Serbian Is Sentenced in Fraud Tied to Abduction

A Serbian man charged with kidnapping his ex-wife’s children from California in 1989 and keeping them in war-torn Yugoslavia for six years received the maximum possible sentence Monday for passport fraud, a crime authorities said facilitated the abduction.

U.S. District Judge Audrey B. Collins sentenced Dragisa Lazarevich, 45, to two years in prison, the longest sentence allowed under complex federal sentencing guidelines.

The sentence was a small victory for Shayna Gluck Lazarevich, the UC Santa Cruz student who spent the years she was separated from her children in a persistent, often frustrating legal and diplomatic battle to win them back.

“I think [the judge] took the case very seriously and followed the letter of the law,” Shayna Lazarevich said outside the courtroom Monday. “I wish the letter of the law were more appropriate to the seriousness of what he did.”

Sasha and Andre Lazarevich, 7 and 5 years old at the time of the abduction, were returned to their mother by Serbian officials in 1995.

Dragisa Lazarevich was later detained in the Netherlands while attempting to return to the United States in an apparent attempt to recover custody of his children. He has served about 20 months in custody, time that will be applied toward his sentence.

When he completes his prison term, Lazarevich will be remanded to the custody of immigration agents for deportation proceedings, officials said.

Lazarevich could not be prosecuted for the abduction of the children because a Dutch court did not extradite him for that crime, since he was tried for the crime in the former Yugoslav federation and would have faced double jeopardy.

Collins, however, considered the abduction of the children--a violation of a Superior Court order granting his ex-wife custody--in computing the sentence for passport fraud.

On Monday, Dragisa Lazarevich’s federal public defender, David McLean, argued that it was unfair for the judge to consider the taking of the children in determining his sentence because he had been extradited only on the passport fraud charges.

“This case has been converted into a child-abduction case and it never was,” McLean said. “This is unjust and unfair. This is not the rule of law being applied in this case.”

The judge rejected McLean’s arguments.

Assistant U.S. Atty. David R. Fields contended that Lazarevich posed a continuing danger to his ex-wife and two children, who are now 14 and 11.

“This is not your usual case of passport fraud,” Fields said. The defendant, he continued, “violated the trust of his spouse and took advantage of the youth of the children to take them out of the country.”

Before his sentence was pronounced, Dragisa Lazarevich delivered a rambling speech about the causes of his 1988 divorce from Shayna in which he accused her of neglecting the children.

The speech appeared to leave a poor impression on the judge.

“I found that to be an extremely self-serving statement devoid of any sense of of responsibility,” Collins said. “The defendant has not grasped at all the seriousness of his [criminal] conviction.”