Ranko Rubežić

Ranko Rubežić (born 1951 in Peć, PR Serbia, FPR Yugoslavia — died 19 February 1985 in Belgrade, SR Serbia, SFR Yugoslavia) was a Serbian gangster and criminal.

A prominent crime figure in Belgrade, known locally as the "Serbian Dutch Schultz", his February 1985 murder caused a media frenzy in communist Yugoslavia. It also marked the first case of gangland murder in Belgrade and Yugoslavia in the so-called 'sačekuša' style — something that would become a regular occurrence in the city and country throughout the 1990s and early part of the 2000s.

Early life

Rubežić was born in Peć in 1951 in a poor family of Montenegrin workers though his formative years took place in the Belgrade neighbourhood of Lekino Brdo where the family moved shortly after his birth. Early on he went down a wrong path with street fighting, theft, and stays in juvenile detention a regular part of his early youth.

Criminal career

In his early twenties, Rubežić emigrated to western Europe, spending time and doing racketeering scores in West Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Austria, and Italy.

By the late 1970s he came back to SFR Yugoslavia and began throwing his criminal weight around Belgrade. In doing so, he initiated several criminal techniques prior unseen in the city's underworld — he began racketeering concierges employed in the state-owned city hotels such as Hotel Moskva and Hotel Srbija who pocketed bribes for turning a blind eye to hotel rooms occasionally being used by the hour for prostitution. He ended up serving a six-month sentence for this in 1978, a largely symbolic sentence because Yugoslav criminal code still didn't treat this activity as a serious crime.

With his short stature and slim build, Rubežić's appearance differed significantly from the other prominent Belgrade gangsters of the day such as Đorđe "Giška" Božović, Ljuba Zemunac, Željko "Arkan" Ražnatović, Rade "Ćenta" Ćaldović, etc. all of whom were physical large. Lacking in size, Rubežić made up for it in ruthlessness and sheer determination as he became one of the first Belgrade criminals to carry a gun and explosive devices.

Unlike many of his underworld colleagues and rivals, Rubežić was never contracted by the Yugoslav State Security Service (UDBA). This was mostly due to his lifestyle and manner of running his criminal activities towards the end of his life — following the 1984 altercation with his one-time friend turned rival Đorđe "Giška" Božović, Rubežić went into deep hiding, leading a paranoid and cautious existence, only surfacing to commit an odd crime.

Rubežić was murdered on 19 February 1985 in front of the Belgrade Eastern Gates in the Konjarnik neoghbourhood by his associates Dragan "Dadilja" Popović and Miroslav "Vuja" Vujisić as well as Boris Petkov and Bojan Petrović. Vuja and Dadilja got sentenced to 15 years in prison for the crime while Petkov and Petrović got 5 years each in later separate court trials.

In many ways, Rubežić's murder was a turning point in Belgrade underworld. Prior to it gangster murders were rare in the city - the name of the game among Serbian criminals was mostly to humiliate and incapacitate a rival, not to murder him, however in the coming years that rapidly changed.