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    The President, the Soccer Hooligans and an Underworld ‘House of Horrors’

    Listen to This ArticleAudio Recording by AudmOn a Saturday night in early March 2021, Serbia’s president, Aleksandar Vucic, appeared on live television, seated at a long wooden table and flanked by the country’s prime minister and interior minister. Vucic said he had an important announcement to make about the arrest of an underworld gang responsible for multiple murders. The interior minister warned viewers to move their children away from the TV. A series of images flashed on the screen behind him: a severed head, a headless body, a torso. Vucic spoke slowly, often pausing and staring ponderously at the table in front of him, his 6-foot-6-inch frame hunched slightly. He praised the police and intelligence agents who investigated the gang; they had narrowly escaped being killed themselves, he said.It was a shocking presentation, even in a country like Serbia, where many adults have painful memories of the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s and their atrocities. But the news conference was only the beginning of a campaign of gruesome revelations. In the weeks after the arrest in February, new details began leaking into the press. The gang was said to have lured its victims to a “house of horrors” in a Belgrade suburb, where they were tortured, dismembered, fed through an industrial meat grinder and sometimes dumped in the Danube.The story captivated Serbs, and not just because of the gory images. The leader of the gang was a burly soccer hooligan and cocaine trafficker named Veljko Belivuk, nicknamed the Trouble, already a well-known figure in Belgrade. He had been accused previously of murder and a string of other serious crimes, but never did much time in jail. He was rumored to have cozy relations with the Serbian police and intelligence services. He and his men had been photographed in the company of powerful people, including the president’s son, Danilo Vucic.After the news conference, Belivuk offered his side of the story at a closed-door court hearing. He said his gang had been organized “for the needs and by the order of Aleksandar Vucic,” according to court transcripts. He described some of the backdoor jobs the gang claimed to have done for the government, like intimidating political rivals and stopping fans from chanting against Vucic at soccer games — a valuable service in a country where the stadium can make or break a president. Belivuk warned that if Vucic “continues his proceedings against me,” he would have much more to say.Vucic angrily disputed any connection to the killers. But he seemed to take the Belivuk case personally, sometimes suggesting that it was a conspiracy against him. In one bizarre television interview a few months after the arrests, he claimed that Belivuk’s men had made their victims into “human kebabs” and sent them to Belivuk’s boss, Radoje Zvicer. Looking into the camera and addressing Zvicer, who is still at large, Vucic laid down a challenge. “I invite him to kill me,” he said. “I have no problem with that, because it is better to be turned into mincemeat than to let these bastards rule Serbia.”A soccer match at Partizan Stadium. The influence of hooligans extends beyond Serbia’s arenas and into criminal gangs and even politics.Jehad Nga for The New York TimesAs the trial approached, facts began leaking out about the longstanding ties between the gang and various members of Vucic’s administration, who appear to have monitored, assisted and protected it. Belivuk came to seem, at times, like the president’s dark twin, a man who embodies the criminal underside of a state that has grown steadily more autocratic over the past decade. Vucic, who has been president since 2017 and has a lock on the country’s ruling party, has long said that he wants to lead his country — still among the poorest in Europe — toward greater prosperity and membership in the European Union. At the same time, he has hollowed out many of Serbia’s democratic institutions, and Mafia-style gangs often appear to operate with impunity.The Belivuk affair, in other words, is not just a noirish tale about beheadings and cocaine. The gangsterism that has thrived under Vucic, alongside Serbia’s periodic threats to “protect” ethnic Serbs elsewhere in the region, could eventually unravel the settlement that restored peace to the Balkans in 1995. The Europeans are keenly aware of this, as is Vladimir Putin, who has fresh reasons to divide and distract them. The Kremlin has a long history of supporting Serbian nationalists as beleaguered fellow Slavs and more motive than ever — thanks to the Ukraine war — to stir up trouble in the Balkans.But the risks for Europe run deeper than that: Vucic’s brand of ethnic chauvinism and demagogy echoes that of his ally Putin, and the spread of illiberal democracy — already gathering strength in parts of the continent — poses an equal, perhaps more ominous threat. The Belivuk case has opened a window into a grim possible future, one in which Vucic undermines the European project from within, building a state where democracy is a facade and criminal gangs are used to spread fear. That would be unsettling enough on its own. It also happens to be the same tactic used by the men who tipped the Balkans into a catastrophic war three decades ago.By the time Belivuk made his first public courtroom appearance last October, he had already gained a macabre kind of celebrity, his rise and fall chronicled in an endless series of tabloid scoops. He was led into the room in handcuffs, wearing a white polo shirt and jeans. His face was soft and rounded, almost cherubic, with big blank eyes. Despite his size — he is a big man with a massive upper torso — he looked oddly like an oversize baby, as if a lifetime of violence had made no impression on him. He and about 30 other defendants, mostly beefy men with tattoos and shaved heads, looked strangely relaxed, grinning and chatting and tossing a few casual insults at one another. Perhaps they expected this trial to end the way most of their previous ones had, with procedural errors, faulty evidence and early release.After a few formalities, a prosecutor took the stand to read the indictment. When he described how Belivuk and his lieutenant hit a victim “in the neck with an ax and cut off his head,” the man in question yawned and looked at the ceiling. Some of his fellow defendants dozed off.The arrest of Veljko Belivuk, the leader of a Partizan fan group. The authorities say Belivuk and his group used a bunker at the team’s stadium to hide money and drugs and torture enemies.Stefan StojanovicWhen Belivuk took the stand, he clutched the lectern with both hands and got straight to the point. His gang, he said, was a state project from the start. He recited some of the services it had provided and even described a meeting he claimed to have had with Vucic at a private house in Belgrade, giving the street address and apartment number and the name of the owner. They only met there once, he added, “because, as the boss put it, if someone saw us or filmed us, it wouldn’t be good for him.”Vucic promptly denied the accusations and even offered to discuss them with investigators and submit to a lie-detector test. Legally, he is not likely to suffer from the trial. No senior officials have been indicted, and very few have even been questioned. The importance of the Belivuk case lies elsewhere. It has forced all of Serbia to face the abundant circumstantial evidence that Vucic has allowed gangsters to become a virtual arm of the state. The support Belivuk and his cronies received from the police and interior ministry over the past decade has been amply documented in court testimony, phone intercepts and photographs. The suggestion that all this might have happened without Vucic’s knowledge elicits laughter in Belgrade. Before Vucic was president, he was prime minister, and a decade ago he reorganized Serbia’s security services. He now exercises near-total control over almost every aspect of public life. From Parliament to the courts to the police to business, Vucic is treated with fawning deference; Serbs cross him at their peril. In fact, the arrest of Belivuk and his gang may be one of the few key decisions of recent years that Vucic did not control.The bulk of the evidence in the case comes from a team of European police officials who stumbled onto it by accident. They spent two years trying to decrypt a phone messaging app called Sky-ECC, which was a favored tool of cocaine traffickers in the container ports of Northern Europe. When they finally cracked the code, they discovered much more than a local cocaine ring. With at least 70,000 users, Sky turned out to be a virtual Rosetta Stone to the globalized world of organized crime, with graphic messages and photographs flickering across the ether in a dizzying array of languages and dialects. “It’s as if you were standing outside a house in the dark, and now you’ve gone inside and turned the lights on,” one official from Europol, the law-enforcement arm of the European Union, told me.Sky was not the first app to be accused by law enforcement of catering to drug lords. But it was the most popular and the most brazen. The company, founded by a Vancouver tech entrepreneur in 2010, boasted that its four-layered encryption was unbreakable; it ultimately made hundreds of millions of dollars before its executives were indicted in 2021.Much of the Sky evidence turned out to be from the Balkans, and especially Serbia. Passing that data on was “very sensitive,” I was told by a French interior-ministry official, because of concerns that it might be leaked. Although the Serbian police did ultimately arrest Belivuk and his gang, they appear to have done so reluctantly. Days before his arrest, he and his top lieutenant were allowed to leave the country for neighboring Montenegro, another hub for drug trafficking. Montenegrin authorities said they foiled an attempt to murder them; a Montenegrin prosecutor told local media that “certain security structures” in Serbia were behind the plot, which may have been conceived to avoid the messiness of a trial.Gang killings are rife in Serbia. Mara Halabrin Melikova lost her son, whose portrait hangs in her Belgrade apartment, in a killing that remains unsolved.Jehad Nga for The New York TimesDuring Vucic’s nine years in power, Serbian soccer hooligans — and the criminal gangs that overlap with them — have been enmeshed in the region’s volatile ethnic politics and helped spur Serbian uprisings in other Balkan countries. Some of them profess loyalty to Russia. Some Serbs have joined the paramilitary Wagner group, which has its own history of hiring criminals and has posted Serbian-language recruitment videos for the war in Ukraine. Though Vucic rebuked the group, Serbia remains a kind of fault line between Russia and the West. All this puts Vucic in a position of remarkable power. In a crisis, he could decide whether the Balkan region will settle toward peace or relapse into violence.The most visible risks today are centered on Kosovo, the country to Serbia’s south that is ethnically Albanian but contains pockets that are majority Serb, especially in the north. Serbia’s leaders remain deeply unhappy about Kosovo’s breakaway from Serbia following the 1990s Yugoslav wars and refuse to recognize its independence, which was established internationally in 2008. The scenario that keeps Western European leaders up at night goes something like this: Vucic, citing a threat to the Serbian minority, sends troops over the border and annexes northern Kosovo. Serbs elsewhere in the region then flee their homes or demand more border changes. This could spell the end of the Dayton Accords, the pact brokered by the U.S. diplomat Richard Holbrooke, which ended the worst of the fighting in 1995 and redrew the map of the former Yugoslavia. It might trigger another war. Even without violence, the collapse of the Dayton order would bolster the politics of ethnic solidarity and autocracy throughout the Balkans.Another scenario involves Vucic’s concealing his irredentist intentions until after Serbia has been admitted to the E.U. This Trojan horse script has gained credence partly because of Hungary’s illiberal prime minister Viktor Orban, a close ally of Vucic’s who has lobbied zealously for Serbia’s admission. He appears to be hoping that Vucic could help Hungary, a member since 2004, steer the European club in a more populist and less democratic direction.For all these reasons, the Belivuk case has been a sensitive one for reporters. I was told before I came to Serbia that my calls would be monitored, that I would be followed, possibly even stopped and interrogated. The