Arkan's Tigers and the new Serbian Mafia
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And this is the podcast where we take you into the secret world of major international crime players, transnational gangs, mafias, and things of that ilk. The bad guys, right? Yeah, yeah, the bad guys and what they're doing and how they're making money and how it intersects with everything else like that. And today we're going to be talking about Arkhan, the quintessential Serbian mafia warlord. Awesome. Can't wait. This guy's a complete loon.

Yeah, he is not a good person and he does very many bad things. So before we get started with that, should we banter a bit, Sean? We can banter. Yeah, we can try. Have you done any organized crime lately? I think I downloaded an illegal stream. Does that count? That's fairly organized, I would say. I mean, that's up there. Yeah, okay. I'll take that. Yeah. So I'm in the mafia, yeah.

Yeah, I had a pretty uneventful week. I would say that there were some definite parking and driving violations, but besides that, keeping it relatively on a level playing field, you know? All right. So we've established ourselves as experts now, right? As experts, as guys who can banter, as just like likable people. Cool. Yeah. Cool. All right. Let's go. So it's a Saturday night in January of 2000 at the Intercontinental Hotel in Belgrade, the fanciest hotel in all of Serbia.

The wars have been over and all sorts of shady money is being laundered in shiny casinos and construction projects, hotels, import-export businesses, you name it. There's a new class of warlord mafioso who earned their stripes in the wars that broke out all over Yugoslavia the last 10 years as the country fell apart and, you know, balkanized, I guess, is what they say. And these men have become obscenely wealthy gangster businessmen adept at smuggling and murdering. One man, though, stands ahead of the pack.

He's the inspiration story for all the others, the one they look up to and fear. And when I say they fear him, the they I'm talking about here is like roided up soldiers who committed war crimes. Like they fear him. He was a bank robber, an international hitman, the leader of the most feared soccer hooligans in the world, a mafioso, a war criminal, ethnic cleanser, militia leader, warlord gangster, and a war hero to some.

He had been wanted in six different European countries for various armed robberies, murder in Germany, escape prison in Belgium, shot his way out of a Swedish court, shot two cops in Belgrade. So I'm starting to get a really dim picture of European cops at this point, right?

Yeah, I mean, this guy, he got away with it all. He was on Interpol's most wanted list, and he was untouchable. And that's before we even get to the Yugoslavia wars that he was involved in starting and the various acts of ethnic cleansing and murder, smuggling, buying a soccer team, starting his own political party, and basically giving birth to a new iteration of the Serbian gangster. And by the end, he was wanted not just by Interpol, but by the International Criminal Court of The Hague,

And he'd also threatened to kill NATO troops on television. The New York Times once described him as if Al Capone merged with General George S. Patton and then married Madonna, moving into the semi-respectable tacky elite of Serbia with its openings and fashion shows, all while doing favors for and being protected by the police and important politicians. Wait, so, you know, you're not supposed to mix your images like this. Like, is the New York Times now hiring 15-year-old BuzzFeed writers or something?

I mean, he was he was that sort of person that almost defied description. I just want to be clear, too. I don't want to make it seem like we're celebrating him. He was an awful person that should have gone to jail forever. And, you know, if there is a heaven and hell, he's definitely definitely in hell. I would say I'm going to go ahead and go on a limb here. And he also he also looked like George Patton and Madonna.

I wouldn't say he looked like them. I mean, we'll get to that. We'll get to why they say that. But this man whose full name I will never be able to pronounce, but everyone called him Archon, was sitting in the lobby of the hotel when four men in tracksuits approached him. And I'm going to go out on a limb here again and say that if you're in Eastern Europe and four men in tracksuits approach you, like it's never going to end well. He was just blocks away from his child at home. He also knew one of the men who had served under him in his militia.

So one of these men asked him where the gym in the hotel was. They had a short conversation. They turned around to leave him, stopped for a second, then turned back and opened fire with automatic weapons. 38 shots in total were fired, three hitting Arkhan in the face. You live by the tracksuit, you die by the tracksuit. Yeah, I mean, that's what it is.

It was a fitting end for the mafia leader in the mafia state, a man Richard Holbrook once called a freelance murderer, the bad role model of the new Serbia, born of corruption and war, flashy and violent and deeply intelligent. And what you have with Archon is a fascinating story that really captures the essence of war and organized crime and how corrupt states and criminals feed off of each other. This guy sounds like an absolute one-man horror show. Did he drown puppies and burn down schools as well?

