Driving back long past midnight, she ignored blinking traffic lights and cruised through a stop sign. She was hauled down to the police station, charged with drunk driving, and photographed. It was the second time in six months.

The two episodes in 2009 cost LaBarba more than $20,000 in legal fees and fines and landed her in jail for a few days each time. A judge ordered her to wear an ankle monitor for five months. Yet the most stinging punishment, she felt, came when several websites posted her arrest mug shots, so that Internet searches of her name instantly turned up the compromising photos.

“It completely screwed with my life,” LaBarba said. “People Googled me and it was very embarrassing.” She said the images complicated her search for a job as well as a new relationship when her boyfriend’s ex-wife looked up her name.

For a fee, she could have the photos removed. She chose to pay up.

Large data brokers have historically limited who gets to see their detailed files on people through a complicated application procedure that discourages casual users. Now, on the spur of the moment, anybody can access digital secrets, including criminal records, thanks to a proliferation of personal data Internet sites. One subset of these sites features mug shots that can be removed for a fee.

Many among America’s 314 million people are affected. U.S. law enforcement officials made more than 13 million arrests in 2010, according to the most recent FBI statistics, although that number includes repeat arrests. The bureau maintains fingerprints and criminal histories for 72 million people, according to its Criminal Justice Information Services. Drug abuse and drunk driving are the most common reasons for arrest.

Clare Dawson-Brown, assistant district attorney in Travis County, Texas, home to bustedmugshots.com’s founder Kyle Prall, said she is concerned personal data sites sometimes list incorrect information and do not comply with state orders to erase certain cases from the criminal records. “Now that this information is out there it is ever more horrific for people to get their lives back together,” she said. “How do you get this garbage out of there?”

Several legal experts interviewed for this article said seeking money to remove mug shots from the Internet does not qualify as a crime such as extortion, since extortion requires a threat ahead of time to post the image unless the mug shot subject pays.

“Wow – it does seem to come pretty close to the line,” Robert Weisberg, co-director of the Stanford Criminal Justice Center, said upon learning about such sites. “I’d say it skirts the line but may stop just short. (It) depends on how a reasonable person would perceive this in terms of fear.”

WANTED: EVIDENCE OF CIVIC VALUE

LaBarba, 35, an event planner, rues the irresponsibility that led to her drunk driving arrests and believes she has learned important lessons. Yet she remains bitter about the public posting of her mug shot. “How is this legal?” she asked. “My business is my business. It’s like me going to your house and looking through your things.”

Bustedmugshots.com responds that it only posts publicly available images. “We are publishing public records with an interest in informing the community,” Prall said, speaking in a series of interviews about his business. “We have never approached anybody attempting to generate revenue from them to remove a record from our database.”

Bustedmugshots.com does not tell people they have posted the images but waits for them to learn of it, either on their own or through friends.

LaBarba paid what the site describes as “nominal” fees – $68 per photo for service within 10 business days, $108 within 24 hours – to make the photos disappear. An Internet search of her name now leads to genial photos of LaBarba pictured with lots of friends.

Prall, 33, grew up in Bloomington, a small city in central Illinois, the son of a circuit court judge. He set up the site a year and a half ago.

In 2008, inspired by a Florida publication, he started a weekly newspaper called Busted! In Austin during his spare time. Promoting his $1 paper with the slogan “Getting arrested isn’t funny… but the mug shots are,” Prall expanded to bustedmugshots.com, continuing with his day job as a financial analyst at a power company until earlier this year.

His website collects its images from city, state and federal law enforcement agencies across the country, either for free or for a small fee. It has assembled more than 5 million records, he says. The company waives the fee for removing photos of those exonerated of any charges.

On the website, bustedmugshots.com describes itself as “a valuable asset to local law enforcement. Our dedication to providing criminal justice has led to breakthroughs in cold cases, and numerous tips on robberies, sex crimes and even murders.” Asked for specific examples, Prall offered none. He said he plans to revamp the site to include a crime map and the ability for users to submit tips to the police.

Some local jurisdictions have resisted making mug shots available to him, although others say state public record laws oblige them to provide the images. Andrew Kossack, Indiana’s former public access counselor, last year cleared the way for Prall to obtain mug shots, but he has reservations about the business: “It doesn’t sit right in your stomach that this person should be someone who has so much control over your likeness.”

Others complain about the drain on resources. “It takes time to distill the records,” said Andrea Brandes Newsom, chief deputy corporation counsel for the city of Indianapolis. “Is it appropriate to make use of taxpayer resources in order for someone to profit?”

