The Underworld Podcast - Assassination Nation: The Balkan Clan War that Took Over Europe

Episode Date: September 22, 2026

In the picturesque Montenegrin port of Kotor, a cocaine trafficking partnership fractured into one of Europe’s bloodiest gang wars. A dispute over a drug shipment in Spain in 2014 split the organization into two rival clans, the Kavač and Škaljari, turning former allies into sworn enemies. What followed was a sprawling campaign of revenge, with gunmen hunting their targets across borders and leaving dozens dead. How did a feud born in a tiny Adriatic town became an international bloodbath with a brutal house of horrors and hundreds of millions of dollars of coke at stake. Some music licensed through Soundstripe.Code: 1VDUSIE5HAQQOMKK, ICXE0MTBHKMQDI84 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Spotify Ads Manager makes it easy to create your first audio ad in minutes for free. Sign up today, launch a campaign, and start reaching your audience. Hi, I'm Alex Goldman. You may know me as the host of Reply All, but I'm done with that. I'm doing something else now. I've started a new podcast called Hyperfixed. On every episode of Hyperfixed, listeners write in with their problems, and I try to solve them. Some massive and life-altering, and some so minuscule it'll boggle your mind.

No matter the problem, no matter the size, I'm here for you. That's Hyperfixed, the new podcast from Radiotopia. Find it wherever you listen to podcasts or at hyperfixedpod.com. January 19th, 2020 in Athens, Greece. But our story actually starts in the Balkans, where all good gang stories do, which are on fire with an ongoing gang war. Only six years earlier, a drug deal goes wrong, and it causes a split in a Montenegro crime group

that changes into a bloody clan war that is leaving body, all over Serbia and Montenegro, and soon the rest of Europe. At this point, the Skalyari clan and the Kavach clan, named after two neighborhoods in the picturesque seaside town of Qatar, are in a state of full-blown war. And a Balkan gang war, well, it's not your average gang war. And this war, it's actually kind of a civil war, because both clans used to be part of the same organized crime outfit.

Now, though, they're hunting each other across the Balkans, while keeping the drugs flowing from South America, into Europe. It's not exactly brother versus brother, but it's close. In Greece, the number two men in the Skulliari clan is on the run, and his name is Slobodan Khazgelen. He's the co-leader, the tactical mastermind, and the financial brain of the entire operation. He's wanted at that point for a 2016 shooting of a Kavaj member and is the subject of multiple international drug trafficking investigations spanning half of Europe. Traveling with him is a top Skulliari intent. a man who effectively runs the Montenegrin capital and the territory surrounding it.

He's been convicted in absentia back in Montenegro for trying to blow up another Kabat associate, and Montenegrin authorities consider him a chief suspect in the killing of yet another Kabach member. These two men represent some of the biggest targets for the Kabach clan, and for years they've been nearly impossible to find. They're moving on fake passports, changing cities, staying invisible. Or so, they thought, because the Kavach clan finally wises up and makes the decision that Intel agencies and shrewd gangsters have made for generations. Stop looking for the men, start watching their wives. Simple stuff, really, when it comes down to it. In January 2020, said wives fly from Montenegro to

Greece to visit their husbands. And on the night of January 19th, four mass men walk into an upscale restaurant in Athens, where the two Scaliari leaders are sitting down to dinner with their wives and their children, and under a minute, both men are dead. The shooters are gone before anyone can react. Clean, fast, professional. A message. The Skoyari clan, of course, need to answer that message, and they need to answer big.

In May of 2020, a hit team crosses into Ukraine, hunting Rodo Zviker, the supreme leader of the Kavach clan. Zvikar is living in a luxury apartment in Kiev, posing as a legitimate businessman, his wife and kids at his side, as he hides from multiple pending indictments for his criminal activities, as well as from the entire Scaliari clan. The going theory is that he went underground after the failed hit on Slobodan Khazgelen, the number two in the Kavach clan years earlier.

But whatever the reason, by this point, every major player on both sides knows they're a target. The hit team tracks Vickered down using the exact fake passport name, the Scaliari themselves, have posted in a YouTube call-out video two and a half years earlier. Svicker isn't unprotected. Corrupt high-ranking Ukrainian police and even a sitting member of parliament have reportedly helped him maintain his cover and his lifestyle in Ukraine. But in a twist, a rival faction of corrupt Ukrainian police feeds this info to his would-be killers and even supplies the logistics and the firearms for the four-man Scolari hit squad, two Montenegrins and two Serbs. The hit itself is contracted out on Scolari's behalf by a high-ranking member of the Pink Panthers.

The infamous jewel heist syndicate from the Balkans, and yes, we did an episode on them years back. Two of the hitman approached Swicker outside his building as he's heading out for a morning jog and opened fire, five shots into his arm and chest. But Zvicker's wife, she's Balkan too, and she doesn't run. She returns fire with her own weapon, forcing the shooters to break and flee. Security cameras catch what happens next. The two hitmen try to torch their getaway car to burn away any DNA evidence, and in the process, they're set themselves on fire. One of them is caught on camera sprinting away with his clothes still burning. Zvaker survives. He undergoes emergency surgery, spends two weeks in a hospital bed under heavy security,

and eventually slips out on yet another false identity. Back to Montenegro. The war, it isn't over. It's actually just getting started. This is the Underworld podcast. Welcome back to the only organized crime podcast that dares to ask the question. How many times can we do a show about Balkan gangsters before a bunch of them, either angry Albanians or angry Serbs, show up at the studio. I am Danny Gold, joined by International Man of Mystery. Sean Williams. We are two journalists who have ventured all over the world reporting on things of this nature.

And now bringing you a new story every single week about international organized crime, past, present, and future. Sean, you are a bright, shining star, and I'm just happy to be here basking in your presence. He finally gets it, guys. Yeah, good to be back in the Balkans after a nose-bleedingly long two weeks away. Yeah. I mean, you could just, like, throw a dart at any town in the Balkans, and we could probably get an episode out of it. So, yeah. We did have a few commenters recommend this.

I think guys from the Balkans, so hopefully we've done it justice, but I think we've been working on this for a while. It's a tough one. you know, really, really making an effort with the name is here. So please bear that in mind. You can sign up for a Patreon to support us at patreon.com. or podcast or directly on Spotify or iTunes, which we could really use after Sean costs us a bunch of sponsors because of the Instagram post he's been making

about women's professional tennis players. There's just no need for that level of aggression, Sean. So definitely support us. Email us tips, offers at, add interest at the underworldpodcast atg.com. T-shirts and more at underworldpod.com. Please leave comments on our social media stuff, YouTube, Facebook, all that stuff. It helps pay the bills.

And also, we got to thank Dean Kind, a listener, who is a tattoo artist, gave Dale a free tattoo. You guys are going to hear the ad. Great guy. Look up, I think, DeanKind.com or Dean underscore, kind underscore tattoos, really sick traditional tattoos, some Asian influence ones as well. Go support him. All right.

Out of the way. Now, Balkan Gangsters, does it get any better? usually it does not. Let's start off with our friend Darko Sarich. Sarech. Darkosarich. He's born in 1969.

I mean, Sean, do you want to attempt to playevilla? Pleevlavia. It is a coal-miding town in the north of Montenegro, which at the time is one of six republics inside Yugoslavia. You got Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia,

Bosnia, Macedonia, and Montenegro held together by one. man, Tito, communist dictator, war hero, and the only thing keeping a very complicated multi-ethnic federation from going after itself. He rules, though, with a very iron fist for three and a half decades. There's lots of good stuff out there on the history of Yugoslavia. We cannot do it justice. Go read Love Thy Neighbor by Peter Moss. Yeah, second now, that book is unbelievable when like, there's a scene where he describes all these folks on the same street in one of the cities there, or like throwing up sandbags and shooting each other with rifle.

falls overnight, like they're literal neighbors. I mean, we've all fought it. Loud music, kids playing at like 11 p.m. But I don't think I left the balls to do that. The Yugoslavs are people of action, though. They're not like me. They're just chants on their own. I think the opening quote from that is from Rebecca West.

