Reporting from Serbia: "Suddenly everybody had to face the possibility that the president himself was in bed with these guys"

My guest today is Robert Worth, a contributing writer for The Atlantic and a former bureau chief for The New York Times. He has spent over two decades reporting on the Middle East, Europe, and Asia. He is the author of A Rage for Order: The Middle East in Turmoil, From Tahrir Square to ISIS, which won the 2017 Lionel Gelber Prize.

For this week’s episode of The Reporters, Robert chose a story he wrote for The New York Times Magazine in 2023 called “The President, the Soccer Hooligans and an Underworld ‘House of Horrors’” about the intersection of crime, politics, and soccer in Serbia, and how a gang leader’s allegations exposed deep ties between the country’s president and the criminal underworld.

Robert Worth, welcome to The Reporters.

Thanks for having me.

This is a long and complex story that appeared in the New York Times Magazine in 2023 and takes place in Serbia. You back into the story with this compelling tale of a trial of violent gangsters that captivated Serbia in the spring and the summer of 2021 and which changed how a lot of things were perceived in Serbia. The leader of this gang was Veljko Belivuk. Tell us a little bit about him.

I was living in France at the time and none of this was really covered in the Anglophone press, but it was in the European press. I saw this story about a gang leader named Belivuk who had been arrested and accused of these gruesome murders and also having run this soccer hooligan gang that had ties to the state. So he was in some way the central figure and remains in a way the central figure along with Aleksandar Vučić, the president of Serbia, of the story.

He illustrates the murky ties between the underworld and the state that is at the core of the story and also the world of soccer. That's what made the story immediately interesting to me. You had at least three worlds intersecting. You also had this role that the soccer stadium played. For decades, the soccer stadium has attracted, along with genuine soccer fans — and by the way, this is certainly not just true in the Balkans, it's all over the world — some really violent, thuggish people. By demonstrating their discipline, their violence and their fighting ability, they advertised themselves to people with money and power who needed muscle. That started in the Balkan Wars. These guys made themselves into private armies.

More recently, you had Belivuk and his gang who were soccer hooligans who basically became members of a drug cartel — but a drug cartel that had ties to the state. Belivuk had been a bouncer. He had a very troubled upbringing in Belgrade with a father who had fought in the Balkan Wars in the 1990s and who then committed violent suicide that almost killed Belivuk himself. He grew up very poorly educated, surrounded by thugs and he became a gang leader. At some point he was noticed by people in the police and the power apparatus who figured: this guy can be useful to us. But he took it too far, like a lot of thugs.

Belivuk goes on trial and during his defense, he makes the allegation that he was working not only for the state but for directly for the president, Aleksandar Vučić. He says, “For the needs and by the order of Aleksandar Vučić” and of course in the story this is a little bit shocking. It's one thing to be corrupt; it's another to be in bed with the president himself. Talk a bit about that relationship.

The challenge with a story like this, where you have these multiple worlds colliding, is how do you start the story? You want to signal to the reader early on what the scope of this story is, who are going to be the main characters. If there are multiple worlds intersecting, that poses a real challenge for the lede. And so I had to find a time and place when all the characters would be, as it were, in the same room together.

That's why I started with Vučić making this announcement about the arrest of these guys. You had this kind of urgent newscast. The president himself is announcing this stuff and talking about these gruesome murders. There's a scene in the courtroom where [Belivuk] makes that accusation. It personalizes the thing. That's why this became such a national spectacle in in Serbia — that accusation. Suddenly everybody had to face the possibility that the president himself was in bed with these guys. And that gave it a little bit of a life beyond Serbia.

You have some of this in the Middle East as well, gang rivalries, sectarian rivalries, layers and layers of history that make it hard to translate these things to a Western audience. Part of the task as a writer is to unpack it, to tell the story in a way that allows readers to work their way gradually into it. And that's what I wanted to do. Here we have Belivuk accused of these gruesome crimes. We have the president of Serbia accused of being in bed with him going back a ways. And we have a context, which is that similar relationships have been going on in this country for decades, if not a lot longer. That's the framework.