I mean, he did far worse. So there's a lot we have to unpack, including somehow explaining the breakup of Yugoslavia and the Balkan Wars that followed. But we'll start with Arkhan and his story and all that. He's born in the aftermath of World War II in the early 1950s to a father who was a Serbian war hero. And he starts growing up in the Belgrade projects in an apartment complex that was called the Six Corporals.

because so many people who moved there have been partisans who fought the Nazis in the war. And that's an important thing to remember. The Serbs fought the Nazis. The Croatians aligned with them. And keep that in the back of your mind because we'll get there. So his early life, stories differ.

Some say he was arrested for the first time at 14. Some say 17. But all we know is he was a petty criminal and his dad used his military contacts to get him out of a jail sentence for snatching purses, which is a pretty good starter crime. Yeah, that's like the gateway drug of terrible criminals, right? Like the serial killer burning ants with a magnifying glass or something.

Yeah, I mean, it's a little cliche, but I think it's pretty fitting. I don't know whether it was an old woman too, but that would be, you know, snatching purses from old women would be like the most fitting thing for his origin story. But yeah, him getting out of jail is where things get interesting because it's clear that he had some early contact with the security services in Yugoslavia.

So he gets sprung from jail, and he ends up in Europe in the 70s and 80s, and that's where things start to get wild. He becomes a legendary bank robber. He's all over in Germany, Holland, Sweden, Italy, just robbing left and right. He gets caught in Belgium and sentenced to 15 years, but escapes after three. He gets caught in Holland and escapes after two. In Germany, he's arrested in 1981 and wounded, but he escapes from the prison hospital.

This is Europe in the 1970s and 80s when it's Bader Minov running around and there's planes being hijacked every other week. I mean, it comes across as basically just lawless if you're this wild criminal from Serbia, this gangster. And I'm sure half the police don't even have guns. And this guy pretty much has a license to kill. And what I mean by that is that he actually kind of does, right? The thing about him getting linked up with the security services in Yugoslavia when he first gets arrested is...

is that like a shady baseball scout in the Dominican Republic finding a promising 12-year-old to pump full of steroids, they see something in Archon. Potential, and it's potential for murdering. Yeah, that Dominican stuff sounds like another episode altogether. That sounds great. We can get there. We can get there. But, you know...

What they see, they're pretty spot on. He gets handed a passport by them and permission and assignments. He's dispatched to Europe to kill dissidents for Tito, the dictator running Yugoslavia. And it's assumed that the reason he keeps getting out of jail is because he has the help of the Yugoslavia security services whenever he gets caught.

So just to establish where we are at this point, he's wanted by six different countries. He's escaped prison in multiple countries, and most likely he's killed a bunch of dissidents. We've only just begun to scratch the surface, but he gets back now in his home country, and he does what any psychopathic gangster, international criminal would do. He opens up an ice cream shop. I mean, I need more on this. Wait a minute. I mean, I need a bit more information. Like, what's the name? Is it Arkans Ice? Yeah.

What flavors is he selling? I really want to know more about this place. What's going on? I think there's a bakery attached as well. But yeah, he opens up an ice cream shop in Belgrade. But first, he robs a bank in the capital of Croatia. This is in 1983. He gets caught there later and gets into a gunfight, wounding two police officers. Yet somehow, he's freed in 48 hours. And a lot of this is from a fantastic Guardian profile by Adam Higginbotham.

So he sets up opening this ice cream shop near the soccer stadium. Nice work. Yeah, tons of customers going through. I mean, what do you need before a day of hooliganism, right? You need, or after, when you've successfully been a hooligan, like a nice vanilla cone with sprinkles. Yeah, you need one of those. Really hit the spot. Arkans nice paramilitary ice creams, right?

Yeah, and that's where things get really interesting. Although I guess they're kind of already pretty interesting, but things are going haywire in Yugoslavia. After Tito dies in 1980, the country starts destabilizing. The economy is suffering, and nationalists of the various ethnic groups inside Yugoslavia are agitating for more autonomy or independence.

Yugoslavia itself is a collection of six different republics, among them Serbia, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Montenegro, and Macedonia. Actually, I think they're called North Macedonia now because the Greeks kicked off about Alexander the Great or something. I don't know the full story.

I mean, I don't even want to get into that. We're going to have a lot of angry Instagram or podcast comments about which one of those provinces are more strong. Like, I just don't want to. We're going to leave that right now. Fair, fair.

So BBC's Death of Yugoslavia, which is a great documentary that's available everywhere you can watch, really dives into this. But like I said earlier, Yugoslavia was a communist federation of six republics ruled over by Joseph Tito. He dies in 80. Things start to fall apart economically. Ethnic tensions increase. Slobodan Milosevic takes power in Serbia in 1987 and starts maneuvering. And in 1990, things start falling further apart and the republics start declaring independence. Milosevic becomes the president and he's just got grand plans.