The U.S. Department of Justice maintains a national sex offender database, and many cities and counties offer free searches of criminal records, while some post mug shots. Because such records are not optimized for maximum Internet visibility, they typically do not turn up in average searches.

One of the most common crimes catalogued on Prall’s site is drunk driving, but the advocacy group Mothers Against Drunk Driving sees little merit in public shaming. “We haven’t seen evidence that tactics such as posting offenders’ mug shots online leads to the reduction of drunk driving incidents or fatalities,” said national president Jan Withers.

Prall says his site is a leader in a sector where competitors include mugshots.com, whosarrested.com, and gotchamugshot.com. “IS THIS YOU? Or your friend/family member? Click Here To Remove,” Mugshotsworld.com tells users. “Originally $175. Discounted price of $100 available only for short time.”

The sites seek to get photos prominently displayed in web searches. GotchaMugshot.com, for example, says on its site: “It’s a common occurrence to find full names, profile, mug shot and offenses in the first page of most search engines like Google, Bing & Yahoo.”

Officials at these other mug shot sites did not respond to calls and emails seeking comment.

‘CREEPY VIGILANTE JUSTICE’

Prall has had his own run-ins with the law. As a young man he was found guilty of illegal consumption of alcohol as a minor, delivering/manufacturing of cannabis, trespassing into a car and drunk driving. A court sentenced him to 120 days in jail for the drug charge and 30 days for the drunk driving offense.

“I made a lot of little mistakes when I was young,” Prall said. “I did some things in high school that were bad choices.”

Prall does not make his own mug shots available on his website but said he would be comfortable publicizing his past. “I don’t think all that stuff should be secret,” he said.

Joelle Bem, who was arrested for crashing a friend’s Ferrari while drunk in 2008, disagrees. She did not pay the roughly $400 bustedmugshots.com wanted to remove a series of images, saying she did not have the money. A Google image search of her name still quickly reveals several unflattering photos.

The divorced unemployed woman said the easy availability of the photos prompted her to move after a neighbor circulated the image to others after a disagreement. The images have also complicated the personal life of the former currency trader and financial analyst: “It’s made dating really hard.”

“I thought I was punished enough by Dallas County,” said Bem, 38, who served 30 days in prison. “I didn’t know I was going to be further punished and cyberstalked by creepy vigilante justice whose only intent is to collect money from me.”

(Adam Tanner is a 2012-13 fellow at Harvard University’s Department of Government)

(Editing by Claudia Parsons and Prudence Crowther)

“I feel compelled to be constantly in touch with my work, including weekends and holidays, but you learn to live with this situation,” said Barbero, the chief technology officer at Spanish and Portuguese-language media group Prisa.

“When you are part of the most important decision-making bodies of a company, there are no limits on dedication. I have little time for family or social activities.”

In recent years, many companies on Wall Street and beyond have embraced the mantra of flexible hours and work-life balance. Read any image-building column written by a top executive, and he or she is likely to stress the importance of getting to a child’s soccer game or concert.

The idea of flexibility and fewer total hours on the job has clear popular appeal. The 2007 book “The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich,” for example, became a huge best seller. But tales of short hours and relaxed work environments do not mesh with reality for many senior managers. The problem is that modern communications may allow less time in the office, but compel them to work around the clock, according to 10 executives in six countries interviewed as part of a larger Harvard Business School survey.

Some grimly predict that those seeking to get to or stay in the executive suite will have to be plugged in almost constantly.

Without a company publicist to cast a positive spin on corporate life, the executives spoke bluntly about how technology increasingly captures their off hours and fills their lives with stress. All subsequently gave their consent for Reuters to reprint their remarks, and two, including Barbero, agreed to have their names published.

“There is no getting away, not at all, no, not when you are in a higher position,” said Susanne Meinl, director of human resources at marketing firm Design Hotels AG in Germany. ”A call center agent, they just leave the office and go home and not bother about anything, but if you have a position with a lot of responsibility … 24/7 availability is a given, has always been and will always be.”

One Canadian executive described what some might see as a dream job: luxurious life on a Caribbean island, huge paycheck, high profile as a hedge fund manager. It wasn’t.

“In my 30s I worked 80 hours, 90 hours,” said the executive, who is now chief financial officer of a publicly traded Canadian company. “I had a young child and dedicated all of my time to my career, and this clearly was not a good way of living. And as a result of that, I went through a divorce.”

Of course, earning big money and being part of the 1 percent rather than the 99 percent does give the executives more choices, particularly concerning early retirement. ”For me the reward of this lifestyle is that I’ll be able to alter my lifestyle much earlier,” said a top official at a California biotechnology company.

One executive said his wife really enjoyed the upscale living his salary provided for the family, even if he was not around that much.