I want to read a section that you wrote that I think is newly relevant today. You write:

“But the risks for Europe run deeper than that. Vučić's brand of ethnic chauvinism and demagogy echoes that of his ally, Putin. And the spread of illiberal democracy already gathering strength in parts of the continent poses an equal, perhaps more ominous threat. The Belivuk case has opened a window into a grim possible future, one in which Vučić undermines the European project from within, building a state where democracy is a facade and criminal gangs are used to spread fear. That would be unsettling enough on its own. It also happens to be the same tactic used by the men who tipped the Balkans into a catastrophic war three decades ago.”

I almost got shivers because of the resonances with today. How does that paragraph land with you a couple of years on from when the story was published? And in light of Trump's recent moves?

Obviously the resonance is very much with Putin. I think the appeal for certain figures on the far right is: There's been so much dysfunction in Europe. The EU doesn't work. The EU doesn't truly represent the people. We have to break some things. That's what Trump and Vance want to do, is to break some things here and in Europe.

Ostensibly they want to do it to rebuild them in a better way. But we don't know that. All we know is that they're trying to break things, and with Putin it's just in the service of a pretty brutish, old-fashioned authoritarianism. They have useful idiots throughout Europe who for whatever reasons — whether it's because of the perception of a shared religious heritage, or self-enrichment — can very easily mimic the external appearances of a democracy while working behind the scenes with people who are making a mockery of it.

I mean, obviously this is taking things to an extreme, what appears to have happened in Serbia. Europe has been able to telegraph pretty clearly that they're not going to allow a country into the EU that has those kinds of things going on behind the scenes. I think the guardrails are there. Let's be clear: with Trump and Vance on the surface saying, “We're just doing this because they need a realistic assessment of what's going on, a realistic solution to the conflict.” It's the between the lines that makes it look as if they're aligning themselves clearly with Putin. I guess all I'm saying is I think we've seen lately how easy it is for that narrative to spread.

Aleksandar Vučić, President of Serbia. Credit: www.duma.gov.ru

Let’s jump back into the story. We’ve met Vučić, we've met Belivuk. One thing I thought you did particularly well was portray this very ominous sense that there is something very personal and very dark about the relationship between these two men that goes back for quite some time.

What seems clear is that people who worked directly for Vučić were in direct contact with Belivuk about the uses that could be made of him in doing certain things in the stadium, occupying a certain position, maintaining a certain share of the drug trade and so forth, and working closely with the police.

There is Belivuk’s allegation that he actually was in a room with the president getting directions. We don't know if that's true or not. Belivuk is not a reliable witness for anything. But there's no question that elements of the deep state were helping Belivuk and had helped his predecessor, the leader of the same gang who was gunned down.

What the authorities seemed to have wanted was a useful guy who could do what they wanted. And this then began to intersect with a very violent rivalry between two organized crime cartels. And things got out of control. And I think that's when they realized, wait a minute, this is no longer serving our purposes.

You introduce another fascinating component of the story, which is how the Serbian police or the Serbian state got a hold of information that led to Belivuk’s arrest. It's preceded by this question that as a reader I had, which is: if Vučić is in bed with the gangsters, why were they arrested?

Basically, there was a European investigation into drug smuggling, which had been mostly concentrated in Northern Europe. That's where you have the big containers where enormous amounts of drugs are brought in, mostly from Latin America. But the drug trade these days is not in national groups, like the Latin Americans do this and the Chinese do that. It's often people working together across nationalities. It's multicultural in that sense.

Some of these drugs would then go down to the Balkans. But it had become really serious. And in the Netherlands, you were seeing a lot of violence related to this, including with prominent figures. Journalists and lawyers were being killed in broad daylight. So Europol, which coordinates European police agencies out of The Hague and the Netherlands, put together a team to decode Sky ECC, which is a communications app that had been used for years.

This is not the first time this has happened. EncroChat and several other apps had been used overwhelmingly by criminal groups, and they had been decrypted and taken down by the authorities in different countries. Sky ECC seems to have been the most widespread. It was used from Australia all the way to Canada, and it had a disproportionate share of users in the Balkans. The server was in France. It was the French DGSI [the French domestic intelligence service], I think, who were able to start monitoring in real time what these guys were saying.

Europol doesn't have police officers of its own. It has intel people who work on the web and do this kind of stuff. And they coordinate with national police agencies. So they, having done this, then had to help coordinate a bust that happened all across Europe simultaneously. But for legal reasons, they had to signal what they were going to do. So people in these countries were aware before the bust happened that something was going on. It looks as if Vučić knew that Sky ECC was going to be broken open.