His hold on power, though, starts to wane a bit, and his main opposition figure has some backing, including the fan club of the top soccer team who are the toughest hooligans, the Ultras of Red Star. And Ultras, for all you...

probably Americans who don't know, are what people across the world refer to as fierce soccer hooligan fans. I mean, Sean, you can kind of back me up here. I figure you know more. Yeah, I mean, like Red Star and Pirates Land are two big football clubs in Belgrade. They're known as these completely crazy organizations that great sides still have issues playing away at because the crowd noise is so incredible and they're chucking flares out of the stands and they're like going wild everywhere.

You generally don't want to mess around with Ultras in Eastern Europe. They're pretty solid guys. I mean, Ultras anywhere. I think during the Arab Spring in Egypt, the Ultras there did serious damage against the governments. And Milosevic and his people, they really feared them and their agitation. So they somehow maneuvered and got Archon established as the head of the fan club. And all of a sudden, all that agitation goes away. And all the Ultras are pro-Milosevic. Yeah.

Serbia and Croatia, those two autonomous regions at this point, were trending really hard towards nationalist governments. And Milosevic was full-on fomenting rebellion by Croatian Serbs. Croatia and Bosnia have small Serbian minority populations in them, who were the minority as Croatia elected a nationalist government. And in World War II, the Croatians, like I said, had a line with the Nazis and killed a lot of Serbs. So this new nationalism didn't really sit well with the Serbs there.

Archon was part of this plan to foment rebellion, doing all sorts of black ops work there. Everything is trending towards war and in 1991, war breaks out in Croatia and things just keep falling apart. I read this great book by an American correspondent who was there at the time and he just said families on the same street were just throwing up sandbags on their front door and taking shots at each other. It's pretty insane stuff going on at the time.

Yeah, there's a really good book by Peter Moss called Love Thy Neighbor, which really talks about how things just – between neighbors, whether they were Serbian, Bosnian, Croatian, things just completely went haywire and how just dark it was. And where was Arkhan during this time? He was in Croatia stirring things up. At one point, he's even arrested there and held in jail on charges of trying to overthrow the state.

But he only serves a few months and it's rumored his freedom was purchased for a million Deutschmarks, which in dollars is fuck if I know, but probably a lot. Yeah, I don't know about the Deutschmarks, but like, why is this guy getting out of prison after weeks or months when he's going down for like 10 years or stuff? Like, what is he doing?

I mean, he's connected, you know, and things are happening. And it just seems like regulations are pretty loose in all these places. And when you have, you know, a country's security services behind you, it's amazing what you can accomplish. Yeah, seems so. Arkan takes the soccer hooligans and a bunch of other criminals and former soldiers and forms the Serb Volunteer Guard, otherwise known as Arkan's Tigers, a paramilitary force set up to do the dirty work Milosevic didn't want an official hand in with his official soldiers.

Archon starts training them and they become what the Guardian refers to as the quote unquote shock troops of ethnic cleansing. It's like a bad Tarantino movie.

So they wreak havoc across Croatia and Bosnia where war breaks out as well, executing unarmed civilians, doing ethnic cleansing of Muslims with a particular focus on looting, smuggling and stealing, with some rape and torture mixed in for good measure. And a couple of particular crimes stand out, like murdering Croatian patients in a hospital, ethnic cleansing a particular town in Bosnia in April of 1992, and killing dozens and possibly hundreds of unarmed civilians. Okay, can we go back to the puppy killing now? This is getting pretty grim.

Yeah, it's dark. I'm sure there were puppy kills along the way. This is awful, yeah. And the famous photographer Ron Haviv tagged along with Archon and the Tigers during this time. He shot some photos that grew to be pretty infamous, like one of a paramilitary kicking a just-shot civilian, a few others. He was basically given a front-row seat to ethnic cleansing, with Archon just hanging out in his fatigues and beret. Later, Haviv would call Archon charming, extremely smart, and deceptively evil.

Quote, unquote, he was egotistical, baby faced, and he considered himself the savior of the Serbian people. He was a likable guy, except that he was a pathological killer. Yeah, I mean, I'm sure you've experienced this kind of stuff too, right? But when I've met the worst, the worst of the worst kind of guys, they're often these charming, sort of seductively friendly guys, which makes them kind of way scarier, right?