She wrote that white 1,000-page book on Travelang Rioslabi, I think, right? Do you know what I'm talking about? I know. I lent it out to someone who definitely was not going to read it, but I was like, oh, yeah, sure. but it's supposed to be phenomenal. And every quote I've seen from that is just like breathtaking. Anyway, 1980, Tito dies, Saritz is 11, and the whole thing starts to come apart.

The economy tanks, nationalists inside every republics are agitating for more autonomy or flat-out independence. In 1987, a Serbian strongman by the name of Slobodan Milosevic starts maneuvering and takes over Serbia, I think by 1989. And in 1991, Slovenia and Croatia declare independence and Yugoslavia goes up in flames. there's something like, I don't know, three, four, maybe five different wars over the next decade. The whole thing is a complete mess. And NATO ends up bombing people twice

to try and stop the killing. We got into all this, I think, in the Arcon episode, so I won't re-litigate it here. The BBC's death of Yugoslavia is a really good thing to watch. I think it's on YouTube. What matters for us

is that a 22-year-old from that coal mining town plea-plea comes of age in a country where the state has stopped functioning and the borders have become a business. Not much is known about Darko's childhood. What we do know is that he racks up multiple arrests in the 90s for small stuff like burglary, possession of an illegal firearm, and that

between sentences, he does a stint as a technician on a merchant vessel. Mostly, though, he's in the smuggling networks, because as longtime listeners know about the podcast, smuggling is the way to go, especially during a war. Fuel, cigarettes, weapons, people, whatever moves. You got networks of guys running goods across borders that don't really exist anymore. There's conflicts, so regular commerce has really slowed down. If you listen to our Pink Panthers episode, again, another good one from back in the day, about the high-end jewelry thieves who are going to function here. A lot of those guys came up out of exactly these networks.

So does most of the cast of this episode, right? It's a breeding ground for all types of future criminal shenanigans. And the interesting thing is that even when you're, you know, there's these periods of ethnic and sectarian wars that are breaking out in the region, the smuggling groups of those ethnicities that actually are extremely nationalists and kind of hate each other, a lot of them aggravate this talk, this talk. They work together with the groups that they're supposed to be fighting in these networks to make money. It's actually, it's a fascinating phenomenon because bootleg cigarettes triumph over all hatred,

as there's the ability to make millions and millions of dollars. Now, it isn't just criminals doing the smogging. It's the state. Between the mid-90s and the early 2000s, by one estimate, a billion marlboros a month are moving from Montenegrin ports across the Adriatic to the Italian coast to dodge those oh-so-dreaded EU taxes. The top of the Montenegrin government

is in business with the Camorra and the Sakara Corona Unita. Is that? Sean, you're my Italian pronunciation. Yeah, that's great. What was the name of the town that guys from again? Please. Please, John. Let me continue here.

So the state, they fill its coffers while it tries to become an actual country. You know, they're doing this because they're relatively desperate. Those are, of course, the massive organized crime groups from Naples, the Camorra, and Puli. With the Soccer Corona, Unita being known as the fourth mafia, and we really should be doing an episode on them. Yes, we should. And Puli, not coincidentally, as easy for me to say, be in the Italian region that is closest to Albania, because we learned a lot about that sort of back and forth in our episode about Artasheu a couple of weeks back. I've mentioned this before, but like every time that I've reported from the Balkans, I've pretty much seen minivans going across the borders, like, full of cigarettes.

And I've been across a few borders where I've jumped out of the van at a border to do like an inspection and people were just offloading millions of cigarettes just out of the back of like Suzuki wagons and stuff. Even when I was crossing like the Syrian border back in the day, I mean, not back in the day, 10 years ago during the war and all that, the border like Iraq was all cigarette smugglers, you know? just like offloading. I don't even know what the taxes are in those countries, but they like a ton of cigarette smokeling. And wait, fourth mafia,

we did an episode on the Stid up, but are they considered the fifth mafia then? They're the fifth. So we did the first, second, third and the fifth, but not the fourth. Add it to the list.

But all good hustles come to an end, and by the turn of the century, the Yugoslav wars are over, which dampens the profit margins. So in 2001, Darkosaric moves to Sao Paulo, Brazil, to make contacts with the Colombian cartels

and the other South American traffickers, and he starts building a transport network to get Coke into Europe. Now, obviously, Balkan groups dominating the Coke trade in Europe is such a well-known fact. It's like a running joke, especially with the Albanians. But back then, like, this wasn't really a thing. So what we're witnessing here is even though it serves and Albanians is really close to like the beginning of it all.

And here's why the Balkans are so good at this. The guys in his network, the Serbs and the Montenegrins, a lot of them were young men in the Yugoslav wars, right? So they're not afraid of risk and violence. They're pretty attuned to it. And a ton of people from the Balkans work on transnational cargo ships. That merchant vessel job that Darko had back in the day, well, he isn't the only one.

One of his top lieutenants is a trained ship captain. And if you're building a logistics network for moving products across oceans, you could not ask for a better labor pool than guys who are familiar with moving cargo across seas and also not afraid of violence and risk. So he places his own people in Latin America and Europe so that he can organize shipments fast. And this is from the OCCRP, the organized crime and corruption reporting project. We quote them a lot over the years. They do really good work.

Quote, over the past two decades, Serbia and Montenegrin crime groups have created a worldwide logistics network and established bases in ex-ugoslav countries, Europe and the United States, as well as Latin America, where they are capable in a short period of time organizing the support of large quantities of drugs from local drug cartels. His home base is a city named Kota on the Adriatic coast in the southwest of Montenegro. It's got medieval walls, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, about 13,000 people. Cruise ships go to the bay these days. It's supposed to be like a gorgeous, gorgeous, just beautiful town.

And I'm sure, international man of mystery, Sean Williams, probably spent the night or two there, no, chasing some sort of romance or dangerous man. Unfortunately, maybe romance as well. Romance, me, no. That's extremely optimistic, no. It's, so it's known to two neighborhoods. I think I'm nailing the pronunciation here. Scaliari and Kovic. I actually spelled that out phonetically, so I get these right.

The two neighborhoods are split by a mountain, and from the air it looks like someone dropped a ridge between two villages. Each neighborhood has its own crew of aspiring criminals, small-time stuff at this point, unstructured, youngsters, hooligans, and when Darco starts recruiting guys from both neighborhoods, they come to work under his umbrella. Yeah, you know what?

I never went to Montenegro. I think it's like one of only four places in Europe I haven't actually been, and the others are the little tiny ones that don't count. I mean, I'm only four places in Europe I haven't been. Look at this. Damn, damn. Imagine if you sat next to me and I was trying to chat someone with that back in the day. It's one of only four countries.

Have you used that line before when you were a single man? No, God, could you imagine? Put it on your, put it on your Raya profile. Yeah, sure didn't. Here's a journalist from Project Brazen, who also does great work on organized crime. I think Mitch Prothero, our guests from our last Balkan episode, has done some stuff for them, on what happens in Qatar. Quote, in the early years, his influence, that's Darko, was the glue that brought together smaller criminal factions. The medieval town of Kotar, a UNESCO World Heritage Site on the age RXC, was his stronghold.

He united the Skoliari and Kavich clans, named after villages local Dakota, and their combined influence grew rapid. working together under Darko's leadership, everything was possible. Leadership quality, Sean, I mean, some people just have them and you're going to unite a bunch of balking hooligans. You're a person who commands authority and respect.

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and specific talents and skill sets to go onto the planet. on Richard Serrett's strange planet, we're redefining reality. Listen now wherever you get your podcasts. But this is actually, it's a little bit of what you call retroactive reporting, because these guys weren't really criminal clans with hierarchies or structures right now, right? They're really just two neighborhoods worth of young hooligans, basically. And the two neighborhoods are small enough that practically everyone knows each other. Qatar is perfect for Darko to get started.

The big legitimate opportunity in Montenegro in the early 2000s is hospitality. So it's a perfect place to launder money. And he does. He buys nightclubs, bars, hotels. And the other opportunity is all those local sailors. Montenegro has a long seafaring tradition. And there's a ton of Montenegrans working the institutional, sorry, not institutional international cargo trade.

