Outlaws Inc. Read Online Free Page A

too—blown up in cars, machine-gunned by ski-masked assailants, stamping desperately on sabotaged brake pedals, having outlived their usefulness to the regime or simply aroused the paranoid suspicions of an ever-shifting inner circle around the president. Even the most feared aren’t safe: Before long, regime favorite, Serb militia commander, color-supplement pinup, and war criminal Arkan will be gunned down in the lobby of the InterContinental next door.
    â€œOne of theirs got assassinated upstairs,” nods my young, slick-coiffed, and Italian-shoed fixer Sasha (not his real name) across the room at a smart young American Psycho look-alike. “A man called Knele in room 331. Checked in, left strictest instructions that nobody was to be allowed up to his room without the front desk calling to announce the visitor. Then a visitor walks straight into his room and blows his brains out.” His hands trace an imaginary room layout on the table. “Think too much about that and you will become very paranoid. Because if somebody let the killer up to do his work, then you know nothing is forbidden.”
    It’s a while before I figure out just why his phrase is nagging at me so badly.
    Serbia is, to all appearances, isolated in the world. The government is careering into its last madness, ordering hit after hit, crackdown after crackdown. Someone on the hotel TV is talking about the latest arms embargo passed against Belgrade by UN Security Council resolution 1160, aimed at forcing what was still officially Yugoslavia to open a dialogue with Kosovo Albanians. Amid the economic collapse and stop-start hyperinflation at home come varying degrees of sanctions, downgrades, embargoes, and censures applied over the past few years by the EU, the United Nations, the United States, and other individual states and organizations in a list as long as your arm.
    On paper, Belgrade is a city in which a great many things are forbidden. Outside the glass bubble, ordinary Serbs pick through rubbish, sell off their last belongings, teeter between poverty and desperation. Yet among the chosen out here in New Belgrade’s luxury palaces, champagne corks pop. International news teams eat fresh fusion cuisine and get whatever protection, transport, and kit they need at the click of a finger. Cash is showered about with ostentatious largesse—no weak Yugoslav dinar here, just fresh deutsche marks and U.S. dollars. All over Belgrade, for the favored few, cocaine is freely available. Guns, luxury goods, and substances that should be scarce are ubiquitous. Where’s it all coming from?
    â€œIf you can’t beat ’em, join ’em,” smiles one local businessman over lunchtime drinks at the Hyatt the next day. “Some stuff you can theoretically get legally, but it’s too difficult and costs too much to do it. I can tell you one thing: If anyone in this city tells you their business, their government ministry, their shop, their restaurant, whatever, could survive for a single week without some benefit, directly or indirectly, knowing or unknowing, from the smuggling pipeline, you can tell them from me they’re talking bullshit.”
    Food and fuel, he confides, are smuggled by land on a nightly basis across the border from Romania and Hungary. Other more specialist items for shops arrive on unpoliceable successions of plain container barges up the Danube, where New Belgrade gets first shout. Some basics designated as “humanitarian aid” get diverted, either en route or upon delivery into the hands of black marketeers. Meanwhile Yugoslav- or Soviet-made arms and other goods are sold for hard currency abroad: dollars, marks.
    â€œAll that sort of thing comes and goes by plane,” he tells me, laughing at how cloak-and-dagger he sounds. “The dealers have their delivery men.”
    Soviet planes have been coming and going with noticeable regularity for a couple of years now, says the