Dinamo fans began throwing stones at them, the Red Star fans used the billboards as shields. Fences that separated the opposing fans mysteriously disappeared.
A brawl engulfed the entire stadium, with the combat-ants identified by the color of their shirts, and then moved onto the field. The police handled the situation with ineptitude. As a cop beat a Zagreb fan, a Dinamo player called Zvonimir Boban intervened with a flying kick into the oªcer’s gut. Helicopters descended on the stadium to evacuate the Serb players from the melee.
To anyone watching, it was clear that both Serbs and Croats had come ready to fight. Rocks had been carefully stockpiled in the stadium before the game, waiting to be thrown. Acid had been strategically stored so that Croatian fans could burn through the fences separating them from their Serbian counterparts.
Standing next to the Red Star coach, guarding him HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE GANGSTER’S PARADISE
from the violence, was an even more ominous presence, a secret-police hit man called Zeljko Raznatovic.
Through his career as a gangster, he’d reached mythical proportions, so much so that everyone simply referred to him by one of his approximately forty aliases. Considering all the Muslims he would later massacre, it is ironic that he went by the Turkish name Arkan.
Arkan came of age in the placidity of Tito’s Yugoslavia, a Balkan’s version of June-and-Ward’s America, where Serbs and Croats were supposed to be happy neighbors.
But Arkan had bucked communist conformism. His father had served as an oªcer in Tito’s air force and used the military rulebook as a Dr. Spock–like guide for raising his son. Predictably, the harsh discipline backfired. By about age sixteen, Arkan had dropped out of a naval acad-emy, stowed away to Italy, and taken up life as a petty criminal in Paris. Not long into this stint, he was nabbed and sentenced to three years in juvenile detention. Unlike the other Yugoslav criminals with whom he teamed, Arkan hadn’t become a thief to fund a luxurious gangster lifestyle. One of his cronies recounted celebrating a heist in Milan with whiskey and whores. Arkan refused to join the party. He sat alone in a room with the window open, letting cigarette smoke escape, performing calisthenics.
The myth of Arkan has more to do with the after-math of crimes than the crimes themselves. He had a magical capacity for escape. In 1974, the Belgians locked him up for armed robbery. Three years later, he broke free from prison and fled to Holland. When the Dutch police caught him, he somehow managed to slither away from prison again. That same year, he repeated the feat at a German prison hospital. The masterpiece in this oeuvre was his appearance at the Swedish trial of his partner Carlo Fabiani. Arkan burst into the courtroom carrying a gun in each hand. He aimed one at the judge and tossed the other to Fabi-anni. Their audacious escape through a courtroom window could have been orchestrated by Jerry
Bruckheimer.
With such attention-grabbing escapades, Western Europe became too hot for Arkan. Back in Belgrade, he reconciled with his father and then worked his connections to the Yugoslav security apparatus. Well before Arkan’s return, the police had begun recruiting criminals to perform dirty work, mostly assassinating exiled dissidents. As part of the government arrangement, the criminals could violate the law abroad and then return to haven in Yugoslavia. Arkan became a star in this system, and he flaunted his status. He drove through Belgrade in a pink Cadillac. After he killed a cop, an extremely rare occurrence in the well-ordered communist society, he unsheathed his Ministry of Interior credentials and casually walked out of his trial.
In his brash manner, Arkan had prefigured the late-eighties transition away from communism, an epoch when gangsters and smugglers came to rule the booming Serb economy. And he was more than just a representative figure. He helped Slobodan Milosevic, who became the Serbian Communist Party boss in 1986, manage an exceptionally tricky task. Milosevic had amassed popularity and power by exploiting the long-suppressed nationalism of the Serbs. But as a cynic he also understood how quickly these inflamed passions could turn against him. Nationalism needed to be care-HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE GANGSTER’S PARADISE
fully regulated. One glaring danger spot was the Red Star Belgrade stadium, where the team’s hooligans had become politicized. They had begun lofting placards with the faces of Serbian Orthodox saints and the ultranationalist novelist Vuk Draskovic, head of the Serbian Renewal Party. Their chants called for secession: “Serbia, not Yugoslavia.”
It wasn’t strange that the stadium should become so fervent. From the start, Red Star had been a bastion of nationalism. Under communism, eastern-bloc soccer clubs adhered to basically the same model of sponsorship. There was usually a team founded and supported by the army; another with the police as patrons; others aligned with trade unions and government ministries.
In Belgrade, the army supported Partizan and the police backed Red Star. To Serb nationalists, the army represented the enemies of their cause. The ideology of the communist army rejected any notion of separate Serb identity as anathema to worker solidarity and ethnic harmony. Tito’s partisans, the namesake of the army club, had murdered, jailed, and beat the Chetniks, the army of Serb nationalists (some say fascists) who had also battled the Nazis. It had suppressed the Serbian Orthodox church. With such odious opponents, Red Star became a home for those Serbs with aspirations of reclaiming their nation.
Throughout Red Star’s history, police eminences sat on its board. In 1989, Milosevic’s interior minister was there. The minister understood that Red Star had become a caldron of post-communist alienation and an uncontrollable mess of gangs, especially ultranationalist ones. Newspapers filled with stories decrying the sta-diums as symbols of “general civilizational disintegra-tion.” To control the mess, the police tasked Arkan, a Red Star fanatic himself, with corralling the fans.
Arkan negotiated a