Like we said earlier. So it's perfect if you're running a drug trafficking operation through massive container ships, which is what he's going to start doing. So a lot of young sailors, they take Darko up on his offer. And they earn like 50 to 100,000 euros a job, which is big money, bigger even back then. And I think at that point, it's one of Europe's poorer countries. I don't think so anymore. No, no, it's pretty well off now.

But it just came out. But I got to assume like early 2000s, they were not doing, you know, fresh off the U.S. Love Wars. You know, call it $100,000 to $200,000 in today's money in a country just getting out of some brutal wars. It's not a hard sell when you're convincing these guys. Some are paid just to look the other way. others are paid to run speedboats to and from the ship shortly after it leaves port or shortly before it gets to port.

The highest paid work involved the more technical stuff like hiding the drugs in the ship, anywhere from fuel tanks to water tanks, engine room compartments, all to avoid inspection from Coast Guards. Darko himself is the opposite of many of the guys we've done episodes on, right? He operates in the shadows. He's quiet, no music videos for him, no like rap videos in London. He plays the normal businessman and not that many people even know who he is. His operation is highly compartmentalized. You got cells in different countries.

They don't deal with each other. He's a control freak and he'll only do business where he's got trusted people embedded on the ground. Taking product from Latin America into Europe. So at this point, all these Balkan guys are making in rows into the Latin American cocaine trade because they're also massively represented in the global shipping industry? Or are they or these former gangsters and paramilitaries who like spot an opportunity and then they get on a plane to Cali and they get into the logistic stuff. Do they have, does that country already have a bunch of people already in this world? I think it's both. I think they have the seafaring

sort of sailors and the people. I mean, they're going to be moving drugs. It's great people to know, especially if you can do it on other people's cargo ships. And they have all these gangsters who are paramilitaries, who are making a ton of money, you know, not compared to the international cocaine trade, but they were making a lot of money in an anarchic war that dries up, right? Once these governments start chasing legitimacy and the war ends. You know, the money to be made in smuggling in those countries is going to significantly decrease, especially because, you know, they start pushing into the EU or wanting to get into the EU. They start cracking down.

They want to be legitimate countries. The power vacuums that were there during the conflict and immediately after, those start getting filled by a state, trying to be a state. So once you have that, and you realize the big money is in obviously international drug trafficking, it just makes perfect sense, especially if you're these gangsters who are not scared and have the seafaring connections.

It's a perfect sort of combination of things coming together to really get involved in that world. It's pretty insane how overrepresented the Balkans are in almost everything in the world. Like, even they're like the best football teams in the world.

I don't know. They seem to, they're like got tons of artists coming out of there. They just seem to be nailing it in every respect. I mean, yeah, the former Yugoslavia really. Yeah, I mean, basketball, right? You got, you got some of the best NBA players are former Balkans, Balkans types.

It's kind of like, I usually used to say like, you know, small, like Jamaica, right? And Puerto Rico, like have their cultural sort of impact. I think athletic, too, is like far, far beyond their population size. But Yugoslavia is another, another, the region. It's crazy. There definitely, definitely well above their means. Also for some not great things. just like Jamaica as well.

Anyway, the organization grows so it's not just people now who grew up around Qatar. It becomes a collection of Balkan criminal groups working together under one umbrella, which is dark-ost umbrella. The closest comparison actually is probably the Sinaloa cartel.

You know, it's a federation, not a pyramid, even though he is sort of at the top. There's also talk that the organization gets inside the Mediterranean shipping company or MSC, which is the largest container line in the world. I did not know that.

I thought it was, what's the one? Mersk? Yeah. You know, you see it everywhere. I don't know if this was that time period, if this is still true. But they control around a fifth of everything that moves in a box on the ocean. Ocean shipping is really fat.

Like, I wish I knew more about it. It's a fascinating, not just for drugs, but for like, the global economy, like chasing the market, trying to understand that. I mean, we're learning it all with traits of form. It was an oil, right? But it really is a fascinating thing to try to understand. People who are in that world, I'm just like endlessly intrigued Biden. There was an incredible story in the, of it. Was it New York?

I don't know. Just some guy spent like two or three months on one of those massive ships and saw all kinds of crazy shit. Like people getting just chucked overboard in the middle of the ocean for drunken fights and stuff and complete lawless, weird stuff going on. I don't know if that's big global. I was talking about the big stuff. But yeah, of course, you know, we've done, I did one of the first episodes I did was based on a documentary I did on like the Rohingya beaming to slaves in Myanmar. And in the Thai fishing industry, like literal slaves catching your seat. That's probably one of the darkest stories, like darker than any war.

If you guys go back, I think it's maybe episode 10 or 15. There's also a documentary I did online called Miamiers. Just dark, like a dark, but that's not what I mean. You know, I'm talking about the little, you know, the giant cargo ships, which I think are a little more regulated when it comes to not having slaves working on them, but still where, you know, black market everything is going. Oh, yeah. Plus, plus also the best YouTube videos that you will ever watch,

are like cargo ships going through massive waves. I could watch that forever. Oh, yeah. Or like the oil platforms? Oh, yeah. Oh, my word. Yeah. Yeah.

By the mid to late 2000s, the darker organization is likely doing a billion euros a year. It's about a billion point four in the dollars of today. Maybe closer to two billion today, actually. Billion. $1.4 in the dollars of the day back then. The euro was strong.

Solid cash flow for middlemen. To quote the OCCRPRRP again, Montenegrin groups in particular have become specialist in cocaine transport service via routine routes from Latin America to some European sea cities under the guise of transporting legal goods. They are able to draw on criminal connections with crews of ocean liners of some transnational companies. Darko is also rumored to have serious political connections with a lot of the top rass of the Montenegrin state on his payroll. Companies owned by him and his top associates are among the biggest cash depositors and among the biggest customers at the first bank of Montenegro, which is owned by the Prime Minister. his family. He's also got ties to leading political and business figures in Serbia, where he gets citizenship in 2005. He buys real estate, clubs, restaurants, runs multiple companies,

and is completely unknown to the public. In 2006, Montenegro votes for full independence, so now Darko's home base is its own country. He's a very business-oriented guy. His main goal is turning drug money into legitimate money as fast and as carefully as possible. ISPI, the Italian Institute for International Political Studies, credits him as the first person to move a ton of cocaine in a shipping container, which I don't know how accurate that is. It seems late for that, right? Because how the hell would they know also?

But it sounds pretty good. So I just wanted to mention it and keep it in. Yeah, even Italian think tanks getting on that superlative, like, TikTok gang. Got it. I mean, our guys, do not judge us by our TikTok titles and 60 seconds law videos. Don't, don't, don't judge us. Maybe they should. Do not judge us by that.

We are just, we're doing what we got to do. You know, I've got, I've got like, if you'd have seen me, if you'd have seen me walking down one of the main streets in Buenos Aires is the other day, screaming in English about gangstead. It was so bad, man. Oh my God. I have friends are still like, I'm sweating embryos for this. You know, legitimate, like very legit. I mean, you are, well, long form.

I mean, very legitimate, like, journalists who are now doing that. And they got to do it. You know, like five, ten. years ago, we were all like, nah. We put it off as long as we could. It is. There's just a level of shamelessness that I don't. Yeah, please get on a page you on, guys.

Because we're doing it. Because we're doing it now. In 2005, Darko first gets on the radar of serving authorities as somebody involved in drug trafficking, but nothing much has done about it. Then in 2007, police find 20 kilos of H in a car parked in a garage in New Belgrade, owned by Darko and his brother. Four people are arrested, not Darko, not his brother. They're invited to testify, though, and his brother tells the court, quote,

when I found out that a car with 20 kilograms of age was found in my garage, I was in shock and I don't understand why the drug was brought to my garage. So, I mean, that essentially clears that up. He then tells the judge that his brother won't be coming in because he's on a business trip to France. Business trip probably about trafficking drugs. Then in early 2008, and a lot of the supporting comes from KRIK, Crick, I think, which is a Serbian investigative outlet that's part of the OCCRP network.