Metadata is police information of who's calling whom, but these guys had transcripts of it all, including everything that was on the chats. They had these incredibly gruesome photographs. These guys were so sure that this app was never gonna be broken open that they felt free to send each other pictures of decapitated heads and everything else. It was all there. Some of it was leaked to the press in Serbia. So you had these gruesome images appearing on TV and on the front pages of newspapers.

Veljko Belivuk. Credit: www.youtube.com

Were you able to see any of the messages?

A lot of them were reproduced in the indictment. I had all of the indictments, which are voluminous. I had other sources who were sending me information and images. I just needed to coordinate it and make sure I had all the pieces together. It was kind of amazing in that sense that you rarely get a case where the evidence is laid out in such a clear way. I talked to the widow of a guy who was himself involved in criminal activity, but not a killer. He was lured out by these guys on the pretext of selling him a gun. So I had all the information from her about when she last saw him, to the minute. And then you have surveillance images given by the police of him going out with these guys. And then you have their account of boasting to each other about how they got him and exactly what they did to him, and then images of his body cut up and stuff. It was one of those investigations where you get to see everything.

You went to Serbia to report this. You talk about it a little bit in the piece, but I'd like to hear a bit more. What obstacles did you face?

I was nervous before I went. I hadn't worked in the Balkans before. Most places I go, I've got a long history there because I've spent decades working in the Middle East and I've worked a lot in other parts of the world, but I had not worked in the Balkans. I have several friends who reported the Balkan Wars in the 1990s and they were able to connect me with old friends still there.

I also did cold calls or emails to people whose work I had come to admire from reading it. There are some amazing and very brave reporters [in Serbia]. Every country has its own network of investigators, and you have to be pretty unapologetic about just bothering people and begging for favors. And sometimes they'll help you.

I ended up at one point talking to a former police official who didn't give me much, even though he told me that he knew all kinds of stuff, but he said it was too dangerous. At a certain point in our conversation, he said, “Right now we're being watched. And in fact, we need to get out of here.” We just got up and after that he responded once or twice, but then essentially stopped responding. At a certain point I don't really blame him. What has he got to gain from talking to me? He's got a family. Sometimes this is just bluster, but I think he probably does face the possibility of serious repercussions. I don't blame him. I didn't get anywhere really in my efforts to talk directly to people in the security services, or to Vučić himself. There's no real positive for them in talking about this.

I was able also to talk to some of the victims' relatives who were not just in Belgrade but other parts of Serbia. And they were often quite angry that their cases hadn't been adequately investigated. And then to some extent — and this is obviously true in the Middle East as well, when there are ethnic, sectarian, nationalistic rivalries, you can sometimes take advantage of that because people are angry and feel that their side hasn't been properly given its due.

I should say also there are lawyers who are very brave, who have gotten involved in opposing the Serbian government and they were very willing to help me as well.

Let’s dive back into the story a little bit. When Vučić was starting his career in the late 1990s and early 2000s, he hitches his fortunes to the then up-and-coming president Slobodan Milošević. Milošević eventually goes down after the war and Vučić's future is somewhat uncertain. What happens then?

He had a mentor early on who was a pretty radical Serbian nationalist. That may have shaped his thinking. He was a young member of parliament, and had always been considered gifted. He also had been a bit of a soccer hooligan, but for a lot of people in Serbia, this is something to boast about. He was a smart guy and very politically savvy. He wanted to work his way up. And there were a lot of people who felt that Serbia was mistreated by the West. At that point anyway, probably most Serbians felt that Belgrade had been bombed, that they had been treated like war criminals, that the West sided against them.

They lost Kosovo.

Yeah, they lost Kosovo. They believed all these trials in the Hague were slanted against them. He played to that crowd and he benefited politically. But at a certain point, he and members of his party began to realize that a lot of Serbians wanted to join the EU and they couldn't do that if they kept singing from that song sheet. They had to adjust themselves politically, and they did. But they managed to kind of split the difference by continuing to appeal to that base while talking up economic prosperity with a future in the EU. So that was the populist party that that Vučić ended up essentially taking over as his career blossomed.

