Marko's Shady Path to Exile in Moscow

BELGRADE, Serbia-Montenegro -- Hours after Slobodan Milosevic was toppled from power six years ago, his son Marko fled Serbia, hustled aboard a night flight by his father's loyalists.

On Tuesday -- with a visa hurriedly issued by Dutch authorities -- the 32-year-old arrived in the Netherlands from Russia to claim the body of his father, who died in his cell in The Hague on Saturday.

But back in October 2000, with the once-omnipotent Milosevic no longer able to protect him, Marko was believed to have been fleeing feared revenge attacks by underworld figures coveting his alleged lucrative drug- and cigarette- smuggling operations.

Marko Milosevic reportedly first headed to a different former Soviet republic before settling in Moscow, where his mother, Mirjana Markovic, joined him in February 2003 as she fled possible arrest after Serb authorities charged her with abuse of power and corruption.

From a sheltered childhood in the gritty eastern Serbian town of Pozarevac to his glitzy youth as a reputed womanizer and a relatively harmless car fanatic, Marko Milosevic later came to be perceived as a dangerous but untouchable man who was accused of threatening an opposition activist with a chain saw.

With just a basic high-school education and no obvious career interests, Marko is believed to have gained enormous wealth in his 20s through alleged smuggling of drugs, cigarettes, alcohol and gasoline.

Trade sanctions imposed on Yugoslavia in 1992 to punish Milosevic for fomenting the Balkan wars gave Serbian smugglers huge opportunities to get rich. Serbian media later accused Marko of not paying taxes for shady business deals, and he was reported to have been involved in violent clashes with business rivals and others.

Serbian media also accused him of involvement in the death of Vlada Kovacevic, also known as "Tref," or The Club, a close friend and businessman killed in 1997 in New Belgrade. No arrests were ever made in the case.

In Pozarevac, Marko was a co-owner of Bambiland, a 60-hectare theme park estimated to be worth $325,000, a high-tech disco, an appliances store and a bakery.

In 2000, Marko's partner, Milica Gajic, gave birth to the couple's young son, also named Marko.

Marko's parents often proclaimed his innocence in public, maintaining he was simply a young man trying to carve out a niche for himself in the harsh world of business. Thin and tall, Marko sported flashy designer suits, occasionally dying his dark hair blond.

In November 2001, a month after he fled Serbia, a Pozarevac court charged him with threatening to kill a prominent opposition activist with a chain saw during a scuffle at his disco. The incident was part of intense violence against Milosevic's opponents in the months before his October 2000 ouster and subsequent extradition to the UN war crimes tribunal.

An Interpol arrest warrant was issued for Marko after he repeatedly failed to appear at scheduled court hearings. His trial began in absentia in March 2003 in Pozarevac, and he was sentenced in July 2004 to six months in jail. But on an appeal, the Pozarevac court suspended the verdict in December 2004 and ordered a retrial. In August 2005, a key witness revoked his testimony incriminating Marko, claiming he no longer remembered what happened.

Both the Serbian and the Interpol arrest warrants were revoked in August 2005, and all charges against Marko were dropped.