A Thai police get information from a Milan Coke dealer who is operating under the Anderangeta's umbrella about Balkan traffickers in Milan, and they arrest a bunch of Balkan traffickers and seize 700 kilos. So these guys are not small fries. The Balkan traffickers had essentially taken over the market with high quality product at low prices. Also in 2008, Brazilian police seized 1.2 tons of Coke on a private vessel 90 miles off the Coke. of Sao Paulo in the possession of some Dutch traffickers who the Brazilians are then able to link the load to Darko's organization. After those busts and the rumblings around his name and international task force is put together to take down Darko.

The task force includes several Serbian agencies plus the British serious organized crime agency, which is just a funny name for an organized crime agency. No, like, we're not the British like kind of joking organized crime agency. we're the British serious organized crime agents. You know, funny? Is that a little? Yeah, like an old... Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I don't know, dude. I thought it was funny. Maybe I'm getting older. Maybe I'm dad-junk material. Just leave it in the comments, guys. The task force gets a line on 1.8 tons, moving from Argentina to Greece, packed as soybeans on two ships owned by a darker associate.

But before the ship's land, his people get a tip that the Greek police are about to search them, and the ship diverts to Spain. The soybean market, by the way, it's like a $220 billion market globally. One of the top agricultural commodities out there, like, I think more than cocaine. So get into soybeans.

That's my advice for the youth. It's a giant, I think it's a gigantic agricultural market. You never think that. Yeah, I mean, finally this guy gets out there and admits that we're a pair of soy boys. But, I mean, I'm not doing anything to my image here.

I'm wearing a purple t-shirt, and I just realized I've got like crochet on the wall behind me. I'm not even doing the books thing. I'm not doing the cool journalist thing. I'm not doing books. I'm not doing any background. I've got crochet. That's it.

That's what you get in. Here's where it gets interesting in terms of getting chipped off. Well, this whole task force thing is going on. One of Darko's top goons is a meeting with senior people in Serbia's Ministry of Interior. And another associate later tells officials that they had people inside the Serbian police, obviously, and that they rebuilt their whole communication structure to beat this investigation.

They came off their phones and moved to Skype, plus the old trick of writing drafts and a shared email account and never hitting send. I mean, back then, this was like a revolutionary, very smart tactic. So now that the useless British

had failed, enter the big boys, the good old US of A. And my notes here say, please pause and stare at Sean. Am I supposed to, can I make a comment about the Brits losing

for once in Argentina or is that? I probably shouldn't say that for my own health. The DEA teams up with Serbian intelligence minus the corrupted parts, and with the Latin American police

to take down Darko's operation once and for all. In October of 2009, an Operation Balkan warrior, which is a dope name for an operation of anything, really. Uruguayan police take down 2.1 tons of coke on a private yacht. After the yacht missed its window to hand off the drugs to a bigger cargo ship. And the same day,

Serbian police arrest a relative of Darko and several other people in the organization. And a month later, Argentine police bust more of the network and seize another 490 kilos. Yeah, these are not small shipments by any stretch. This is a major operation. These guys are massive.

This whole of Latin America. Yeah. How is this guy not better known? He played it right. And this is like back before, you know, Albanians were putting out rap videos and like this was like a common thing about the Albanians dominant. You do see it. I'm actually rewatching Topoi right now, the first two seasons.

Yeah. And like that, like the Albanians moving on them is a big plot line in season one. So it was becoming like a thing that was big enough to end. or pop culture by like the mid-2010s, but I do not think in, you know, 2007, 2008, it was a very well-known thing. I could be wrong. You know,

I wasn't tapped into London at the time or paying attention, but, either may. It's kind of just starting up. In January, again, we're talking Albania's there. We're talking Serbians here,

but, you know, it's, they both moved in very aggressively. In January of 2010, Serbia issues an international warrant for his arrest. And apparently he tries to renounce a Serbian citizenship right before it's issued. That's not allowed. I don't think that,

That's how it works. But it would be cool. It would be cool if it did. Indictments start flying all over the Balkans and people are going down left and right. Darko himself goes on the run. And with the boss of the Balkans being on the lamb, well, that means trouble back home. One day in May of 2010, Darko's top lieutenant in Kotor is having his morning coffee in Kotor when a gumman walks up and just shoots him dead. And the shooter comes from the Scaliari clan.

Now, this guy was a pretty big player in Darko's operation. he co-owns Maximus with Darko, which is the biggest nightclub in Montenegro, and Billed as one of the biggest in Europe. He also manages four companies for the organization, register in Delaware, of course, and the Marshall Islands, and he's viewed as the top crime boss in Qatar. Now, I just, you know, I have to pretend that I really want to go to Maximus for the law of this podcast, right? So I'm like, oh, my God, I never got a chance to go. But I did look up some of the reviews for the club on Reddit, and they include the following. Maximus is garbage Party and Kotor

sucks staff are okay but not super friendly staff is really unpleasant worst ever don't go there and I didn't cherry pick those so I don't know maybe this is a pod trip coming out I've heard great things about Albania

like going and hanging out there nightlife but I have to imagine if you're going out anywhere in the Balkans like a club it's going to be filled with the most beautiful woman you've ever seen and the scariest man you've ever seen just standing around staring at people.

And that's generally what I would assume. Yeah, you know, that type of guy that's got like a plowed head. Yes, ridges, ridges in the head. Yeah, yeah. It's that. No neck. Yeah. Again, I've heard nothing but positive things about hospitality.

You know, many of great things about Serbia as well. But my assumption for the nightclub atmosphere there is just a lot of women who's, if you hold eye contact for more than two seconds, they're brothers and or paramours will stab you and then just keep partying afterwards. That's an assumption. I could be wrong. I could be wrong. That was, that's, that was great.

Yeah, from start to finish. But I've heard, I mean, I don't want to disperions like Danny. I think Montenegro is wonderful. I don't have any assumptions for anyone who's vacation there. Several weeks prior to his assassination, Darko's lieutenant was meeting with high-ranking officials in Serbia's Ministry of Interior. Serbius National Security and intelligence and also the special prosecutor

and chief of Serbia's police. This is a quote from the biggest Montenegrin media outlet. It is unclear what the Sarich lieutenant was talking about. According to the statements of some of the participants in the meeting, he did not say anything interesting, but tried to find out who the people are leading the process against Sarich, while others stated that he exposed in detail the scheme of organizing the smuggling of cocaine from South America to Europe.

So he's either an informant or trying to find out what they had on boss, which is quite a discrepancy and the kind of thing that probably gets you killed. There's actually a video of this meeting that later mysteriously disappears. Anyways, some people in his operation in Montenegro either think he's a rat or maybe they just want a bigger piece of the pie. Two months later, in July of 2010, Darkosarich writes a letter, passed to the media through his lawyer, sent from one of the Eurasian countries. In it, he says he isn't actually the mastermind behind any of these groups or any of this

trafficking, that he's being publicly lynched by the media and certain structures in the Serbian government and that he's sorry he can't show up in person and lay it all out because he wouldn't get a fair trial. A letter, he says, is the only way he has to deny the lies and ask for the justice he'll eventually have. It's quite interesting because I think the phrase Eurasia comes straight out of like right wing Russian and Serbian propaganda, isn't it, when they were trying to like all be best buddies. So I think that's them trying to like rebuild the Soviet Union in some way. I feel like Eurasia is an idea. You might be reading too much into what he's saying. I feel like he's just like throwing it there as like a geographic, you know.

I'm trying to cancel. Meanwhile, back in, yeah, he definitely sounds like a, you know, yeah, I don't care what he gets up to, but some of his language is a bit problematic. That's all. Meanwhile, back in Qatar with the top shot or dead and Darko in the wind, the Skoliari guys and the Kavach guys get together and from what everyone start, from form what everyone starts calling the Qatar clan. They take over a nice chunk of Darko's operation. mainly moving coke from Latin America into Europe, and the money is pouring in.

With Darko and his top guy sort of out of the picture, the Kotar clan are making money hand over fist, and it's a really happy ending for everyone. But I mean, come on, these are Balkan gangsters, and as the money flows, disputes start surfacing in the Kotar group over the splits, but also over controls of shipments and over who has the say.