So Vučić is on the rise politically. He's managed to salvage his career after Milošević's fall. He's fashioned this new political party. He's playing both sides of the game. Meanwhile, Belivuk, the gangster that you lead the story with, is on a different trajectory. Eventually their paths cross again around 2012, but bring us up to date on where Belivuk is as Vučić is orchestrating his own political rise.

He was working as a bouncer, I think, and had some charges against him at one point for smashing a chair over somebody's head. That was one of the ways that the police were able to make use of them, because they could always say, “Look, we'll prosecute you all the way or we can drop the charges depending on how you play ball.” They seem to have done that a lot. At a certain point, Belivuk and his guys took over. He and his guys were given an opportunity to take over running this gang that would do political favors for Vučić's party. Vučić wasn't always that popular. There were circumstances, for instance, when people would boo Vučić at a soccer game. Well, somebody had to stop that. Somebody had to shut those people up because the stadium matters in Serbia. Everybody's watching, right?

You had a lovely description of the role of the stadium and soccer:

“Team loyalties take on an almost religious intensity. The chief executive of Red Star Belgrade, the most popular team in Serbia, famously said that Red Star is ‘not just a football team, it is an ideology, a philosophy, and a national symbol. The Red Star is the guardian of Serbian identity and the Orthodox faith.’”

That’s a mouthful.

It is weird. The Orthodox Church, by the way, is kind of wrapped up in a lot of this because it's important to Serbian identity. And it is, of course, the shared bond with the Russians. There's all kinds of accusations of corruption inside the Serbian church. And there have certainly been cases of people being arrested, of Orthodox priests being accused of working for Russia and being thrown out of some of the countries in that region.

Symbolically, politically, culturally, it's such an immense power center, for any politician or criminal striving for greater things. When Vučić becomes president, one of the first things he does is enlists these soccer hooligans in his service. He's gone from being one of the hooligans to now being the president and turning around and repaying the favor. But trouble erupts. There's a drug war in Montenegro. The town of Kotor is essentially split into two different clans who have gone to war against each other. It continues to this day and it's very, very bloody. This war erupts and throws the whole thing into chaos.

I wish there had been more space in the piece to get into this. Kotor is this beautiful port town. It's actually a UNESCO heritage site in Montenegro on the Mediterranean. Montenegro had some things in common with Sicily. It's got the clan social structure, and it is poor. It's always been tied to maritime trade. It was a natural thing for drugs to come in that way. It was a way to make money. There’s a feud over drugs. These guys have connections all over the world by virtue of their maritime stuff.

Once they start killing each other, it just gets worse and worse. These killings were happening in Greece and Turkey and Serbia and Croatia, all over the region. A lot of money was at stake. Belivuk was with one clan which had at a certain point mostly wiped out the other clan. That was a big part of what was going on with these killings that were broken into the open when they cracked the code on the Sky ECC app. It's hard to say what would have happened if Europol had not broken the code on Sky ECC and not exposed all this stuff. Would the Serbian authorities have at a certain point said this is getting too big, we have to do something about it or would they have just killed Belivuk themselves? There are indications that that's what they wanted to do.

It's worth a whole separate book. I should just quickly add that Montenegro is a smaller country than Serbia. There are a lot of people in Serbia who have Montenegrin origins, and there are many people who feel that Montenegro shouldn't be a country at all, that it really should just be part of Serbia. And that sense, I suppose, is a parallel with Russia and Ukraine.

Part of Vučić's power base is the regional Serb community in Kosovo and Montenegro and Bosnia. At any moment he or his allies could pull the trigger on a push to muddy the waters about where those boundaries are, much in the way that Putin did in Ukraine — but to do it in the Balkans. Given our current geopolitical reality, I'm wondering what you think about that? As you say in the piece, the fate of the Dayton Accords could be in jeopardy.

There have been significant protests actually against Vučić, some last year and some even this year. There are people in Serbia who really dislike this whole style of governance that Vučić has, the very close ties with the Kremlin, the seeming criminality, the corruption.

His party has ties to well-known criminals. Some of them are sanctioned by the U.N. and the U.S. operating in northern Kosovo. It's changed again and again in the past couple of years. It depends when you put your finger on the pulse. On the one hand, he knows that Serbia's economy really would improve a lot if they were to join EU. And that's not going to happen if he's setting off wars and reigniting conflicts over boundaries. On the other hand, he does have that political base that still feels Kosovo was stolen from us, we have all our Serbian brethren in Montenegro and in Bosnia.

