Born A Boxer

The finale of this year's Belgrade Winner boxing match ended in irregularity even though there were some good fights. The boxers were good, the judges were fair, the audience was OK but to no avail. Two boxers were disqualified by gun shots.

The day of the match, Sunday February 12, after they were weighed, Macedonian Ramo Alomerovic (19) went down to the lobby of Belgrade's Putnik hotel to make a phone call. His timing was wrong. The moment he picked up the receiver, shots rang out which witnesses said went on for all of two minutes with about 50 rounds fired. One of them ricocheted and wounded the young Macedonian fighter. Others were also wounded: finalist heavyweight Radovan Radusinovic and former boxer Dragan Zaric. Mihailo Divac was killed.

The police emptied the sports arena in Novi Beograd and admitted everyone only after body searches. They confiscated eight pistols.

The gunfight broke out after an argument between Radusinovic and Miodrag Stojanovic Gidra on one side and Zoran Manojlovic and Divac on the other. The whole things smacks of enmity between opposed boxing clubs. Nasa Borba reported that a boxing club was formed last year as part of the kick-boxing club Red Star Delije whose patron is Zeljko Raznjatovic Arkan. In the meantime, Gidra formed his own club Red Star.

The motives for the clash are clearer once you discover that both clubs were competing to continue in the footsteps of the original red Star boxing club. The boxing association treats them equally but the rumor is that it will side with Arkan's Delije in the end.

Clearly, local criminals have infiltrated boxing clubs and their power is shown by the fear and silence in boxing circles. The underworld is strengthening its position in other sports as well. Sports have brought a lot of people lots of money once it is controlled by managers, brokers and officials but there were no conventional criminals so far. Everyone knew their position.

The latest rumor is that a group of Gidra supporters beat up former boxer Sekularac (he is often mentioned in connection with a Hong Kong businessman and transfers involving large amounts of money).

Red Star football club chairman Dragan Dzajic told VREME about the danger of crime infiltrating sports: "I'm just doing my job and not thinking about it."

Sports officials are sometimes directly responsible for the infiltration: when multi-partyism began in Serbia criminals were a convenient way to "discipline sports fans" and direct their energy against the authorities into other fields. Criminals have the bad habit of holding firmly onto their positions, expanding their influence and getting tough very quickly and many sports club chiefs probably came to regret their links with criminals.

Sports officials and the police are keeping quiet while the government is making increasingly frequent promises to combat crime persistently and the underworld is boiling over. Several hundred people at the Divac funeral kept their right hands inside their jackets and constantly kept looking around. Well informed sources claim a war is near with the Montenegrin lobby being targeted.

Regardless of whether the rumor is true or not, simple logic points to the fact that the clashes for power in the Belgrade underworld will become increasingly frequent and brutal because there is less and less money in the state and more and more guns and bad tempers. Some say it's all because Arkan is running out of cash.