Bobby Fischer lived on Serbian People’s money
It would have been one of those urban legends if the story was not a true one. Unlike the only American guy we could compare with the hero of this tale, boxer Mohammad Ali, who had been a glorious World champion, then found himself in a penitentiary after refusing to go as a soldier to Viet Nam. After regaining his boxing title and after he died as an accomplished and praised American hero, BOBBY FISCHER, a boy from Brooklyin, conquered the World of chess, single-handedly taking over the World title from the Russians during the Cold War, becoming in 1972 the ultimate American hero.
Twenty years after, after choosing to abandon the game and refusing to defend the title ever again, Bobby got an offer he could not refuse. A Belgrade, Serbia banker offered him and his 1972 rival Boris Spassky 5 million US dollars for a rematch to be played in Serbia and Montenegro, at that time (in 1992), called FR Yugoslavia. No matter the country was shaken and pauperized by US-inspired sanctions, banker Vasiljević, running at that time a Ponzi scheme bank in turbulent times, was ready to provide Fischer with 3,65 million USD as he won the rematch in the fall of 1992. Fischer was automatically indicted by the US officials for violating an executive order issued by President Bush that restricted commercial relations with what then remained of Yugoslavia.
So Fischer never set foot on the American soil again, being allowed to stay in the few countries that had accepted him, living in deep exile conditions, always persecuted by the US authorities. Talking about the gratitude of his motherland would be a futile task, but Fischer had to live on something, and so he did until his last days spent in 2008 in Reykjavik, the very place where he had won the title, where he passed away at the age of 64.
However, he never spent all of the money earned in Belgrade 16 years before! The banker Vasiljević, that provided him his earning in 1992, in exile himself after escaping Serbian justice for the fraudulent scam that had additionally pauperized lots of naïve Serbs, was extradited two years later to Serbia…