Liberia: How Five European Outcasts Flew Under the Radar In a Bid to Make Liberia a Narco State

Liberia, Aug. 25 -- Two Croatians. A Ukrainian. A Serbian and a Spaniard, charged earlier in the same sprawling case. Long before anyone in Monrovia knew their names, these five men had already made themselves at home - in government offices, in run-down neighborhoods, in the easy, ordinary friendships that make a foreigner stop being a stranger. It was, investigators say, exactly the kind of access a narco state is built on.

By Rodney D. Sieh | [e-mail]

MONROVIA - In the years before anyone in this country had reason to say the words "US$319 million" in the same breath as Monrovia, three men were already comfortable here. Nikola Ivancic, Mihovil Vrovac and Taras Zadereiko did not slip into Liberia as strang...