To be sure, all of those interviewed said they found their jobs interesting, and Design Hotels’ Meinl drew a stark contrast between the executive suite and a menial position elsewhere. Cashiers in a supermarket “will not burn out in the way someone burns out like me. I mean, they are bored and not appreciated.”

One top international airline executive said a tragedy — the loss of a child in the fifth month of his wife’s pregnancy — reinforced the need to balance work and home.

“The always-online kind of approach is, from my point of view, close to noise, close to pollution,” he said. ”In a top management job, how can you work strategically smart if you are embedded in noise?”

An executive who is afraid to delegate, he added, “should be prepared to get emails at night.”

For many executives, though, balance is elusive, and their jobs have become an endurance test.

A CEO of another biotech company says he works 11 or 12 hours a day and is always on call. ”Sometimes I stop and think whether or not I can continue with what I am doing with the level of stress that I have and then what always surprises me is that I am able to accommodate it and go to the next level of more stress,” he said.

He now regrets that he was not around much when his two teenage children were smaller, so he wants to do better with his 6-year-old.

“All of a sudden I have turned around and my kids are no longer living at home, they are in college and then I have a little one at home,” he said.

Why then does he devote so much time and effort to his job?

“It’s not an objective; it is not something I want to do,” he said. “I think that people today expect that you are available and going to be available at all times, and if you don’t return an email within an hour, or even minutes, then people think that you are not paying attention to them.

“I feel like if I take a vacation, it is not going to be a vacation because I am going to be working all the time.”

The balance shifts even more toward the company and away from “my time” as a manager gets higher up the ladder, the executives say. If anything, most interviewed expected demands on their time to increase in the years to come.

“Technology has created an expectation that you are connected,” said Meinl, who enjoys yoga in her free time. “With the economy, there is definitely more expectation for employees to deliver now … Work-life balance will become harder.” Those who use personal time for work will be the great economic winners as technology advances, the California biotech executive said.

“I hate to say it,” he said, “but I think the technology is just enabling the people who are really hungry for success to climb quicker, further, and your middle America, your blue-collar worker, (for whom) technology is a convenience to just enjoy life a little bit better, is not going to benefit from it economically.

“The problem is just going to get worse and worse, where you have got a small group of people who are just leveraging technology to be 24/7, you know, anywhere on the planet and that will make them more productive people, but it will separate them even further from the rest of society.

“I can see a scenario where you have people who have every five minutes of their lives planned out and technology on the fly and data coming to them left and right, and I can see where most people would look at that and say ‘Oh my God, that’s awful.’”

(Adam Tanner is a Reuters correspondent on a 2011-12 Nieman fellowship at Harvard.)

(Editing by Martin Howell and Lisa Von Ahn)

It was clear Zuckerberg was no longer the dropout who left the iconic Ivy League institution, even if he still dresses in the classic campus uniform of T-shirt, jeans and sneakers.

If he weren’t so famous, the billionaire and Silicon Valley entrepreneur portrayed as the flawed protagonist of the Oscar-nominated “The Social Network” could have passed for any one of the hundreds of computer science students who came to hear him speak.

“It didn’t seem it was that different than talking to other Harvard students,” said Kyle Solan, 19, a computer science major afterward. “He seemed very down to earth.”

Just a few blocks from where he started the world’s largest social network, Zuckerberg took part in a rare question-and-answer for students, who snapped up tickets to the event with the same frenzy reserved for favorite bands.

“We weren’t originally planning this as a business or anything,” Zuckerberg said sheepishly of the phenomenon that Facebook would become. “If I had a chance to do it again I would have gone to classes.”

Zuckerberg’s rock-star reception marked a sea change from when the entrepreneur famously landed himself in hot water for creating Facemash, a website that allowed users to rank their fellow students’ attractiveness and an incident immortalized in the film.

Speaking at his usual machine gun clip, Zuckerberg appeared every bit as driven as the character Aaron Sorkin imagined for “The Social Network”. But his bluntness and occasional humor in response to questions ultimately won the crowd over.

CODING THE CLASSICS

More comfortable with coding than the classics, Zuckerberg playfully acknowledged a lackluster academic career. Indeed, he said he once aspired to be a classics major, describing how he passed a course on ancient Rome while working on Facebook by building an Internet site for students to share notes.

“About halfway through the semester I stopped going to class,” he said to laughter from the audience.

One day he sent around an email to other students saying: “Hey, I built a study tool for everyone. And everyone filled out all the answers of all the significance of each of the pieces of art work, and made it a lot easier to study and I passed!”

