5: Catch and Release

Basketball is a hugely popular sport in the Balkan States. If you're a professional basketball player in say Serbia, you're a big deal, a celebrity that said, no one can play basketball forever. But when your time as a professional athlete is over, there is another popular career you might be able to presume. If you have the right set of skills, the right connections, and the nerve, you could

Thirty to forty seconds, they're in, they're out.

They've stolen half a billion dollars worth of valuables. Two well dressed men strolled into an exclusive jewelry store in London and walked out with sixty six million dollars in jewels. They're called the Pink Panthers. They're a loosely connected group of over educated, underemployed, ambitious young people who rose from the ashes of the Yugoslav Wars of the nineteen nineties to commit elaborate smash and grab heists all across the globe,

In shebroked.

That's my ex husband. He was a member of the Pink Painters and he still is member of the Ping Pents.

Olivera mostly speaks Serbian. That's her son, Nicholas translating like she says, her husband was a Pink panther, but that was not the life he wanted for her.

He didn't want me to do that stuff because I was the professional basketball player, so it was like unbelievable for me to step in that side of the world.

You know, Olivera was a power forward for one of Serbia's tom basketball teams, the Novasatska ze Ka. She made good money and made smart investments around Belgrade.

I have you private business which did well. I had a lot of funny all the time.

But when the civil wars in the Balkans break out in the early nineteen nineties and sanctions are imposed on Serbian Oliveri's team can no longer travel to compete in international games. To continue playing professionally, she has to leave Serbia.

So it all started when she first came to Greece.

The Spina Papa Joryu is a freelance journalist in Greece.

In nineteen ninety one, the water upted in Yugoslavia, so it was impossible for any kind of professionals to do some living there. So she came in Greece in the summer of nineteen ninety two to play professional basketball.

Because she was quite a star in Yugoslavia.

Oliveri is hired by one of the top teams in Greece based in Athens. At first, she doesn't think of her adopted city.

She wasn't very impressed.

She found the city a bit dirty, but it.

Was in Athens. Such a love noctio door.

Love who has a way of leading to trouble. The man Olivera falls for in Athens has an interesting way of making a living and some interesting associates too.

So it all starts now because the whole pink Panther's thing is connected with her husband, who she.

Met in as.

Olivera said in an interview that she saw her husband as a robin Hood figure stealing from the ridge, and well that's where the robin Hood analogy kind of falls apart. But it was her relationship with this man that leads Olivera into her next profession.

When she got pregnant, she went back to Belgrade and then it started.

So first she got in contact with the ring via her husband.

This ring, as the Spina Papajoria calls it, is made up of fellow Serbians who are doing brisk business in Greece and across Europe.

This ring was bringing stolen goods to Serbia from abroad, and it was mostly jewels and fashion brands, expensive fashion brans, clothing.

The sanctions against Serbia had created a super charged market for stolen goods and it didn't just go away once the sanctions were lifted, the Serbian economy was still in shambles. On the streets of Belgrade, illicit merchandise was everywhere. Olivera's son Nicholas explains how she got involved.

Through the relationship and marriage with him. She got closer to those kind of people. So the people who still it, they don't sell it like in real store, they sell it like three times less price.

You know, Olivera can see there is an opportunity here. She's got the legitimate businesses she's invested in around Belgrade, and she certainly knows the right people.

So in Oliveda's mind, it was good point to start buying the stuff from the criminals. And she already got to the content with the people with the friends with my father, so she got the idea to buy the stolen stuff from them from the less money, and then then sell them in the servia and earn like for one day, she earns like one year basketball contract, you know.

With her fame, her looks and her connections, Olivera's business booths. She told the British newspaper The Independent, quote, I even had politicians, doctors and famous people coming to my makeshift showroom to buy the stolen goods end of quote. She's so successful that she outgrows her piecemeal suppliers. Here's Nicholas translating for her again.

At the one point, they don't have so many goods as I want to buy because I'm selling it every day. So they don't have enough money to go to another country to steal something.

They don't know where to go and what to steal that.

I want to make it faster to get to the goods that.

I need to sell.

Then I'm going deeper and deeper to the crime.

Soon, Olivera was running her own tea.

Tea after a few months.

I am the absolutely one who is organizing the group.

She recruits the new crew members, and she has excellent instincts for who will be a good getaway driver, who is quick with tools, who will make the best team leader. At first, on the very plans of Heights from Afar, she carefully diagrams the store she's targeting, details the items she wants her crew to steal. She makes a map of the surrounding roads for their getaway. Her associates case the store for weeks before striking. It's all working.

I have the people who are moving the stolen goods by the borders. So I already have two or three those personal stores in my own showrooms. So it's all circle. All the people from the crime trust me because I never come late to pay them. I always pay them on time, and I'm doing it as someone who is professional sports player, not a criminal. I have a sports discipline.

