Avenger

Skipping school from fourteen onward Zilic became the 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, whose 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 of it.

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 afterward. Zilic remained at the head of his gang in Germany and Austria for the next five years. He had long ago 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 u

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 his lot in with a shabby little ex-Communist Party hack whom others had overlooked or underestimated. He sported two qualities Zilic liked: an absolute ruthlessness in the pursuit of power, and a level of cu

By 1989, Milosevic had realised that communism was dead in the water; the horse to mount was that of extreme Serb nationalism. In fact, he brought not one but four horsemen to his country, those of the Apocalypse. Zilic served him almost to the end.

Yugoslavia was breaking up. Milosevic posed as the man to save the union, but he made no mention that he intended to do this through genocide, known as "ethnic cleansing." Inside Serbia, the province around Belgrade, his popularity stemmed from the belief that he would save Serbs everywhere from non-Serb persecution.

To do this, they first had to be persecuted. If the Croatians or Bosnians were slow on the uptake, this had to be arranged. A small local massacre would normally provoke the resident majority to turn on the Serbs among them. Then Milosevic could send in the army to save the Serbs. It was the gangsters, turned paramilitary "patriots," who acted as his agents provocateurs.

Where up until 1989 the Yugoslav state had kept its gangster underworld at arm's length and abroad, Milosevic took them into full partnership at home.

Like so many second-raters elevated to state power, Milosevic became fascinated by money. The sheer size of the sums involved acted on him like a snake charmer's pipe to a cobra. It was not, for him, the luxury that money could buy. He remained personally frugal to the end. It was money as another form of power that hypnotised him. By the time he fell, it was estimated by the successor Yugoslavian government that Milosevic and his cronies had embezzled and diverted to their own foreign accounts about twenty billion dollars.

Others were not so frugal. These included his ghastly wife and equally appalling son and daughter. The Milosevic household made *The Munsters* look like *Little House on the Prairie*.

Among those "full partners" was Zoran Zilic, who became the dictator's personal enforcer, a killer for hire. Reward under Milosevic was never in cash. It came in the award of franchises for especially lucrative rackets, coupled with the assurance of absolute immunity. The tyrant's cronies could rob, torture, rape, kill, and there was absolutely nothing the regular police could do about it. He established a criminal-cum-embezzler regime, posed as a patriot, and the Serbs and Western European politicians fell for it for years.

In all this brutality and bloodshed, he still did not save the Yugoslav Federation or even his dream of a greater Serbia. Slovenia left, then Macedonia and Croatia. By the Dayton Agreement of November 1995, Bosnia was gone; and by July 1999, he had not only effectively lost Kosovo, but he had also provoked the partial destruction of Serbia itself by NATO bombs.

Like Arkan, Zilic also formed a small squad of paramilitaries. There were others, like the sinister, shadowy, and brutal Frankie's Boys, the group of Frankie Stamatovic-amazingly not even a Serb, but a renegade Croat from Istria. Unlike the florid and ostentatious Arkan, gu

The third occasion was in April 1995. Where Arkan called his group his Tigers and had a couple of hundred of them, Zilic was content with Zoran's Wolves and he kept the numbers small. On the third sortie, he had no more than a dozen. They were all thugs who had operated before, save one. He lacked a radio operator and one of his colleagues, whose younger brother was in law school, said his brother had a friend who had been an army R/T operator.

Contacted via the fellow student, the newcomer agreed to forego his Easter vacation and join the Wolves.

Zilic asked what he was like. Had he seen combat? No, he had done his military service in the Signal Corps, which was why he was ready for some "action."

If he has never been shot at, then he surely has never killed anyone," said Zilic. "So this expedition should be quite a learning experience.

The group set off for the north in the first week of May, delayed by technical problems in their Russian-made vehicles. They went through Pale, the tiny former ski resort now established as the capital of the self-styled Republika Serbska, the third of Bosnia now so "cleansed" that it was uniquely Serb. They skirted Sarajevo, once the proud host of the winter Olympics, now a wreck, and went on into Bosnia proper, making their base at the stronghold of Banja Luka.

From there Zilic ranged outward, avoiding the dangerous Mujehadin, looking for softer targets among any Bosnian Muslim communities that might lack armed protection.

On May 14th, they found a small hamlet in the Vlasic range, took it by surprise, and wiped out the inhabitants, spent the night in the woods, and were back at Banja Luka by the evening of the 15th.

The new recruit left them the next day, screaming that he wanted to get back to his studies after all. Zilic let him go, after warning him that if he ever opened his mouth, he, Zilic, would personally cut off his dick with a broken wine glass and stuff both down his throat in that order. He did not like the boy anyway; he was stupid and squeamish.