Bosko Radonjic | Gotti associate, 67

Bosko Radonjic, 67, a Serbian nationalist emigre who participated in the bombing of a Yugoslav diplomat's home in suburban Chicago in 1975 and who later became an associate of the Gambino crime family boss John Gotti, died March 31 in Belgrade, Serbia.

Radonjic was one of six Serbs who were convicted or pleaded guilty in 1979 in the bombing of the Yugoslav consul's home four years earlier, as well as a plot to bomb a Yugoslav club in Chicago. Like the others, Radonjic was said to have been motivated by hatred for the Yugoslav dictator Josip Broz Tito and his communist government.

Radonjic served three years in prison while his coconspirators received sentences of three to 12 years.

Born in Uzice, Serbia, then part of Yugoslavia, Radonjic came to the United States in 1970. His father, a teacher, had been executed by Tito's partisans during World War II.

After arriving in New York, Radonjic found work as a parking lot attendant in the Hell's Kitchen neighborhood of Manhattan. He later managed to lease a parking lot on his own on West 49th Street, the first of several lots he operated.

Upon his release from prison in 1982, Radonjic returned to Hell's Kitchen and joined the Westies, a traditionally Irish American gang.

But as more and more of the gang's leaders went to prison in the late 1980s, he was able to exert increasing influence over its operations and form ties with the Gambino crime family.

After the ethnic conflicts and partition of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, Radonjic returned to Belgrade, where he opened several bars and casinos and became a close associate of the Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, whom the United Nations is prosecuting in the Hague on genocide charges. - N.Y. Times News Service