And once that starts, it's only going to get worse. Yeah, I mean, you've kind of mentioned this earlier up the show, but are these guys directly wound into the pink panthers, or are they like two separate entities, the robbers and the narcos? Because they can't be that huge a scene in Montenegro, right? I think people move in between. Like, I'm sure those guys probably who specifically focus on the robberies

and others there, but I think, you know, it's like fluid, I would say. Sort of like how the Russian mafia operates, you know? Different guys, different households, but sometimes they work together. That's an assumption, again, as well. I don't know that for a fact. I did actually look into like the populations of these kinds of, countries and they're extraordinarily small, actually. Even Serbia is like five or six million people. It's nuts. Pound for pound, man. They hold down. Pound for pound. As a phrase that's

been used extremely badly this way. Yeah, in the completely wrong way. It's like the opposite way. We're using it in the right way. Yovanovun Vukovic, the emerging leader of the Skulliari side, he starts building his own organization inside the organization. At the same time, multiple leaders on the Kovitz side do the same thing. Their own soldiers, their own loyalists, their own circles. Not quite a Cold War because they're all still working together, but preparation for a war if and when the split arrives. The split arrives in Valencia, Spain in 2014. And there are two versions of what happened, and they don't agree on much except the number. Version one from the OCCRP, the Scaliari guys find 200 kilos in a warehouse in Spain that they didn't know about.

The Kavich guys admit it's theirs and they offer to pay the Skaliari guys off. But the Scaliari guys refuse and tell them, these are our drugs now. They're pissed that Kavich guys were doing deals behind their partner's backs. Version 2 from Serbian journalist. A Scaliari guy is serving seven years in a prison in Havana, Cuba, of all places, for killing someone in a car crash. The highest levels of the Serbian government lobby to get him out, and he's flown back to Serbia in December of 2013, with five years left on a sentence. Some say he's flipped by Serbian intelligence as an informant, and some say he already was one. Some say it's just corruption.

He hangs around Belgrade for a few weeks, then heads to Valencia where he owns an apartment. And in the apartment, he just finds 200 kilos of cocaine that somebody else had. store there, which he immediately sells and pockets the cash, which ends up pissing off the rest of the criminal organization. The Kavats Klan want him dead. The Skoyari guys are like, nah, he's too good of logistics guy. Obviously, if he's moving 200 kilos that fast. And everything that's been brewing under the surface boils over.

Accusations of betrayal, theft, stolen money are flying in every direction. And right in the middle of this, the man who built the whole thing walks back through the the door. In March 2014, Darco Sarich were surrenders to the serving police. flying in from an undisclosed country, with a stopover in Montenegro to see his mother first, because he's a good boy, all of it negotiated with the Serbian government in advance.

The New York Times reports that a team of a hundred Serbian special police and a dozen Ford intelligence agencies, including the CIA, were closing in and that Darko wanted to avoid a blood shootout. But Crick, the Serbian investigation outlet, tells a different story. They report that Darko surrenders two days after a new party wins the Serbian elections,

and he shows up with a new lawyer, who's the former president of the special court in Belgrade. So, I mean, Sean, I guess it's who do you believe, the Serb journals or the lying New York Times. I'll just say, I doubt one of the most feared and successful crime bosses in the Balkans is turning himself in because he's scared of a shootout. The CIA thing and all these special, like, intel agencies, that also doesn't really make sense to me, right? But that's just one man's opinion. Wouldn't this be an FBI thing?

It doesn't feel like a CIA operation, right? No, it's a DA and FBI thing. Yeah. Even with his ties to the government. But Darko himself says he's been hiding out in the Dominican Republic, great place to hide out, and came back because now he can get a fair trial. Quote, this is a fair trial now. Darko is not an enemy anymore.

That's him saying that person. Love it. He says they offered him a 10-year plea deal, which he refused, and that he'd been negotiating with the serving government for a while, and the government, of course, denies all of it. Then in February 2015, the shooting starts. One of the top guys on the coverage side, the right-hand man of the boss is in his armored Audi.

on the Montenegro and coast. 11.45 in the morning when a remote control bomb goes off underneath it, broad daylight, 12 or 13 hours later in an underground garage under his apartment building in Belgrade, the Skyari logistics guy at the heart of the dispute from Valencia, he gets out of his armored BMW and he's hit 25 times by a man with a machine gun. And now, we are often running in a Balkan clan feud of epic proportions. A few months after that in a Belgrade courtroom, Darko was convicted and sentenced to 20 years.

Probably should have taken that 10-year deal. That gets overturned. Probably shouldn't have taken that 10-year deal. He gets a tried and gets 15. Probably should have taken that deal. Then there are more convictions, and some of those get overturned, too. It's a decade plus of legal drama, and the short version is he's in prison and will be for a while. So the two sides, right?

You've got the Skallari clan. They're more decentralized of the two, and they lean on alliances with other criminal groups. In Serbia, for example, they team up with crime boss Philippe Karach, Kharach, a man the Serbian president has called one of the most dangerous in the country. And the Kavach clan, in other hand, teams up with football hooligans who have ties to top-level Serbian politicians,

and per the OCCRP, a lot of politicians and police in both Montenegro and Serbia are on the Kovic side. The hooligans are known as the Janissaries, which is an insane name for a football hulgun group.

Those are the Ottoman troops, the elite ones. Supporters of the partisan Belgrade, led by Alexander Stankovic, a. Saleh the Mute. I believe it's Salle the Mute. I saw some places that said Salé the Mule, but I think it's Sali the Mute.

They're the Kavich's muscle and logistics for controlling the Belgrade Coke market, and the Mute himself has ties to high-ranking Serbian officials. Now we're straight into something that I know a tiny bit about, because partisan, which are the slightly less problematic of the two big Belgrade teams, they're not, I mean, look, these fan bases are absolutely mad, and they've been banned from just about every like country in Europe for away days, but they are not comfortably into second place after Red Star, that's Red Star, Belgrade, Savina Zveda, I think they're called,

unveiled a banner. I think it's last week as we're recording this, honoring Racko Maladich this month, alongside the chant destination Pototsari, which is the site of the Srebrenicaa, which is a lovely sentiment, as I think we can all agree, not at all

unhinged genocidal people which is I think they've already been bad I think like UEFA which is the governing body for Europe's football has already banned

Red Star from like everything for doing that and if anyone doesn't know Ratko Maladich is I think you can probably just look him up he died in the Hague a couple weeks ago isn't that just average

European football hooligan um yeah I mean like every every major like Eastern European city has like the fascist team and the communist team basically. And they probably both should be banned from most things. But Belgrade is particularly terrible.

June of 2050, it's those games. You ever see like there's a famous, um, uh, video that went around of, uh, joking,

you know what joking is, right? Um, you don't, yeah, so incredible serving basketball are probably the best in, in the last 10 years. There's a famous video of,

them asking him, he was intimidated by like an NBA audience, and he was like, brother, I play in Serbia. And then it cuts to like footage of like the flares going off and just like stands full of just war criminals. Like just like, it's just like, it's, uh, yeah, he's the guy. He's the guy who's just like, no, it's just a job, right? I don't care about this. Like, it's just a job that I do.

Is he that guy? Yeah. He does not like playing in the NBA. He likes, uh, plays of horses in his hometown. But not even like normal horses, like the ones with the, um, like the buggy on the back. I forget what it's called. Oh,

like a chariot thing. Yeah, but there's a different term for it. My brothers are both huge horse racing guys, and they love that, like, joking, he just,

like, doesn't want to go to, like, the MVP parade. He just wants to go back home and race his horses. And I kind of love it, I love that.

There was a footballer who played for Tottenham in the Premier League, and they were like, so who's your favorite play? He's like, I don't watch football. I don't even like football.

It's just a job. There's, you grant, the actor is like, he's like, dude, he's like, acting is not a serious job. It's a bunch of, it's for children playing pretend. And I kind of, I respect that immensely.

