Years active 1990s–present Ethnicity Serb | Territory Zemun | |
Founding location Zemun, Belgrade, Serbia Membership (est.) 2,000 members
10,000 foot-soldiers Criminal activities Arms trafficking, bribery, burglary, drug trafficking, embezzlement, extortion, fraud, Kidnapping, money laundering, murder, Racketeering, robbery and theft | ||
The Zemun Clan is one of the Belgrade clans of the Serbian Mafia. The name is based on the base of the clan located in Zemun, a municipality of Belgrade. The peak of the clan occurred from 2000 to 2003 and until today they were one of the most powerful organizations in Southeast Europe.
History
In 1992, the gang of "Peca" was arrested. One of the members was Dušan Spasojević, who would later become the head of the Zemun clan.
The clan grew in prominence after the downfall of Slobodan Milošević with an influx of many Red Berets paramilitaries, including Milorad Ulemek. These were people who had military training, wartime experience and connections with elements of the Serbian state secret service UDBA.
In September 2001, 700 kilos of heroin was found in a bank vault rented by the BIA in central Belgrade. The illegal safekeeping was never explained nor brought up.
In 2001, the Zemun clan organized "special training courses" with the BIA, lending them information on Kosovo Albanian insurgents in exchange.
During the period that started with the Yugoslav Wars and ended with the assassination of Prime Minister Zoran Đinđić in March 2003, connections between the Serbian Mafia and the government were obvious and corruption was rampant in most branches of the state, from border patrols to law-enforcement agencies. On 12 March 2003, Đinđić was assassinated by former Special Operations Unit member Zvezdan Jovanović. The government then set in motion a major operation against criminality during Operation Sabre, which led to more than 10,000 arrests. The revenue of New Belgrade malls, locations frequented by gangsters, plummeted by more than 20+% after the Operation. Milan Sarajlić, the Deputy State Prosecutor of Serbia, was arrested and confessed to being on the payroll of the Zemun clan. The Red Berets were dissolved on 23 March 2003.
In 2006, it was revealed that Dušan Spasojević, the gang leader of the Zemun clan, was a source of information to Serbian Radical leader Vojislav Šešelj, whom he had given information about high-profile murders carried out in Serbia, written about in Šešelj's two books (Šešelj referred to Spasojević under the pseudonym Laufer)
In November 2009, Argentine Police arrested 5 Serbian drug couriers and seized their 492 kilograms of cocaine in Buenos Aires. On 31 October 2009, Serbian police arrested over 500 people in the biggest ever anti-drug operation carried out in Serbia. The routes of the drugs were from Uruguay and Argentina to South Africa to Northern Italy, Turkey and Montenegro.
Serbian organized crime experts estimated that 10,000 foot soldiers form a part of the 5 major organized crime groups operating in the country. A courier package of 5 kilos of cocaine was intercepted from Paraguay and 4 Belgraders were arrested. The busts were part of Operation Balkan Warrior; an international drug smuggling case that involves mainly the Zemun Clan. The leader of the drug ring is Željko Vujanović.