It is that sports discipline. By the late nineteen nineties, Olivera has become a major figure among the Serbian criminal class, one of the only women with her own crew. It's a new kind of celebrity for her.

In the criminal circles.

I get famous, kind of popular. We are doing well, and if you become a member of my group that you're going to be reach in a few months.

So only one month you will.

Buy the best car, two months you will got the new apartment in the luxury part of the city.

My colleague Alan Greenberg says Olivera's decision to join the criminal world is not all that surprising.

For people of her generation. They really were forced to get creative about how they were going to make a life. Serbia was so cut off, the sanctions from the West, just a general dismal economy, yeah.

I get that, But what I don't get is like, why Olivera. She's in a much better position than most Serbians. I mean, she is famous, she's got money, she is kind of a star.

Definitely, she's head of the game in post war Serbia. But when her basketball career was over, when she couldn't play anymore and she wanted to have a business career, she had to deal with the realities of life at home. So she did get.

Creative, right, and we heard how they became very reliant on the black market because of the civil war, and that never really went away, did it, Right.

It becomes entrenched. It's very common and a lot of the goods people need or want medicine, cigarettes, designer clothing, jewelry, it comes from the West. People steal it there and then they bring it home to Serbia and sell it.

Yeah, that sounds familiar for so much of the region. But what makes Serbia difference is that anger towards the West. Right, they felt that they were being punished by the West, and it seems like a lot of people felt justified. Do you think it would be an exaggeration to say that for Serbians it was almost patriofic to bring things back from the wealthier countries to help people back home in Belgrade.

I think that's true when you talk to people who live through this period, or even ask people in Serbia now about the pink panthers, there's this attitude like, sure, crime is bad, robbery is bad, but the West is rich and we have nothing, so the hell with them.

Olivera is happily running her own successful team of Belgrade thieves. She and her husband have a son, Nicholas, but the marriage doesn't end up working out. She leaves him and finds a new love interest.

The story continues because she then was receiving the best merchandise from a guy called Dragon Dragon yazid if I pronounced it correctly, and she was so intrigued by this personality of Dragon and she decided to come back to Greece and meet him in person.

Dragon spelt drga n is a popular name in Serbia. And to be clear, this Dragon is not Dragon Mickage, the pink panther who is arrested in the train station in France after trying to buy a ticket with a five hundred euro note. This Dragon was running a team of jewel thieves in Athens. He and Olivera had been doing good business together. Then they meet in person and they fall in love. He's ten years younger than Olivera.

Was probably something like very intense feeling the love at first sight, so she decided this way to participate in a robbery in a big hotel jewel resort. This was in the summer of two thousand and five.

Olivera agrees to help Dragon case the jewelry store in the luxury hotel. Like many of the female Pink Panthers, her role is together intel on their targets, identify them as merchandise, and assess the security. And like other women panthers, she looks the part impeccably.

She visited the store before, pretending to be a wealthy customer and being also a very impressive woman. She was like a blonde one meter ninety two ninety three resuld, so she didn't have much difficulty in frusuading the staff in the junior store to show her the most expensive collections. At the same time, she was screening the place to see how security is like and pass the information to her associates.

But after the robbery, oliver and her boyfriend hit a stroke of bad block. They're in a routine traffic stock when police discover incriminating evidence Dragon had left his cutting tools in the trunk of their car.

She was arrested in them. She was really a starn.

You know how the media, the tabloids, they were like the Amazon, the basketball. The Amazon was arrested and created was a big thing.

So she found herself Jay.

Although she kept the court of contact of the gang, she didn't give anue away in the court and she denied any involvement, but still she.

Was in Jane.

Olivera and Dragon are both sentenced to prison on the island of Crete. She serves six years, but when she and Dragon are released, are they reformed? They or not. In March twenty twelve, Olivera returns to Athens and teams up once again with her boyfriend Dragon.

She decided to come to Athens this participate in a robbery.

And this actually wasn't the best.

Timing this particular moment they chose from the robbery because it was really very strange.

There was another robbery taking place at the same time.

Next stor another robbery taking place next door at the exact same time. It truly is terrible luck.

So the police were there and shooting starts, which is not usually in Greece.

It's highly useful.

The Pink Panthers plan their heis carefully. They make every effort to avoid anyone being heard. But this is something no one could plan for. Olivera's boyfriend, Dragon is shot three times.

So her boyfriend was wounded very very seriously, and he end it's up in the hospital and he was in a coma for forty days.

Olivera manages to escape, but she is beside herself over Dragon. If there was ever a time to get out, it is now. But she can't.

She apparently quite emotional.

She couldn't leave him here like that, so she went back into the house they used, and the police raided the house and they found her in there, along with a lot of incriminating the evidence from its robberies.

The police find masks, wigs, weapons, and fake identity documents. Olivera is arrested and lands back in a Greek jail, this time in the infamous Athens prison called Corrida Los. Olivera loves to tell stories of her time inside Corrida Loss. She claims that one cell made told her she had killed her husband and his mistress then serve them in a pie to the husband's parents, something out of a

Every criminal believe in that you are so smart that there is no way for you to get into the prison. And you are thinking like that until your first time go to the prison, and then you learn that you were just an amateur and you didn't know nothing about the crime.

Prison, it turns out, is a crucial aspect of a panther's credibility.

I don't know anyone in the pink painters that has not a serious prison sentence behind his back. Those who say that they are so smart, they were pin ventors and they never went to prison, that's all the lies.

That's not a true story.

So destiny of one good ping ventor is a lot of money, a lot of fast money, prison one hundred percent for sure. After the prison, again fast money, and again.

Prison Olivera makes good use of her time at Carida Loss, but she doesn't plan to stay long. Journalistic spinup a bar your you.

She started painting in prison, and she discovered she was quite good to sea.

Olivera Tchirkouture's artistic talent is more than a hobby. It becomes part of her plan to escape.

So she had been thinking to escape since day one. The prison officer was persuaded to let your.

Paint the prison governor's office while the governor was away, and this was golden opportunity because the office was fifteen meters from Colorida Lost prison entrance, that is, fifteen meters from freedom.

As you might expect, Olivera has worked through the logistics carefully and she's patient.

So since started painting endless hours and waiting for the right moment, she had notified the Pink panther gun members to come to others and rent an apartment.

Olivera manages to get permission to buy art supplies from outside the present and have them delivered.

And of course this was part of the plan.

So her collaborators were strolling for weeks on ends outside the prison walls, and the day comes Olivera is now in the prison governor's office, so she gives a signal with her mobile phone, which she had managed to smuggle into the prison, and when the gate opened, her cellian associate enters holding a bag with art supplies, and everything happened within seconds. The man hit the prison officer on the head, and Olivera just walked out of prison and got on a motorbike that was waiting outside.

After the escape, Olivera heads on foot to the mountains of Macedonia. A young accomplice is waiting there near the border. He shows her the route across the mountainous terrain. It's over one hundred and fifty miles. Olivera tapes her wrists and ankles as she would for a pro basketball game, and she makes the climb. She's been given a map, some money, and has set up meetings with contacts along the route to charge her phone and get more supplies.

Her son translates, I'm the first and only woman ever escaped from the prison in Europe.

But like every true team player, she shares the credit for the win.

That's why I escaped from the prison. That's why I made it. I was smarked by the time to make a good plan for how to escape. But with all those people who are ready to give the life for you, you cannot escape from the prison.

But one of the craziest things about Oliver's story is the fact that just a few months after escaping prison and walking back to Serbia, she returns for another job in Athens.

After I escaped. Three months later, I came back to the same city and we did the armed robbery of the jewelers store. Four days after we did it, well, they arrest me.

Police raide Oliver's rented safehouse and find her with sixty five pounds of gold.

Oh I was convicted organizer of the criminal gang named Pink Panthers.

This time, Oliver is sentenced to thirty two years on one hundred and sixteen charges of aggravated theft and three armed robberies. The authorities value the looted goods at more than five hundred million dollars. Back in prison again, she is deprived of her art supplies naturally, so instead she turns to creative writing. She chronicles her criminal exploits in a kind of diary, but on appeal many of the charges against her are actually dismissed and her sentence is commuted.

I am free from the prison since twenty seventeen, so I decided to change my life. I serve my prison sentences, so I don't own anything to anyone. Any country is not looking for me.

Anymore, Oliver.

She's done with the life of crime.

To step up out of the crime, it's really really hard. You need a lot of money to continue the life that you get used to by doing that crime stuff.

And so she's turned the story of her criminal past into a new enterprise. She has speaking engagements, she's a YouTube star. And remember that prison diary she kept, She's turned it into three books. They're called I Pink Panther, I Pink Panther two and I Pink Panther three all have sold quite well in the former Yugoslavia. There's even a TV series based on her books that's being developed

I'm representing not just the crime story. I'm representing my life and my character, and my character is the character of the winner.

Oliveri. Tcherkovich says that prison is a necessary part of the criminal education of any pig Panther, but there is a limit to how much time behind bars a panther is willing to spend, and as Oliveri's story shows, a prison break is not that different from a heist. Both involved tight security and armed guards. To pull either of them off, you need careful planning, precision, and ingenuity, and Oliveri is not the only Panther to stage an escape that has all the flare and theatrics of one of

Today, two vehicles crashed through the perimeter, pushed through layers of barbed wire, got ladders up over the last of the wire so their guy could climb over to them.

And so the Pink Panther gang strikes again. The trucks barreling through the gates, the ladders thrown over the wall, the prison yard paralyzed by gunfire. But if you take a closer look at the actual operation, much of it starts to seem like a spectacle designed to draw the attention of the media. Jack Johnson is an American expert on prison systems who's worked for the Federal Bureau of Prisons for the past twenty three years.

I will tell you that what you described to me is just people practicing a trade, having a career criminal orientation, and the escape is part of the trade. This is rod interrelated organized criminal activity that's very regimented and very methodical and so as brazen as it sounds, it probably was calculated.

It was to be overkill, you know what I mean. They didn't even need all that firepower. The guards didn't have guns, So like a sensational as the escape sounds, they know that they're not going to get resisted.

The po wasn't in. Panther who made this dramatic escape had only two years left on his sentence. In another Panther prison break, the men who escaped had just one year remaining. Like stealing jewels who can't easily sell, these prison breaks seem as much about the Pink Panther's own mystique as anything else.

I keep going back to the oneywhere the person's a year from release, you know, So what's the motivation for something like that? Has to be more than just getting somebody out of prison, So I think maybe it is a lot of this is by design for the publicity, for the sensationalism and the publicity.

Captain rve Konnon of the Paris Police had arrested the Pink Panther, named Dragon Mikage after a high stat a ski resort in the French Arms. Mikitch is a big man six foot six and his fit. Conan had heard that he did two thousand push ups a day. That's why Conan had immediate doubts that the French authorities would be able to secure their prisoner. And he told them, so, I've been to.

The prison to interview this guy. Okay, he was two met as tall. That was impressed because the guy, he was just a muscle. And I disc got after that with the god of the prison. I said, okay, guys, you know the guy.

Is very very fit.

You should be very careful.

And one week after that, at Conando attacked the prison with a K forty seven.

It was the afternoon of October sixteenth, two thousand and five. Mikitch had just entered the prison yard for his daily exercise when two pink panthers pulled a venop outside the prison walls, threw a ladder and wirecutters over the wall, and then while the shop at the guards with an AK forty seven, Mikitch climbed the ladder, jumped into the van and they all drove off.

They shot on the prison and they liberate the guy, and the gay disappeared nothing.

He was totally lost.

It's widely assumed that dragon, Mikic went straight back to Serbia, where he could live openly beyond the reach of French law enforcement, much to Captain Connan's frustration. Another person who proved difficult to keep behind bars is Milan le Poya. In our last episode, we said that Milan had also managed to escape prison before his dramatic arrest in the French border town of Jacques in two thousand and eight. Here's how he ended up in jail that first time.

Milan Librier was first arrested in two thousand and six when he entered Switzerland from France, and he was extraducted to US.

Robert Wallner is the prosecutor General for Liechtenstein. After Milan's arrests and extradition, he was held in the country's only jail well he awaited trial.

We thought we could bring him to trial, but he didn't have the intention to stay with us and our polices is not really very often confronted with criminals of black calaber. So what he did was he had meticulously planned to flee our small jail.

Liechtenstein is tiny population just under forty thousand, and the single small jail is all they have. The police there are more used to dealing with white collar crime. Serious criminals are typically exported to Austrian prisons, and Milan happened to know that the jail he was in did not have a hospital on its grounds.

He one morning went to the fitness room in the jail and he smashed his hand with a weight and he was taken by two policemen to our local hospital here, and that's when two men entered the hospital with kalashnikovs and they managed to free him, and then it was gone.

Despite its reputation as a finishing school for pink panthers, prison was not where Milan Lipoye wanted to be. In two thousand and six, he had plans, and just a few months later the world would see those plans come to life as he and Boyana Mitch drove a pair of Audis through the plate glass doors of the Waffi Moll in Dubai. Milan's escape from the Liechtenstein jail might have been a sore point for Robert Walner, but Warner would see his prisoner again.

But he was re arrested later and extradited us again in twenty ten, and this time we looked after him very carefully until the trial and he wasn't able to escape again.

Lalipoe was convicted for his role in the Lectinstein heist and sentenced to nine years in prison. This time he served his time. Coming up next on Infamous International, The Ping Panthers Story.

Guys are hungry, they want to make some money.

When it comes to the Ping Panthers, it's hard to know if this is a highly organized criminal syndicate.

You have a bunch of these organizations.

They're like sales, you know.

Or an informal network of thieves.

It doesn't necessarily make sense that there's this one centralized hierarchy, either very complicated it's very hard to follow the money.

Or something else entirely.

We can say it was some kind of joint venture business between organized crime and the state.

That's next time on Infamous International, The Pink Panthers Story. Infamous International. The Pink Panthers Story was produced by Best Case Studios in association with Koda's Story, hosted by me Natalia ant Lava and written by Katrina Wolfe, Adam Pinkis, Suszanne Myers, and David Markowitz, with help from Brent Katz