The Pink Panthers: The Secretive Organization of the World's Top Jewel Thieves
58:21 Share

ButcherBox, you guys have heard me talk about it before. It is a service that I used even before they were an advertiser because I like getting high-quality meat and seafood that I can trust online.

right to my door, 100% grass-fed beef, free-range organic chicken, pork-raised crate-free, and wild-caught seafood. We are only like a month and a half away from chili season. You're going to want to stock your freezer with a lot of meat. That's not going to cost you that much at all. It's an incredible value. There's free shipping. You can curate it to customize your box plans, and it gets delivered right to your doorstep.

No more annoying trips to the grocery store or the butcher. It's going to save you time and save you money. Sign up for ButcherBox today by going to butcherbox.com slash underworlds and use code underworld at checkout to get $30 off your first box. Again, that's butcherbox.com slash underworlds and use code underworlds.

Two weeks had gone by in May 2003, since Predrag Vojovic, or Vuio for short, had arrived in London from his current hometown of Paris.

Vujo is an inconspicuous guy, served from a small village in Montenegro, and he was staying in a cheap hotel, waiting a week or so to meet another guy, a large Serbian man who was a little less inconspicuous, who was also a janitor at a hospital in Switzerland. A buddy of Vujo's from the same town by the name of Milan had connected the two of them, and together they bought a scooter, but didn't do much else in London except pay just a little too much attention to a graph jewelry store.

Graff's one of these famous high society jewelry brands, the kind of place where Oprah Winfrey and Victoria Beckham buy necklaces or rings or whatever. And they're known for their colored diamonds. The day before, Vuio had stopped by and dawdled just a bit too long in front of the store. But on this day, May 19th, 2003, Big Sur had shown up at the jewelry store wearing a wig, carrying an umbrella, and just acting like a wealthy, eccentric customer. At least that's what the salesperson thought.

He starts asking the guy behind the counter to take out a diamond and then another diamond so we can look at them. All of a sudden, he says he doesn't like it and then asks them to take out another one. Then he quickly pulls out a gun and lets Vuio in, who also very quickly smashes a bunch of display cases and grabs all the jewelry he can. What ends up amounting to $30 million in three minutes. The biggest jewel heist in British history at the time.

Vujo is able to make his getaway on the scooter they bought, but unfortunately, his partner, the big Serbian dude, gets wrapped up by a nearby security guard and arrested. It's uncharacteristically sloppy, as we'll learn. After a few days of searching, the British police are able to ID Milan and track him to his apartment. They're searching the apartment, trying to find evidence of the robbery, when one of the detectives notices a little thing of fancy face cream moisturizer, like a little jar or something that his girlfriend or fiance had been using.

Welcome to the Underworld Podcast.

So wait, Jack, like Cuso, is that the French undersea like explorer guy or is that Jack Custo, right? Jack Custo. Yeah. The submarine dude that Steve Zizzo was based on. Right. I think so. Yeah. Okay. All right. We're, we're, we're, we're clearing this up right now. We do our fact checking live on the air in this podcast, but yeah, I don't even know what episode this is going to be because we banked a bit for the, for the relaunch, but the merch should be up. Yeah.

Everything else should be going as planned. Patreon.com slash The Underworld Podcast. We've got some good stuff going up this week actually. And yeah, this story in the beginning right now comes from a lengthy New Yorker article by David Samuels from 2010 who wrote without a doubt like the best and most in-depth piece on the Pink Panthers.

There's been a lot of media on these guys over the last 15 or 20 years or so, because I mean, how could how could there not be right? Who doesn't love a gang of professional international jewel thieves doing slick heists, sometimes for tens of millions of dollars in like.

Monaco or the south of France or Switzerland, getting away with it, you know, said to be like smooth and really cultured guys and beautiful women who speak five languages and rarely use violence or when they do, they drive cars into shopping malls, you know? Yeah. Yeah. I'm a fan of that story. Yeah. It's a good, it's a great video. If you guys haven't seen that, definitely YouTube it, but it's just, I mean, this whole thing is just an unbelievable story and the legend that's built up around these guys is big part of that, you know, but

When you read up on these guys and you do this research and you see the way a lot of articles are just write-ups of other articles without new information or confirmation, the whole thing can feel a bit murky at times. I don't mean to say that these guys don't exist, right? They definitely do or that the basics are wrong because they're mostly right. But the truth is that we still don't know everything about the Pink Panthers, who they are, how they work, whether all the heists that are attributed to them are actually them or not copycats of someone else and

Sometimes like stuff does get exaggerated, right? Sure. Yeah. Take this, the Kim Kardashian robbery. You remember this? It was October, 2016.

Kim Kardashian was in Paris for a fashion thing, staying at some fancy hotel that caters to like celebs and billionaires and all that. And, you know, we've been very specific in our advice not to Instagram your crimes. Yeah. But some other advice I feel like we need to give you as well is like don't Instagram things that will make people want to do crimes to you and then also provide all the information they need to do the crimes through Instagram. You know, that's just it's just like bare bones operational security. Yeah.

But Kim K, as far as I know, doesn't listen to the podcast yet.

So she was, of course, Instagramming the million dollar jewelry she wears and the location of a hotel. And yeah, it's just it's just bad opsec, man. You know how many rappers have been killed because they're IGing their jewelry or giant wads of cash and location? I mean, come on. Like being a bodyguard for a rapper is probably the hardest job in the world. Like, don't make it harder than it has to be. No, I mean, a couple of things. We don't know for sure that Kim doesn't like to max out with the underworld podcast. I mean, she could be an early adopter.

and it's true that's true yeah i want to send a shout out to the editor that turned me down to write up this robbery fuse but i really wanted to do a piece on the pink panthers but oh were you pitching this yeah i pitched that around but there's like it's like you said there's like they've done so many things and there's so much like whispers going around about what they've done it's really it can be a bit difficult to pick apart what's real and what's bs but um yeah i love this story it's so interesting

Yeah, this one gets cleared up real quick. So Kim leaves the fashion show, gets back to the hotel around 2 a.m., and by 3 a.m., a team of thieves have entered the hotel, which had just like terrible security. They tie up the concierge. They make him tell them where the Kardashian is. They're dressed like cops. They're wearing balaclavas and gloves.