Yeah, I think definitely in leadership levels. You know, Charles Manson, man, you have these guys who can sway people, who know how to turn it on when they need to, and know how to play the game. And that really is what Archon was like. Khabib got the access because he had taken this famous photo of Archon and his men standing in front of a tank,

They're all wearing balaclavas and fatigues and Archon's just there. He's the only one not wearing a balaclava holding up a baby white tiger. I mean, it is a startling photo, like something out of a movie. Yeah, the warlords just love a tiger, right? I mean, this photo is something else. And there's conflicting reports about what happened to the tiger.

One I read said it went back to the Belgrade Zoo and another said Arkhan's men kept it but forgot to get it some necessary shots and it died shortly after, which is, I think that one's a lot more poetic. Yeah, I'm going to say judging on what happened before this, it probably died. Yeah, yeah, one way or another. But after the photos Khabib took of them abusing people were printed, he feared for his life and Arkhan reportedly threatened to drink his blood. Okay, that's worse than anything I've had so far.

Yeah, it's a solid threat, I think. Meanwhile, he's becoming a legend in Serbia. He's seen as a war hero for some, who is protecting the people from the alleged Croatian Nazis and the Bosnian jihadis. And he's doing the dirty work the government wishes it could do, but needs just a hint of plausible deniability. Though later on, he actually forms his own political party and becomes a member of parliament. So he becomes a member of the government. But it's not really about the war. The war itself is an opportunity.

From the war, a new gangster class emerges, made rich from looting, smuggling, and racketeering. And that's where Archon really finds his footing. So this guy has gone from small-time crook, big-time crook, warlord, and now he's going back to a kind of mafia setup?

Yeah, you'll see as he progresses, but it really is fascinating the trajectory that he took. And to start off, Christopher Stort in his book Hunting the Tiger, which is about Arkhan, says that he was very likely paid $2 million by a local Serb in Bosnia to cleanse a town of Muslims. But the real money is in business, war profiteering. That's where you make the big bucks right there.

And in 1992, sanctions hit. And that, for Archon, is boom time. There is no money like contraband money. State-sanctioned smuggling rings start bringing in anything and everything. Again, looting and robbing, you know, it's good for your classic tracksuit thug, but the top leaders, the brains, they know the score.

Fuel, cigarettes, guns, booze, even some heroin. That's where the money is. So Arkhan and the other thugs are linking up with other crime groups, Italian mafias like the Kimura, Montenegrin mafias, Bulgarian, Russian, Albanian. And it sounds ridiculous as the guys like Arkhan and his Bosnian counterparts were all fighting this sectarian war where they gladly participated in propaganda and killing along ethnic and sectarian lines. But they were also doing business with each other.

In his seminal organized crime book, McMafia, Misha Glennie writes, quote, most shocking of all, however, is how the gangsters and politicians fueling war between their peoples were in private cooperating as friends and close business partners. When the fuel and weapon sanctions hit and then all these organized crime groups are creating relationships with each other and symbiotic relationships with their government because the governments need them to bring it in, you know, it's just, it's crazy. They're all getting extremely rich and extremely powerful overnight.

I think I need to know at this point if he's still doing the ice cream parlor. I mean, there's always money in an ice cream stand. Forget a banana stand. Ice cream. I have an ice cream problem. I'm out there buying ice cream three, four times a week. It's an addiction. It's fair. It's a racket. Yeah.

And why would you shut down something like that? But I, you know, I didn't do proper research. This is our first episode. I really wish I had followed up with the ice cream store and really found out what was on offer, what they were selling and how long it lasted. I mean, maybe that's one for listeners to get in touch, right? They got to fact check this.

Yeah, let me know. Look up that ice cream stuff. If you're in Belgrade right now, if it's still out there, I want to know if they got fancy. You know, you can charge $7 for a scoop of ice cream in Brooklyn. It's really artisanal ice cream is a fucking racket, man. This is really when the mafia becomes the state and the state becomes the mafia. Everything is so intertwined with Milosevic's government that Archon might as well be vice president.

Maria Vivot, or Vivad, I might pronounce her name, in her book Warrior Aristocracy, breaks it down from the Tito days of political assassinations to making banks smuggling with the government pernition and how it's all related. Quote, the state security service in former Yugoslavia employed professional criminals in the elimination of dissidents, enemies of socialism, and used their services to produce illicit profit for its financing.

When the Milosevic regime rose to power, the service just changed its master, but the method remained the same. Professional criminals were recruited to join or lead a so-called unit of volunteers. Often, these criminals exchanged their time in prison for a time at the battlefield.

