YUGOSLAVIA: The Notorious Bandit

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In World War II, Carmelo Jurissevich was a tough-minded and tough-sinewed partisan who fought with Tito against the Germans. But being a Croatian peasant who treasured freedom and hated authority, he had no use for Tito's postwar Communist dictatorship. On the inevitable night in 1949 when Tito's secret police came after him, Carmelo and his younger brother Emil fled to Trieste, only a thump ahead of the knock at the door. From their haven just across the border, Carmelo and Emil set up an overland express, guiding Yugoslavs to freedom. Before the year was out, Tito's agents had jailed Carmelo's mother and sister back home, and shot Emil dead in Italian territory. Three times they tried to kill Carmelo in the streets of Trieste, and failed.

"I'll take anyone who wants to get out," promised Carmelo. And for eight years he did. A good thousand men and women—Yugoslavs or Italians caught on the wrong side by the map makers—owe him their freedom. To fugitives who protested fearfully when he picked up others en route, he replied, "As many as we are, we all go, or nobody goes." To those who tried to pay him (the standard border-running price is $160), Carmelo laughed and said softly, "You'll need it later. Come on, let's go." Once, in the troop-infested area around Capodistria, Carmelo and his refugees were sweating out the arrival of nightfall in a cottage when there came a knock at the door. Carmelo ordered the refugees out the back window, calmly opened the door, tossed out a grenade, slammed the door and escaped through the back window himself. To a father who had to leave a ten-year-old boy behind, Carmelo pledged, "You'll get your son back." Seven months later he raided a detention camp deep in Yugoslavia, found the boy and delivered him to Trieste. Once he made a special trip to bring out a farmer's pig and cow.

Between missions, Carmelo, 35, always armed, shifted in a shadowy world of refugee camps, empty attics, slivovitz bars and rented rooms (which he liked to share with grateful refugee girls). No one on either side of the border ever betrayed him. But last week Carmelo's luck ran out. In the Carso hills above Trieste, where he knew every twisted pathway, sheltered wood and hidden gully, Carmelo was leading a couple and their two children to safety when Tito's red-starred "people's guards" opened fire with submachine guns. Carmelo returned the fire with his Beretta pistol, but the next day Yugoslav authorities proudly announced the killing of "the notorious bandit, Jurissevich." Mourning a legend and a hero, a Triestino said: "He really cared about only one thing, personal liberty. He wanted everybody to be free."