SEEDS OF EVIL

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Karadzic's life took a turn toward darkness during the 1970s, when Tito's communist government mounted a loyalty crackdown. Sarajevo's young writers, subject to repeated interrogations by the police, concluded that there had to be an informer in their midst. After checking the timing of police visits and the things interrogators seemed to know, Vesovic began to suspect Karadzic. Vesovic claims that a senior Communist Party official confirmed the suspicion to him, and he says some friends broke with Karadzic then.

By this time Karadzic was a qualified doctor, having launched a career as a psychiatrist in the outpatient clinic of Sarajevo's Kosevo Hospital. "We never really noticed him," says a former colleague. "He just did the minimum the job required. He was a lazybones, and we often heard patients complain about him." Perhaps he had other outlets for his skills. It was well known in Sarajevo that Karadzic padded his income by selling false medical diagnoses so his patients could dodge military service or receive early pensions.

But he could also be a good and caring doctor on occasion. "He saved me," says Fatima Hodzic, 63, a Muslim neighbor and patient of Karadzic's. She suffered from deep menopausal depression, could not get up for days and was thinking of suicide. He treated her at home with medication and therapy sessions. "He was very sensitive and understanding," she says. "I always felt comforted."

The early 1980s brought another phase in his restless search for success. Karadzic became the team psychologist for the popular soccer club Sarajevo, charged with boosting the players' morale and spirit. "Before and after every match he used to talk to us," says Predrag Pasic, a former team member. "But he wasn't too successful. We were too young and crazy to listen to all his stories about a winner's mentality." Pasic says Karadzic used to complain that he was unsuccessful because Sarajevo was not his home and the city rejected him. Pasic says that it was not true, "only his excuse for his failures." Karadzic also urged Pasic to switch to the Belgrade team, Zvezda. "He said as a Serb I should play" in Serbia. "That was strange at the time, because nobody else was thinking in ethnic terms."

That was an early indication of Karadzic's Serbian nationalism. He then went to Belgrade himself and tried to get a job with the Zvezda team. He had no luck and returned to Kosevo Hospital. Now he was openly hunting for a way to make it big. He went into business with Momcilo Krajisnik, the present speaker of the Bosnian Serb parliament, and ended up causing the collapse of a construction company in Pale. In the mid-1980s, he was held in custody for 11 months on suspicion of fraud. Karadzic claims this was an anti-Serb show trial. His poetry mentor, Koljevic, who had been earning hard currency teaching in the U.S., went home and bailed him out.

Karadzic returned to his hospital job and, an inveterate gambler, to late-night poker games. People in his neighborhood still thought of him as a "crazy poet." An electrician who lived nearby says, "He was a great swindler but a nice man. And he loved to gamble." Bosnians who know him say Karadzic today thinks nothing of wagering thousands in a night at a casino.