NY Times: Radovan Karadzic’s New-Age Adventure

By JACK HITT
Published: July 22, 2009

It was Mina Minic’s wife who first opened the door, that day in 2005, to find a tall man inquiring if this was the house of “academic professor doctor Mina Minic.” The tall man gave Mrs. Minic a bouquet of flowers and kissed her hand. When Mr. Minic, a short, chipper Serbian soothsayer with 19th-century-style mutton chops, came down to the door, he found a “very strange” man who introduced himself as Dragan Dabic. The man wore a long overcoat with a gentleman’s hat, and when he lifted it, he revealed long gray tresses pulled up into a topknot, set beaklike at his forehead. Below, he sported a full bushranger beard. Minic’s first impression, he told me, was that Dabic looked “like a monk who had done something wrong with a nun.” Dabic asked if Minic was the famous “maestro of radiesthesia,” the master of a dowsing method that instead of a stick relies on a pendulum called a visak. (Depending on which account you read, radiesthesia dates back as far as the Egyptian pharaohs or some decades ago to a guy named Albert Abrams in San Francisco.)

Around the same time that Minic opened his door, another Belgrade clairvoyant, Dusan Janjic, had a similar encounter. The tall man appeared one day in the same get-up, again with flowers in hand for the wife. Dabic expressed profound admiration for Janjic’s talents — specifically, his prowess in reading energy grids with something called a Multi-Zap Zapper.

After acquiring his own Zapper and visak, Dabic grew professionally close to both Minic and Janjic. He came to spend vast swaths of time holed up in Minic’s office, a humble basement room where a desk was improvised from a bookcase set upon two chairs. Sometimes Dabic would sleep on a cot there. When Minic or Janjic would ask about Dabic’s history or his credentials, he’d be vague. He had lived in New York, he would say, but his marriage to his wife, who remained in New York with his children, had ended on an ugly note. Minic remembered that his friend maintained “four or five” cellphones and that they rang all the time. “He would always arrange to call everyone back,” Minic explained. “That’s why I thought he was a spy.”

But he wasn’t a spy. As Minic and Janjic (along with the rest of the world) were shocked to find out last July, their tall protégé with the eye-catching hairdo was Radovan Karadzic, the most hunted war criminal on the planet.....