Zuckerberg’s return was labeled his first official on-campus appearance since leaving in 2004, though he has been back informally. His creation Facebook has been a huge presence on campus since, to the consternation of its professors.

At least one Harvard professor, British historian Niall Ferguson, has warned students he will fail anyone he finds using the site during his class.

While Zuckerberg appeared for the most part at ease, he still lacked the polish of a seasoned executive at public appearances. Asked what books inspired him, he faltered and admitted he “stumped” by the question. When another student asked what global problems worried him, he responded only by detailing different features on Facebook.

The Facebook founder conceded he had a lot to learn.

“You have to be willing to make a lot of mistakes,” he said. “The story of Facebook, we made so many mistakes and continue to, every kind of mistake. I mean I knew nothing when I was getting started. I still know so little. I mean I am so young running a company of this scale.”

In response to a question about Facebook’s privacy policy — an area of constant criticism for the company — Zuckerberg said Facebook was better than many others which gathered data on unsuspecting users to target ads.

“People share so much information, put so much stuff into Facebook that how their data is treated is super important and we’re constantly working on more stuff to make that more transparent,” he said.

Zuckerberg also boldly predicted that the amount of content that people share on Facebook would double annually for years to come.

“If you project forward 10 years, each person will share about 1,000 times more things per day than they are now – 2 to the 10th is 1024,” he said.

(Editing by Peter Lauria, Edwin Chan and Derek Caney)

The arrest of the Croat Serb wartime leader Goran Hadzic on Wednesday provoked a far less dramatic reaction, but is key for the European Union future of Serbia as it removes the shadow of war crimes that has plagued Belgrade’s membership bid.

“I will be looking our European counterparts in the eye and seeing whether they make good on what they have promised,” Serbian President Boris Tadic told reporters, spelling out Belgrade’s expectations of quick progress from now on.

Serbia hopes bringing Hadzic — the last remaining fugitive sought by the United Nations war crimes tribunal — to justice will be enough to persuade the EU executive that it is ready to launch EU accession talks.

Once started, negotiations will likely take years. But until now, the baggage of its role in the 1990s war that followed the collapse of Yugoslavia kept Serbia behind many of its regional peers, all of whom aspire to membership.

Wartime foe Croatia is expected to become an EU member in 2013, while Serbia still does not have even candidate status, putting it behind Montenegro and Macedonia in line for entry.

Tadic acknowledged that dealing with the wartime past was only one of the conditions set by the EU before it agrees to discuss the details of accession.

But he expressed hope for progress by the time the European Commission releases its annual report on countries aspiring to join in October and announces the next steps they can take.

“It will not be an easy feat, as (gaining) candidate status and a date for accession talks are related with internal reforms,” said the pro-European politician. “I believe it is possible to achieve good results by September.”

APPROACHING THE START LINE

EU diplomats say Belgrade may have done enough already in terms of necessary democratic and market reforms to qualify for an official start of accession talks.

With Hadzic on his way to court, one of the few remaining question marks may be how EU governments will judge the progress Belgrade is making in relations with Kosovo, whose declaration of independence from Serbia in 2008 it does not recognize.

Effective regional cooperation is an important factor in EU evaluations of potential candidates. The bloc has been burned in the past by admitting Cyprus, which now blocks the aspirations of Turkey because of a dispute over the divided island.

Many EU governments are also wary of expansion at a time when issues ranging from economic woes to immigration have hampered the bloc’s ability to make decisions.

Earlier this month, Serbia appeared to make headway with Kosovo, striking a handful of breakthrough deals to fix practical issues crucial to the latter’s daily existence.

But talks suffered a setback on Tuesday, when Serbia refused to budge on the issue of customs stamps and a round of discussions was postponed until September without progress. Kosovo said on Wednesday it would ban all products from Serbia.

“As of yesterday morning EU mediators thought it would happen, but the Serbs were unwilling to move so they thought better to cancel,” one EU diplomat close to talks said.

The Netherlands, an EU member which in the past has pushed its peers to take Serbia’s EU integration slowly because of its failure to capture fugitives, gave a positive signal, hailing the arrest of Hadzic.

“Serbia has acted according to its responsibility,” Dutch Foreign Minister Uri Rosenthal said. “This marks an important step on the path to further regional reconciliation.”

BOOSTING SERBIA’S IMAGE

Many Serbs feel the international community has unfairly singled out their wartime leaders to face prosecution in the Hague. At the same time many citizens of the Balkan country are reluctant to come to terms with wartime killings of other nationalities in their name.

Perhaps the most significant boost to Serbia’s image this year came not from the arrest of the final war crimes suspects who have played no role in public life for many years, but on the tennis courts of the professional circuit.