Two have guns and they're the ones who really do the dirty work while the other three are more like assistants. So they get to Kim's room. They tie her up. They force her to lie down in the bathtub. They steal $9 million worth of jewelry. It's a team of five, like I said. Three leave on foot and two actually leave by bicycle. Like bicycle, which is just – that's the most European thing I've ever heard in my entire – it feels like Amelie or something, right? I love a European city. So right away –

People start talking about the Pink Panthers being behind it. A freelancer for the Daily Beast interviews a former Pink Panther member, Punch Stanimirovich, who says it sounds like it's probably his former associates, and a bunch of other places run with it. But it turns out it wasn't them at all. In fact, it's a group of elderly gentlemen, five of them, between the ages of 60 and 72, that got caught, and the French press then referred to them as the Grandpa Robbers.

One of them, a 67-year-old named Eunice Abbas, even wrote a book called I Kidnapped Kim Kardashian that came out before his trial, which I mean like cast this right away, like right now. Tony Shalhoub as the ringleader, like let's do it. I'm ready to watch this movie.

I barely believed that he'd written this, right? So I found this absolutely amazing quote from the London Evening Standard. This is a quote. He says he wanted to write the book to set the record straight as he'd been portrayed as, quote, a very uninviting character. It's sad, really. And then the newspaper goes on. But he hardly helps himself by saying in the work that he's proud to have fulfilled the kind of heist that, quote, every mobster dreams of.

This takes IG and your crimes to a whole new level, this. Yeah, I mean, it's pretty...

look you know get get your money if you can but also like you know this is the kind of robbery obviously for kim it's a very traumatic experience we don't want to be light of that but like come on man like they robbed a billionaire of a bunch of jewelry i don't think anyone's looking at this guy like he's the worst guy in the world you know what i'm saying uh-huh yeah yeah yeah yeah he's got he's got like a he's got like an actor style headshot in the story that i saw as well it's pretty amazing yeah he knows he knows what he's doing yeah for sure

Oh, yeah. No, I found out this other weird thing that he says he took a phone and the first call that comes through was Chasey Chapman, which is ironic because he was on a bike and he got a flat tire. And he also misses that open goal of a pun in his book. So he should probably just stick to being a crook in the future. Oh, you mean like doing a fast car situation? Yeah. Yeah. I've got more bad puns coming for you in the next episode. I promise that.

It's still a banger, you know, like fast car just goes. Yeah, it hits you in the soul. Anyway, moving on. Anyone who really knew how the Pink Panthers operate, though, would have been skeptical that they were behind the Kardashian robbery. Samuels in the New Yorker piece, he breaks down their M.O. Quote, a well-dressed man enters the store alone and puts down a piece of wood to prop open the security door, allowing a few associates to enter.

High-end jewelry stores tend to admit one customer at a time. The first man through the door typically has a gun. The others carry hammers and pickaxes for breaking display cases. The robbers hide the jewelry and watches in backpacks and leave in a stolen car. They're all old cars, 10 years old, he explained. That's a Pink Panther explaining it to him. Older cars are less conspicuous and can be more easily hotwired. Local associates of the Panthers obtain weapons in cars, rent hotel rooms, and make other arrangements.

Now, this can vary a bit, right? Sometimes there's a beautiful woman involved. Sometimes the smash and grab involves a little more smashing, like the time in Dubai. You can see it in the YouTube clip where they're literally driving two cars through a fancy mall. They ram a car through the front of a jewelry store, grab everything they can, and skate out with 3.4 million in broad daylight. And they didn't do too good a job destroying the evidence, though, because the police were able to trace eight or so Panthers, a bunch of them wanted for different robberies and heists across Europe.

I mean, I'm guessing this is like really, really fun for the cops to compare to their normal stuff, right? Hunting a bunch of international jewel thieves across Europe. It's like that Frank, the Frank Matthews episode we did with the investigators basically just take, it's like round the world trip to find him and they find like sweet F.A.

Yeah, it's got to be better than like the usual work that they do. Like it's got to be a pretty prestige assignment right there. So Ron Noble, who's a top Interpol cop, says that from the time they enter the door of a shop until they break all the glass in the cases, take the jewelry and are out, it's less than 30 seconds. But I mean that seems a little far-fetched. Like I've seen it said elsewhere, they aim to be out in two or three minutes, which is a lot more realistic.

And then they have a getaway plan. And within a matter of hours, they're in another country, which is like that's their classic MO, right? And the Pink Panthers, they've been nothing short of prolific. It's hard to say or to certify really, but a 2014 CBS special had them at 370 heists across 35 countries for a total of $500 million.

In 2019, Jeweler Magazine, which is a real magazine, put it at one billion. And also from Jeweler Magazine, this quote, they've been known to cover public benches near their crime scenes with fresh paint, deterring potential witnesses from sitting there and have also resorted to using bizarre masks, tourist disguises, cross-dressing and even tear gas. I mean, if you see a guy coming at you in a dress with a Pennywise mask on holding a bag of diamonds and a tear gas canister, I reckon you're going to run.

