Group America

Group America — usually called Grupa Amerika or Klan Amerika in Serbian reporting — is one of the longest-running Balkan organized-crime networks to acquire a genuinely international footprint. Its history is unusually difficult to tell cleanly because three different layers are often mixed together: court-proven drug cases, police and intelligence assessments about membership, and a much darker set of unresolved murder allegations. the archive separates those layers rather than presenting the entire mythology of the group as fact.

Origins in New York and Belgrade

OCCRP traces the network’s prehistory to Serbian émigré Boško Radonjić, who became associated with New York’s Westies and maintained links to figures in the Gambino crime family. Two younger Serbian associates, Mileta Miljanić and Zoran Jakšić, spent time in the United States before later becoming central figures in the organization that investigators came to call Group America.

The bridge between that New York circle and the 1990s Belgrade organization was Vojislav “Voja Amerikanac” Raičević. OCCRP reports that Raičević was given control of the gang in Belgrade and oversaw its transformation into a disciplined network increasingly focused on cocaine trafficking between South America and Europe.

Raičević disappeared in 1997. His body has never been publicly recovered and no final judicial finding establishes precisely who killed him. His disappearance is nevertheless the pivotal event in the group’s early history. Investigative records reviewed by OCCRP describe a subsequent cycle of revenge and internal violence. Those accounts are valuable evidence about how investigators understood the network, but they are not substitutes for murder convictions, and the archive labels them accordingly.

Miljanić and Jakšić

After the Raičević period, Mileta Miljanić “Majk” emerged as the organization’s strategic leader, while Zoran Jakšić became a central operational figure. Italian investigators quoted by OCCRP described Miljanić as a promoter and financier and Jakšić as the man directing important operational phases of trafficking.

The pair illustrate why Group America survived longer than many Balkan gangs created in the 1990s. Instead of relying on a single neighborhood or a visible street hierarchy, the network could move people, money and logistics between jurisdictions. Investigators followed members and associates through Italy, Central Europe, the Balkans and South America.

Cocaine as the core business

The strongest provable part of the Group America story is drug trafficking. Miljanić served a prison sentence in Italy for cocaine distribution. Jakšić accumulated a long international criminal record and received major drug-trafficking sentences in Peru, including a 25-year sentence in 2021 in the Las Golondrinas case involving an 800-kilogram cocaine shipment.

Slobodan Šolaja, another figure identified by OCCRP as a group member, was sentenced to eight years after a scheme to move 164 kilograms of cocaine from Panama to Bosnia hidden in shipments of ceramic cups. He later absconded rather than report to prison and died in 2017.

A later Serbian case involved Goran Jović, Miodrag Nikolić, Zoran Simić and Vlatko Filiposki. Serbian Supreme Court records confirm final convictions for unauthorized drug distribution, with sentences ranging from four to six and a half years. Contemporary police-source reporting linked that circle to Group America and described Jović as close to Veselin Raičević. Because the formal judgment proves the drug offense but does not itself adjudicate the historical structure of Group America, the archive records their clan connection as reported rather than court-established.

The murder allegations

Group America has for decades been associated in police files and investigative reporting with a series of killings in Serbia and elsewhere. Some accounts describe a revenge campaign after Voja Raičević disappeared, and various names from the 1990s Belgrade underworld recur in those narratives.

This is also where the evidentiary line matters most. OCCRP notes that authorities have attributed contract killings to members of the network, while murder convictions establishing a broad Group America assassination program have not followed. Individual the archive pages therefore distinguish convicted conduct, police attribution, informant testimony, and media speculation.

Money, businesses and longevity

OCCRP’s financial reporting found that people linked to the network invested in ordinary businesses across the Balkans, including property, hospitality, vehicles and other commercial ventures. This gave the organization a different profile from a purely street-level gang. The network’s ability to move between legal business structures and illicit trafficking helped make it durable and difficult to map.

Miljanić’s later U.S. cases provide another window into that overlap. He received a 16-month sentence in 2022 for illegal firearm possession and later pleaded guilty in a federal fraud case involving pandemic-relief funds. By 2026, federal court records showed him serving supervised release, demonstrating that the legal history of the organization did not end with the classic Belgrade conflicts of the 1990s.

Why Group America matters in the the archive graph

This organization is a major junction between several existing the archive clusters: the New York underworld, Belgrade’s 1990s criminal scene, Balkan cocaine trafficking, South American supply routes and later transnational organized crime. It connects directly or indirectly with profiles already in the database including Željko Maksimović Maka, Radovan Stojičić Badža, Rade Ćaldović Ćenta and others from the period.

The central reading path is therefore not a single list of alleged murders. It is the evolution of a network: New York roots → Voja Amerikanac → 1997 disappearance → Miljanić/Jakšić leadership → international cocaine logistics → later Serbian and U.S. prosecutions. That structure gives each person page a clear role while keeping unresolved allegations visibly separate from final judgments.