The Serbian warlords were able to carry out the political goals of the Belgrade regime and were granted in exchange open hands in looting and developing illicit trade. In McMafia, Glennie breaks down how some of these markets work. You know, you take cigarettes. In the 1990s, nearby Montenegro was the center for the illegal cigarette trade, bringing in billions of dollars in what they call a transit tax.

There's two types of cigarettes. There's bootleg, low-quality ones faked as Western cigs, which I've smoked before and are terrible, and high-grade cigs produced by Western tobacco companies as what's known as duty-not-paid item, which are designed for export to two free trade zones in Europe. Those cigs are sold to corrupt third countries like Egypt or Uzbekistan, and they make their way to Montenegro before crossing over to Italian ports where they enter the European Union.

Everyone gets paid along the way. All matters of criminals. And they're still cheaper to buy in Europe than normally taxed cigarettes. Along the way, all these mafias are getting rich and so is the Montenegrin government. And according to Glennie, all the governments in the Balkans in the 1990s were essentially intertwined with organized crime. Sanctions, man. Yeah. It makes you wonder about the sanctions the White House is throwing around now, right? What that's going to cause.

I mean, it's tough, right? Because you want to punish these governments for what they're doing without having to get violent. But sanctions, they allow black markets to flourish. They punish regular citizens. But yeah, I mean, I think I explained it in a convoluted way, but basically it comes down to finding a product that should be getting taxed and –

Making it so it's not taxed, especially products with high taxes like fuel and cigarettes and finding a way around that where you can sell them for a price that's just a little below, but people just get paid off. Yeah, the six is a good one. I wonder if the listeners would like tracing lines across the map in their head like I was doing there. It's good.

I hope it made sense. So, you know, Arkhan's so intertwined in the government and business there that in his obituary that comes out in the New York Times eventually, a Serbian playwright tells them, quote,

but the leaders are also the mob. The mob is part of them. This is not a metaphor. He was invited everywhere. End quote. I like how he threw in, like, it wasn't just Godfather 1. It was also Godfather 2. Left out the third one though, right? Yeah, let's not talk about the third one. And that's the crux of Archon. State-sponsored mafias who maybe the state once used as a tool

But they end up enveloping the state, and it has disastrous consequences, some that are still being felt today. Yeah, I kind of want to back for the Balkans here as well. All of this stuff is still the case, and it's politically kind of a mess in so many ways. But if anyone gets the chance to go to that part of the world, it's unbelievably beautiful. People are amazing. It's so interesting. So I don't know where you're listening to this podcast, but...

If you can travel in the next decade with this pandemic, then I would recommend spending a holiday out there. It's an incredible place.

Yeah, I mean, that's like the worst thing about doing the kind of work that we've done, I think, and about doing this podcast. Like you only focus on the worst aspects sometimes of places, of people, of whatever else. And it's kind of like something I've come to grips to in my career. Like that's what I would be doing in New York. So we mean no, you know, no hate towards these places, which I would love to go to and visit. But it's like, you know, I'd go to El Salvador and it's this beautiful country full of beautiful people, but you're reporting on the gangs there. And you kind of got to walk that line where you talk about, yeah, things are bad there, but it's not like everything there is bad.

And it's also not like it's full of bad people, right? It's just these elements of society which are present even in New York, anywhere you look. Even in Switzerland, I'm sure there's shady organized crime, even the Danes, you know? Yeah, I mean, like the amount of work trips I go on and I just wish I could come back the next week and do a holiday there is pretty much all of them really. They're like, they're always cool places.

That's why Bourdain had the dream, right? You get to talk about some of the awful things of a place, but you also get to eat barbecue there and get drunk with the locals and see how cool it can be. Yeah, yeah. I mean, you do that as well, right?

Yeah, but I don't get the report on it and propose it. Maybe that could be our next, once the podcast money starts rolling in, we start doing that add-on as well. Yeah, Underworld on tour. It's going to be great. Yeah, yeah. So 1995 rolls around and the dating accords are signed. So the war ends and Archon can now focus his full energy on being a gangster. And we are talking Versace suits driving around Belgrade in a pink Cadillac. Okay, he's turning into Gucci Mane now, right?

I don't know if Gucci has a pink Cadillac. I don't know how tapped in he is to the real estate market. But along those lines, you know, along like cheesy rapper lines of bad suits and pink cars and things like that. Actually, Cameron would be a more fitting pink Cadillac sort of guy. But yeah, property development, hotels, casinos. And also, why is it that whenever gangsters want to go legit or at least pretend to, they make their way into real estate development?

Like, what does that say about people already in that industry? I guess they're smarter because they skip the whole selling heroin and murdering people and just get started on the real estate development right away. That's the real takeaway, right? Like, if you want to be a real gangster, you got to learn about industrial and residential zoning, multifamily homes and things like that. Yeah, that's the takeaway of this whole podcast. Get into real estate development. You know, that's what the money is. Yes.

Arkan now tries to buy the Red Star soccer team that he once was running the fans for, but he has to settle on a different one. And there's stories of him now threatening opponents, having managers killed who wouldn't sell him a player in the games. I mean, the games, if you see the crowds, they're literally filled with paramilitary maniacs and gangsters on their off days, lighting off flares and just being generally terrifying. Like that is a home field advantage right there. And somehow the team starts winning and gets really good, which is shocking. Yeah.

And something like 11 club chairman in Serbian football would go on to get murdered between 1995 and 2006. Jeez. I guess that's the price of success in Serbian football. I mean, by the way, at this point, is the ice cream still outside the stadium? You know, I wonder if there were ice cream wars, too. I know that there was actually an ice cream war thing in Glasgow involving ice cream trucks and all that ice cream. I think we'll do another episode on that. Oh, definitely. That's so good.

I think I'm a failure as a podcaster for not having all this ice cream information. We'll learn. I mean, this is the first episode, right? It's rough. We will learn. We will make things like, like we'll make sense by the end of this. So after the war ends, the Tigers allegedly disband because there's not much ethnic cleansing to do, but there's still plenty of crime.

Arkan by now is a legend in Serbia, like I said, a hero to many. Remember, he has his own political party. He owns a soccer team. He's filthy rich, the right-hand man of the president. And he marries Serbia's most popular folk singer, Sejsta, I think is how it's pronounced, who is a silicon-enhanced diamond stiletto-wearing diva, which is like the perfect wife for a warlord, gangster, mafia, or so. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

The wedding is a broadcast on state TV. It's completely insane. VHS copies of like reportedly a hundred thousand sell at the markets. I was watching footage of it earlier today. And there's one point where Archon wearing this traditional, you know, traditional clothing just dances in a crowd and keeps firing different guns in the air that are handed to him. Like not just, you know, a rifle, but like pistols. One looks like an Uzi. It just like different guns keep going and just keeps firing them in the air. Not one gun, many guns.

And later, there's actually a great story of him doing a live TV interview with his wife, like a phone-in show. And she's wearing a gaudy diamond necklace. A woman calls in and tells them that she's going to recite the inscription on the back of the necklace. And Seysta asks her, you know, how do you know the inscription? The woman says, because it's actually my necklace. And Arkhan stole it from her. Holy shit. Okay, this is knocking every reality TV show out of the park right now. That's just good TV. Yeah, yeah.

But it just shows like how criminal these guys were. You know, it wasn't enough to run these import export markets. He stole some poor woman's diamond necklace just for that thrill of like for the hell of it, you know? Well, it's in his blood, right? Yeah. I mean, he just, like I said, those guys who found him in jail when he stole that purse, like they were good scouts. Yeah. Yeah. They saw something. They saw something in him.

So Archon is living the high life. He's Tony Soprano on steroids. He's a man about town, but he's also very disciplined. Jonathan Wilson, who wrote Behind the Curtain, which is about soccer in Eastern Europe, mentions how there's a story going around of Archon where he's in the same room with his men. And while they're partying with drugs and hookers, he's in the corner doing his exercise regime. He's just a real, you know, rise and grind type of guy. Yeah, so he's like an early Instagram fitness influencer or something.

It'd be very puffy right now, I think, if he was, you know, got to get up, got to get that money, you know, got to murder your opponent and take over his smuggling market. Yeah, you know, like, warlords got to be up early.

Make you beg. I think he'd do better than, you know, Kadyrov has his Instagram, the Chechen warlord who's now in charge there. He's got a solid presence, but this one seems like it'd be a lot more. A bit diverse. Yeah, like fewer gold guns, more like Uzi's weddings. He also took care of his men even after they died, watching out for and supporting their families.

He was like, you know, the godfather. And Christopher S. Stort, who wrote a book about Archon, interviewed one of his men named Trax, great gangster name, who told of how Archon kind of plucked him from nothing and made him into a militiaman. This guy was a grizzled war vet. And he also said, quote, Archon was fucking nuts and you didn't say no to him. I mean, no one's saying no to him at this point and not getting dumped in a canal, right?

Yeah, and then I keep stressing this, but it wasn't like average shopkeepers were scared of him. Dudes who did the ethnic cleansing were scared of him. That's how terrifying a person Arkhan was. Yeah, this guy's a complete, like, crazy. Yeah, yeah.