Yeah, like they know what they're doing. Like these guys, they're professionals. But who actually are they? And that we're not 100% sure of. But I guess, I mean, we're kind of like 95% sure. So a bunch of them have been caught, but they're not known for snitching. They're actually more known for escaping prisons than for like ragging or giving up their accomplices.

Some say they're rough guys in leather jackets. Others describe them as classy and wearing suits, culture, that whole thing. All agree they're highly skilled, disciplined, and many speak a handful of languages. They're from the Balkans, usually Serbia and Montenegro. And there are a few cities or towns they're most known to be from, including Sintenje or Sintenje and Nis. You ever read, I think I talked about this in one of the other podcasts, the book, it's one of the best books on cartels and the heroin trade, Dreamland's.

So one part of it is about how all these heroin dealers came from this one town in Mexico, and they're not like top-level narcos. They're just guys who essentially treated it like migrant work. Some guys learned how to do it first, and then all the younger men saw them making money, and they just followed. And these are guys who would go door-to-door making deliveries essentially. They were the first guys to really organize selling on cell phones.

So they would get money, go home, and spend it on making the town look better and fancy American shit, buying up big houses, building their houses, bringing in Toyotas. And anyway, this is what happens in these towns where these guys come from in Serbia and Montenegro, right? Lots of fancy cars and expensive suits and new businesses for a place that doesn't really have any real industry.

There's all these sorts of rumors of them all being former paramilitary soldiers who fought in the Balkan Wars in the 90s. But some of the ones caught are kind of way too young to have participated in those wars. An LA Times article from 2014 describes them like this, quote, the Panthers lead hidden lives among Europe's Balkan diaspora of refugees, former paramilitary fighters, opportunists, and laborers who watched Yugoslavia splinter throughout the 1990s.

Working in hospitals, bars, and restaurants, they're summoned by messages to join comrades and hatch robberies on streets that glow with designer names. I mean, there must be some crossover with them and Arkans Tigers, right? This splitting of an entire region that just like creates a huge vacuum of power. All of these kind of ne'er-do-wells are flourishing in it. Yeah, yeah, we'll get to that.

Most law enforcement agree there's a core group of between 30 and 40 of them, maybe even a few dozen more, some say even up to 100 members with another couple hundred accomplices. And they've been set to train up and bring in new blood at various points over the last few decades. They're loosely organized like there's no hierarchy. It's autonomous cells that operate. Sometimes they even have country territories that they stick to.

They call each other. They make a plan. One guy brings together another guy and some accomplices, and they just give it a go. People writing about the group and law enforcement also keep referring to them as observing a target for like 10 days as painstaking surveillance, which, I mean, I don't know. It doesn't seem like that much of an effort, right? Like these sort of heists don't seem that hard, right? It's all just about like having the balls to do it, I kind of feel like. Like don't get me wrong. There's planning involved and stuff like that, but it's more just like

All right, we're just going to go in there, punch someone, take this stuff and get out. Right. Like it kind of, you know, when I was in high school, like a bunch of me and my friends all worked in the mall, like doing retail. And we would just kind of go into each other's stores, right?

When one person was working the register and you would bring up 10 items and they would just ring up one of them. You know, like it wasn't these weren't like genius heists. You know what I'm saying? Like if one person was the only person working in the store that day, just like walk in, take it and go out. Like it's so much of it is it's about just like having the balls to do it and like not being scared of getting caught. Of course, we end up getting caught. We got a little too cocky. You know, if you return items a lot and you don't have a receipt.

You can do something called merchant credit. So we would do those on like the, on like the company cards for this company store that I worked at and then sell those at like a discount. But you do that too much and you know, you get cocky and you get busted and that's what happens to the Panthers a lot. I used to work in some like, I used to work in some electronic store just outside London and,

and uh they on the first day they showed us one of those like security videos where there's this guy who plays like a low-rent cop in some budget tv show and he's like this is how this is not what you should be doing and he goes around the back through the security like around the back of the security and he just lobs a load of cameras in the back of a like skip in the back of the yard and then he walks around the front and goes pick it up he's like that's what you should not do and

And guess what we all did on day one? Oh, yeah, dude. Took him to town. Yeah. I mean, I can talk about my friend because my friends worked at like Sharper Image and Dappy's and like Spencer Gifts. I don't know if young people are not going to know those stores, but like I worked at a clothing store and I would like if I needed underwear, I would just go to the pretend I was cleaning up one of the changing rooms, put on like 10 pairs and then just walk out with it.

I mean, this is all expected, right? They've got to be putting that in their budget. Yeah. The point is that sometimes it's all about just taking it and giving it a go. You know? Yeah. Not getting sloppy like we did with those merchant credits. Anyway, Samuels actually goes to the Balkans to look into it. He meets some people involved. One guy who's a real pro and the kind of guy that only handles his drinking glasses with napkins and wipes the glasses rim when he's done drinking, leaving no trace. He tells him, quote,

There was a centralized system for picking targets and assigning crews to jobs. There were four main Panther groups originating from a single group of diamond thieves from Montenegro. Half the Belgrade group was made up of thieves from Sentinje who had moved to Serbia.

There's a documentary on the Pink Panthers called Smash and Grab that interviews one or two other members or affiliates. Who knows? Maybe it's even the same guy. And they break it down like this. Networks of teams working together. Everyone has specific jobs to do. Those in the inner circle are called the family. Guys don't know who their bosses or associates are, like at the start. You get tips from your supervisor, but there's also a chain of command. No big boss. No idea where you are in the hierarchy. So right away, you know, we're kind of getting different ideas.

Like different people who are supposed to be a part of it, giving different rundowns of how it actually works. Some say, you know, no autonomy, complete autonomy. Some say hierarchy. You know, it's just it's murky is what I'm trying to say. I'm seeing an airport bestseller right now. Like how to run your startup like a Pink Panther. I reckon that's going to sell millions, man. I'm wasting my time.

