by Stevan Dojčinović, Pavla Holcová, and Alessia Cerantola
This article from the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) is part of an investigation with Jan Kuciak Investigative Center. Courthouse News Service is partnering with OCCRP on other investigations.
Mileta Miljanić, a Bosnian-born U.S. citizen, is a wanted man in Italy and faces arrest if he so much as changes planes there.
In New York, a 2003 federal indictment of Miljanić remains inexplicably open, with no apparent move to take him to court.
So it’s easy to find the leader of “Group America,” a brutal cocaine trafficking network that operates on at least four continents and is said to be responsible for a dozen murders.
He keeps an apartment in a neat townhouse in the Ridgewood section of Queens, New York.
His surname is on his doorbell.
Sometimes he even appears on television.
After a fire gutted the St. Sava Cathedral, Manhattan’s landmark Serbian Orthodox church in May 2016, Serbian Foreign Minister Ivica Dačić flew to New York to see the damage. As he spoke to television reporters, viewers in Belgrade spotted a familiar face in the tour entourage: Mileta Miljanić.
Facing criticism, Dačić said he was told Miljanić was a church benefactor “who gave more money than all the other donors put together.”
Records from dozens of countries examined by OCCRP reveal decades of drug seizures and murders linked to Miljanić’s organization. Since the late 1990s, Group America associates have been arrested and charged in Serbia, Montenegro, Germany, Italy, Greece, Poland, South Africa, Argentina and Peru. More than five metric tonnes of Group America cocaine has been seized.
But Miljanić remains safe from arrest, at least in New York and in Serbia, where he made a visit in August, as shown in posts to an Instagram account used by his wife.
In Italy, where investigators have aggressively pursued Group America, authorities say they have been continuously hamstrung by the gang’s connections to the Serbian law enforcement — and perhaps beyond.
“Someone in the United States protects them,” a senior Italian police official told OCCRP in 2015.
A former senior police officer in Belgrade independently offered the same theory.
“I believe the CIA stands behind them, that is why we gave them the name Group America,” he said.
CIA officials declined comment, as have all other U.S. law enforcement or intelligence agencies contacted for this article.
Group America’s astonishing story is grounded in New York City’s Serbian-American immigrant community and in Serbia’s political history, but its operations were largely unknown to authorities in any country until 2001, when a gang insider codenamed Srećko – “Lucky” in Serbian – volunteered to tell the police what he knew.
For hours, stunned officers listened to the story of Yugoslavians who became criminals on the streets of New York, immersed themselves in Serbian politics and graduated to the world of high-volume international drug trafficking.
The police wrote reports, but their attempts to investigate went nowhere.
What is Group America?
The story of Group America begins in 1970, when a young Serb, Boško “The Yugo” Radonjić, emigrated to the United States from what was then Yugoslavia.
Radonjić was both a criminal and a strident opponent of his country’s communist rulers. A supporter of Serbia’s exiled royal family, he did prison time in the United States for a series of bomb plots targeting Yugoslav diplomatic missions.
In the 1980s, Radonjić was an acolyte of Jimmy Coonan, the leader of an ultraviolent Irish-American gang called the Westies that dominated New York’s old Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood. He became head of the infamous gang after Coonan and other leaders went to prison. Under Radonjić, the Westies grew closer to the Gambino Mafia family, led by the infamous “Dapper Don” John Gotti. When Gotti faced racketeering charges in 1986, Radonjić helped tamper with the jury.