The world got a little smaller on July 17, 2016. That evening, television news reports in Peru and in Serbia were covering the very same story: A global drug trafficker who had switched among 40 identities to escape justice for years had finally been caught. The footage of the arrest in northern Peru was dramatic....
On the night of April 6, 2009, Mladen Miljanić and Braim Sinani were on the road, driving an Opel Astra across the plains of northern Italy from Milan to Venice. The two men were visiting from Slovakia, but they weren’t tourists — as police wiretaps of their conversations would later prove. In the car, Miljanić...
What do drug traffickers do with the mountains of cash they make supplying Europe’s cocaine habit? For members of Group America, the answer is easy: Spend it on Zlatibor, a mountain resort in southwestern Serbia. Though global in scope, the international cocaine smuggling operation has both roots and friends in Serbia. It’s only natural that...
LIMA, Peru (August 16, 2017) – Standing in front of tall metal doors wrapped in razor wire in the dusty outskirts of Lima, Peru, my colleague Stevan Dojčinović and I realize this might not be such a great idea. I’m about to pose as a prostitute to sneak into the maximum-security Miguel Castro Castro prison....
On a cold winter day in Gdansk, Zoran Jakšić scrambled to fix a problem not of his making. The second-in-command of Group America, a major international narcotics trafficking organization, was in Poland to prepare for a drug delivery. But at 12:42 p.m. on January 28, 2009, Jakšić received a troubling call from an associate called...
Mileta Miljanić, a Bosnian-born U.S. citizen, is a wanted man in Italy and faces arrest if he so much as changes planes there. In New York, a 2003 federal indictment of Miljanić remains inexplicably open, with no apparent move to take him to court. So it’s easy to find the leader of “Group America,” a...