Yes. June 2015, June 2015, a Scaliari member who's close to Vukovic, the leader, and trusted by the top of the clan is ambushed walking his apartment building and cut there and gun down. There are so many back and forth murders here of people with names that are hard to pronounce. So I'm trying to keep it down to like only the main ones, but you could spend. So please don't get mad if you're one of these people who follows this clan where very

closely you're in the clan that we skipped out on one. there is like 14 dozen of them and it's just, it's hard. You can just bore everyone if you're just back and forth every, do get mad on Spotify. Don't get mad on Facebook. Do get mad on Spotify though.

But it's like, you know, the Traplor Ross videos of like four hours of like different guys in American rap crews shooting each other. Like, he does amazing, detailed work,

but like I feel like you guys would get bored of that sort of back and forth. October 2015th, a top Sculliari member is at his waterfront restaurant in Montenegro surrounded by friends and bodyguards. He gets a phone call. He steps outside to take it

and a sniper kills him. The sniper then escapes on a jet ski. We're going to talk about this one because that's anyone who kills someone as a sniper and then escapes in a jet ski. You're going to get mentioned in the episode. Rise it across the bay, sets the jetsky on fire, throws the rifle in the sea, climbs into a waiting Kavach car and is out of the country. The Kavats actually tried to get the same guy a few months earlier in ambush on his car,

killed his best friend instead, a civilian who just rode around with him a lot, which is very, very tragic when that sort of thing happens. This is like almost literally a scene from the jackal, incredible. James Bond stuff. Yes. Except the actual Jacko was actually really bad at his job. Yeah, he was an idiot, right? Like a notoriously stupid guy.

Failed all the time. He got the reputation as being like the most premier terrorist for hire, but just really bad at terrorism. By the end of 2015, the Kavach clan seems to have the upper hand. They've taken out some big players on the Skaliari side and haven't taken a hit themselves. But the Skaliari guys, they have some things up their sleeve. In early 2016, they ambushed and shoot a high-ranking Kovach member who,

who also happens to be the sudden law of the number three in the Kabach hierarchy. The big move comes in May of 2016 in Serbia when they go after Slobodan Khazgelin, a co-founder of the Kabach clan and number two in the hierarchy. A gunman on a motorcycle shoots up his Audi. He's hidden the stomach and survives. And afterward, he vows to wipe out every last Koliari from the face of the earth. Although according to Google Translate, it could also wipe all the scumbags off the face of the earth down to the last one. either way, it is a threat that he plans on carrying it out and he's the kind of person that could

carry it out. A few months later in September 2016, we get maybe the craziest killing of this entire war and that's saying a lot. In retaliation for the botched hit, a high-rankinged sculli a member is killed by a sniper from 204 meters away, one shot and here's the thing. The guy is killed in a high security prison in Montenegro. He sniped while exercising in the prison yard, Which is nuts. And sounds like something out of that Mayor of Kingston show, which I have to stop watching because, like, Taylor Sheridan just takes everything too far.

Like, really, 100 people die in a prison riot in America. Like, be for real, man. Like, come on. In, like, a prison in, like, upstate Michigan, you're going to have 100 people die in a prison riot. Like, it's some Brazilian, Amazonian prison. Like, that just ruins the whole thing for me. Like, I've got to be honest.

I didn't even know who Taylor Sheridan was. And then I found out he is the guy who wrote Sicario. So now I like it. He's written every. every show in the U.S. that's popular right now. Landman, which rules also a little

I want to see that. What's the one? Yellowstone, all the Yellowstone offshoots. I think a couple others, but are just kind of, you know, he gets a little ridiculous with it,

like Sicario 2. Even though Sicario 1 had a lot of stuff that came kind of true. Anyway, 2016, Saleh the Mute, the politically connected

hooligan, running cabbage muscle and Belgrade is assassinated in a drive-by. A few weeks earlier, He'd sat down with a Scaliari ally, Philip Khorach, to try to settle a dispute. Other Serbian drug bosses, him included, were mad at Salé to mute because he was getting such discounted coke from the Kavach clan that he was wrecking the market.

The meeting is arranged by one of the biggest HGOs in Serbia, different market, neutral party. And at the meeting, Salele slaps Korach in the face, which I feel like if you do that to even like a random Serbian guy on the street, you're signing your own death sentence. But a crime boss, like, come on, but what do you expect? that obviously infuriates him, but also the other criminals in the room and the guy who organized that are mad that he does this at like a neutral sit down. A local Serbian journalist said that after the slap doesn't matter his political connections, he's going down and he did.

Not so great for the Skaliari's guys, though, because a new hooligan boss takes over and he's even more loyal to the Kavach clan. The killings continue through 2016 and 2017, all in Montenegro, people both sides are dying. One that stands out in April 2017, the Skaliari had a high, Heinriching Kavach guy's car with a remote bomb. He survives but loses both his legs. A few years later, the Skulliari guy,

the Scar will plan to drop a bomb on the same guy's house with a drone because he's so heavily guarded. A few months after the failed hit, the Skari killed his father. Father isn't an organized crime at all. He's a cousin of Slobodan and Kazjelian, Kavach number two, and after the bombing of him, Kuzjelian had offered the family his protection.

So this is a Skaliari way of saying, like, we're going to get to anyone. Family members are in. Like, this is like one step further than it's been so far. That's some of the Scoyari killer recently retired goalkeeper who had played for the local Cotter Club in the Montenegren top flight. He grew up in Skoliari in the neighborhood and was friendly with a lot of the clan. But when the war started to cut them off and stuck with his friends on the coverage side,

and again, guy is not in the underworld, but killed for his friendships. Yeah, but a goalkeeper though, and they're pretty weird. Guy I play against on a Sunday is like, he looks and sounds like Andre the Giant, He's pretty much almost mute and he's just amazing but being a goalkeeper which throws himself with the ball. I should add,

I probably wouldn't kill him though. Do you think he listens to the show? Because I feel like that could be in issue. I don't think he speaks a word of English so I think we're good. We're getting this translator now. It's very popular and,

no, I'm kidding, we're not. But we could. Maybe someone will do it for us. Also in 2017, two guys in the Skyari clan two guys the Skyari clan hired to build an IED, mishandle it and blow themselves up. Which, you know, it's not just pros doing the killing here.

Sometimes you get a highly trained mercenary. Sometimes you get a Dufus who blows himself up. And some, you know, amateurs. The two guys who blew themselves up, they're 22 and 24 years old. In late December 2017, the Skyari unveil what anyone in the American influencer business would tell you is the deadliest form of attack. They release a 15-minute-long YouTube video, simply titled Cabotch Clan.

and it goes viral across the Balkans, 108,000 views before it's taken down with Sean, a lot better than some of our YouTube videos. So maybe we should get in touch with them and their social media team and see what they can do for us. Hey, if you want me to do 60-minute videos shitting on other journalists

and we get that kind of money, then probably would be happy. Actually would do well for us. The video is documentary style, intelligence-level dossier, that dumps a ton of information, a lot of it unknown, even in the Montenegring police and Interpol.

It outs Rado Zviker as the top off of the Kavich clan. I think he's from the cold open. It shows his actual ID card, the fake passports, and the names he've been traveling under. That's how they're able to track him to Ukraine. It identifies other top cabbage members, their IDs, their fake passports, their travel logs, their local movements, their family members, and it outs a couple of them for extra marital affairs. And the craziest detail, it plays audio from hot communications between the Kavach leadership talking through internal operations. Really wild. The cops try to trace the video. They can't figure it out.

See, actually, despite all the slop out there, there's nothing to get the punters going like a good, deep investigation, eh? Yeah, I've been saying it for so long. I mean, this video, it's going to so insane distrust inside the Kavich Klan and embarrasses the Montenegrin police, them as well. A lot of people think they're in, they're entirely in with the Kavich Klan side. So, bad look. 2018 opens with a killing of a high-ranking Kovach member in Serbia, more back and forth. The first murder outside Serbia and Montenegro, a little assassination in Austria. Then in June 2018, the Scaliari get a line on 400 kilos being guarded by two ofotch guys in

Majorca. They pose a spanish police, arrest the two, kill them, make the bodies disappear, then steal the drugs, and sell them. And then in September of 2018, Yovanovanovukovic, the leader of the Skaliari clan, is arrested in Turkey for using a forged Macedonian passport and immediately sent the Serbia to serve a 15-month sentence. A few months before that, his brother, was number three in the leadership, goes on the run right before a massive indictment drops to Montenegro. The indictment describes an alliance between the Scaliari, another Montenegro who's not in the claim closely aligned, and an Albanian boss teaming up for targeted

assassinations of government officials. The targets include the chief special prosecutor of Montenegro, and if they can't get to him, his son. Plus multiple high-level police and security officials, those three police and security officials on the list are the ones responsible for cracking down the Skoyari. So maybe on the topics aside, but maybe just doing their job, who really knows? I mean, obviously this is insane, but isn't it a nice to see, Sean, serves in Albanians teaming up and getting along? It's like seeds of peace, except instead of playing soccer or going to summer camp, they're there to murder officials.