The Wimbledon title victory earlier this month of Novak Djokovic, who was just four when the Yugoslav wars began, has given the Balkan country a positive role model who was greeted in heroic terms upon his return to Belgrade.

Some even see Djokovic’s victory as helping Tadic, whose popularity in polls has grown of late after trailing far behind the reformed nationalist opposition ahead of elections next year. “I can think of no other reason for his increase in popularity,” said one diplomat.

In his news conference, Tadic acknowledged it will still be difficult to win EU membership given the serious economic woes in the bloc.

“A crisis is never a good time for the enlargement process,” Tadic told reporters. “I think it would be a tragic mistake to halt the integration process as that would hamper stability in the Balkans.”

(Additional reporting by Aleksandar Vasovic in Belgrade; editing by Philippa Fletcher)

Serbia’s president announced the arrest of Hadzic, a Croatian Serb wartime leader indicted for crimes against humanity during the 1991-95 Croatian war, Wednesday.

In a later news conference, Serbia’s chief war crimes prosecutor Vladimir Vukcevic said the 52-year-old was arrested in a forest near the village of Krusedol after investigators followed the trail of a painting attributed to Amedeo Modigliani, the Italian 20th century figurative artist.

“The breakthrough was information that he (Hadzic) wanted to sell a stolen Modigliani painting as he was running out of money,” Vukcevic told a news conference.

Earlier this year Serbian tabloids reported that the painting, allegedly titled “Portrait of a Man,” had been discovered in the home of a friend of Hadzic.

The Art Loss Register in London, which tracks lost or stolen paintings, lists four Modigliani portraits of men as stolen, said executive director Christopher Marinello.

“We have worked with the Serbian authorities before and we are currently working with them on a number of cases,” he said in an interview.

Marinello said Modigliani paintings had sold for between $4 million and $10 million recently, but the seller of a stolen painting might get just 5-10 percent of its value if it was traded on the black market.

There is also a fair chance that the painting, which was apparently exhibited in Belgrade in the mid-2000s, was a fake, said a law enforcement agent who had investigated stolen art works.

“We had suspicions about that particular painting because it was part of a large number of fakes sold to a collector,” said the investigator, who did not want to be named.

He said the Serbian market for stolen art was at its height during the late 1980s and early ’90s — a period in which Yugoslavia collapsed and war broke out — before it subsided after 2000.

Marinello said there are many cases involving stolen art in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union as enforcement is not always robust and corruption widespread.

“Recovering stolen art in that part of the world is extremely difficult,” he said.

(Editing by Robert Woodward)

Goran Hadzic, 52, was a key figure in the breakaway Krajina Serb republic in Croatia, and after the arrest of wartime General Ratko Mladic earlier this year, he was Serbia’s last remaining figure sought by the United Nations war crime tribunal in The Hague.

A Serbian official confirmed the arrest but declined to give details. President Boris Tadic, who announced the arrest of Mladic in May, scheduled an urgent news conference for 11 a.m. (0900 GMT).

Hadzic is charged with ordering the killing of hundreds and the deportation of thousands of Croats and other non-Serbs from his region of Croatia.

For years he was overshadowed by the higher profile ethnic Serb fugitives Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb leader, and his military commander Mladic. Hadzic may ultimately be remembered mostly as the man who evaded justice longer than others charged with crimes in the 1990s Yugoslav wars.

“He is much more discrete than the others in terms of personality and what he did,” said Anna Maria Corazza Bildt, a member of European Parliament who served with U.N. forces in the region of Croatia where Hadzic was a regional leader. “He was not a particularly notable personality.”

Hadzic was a physically imposing figure however at 1.85 meters tall with a full dark beard during the war years.

EU SOUGHT HIS ARREST

The European Union, which hailed Belgrade for finding Mladic in May, has continued to insist on the arrest of Hadzic for Serbia to make progress toward European Union membership.

“Twenty years after the start of the wars of Yugoslav disintegration an important chapter in the history of the region is closed when the last person indicted for war crimes by the U.N. Tribunal is arrested,” said Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt, a former E.U. and U.N. Envoy to the region.

“I warmly congratulate Serbia.”

Hadzic lived openly in the northern Serbian city of Novi Sad until July 13, 2004, when The Hague sent an indictment and arrest warrant to Belgrade. He fled immediately, tipped off by nationalist hardliners in Serbia’s security services.

His escape was kept a secret for days, while relatives said he was at home and police denied having orders to arrest him. The Hague later made public surveillance pictures showing him leaving his house with a bag on the afternoon of July 13.

Hadzic also gained notoriety for his involvement in murky deals including illegal exports of oak, wine and crude oil from a well under Serb control. He was frequently seen in the company of Zeljko “Arkan” Raznatovic, a paramilitary leader and head of Belgrade’s underworld at the time.

Recent experience with Mladic suggests it could take several days before Hadzic is extradited to The Hague. Nerma Jelacic, a spokeswoman for the Yugoslavia tribunal in The Hague, declined to comment.

(Additional reporting by Aaron Gray-Block, editing by Philippa Fletcher)

However, Jadranka Kosor’s forecast of 1 to 1.5 percent GDP growth for the former Yugoslav republic, which concluded EU membership talks last month, was slightly below the 1.5 to 2 percent estimate she had given in April.

“This year we expect economic growth at long last,” she said at the closing of a two-day regional summit she hosted in the walled Adriatic city of Dubrovnik. “These were terribly difficult years. We expect growth of at least one percent.”

“We expect that major government investment will impact unemployment, which will lead to economic growth,” she said. “I think we can reach 1.5 percent.”

The International Monetary Fund has forecast growth of 1 percent.

Croatia’s economic recovery has lagged other countries in emerging Europe. It experienced two years of recession as it was completing EU talks and now hopes to become the bloc’s 28th member in July 2013.

With tourists flocking to Croatia’s pristine coastline and crystal clear waters this summer, Kosor was optimistic about the season, as tourism brings in about a fifth of total GDP.

“We think it will be one of the best, if not the best season ever,” she said.

Unlike ex-Yugoslav neighbours Serbia, Macedonia, Bosnia and Kosovo, Croatia needs no loans from the International Monetary Fund and should not fear a credit downgrade, Kosor said.

The government had taken big steps toward fiscal responsibility by cutting spending and freezing wages, she said.

Earlier this month, the country of 4.4 million issued its first Eurobond since the summer of 2009, bringing in 750 million euros with a coupon of 5.875 percent.

FIGHTING CORRUPTION

Kosor said the anti-corruption drive and efforts to curtail red tape will make the country more attractive to investors. She said reforms would not let up before joining the EU in 2013.

“We’ve already done a lot in the fight against corruption,” said Kosor, who took office in July 2009 after Ivo Sanader suddenly stepped down.

“People now see that if someone is corrupt, whatever their name, and whatever position they may hold in society, they will be held accountable.”

Prosecutors have launched several graft probes against Sanader, who is in detention in Austria and awaiting extradition on charges of creating slush funds for his conservative HDZ party during his term as prime minister.

“The fight against corruption is giving a big push to improving the investment climate in Croatia,” Kosor said. “Those who invest want to know that there is no tolerance for corruption.”

Investors still complain that corruption remains endemic as bureaucrats who have the ability to approve construction permits and other key documents seek to enrich themselves.

Kosor acknowledged there was more to do, but also added the anti-corruption campaign may have caused bureaucrats to become overly cautious about issuing permits and approvals.

“Many people in Croatia, in state companies for example, are afraid to take decisions, to avoid the appearance of being involved in past corruption affairs,” she said. “But certainly there is a new climate now.” (Editing by Zoran Radosavljevic and Alison Birrane)

By 2006, the man charged with genocide by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia had been on the run for 11 years. Suffering from kidney stones — solid salts or minerals in the ureter which cause sharp pain — he ordered one of his aides to end his misery.

“We could not take him for treatment,” the former aide, who refused to be named because he still faces legal proceedings related to his role, told Reuters. “We found him some painkillers, but he was in such a pain that he begged us to kill him.”

That refusal by Mladic’s supporters to end his life was to prove one of many secret episodes in a long life on the run that ended with his arrest last week.

There are many gaps in the trail of Ratko Mladic. But interviews with the former aide, a Serbian operative working on his arrest, a top government official overseeing the operation and others, as well as information contained in U.S. diplomatic cables, show a man whose power and influence dwindled over the years until he was found alone last week in a farmhouse, surrounded by disorder and medications.

FRAGMENTS OF A LIFE ON THE RUN

At first he had lived quite openly at his home in the Serb capital Belgrade. As a commander overseeing the siege of Sarajevo and other operations, Mladic had gained a reputation for fearlessness, as someone who would not seek cover even when other men scrambled for safety.

It helped that he was popular. He was reviled by Bosnian Muslims for the Srebrenica massacre of 1995 in which 8,000 Muslim men and boys were killed, and for the long siege of Sarajevo, but the respect he commanded among Serbs smoothed his early years as a fugitive.

Bosnian Serbs had failed in their goal to create an independent state, but they did succeed in creating their own half of Bosnia under a weak central government. Many credited Mladic for this, and respected his reputation as someone who was tough but fair, un-corruptible in a war in which many leaders and business people grew rich.

