Montenegro's Mafia and the Cocaine Kingpin You've Never Heard Of

Over the past decade, Balkan gangsters have come to dominate Europe’s cocaine supply. The market is now worth up to €10 billion on the street, and this week on Whale Hunting, we’re looking at one man who has made his fortune shipping party powder across the Atlantic: Darko Saric.

Currently on trial in Belgrade and likely to be sentenced to decades behind bars next month, Saric was a pioneer of the tactics that have taken the Balkan cartel to the top: embedding in Latin America, infiltrating cargo shipping, using small and secretive cells of gangsters. 

But Saric’s money has also drilled his power into the bedrock of the state. Standing trial alongside him are three police officers he allegedly paid to obstruct the investigation; making a conviction stick is no foregone conclusion. 

Welcome to the world of Darko Saric.

If you can earn €1 billion in a year — legally or otherwise — chances are you’ve got a ruthless streak. At the height of his power in the mid-2000s, cocaine kingpin Darko Saric was likely making even more. The emperor of Montenegro’s Kotor clan, Saric’s grip was iron-clad, stretching into Serbia and across the Balkans.

An engineer on container ships in his youth, his rise was a masterclass in management. After brief prison stints on burglary and firearms charges, Saric fled the continent and all but disappeared from view. Deep in the suburbs of São Paulo, however, his fingerprints were soon everywhere — he conjured up streets of restaurants and cafes to launder his cash, networking intensely on the ground with Brazilian and Colombian narco-traffickers.

Business was booming, and soon, Saric was moving cocaine from South America to Europe by the ton, controlling more than half of the continent’s ever-growing market. His secret? He’s a total control freak.

Old Habits

In Saric’s native Montenegro, dirty business was state business at the turn of the 21st century. The government profited hugely from smuggling cigarettes to the Italian mafia on the coastline opposite, and old habits die hard — especially in a new-born country that only gained its independence in 2006.

There’s an old law enforcement maxim that smugglers are in the logistics business. But Saric was no simple smuggler — the First Bank of Montenegro, which was controlled by the family of then-Prime Minister Milo Djukanovic, couldn’t get enough of Saric’s cash.

In 2009, a company owned by Saric and his closest associates was the “top depositor” and “one of [First Bank’s] biggest customers,” entrusting millions to the bank each year, despite receiving abnormally low interest rates. First Bank was desperate for capital injection, and happy to look the other way when Saric’s men arrived with sackloads of cash for cleaning.

Saric’s touch tarnished the nation’s top brass: policemen, politicians, and even the anti-corruption chief’s son were all on his pay-roll, assimilating his cartel into the machinery of state. In both Montenegro and Serbia, his connections went right to the top. For a time, he was untouchable.

“His secret? He’s a total control freak.”

His reach was so tentacular that Saric may even have infiltrated the Mediterranean Shipping Company — the world’s largest container shipping conglomerate — whose vessels have repeatedly been busted carrying tonnes of Balkan cartel cocaine.

But in October 2009, everything changed. Saric was no longer safe in the Balkans.

Operation Balkan Warrior

The defining feature of the Balkan cartel, according to one Whale Hunting source, is that “they’re control freaks.” Whether operating in South America or Africa, without trusted boots on the ground to control everything, they won’t do business at all. And Saric was the paragon of this perfectionism.

In the early years, his influence was the glue that brought together smaller criminal factions. The medieval town of Kotor, a UNESCO World Heritage site on the Adriatic Sea, was his stronghold. He united the Skaljari and Kavac clans, named after villages local to Kotor, and their combined influence grew rapidly. Working together under Saric’s leadership, everything was possible.

With the Balkan cartel embedding itself in the region’s state apparatus, Operation Balkan Warrior was born — a joint investigation led by the DEA, the Serbian intelligence agency and Latin American police. The aim was to forestall a Medellin-style cartel taking the region — but they didn’t even know who their Escobar was yet.

It was only when a tip-off about a pleasure yacht anchored off the coast of Montevideo, Uruguay, came good in October 2009 that law enforcement got a name. Despite seizing  more than two tonnes of cocaine, the greater prize was two simple words: Darko Saric.

“He was known for operating discreetly and skillfully, successfully keeping his activities under the radar of law enforcement for years.” Sasa Djordjevic, a senior analyst at the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime, told Whale Hunting.