Or their sons. Yeah, it's the feel good buddy movie of the summers, definitely. I mean, I can guarantee it's better than anything me and Dale have been watching on Fridays for this show. By the way, someone accused me of a disparaging Carlito's Way and hyping up States of Grace, but I don't remember doing that. I don't think I did because I thought states of grace was kind of boring. And Carlyto's Way has been like my number. I've been trying to get you to watch Carleu's Way for years.

Oh, I watched it. I didn't even tell you. I watched it when I was in Bolivia on a bus ride. Yeah, it's fantastic. Incredible. Yeah. It's also where the opening for every Jay Z song comes from in the first like two albums, which made me love it even more before I'd even seen the movie.

but someone did accuse me of that on the Patreon I have to correct that I don't think I ever disparage Khalid's way Um I don't think I hype Did I ever hype up states of grace? Because I don't really I think it's kind of

It's a good story The Westies but it's kind of boring You know? Yeah I don't know There's that new show on MGM I haven't seen I heard it was bad But I should watch that too Anyway

By the start of 20, I had to clear my name By the start of 2019 There have been roughly 30 killings In this feud Mostly in Lonsonegro and Serbia April 19th, 2019, a Skyari member is killed in Spain, but the big hit comes the next day

when Yoban Vukovic's 69-year-old father shot dead by a lone gunman outside the family's apartment building in Qatar. Father, nothing to do with the son's business. Be fair with the Kavach, the Skoyari killed the father first, but the Vukwitch brothers are number one and number three in the Sky Rai leadership,

so killing their dad is like a powerful and insane move. You might be wondering, though, how's business going with these guys just killing each other left and right all over Europe? The answer is, it's booming. The war actually forces both sides to expand rapidly.

In June of 2019, U.S. authorities board a Liberian flag container ship at the port in Philadelphia and sees another 20 tons of cocaine, one of the biggest bust in American history. Speedboats have been loading the ship in the middle of the night on its way to the states. Big mistake, I think, going after the states, drawing suspicion from the authorities. The rest include Serbs, Montenegrins, and Samoans, and the top Montenegrin involved is linked to the Kavich clan. After that, the largest shipping container company, the one that people thought Darko had infiltrated bans Montenegrin sailors from certain high-risk routes. December of 2019, Vukovic is still in prison in Serbia doing time for the forged passport. He's refusing to eat the prison food because he's afraid of being poisoned, so every day his girlfriend and sometimes an associate,

bring him food from a local restaurant. One day, the associate is stopped on the street by four men in full police uniforms who asked to inspect the food he's carrying for security purposes, but the associate senses something is off and tells the person, officials when he gets there, that he'll do it. You know, that this happened, but it wasn't hard to tell because the day he was carrying clothes and not food. The four cops are Kavich Klan guys. Their plan was the poisonous food with cyanide.

Then, of course, we get the cold open murders, the botched hit on the head of the Kavich clan and the war ratcheting up even more. It's hard to imagine this stepping up a notch, but I guess we're in the Balkans, so there's no limit to craziness violence. Or, in my opinion, and experience the alcohol content of homemade moonshine. that will do you. Slyvich Slivvich, my friend. Scoliari top leader Vokovic, meanwhile,

finishes his passport sentence in February 2020 and is transferred to a prison to Montenegro. The same one where the sniper got that Scaliari guy in the yard. Montenegro has a whole host of warrants out for him, attempted murder on Kovitch guys, weapons charges, on and on and on. He sits, while he sits awaiting these charges, the Kavich clan get to work.

They put snipers on the windows in a yard. They acquire a drone loaded with explosives to drop on him during one of his walks. They really go all out here. Again, like something you've seen at Taylor Shadern show. But alas, they cannot get to him. And in July of 2020, all charges are dropped, and he just walks out. A few months later, he's charged again for some crimes.

But by then, he's already on the run. I mean, hey, this is Montenegro, right? He's not released into a good moment either because 2020 is a really bad year for the Skyari clan. They've taken out a few low-level Kavich guys, but their top people are being taken out left and right, and it's about to get worse, because the Kavich guys have a mole on the inside. The mole gets inside the operation of Milay Radulovich, Radulovich, a high-ranking Skulliaria operative

who's in touch with the top of the clan across Europe. Everyone at this point is talking on the Sky ECC, which is subscription-based encrypted messaging gap. Their criminals worldwide are all using. Both clans included, we've talked about it a bunch on here before and the bus that happens with it. Through Adjoujavich, the mole gets photos of two top Scaliari guys, the regional boss of Barr and Port and Port City in Montenegro and a senior logistics officer.

both on the run from multiple investigations and Europol red notices, but both trying not to get killed or arrested. And they're sending Reduvic pictures of their daily life on the island of Corfu. Using satellite imagery, Airbnb listings, all sorts of stuff, the Kabach narrowed down to the exact villa, which is just really good open source work. A four-man team is dispatched to Corfu. On July 23rd, 2020, the Skyari duo are ambushed in their park car in the lot of the villa complex where they're staying. 29 shots under a minute. Each of them is hit 10 times. Then the hit men take ATVs down to the beach,

get on a ski speedboat, and escape to the mainland. Around 19 people are involved in the Corfu hit, from planning to logistics to the scout teams. Different shooters than from Athens, it's organized by an Albanian gangster, and the Corfu job costs 1.5 million euro, with each shooter paid 200,000. The Athens won, the same Albanian who organized that

from the Cold Open, only cost a half million, which, considering Athens took out the scars, is number two is pretty good deal in comparison. Then in October of 2020, the mole sets a meeting with the Pruduyivich. Radovich shows up with two Skalyari guys. The two guys are killed on the spot, and he's taken to a safe house. The Kavach clan, they get to work the same day. This is insane, by the way.

They take his phone and send a photo stage of a Kavach guy tied up and covered in fake blood to a feared Skaliari enforcer with a message over the sky, ECC. Brother, look, we have captured the enemy. He is tied up in a basement. Come to this exact safe house right now so we can torture. and interrogate him together. The safe house is what the Serbian press will later call the House of Horrors. The story I think actually made the rounds in the international press because I had heard of it.

It's a heavily fortified three-story house outside Belgrade, high wall surveillance, and the basement has a bunker line with plastic, with an industrial meat grinder in it. When the enforcer shows up, they torture him for a couple hours, kill him, turn the body into mush, then dump the remains in the river. I mean, Jesus, man, this is like the Balkans being the Balkans here. Hey, aye, I mean, I think I saw this at the time. I think Crick were the ones that sort of broke a lot of the stuff around this as well. What a waste of a good horror narrative as well.

Just feed him to the dogs, the pigs. Get a shark tank, something. Just finish off the job properly. They try the same move on another Scaliari guy, a former big player of the Pink Panthers. This guy's a little more street smart. He's got that Pink Panther experience and he tells them he'll meet up another time. So they change tactics. And a few days later, a Kavich guy walks up to him in a mall and just shoots him dead.

It's not totally clear why these two were targeted first. The enforcer was an important local leader. For the next two months, Radulovic is tortured and mentally broken while they squeeze information, use his phone to text, and force him to record voice messages. For the low-level Skari drug guys, they set up fake drug meets, and when the guys show up, they take them to the house of whores and kill them there. They have Skoliari money guys drop off cash for weapons and drugs and steal the money to kill them, too. Remember that attempted hidden Ukraine on Zviker from the Cold Open, the Kavich Klan's top boss?

