Black Briefcases

From the briefcase with 700.000 German marks found in the attic of Velimir Mihajlovic's brother, the then Serbian Minister of Commerce and Tourism, to the briefcase with 750.000 marks found, allegedly, at the spot where Radovan Stojicic Badza was murdered, the until recent deputy Serbian Minister of Police, slightly more than four years have elapsed. It seems as though that was just enough time to enable one part of the local citizenry to traverse the road from necktie and briefcase to pagers and faxes to mobile phones.

"That is part of the process of a primary accumulation of capital," says Dr. Zivojin Aleksic for VREME, a retired professor of the School of Law. He sees the causes for the criminalization of the economy in the collapse of Yugoslavia as the war and the fact that the criminals originally from Serbia and Montenegro have been expelled from all European countries and the sanctions.

War has been concluded and the sanctions lifted. However there are no signs that Yugoslav society is returning to some kind of normal state. On the contrary. "The transition to peace-time conditions can be sustained only by those who are most powerful. Resources were spent, the profits are no longer such as they had grown accustomed to - 50 to 100 percent - so that a reallocation was launched. In a matter of minutes, the bigger fish started to swallow the smaller ones. All of that generates nervousness, and conflicts multiply. Mutual assassinations also serve as a correction of justice, since our laws protect debtors. You have these huge loans with high interest rates. These are operations which cannot receive support from a court, so that their mutual shakedowns stand as a certain kind of correction of justice. Institutions that deal with such loans should either be prohibited or should be given support in a court of law", believes Dr. Aleksic.

More than ever before, successful business moves are brought into relation not only with criminal activities as such but also with its organized activities hidden behind the frightening word - Mafia. Even though Dr. Dobrivoje Radovanovic, the director of the Institute for Criminological and Sociological Research, claimed in Nasa Borba daily that organized crime here was in the process of taking over economic and social power, there is no research that would tell us what the proportions of this process are.

The pictures from the local funerals irresistibly remind one of Chicago in the thirties. Even the moral portraits of the long-ago and contemporary gangsters don't overtly differ. When the huge economic crisis hit Chicago, as the Spectator magazine states, Caponne created a miniature welfare system

for thousands of impoverished citizens. Naturally, the majority was very loyal to the family. Here the invalids and soldiers of this or that war are receiving financial aid, while happy pictures of family life, with both old and new wives, are being showered upon us from all directions.

Dr. Radovanovic deems that organized crime has already started to transform its economic power into social power, since through ownership of radio and TV stations and newspapers it is influencing public opinion. Establishing political parties or movements falls into the same category. If it is of any consolation, this expert believes that we are still not in the phase in which organized crime imposes its behavior patterns upon us. Formally, it does so when it exerts its influences at the time when a new law is passed, and informally, when via criminal methods it forces people to act in accordance with the regulations characteristic of them.

Can the entrance into that final phase of a legalized Mafia and a Mafia state be stopped? "A method cannot be found which would eradicate it, however methods can be found which would make it extremely difficult for criminal activities to survive and which would create a hot terrain for it. The same as when you place an alarm in your car: you don't prevent theft by it, however you make things more difficult for the thief making him turn towards a car without an alarm," says Dr. Aleksic. According to his opinion, this shall be achieved by a speedy re-integration with Interpol; entering Europolis at the same speed; an institutional revenue and property control of people in the country and abroad; establishing a commission in the federal parliament for a public inquiry into the activities of those people who are suspected of amassing wealth in an illegal manner; establishing a special committee which would control the activities of the overall judicial system; introducing people with special authorization (ombudsman) and introducing a registry of all interventions in the police and judiciary (so that it can be seen who has intervened for whom and on how many occasions).

Dr. Aleksic believes that mathematics are a sufficient tool to uncover turbo-millionaires: "Our people do not know how to hide their wealth. In 40 years I only met one such person along with the minister who buried his money. If you chuck out a bottle of scotch per day, we then calculate how much money that is per month, pay you a visit and inquire how big your salary is and whether you had inherited anything or received money from a lottery to enable you to buy a bottle of scotch per day."