Peace in the Balkans does not last long. The war in Kosovo kicks off. Again, I can't even remotely do it justice, but Kosovo is a part of Serbia that's mainly made up of Albanians with a small minority of Serbs, and the Albanians want to break away from Serbia.

And it's the feeling of Kirkuk or Jerusalem where everyone wants a peace. Everyone says it's their ancestral homeland. That's important. The Albanians eventually do some guerrilla attacks. They have a militant group. The Serbs crack down hard. Civilians get caught in ethnic cleansing, vicious paramilitaries, Serb extremists. NATO gets involved after trying to initiate a peace deal with Milosevic for a long time.

Archon claims he isn't participating. He actually tells the journalist that he would only go to Kosovo if he could kill British soldiers, which is, you know, a solid shit talking in my opinion. Meanwhile, his militiamen are clearly there doing their raping, pillaging and killing. A Wall Street Journal article in 1999 revealed the Tiger is still mostly existed and that Archon was directing ethnic cleansing and looting, sending trucks to take out goods. Here's a quote from the article.

The thefts were meticulously planned. Tony says, Tony was a tiger a full three weeks before NATO launched. Tony's Tony's a tiger. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Jeez. All right. Tony, Tony was a tiger.

Okay, I got to catch myself there. Anyway, getting back to it. A full three weeks before NATO launched its campaign against Yugoslavia on March 24th, ethnic Serb municipal and police officials gave Tony and his associates computer printouts listing the names and assets of wealthy Albanians. Each page contained 20 names. Other Archon units received separate lists of people slated for execution.

What is it about fascists and handwriting and documents and lists? Look, they're organized, man. Fascists, they are always organized. You can't take that away from them.

The same article quotes another militiaman named Jastreb. My interest was money, he says. We would cleanse, execute, and loot. We could do things at our own initiative. We were told by the commander to go to Albanian neighborhoods and kill all young men, but to let the old ones go.

We would work in groups of four or five and break down the doors of five or six flats a night. By the way, I love that part where he talks about how they could do things at their own initiative. Like the other paramilitary ethnic cleansing groups he was part of were way too organized and bureaucratic. You had to go up the totem pole and get permission. But this one, they could just go out on their own and really use all their creativity and do what they wanted to do. He hated when they could only murder or rape when the higher-ups approved. Yeah, we all know what it's like to have a boss who's always looking over your shoulder.

Yeah, you really got to have your creativity to do a good job, whether it's creating a podcast or committing horrific war crimes. So as the war drags on and NATO intervenes, Arkhan grows vocal about what's happening in Kosovo, criticizing the intervention and the bombing.

He wasn't criticizing the war crimes. He was criticizing the intervention to stop the war crimes. Okay, right. Okay, fair enough. There's a 1999 interview with him and the journalist John Simpson on YouTube. Archon's wearing a suit now and not the fatigues and beret of seven or eight years ago. He's more polished. His face is puffier and softer. He's a businessman, you know. He had taken to wearing a badge of a mini target around town, starting a trend to emphasize his distaste for the bombing.

In his interview, he's defiant, saying how he's friends with Albanians and Muslims, saying all the people complaining to the media about ethnic cleansing are stage actors. His English is almost perfect, and he's spouting off statistics that he has memorized. This is a direct quote.

We want peace. We want to live together. My children can grow together with Albanian children. You can kind of see the evolution of the slickness of like now where he's doing all these things, but he's saying all the right things, you know, about what you're supposed to say, even though he's doing the exact opposite. Yeah, he's got the MLK line as well, which is right on point. Yeah, he's got a dream, you know?

The same year, 1999, nearly at the same time as the NATO bombing commenced, a secret indictment from The Hague was unsealed. Archon had been charged in 1997 with crimes against humanity for his part in murdering civilians, Muslims, and Croatians. 24 charges in general and violations of the Geneva Convention. He, of course, denies all charges, but one thing to keep in mind, he could also be a really damaging witness for Milosevic if Milosevic goes on trial.

Anyway, so fast forward to the beginning of 2000 and Archon is in that hotel lobby. And I love hotels like this in conflict zones even though Belgrade was peaceful at this time. The war is pretty much over.

But I remember being in one in the Central African Republic in the midst of a civil war. And you have just guys that, you know, you have NGOs, you have shady warlords passing through in their suits and their weird costumes, diamond dealers, all sorts of mafiosos and businessmen, journalists. They're really just fascinating places. And I get the feeling that this is one of those hotels. Yeah, I was in one in Juba in South Sudan years ago. And there was like, we're sitting at a table drinking a few beers with

Guy who was an NGO worker who was helping migrants cross the border there. And there was another guy working for a big oil company trying to sort of like screw the country over. You kind of get an idea of how weird and kind of dark these places are in these moments.

