AKA Arkan

I wouldn’t piss on Matt Lauer if he was on fire.

My contempt for this sorry excuse for a man has nothing to do with whatever pathetic and sordid acts of sexual misconduct he got up to. As my wife can attest, my disdain for the “journalist” dates back to the late 1990s, when I watched him get owned on his own Today Show by a Serbian crime boss/warlord named Željko Ražnatović, aka Arkan.

Now, one might question the propriety of NBC offering a career criminal and leader of a paramilitary death squad 10 minutes of airtime for an interview in the first instance. But if you’re gonna go for the ratings, at least send a man to do the interview. Or Katie Couric, even.

The flamboyant, charismatic and breathtakingly arrogant Ražnatović simply wiped the floor with a hapless, out-of-his league Matt Lauer. I was astounded to hear recently that Matt had sent some poor young woman a dick pic. I was pretty sure Arkan snipped off Lauer’s junk and left the studio with his balls in the pocket of his Armani suit.

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Željko Ražnatović was a bad hombre. Born in 1952, he was a career criminal by the 1970s. And we’re not talking white-collar crime here — he was pulling armed bank robberies and jewelry heists across Europe. Always a showman, he liked to leave a rose on the counter of the banks he robbed. He was arrested several times and made multiple prison breaks.

He was a real-deal hard man, and when he returned to Yugoslavia in the 1980s, he got in tight with the Yugoslav interior ministry’s security services, which extended protection over him as he gambled, ran a disco and an ice cream parlour, and rolled through Belgrade in a pink Cadillac. Waving to the girls, feelin’ outta sight, spending all his money on a Saturday night…

He was also the leader of a football support club, meaning he was a boss soccer hooligan. Because of course he was.

When Yugoslavia came apart in a welter of blood in 1991, Ražnatović, who went by the nom de guerre Arkan, led the Serb Volunteer Guard, better known as Arkan’s Tigers. This small, but mightily feared unit, composed of nationalist gang members and soccer hooligans, “supported” Serbian military forces. Just a few hundred strong, they smuggled arms, fought Bosnian and Croat paramilitary groups and grew rich on loot.

Arkan was accused of war crimes, including genocide against the Bosnian Muslim population. He was most infamous for the massacre of over 250 patients, medical staff and wounded Croatian fighters from the city of Vukovar during the Croatian war in 1991.

There’s no reason to doubt the sincerity of Arkan’s Serbian nationalism. He ran his war like a massive and very violent organized crime heist, but banditry and paramilitary warfare are simpatico endeavors and self-aggrandizement and serving The Cause can readily go hand-in-hand. Just ask Jesse James.

His rage at NATO airstrikes during the Kosovo War struck a chord with the Serbian people. For many of them, he was a roguish patriotic hero. Of course, some people think Pablo Escobar was a hero, too. When an American F-117 stealth bomber was shot down during the air campaign, Arkan took a small piece of the wreckage to carry with him — over his heart.

In 1995, the charismatic paramilitary partisan married a popular Serbian turbo-folk singer, the sultry Svetlana Veličković, known as Ceca, in a “Serbian fairytale” wedding — broadcast live on state television. The fairytale prince — wanted by NATO and by Interpol — dressed in a World War I Serbian Army uniform.

After the Balkan Wars, Ražnatović took over a football club and made it very successful. Some of that success was doubtless owed to the overt intimidation of opposing teams. He was also regarded as Serbia’s most important mafia boss.

He was holding court in the lobby of the Intercontinental Hotel in Belgrade on January 15, 2000, when (according to most accounts) assassins shot him in the face with a H&K submachine gun. Live by the MP5, die by the MP5. Arkan’s wife and her wounded sister (or maybe a bodyguard) got him in a car and rushed him to the hospital, but he died enroute, in the arms of Ceca. The reasons for the assassination have never come clear. Perhaps Arkan was perceived by shadowy security forces as a liability in the post-war era. Perhaps it was an underworld beef. Some assert that there was a falling out over the profits from the “sale” of a soccer player.

Arkan’s wild career was over. He was 47.

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Looking back, I guess it’s no surprise that Matt Lauer was outgunned and humiliated by a Serbian alpha-male gangster. Why should we expect a multi-million dollar journalist to hold a Serbian warlord’s feet to the fire? Turns out that harassing the interns was more Matt’s speed.

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Speaking of the Balkans, I’m reading Anthony Conway’s thriller The Black Hand and enjoying it. The protagonist, Thomas Jaeger is of English-German descent, a Boer War veteran. I picture Daniel Craig in the role. Conway is the author of the Caspasian novels, recounting the adventures of a British leader of Gurkha Rifles (Richard Armitage for that one) on the frontiers of the Empire c. 1920s. Good stuff. The Jaeger novel, which is the first of a projected series, kicks off with the assassination of Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, which, of course, triggered the Great War. The tone is darker than in the Caspasian novels, which have more of a pulp-adventure flavor.