Serbian journalists who gave me these warnings have themselves been routinely harassed and threatened by both criminals and the B.I.A., the Serbian domestic intelligence agency.The gray zone between the state and the mafias in Serbia is real. It is also surrounded by outer walls of rumor and paranoia that make a reporter’s job more difficult. I must have spoken to a dozen Serbs whose sons or husbands or children were killed under murky circumstances. Most of them had no idea who the killers were, but they had elaborate stories to tell about corrupt officials, drug barons, arms deals and incriminating photographs. Some had hired private detectives. All of them seemed convinced that the truth was being deliberately kept from them. Yet some of the people I spoke to were clearly hiding things from me. I spent an hour talking to one widow whose husband was among the butchered bodies in the photographs that accompanied the Belivuk gang indictment. She was tall and severe-looking, with long black hair. Her story was poignant, but when I started asking about her husband’s criminal background — he had done prison time for his role in a notorious gang of Balkan jewel thieves — her answers turned cold and monosyllabic. I had the feeling that she could have told me a much more interesting story if she hadn’t been worried about the consequences of her husband’s complicity and perhaps of her own.Vucic is not responsible for this morass of fear and endemic criminality. It is almost part of the scenery in the Balkans, so much so that the region’s very name has been used for centuries by outsiders as a kind of shorthand for ethnic hatred and violence — “a stage set for exotic thrillers of corruption, quick killing and easy crime,” as the historian Mark Mazower has written. But Vucic has the demagogue’s gift for breathing new life into demeaning stereotypes. He has made brilliant use of Serbia’s mafia problem, creating an environment in which the blurred line between organized crime and the state plays to his advantage.The south stand at Partizan Stadium in Belgrade is almost exclusively populated by football hooligans and is notorious for the violence that often breaks out.Jehad Nga for The New York TimesIt is no accident that both Vucic and Belivuk got their start in soccer fan groups. Perhaps more than anywhere else, soccer stadiums in Serbia are venues for power in its rawest form, a recruiting pool for militias and criminals alike. Stadiums were the crucible of the ethnic nationalism that destroyed Yugoslavia, and those violent emotions shaped Vucic and his contemporaries. Even today, approaching an arena on a game night can feel like walking into a lightning storm. Police officers line the boulevards, and as you get closer, there are teams of militarized police with body armor and shields. Fans sometimes chant slurs that recall those used during the ethnic-cleansing campaigns of the 1990s. Team loyalties take on an almost religious intensity. The chief executive of Red Star Belgrade, the most popular team in Serbia, famously said that Red Star is “not just a football team, it is an ideology, a philosophy and a national symbol. The Red Star is the guardian of Serbian identity and the Orthodox faith.”Dead football fans gaze out from painted murals all over Belgrade, alongside plaques, statues and other memorials that bear witness to their status as a kind of vox populi. Hooligans were among the first to go off to war in the early 1990s, and it was hooligans who provided the muscle in the movement to bring down the nationalist strongman Slobodan Milosevic a decade later. Ever since, Serbian politicians have feared the stadium and have tried to keep the hooligans on their side.Talking to Serbian hooligans is not easy. Some are dangerous. Most of the ones I met were taciturn and wary, no doubt in part because of the Belivuk case. After two weeks of searching, a Serbian colleague helped me find what I was looking for: a man who had grown up alongside Vucic in the stadium, and who was willing and able to talk about their common origins. He was a 46-year-old who still refers to himself as a hooligan, though he has a wife and children and rarely gets into brawls anymore. We met in a bar far from his neighborhood, so he wouldn’t be recognized. He spoke on condition that I not identify him, so I will refer to him as B., his first initial. He has a compact body and a shaved head, and as he walked across the bar his gaze was so direct and fearless that I had a feeling he was charging me. We sat down and ordered beers. He talked fast in English, lapsing occasionally into Serbian when he couldn’t find the right word.B. told me that the stadium was a rare zone of freedom and anonymity in Yugoslavia’s tightly controlled Communist state. It was also a place where, by the late 1980s, you could see the country disintegrating day by day. Young men began forming gangs and bringing baseball bats to games, aping street gang members in the 1979 American film “The Warriors.” The older hooligans told B. and his friends to find a similar group of young men supporting the other main Belgrade team, Partizan, and challenge them to fights “to see who is brave and who is not.” This pipeline is still in place, other Belgrade hooligans told me, and sometimes initiates must “bleed” another member to rise up the ranks before being given “missions.” These may include committing crimes or just beating up a particular rival.B. is a Red Star supporter who has been deeply involved in the Belgrade football scene for decades.Jehad Nga for The New York TimesAll the young hooligans on the north stand were budding nationalists, B. said, including Vucic. Among the chants was “Serbia, not Yugoslavia.” After a game in 1988, B. said, he and his group heard about a clash between Serbs and ethnic Albanians. They went “to hunt” for Albanians in Belgrade after a game, hoping to smash up some stores and teach the Albanians a lesson. They ended up in a street fight. “President Vucic was in that also,” B. said. “And I must tell you, I don’t like him now, but he was brave, brave in the fight.” (Vucic’s spokespeople did not respond to repeated requests for comment.)Vucic has said he was in the stands during a legendary 1990 soccer brawl that has sometimes been described as the true beginning of the Balkan wars. It happened during a match between the Red Star and Dinamo Zagreb teams, and it quickly devolved into a melee that overran the entire stadium. Fans on both sides were clearly primed for a battle: Stones had been stockpiled in the stadium, ready to be thrown. Decades later, Serbian media published blurry photos of the match in which a lanky young man, identified as Vucic, is visible in the crowd.By 1990, the violence was veering out of control. There were thousands of young vandals looking for trouble, and, B. said, somebody needed “to calm down that group, because Slobodan Milosevic was afraid of them.”So Milosevic, who was Yugoslavia’s president at the time, selected a leader for the hooligans. This was the first time a political leader entered into such a relationship, and it set a precedent that Vucic would later follow. Milosevic’s man went by the name Arkan. He had a boyish face with a brittle smile that concealed a propensity for violent rages. Something about him commanded respect. Arkan was a storied figure of the Serbian underworld, who made his name with a series of daring bank robberies and prison escapes across Europe in the 1970s and ’80s. He would go on to become one of the most brutal war criminals of the following decade. Photographs of his paramilitary group, the Tigers, helped turn Western opinion decisively against Serbia. In one of them, a Serbian militiaman can be seen kicking the head of a dying Bosnian woman.“So Arkan collects our leaders, he gave them good salary for everybody to be quiet,” B. said. “And he said: ‘Don’t fight with him. We must fight for Serbia now. It’s going to be war.’”If the soccer stadium shaped Vucic’s character, the war was where he learned politics. Fresh out of law school in 1991, he apprenticed himself to a far-right Serbian politician named Vojislav Seselj. It was in that same year that Slovenia and Croatia declared their independence, triggering the intermittent and brutal conflicts that would shatter Yugoslavia into statelets. Seselj, a proponent of ethnic cleansing, was a useful foil for Milosevic, who could point to him as proof that some Serbs were even more extreme than he was. Seselj’s Radical Party recruited a militia that became notorious for its rampages in Serbia, Bosnia and eastern Croatia, where they robbed, tortured, killed and expelled non-Serbian civilians. Seselj once said his men would use rusty spoons to scoop out the eyes of their enemies, though he later claimed this was black humor. He was ultimately indicted and convicted of crimes against humanity by the United Nation’s war-crimes court in The Hague.Vucic was an enthusiastic backer of Seselj’s party, and he soon became the youngest member of Serbia’s Parliament. In 1995, days after the massacre of nearly 8,000 Bosnian Muslims around Srebrenica, Vucic gave a speech in which he declared, “If you bomb us, if you kill one Serb, we will kill a hundred Muslims.” In the decades since then, Vucic has never fully apologized for crimes carried out in Serbia’s name or for his rhetoric. He has treated some convicted war criminals like heroes on their release from prisons abroad.In 1998, Vucic became information minister under Milosevic, his first position of real power. He presided over a landmark crackdown on the press, levying huge fines on organizations that criticized the government. It was the start of a preoccupation with the media that would help define Vucic’s political career.But if Milosevic and his deputy succeeded in taming the press, they were losing their hold over the stadium. Many soccer hooligans had fought in the wars, and when they came home, “they felt they could be arbiters of national identity,” I was told by Ivan Dordevic, an anthropologist at the Institute of Ethnography in Belgrade who wrote his dissertation on soccer and nationalism in the Balkans. B., my hooligan contact, put it a little differently. At the stadium, “a new generation came, and they didn’t give a [expletive]” about Arkan’s riches or his glamorous pop-star wife, Ceca, he said. They decided they had also had enough of Milosevic, who had brought Serbia to economic ruin and pariah status in Europe. At stadiums, soccer fans chanted, “Kill yourself, Slobodan!” The hooligans linked up with the political opposition and began serving as informal security during protests.The big moment came on Oct. 5, 2000, when a week of street protests culminated in the storming of the Serbian Parliament, with hooligans leading the way. Milosevic resigned the following night, and for a brief moment, Serbians were ecstatic. In recognition of the role they played in his overthrow, some hooligans had their criminal records cleared by the victorious Democratic Opposition coalition. “Nothing in police, nothing in courts,” B. said. “We’re free. We’re like angels. Clean slate.” The euphoria soon faded. Serbia’s economy was a wreck, and the European Union was not about to bail out a country widely seen as a den of unrepentant war criminals.For Vucic, the fall of Milosevic meant a moment of profound uncertainty about his own political future. Years later, he gave a strange interview that hints at his feelings of anger and thwarted ambition. “I was sitting at home and seeing it as a tragedy for the Serbian people,” he said. “Then I went outside, some junkies attacked me, so I had to beat them.” He thrashed them both and knocked them out, he said. But somehow these mysterious assailants got up and came at him again, and he thrashed them a second time. “I went back home,” Vucic said, “and I knew, of course, that Serbia was in for years of collapse and destruction.”For centuries, Serbia’s national identity has been shaped by feelings of loss and wounded pride. Serbia came under Ottoman rule not long after a legendary battle in 1389, a date you see spray-painted on walls all over the country. It did not fully regain its independence for almost 500 years. Those feelings were reawakened during the 1990s, when many Serbs believed they were unfairly portrayed as the villains of a complex civil war. They also deeply resented the American-led NATO bombing campaign in 1999 that forced the Serbian military out of Kosovo after it was accused of ethnic cleansing and murder. That expulsion allowed Kosovo, once considered a Serbian heartland, to become independent, another blow for the Serbs.Smoke rising over Novi Sad, in Serbia, after NATO airstrikes in 1999.Jaroslav Pap, Associated PressVucic and his Radical Party became standard bearers