He was protected by key officials for years after being originally indicted in 1995. A 2006 U.S. diplomatic cable, obtained by WikiLeaks and seen by Reuters, gives a sense of how much support Mladic once had.

Svetko Kovac, director of the military security agency, told the United Nations war crimes prosecutor that “some 300-400 people” were in the Mladic support network between 1997 and 2004, it says.

Despite his indictment, Mladic kept his job as Bosnian Serb military commander through 1996, and then moved to Belgrade where he lived with his family until 2002, according to friend Aleksandar Mihailovic, who lived a few houses down from him in Belgrade’s Banovo Brdo neighborhood.

“Everybody came by to pay their respects,” Mihailovic, a real estate developer, said in an interview. “They were always asking for advice and favours. “He simply became the idol of the people, the only person they believed in 1994-95.”

According to Mihailovic, among those who visited during those years was Vojislav Kostunica, who succeeded wartime strongman Slobodan Milosevic as Yugoslav president in 2000. A spokesman said an official from Kostunica’s party would only answer questions at a news conference set for next week.

ONE APARTMENT TO ANOTHER

The period of stability started to end in 2001 when a new pro-western prime minister, Zoran Djindjic, came to power. One day in 2002, Mihailovic said, Mladic simply disappeared from his apartment. Even though the general remained popular, the young reformist leader was seeking to distance Serbia from its wartime pariah years.

In 2001 Belgrade had sent Milosevic to The Hague where the strongman died before his trial ended. In 2002, the country passed a law allowing the extradition of war crimes suspects and urged all of them to surrender.

After that, Mladic moved in irregular intervals from one location to another, mainly in the concrete buildings of Belgrade’s New Belgrade neighborhood, according to helpers who later went on trial for hiding a fugitive.

“We were moving him from one apartment to another, every two or three weeks on the average,” said one who did not want to be named because he still faces legal proceedings. “I would play some chess with him sometimes, bring him food, newspapers, we frequently talked a lot.”

Chess had been one of Mladic’s wartime passions. He often played as he traveled, at military headquarters, or even at the front lines.

Mladic also seems to have been haunted by the 1994 suicide of his daughter Ana. Before extradition to The Hague on Tuesday, Serbian authorities allowed him one final visit to her grave in Belgrade.

“He frequently spoke at length about his daughter, about his suspicion she was killed by some secret service,” said the past helper who described his kidney stones problem. “He was inquiring about his family, how they lived, about his son and wife. “We seldom spoke about the war.”

Spending the overwhelming bulk of his time indoors with a limited group of people led to mood swings.

“Sometimes he was in good spirits, sometimes he was depressed,” the helper said. “In such bad moments he asked us to kill him if someone tried to arrest him. He always had a loaded pistol on him. He also had a hand grenade at some point, but asked us to dispose of it as it was highly unsafe to carry a piece of live ordnance around.

“Sometimes he would go for a walk, usually in the evenings. Sometimes I would go with him. We appeared as a couple of pensioners, which we actually were.”

Mladic suffered a variety of medical problems. But getting medicine was no problem for his support network. Serbian pharmacies rarely ask for prescriptions.

An investigator working on the hunt for Mladic said a major focus in recent years was on doctors or pharmacists who might have been helping him. Since 2006, Serbian agents have also raided a number of homes and businesses throughout the country in hopes of learning more about how his network was financed.

THE BOSNIAN CONNECTION

Investigators suspect Mladic’s support network extended into the Serb Republic half of Bosnia, a mostly ethnic Serb enclave whose very existence was a legacy of his military offences during the war.

There, as in Serbia proper, some officials played a double game, telling diplomats they were doing everything they could to apprehend him but consistently falling short. U.N. war crimes prosecutor Carla del Ponte was often frustrated by the lack of progress, including in 2006 when she met Serbia’s war crimes prosecutor Vladimir Vukcevic. “She described her five-hour meeting with Vukcevic earlier that day as ‘five hours of trash’,” according to one U.S. cable.

Bruno Vekaric, the deputy war crimes prosecutor and spokesman for the office, said they had very good cooperation with del Ponte, although he added there were some tense moments in 2006. And Vukcevic was still in the job when Serbia did finally arrest Mladic.

Privately and in their cables, some diplomats were also convinced that some officials in the Serb Republic of Bosnia were helping Mladic. One U.S. official was particularly concerned about a private security agency in the Serb Republic capital Banja Luka.

Serbia’s war crimes court rejected an appeal from his lawyer that poor health should stop the former general’s extradition to the U.N. tribunal in The Hague, where ex-Bosnian Serb wartime political leader Radovan Karadzic is already on trial.

“Ratko Mladic has been extradited,” Serbian Justice Minister Snezana Malovic told reporters on Tuesday evening. “That means he is in the plane en route to The Hague tribunal.”

Mladic, 69, was indicted by the International Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia 15 years ago for genocide in the 43-month siege of the Bosnian capital Sarajevo and the massacre of 8,000 Muslim men and boys in the town of Srebrenica during the 1992-95 Bosnian war.

He was arrested on Thursday in a farmhouse in northern Serbia belonging to a cousin. His capture prompted at times violent protests by Serb nationalists in Serbia and Bosnia.

Mladic’s last day in Serbia, where he spent most of his fugitive years, began with a police-escorted visit to the Belgrade grave of his daughter Ana, who committed suicide in 1994.

Mladic’s wife and son paid a final visit to the prison before he was dispatched to the Belgrade airport with special police wearing balaclava masks, bulletproof vests and automatic rifles guarding the convoy of Land Rover vehicles.

He was expected to arrive in Rotterdam in the Netherlands en route to The Hague at around 7 p.m. local time (1700 GMT), a local official said.

The Serbian court received the Mladic appeal on Tuesday morning after his cemetery visit and rejected it within hours.

During a prison visit on Monday, Mladic met his five-year old grandson, possibly for the first time, and his 10-year-old granddaughter.

Mladic’s lawyer and family argued Mladic was mentally unstable and too sick to be extradited to the tribunal. Yet the former general was able to elude justice for 16 years, a fact that in recent years held back Belgrade’s progress in achieving membership in the European Union as Brussels had insisted on his capture and transfer to the international war crimes court.

Mladic’s arrest also highlighted continued deep ethnic divisions in Bosnia, where he fought to create a separate Serb entity. As a result of the war, a Serb Republic exists as one of two halves under a weak central Bosnian government.

Around 10,000 Bosnian Serbs pledged support for their wartime commander in the Serb Republic capital Banja Luka, an affront to Muslims elsewhere in Bosnia who view the general as a brutal murderer.

Buses arrived from across the Serb Republic, many filled with his former soldiers bearing his photo.

“There are more Mladics in Serbia, they grow and will continue where he stopped,” Srdjan Nogo of the ultra-nationalist organisation Srpske Dveri from Belgrade told the crowd.

Such sentiments alarmed Muslims in Bosnia.

“Night after night I shiver in fear that someone may come and force us leave the house and shoot at us,” said Emina Bajric, 72, a pensioner from Banja Luka.

“We have been through such an ordeal once and I am not sure if I could go through it again.”

(Additional reporting by Gordana Katana in Banja Luka; editing by Mark Heinrich)

Earlier in the day, Serbian officials said Mladic could be sent to the international criminal court within 24 hours, making a late night Tuesday or early Wednesday departure most likely.

The accused war criminal’s last day in Serbia began with a police-escorted visit to the Belgrade grave of his daughter Ana, who committed suicide in 1994.

Mladic is charged with genocide in the 43-month siege of Sarajevo and the massacre of 8,000 Muslims in Srebrenica during the 1992-95 Bosnian War.

The court received the Mladic appeal on Tuesday morning after his cemetery visit and rejected it within hours. His lawyer said he had new medical evidence.

The justice minister scheduled a news conference for 5 p.m. local time (1500 GMT).

During a prison visit on Monday, Mladic met his five-year old grandson, possibly for the first time, and his 10-year-old granddaughter. His wife and son were expected to visit him again on Tuesday afternoon.

Mladic’s lawyer and family say the 69-year-old, who was captured alone in a cousin’s farmhouse, is mentally unstable and too sick to be extradited to the tribunal.

Yet he was able to elude justice for 16 years, a fact that in recent years held back Serbia’s progress in achieving membership in the European Union as Brussels has insisted on his capture and transfer to the international court.

Mladic’s arrest has also highlighted continued deep ethnic divisions in Bosnia, where he fought to create a separate Serb entity. As a result of the war, a Serb Republic exists as one of two halves under a weak central Bosnian government.

Around 10,000 Bosnian Serbs pledged support for their wartime commander in the Serb Republic’s capital Banja Luka, an affront to Muslims elsewhere in Bosnia who view the general as a brutal murderer.

Buses arrived from across the Serb Republic, many filled with his former soldiers bearing his photo.

“There are more Mladics in Serbia, they grow and will continue where he stopped,” Srdjan Nogo of the ultra-nationalist organisation Srpske Dveri from Belgrade told the crowd.

(Additional reporting by Gordana Katana in Banja Luka; Editing by Ralph Boulton)