A few days ago, the trial of a 50-year-old Serb and a 39-year-old Montenegrin accused of kidnapping and torture began before the Viennese court, and Dario Đorđević aka Dexter is mentioned as the “mastermind” of the whole operation. The duo, who are associated with the “Kavak clan”, are accused of luring two Croats to Vienna on Dexter’s instructions and abusing them for hours, mistakenly believing that one of them was the son of a millionaire, writes nova.rs.
The chilling details of the kidnapping
According to the prosecutor’s office, the abduction took place in 2020. The two defendants, together with other suspects, lured a younger man, who they thought was the son of a Croatian millionaire, and another 64-year-old Croat to Vienna.
In an apartment whose walls and floor were covered with plastic film, the victims were tied up, tortured and threatened with death in order to reveal the whereabouts of the money. They intimidated them with “hand saws and pistols with silencers”, and abused the younger victim for more than four hours. One of the messages they sent them said: “If you don’t tell us where the money is soon, we’ll have to start sawing.” The prosecutor’s office stated that the scenes of torture were “something that is normally only seen in television series”.
The “mastermind of the operation” is already serving a life sentence
Dario Đorđević Dexter, the alleged organizer of this kidnapping, is already serving a life sentence in the Austrian Stein prison. In March of this year, the Supreme District Court in Vienna upheld his first-instance verdict from December 2023 for smuggling hundreds of kilograms of cocaine and heroin in Austria.
The indictment charged him with leading a criminal clan that sold 340 kilograms of cocaine, 50 kilograms of heroin and five kilograms of cannabis from the beginning of 2020 to the summer of 2021 and organized the smuggling of additional quantities of drugs. At the trial, Đorđević pleaded not guilty, and his lawyer Werner Tomanek protested the extraordinary security measures. “They’re portraying him as Hannibal Lecter from ‘Silence of the Lambs.’” That violates his presumption of innocence, Tomanek said.
Accusations in Serbia and the connection with the Veljko Belivuk clan
Dexter’s name is also on the indictment in Serbia, where he is accused of participating in the organization of three murders: Dragan Ristić Čađa, Aleksandar Halabrin and Aleksandar Šarac, together with members of the “witch clan”, Nikola Vušović and Uroš Piperski. Although Serbia issued a warrant for him, he was arrested in June 2021 in Austria.
Interestingly, in 2020 he was reported missing and it was suspected that he was one of the victims of the Veljko Belivuk clan. Later it turned out that he was not only alive, but also that he worked closely with Belivuk’s group. His criminal past in Serbia dates back to 2008, when he participated in a gang conflict in Kaluđerica in which two people were killed.
Operation “Achilles” and armed robberies
Dexter’s arrest is part of an extensive Austrian police investigation called “Achilles”, launched four years ago, which included around 10,000 people connected to mafia organizations from Serbia and Montenegro. In addition to drugs, Đorđević was also tried for other crimes.
At the beginning of November 2023, his trial began on charges that he and six other clan members stole 13 kilograms of cocaine and 106,000 euros from a rival gang in a garage in Vienna in December 2019. That indictment was based on decrypted messages from the “Sky” application, writes Index.hr.
(TYPE)