for their country’s accumulated rancor. In 2007, Vucic led a group of protesters in support of Ratko Mladic, the military commander sometimes called the Butcher of the Balkans. A year later, when the Bosnian Serb wartime leader Radovan Karadzic was arrested, Vucic was back in the streets, getting roughed up by the police.But the wind was shifting. In 2008, public-opinion research showed that most members of Vucic’s own party wanted Serbia to join the European Union. Vucic helped found a new bloc, the Serbian Progressive Party. Critics derided it as the same old party with a different look. Nonetheless, four years after its founding, Vucic’s coalition won a plurality of seats in Parliament. His party had deftly played to the middle of Serbian politics, promising prosperity, cleaner government and E.U. membership even as it catered to right-wing anger over Kosovo and other perceived wrongs. Vucic was too junior to become prime minister, but he gained control over the party. He was also given authority over all arms of the security services. He replaced the major department heads with loyalists.Vucic soon began styling himself as a warrior against corruption. He ordered a series of splashy arrests, and the media took to calling him “Serbia’s Eliot Ness.” While some were legitimate targets, more than 100 of those arrested were officials of the Democratic Party that had just been ousted in the elections. Critics deplored the move as political score-settling. But the anti-corruption campaign was popular with the public and especially with the Progressive Party’s membership, which skewed to older and less educated Serbs. The party’s ratings shot up. People wanted something to blame, and Vucic had given it to them.Among the criminals that Vucic proudly boasted of having put behind bars was Darko Saric, the Balkan region’s most powerful drug lord. Saric, the “King of Cocaine,” ran a global smuggling network and was indicted in absentia after a yearslong investigation that included the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. Vucic, who had just won the 2014 parliamentary election and was set to become the country’s new prime minister, called the arrest a triumph for Serbian law enforcement. Saric, who had returned to Serbia voluntarily and surrendered to the police, had a different perspective. The chief judge in the case told me that he asked Saric in court why he chose to give himself up. Saric, the judge recalled, replied that he felt safer in Serbia under the new Vucic-led government.Like Vucic, Belivuk was shaped by the war in Bosnia, though he was much too young to play any role in it. One morning in the late winter of 1995, when the war was at its height, an explosion tore through the Belivuk family home in Belgrade, killing three. The forensic inspector at the scene that day was a man named Caslav Ristic, already a veteran at his job. When I met him in Belgrade, he was a retiree of 63 with a ruddy face, thinning white hair and a gruff manner. He had brought yellowing newspaper clippings about the explosion, along with his own Polaroid photos from the crime scene.Belivuk’s father, Ristic told me, was a veteran who brought weapons home from the war; he was keeping two grenades in a kitchen drawer. He had been depressed, and after arguing with his wife, he walked off and triggered both grenades, apparently intending only to kill himself. His wife and mother-in-law were collateral damage. Afterward, the 9-year-old Belivuk “had to go through the hallway, past the dead bodies, to the neighbor’s house,” Ristic said. (The only visible injuries he had were some cuts.) Ristic told me it was an unusual case, but only because the father had killed himself with two grenades. “Usually they just used one,” he said.Belivuk grew up and became a bouncer in Belgrade nightclubs, acquiring a rap sheet full of petty crimes. In the early 2000s, Serbia was struggling with the toxic legacy of Milosevic, who had empowered a criminal class as a means of evading the wartime sanctions placed on Serbia’s economy. At the top end, mobsters colluded with the country’s intelligence chiefs to protect their cash flow. They were so powerful that in 2003 they killed the country’s reformist prime minister, Zoran Djindjic, who had threatened a crackdown. At the bottom end were thugs like Belivuk, foot soldiers in the rising cocaine trade.Belivuk might have remained a small-time thug had his life not intersected with the rise of Aleksandar Vucic. Around 2012, as Vucic was gaining control over the country’s security agencies, a new group of hooligans appeared in Belgrade’s Partizan Stadium, and Belivuk was asked to join. Most soccer loyalties are lifelong in Serbia, but the leaders of the new group were mainly made up of people with no prior connection to Partizan. The group’s name, the Janissaries, was a sly acknowledgment of this fact: The Janissaries were an elite Ottoman military force made up mostly of boys taken from their Christian families and molded into ruthless killers for the Ottoman state. Where earlier hooligans had informal and haphazard support from the police, mostly for drug sales, this new group’s ties to the state were direct and political. Its first leader’s name would later appear in the handwritten notes of a law-enforcement official alongside the label “state project,” in evidence uncovered by Serbian investigative reporters.Belivuk and his new boss — a fellow hooligan called Aleksandar Stankovic, known as the Mute — soon began working closely with their patrons in the interior ministry. The relationship was exposed in a series of photographs and text exchanges that surfaced in a lawsuit years later. In one of the exchanges, Belivuk stressed his fealty, and an interior ministry official texted him back: “She knows. The boss knows. The big boss knows.” The texts don’t detail who he was talking about, but the minister’s immediate superior was a woman. Vucic was then the prime minister and security chief.Belivuk would later claim in court that the Janissaries helped pull off a brazen demolition in downtown Belgrade that made way for a waterfront project that one of Vucic’s allies brokered with the leader of the United Arab Emirates. That case, in which dozens of masked men used bulldozers to destroy a street full of buildings that were in the way of the project, remains unsolved.Curiously, the Janissaries also appear to have helped ensure the safety of gay-pride parades for Vucic. It was a little out of character for the hooligans, a flamboyantly homophobic crowd who had turned the occasion into a bloody melee in years past. But Vucic apparently felt that the violence was becoming an obstacle for Serbia’s application to join the E.U. According to B., who was not himself present, Vucic organized a closed-door meeting with a group of hooligan leaders, holding up a thick packet of case files and promising them that any prior criminal charges against them would be suspended if they kept the peace during gay-pride events. The parades went smoothly after that.I wasn’t able to confirm that Vucic ever held such a meeting. (Vucic rarely gives foreign-media interviews, and his spokespeople did not respond to my requests for one.) But Stankovic — Belivuk’s boss — does appear to have had his cases suspended. When he became leader of the gang, he had already been sentenced to five years in prison for drug trafficking and illegal weapons possession. In the following years, the sentence was deferred a dozen times on phony medical claims, using doctors’ forms that later turned out to be falsified, according to documents unearthed by Vreme, a Belgrade weekly.Soon afterward, Vucic was asked during an interview if he planned to do something about the rise in hooligan violence. He replied that he lacked the power to do so, because there was no “general social consensus” on the issue. It was quintessential Vucic: part dog-whistle, part provocation and soon forgotten amid Serbia’s constant swirl of real and manufactured crises.President Vucic at a session of the National Security Council. He has tried to win Serbia’s entry to the European Union while also maintaining hard-line nationalist positions.Srdjan IlicAs he consolidated power, Vucic steadily reshaped Serbia into an autocracy. In 2019, the nonprofit Freedom House downgraded Serbia in its annual assessment of democracies from free to partly free, citing the politicization of the judiciary and other institutions and elections fraught with bullying and bribes. Yet Serbia’s application to join the E.U. has rolled blithely along, as if the bureaucrats in Brussels haven’t noticed that Vucic is moving in the wrong direction.One important lever of power for Vucic is the media. He has used the state telecommunications company to buy up local TV stations, and his allies run a triad of media organizations that shamelessly follow the Progressive Party line and give plentiful airtime to Vucic himself. These include a TV network called Pink that specializes in glitzy talk shows and reality TV. But the most shameless is Informer, a scandal sheet that features hatchet jobs and images of buxom women.In early 2017, Vucic announced that he would run for president. The campaign that followed was rife with accusations of voter intimidation, with some public employees saying they were pressured to support the ruling party, according to a report by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. Media coverage was dominated by the party’s organs, which smeared Vucic’s rivals. He received 120 times the coverage of the two leading opposition candidates combined, according to Birodi, an independent research group.Vucic won the presidency by a sizable margin. With his party dominating Parliament, he now controlled every branch of government and was able to pick his successor as prime minister, a move that earned comparisons to Putin, who in 2008 placed Dmitri Medvedev in the president’s chair to provide a mirage of democratic order in Russia. During Vucic’s inauguration ceremony, hooligans, including a member of the Janissaries, helped to rough up and remove protesters. Vucic’s governing style was becoming more openly authoritarian, with sycophantic public displays of loyalty by his allies.At the same time, Vucic grew more open in his courtship of the authoritarian leaders of Russia, Hungary and China. Despite all these signs of slippage, European leaders continued to greet him warmly, doling out investments and giving no indication that Serbia’s E.U. application was in any danger. (In 2020, the E.U. donated about 300 million euros to Serbia and accounted for 62 percent of Serbia’s trade.) The reason was no secret: Kosovo’s status is still unresolved. The Europeans were pinning their hopes on Vucic to oversee a settlement. “He is very powerful, someone who can deliver on things if he wants to,” one German diplomat told me. “He could be the one to deliver substantial progress on Kosovo.”Vucic sent reassuring signals to the Europeans, but he had other messages for his conservative base and for the Serbian nationalists he supports in Bosnia, Kosovo and Montenegro. (He shares this defiant language with Putin, who has repeatedly affirmed his opposition to Kosovo’s independence.) These messages are often delivered by Aleksandar Vulin, the interior minister, who regularly complains that ethnic Serbs in other Balkan countries are being mistreated. Vulin and other nationalists drop hints that their true goal is a Greater Serbia — the same dream that helped lead the Balkans into war in 1991.The gangs have their role to play in these political charades. Northern Kosovo, with its mostly Serb population, is nominally under the control of the national government in Pristina. In reality, it is dominated by organized crime groups that are widely seen as allies of Vucic’s party and have been accused by the U.S. Treasury Department of conspiring with Serbian security officials in smuggling rackets. That gives Vucic an important lever to dial regional tensions up or down. But as tools of state, mobsters can be unreliable.The first sign of real trouble in the Vucic administration’s relationship with the hooligans came on the night of Oct. 13, 2016. Belivuk had just left his Belgrade gym alongside his boss, Stankovic, when a team of assassins sped past in a black Audi and opened fire with Kalashnikovs. As Belivuk cowered behind a car, the gunmen sped away, leaving Stankovic dead. The crime scene was soon swarming with police, according to a meticulously documented story published last fall in Vreme. One of the officers, on the phone with his boss, shouted, “Who’s Belivuk?” When Belivuk responded, the officer said, apparently referring to his superior, “She told you to go back to the hide-out.” The gang had a new leader.The site where Aleksandar Stanković was murdered in 2016.Jehad Nga for The New York TimesThe murder may have been related to Stankovic’s role as a “state project.” According to the Vreme report, Stankovic, who had been driving around in an armored Audi outfitted with a police radio, was receiving cocaine shipments at lower prices than other gangsters, and they were angry. But the broader lesson of the Stankovic murder was that the Belivuk gang had become embroiled in an increasingly violent war among the region’s drug clans. The cocaine trade was more profitable than ever, with Latin American cartels turning their eyes to the growing European market. Although much of Europe’s cocaine arrives via container ports in Northern Europe, the Balkan route was becoming more important, and much of it was focused on Montenegro, Serbia’s southern neighbor. Montenegro is tiny — the population is just over 600,000 — but it has certain features that make it well suited to the trade, including a long Adriatic coastline. Like Sicily, it is poor and dominated by clans with a reputation for lawlessness. And it has a history of smuggling, a practice abetted by the government during the civil wars of the 1990s.The gang war started after the fall of Darko Saric, the drug lord whose arrest Vucic announced with such ceremony in 2014. Saric had built a narcotics base in Kotor, a gorgeous medieval port town on the Montenegrin coast that is a UNESCO World Heritage site. A group of Kotor traffickers inherited his mantle and then split into rival clans over a 200-kilogram shipment of cocaine. The war quickly turned deadly, with tit-for-tat assassinations taking place in Serbia and Montenegro. The warring clans, Kavac and Skaljar, had built ties to police and intelligence agencies across the Balkans, which were being drawn into the violence.Stankovic’s murder was seen in Belgrade as a sign that the war of the clans was getting out of hand. On the morning after Stankovic’s death, the Serbian interior minister at the time, Nebojsa Stefanovic, held a news conference to announce that enough was enough: It was time to crack down on the mafia. As it happened, things were about to get much worse.One of Belivuk’s first acts as boss was to change his gang’s name to the Principi. In an interview with a Belgrade weekly — the only one he is known to have given — he said it was because he acted “from principles.” He did not say what those principles were. The name carried another tacit association: Gavrilo Princip, the Bosnian Serb nationalist who set off the First World War by killing Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914 and who is still widely considered a hero among Serbs for his brave stand against the Austro-Hungarian empire.Belivuk made bigger headlines a few months later, when he and his top lieutenant, Marko Milikjovic, known as the Butcher, were accused of gunning down a man in central Belgrade. The victim was a martial-arts expert who worked security at a Belgrade nightclub on one of the riverfront rafts. On his favorite outlet, Pink TV, President Vucic explained that this man was targeted “because he prevented some of Belivuk’s and Milikjovic’s people from taking over the rafts. When you come to the bunker at the stadium, you get a gram of drugs for 50 euros, and then it spreads throughout Serbia, they sell it on the raft for 70. That price only goes up. And that’s why this man was killed.” Hearing that, Belivuk might easily have imagined that his state support had dried up. Instead, a familiar pattern reasserted itself. The DNA evidence implicating Belivuk mysteriously disappeared, and he and his deputy were both acquitted (though they did serve some jail time before the verdict).Another sign of Belivuk’s untouchability was the appearance of a guest in the soccer stands: Danilo Vucic, the president’s oldest son. Photographs of Danilo with his arms around members of the Belivuk gang appeared in Belgrade’s independent media, prompting the president to lash out in fury and accuse reporters of unfairly targeting his family. Vucic has repeatedly said that his son, who works in a wine shop, is a private citizen with no official position. But Danilo appears to play an ambiguously political role. Two years ago, he publicly welcomed a Serbian war criminal after he had served his time in Croatia, and, according to Serbian media reports, handed him $30,000 in cash, along with the keys to a Belgrade apartment and a car. The origin of this largess has not been explained. (Vucic’s spokespeople did not respond to requests for comment.) Danilo has also been photographed standing with the leader of the People’s Patrol, a far-right nationalist group that stages anti-immigration protests and recently threatened to cross the border in defense of ethnic Serbs living in Kosovo.In Serbia, the stadium can make or break a president.Jehad Nga for The New York TimesBy 2019, Belivuk and his gang had established a bunker inside Partizan stadium where they tortured victims and stored drugs and weapons. They had bigger things on their minds than soccer: The war between the two Montenegrin cocaine factions was upending organized crime across the region. “Most significant organized criminal groups have decided to join one of these two rival criminal groups,” was the conclusion of a Serbian intelligence document, cited in an investigation by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, an international consortium, in May 2020.It wasn’t just criminals driving the clan war. Some Serbian and Montenegrin police and intelligence agencies had sided with the Kavac clan, according to the information from the reporting project. (The police in both countries deny any connection with the gangs.) The assassinations started in the streets of Belgrade and Podgorica but soon spread to Spain, Austria, Germany, the Netherlands and Greece. Several Balkan reporters who have monitored the clan war told me that the current body count is more than 70.The Belivuk gang was becoming more visible beyond Serbia’s borders. In 2019, the Spanish Coast Guard seized 800 kilograms of cocaine on a ship coming from South America. The drugs were worth 50 million euros. Although there is no evidence that the three Serbian sailors on the boat were directly linked to the Belivuk gang, many of the cocaine packages bore the image of Gavrilo Princip, the gang’s signature.There is little doubt that Belivuk and his gang are in prison because Europol cracked the code on Sky-ECC, exposing the group’s incriminating texts and photographs. What remains unclear is what the Serbian authorities knew and what they intended to do about it. The Europol officials I met with in The Hague were cagey about how and when they communicated with Serbia regarding the Sky data. Officially, the intercepts were handed over after Belivuk’s arrest, and those intercepts formed the basis of the indictment. But Europol (or one of its partners) appears to have tipped off the Serbs several months earlier. Serbia’s former interior minister, Nebojsa Stefanovic, said as much, asserting that the arrest was made possible by Sky intercepts. And in October 2020 Vucic, during a rambling statement about gang violence, said he had been hearing about gruesome crimes for weeks, then added cryptically, “And don’t let the whole town tell us about how someone cut someone’s head off via Skype.”That comment got the attention of Stevan Dojcinovic, one of Serbia’s foremost investigative reporters. Dojcinovic is a founder of the Crime and Corruption Reporting Network and has been writing about the Belivuk gang and its ties to the state since 2016. He has been the target of many threats and attacks in the Vucic-allied media, which have labeled him, among other things, a terrorist, a spy, a mobster, a drug addict, a traitor and a sadomasochist. Dojcinovic is a small man with a sensitive, foxlike face and a nose ring. He and his staff work out of a Belgrade office so tiny and full of documents that walking into it is like entering an overstuffed closet. Dojcinovic told me that he believes Vucic’s comment about beheadings (he apparently confused Sky with Skype) may have been a final warning to the gang. “The Belivuk gang had been useful to the state, but they were getting out of control, getting too violent,” Dojcinovic said. “Also they were being watched from outside, the Europeans had informed the Serbian police about the Sky intercepts.”If Dojcinovic is right, the Serbian authorities had not decided what to do about Belivuk and his gang as late as October 2020. They were definitely concerned, because court documents show that the Serbian police started surveilling the gang in early August, six months before the arrests. But it seems they were not concerned enough to stop the gang from torturing and killing people.Thanks to the Sky-ECC messages uncovered by Europol, we now have an appallingly precise record of what happened to some of the men who started disappearing in Belgrade in 2019. The Belivuk gang developed a murder routine and refined it, with dozens of henchmen playing different roles. Sometimes they tempted the victim with drug or gun deals; in one case they tricked a rival into believing an associate had captured Belivuk and he could now kill him. The Sky text messages often provide a minute-by-minute trail of the crimes.One of the men they targeted was a 33-year-old rival hooligan leader named Goran Velickovic. He was a prominent, well-liked figure at Partizan Stadium. He was married to his childhood sweetheart and had two small children and a job with his cousin fixing windows. In photographs, he has ruddy cheeks, cheerful brown eyes and a massive chest, with a tattoo visible on his thickly muscled right forearm that says “The Young Boys,” the name of his fan group.Velickovic knew all about the stadium and its rivalries. What troubled him, his widow, Jelena, told me, was the role the police played. “The thing that really worried us, there were police who were there to provide assistance to rival groups,” Jelena said. “If you’re part of such a group, it gives you unimaginable power. And if you’re against that group, you cannot protect yourself.”In early August 2020, Goran went out to meet a friend and never came back. It would be months before Jelena knew for certain what happened. Only when she saw the Sky evidence from the indictment did she understand: Goran had been lured out of Belgrade by a man he trusted to a dirt road alongside a deserted wheat field. The Belivuk gang ambushed him, tied him up and drove him to their slaughterhouse, even as Jelena was feeding the babies and making dinner for her husband.Jelena Velickovic’s husband, Goran, was one of the alleged murder victims of a gang currently on trial in Belgrade.Jehad Nga for The New York TimesThe gang had prepared a torture chamber in a hidden room accessed via the garage. There were handcuffs and straps, along with blades, hot irons and disposable work clothes. The meat grinder stood at one end. Before every murder, gang members laid out fresh plastic sheeting on the floor and walls.According to the indictment, they brought Goran inside the room and interrogated him, forcing him to unlock his phone and go through his contacts. They pulled off his fingernails with pliers, beat him, and finished him off by beheading him with an ax. They carved an insult onto Goran’s back with a knife, took some photographs and sent them to contacts on his phone. One photo went with a text: “See honey? Mexico in the middle of Belgrade.”The gang’s leaders, the Sky intercepts reveal, often reveled in torture. During another murder a few weeks later, Belivuk and his right-hand man called in on their Sky phones from Montenegro (where they were carrying out three other killings) to encourage their henchmen in Belgrade to give “102 percent of yourself” to the torture of the latest victim. The Sky transcripts show that they asked the phone to be put close to the victim so that they could curse him and tell him they were planning to kill his father and brother and “everything you’ve ever known and loved.” Later, Belivuk texted again, asking one of his subordinates to describe the torture at length and “don’t skip those juicy details for me.”After each victim was dead, the men followed the same ritual. They used axes and knives to cut the body into small chunks, then fed them through the meat grinder, gathering the remains in bags which they upended into the Danube. They burned the bags, along with all the victim’s clothes and belongings. They also destroyed the bloodied plastic sheeting and cleaned the meat grinder with acid and bleach. But that was not the end of it. In almost every case, prosecutors say, they texted the victim’s family members, often pretending to be him, and found ways to extract money, drugs and cars.Jelena Velickovic told me that until the day she found out what happened to her husband — by seeing photographs of his mangled body on a Serbian TV show — she found it hard to believe that Belivuk was responsible.