Well, Zviker didn't forget. Through intelligence and intercept communications handed over by their friends and the serving police, the Kavich find out a pink panther in line with Skaliari guys is the chief organizer of the Ukraine operation, and they know he's paranoid about his security, so they set the perfect trap. Through Raduievich's phone,

and they tell him they've got a special armored vehicle, sell him. He comes to the meeting without his usual security detail because he trusts Radu Kovic, and he really wants better protection. They kill him, and it isn't purely revenge, right? He's heavily in line with the Skaliari's, and he's been trying to muscle into the Belgate drug market who they're with their backing.

Then they go after the top guy, Yovanovanovukovic. They send him messages saying they've got the perfect plan to assassinate the coverage boss. Vukic reads the text and immediately clocks that Radoevich have been compromised just from the syntax and he cuts off contact. I mean, that's how you get to be the boss, right?

You can smell this stuff at. So at this point, they've kind of, you know, they fail with the big guy. They've exhausted Raduvichich's usefulness after two months, so they just kill him. But that, the House of Horace thing is just insane. The whole operation resulted in 15 dead Skyari members

and associates including a couple of big fish and it just decimates their architecture, their infrastructure in Serbia and Montenegro. Between that and the top guys killed in Greece, journalists and law enforcement generally view the Kavich clan at this point as having the extreme upper hand, if not having won the war. So just when it looks at the Skyari guys are down

for the count in February 2021, Serbian police arrest the hooling emboss who took over from Saleh the Mute, along with his top lieutenants and 17 others, and that right there decimates the Kavach's hold on Belgrade. Then in March of 2021, European police cracked Sky ECC, the encrypted network both plans have been using for the entire time, mass disruption across the entire European underworld. But for our story, the Skalyari and Kavich clans, they were all about it. Now the police have all their messages.

And it's a big part of why we know so much about this war. And because of the recent arrests, the police also have a bunch of the Kavach's phones. With the messages in the phones, they find out about the House of Horrors. and a whole lot more. More people are arrested, and much of the top of the Kavach's Belgrade branch gets hit with multiple murder charges, Kavach members in Montenegro and Serbia start getting arrested too,

and not even corrupt cops can save them with all this input out there. In April 2021, the Kavach number three and his son are arrested at a villa in Portugal, where they've been on the run for a few years. All these top guys, they're always on the run. They've all got warrants out, convictions, and absentia. We haven't even been listing every single one throughout the episode, because, again, just never finished with all of their.

their warrants in absentee of conventions. Then an even bigger blow happens to the Kavach clan. The same April, Slobodan Khazgelian, the Kavach number two, is arrested in Montenegro. He's already been stuck in Kotar because of some similar cases, which prevented him from traveling. But now it's a much bigger case. Murder, attempted murder, organizing criminal organization and a whole host of other charges. He sent the jail for pretrial detention. Paul is in the killings for a while, but the Kovic are hot on the trail of Yovanovanovich

through his wife, who isn't as careful as with her. communications as he is, never are. The Kavich clan I originally been tracking him since she was bringing him food to the Serbian prison or tracking her. In 2021, she moves to Istanbul to join him. He's deep underground at this point between the international warrants and all the people trying to kill him. They track her by bribing a Turkish official to get her Turkish number and get the metadata of her phone. They follow her digital life whenever she posts a picture. They contract a local Turkish mafia crew to keep spotters on her until she leads them to Vukubich, which she eventually does.

Then the Turks put multiple GPS trackers on his car. And on the evening September 8th, 2022 in Istanbul, a motorcycle pulls up alongside his car. The rider puts five shots into him. He's killed. His driver wife and his kid who are there unhurt. The hitman, local Turkish mobsters, the whole operation cost 1.5 million euros. I mean, these guys aren't throwing 10k out of hit men. They're throwing millions and they're getting it done.

Obviously, gigantic deal. Vukovic was the under, Vukovic is the undisputed leader of the Skallari clanar was. They already killed this number two. The Serbian and Montenegro and press now say the Skulliari are completely finished. Yeah, but I mean, the biggest winner in this entire episode is like the Ossin community, right? It's like, this is like really sort of darkly impressive stuff. I can see why those nerds on Twitter sort of managed to find rush from drone factories and stuff. if you can follow someone's wife

and then just assassinate him in a foreign country. I mean, I don't know what she's... But you're doing an open source class tomorrow, so maybe you want to, you want me to hunt down anyone for you? I don't know what she was posting, but she was definitely on the gram, dude,

and it's like, come on. Like, I'm sure she got lectures being like, honey, you can't, you can't. And she's like, whatever, no one's paying attention to my Instagram. They are. They were. Boom.

They always are. Someone's paying attention to your Instagram. 2023, Greek prosecutor has hand down a massive indictment for the Athens and Corfu killings, 44 people, including the top two boss

of the Kovach clan, Zvaker and Kuzgelian, because everybody has the ECC data by now, which isn't that noble on its own, these guys get indicted all the time, but there was one surprising name in the indictment. And that is Darko Sarich. That's right.

The godfather of the Balkans, the men who started our episode, has been working with the Kavach clan the entire time, unfunds smuggled into his jail cell, and not only that, he put up $750,000 euros himself for the Greek killing operation,

the Athens hit. Now, way back in 2010, right after he went on the run, his top lieutenant and Cote were shot over his morning coffee by a Scoyari gunman. So my assumption is he did not like that too much, held a grudge. Maybe he just liked the Kabach gun better in general. Either way, him and his brother, who was not in jail, had sided with the Kavach guys since the split officially took place in 2014. In October of 2024, we're in the home stretch now, guys, because Jellon is set to walk out of prison after three and a half years of pre-child detention. the prison gate, he's arrested again on a piece of legal maneuvering and goes right back inside. The days of corrupt officials in Montenegro and Serbia,

letting some of these guys kind of do whatever they want. They're over. Both countries are trying to get into the EU, and the European law enforcement all know how gnarly these guys are because of the hack messages, so they have to crack down this point. There's another good lull in the killings after Vukovic dies, but it doesn't last. And on July 15, 2025,

a copic guy is gunned down in Barcelona. Like many of these guys, he's already been won, by Interpol. He was, I think, one of the lead shooters in the Corfu assassinations. And the Balkan press figures he was pretty high ranking because Rado Zivicker, the top Kavich boss, and the one not in jail, publishes a small death notice in the local papers that translates to, made the black earth rest lightly on you, kid. Zavichler's right-hand man publishes a longer one, and this is like a very big sign of respects

in the Balkans underworld. And it's also a promise that, you know, I'll let you guys guess what that promise is, but you know. The next day, a Scaliari guy who had switched sides to the Kavich clan is gunned down in Montenegro. A couple weeks later, back in Barcelona, a few blocks from where the Kavich guy died. A Skoyari aligned Pink Panther boss is shot sitting on a bar terrace. He survives. And then we're back to the killings on both sides.

The two most recent ones are in the spring and summer of 26, 2026, both in Barcelona. Skaliari guy nicknamed the Terminator and a guy shot outside the Montenegro and consulate. So that's where the war stands right now. still going. Kavach's top boss is still on the run. Vukovic's brother, Skyari number three, is still a fugitive,

and both clans are still moving weight. Today, as I'm writing this, August 20th, and I just read about a former Serbian soccer player, arrested driving a van with 1.5 tons of cocaine in it in contact with the top Kavich boss. Total numbers, I think,

between something close to 100 people, maybe as low as 60, have been killed since the war started in 2014, and I think six countries, pretty wild for a neighborhood claim war but that is the Balkans brother, a place that need not remind you listeners, Sean and I don't have a bad thing

to say about. That's the episode. No, not a word, but I would just like to add the following. There's shipperene to get a nerezit and sajee Mretcud Luzashim.

There we go. That's all our Albanian fans. I don't know what that means. I can't remember what that says anymore. I hope it's something good. Thanks for tuning in, guys. sorry about all the names and all the back and forth killings, but we had to, you know, do something. Anyway, enjoy yourselves.

Easy, fast, love you all, comment on things. That's all I got. Yeah, that's it. That's it. I don't know.