How a cracked phone app rocked a crime-ridden Balkan state
When police forces in Western Europe cracked an encrypted phone app popular with drug smugglers, the messages they deciphered from the Balkan state of Montenegro provided shocking evidence of a crime-trapped state.
A Montenegrin policeman discussed cocaine shipments with a notorious crime boss, and the son of the head of the country’s highest court offered to skew sentences and help with smuggling. Another police officer sent photos to the leader of an organized crime group showing how his police unit had dealt with members of a rival crime gang. One victim had a gun stuck in his throat.
The messages, shared with prosecutors in Montenegro in 2021 but followed up only last year, helped accelerate the fall of Milo Djukanovic, 61, Europe’s longest-serving elected leader until his defeat in the presidential election in April. Rumors had been circulating for years about Djukanovic’s conspiracy with criminals, something he has always denied.
“It was clear that the institutions were being conquered by corruption and organized crime,” Mr Djukanovic’s successor, Jakov Milatovic, 36, said in an interview on his first day as president in Podgorica, the capital, last month.
The new leader, an Oxford-educated former economist at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, said it was time to stop shrugging in response toa widespread perception that the entire system is corrupt.
“Everything started from the top – and that top has been politically defeated,” President Milatovich said. .”
How far he can go depends in large part on whether the parliamentary elections on June 11 are the political downfall of Mr. Confirm Djukanovic. That process began three years ago when his previously invincible governing party lost control of parliament — and the power to appoint ministers responsible for law enforcement.
Privately, European diplomats have long complained about the rot in Montenegro, but said there was little they could do. That was partly because the United States was focused on getting the country to join NATO against the opposition of Mr Djukanovic’s pro-Russian enemies, and had little interest in rocking the boat. Montenegro, with towering mountains, beautiful beaches and only 625,000 people, sat on the last stretch of the Mediterranean coast not yet in the alliance.
There was also little solid evidence of conspiracy with criminals, at least until police infiltrated the messaging app Sky ECC, which shut down after its executives were indicted by the United States for extortion in 2021.
The decrypted messages sent to prosecutors in Podgorica were not acted upon until last year when they leaked to local media and led to a spate of arrests of people featured in the messages, all named during Mr. Djukanovic.
These include long-time head of the Supreme Court, Vesna Medenica; her son, Milos; a prosecutor; and several police officers, including another frequent user of the Sky ECC app, Petar Lazovic, the son of a former head of the fight against organized crime.
“We finally have proof of what we all thought was going on,” said Zeljko Ivanovic, the CEO of the country’s largest independent media group, Vijesti. “We should build a monument to the Sky app.”
That Montenegrin criminals, some of them fabulously rich thanks to the cocaine trade and the smuggling of cigarettes into Europe to avoid import duties, had bribed parts of the police and judiciary has been an open secret for years, but “they were untouchable,” said Montenegro’s acting Prime Minister Dritan Abazovic.
“The narco cartels and cigarette smugglers formed a network that funded political parties, political parties gained power and the criminals felt comfortable,” he said. “But after recent changes everything crashes now.”
Mr Djukanovic has long denied any links to organized crime, dismissing allegations as the work of his political enemies and disinformation generated by Serbia and Russia, both of whom wanted him gone because of his support for NATO, Montenegro joined in 2017. Milatovic, the new president, is also a strong supporter of NATO, although some of his supporters are not.
In addition to punishing arrests, the government led by Mr. Abazovic also targeted the businesses of Mr. Djukanovic’s associates, cutting off the revenues of state-owned companies.
What supporters of Montenegro’s break with Mr. Viewing Djukanovic as draining the swamp, however, is viewed differently by the former president and his supporters. Instead, they see a victory for Serbia and Russia and a politically driven redistribution of the loot.
Zdravko Becovic, President of the Bar Association of Montenegro and lawyer of the arrested former Supreme Court Chief Justice, Ms. medicine,
said his client was blamed for her son’s sins, who may have promised gangsters that through his mother he could tip the scales in their favor. “But there is no evidence that she ever spoke to these people or took their money,” Mr Becovic said. The mother, unlike the son, a cocaine addict, he added, has never used the Sky ECC app.
Mr Milatovic, the new president, declined to say whether he would like to see his predecessor prosecuted, saying only that Mr Djukanovic, as a former president, “may have an office, a car and an allowance, but he has no immunity. .” Mr Djukanovic has denied rumors that he plans to move to Dubai, saying at a farewell press conference that he has done nothing wrong and will remain in Montenegro.
Italian prosecutors investigating the Mafia accused Mr. Djukanovic suffered nearly 20 years of running a cigarette smuggling operation, but abandoned plans to prosecute him after he led Montenegro to independence from Serbia in 2006, a move that earned him immunity as it made him the leader of a sovereign state.
In 2016, Jelena Jovanovic, a reporter at Vijesti newspaper, received a potentially explosive tip from the head of an organized crime group who, angry at an attempt by a rival criminal group to blow up his brother, gave her a list of police officers, said he, were on the payroll of his brother’s would-be assassins.
Ms. Jovanovic, who is surveilled by guards whenever she goes out due to death threats, wrote about the list without naming names. But she reported it to the public prosecutor, Milivoje Katnic, an old ally of Mr. Djukanovic, and the special prosecutor Stojanka Radovic, who led a subsequent investigation.
Prosecutors, she said, did nothing.
“They could have stopped all this years ago, but they didn’t want to,” she said. “Protecting criminals was a state project.”
It was much the same story, according to Mr Abazovic, the acting Prime Minister, when Europol delivered a first episode of deciphered Sky ECC phone messages to Montenegro in 2021. The prosecutor’s office, still led by allies of Mr. Djukanovic, he said, buried the transcripts and insisted there was nothing to investigate. The prosecutor responsible for that decision was arrested in December.
Hiding the evidence became impossible after that Libertasa news portal funded by the US embassy in Montenegro leaked some of Europol’s information and began publishing decrypted messages last year.
Mr Lazovic, the son of the anti-organized crime chief, whose reports indicate he tipped off a notoriously vicious crime boss about police surveillance and ongoing investigations, was charged in April with another police officer for setting up a criminal organization, abuse of office, drug smuggling, drug trafficking and complicity in murder.
Mr Lazovic’s lawyer, Nikola Martinovic, acknowledged that his client had communicated with criminals about drug shipments, but said it was done only to gain their trust as part of an undercover mission to break into a particularly brutal drug ring.
“He is a victim, not a criminal,” the lawyer said.
Damir Lekic, a lawyer from Podgorica who represents members of a rival gang arrested by Mr Lazovic in the past, dismissed that as highly unlikely. He said his clients had told him in 2017 – long before the decrypted Sky messages surfaced – that the police officer for an organized crime group that tortures rival drug traffickers on assignment.
“I didn’t believe them, but when I read the Sky transcripts I understood that what they said was 100 per cent correct,” said Mr Lakic. ‘I can’t lie. My clients are criminals. But everything they told me turned out to be true.”
Alisa Dogramadzieva reporting contributed.