“He was almost a friend,” she said. “I met him lots of times at the stadium. My husband, too.” Years earlier, when she took her first child to the stadium for a game, it was Belivuk who congratulated her. And, in keeping with Serbian custom, he even gave her money for the baby, a gift of 50 euros. “He was nice at the time,” she said. “I could never imagine that a guy who gave us gifts for our child, that this guy could kill my husband.”Jelena is a small woman with large, dark eyes, round features and a look of resigned melancholy. Tattoos cover her arms, including a recent one that says in Serbian, “The pain I feel today will be my power tomorrow.”Jelena’s lawyer, sitting with us, told me she believed Belivuk and his men weren’t born monsters. It took the government to make that happen. “Belivuk was a victim of unrealistic expectations,” she said. “He had illusions of grandeur. He and his friends became victims themselves. Someone fed them delusions.”A meat grinder in a hide-out that gang members used to dispose of the bodies of murder victims.Photograph from the Serbian Ministry of InteriorIn the two years since the Belivuk gang was arrested, Vucic has repeatedly said the case marked a decisive break with the past. “We will clean the state institutions of all their collaborators,” he declared at the first news conference after the arrests. He later told a group of journalists: “This is important for us, but also for ordinary citizens. Restaurant and bar owners will not have to worry about someone coming and wanting to racketeer them and then they are afraid to report it to the police because they don’t know if someone in the police is well connected to these killers.” It was a message calculated to appeal to Serbs who were troubled by what they heard about the Belivuk case. It may also have been aimed at the European Union, which will not admit Serbia to the club until it gets more serious about the rule of law.There were a number of reasons to doubt the president’s promise. He has said similar things in the past, and Belivuk is widely viewed in Serbia as the latest in a long series of useful thugs, as replaceable as Aleksandar Stankovic before him. The bigger reason is that the Serbian authorities continue to be cozy with drug dealers and gangs. One of the more sensational recent examples was the discovery of a sprawling marijuana farm 30 miles outside Belgrade that, according to prosecutors, was being protected by police and military officers. The farm, designed to produce highly concentrated forms of cannabis, appears to have been Europe’s largest.And Vucic’s relationship with outlaws goes beyond Serbia. In 2018, a Kosovo businessman who is accused by the U.S. TreasuryDepartment of large-scale drug and weapons trafficking was charged in the murder of a politician there. Vucic defended him, calling him “a man who defends the Serbian people and the hearths of northern Kosovo.” Paradoxically, Vucic’s influence in northern Kosovo is part of the reason the European Union sees him as a valuable partner. He demonstrated that power late last year during a border crisis that briefly threatened to tip into open conflict.The confrontation heated up, perhaps not coincidentally, during a European Union summit meeting in December at which Vucic reaffirmed his refusal to participate in the E.U.’s sanctions on Russia. Ethnic Serbs in northern Kosovo barricaded the roads, blocking the movements of the Kosovan authorities. Protesters gathered on the Serbian side of the border, including members of the People’s Patrol, the Serbian nationalist organization that has documented ties to Russia’s paramilitary Wagner group. Belgrade sent its own troops to the border, threatening to step in and defend the Serbs of Kosovo. Vucic then held a meeting with a group of Kosovan Serbs, and the crisis came to an end. Needless to say, the border fracas got the attention of the European Union. In mid-March, the leaders of Serbia and Kosovo tentatively agreed to an E.U.-sponsored plan to normalize relations, but Vucic has refused to commit to anything in writing.A roadblock in near the northern part of an ethnically-divided town in Kosovo in 2022. Serbia’s leaders remain deeply unhappy about Kosovo’s breakaway from Serbia.Florion Goga, ReutersAlmost a decade ago, an American scholar and analyst named Daniel Serwer helped to arrange Vucic’s first public appearance in Washington, D.C. Serwer worked in the Balkans in the 1990s and he knew all about Vucic’s nationalist roots. But he was disappointed with the record of other Serbian political leaders. He told me Vucic made no promises about Kosovo, but said he would move closer to the European Union. Serwer found Vucic intelligent and serious. There was some hope, he told me, that Vucic could be a “Nixon in China” figure, capable of bringing his party’s conservative base to a fuller reconciliation with Serbia’s neighbors.Serwer told me that his attitude toward Vucic has changed radically. “Vucic is now deadly serious about the ‘Serbian world,’” he said. Those words, invoked often by Serbian nationalists, convey the idea that Serbia is entitled to dominate the lands where ethnic Serbs live, including several neighboring countries. “He had the opportunity to move in a pro-E.U. direction, and he chose not to.” Serwer speculated that Vucic has concluded the reforms required to join the E.U. would weaken his hold on power or perhaps even land him in jail. That is what happened to the former prime minister of Croatia, Ivo Sanader, who presided over most of his country’s preparations for accession only to be arrested and imprisoned on corruption charges (he remains in prison today). Sanader’s fate has become a cautionary tale for Balkan would-be reformers.The United States and the E.U. have continued to cater to Vucic, focusing their policies on economic growth and mostly ignoring his illiberalism. The Trump administration seemed especially favorable to Vucic, openly siding with him in a regional tariff dispute and forcing the collapse of a popular government in Kosovo. Trump sent an abrasive special envoy to the region, Richard Grenell, who seemed bent on brokering a Serbia-Kosovo “deal of the century” to enhance Trump’s prospects in the 2020 presidential election. (It did not happen.)Serwer and a number of other Balkan experts say that the United States and the European Union are missing an opportunity to push Vucic in a more democratic direction. “We have more leverage in the western Balkans than anywhere on earth,” I was told by Kurt Bassuener, a scholar who has written extensively on the Balkans. “And yet we’re building our policy on Vucic and people like him.” If Vucic knew he risked losing much of his Western financial and diplomatic support, Bassuener said, his calculus might change about all kinds of things, including his habit of coddling criminals and hooligans. The notion that Serbia can “balance” the West against Russia is largely a mirage, Bassuener said. Russia may be Serbia’s traditional ally, but Putin, who is struggling to rebuild his own shattered army, has little of substance to offer ordinary Serbs.One afternoon in Belgrade, I spent an hour talking to Boris Tadic, who served as Serbia’s president from 2004 until 2012, when he lost to Vucic’s party. He told me that organized crime has become so powerful in Serbia that it is difficult to know who is calling the shots. During his own time in office, he said, he was amazed to discover that the criminal gangs “had better equipment and technology than our police.” The cocaine cartels had become so lucrative that they could corrupt anyone. Tadic said he had fought the mafia with some success. Vucic, he said, had “helped put criminals in power” with the belief that he could control them. It was a dangerous gamble.“What is the final outcome of your power if you’re going to destroy the foundations of society with hooligans and criminals?” he asked. Tadic glanced uneasily around us at the hotel courtyard. “Who is running this country?” he asked. “Maybe some companions of Belivuk are sitting next to us.”Robert F. Worth is a contributing writer for the magazine and former chief of The Times’s Beirut bureau whose book on the 2011 Arab Uprisings, “A Rage for Order,” won the 2017 Lionel Gelber prize. More

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    In the Deal to Free Griner, Putin Used a Familiar Lever: Pain

    President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia wants to prosecute his war in Ukraine in the same way he secured the freedom on Thursday of a major Russian arms dealer: inflict so much pain on Western governments that, eventually, they make a deal.The Kremlin pushed for more than a decade to get Viktor Bout, convicted in 2011 of conspiring to kill Americans, released from prison in the United States. But it was only this year, with the arrest at a Moscow airport of the American basketball star Brittney Griner, that Mr. Putin found the leverage to get his way.On Thursday, pro-Kremlin voices celebrated Mr. Bout’s release, in a prisoner exchange for Ms. Griner, as a victory, a sign that no matter the desire to punish Russia over the war in Ukraine, the United States will still come to the table when key American interests are at play. Russia negotiated from “a position of strength, comrades,” Maria Butina — a pro-Putin member of Parliament who herself served time in an American prison — posted on the Telegram messaging app.Mr. Putin’s emerging strategy in Ukraine, in the wake of his military’s repeated failures, now increasingly echoes the strategy that finally brought Mr. Bout back to Moscow. He is bombarding Ukrainian energy infrastructure, effectively taking its people hostage as he seeks to break the country’s spirit. The tactic is threatening the European Union with a new wave of refugees just as Mr. Putin uses a familiar economic lever: choking off gas exports. And Mr. Putin is betting that the West, even after showing far more unity in support of Ukraine than Mr. Putin appears to have expected, will eventually tire of the fight and its economic ill effects.The American basketball star Brittney Griner, who was arrested in March, was released from a penal colony on Thursday. Here, she is being escorted to a Moscow courtroom last August.Pool photo by Kirill KudryavtsevThere’s no guarantee that strategy will work. Though President Biden yielded on Mr. Bout, he has shown no inclination to relent on United States support for Ukraine. America’s European allies, while facing some domestic political and economic pressure to press for a compromise with Russia, have remained on board.In the face of this Western solidarity, Mr. Putin repeatedly signaled this week that he is willing to keep fighting, despite embarrassing territorial retreats, Russian casualties that the United States puts at more than 100,000 and the West’s ever-expanding sanctions. On Wednesday, he warned that the war “might be a long process.” And at a Kremlin medal ceremony for soldiers on Thursday, Mr. Putin insisted — falsely — that it was Ukraine’s government that was carrying out “genocide,” suggesting that Russia’s attacks on Ukrainian energy infrastructure would continue.“If we make the smallest move to respond, there’s noise, din and clamor across the whole universe,” he said, champagne flute in hand, in remarks broadcast on state television. “This will not prevent us from fulfilling our combat missions.”Mr. Putin did not comment on the prisoner exchange himself on Thursday. But in the context of the Ukraine war, there was a clear undertone to the crowing in Moscow: To supporters, Mr. Putin remains a deal maker, and he stands ready to negotiate over Ukraine as long as the West does not block his goal of pulling the country into his orbit and seizing some of its territory.“He’s signaling that he’s ready to bargain,” Tatiana Stanovaya, a political analyst who studies Mr. Putin, said. “But he’s letting the West know that ‘Ukraine is ours.’”Heavily damaged buildings in Bakhmut, Ukraine, last week.Tyler Hicks/The New York TimesAsked when the war could end, Mr. Putin’s spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, hinted on Thursday that Russia is still waiting for President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine to accept some kind of deal: “Zelensky knows when this could all end. It could end tomorrow, if there’s a will.”But when one of Mr. Putin’s top spies, Sergei Naryshkin, met with the head of the C.I.A., William Burns, in Turkey last month, Mr. Burns did not discuss a settlement to the Ukraine war, American officials said. Instead, Mr. Burns warned of dire consequences for Moscow were it to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine, and discussed the fate of Americans imprisoned in Russia, including Ms. Griner.“The Russian negotiating style is, they punch you in the face and then they ask if you want to negotiate,” said Jeremy Shapiro, a former State Department official who now works as research director at the European Council on Foreign Relations think tank. “The Americans respond to that by saying, ‘You know, you just punched us in the face, you clearly don’t want to negotiate.’”Nevertheless, negotiations on some issues have continued even as Russia’s onslaught of missile attacks has escalated, talks blessed by Mr. Putin despite occasional criticism from the most hawkish supporters of his war.Russia’s pro-war bloggers fumed in September when Mr. Putin agreed to an earlier high-profile exchange: commanders of the Azov Battalion, a nationalist fighting force within the Ukrainian military that gained celebrity status for its defense of a besieged steel plant, for a friend of Mr. Putin, the Ukrainian politician Viktor Medvedchuk. Some critics have slammed Mr. Putin’s agreement to allow Ukrainian grain exports through the Black Sea as representing an undue concession.President Vladimir V. Putin, third from left, inspecting the Kerch Strait Bridge this week. The bridge, which connects the Russian mainland and the Crimean Peninsula, was badly damaged in a Ukrainian attack in October.Mikhail Metzel/Sputnik, via ReutersAnd then there were the talks surrounding Mr. Bout and Ms. Griner. On the surface, the exchange appeared to be a mismatch, given the wide disparity in the severity of their offenses: one of the world’s most prolific arms dealers and an American basketball star detained for traveling with vape cartridges containing hashish oil.But Mr. Biden showed he was prepared to invest significant political capital in securing Ms. Griner’s freedom, while the Kremlin has long sought Mr. Bout’s release.“We know that attempts to help Bout have been made for many years,” said Andrei Kortunov, director general of the Russian International Affairs Council, a research organization close to the Russian government. “He has also become a symbolic figure” for the Kremlin, he added.Mr. Bout became notorious among American intelligence officials, earning the nickname “Merchant of Death” as he evaded capture for years. He was finally arrested in an undercover operation in Bangkok in 2008, with American prosecutors saying he had agreed to sell antiaircraft weapons to informants posing as arms buyers for the Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces, or FARC.Some analysts believe that Mr. Bout has connections to Russia’s intelligence services. Such links have not been publicly confirmed, but they could explain why Mr. Putin — a former K.G.B. officer — has put such stock in working for Mr. Bout’s release.“If he were just some arms dealer and cargo magnate, then it is hard to see why it would have been quite such a priority for the Russian state,” Mark Galeotti, a lecturer on Russia and transnational crime at University College London, said last summer.President Biden at a news conference on Thursday with Brittney Griner’s wife, Cherelle Griner, left, Vice President Kamala Harris and Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken in Washington.Brendan Smialowski/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThat means that the U.S. decision to free Mr. Bout — likely the most prominent Russian in American custody — represented a significant compromise. It was magnified by the fact that the United States accepted the exchange even though Russia declined to also release Paul Whelan, a former Marine the Biden administration also considers a political hostage.Some analysts believe that the decision to free Mr. Bout carries risks because it could encourage Mr. Putin to take new hostages — and shows that his strategy of causing pain, and then winning concessions, is continuing to bear fruit.Andrei Soldatov, a Russian journalist who specializes in the security services, said that he was worried about the precedent set by Washington’s agreeing to trade an arms dealer for a basketball player who committed a minor offense.“Back in the days of the Cold War, it was always about professionals against professionals, one spy against another,” he said. While the United States must contend with public demand at home to return a hostage, the Russians can “ignore it completely,” he said.Now, Moscow “can just grab someone with a high public profile in the U.S. — an athlete, a sportsman,” he said. Public outcry in the U.S. “would make that position much more advantageous in terms of these kind of talks.” More

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    Why Brittney Griner and Other Athletes Choose Cannabis for Pain

    Griner, the W.N.B.A. star detained in Russia on drug charges, is one of many athletes who have said cannabis helps with sports injuries. But it is banned by sports leagues and illegal in many places.Shawn Kemp played most of his N.B.A. career before the league began testing players for marijuana use in 1999. So after playing in the bruising, physical games typical of the N.B.A. in the 1990s, he would smoke. He didn’t like taking pain-relief pills.“I was able to go home and smoke pot, and it was able to benefit my body, calm my body down,” said Kemp, who is 6-foot-10 and was upward of 230 pounds during his 14-year career of highlight-reel dunks, mostly with the Seattle SuperSonics. He said the drug seemed to help with inflammation in his knees and other joints.Now Kemp, 52, owns a stake in a Seattle marijuana dispensary bearing his name.In the two decades since the N.B.A. and its players’ union agreed to begin testing for marijuana, or cannabis, the drug’s perception has undergone a makeover in the United States, where it has been illegal for decades. Researchers don’t fully understand its possible medical benefits or harmful effects, but it has become legal in many states and some professional sports leagues are reconsidering punitive policies around its use. Many athletes say they use cannabis for pain management.Brittney Griner is one of them.Griner, a W.N.B.A. star, was detained in Russia in February after customs officials said they found vape cartridges with hashish oil, a cannabis derivative, in her luggage. Cannabis is illegal in Russia, and Griner, 31, faces a 10-year sentence in a Russian penal colony on drug trafficking charges if she is formally convicted. She has pleaded guilty, but testified that she did not intend to pack the cartridges. Her legal team said she was authorized to use medicinal cannabis in Arizona, where she has played for the Phoenix Mercury since 2013.Griner’s case has drawn attention to the debate over marijuana use for recreation and relief. The U.S. State Department said it considered Griner to be “wrongfully detained” and would work for her release no matter how the trial ended. But in the United States, thousands of people are in prison for using or selling marijuana, and it remains illegal at the federal level even as dozens of states have legalized it for medicinal use or recreational use. It is banned in the W.N.B.A.Kemp and many others are urging sports leagues and lawmakers to change.Shawn Kemp at the grand opening of his cannabis shop in Seattle in 2020. He said his 14-year N.B.A. career might have been longer had he been able to use marijuana without penalty in his final years.Ted S. Warren/Associated Press“There’s still a lot for people to learn throughout the world with this stuff,” Kemp said. “And hopefully they will someday, where people will see cannabis oil and all these things and realize some athletes use this stuff to benefit their body, calm their body down from beating up their body so much on a daily basis.”Kemp said he was deeply saddened when he heard about Griner’s detention.“I’m such a fan of hers, to see her with that big, tall body to be able to move the way she does. She’s changed the game of the W.N.B.A.,” he said.In testimony at her trial, Griner described injuries to her spine, ankle and knees, some of which required her to use a wheelchair for months, according to Reuters. Like Kemp, the 6-foot-9 Griner has endured bumping and banging as she battled for rebounds and dunks. Many athletes believe marijuana is healthier for dealing with pain and anxiety than the addictive opioids and other medications historically prescribed by doctors.Eugene Monroe, a former N.F.L. player who has invested in cannabis companies, said he began using cannabis for pain relief after he realized other types of medications were not working for him.“Going into the building every day, getting Vicodin, anti-inflammatories — there was something about that, over time, that made me think: ‘Am I even needing these pills? Is this an addiction causing me to come in here and see the team doctor?’” Monroe said.The N.F.L. relaxed its marijuana policy in 2020 to allow for limited use, but it can still fine and suspend players for exceeding the limits. In the basketball leagues, only repeated offenses lead to a suspension. Griner will not face punishment from the W.N.B.A. if she returns to the league, an official who was not authorized to speak on the record because of the sensitivity of the matter told The New York Times.The N.B.A. halted testing when the coronavirus pandemic began, saying it was focusing on performance-enhancing drugs instead. Major League Baseball removed marijuana from its list of banned substances in 2019, but players can still be disciplined for being under the influence during team activities or breaking the law to use it (as, for example, they could be for driving under the influence of alcohol). The N.H.L. tests for marijuana, but does not penalize players for a positive result.Calvin Johnson, right, the former Detroit Lions star, with Rob Sims, his partner in a cannabis business, in June 2021. Johnson and Sims looked at marijuana plants for their business.Carlos Osorio/Associated PressLast year, Kevin Durant, the All-Star forward for the N.B.A.’s Nets, announced a partnership with the tech company Weedmaps, which helps users find marijuana dispensaries. “I think it’s far past time to address the stigmas around cannabis that still exist in the sports world as well as globally,” Durant told ESPN, which said he declined to discuss whether he used marijuana.Al Harrington, a retired N.B.A. player who has invested in cannabis companies, told GQ last year that he thought 85 percent of N.B.A. players used “some type of cannabis.”The W.N.B.A.’s Sue Bird has endorsed a cannabis products brand aimed at athletes. Lauren Jackson, a women’s basketball great, credited medicinal cannabis for her long-awaited return to the court this year after dealing with chronic knee pain. She is listed on the advisory board of an Australian company that sells cannabis products. Many former N.B.A. and N.F.L. players, like the retired Detroit Lions star Calvin Johnson, have invested in cannabis companies.About a month before Griner’s detention became public, the N.F.L. announced it had granted $1 million in total to the University of California, San Diego, and Canada’s University of Regina to study the effects of cannabinoids — the compounds in cannabis — on pain management. U.C. San Diego’s research will involve professional rugby players.Until recently, cannabis research has typically focused on abuse and whether it enhances performance in sports, rather than any potential benefits.In 2017, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine said a review of research since 1999 had shown “substantial evidence that cannabis is an effective treatment for chronic pain in adults.” But its review also found indications that cannabis use can hinder learning, memory and attention and that its regular use likely increases the risk of developing social anxiety disorders. There was also moderate evidence that regularly smoking marijuana could cause respiratory problems.Another review published in the Clinical Journal of Sport Medicine in 2018 found that early cannabis research showed a decrease in athletic performance. It also said there was little research examining cannabis use in elite athletes.Kevin Boehnke, a researcher at the University of Michigan’s Chronic Pain and Fatigue Research Center, said “cannabis tends to be safer” than anti-inflammatories and opioids that are often used for chronic pain.“That doesn’t mean it’s without risk,” he said, but added that the goal should be to use treatments that are the “lowest risk and most acceptable to the person who’s using it.”“At this point there’s not really a good justification from at least a pain management standpoint of why that should not be an available tool,” he said.Dr. David R. McDuff, the director of the sports psychiatry program at the University of Maryland, said many substance abuse referrals early in his career involved athletes who were binge-drinking alcohol. Later, he saw a shift to patients who were using cannabis.“If you look at the universe of people that use cannabis, about 10 percent of those will develop a cannabis use disorder,” said Dr. McDuff, who specializes in addiction and trauma. “They can be very serious. They usually will start by reducing motivation and initiative.”He said he was particularly concerned about how cannabis could affect adolescents’ brain development.Despite his caution, Dr. McDuff said he believes cannabis has medicinal properties that should be better studied. He said one barrier to that happening in the United States is marijuana’s federal classification as a Schedule I drug, meaning it is said to have no medical use and is likely to be abused. It is in the same category as drugs like heroin and ecstasy.Griner said she used cannabis products to manage pain from basketball injuries.Ethan Miller/Getty ImagesDennis Jensen, a researcher at McGill University in Montreal, said Canada’s 2018 marijuana legalization opened the door for more research there.“There’s a lot of anecdotes, there’s a lot of individual athlete reports, but the research does not necessarily support or refute anything that they’re saying as of yet,” he said.Riley Cote, a former member of the N.H.L.’s Philadelphia Flyers, said he tried marijuana as a youth player and found that it relieved his pain from fighting during games, even though he didn’t understand why. He co-founded Athletes for CARE, a nonprofit that promotes education and research for using cannabis and hemp as therapeutic alternatives. It receives some funding from cannabis product and branding companies.Anna Symonds, a professional rugby player and a member of Athletes for CARE, said she was heartbroken and frustrated when she learned why Griner had been detained. “It’s ridiculous that cannabis is criminalized, and that causes many more problems than it ever could solve,” she said.Symonds said she tried painkillers and muscle relaxants to ease the pain from muscle spasms and herniated and bulging discs in her back. Nothing, she said, worked like cannabis.Ricky Williams, a former N.F.L. player, said he hoped Griner’s situation would cause people to think about those imprisoned in the United States for cannabis-related offenses. Williams started a cannabis brand last year.He won the Heisman Trophy in 1998, but had a halting N.F.L. career in part because of discipline from the league related to his marijuana use.Ricky Williams, who played 11 seasons in the N.F.L., said using marijuana helped him realize he did not want to play football anymore.Photo By Eliot J. Schechter/Getty Images“I value feeling good, and I’m comfortable pushing the boundary of the rules, so I kept on going with it,” Williams said. “For me it became an issue because what I did for a living conflicted with my choice to consume cannabis.”Using marijuana helped him realize that playing football was not what he wanted to do for a living, he said.“I use cannabis now to accentuate what I do, not to deal with my life,” Williams said.While he believes cannabis helps with pain, he wishes its use was more widely accepted even for those without chronic pain.“I look forward to the day when the N.F.L. says, ‘This seems to really help our players, they really want it and we haven’t found any reason to not do it so let’s support it,’” Williams said. He added: “At least ask, have that conversation instead of just assuming that they’re doing something bad, and then punishing them. That was what happened to me and it doesn’t make any sense.”For Kemp, whose N.B.A. career ended in 2003, the changing mood about marijuana use among athletes like Griner is welcome, if perhaps too late for him. “I would have kept playing basketball if I could have used marijuana products back when I retired,” he said.He and his wife usually go out to see Griner’s Mercury play the Seattle Storm each summer. The teams’ matchups have come and gone this season, without the detained Griner, but she’s still on Kemp’s mind. “Hopefully she can get home with a safe return,” he said. “I miss seeing her play.” More

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    Brittney Griner Was ‘Wrongfully Detained’, U.S. Government Says

    More than two months after the W.N.B.A. star Brittney Griner was accused of having drugs in her luggage and taken into custody in Russia, the U.S. State Department on Tuesday said that it had determined she was “wrongfully detained.”“The U.S. government will continue to provide appropriate consular support to Ms. Griner and her family,” a State Department official said in a statement, adding that an interagency team would work to have her released.Griner, 31, has been held in Russia since February on drug charges that could carry a sentence of up to 10 years if she is convicted. Russian customs officials accused Griner of carrying vape cartridges with hashish oil in her luggage at an airport near Moscow as she returned to Russia to resume playing for UMMC Yekaterinburg, a professional women’s basketball team, after a two-week break.“Brittney has been detained for 75 days and our expectation is that the White House do whatever is necessary to bring her home,” Griner’s agent, Lindsay Kagawa Colas, said in a statement.The State Department did not explain why it was now designating Griner as wrongfully detained. ESPN first reported the change.A law passed by Congress in 2020 established 11 criteria for such a designation, any one of which can be a sufficient basis to secure the detainee’s release, including “credible information indicating innocence of the detained individual,” “credible reports that the detention is a pretext for an illegitimate purpose,” or a conclusion that U.S. “diplomatic engagement is likely necessary.”Under the law, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken must personally approve such a designation, and transfer responsibility for the case from the department’s consular affairs bureau to the office of the special envoy for hostage affairs.Some of Griner’s supporters and inner circle had been concerned about politicizing Griner’s case because of the frayed relationship between the United States and Russia and the tensions of the war in Ukraine. Most W.N.B.A. players and government officials have said little about the situation beyond expressing general support for Griner, as part of a strategy of quiet diplomacy.In other cases of wrongful detention, the United States had insisted that it would not link the fate of imprisoned individuals to larger policy issues. The State Department has repeatedly said, for instance, that Americans held in Iran are not part of the negotiations between Washington and Tehran to restore the 2015 Iran nuclear deal.In March, a Russian court extended Griner’s detention until at least May 19 and denied an appeal from Griner’s legal team in Russia, who had hoped to have her transferred to house arrest. That hearing did not deal with the merits of the case.Word of Griner’s new status comes less than a week after the United States conducted a prisoner swap with Moscow. Russia had for two years detained Trevor R. Reed, a former U.S. Marine, on what his family considered to be trumped-up charges of assault.Reed’s release renewed optimism that Griner would also be freed.“As I do everything in my power to get BG home, my heart is overflowing with joy for The Reed family,” Griner’s wife, Cherelle Griner, wrote on Instagram. “I do not personally know them, but I do know the pain of having your loved one detained in a foreign country. That level of pain is constant and can only be remedied by a safe return home.”Among publicly-known cases of Americans wrongfully held abroad, the average case has lasted more than four years, said Cynthia Loertscher, director of research at the nonprofit James W. Foley Legacy Foundation. The foundation is named after an American journalist kidnapped in Syria and executed by the Islamic State in 2014.The United States has designated as wrongfully detained Americans citizens and U.S. nationals who are currently imprisoned in China, Venezuela, Iran, Afghanistan, Belarus, Myanmar and Cuba, among several other nations. In an interview with “60 Minutes” that aired in February, Roger D. Carstens, the diplomat who will be overseeing the interagency effort to free Griner, said that over 40 Americans were wrongfully detained abroad.Many W.N.B.A. players join international teams to earn additional income during the league’s off-season. The top-tier players can make more than $1 million by playing in Russia. Griner, a two-time Olympic gold medalist and seven-time All-Star, is set to earn about $228,000 with the W.N.B.A.’s Phoenix Mercury in the 2022 season, according to the website Her Hoop Stats, just shy of the league’s maximum salary.The W.N.B.A.’s new season begins Friday. The league plans to “acknowledge the importance” of Griner by featuring her initials and jersey number, 42, on the sidelines of teams’ home courts.“There’s not a day that goes by where we’re not spending significant time on strategizing with, essentially, the administration experts,” W.N.B.A. Commissioner Cathy Engelbert told The New York Times in an interview last month.She added: “Everybody wants her to come home as quickly as possible. It’s a complex situation.” More

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    As His CNN+ Show Debuts, Rex Chapman Fears His Own Success

    With 1.2 million Twitter followers and a new show debuting Monday, the former N.B.A. player appears to have an enviable life. But he’s haunted by what happened the last time he was famous.Sitting in a Midtown Manhattan cafe after shooting B-roll for his new show on CNN+, Rex Chapman says he knows that he’s living a dream, and it’s making him uncomfortable. “I struggle with it,” he said.Chapman, a former pro basketball player now best known as a Twitter personality, loves doing the show, which debuts Monday on CNN’s new streaming service. The show is not the problem. Simply titled “Rex Chapman,” it features him in conversation with a diverse array of people who have faced challenges, as he has, and who now try to make the world better, as he says he is trying to do.Chapman has interviewed Jason Sudeikis in London, the N.B.A. forward Kevin Love in Cleveland, the actor Ben Stiller in New York City and the paralyzed former college football player Eric LeGrand in New Jersey. After this conversation, he was going to the bar next door to meet the comedian, writer and talk show host Amber Ruffin.So why the struggle?“People dream of doing this,” said Chapman, whose height (6 feet 4 inches), gleaming bald head and bright blue glasses make him conspicuous. “They dream of having their own show. I struggle with whether I deserve it or not.”He explains: “I’ve been through some things,” he said. “And I’ve put myself through some things. And, uh. …”He hesitated, his voice catching.“I’ve got four kids,” he went on. “Sitting here talking to you is probably easier than many of the conversations I have with my kids.”His son and three daughters — Zeke, Caley, Tatum and Tyson — range in age from 29 to 21. “And,” Chapman said, “not a day goes by that I don’t think about disappointing them.”Chapman, now 54, was once the best high school player in his home state of Kentucky, a superstar at the University of Kentucky, the first-ever draft pick (No. 8 overall) of the expansion Charlotte Hornets and a member of the U.S. national team. He estimates that he made $40 million in 12 seasons in the N.B.A.Chapman, who played with the Suns, Heat, Wizards and Hornets during a 12-year career, taking a shot in a game against the Seattle SuperSonics in 1999.Dan Levine/AFP via Getty ImagesBut the attention and scrutiny that came with success never felt right. When he was 10 years old, he quit swimming after other kids made fun of his Speedo. When he was 15 and a high school basketball star, students from another school stopped him in a mall, asked for his autograph and then tore it up in front of him.Love and success seemed to lead to pain.That feeling intensified in the N.B.A. After some injuries and surgeries, he ended up addicted to opioids, exacerbating his long-running gambling addiction. Retirement from basketball led to deeper addiction. Chapman burned through money. By his 40s, he was crashing on couches and shoplifting goods to pawn for cash. His wife, Bridget, divorced him in 2012.At the height of his addiction, Chapman was consuming about 10 OxyContin and 40 Vicodin pills per day, chewing them to get them into his bloodstream quicker.“At some point, I had just resigned myself to the fact that my life’s just going to be as a drug addict,” he said, adding an expletive for emphasis.In September 2014, he was caught shoplifting more than $14,000 worth of electronics and was arrested. His sister, Jenny, took him in, and with the help of friends persuaded Chapman to go to a rehab center in Louisville, Ky., where his college roommate, Paul Andrews, was an executive. “Saved my life,” Chapman said.After Chapman got clean, he began speaking in public about recovering from addiction. He found work covering Kentucky athletics on the radio for a regional media company around 2016. The company pushed him to be more active on social media, particularly on Twitter, but Chapman resisted. “The landscape was just toxic. Everybody hating each other,” he said.A dolphin video changed everything: “I saw a video one day of a school of dolphins swimming out to sea, and a guy on a paddle board coming in, and a dolphin jumped up and hit him in the chest and knocked him off. And I said to myself, ‘That’s a charge,’” Chapman said, adding another expletive. (The account that first shared the video is now suspended.)Chapman and his production crew filming B-roll for his new show.Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York TimesPeople responded well to the tweet, so he shared other slapstick videos, inspiring lighthearted debates about whether a given collision was, in basketball terms, a block or a charge. In time, he began posting “feel-good stuff” — videos of dogs, babies and animals interacting adorably — and paying two people to find content for him.Chapman, who now has 1.2 million followers, later ventured into tweeting about politics, with Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky a frequent target.In 2019, his friend Steve Nash, the former basketball star and current coach of the Brooklyn Nets, called Chapman with an idea for a podcast about people rebuilding their lives after making terrible mistakes. Chapman was wary of seeking fame again — “I didn’t fare real well with it the first time around” — but went forward after his children told him it was OK to do the show.The podcast was called “Charges.” To make his guests more comfortable, and in the hopes of helping people, Chapman began publicly sharing more of his story. This was healing at times, painful at others. “There’s something really cathartic about it,” he said. On the other hand, he said, it never doesn’t hurt, because you’re telling a bunch of strangers the worst stuff in life.He added: “I still can’t believe it was me. But it was. So I have to deal with that constantly.”Worse, he knows his children do too. “If they had any reservations,” he said, “then I wouldn’t do any of this stuff.”In an interview, Chapman’s daughter Caley, 27, said: “After he retired, that was a dark time. But he was always still my dad. I have respect for him. I just wanted him to get better for himself. And he’s done that. So I’m proud of him.”She expressed concern that her father is too hard on himself.“He holds a lot of guilt,” she said. “But there was never anything to forgive him for. From my point of view, I just wanted him to do better. So he’s been forgiven. And I’ll continue to say that until he forgives himself.”Chapman’s son, Zeke, declined to be interviewed, but sent a statement by text.“I’m extremely proud of my dad and how he has bounced back after a very tough time for him and our family,” he said. “I’m super excited for his new show and know how hard he’s been working on it.”“Life’s weird, man,” Chapman said. “And life’s hard.”Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York TimesChapman was approached about the CNN+ show late last year. Rebecca Kutler, the senior vice president and head of programming for the streaming service, sought him out because she liked his Twitter feed. Like many of his followers, she didn’t know much about his basketball life.“I found him to be an incredibly compelling human being,” she said. “He has come forward and talked about these challenges publicly, and really tried to use his experience to help others. That, along with his history as an incredible athlete, and the way that he’s been able to connect with an entire new generation of fans using social media, and sharing really uplifting content — I thought he would be a great person to bring new stories to CNN+.”The shows will range from 20 to 40 minutes per episode, with episodes to be released on Mondays.Chapman shooting an interview on Wednesday in New York.Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York TimesLeGrand, the former Rutgers football player whose spinal injury requires him to use a wheelchair, said he quickly felt a connection with Chapman when they met on campus in January. Chapman wore Nike Air Force 1s and a zip-up Jordan brand jacket, prompting LeGrand to say, “Look at you, all swagged out!” The two laughed and the conversation flowed.“When somebody else has been through a rough patch or overcome adversity in their lives, and they’ve been able to get through it and impact people in a positive way, it makes you open up,” LeGrand said. “It makes you feel that sense of comfort.”During the interview, Chapman asked what LeGrand dreamed about, a question no one had ever asked him before. LeGrand said: “When I’m dreaming, I’m always on my feet. I’m never in a wheelchair.”Chapman said he learned empathy from his mother, and from his own pain. He still wrestles with the guilt and shame of his past, particularly for not being a better father. “What they had to go through at school, and people knowing that their dad was in trouble and got arrested,” he said. Chapman said it “crushes” him.Now, he said, “I’m just trying to make up for lost time. I feel like I was gone for about 15 years.”This year, Chapman moved from Kentucky to Brooklyn, 10 minutes from his son. When his new success makes him uncomfortable, he reminds himself that it helps him be the father he wants to be for his children.“We have really no issues at this point,” he said. “Still trying to just show them a better me.” More

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    Keith McCants, Football Star Laid Low by Drugs, Dies at 53

    At one time the N.F.L.’s highest-paid defensive player, he left the league after six seasons and fell into a spiral of addiction, homelessness and desolation.In N.F.L. parlance, Keith McCants was a “can’t miss.” A relentless and powerful athlete, he was a first-team all-American linebacker at Alabama and was drafted fourth overall in 1990 by the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. His success seemingly guaranteed, the team made him the highest-paid defensive player in the league.But McCants soon became known by a less flattering N.F.L. moniker: “draft bust.” Days after being chosen by the Buccaneers, he had knee surgery. A year later, he had to learn a new position when he was moved from linebacker to defensive end. The injuries and frustrations mounted as he tried to meet people’s outsized expectations.His promise unfulfilled, the Buccaneers released McCants after three years. He spent three more seasons with the Houston Oilers and Arizona Cardinals before he left the league, his money and celebrity diminished. What remained was an overpowering addiction to painkillers, and eventually to other drugs, that consumed the rest of McCants’s life and turned him into a cautionary tale.After decades of drug abuse, numerous arrests, dozens of surgeries and years living on the street — all punctuated by brief stretches of sobriety — McCants was found dead early Thursday morning at his home in St. Petersburg, Fla. He was 53.The cause appeared to be a drug overdose, but Amanda Sinni, a spokeswoman for the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office, said the department was awaiting a report from the medical examiner’s office.In and out of rehabilitation and eager to share his story to warn others away from drugs, McCants all but predicted his demise in 2015, when he was interviewed by The New York Times.During six seasons in the N.F.L., Keith McCants became addicted to painkillers, and later went to jail, lived on the street and battled depression. He was interviewed by The New York Times in this 2015 video.Josh Ritchie for The New York Times“I live one day at a time; I’m a recovering addict,” he said. “Tomorrow’s not promising. If I die today or tomorrow, I’m all right with that because I’m comfortable with me. My goal is to help people who can’t help themselves, to turn their negatives to positives, to give them hope. That’s what I sell.”McCants did not just talk about his struggles with substance abuse. He pointed the finger squarely at the N.F.L. Coaches, he said, pushed players to perform without regard to their long-term health. Team doctors handed out painkillers like candy to mask injuries and get players on the field. And when players were unable to perform, he said, the league turned its back and focused on younger replacements.“I will continue to tell the truth, how they got me hooked on drugs,” he said. “I feel it’s my duty as a retired player to explain the difference between being hurt and being injured.”McCants in a game against the Indianapolis Colts in 1992, when he was with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. He was with Tampa Bay for three seasons before being released, his promise unfulfilled.Scott Halleran/Allsport, via Getty ImagesAlvin Keith McCants was born on April 19, 1968, in Mobile, Ala. His father abandoned him when he was young; he was raised by his stepfather, James Turner, who worked for the city, and his mother, Cinderella Turner, a cook. He is survived by two sons, Keith Jr. and David; two daughters, Aysha and Kera; two brothers, Robert and Anthony; and two sisters, Angie and Denise. He was married and divorced twice.Widely scouted while at Murphy High School in Mobile, McCants enrolled at Alabama, home to one of the country’s premier football programs. He left for the pros after his junior year, a bold but contentious step at the time. He said he opted out of his senior year because he did not want to risk further injuries that might shorten his career, and because he needed to provide for his family while he could.Some experts predicted that McCants could have been chosen first overall in the draft; he was ultimately picked fourth, one slot ahead of Junior Seau, a linebacker from the University of Southern California who played for 20 years and was elected posthumously to the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2015. Seau killed himself in 2012 and was later found to have chronic traumatic encephalopathy, the degenerative brain disease linked to repeated hits to the head.The Buccaneers had losing records each of McCants’ three years in Tampa, which heightened the scrutiny of his performance and his paychecks. (He received a record $2.5 million signing bonus as part of a five-year $7.4 million deal.) McCants lived the life of a celebrity player, spending freely. He said that he was preyed upon by financial advisers and others and lost $17 million.He played in 88 games in his career and recorded 13.5 quarterback sacks and one interception.After he left the N.F.L., McCants, who studied criminal law in college, became the first Black marine police officer in Alabama when he joined the state’s Department of Conservation and Natural Resources. He joked that he found it hard to arrest people because they often recognized him from his playing days and said they were fans of his.Yet the power of his addiction proved strong. He lived on the street in Tampa for two years in the early 2000s, worked as a pimp and drug dealer, and spent time in jail, where he once tried to hang himself. He spent stretches in numerous rehabilitation facilities, only to succumb to drugs again once he got out, as he recounted in his 2018 memoir, “My Dark Side of the N.F.L.”In recent years, seemingly at peace with his fate, he tried to warn others by talking about his financial troubles, his run-ins with the law and the pain — emotional as well as physical — that he buried with drugs.“I’m not too much worried about Keith McCants,” he said. “I’m more worried about the people that’s coming after Keith McCants.” More

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    Diego Maradona, One of Soccer’s Greatest Players, Is Dead at 60

    AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyDiego Maradona, One of Soccer’s Greatest Players, Is Dead at 60He was ranked with Pelé among the best, and his ability to surprise and startle won over fans and even critics. But his excesses and addictions darkened his legacy.Diego Maradona in 1986, the year he led Argentina to soccer’s world championship.Credit…Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBy More