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any MiG-29 fighter planes or bits of other hardware that Russian, Kazakh, Ukrainian, or Byelorussian biznesmeny or impoverished state concern had acquired and wished to convert into currency. Taking copy of the “We are your ideal partner in Russia for sell top military plane” variety, dictated by a man who only ever referred to himself as “The Contact” over a crackly phone line from a dacha * in the Caucasus seemed to fit, somehow, with what I’d seen myself a year or so earlier. None of them ever paid for their ads.
    But with their dachas and deals, these men were clearly at the top of the tree: the winners from the big shake-up. I couldn’t help wondering about where that money was going. About who could possibly have a use for all these Soviet planes. And about who was going to fly them. What ever happened to all those regular Joes down below?
    Then in 1998, I found myself in what was left of a rapidly disintegrating Yugoslavia—the war in Bosnia over, the NATO intervention in Kosovo imminent—on what I hoped would become a freelance piece for the Sunday Telegraph . And with the currency collapsing and the Serb mafia and regime cronies holding court in the hotels of Belgrade, I considered myself pretty well versed in Eastern European anarchy. I thought I’d seen it all before.
    What I hadn’t prepared myself for was the first glimmering of an answer to the questions I’d been asking myself all along.
    * We became quite friendly eventually, and he posted me a photo of the interior, log-clad with huge animal skins stretched out on the walls and rifles above the door.

 
    CHAPTER TWO
    What Am I Doing Here?
    Serbia, 1998
    THE FREEZING NIGHT RAIN COMES IN DRIFTS, smashing onto the driveway of the Hyatt Regency Belgrade with the force of an airborne tsunami. There’s no point pulling my collar up against the roaring night, but I’m relieved to have made it out of the boozy, pistol-packing driver’s cab. For a few seconds, the universe is chaos. Then the glass moves and I cross into the bubble of warm-blown air and light music.
    Inside, cops are everywhere, flashing sidearms, smoking cigarettes, and drinking with mobsters. The atrium is crawling with “security”: some state, some private, some mafia, some uniformed, some not. Packing the lobbies, restaurants, and business centers, press, diplomats, and NGOs bide their time, flipping between CNN and BBC World and swapping stories about how close we are to the inevitable backlash against MiloÅ¡evi ć ’s campaign of ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, his increasingly flagrant disregard for international diplomatic efforts to defuse the crisis, and his mafia-sponsored grip on Serbia itself.
    Right now, this hotel is the branded international heart of Belgrade: a relatively safe environment where diplomats and anchormen stay and work, and where Serbia’s own VIPs play. The once-proud Hapsburg city and former capital of Yugoslavia has by 1998 become the tattered gangland capital of a state now consisting solely of Serbia, its tiny mountainous neighbor Montenegro, and whatever claims on Kosovo it could make stick. Even now, it’s obvious to everyone but the regime itself that these are its final days. Just like the Moscow I’d left in 1992, this freewheeling, broken Belgrade is a honeypot for the new rich, the scene of almost daily mafia assassinations, and home to an honest, increasingly desperate majority still grimly holding on for better days.
    It’s also the playground of the MiloÅ¡evi ć regime’s cultivated army of cronies, mobsters, and mercenaries, and the black-market heart of the remaining economy: the town’s official structures are ruled by “Red Businessmen”—gangsters given carte blanche by the regime to kill and traffic to their hearts’ content, in return for their loyalty to MiloÅ¡evi ć when it’s head-cracking time. Only now, they are falling