Yeah, mercenaries. That's a big one, too. I remember there was this Lebanese guy there, and he was buying us all the journalist bottles of wine and whiskey and like a really good time, really fun guy to be around. And like a couple days later, one of these guys who has a lot of experience in human rights stuff and had traveled around to all these conflict zones was like, hey, by the way, that guy, be careful. He said this to everyone. Like he's on the watch list for being a member of Hezbollah. So yeah.

These lobbies, interesting things happen. And interesting things happen to Arkhan, which is him getting shot in the face. That's a pretty high on the list of interesting things to happen in a hotel lobby. Yeah. So the shooter was ID'd eventually as a former member of the Tigers. Arkhan was with two high-level men. Tracksuit guys approach. Shooting happens. They light him up. His funeral. Some papers say 10,000 people attended. Some say only 3,000.

But at the time of his death, Arkhan was estimated to be the largest organized crime figure in Serbia and one of the country's richest men. His legacy and that of the Tigers is still being felt. In the years before and after his death, there were assassinations of politicians, police chiefs, gangsters, journalists. The International Crisis Group would say that members of the Tigers joined law enforcement and politics in Serbia and in Bosnia.

culturally critics sort of treat him like the emergence of gangster rap where he so influenced young people and the culture into this get rich quick hyper violent lawless way of being that you know he was just the godfather of all these new criminals and i think it actually has a lot of merit meanwhile in the late 90s and 2000s as well you saw not just archon but other militia leader warlords who

who got rich on the battlefield, transitioned into mafioso businessmen. And of course, they started turning on each other. And Serbia becomes this lawless place of assassinations and organized crime. In 2003, the Serbian president vows to finally crack down on the mafia state he inherits. Shortly after, he's killed by former members of the Tigers.

And in the weeks and months that followed, 10,000 people were arrested for organized crime, with 3,000 people ended up being charged, including top army officers, police, and Secret Service members. And you still kind of see it now. Dragan Palma Markovic, one of Argon's colonels, was Serbia's most popular mayor in the 2000s and currently leads his own party as a member of the National Assembly.

He has a nationwide TV channel too. A WikiLeaks cable from 2009 mentioned how he kept a stuffed tiger in his office and named his kickboxing team Palmless Tigers. I'm going to go out on a limb and just suggest that he wasn't getting beaten that much, that guy.

Oh, his kickboxing team? Yeah, yeah. They sound pretty solid. I don't even know. I don't even know if he was fighting. I mean, I think I get the impression, and this is completely guesswork, like this would not suffice in an article, that he was the big heavy set guy and he had the younger guys do all the dirty work for him. Okay, so he's just like a Balkan Miyagi kind of character. Yeah, yeah. You know, wax on, wax off. I'm going to give him a tracksuit and a chain. Again, this is me just hypothesizing and like I said, correct me if you have to, but tracksuit, chain, manager.

As for Arkon's murder, it's never really been solved. But there's two competing theories that have gained a lot of traction and both point to Milosevic. The first is that Milosevic was worried Arkon was going to testify against him in The Hague to save his own ass. The second is that Arkon had a beef with Milosevic's son over tobacco smuggling profits and things came to a head and he got whacked.

Archon himself never went to trial. None of his men ever served time for any of the war crimes committed during their days with the Tigers. They might have actually served time for something else, but quite a few of them grew rich. And yeah, that is the story. Yeah, that's insane. I mean, there's a lot to take in. I mean, the main thing I want to know is who took on the ice cream parlor.

We really, I really dropped the ball here and I'm sorry to the new fans. Please know that in the future I will get on this, but yeah, if anyone has knowledge of that, like we will say it in the next episode, let us know. Please let us know. Yeah. But thank you for tuning into the underworld podcast. You can subscribe to us on, on Patreon, Spotify, Stitcher, Instagram,

Apple, whatever else, wherever you get your iTunes. All of those. If you really like us, subscribe on all three. Do it. Why not? Give us a go. Patreon.com slash The Underworld Podcast. You can give us money so we can keep doing this. The more money we get, the more motivated we'll be. Yeah, and maybe I'll get a new tracksuit and a chain, right?

Yeah, the more episodes we can do. We want to bring in special guests. We'll have bonus episodes, interviews. So please support us if you can. For now, subscribe. Tell your friends. Tell your parents. Tell your parents' friends. And until next time, peace. See ya.