Ranko Rubežić

Ranko Rubežić (born 1951 in Peć, PR Serbia, FPR Yugoslavia — died 19 February 1985 in Belgrade, SR Serbia, SFR Yugoslavia) was a Serbian gangster and criminal.

A prominent crime figure in Belgrade, known locally as the "Serbian Dutch Schultz", his February 1985 murder caused a media frenzy in communist Yugoslavia. It also marked the first case of gangland murder in Belgrade and Yugoslavia in the so-called 'sačekuša' style — something that would become a regular occurrence in the city and country throughout the 1990s and early part of the 2000s.

Rubežić was born in Peć in 1951 in a poor family of Montenegrin workers though his formative years took place in the Belgrade neighbourhood of Lekino Brdo where the family moved shortly after his birth. Street fighting, petty theft, burglary break-ins, and stays in juvenile detention were a regular part of Rubežić's early youth.

In his early twenties, Rubežić emigrated to western Europe, spending time and doing racketeering scores in West Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Austria, and Italy.

By the late 1970s he came back to SFR Yugoslavia and via theft and racketeering began throwing his criminal weight around Belgrade, especially the city's downtown area that many considered to be his turf. In doing so, he initiated several criminal techniques prior unseen in the city's underworld such as racketeering concierges at state-owned city hotels around Belgrade who pocketed bribes for turning a blind eye to the practice of hotel rooms occasionally being used for prostitution by the hour. The police got alerted to his activity in 1978 after Hotel Moskva's and Hotel Srbija's respective managements notified them of Rubežić maltreating their staff. The particular complaint resulted in criminal prosecution as he got sentenced to six months, a largely symbolic punishments due to Yugoslav criminal code still not treating this activity as a serious crime. His half a year in jail, which he served during 1980 in the isolation ward of Belgrade's Central Prison, was marked by his silent behaviour and fellow prisoners' reluctance to interact with him due to the street reputation that preceded him.

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