He’s very Trump-like or Trump is very Vučić-like. There is this tension between what seemed when he first started a desire to join the EU — somebody called him almost like a Nixon in China figure — and it’s like he's just abandoned that whole project to pursue this more authoritarian style of governance. But maybe that could change.

I mean, you never know. A lot of people in the United States and Europe thought, well, Vučić, okay, he's a little rough at the edges, but frankly, that's what Serbia needs. This could be our guy. And then it began to seem, no, no, no, he's actually not very interested in that. He's more interested in maintaining this kind of crony system where he gets to dominate everything.

Well, it's such a great piece. The reporting is incredible.

Thanks very much. One of the things that really sticks in my mind with that piece, by the way, is some a guy I met, I refer to him as B. One of the most satisfying things about reporting a piece like this is that it's all a mystery to you. And then you meet someone who really brings you into their way of thinking, into their life. And suddenly, people who would seem just kind of alien feel human and real. And he was one of those people. He is a soccer hooligan. He grew up beating the shit out of people in stadiums. But I ended up finding him immensely likable. He was not a big guy. You remember the movie “Trainspotting?” There's that incredibly violent character who's actually physically quite small. He was sort of like that.

He's also a big talker, and he was able to bring to life the whole narrative of the Balkan Wars and what the stadium meant to people and where these people had all ended up. And I just felt really grateful to spend a couple hours talking.

It's almost like reading a novel. You're kind of, I don't know, a third of the way through or halfway through and then suddenly, you're in a dark alley and you get to meet that deep throat character, that clandestine person. In my experience, it's often just so serendipitous. You randomly meet somebody, a friend of a friend of a friend, and then suddenly you find yourself in a bar and you're talking to this person and it's all anonymous and it's all cloak and dagger.

Absolutely, absolutely. And there's this kind of wonderful moment of recognition when you think, my God, this is going to waste my time. The last interview wasn't really worth it. And then the guy starts talking and you go, “Yes! I'm onto something here.”

Do you have time for a quick lightning round?

Yes.

What are your must-reads every day?

I read the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, the New York Times, and the Economist. I also try to stay in touch with Le Monde and Le Figaro.

Your favorite opinion columnist, if you have one.

I like Janan Ganesh in the FT. I read Ross Douthat, not religiously, so to speak, but pretty often. I love Fintan O’Toole, actually.

Favorite story by another reporter now or one that comes to mind?

I'm a big fan of David Grann. He has done all kinds of legendary stories for The New Yorker. I think he did one, must be 20 years ago, about the Sand Hogs, which are the New York City workers who work in the tunnels underground and manage the water supply. It's a classic Grann piece because it introduces you to a whole world that nobody really knows about, that is going on literally underneath your feet.

Favorite country to report from, if you have one, and why?

I lived for years in Lebanon and I just love spending time there because it's such a small place but also so rich. In recent years, I've really enjoyed reporting from Japan, partly because it is so totally different.

I reported from Japan once and what I remember most about it is how hard it was to report there, just to get people to talk.

I've encountered some of that, but it's just like the obstacles are different. Some things are much easier and some things are much harder.

Favorite research tool?

RocketReach. I mean, just forgetting people's names and phone numbers and stuff. I feel like we're all way too much on the web these days. So I think making cold calls, if I had to name something.

I love that one. Words of wisdom for aspiring reporters out there?

It is a really odd profession to get your head around these days. I've been asked by many younger reporters, like how do you start? There's no one way to do it. If I could say one thing, find someone whose work you admire, whether that's a broadcaster or a blogger or a narrative reporter or radio person, whatever. Find someone who is kind of a model for you. Then read or watch all of that person's work and maybe try to contact them and see if they're willing to offer you suggestions.

What is your number one “don't do?”

Write a story about a place without going there.

What book are you reading right now?

Weirdly enough, a book by Carl Sagan, the science guy. I used to think he was this somewhat dopey character who said billions and billions on TV in the 1980s and 1990s when I was a kid. But this is actually a beautifully written book. He's a sophisticated guy. It's called “The Demon Haunted World.”

Robert Worth, thank you so much for coming on The Reporters. This has been really interesting and I can't recommend the piece enough. I can't wait to see what you do next.

Thank you so much. I really enjoyed being here with you.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.