After years of investigative research, the Tribunal now understood why Hadzic had initiated a self-destructive war against rival paramilitary leader Mirko Jovic's "White Eagles." He not only suffered the loss of his brother and trusted security chief in the brazenly twisted attack, but more importantly to Hadzic, he had been robbed of his entire criminal fortune. Confiscated bank records showed a sudden, systematic transfer of his wealth out of long held European bank accounts, to new accounts scattered throughout the Caribbean and South America. From there, the money vanished along an untraceable trail of wire transfers. Some of the money had been transferred by Hadzic himself at the outset of NATO hostilities, but one hundred and thirty million dollars suddenly left Europe on April 23, 1999, and it all had previously belonged to Hadzic. The result was predictable for a man already considered to be one of the most ruthless and fickle psychopaths in Europe.
Hadzic dispatched his most trusted Panthers to take immediate revenge, and he particularly wanted to avenge his brother's death. Pavle Hadzic had been found hacked to death in his wheel chair, the obvious victim of an infamous White Eagle enforcer, Goran Lujic, who had used an ice-climbing axe as his personal calling card for over a decade on the Belgrade organized crime scene. Kavich had participated in two ambushes in Belgrade on the first day of hostilities, and was almost killed the next day in a retaliatory raid by White Eagle commandos on a Panther safe house in Zemun, but the Tribunal wasn't interested in the back and forth fighting between paramilitary groups. The Hague wanted to pin as many civilian murders on Hadzic as the Tribunal jury could tolerate, and Kavich knew of a particularly gruesome murder.
On one of the deadlier nights of fighting, Kavich witnessed a bizarre exchange between Hadzic and a trusted Panther sniper, Marko Resja, in the basement of a safe house hidden deep inside a run-down suburb of Belgrade. Resja had arrived by himself, wearing a blood stained, mud caked camouflage uniform devoid of any insignia. A black watch cap was pulled tight over his head to merge with a face smeared black and brown with grease. He walked into the basement carrying a Dragunov sniper rifle in one hand, and large blue nylon duffel bag in the other. Kavich was located at the bottom of the basement stairs when Resja was searched in the landing off the kitchen. He heard one of the guards utter "Oh fuck," and became momentarily alarmed, but the guard called down "all clear," and he heard Resja descend the stairs.
Resja gave Kavich a barely discernible nod as he passed by, which wasn't unusual. Resja was all business, and didn't fraternize with many of the Panthers. He spent most of his time in the field stalking Kosovar militia. On that particular night, Resja walked into the room and slung the rifle over his shoulder, freeing one of his hands. He was immediately greeted by Hadzic, who shook his hand enthusiastically, and slapped him on the shoulder. Resja responded with a rare display of friendliness and banter, before he tossed the duffel bag onto the floor, and declared that "he had gotten to the bottom of their problem."
Hadzic told the nearest Panther to show him what was in the bag, and the burly guard standing next to Resja kneeled down on the floor and opened the zipper. The unmistakable stench of rotting flesh filled the room immediately, and the burly guard gagged, mumbling protests against touching the contents. Hadzic ordered him to remove the contents, and the guard took in a deep breath before turning back to the bag. Resja softly told him to "take out Lujic" first, and this caused some confusion for the guard. Resja added "he's the one with the short hair." At this point, everyone in the room was deathly quiet, waiting for the guard to reach into the bag, which he did reluctantly, using both hands to remove the severed head of Goran Lujic, Pavle Hadzic's presumed murderer.
Goran's face had been brutally beaten, showing extensive bruising and pulverized eye sockets. One of his ears was missing, which Kavich learned was the result of Resja's extensively thorough torture routine. Resja announced that Lujic had confessed to torturing Pavle for access information to Hadzic's accounts, and eventually killing him. The money was promptly transferred to accounts owned by Lujic's boss, Mirko Jovic, leader of "The White Eagles." Resja added that he had hacked off Lujic's head with the same axe used against Pavle. Hadzic nodded with stunned approval, and looked down at the bag, which contained still another surprise.
While squirming under the knife, Lujic had implicated someone close to the Panther organization. He told Resja that they had learned of Pavle's access to the money through a woman that frequented the company of Radovan Grahovac's men in Belgrade. Apparently Radovan, or one of his close associates suffered from loose lips while under the spell of liquor and beautiful women. One of the nightclub regulars had learned that Pavle actively managed his brother's vast monetary fortune, and the rest was history. Marko had found her hiding in a small White Eagle safe house on the outskirts of Belgrade, and used the same axe on her.
Hadzic grew impatient while Resja explained, and demanded to see the other head, but it was obvious that the guard still holding Lujic's head was in no condition to pull another one out of the bag. He was barely holding onto the first. On Resja's cue, he dropped the head back into the bag, which made an awful thunk against the concrete floor beneath the bag. Resja impassively pulled the other severed head out of the bag, his hand wrapped tightly around a long, thick spread of filthy, matted black hair.
He announced "Zorana Sekulic," and "held the head up high, like Perseus is often pictured holding the Gorgon Medusa's severed head." Sekulic had been beaten worse than Lujic, bruises and contusions covering nearly every square centimeter of her once beautiful, angular face. Both eyes had been gouged out, and she was only identifiable by her long hair and a single diamond stud nose ring, which was miraculously still visible on her battered nose.
A few members of the Tribunal had chuckled at Kavich's obviously coached reference to Greek mythology, even admonishing the prosecution to cut the theatrics, but according to Kavich, nobody had laughed in that putrid, candlelit basement of the safe house. Everybody in that room knew Zorana, and everybody in that room had partied in the clubs with her at some point very recently. Hadzic had probably seen every one of them alone in her company within the past month, and the implications of her treachery were apparent to even the dimmest of henchmen huddled in that basement. They all wanted to run for the staircase, because Hadzic looked like he had reached the point of critical mass.
"I hope you fucked her corpse," Kavich remembered him saying to Resja, before demanding to see the head of Mirko Jovic in the same bag. Resja told Hadzic "I'll see what I can do," and walked out of the basement. When asked what happened to Resja, Kavich commented that nobody ever saw him again. They all assumed he had been killed trying to find Jovic, and ended up in one of dozens of unmarked mass graves found in the fields surrounding Belgrade.
Berg remembered reading the transcript of Kavich's testimony with a strange sense of detachment. He had finally uncovered Nicole Erak's fate, and the name of the man who brutally killed her, but he felt no closure. Hadzic was eventually convicted of Lujic's murder, but no formal charges were filed against Hadzic pertaining to the brutal murder of Zorana Sekulic. The Hague issued a warrant and summons for Marko Resja, adding another name to the already impossibly long list of thugs and murderers associated with the paramilitary groups that flourished under Slobodan Milosevic's regime. Nobody cared about finding Marko Resja except the CIA, and Berg knew that even the CIA's interest had a limited half-life.
Agency attempts to locate information regarding Marko Resja led nowhere. Berg, and other members of the CIA wanted to find Resja, and make him pay horribly for Nicole's death, but Resja had indeed disappeared shortly after Nicole's murder. Belgrade in the spring of 1999 had a way of eating people up, and spitting them out.