents were concerned, but kept it quiet and discreet. The compact with the gangsters was run and supervised not so much by the civil police but by the secret police, known as State Security or UDBA.

It was the UDBA that laid down the terms. The gangsters preying on the Yugoslav communities abroad could return home for R and R with impunity, and did. They built themselves villas on the coast and mansions in the capital. They made their donations to the pension funds of the chiefs of the UDBA, and occasionally they were required to carry out a ‘wet job’ with no invoice and no traceback. The mastermind of this cosy arrangement was the longtime intelligence boss, the fat and fearsome Slovenian Stane Dolanc.

Inside Yugoslavia there was a little prostitution, but well under local police control, and some lucrative smuggling which, again, helped official pension funds. But violence, other than the state kind, was forbidden. Young tearaways reached the level of running rival district street gangs, stealing cars (not belonging to tourists) and brawling. If they wanted to get more serious than that they had to leave. Those hard of hearing on this issue could find themselves in a remote prison camp with the cell key dropped down a deep well.

Marshal Tito was no fool, but he was mortal. He died in 1980 and things began to fall apart.

In the blue-collar Belgrade district of Zemun a garage mechanic called Zilic had a son in 1956 and named him Zoran. From an early age it became plain his nature was vicious and deeply violent. By the age of ten, his teachers shuddered at the mention of him.

But he had one thing that would later set him apart from other Belgrade gangsters like Zeljko Raznatovic, alias Arkan. He was smart.

Skipping school from fourteen onwards, he became leader of a teenage gang involved in the usual pleasures of stealing cars, brawling, drinking and ogling the local girls. After one particular ‘rumble’ between two gangs, three members of the opposing team had been so badly beaten with bicycle chains that they hovered between life and death for several days. The local police chief decided that enough was enough.

Zilic was hauled in, taken to the basement by two stalwarts with lengths of rubber hose, and beaten till he could not stand. There was no ill-will involved; the police felt they needed him to concentrate on what they were saying.

The police chief then gave the youth a word of advice, or several. It was 1972, the boy was sixteen and a week later he left the country. But he already had an introduction to take up. In Germany, he joined the gang of Ljuba Zemunac – his surname was adopted, taken from the suburb of his birth. He also came from Zemun.

Zemunac was an impressively vicious mobster who would later be shot to death in the lobby of a German courthouse, but Zoran Zilic stayed with him for ten years, earning the older man’s admiration as the most sadistic enforcer he had ever employed. In protection racketeering, the ability to inspire terror is vital. Zilic could do that and enjoy every moment.

In 1982 Zilic left and formed his own gang at the age of twenty-six. This might have caused a turf war with his old employer, but Zemunac shuffled off the mortal coil soon afterwards. Zilic remained at the head of his gang in Germany and Austria for the next five years. He had long mastered German and English

. But back home, things were changing.

There was no one to replace Marshal Tito, whose war record as a partisan against the Germans and sheer force of personality had kept together this unnatural six-province federation for so long.

The decade of the Eighties was marked by a series of coalition governments that rose and fell, but the spirit of secession and separate independence was raging through Slovenia and Croatia in the north, and Macedonia in the south.

In 1987, Zilic cast in his lot with a shabby little excommunist party hack whom others had overlooked or underestimated. He sported two qualities he liked: an absolute ruthlessness in the pursuit of power, and a level of cunning and deviousness that would disarm rivals until it was too late. He had spotted the coming man. From 1987 he offered to ‘take care’ of the opponents of Slobodan Milosevic. There was no refusal and no charge.

Tags: Frederick Forsyth Thriller
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