Yeah, all sort of – I think there's definitely a handful of mafia and cartel guys who do the whole like how to run your business, like a cartel guy or a mafia guy. I mean any sort of like how to run your business like talks or – it's just like it's a great scam. People will give you a lot of money to talk nonsense. We should actually transition. Anyway. Yeah.

Nice.

Like that should be – people – every young idiot wants to idolize Scarface, but Scarface dies. And he doesn't get to enjoy it. You should idolize this guy who's just like – I imagine him wearing a linen suit and designer sunglasses, drinking wine starting at noon and just kind of like chilling out. Like that's who you should idolize if you're going to lead the criminal life. Yeah.

That's a big advice. He did 20 years. Like, come on, find a, find a new hero. This guy, DACA should be your hero. He tells them there's an, there is an organization, but it's not formal. And that though friends recommend friends for jobs, nobody inside the circle knows everyone else. There is a central hierarchy that determines how jobs are set up and who pays for expenses. He even explained that the Tokyo heist, which we'll talk about in a little bit, cost about a hundred thousand dollars to do. And that money's got to come from somewhere.

The organizing syndicate, he says, determined who got to hold the goods and where the money went. The main Panther groups are based outside Serbia.

Italy, France, Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Switzerland, and they often come home to Serbia and Montenegro when they are on call for jobs, where they are on call for jobs. No criminal extradition exists in Serbia and Montenegro, which is important, and we'll get to that later. But basically it means that even if European law enforcement, American law enforcement agencies know who they are and know they're in Serbia, there's nothing they can do.

DACA says the higher ranks of the Panther organization actually do include a number of Serbian ex-soldiers who were currently living in Scandinavian countries. But the diamond trafficking was directed mainly by criminals from Italy, Russia, Israel, and Holland. Diamonds and jewels, for those who don't know, they're really prized in terms of trafficking and transferring wealth because they're super valuable and they're easy to carry and to hide. Back in the old days – I mean we're talking hundreds of years ago –

There's a lot of people who lived in volatile places. They kept gold jewelry. And even now I've heard stories of big-time ballers in Vegas who win big and always buy fancy watches right away just because that stuff is a lot harder to trace.

than cash than anything else. It's just, it's an easy way to hide your money. If you're on the run and you have a lot of gold, you just wear it and you can run away or hide it. You know, it's just, it's like I have family that did that when they fled various parts of Eastern Europe or had to do it. It's just like, you know, diamonds are sort of the next leg up from that. Yeah, I mean, I think we should do, we could even do a gem smuggling episode because I've met some shady people in Afghanistan where a load of it's happening at the moment, like rubies and other stuff.

Just like going straight through the airports and everything. Everything's corrupt. It's like millions and millions of dollars coming out of Afghanistan like that. I don't think many people know about that in Afghanistan. I guess there's kind of more headline grabbing stuff going on. Sounds like you just gave yourself an assignment for an episode, man. Yeah. I can find that guy and put him on the show. Have you ever heard that story that Napoleon used the Egyptian Sphinx for target practice and shot its nose off?

Or maybe you've heard that a French astrologer named Nostradamus correctly predicted nearly 500 years of human history. Or maybe someone told you that the legendary blues guitarist Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil at a crossroads in Mississippi. These stories are what I like to call historical myths. Great little tales that may or may not have any basis in historical fact.

On Our Fake History, we explore these historical myths and try to determine what's fact, what's fiction, and what is such a good story. It simply must be told.

If you dig stories about death-obsessed emperors, lost civilizations, desperate sieges, voodoo black magic, and famous historical figures you thought you knew, then Our Fake History might just be your new favorite podcast.

Still not sure? Then stick around to the end of the episode today to hear a teaser episode of Our Fake History. If you dig it, then subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. Most people say the group first started operating in 2003. At least that's when detectives started piecing it together. And it starts with that robbery in London we mentioned at the beginning of this involving our boy, Vujo.

After that happens, the detectives, they get the detecting. They find counterfeit passports, assume the base is in Italy, and of course the Italian authorities don't do anything. But the French do, and get this. They have a task force called Brigade for the Repression of Banditry, which is just like a special police unit that investigates organized crime, that does robberies and things like that, which is – I mean that's awesome. That's a really cool name. Yeah, that's a chef's kiss one. That could make the list at the end of the year.

Yeah, definitely. So they all get to talking and they realize these guys are some form of, well, just criminal with Balkans accents have hit like 20 places across Europe recently.

Our boy, Vujo, he robbed a fancy jewelry store in Paris, a Graff store in Amsterdam, another fancy one in Frankfurt, jewelers in Geneva and Barcelona. After a few months, they finally get Vujo and he's polite and he's well-spoken, but he doesn't give up anything during the interrogation. Graff needs to sort out his security. Graff needs to figure out what's going on. I didn't even, I didn't really know Graff, but they seem they're behind their game.

Yeah, I mean I don't – I can't really tell you high-priced jewelry stores. But yeah, they seem to be getting robbed all the time. Meanwhile, the Panthers are still out there making moves. In 2004, two Serbian guys – this is the Tokyo rapper we talked about. They're also wearing wigs. They pepper spray a jewelry store there, and they make off with pricey diamonds. In Paris, they hit a fancy jewelry store while the prime minister's wife is there, and they still steal $14 million worth of jewels.

In 2005, they hit a shop in Saint-Tropez and they escape on a speedway, which again, awesome. Amazing. In 2008, a group of armed and masked panthers hit this museum in Zurich, making off with a Monet, a Van Gogh, a Degas, and a Cezanne. Cezanne? Whatever. I'm not that cultured. It was the largest art robbery in European history. We've got some stuff coming up on Crime in the Art World really, really soon. And this is going to be in there for sure. It's so interesting. Yeah.

So dozens are eventually arrested over the next decade and a half. But again, they don't talk and new ones keep coming. Interpol creates a group solely dedicated to the Pink Panthers in 2007. And the thing is they get these guys, but they rarely recover the jewelry and they can't figure out the inner workings because the diamond and jewel industry itself is just so shady. All these European agencies are pissed. They start working together and they manage to bag like 20 or so Pink Panthers. But again, stores keep getting hit. And again, none of the Panthers really say a word.

A bunch of them also keep breaking out of jail all over Europe. Take this guy, Dragan. He's a big Serb from Belgrade. He allegedly didn't fight in the wars because he was too busy being a criminal. He became super connected among thieves in the underworld.

He robbed a bunch of jewelry stores between 2001, 2003, some with a smash and grab, and he ends up getting caught in a fancy French ski town. And this is again from Samuels. He was taken to jail where Gilbert Le Fay, a local prosecutor, was impressed by his physical size and strength and by his intimidating aura. He had an ironic grin on his face, Le Fay told me, recalling that he didn't say very much.

These guys don't care about being put into jail. They know they are going to escape. He tried to escape once, literally just running away from his guards while being transported. They shot him in the leg and they moved him to a more secure prison. One afternoon, two men pulled up outside the prison in a white truck that had three ladders in its cargo bed. They got out of the truck and one of them placed a ladder against the prison wall, climbed to the top and began firing Kalashnikov at the guard tower.

The second man hurled one of the ladders as well as a pair of wire cutters over the prison wall where Dragon was waiting. He cut through a roll of barbed wire lining the perimeter of the prison yard and climbed up the wall. The third ladder had been positioned so that he could descend to freedom. He has not been seen since. I mean, are these guys like, I mean, you mentioned it further up the piece, but like, are they, are they violent? Like they'll point a shooter in someone's face, but they don't seem like they beat many people up.

I would add that we do not officially endorse armed robbery. Not officially. Not officially. Not officially.

Yeah, I mean they will use violent ends. I don't think they're scared of using violence. But I think in all the robberies they've done, maybe one or two people have been killed, and we're talking about literally hundreds of robberies, right? Yeah, yeah. I mean they punch people in the face, but that's really it. I think they take a lot of care so that they don't end up killing someone. It's a smart way of doing business, I think.

Obviously, these guys have a lot of attention, a lot of people going after them, but once you involve murder, it's a whole other ballgame. Yeah. I mean, I guess that Serb ex-soldiers aren't particularly known for being the cutest guys around, but yeah, they seem to sort themselves out pretty well. They don't really hurt many people.

I think they enjoy the lore of the Robin Hood thing too, right? And if you start killing salespeople or bystanders, it kind of takes away from that lore, right? It doesn't really seem as noble as stealing from the rich. And I mean, they don't really get to the poor, but you know what I mean? Buying yourself a Mercedes, if you're stealing from the rich and like murking a bunch of sales assistants and then buying yourself a Mercedes. It's a different aura.

If you really want the beginning of the origin story, you have to go back even further. Actually, it's kind of the same thing with the podcast because I covered the disintegration of Yugoslavia and the explosive growth of organized crime that emerged from the region during the Balkan Wars in the 90s in the very first episode. But I'm going to do a slightly abridged version right here.

Yugoslavia was a communist country ruled by the man they called Tito for decades. It was a collection of six different republics, among them Serbia, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Montenegro, and Macedonia. Tito kept things together. He also had a habit of sending talented criminals abroad to murder dissidents, commit bank robberies, fun things like that. And networks of these criminals started to form all across Europe during this time.

He dies in 1980, and the country starts destabilizing. The economy is suffering. Nationalists of the various ethnic groups inside the country are agitating for more autonomy or independence. They're starting to form up military groups. BBC's Death of Yugoslavia is a really great watch on this. I think it's on YouTube. Slobodan Milosevic takes power in Serbia in 1987, and he starts maneuvering right away. In 1990, things start falling further apart, and the republics start declaring independence. Wars break out, and it gets really ugly again.

With the Serbian military and paramilitary groups going on vicious ethnic cleansing campaigns and committing various human rights violations. Is it Misha Glennie's book where he describes like neighbors from different ethnic groups like in the same street? And they suddenly just like the day after everything's announced, they throw sandbags outside the door and they just start shooting the shit out of each other. I don't know. I can't remember. I mean, the war is the war was so well covered by some really good journalists.

Yeah, that might be Love Thy Neighbor by Peter Moss, which is a good book on it. Lenny's book does mention though how his whole thing is about organized crime and his whole thing is like during this time when these various ethnic groups were committing to kill each other, the people at the top of these paramilitary groups were all in business with each other actually. So the Serbs were in business with the Albanians and the Bosnians and all that because they were just criminals. The money was more important than the various ethnic hatred they were preaching to the regular people at the same time.

In 1992, sanctions hit. And that, you know, for criminals and wannabe criminals, that's boom time. There's no money like contraband money. State-sanctioned smuggling rings start bringing in anything and everything. Again, like looting and robbing, that's good for thugs, but the top leaders, the brains, they know the score, and that's fuel, cigarettes, guns, booze, even some heroin. And

And that's where the money is. And soon the organized crime groups are linking up with each other and other organized crime groups, whether it's Italian mafias like the Camorra, Bulgarians, Montenegrins, Russian, Albanians, fuel and weapons sanctions hit. And then all these organized crime groups are creating relationships with each other and symbiotic relationships with their governments because the governments need them to bring in the goods and the money. And they're getting extremely rich and extremely powerful overnight. This is really when the mafia becomes the state and the state becomes the mafia.

Maria Vyvod, or Vyvod, in her book Warrior Aristocracy, breaks it down from the Tito days of political assassinations to making banks, smuggling with government permission, and how it's all related. Quote, the state security service in former Yugoslavia employed professional criminals in the elimination of dissidents, enemies of socialism, and used their services to produce illicit profit for its financing. When the Milosevic regime rose to power, the services changed its master, but the method remained the same.

Professional criminals were recruited to join or to lead a so-called unit of volunteers. Often these criminals exchanged their time in prison for time at the battlefield. The Serbian warlords were able to carry out the political goals of the Belgrade regime and were granted in exchange open hands in looting and developing illicit trade. The filmmaker of Smash and Grab actually said this in an article she wrote for The Guardian. Quote, it was the 1992 UN sanctions against Yugoslavia that really determined the fate of the Pink Panthers.

Entire industries in Serbia collapsed, creating a generation of people either forced or willing to take part in criminal activities. She also explains how this plays into what happens to the diamonds after, or rather someone involved explained it to her. Everyone who was in the special forces has, quote, business contacts, he explains. Those contacts stretched to West Africa, the home of many diamond mines, and to Antwerp, where Mr. Green later set up a diamond business.

His team recut the diamonds and create new certificates of origin, stating that each stolen diamond was mined in Sierra Leone recently. I mean, I don't fully get why people are so into diamonds these days. Like, I got quite into the industry because I was trying to do a story on it, and I ended up going to Antwerp. And, I mean, Antwerp has the best train station in the world, by the way. But, like...

Lab made diamonds these days, like the ones they could just make on site. They're pretty much the real thing. Like there's almost no difference whatsoever. So why, I mean, why would you pay thousands for some conflict stone? This might also be because I bought a diamond engagement ring for my ex and I blame that ring for a lot of stuff. Yeah, I think we're going to save that story for a different podcast.

So what we have is criminal networks having been set up in Europe even before the wars. And then the wars and sanctions lead to the rise of organized crime groups. And additionally, the wars and sanctions and the trials and tribulations of a post-communist country that was already failing in the 1980s, trying to adjust. And all that just wreaks havoc. Also, besides the sanctions, right, you also have these wars, including NATO bombing Serbia. And that just kind of devastates the economy even further.

And this actually goes into the supposed motivation of the Pink Panthers and their associates. Though if I'm straight with it, I think the money is by far the biggest motivator. So a big part of it is the suffering economy, the lack of jobs, the kind of industry and all that. But according to Samuels, there's also the motivation to say fuck you to the West, to NATO, to the EU and all that. Serbia was hit hard since the wars, tons of unemployment. It's poor. Though to be fair, they were again hit hard after the death of Tito too.

So the way to get ahead was to go to the EU, do crimes, take the money, and go back to Serbia to buy up property and cars. From Samuel's quote, stealing from the West was so ingrained in the local culture that it approached a form of patriotism. There was a song about the guys who steal clothes here, the mayor told me. It goes, we don't steal from Montenegro, we steal for Montenegro.

Many of the Pink Panthers from Sintigny had left the country when they were 20 or younger because there was no work to be found. In Belgrade and beyond, the mayor said, they remained connected to each other because they came from the same place.

He ends his lengthy piece with the sentiment the pig panthers were taking revenge on a world that had robbed them blind, which, you know, I kind of find this thing to be like nonsense. Basically, they're saying the world forced them to this and they were getting revenge on the rich European Union, which kind of strikes me as, you know, like using the word appropriations for a bank robbery where you're just going to take the money and buy yourself jewelry and Mercedes. Like it's, you know, you're not you're not Robin Hood. Like you're robbing. Yeah, you're Robin Hood.

I mean, I am available, by the way, Sony. Please stop. Come on. Also, you kind of need to point out the reason the world cracked down on Serbia was because they were doing war crimes and ethnic cleansing nonstop. That's a big part of the story. But these guys, they do sort of become folk heroes in Serbia and Montenegro.

Again, a 2014 LA Times article. They've become more than pure criminals. They're heroes, said Dragan Ilik, a morning radio talk show host in Belgrade, the Serbian capital. They're violent, but they haven't killed anyone. It's as if they're saying we can beat the technologically superior West with our raw power and intelligence. They're feeding the Western myth of the dark tribal Balkans, these criminals coming from those wars and woods.

Which, like, I don't know. There's a New York Times article that uses the phrase linked by village and blood, which I'll make fun of here, but, like, I definitely would have used that if I had written up this article. So, yeah, these guys, they take their crime profits, they splurge around town, and the authorities can't do anything because Serbia and Montenegro don't extradite citizens. They also don't seem too bothered by it because the Panthers are above board while they're in their home countries. Samuel meets the police chief of Nice, one of the towns known for its Panther contingency,

And speaking of one of them, he says in Europe, he's considered a big boss. Once he gets a hold of a large amount of money, he comes back to Nice to spend the money and show off. We can't do anything because he's not doing anything illegal. And he also tells Samuels that Interpol sends him something like 10 requests a day about people in his town. Why? Because they're the people robbing everything in Europe. They want information on it. Yeah. And, you know, the police chief doesn't have to do anything.

So one of the most famous heists, it's Ginza in Japan, actually involved a woman from Nice and two Serbian men and a Scotsman, which is kind of a wild card. So they stole a famous necklace with 116 diamonds. That's the one that happened in 2004, and it's said to be the greatest robbery in the history of Japan. These guys are just setting records all over different countries. Biggest robbery here, the biggest robbery there.

They arrived a few weeks before. They cased the joint, first pretending to be rich people, came back, pepper sprayed and punched the clerk in the face, grabbed the necklace, which was worth $33 million. Which again, like, you know, this isn't fucking Ocean's Eleven, right? Like how hard is it actually to plan this? Like you asked to see the necklace, you punched the guy in the face, you take it and you run. Like I could come up with this plan. Yeah. I mean, let's have a quick business call after this record as well. It just like, it doesn't seem...

I don't know. It's not. What's interesting about this, though, is that the robbers eventually said that the jewelry shop owner, whose business was going bankrupt at the time, had actually commissioned them to do it, which is a nice little bit of insurance fraud.

And there's questions about how many of the Panther jobs may have been done under similar circumstances. So to be honest, would these guys do that and give up the $30 million necklace for a sum that's probably far less in comparison for helping them out with the insurance fraud? I don't know. Something to think about. Another thing that's happened recently is one of the female Panthers who served in the whole beautiful, celeb, or rich person wife role…

actually wrote a book released in 2018. She's a former professional basketball player that had joined the Panthers. She was a good student. She came from a good family. One of the best ballplayers in Serbia. She spent eight years in prison, actually escaped from one in Athens. She had been doing a smash and grab on Crete and got busted after the robbery when one of her accomplices left some of their tools in the trunk and they got pulled over. They've nicknamed her the Queen Panther. And like I said, she played for a bunch of top ball clubs all around the Mediterranean, including

Got involved with the Panthers in 1995 because her husband was one. So yeah, this is part of the whole are they, are they not? Because like we said, this is eight years before other detectives and journos say the Panthers actually came to be. She started off just reselling designer clothes that had been stolen before she moved into reselling gold and jewelry. And her little Panther cell focused on grief. She was tasked with the staking out and the surveilling.

The Independent says, quote,

For the boots on the ground, the idea was a fit young man with good technical skills and ideally without a criminal record. Someone at The Independent had to make up a word count. Why do you say that? It's just like, this is so wordy. And I don't really, I had to look at this twice and I was like, I can't figure out why she's not quite as truly, but not as artistically as an architect. I don't even get what that means, but yeah, go on The Independent.

So she actually is like pretty sharp. I don't know if she orchestrated this or how it actually played out, whether she had the idea after. But she starts painting while locked up in an Athens prison cell. And the prison officials, they thought she had talent. So they let her start painting offices in there and then hallways, murals and things like that. And prison officials get kind of used to her walking around. So she had this degree of freedom. You can kind of see where this is going, right? Yeah.

Eventually, she called up a Panther friend and they hatched a plot where he would pretend to deliver oil paints. She would go with only one guard to the prison doors to pick up the paint from the supplier, except the supplier, like a Panther, punches the guard in the face and they escape on motorcycles. Again, a lot of these criminal masterminds, their plans literally are just like punch the guy in the face and run. Can we make that into a t-shirt too? I don't know. Like that's a, that's a smart thing to be walking. Yeah. Loads of jugglers. We don't want that on our conscience.

She makes her way back to Serbia through the mountains of Macedonia. Remember, there's a huge manhunt out for her. She's the first woman to escape prison in Greece. But she's a dumbass, so she goes back to Athens afterwards for a planned robbery a few months later. Her safe house gets raided. She's found with like 30 kilos of gold and sentenced to over 30 years in prison. And this is 2012 when she's caught?

And she was not allowed to paint anymore. But I guess she started writing. And then surprisingly, she gets released in 2017 for good behavior, which is 27 years reduced off her sentence. And like, I mean, I know Europeans have a different incarceration program than we do in America. But like somebody definitely got paid for that. For sure.

And come to think of it, like the whole thing with them not talking, it kind of seems like a myth as well. Like maybe they don't give up all the goods, but there's definitely a double-digit number that seem to talk to the media, write books, give interviews. Dusko Martinovich is another one. He was actually nabbing St. Tropez on the speedboat thing. So this is from an old Vice video. Reporter Rocco Castoro, who's a friend of the podcast, said,

He visits him in a Montenegrin prison. I think it was 2013, 2014. He's, you know, no surprise, charming guy. He's working on a farm in the prison and he has the stereotypical Balkan look, right? Tall, shaved head, looks like a bouncer. He's intimidating.

He talks about how in 1993, people in Serbia and Montenegro were just doing what they could to get by. And he takes Rocco to a shoe factory he used to work at. He's on furlough from the prison. He's allowed to go out of it. Where 2,500 people used to work and now it's abandoned. And he says it used to feed half the town and that the war just ruined everything.

Rocco also shows a training exercise that the apprentice Panthers are going through, like literally training for a smash and grab at a jewelry shop in the town. And he gets to participate in it like he's a Panther apprentice to see if he has what it takes to make it as a Panther. It's actually really funny. Like they're doing it in broad daylight. There's alarms going off. No one even like bats an eye. And of course, it includes an interview in a strip club with a dude whose face is totally blacked out, which is just like, you know.

Like old school vice had its issues, but it was fun, man. Like there was a nice period there, 2013, 2014, where it just retained enough of that old school fun with actual responsible reporting. Did that actually happen to coincide when I was there? Yes, it did. But I mean, media is just so boring right now. Yeah. This is the lamestream media, by the way, not cool in-depth podcasts about organized crime, right? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And,

One thing I also found interesting about this is they talked to a middleman who does say that 40 percent of the robberies are arranged by a tip off from the store itself for the insurance, which goes with what the Japan story. You know, we mentioned earlier what we heard then, which, again, like if they're so independent, how does he know this? I don't know. But it's just it's interesting to think about.

One expert they talked to actually believes that the Pink Panther era is nearly finished because Serbia and Montenegro are becoming more willing to hand over these suspects because they want to join the EU. And they have certain milestones they want to hit in the next few years. And getting on the good side of all these law enforcement agencies and countries that have been robbed for millions of dollars factors into that.

Yeah, I mean, they've wanted that for a long, long time. But as long as a guy in control now, like this Bukic guy, is in Serbia, I don't think they're going to be in the EU. But...

I mean, this is such an interesting topic. And while I'm like, while I remember this, actually, I want to give a shout out to Jovo Martinovich because he's done some amazing reporting on the Panthers corruption all over that region. And I spoke to him about doing a story out there about some like Venice heist. I think that was what I was hanging a later version of the pitch on. Didn't get picked up. This guy, Jovo was like, he was done in 2015 for drug trafficking in Montenegro, but he

he was just interviewing drug traffickers for a story. So, uh, and I think he's, his shit's still going down. So I hope he's doing well. I have no idea about that, but it sounds like we could do an episode on it. I mean, that's, it's really interesting. Yeah. I don't like hearing about journalists going to jail for interviewing drug traffickers. That kind of, uh, I know, right. It's a little, little close to home for us over here. Yeah. Um, but yeah, I mean, I don't know if this is still like, why would you bother interviewing

taking this sort of risk now when you can just do ransomwares or you know steal a bunch of crypto or just rip a bunch of people people off with like bullshit crypto like that seems to be where the money is right now is that sort of financial fraud as opposed to taking all this risk with stealing diamonds but who knows i haven't heard any big stories of heist lately i think maybe 2019 or 18 there are a few but it's been relatively quiet yeah it's like it seems something that should be going out of date right it just doesn't feel like something that's of its time

or i don't know yeah something i just thought of right now like why don't why don't they make those glasses like the glass cases shatterproof can you do that like that just seems like a really easy idea right yeah yeah i mean and also cops should i mean what i'm learning from this is that cops should really be if they want to really find the pink panthers they should not be going to like obvious places and just checking out random italian restaurants in towns across serbia they're probably going to find that guy

Yeah. Yeah. Um, but he has shatterproof glass, man. Like get on it anyway. Uh, thank you again for tuning into the underworld podcast. Merch is up. Patreon.com slash the underworld podcast for, you know, we put scripts up there. We put all the sources that we use bonus episodes. There's a bunch of other stuff that we should probably get around to before people. Um, anyway, yeah. Patreon.com slash the underworld podcast. Make it happen. Thanks again. Later.

The 2020 presidential campaign in the United States was a pretty wild spectacle to watch, no matter what your political perspective may be. But there was one particular bit of rhetoric that jumped out at me. It was a criticism of Donald Trump leveled by Bernie Sanders that made use of a well-known historical tidbit. Here's what Sanders had to say.

Nero fiddled while Rome burned. Trump golfs. Nero fiddled while Rome burned. Trump golfs. The senator was riffing on one of the best known stories from the history of ancient Rome.

That is that during a great fire that consumed the Roman capital in the year 64 AD, the self-absorbed Emperor Nero not only did nothing to help, but laughed and played the fiddle while his city burned. It's the kind of story that many people know, even if they know absolutely nothing else about Roman history.

For a whole lot of people, the history of Rome is basically just Julius Caesar, beware the Ides of March, and Nero fiddled as Rome burned. So, in a way, it's not surprising that this story has proved so enduring. It's just too perfectly symbolic.

If you need a historical example of the ruling elite being hopelessly and heartlessly out of touch, I mean, this is it. Nothing quite says, I could care less, like playing a jaunty little tune on the fiddle. But we really should ask, is any of this true?

Did the emperor of Rome really sit back and put on an impromptu hoedown as his city crumbled beneath his feet? Well, here's the thing. If he did, there was no way he played the fiddle. In 64 AD, the violin hadn't even been invented yet. The instrument as we know it today wouldn't come into being for another 1400 years at least.

To give you some historical context, Nero playing the fiddle is basically the same as Charlemagne shredding the electric guitar. In 64 AD, the violin was an impossibly futuristic instrument. But we do know that Nero was an amateur musician and was particularly fond of an instrument known as the lyre, which was a small Greek harp.

He was known to put on long recitals for his advisors where attendance was mandatory. So the original story was that Nero actually played the lyre and sang as the great fire ravaged Rome. But there's good reason to doubt that story too.

The most trustworthy Roman sources inform us that the Emperor Nero wasn't even in Rome when the Great Fire broke out. In fact, we're told that the Emperor rushed back to the city as soon as he was informed so he could personally oversee the relief effort.

So Nero didn't fiddle as Rome burned, and he didn't play the liar. He didn't sing. He didn't sit back all smug and laugh as his people suffered. He learned about the fire through messengers and did his best to respond. Now, that doesn't mean that Nero was somehow a good emperor or even a good guy. In fact, he was probably one of the worst messengers.

But the fiddle, well, that just wasn't a thing. Nero fiddling as Rome burned is a perfect example of what I call a historical myth, a little legend that got wrapped up in the transmission of our history and often gets repeated as a historical fact.

My name is Sebastian Major, and on the podcast Our Fake History, we explore these historical myths and try to determine what's fact, what's fiction, and what is such a good story that it simply must be told. The podcast is one part storytelling and one part historical detective work.

I do my best to bring these weird stories from our past to life, while also asking probing questions about whether or not we should believe them, and how these misunderstandings took root in the first place. On Our Fake History, the goal is to celebrate everything that's weird and wonderful about the past, while also thinking critically and trying to grab on to the slippery concept known as the truth.

If Our Fake History sounds like it's for you, then subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts.