Some were beaten and interrogated. Others were crammed into a basement boiler room, five square meters in size. For more than three days, the Tigers kept thirty men and one woman in this space, without food, water, or adequate ventilation. A bus transported detainees from the boiler room to the foot of a hill looking up at a village church. They killed all but two of the detainees, shoving them into mass graves that would be exhumed a year later. By the end of the war in Croatia and Bosnia, according to State Department estimates, with throat slitting, strangulation, and other forms of execution, Arkan’s Tigers had killed at least 2,000 men and women.
Arkan’s crimes had been documented well. In Serbian society, it wasn’t hard to find out about them.
Milosevic hadn’t curtailed access to the Internet, hadn’t banned satellite dishes, hadn’t tossed out the human rights activists. The Belgrade dissident Filip David told me quite simply, “We knew.” But instead of greeting Arkan with moral opprobrium, Serbian society turned him into a hero.
Many of the Serbs who watched Arkan’s veneration, now compare it to the laudatory, fascinated coverage HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE GANGSTER’S PARADISE
that Americans devoted to John Gotti and Al Capone.
This comparison, however, understates both Arkan’s wickedness and the swooning of the Serb press. With regular appearances on the wildly popular Minimaxovi-sion variety show, Arkan presented himself as a charming persona that even the country’s middle class could adore. He used these cameos to announce his marriage to the pop star Ceca and the impending births of their children. When he married Ceca in 1994, TV carried the event live.
The war hadn’t just made Arkan famous; it made him rich, too. Patriotism had provided the justification for looting on a grand scale. Arkan ran his network, the Tigers, as a black market sanctions-busting conglomerate, cornering monopolies on petroleum and consumer goods. Some in Belgrade jokingly dubbed the city’s shopping districts “Arkansas.” Here, the American gangster metaphor really does work. Like many
Mafiosos before him, Arkan was intent on parlaying this newfangled wealth into legitimacy. More
specifically, he hoped to become the president of a championship soccer club that would provide him with international prestige and even more adoration. When Red Star wouldn’t sell the club to him, Arkan set out to create his own Red Star. First, he bought a team in Kosovo and purged its largely ethnic Albanian lineup.
Then, in 1996 he traded up for the Belgrade club Obilic, a semi-professional team that had lingered in Yugoslavia’s lower divisions for decades.
Part of Obilic’s appeal was its namesake, a knight who fought at the Serbs’ defeat in the 1389 battle for Kosovo—the defining moment in the national narrative of victimization. Just before the battle, Obilic infiltrated the Turkish camp and stabbed the Sultan Murad with a poisoned dagger. Arkan added to this preexisting mys-tique, figuring himself a latter-day Obilic. He changed the color of the club’s uniform to yellow, a tribute to his Tigers, and made the tiger a ubiquitous symbol spread through the stadium. Its face greets you as you enter the club’s headquarters. It appears on the doors of vehicles the club owns.
Almost instantly, under Arkan’s stewardship, the club triumphed. Within a year of arriving in the top division, it won the national championship. Arkan liked to brag about the secrets of his success; the fact that he paid his players the highest salaries in the country; that he forbade them to drink before games; that he disciplined his players to act as a military unit. But his opponents provide another explanation for Obilic’s impossibly rapid ascent. According to one widely reported account, Arkan had threatened to shoot a rival striker’s kneecap if he scored against Obilic. Another player told the English soccer magazine Four-Four-Two that he’d been locked in a garage while his team played against Obilic.
At games, Arkan’s message to his opponents was clear enough. Obilic’s corps of supporters consisted substantially of veteran paramilitaries. These Tigers would “escort” referees to the game in their jeeps. At games, they would chant things like “If you score, you’ll never walk out of the stadium alive” or “We’ll break both your legs, you’ll walk on your hands.” As English newspapers pointed out, it was in the player’s best interest to adhere to the demands. Fans were frequently waving guns at them. HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE GANGSTER’S PARADISE
According to Belgrade lore, Arkan made a habit of barging into opposing teams’ locker rooms during half time, where he would shout abuse. To avoid this fate, Red Star once simply refused to leave the field during the game break. Its players loitered on the pitch, even urinated on the side of field, rather than risk encounter-ing Arkan. After another match, Red Star Belgrade striker Perica Ognjenovic complained, “This is not soccer, this is war. I think I’d better leave this country.”
With its overnight success, Obilic had qualified to compete against other top teams in the European Champions League. But even the European soccer oªcials—not exactly sticklers when it comes to criminals and dictators—couldn’t tolerate the presence of Arkan at their stadiums. They banned the club from continental competition. To get around the ban, Arkan resigned from the club. He installed his wife,
