From War Criminal to New Age Guru

It was Mina Minic’s wife who first opened the door, that day in 2005, to find a tall man inquiring if this was the house of “academic professor doctor Mina Minic.” The tall man gave Mrs. Minic a bouquet of flowers and kissed her hand. When Mr. Minic, a short, chipper Serbian soothsayer with 19th-century-style mutton chops, came down to the door, he found a “very strange” man who introduced himself as Dragan Dabic. The man wore a long overcoat with a gentleman’s hat, and when he lifted it, he revealed long gray tresses pulled up into a topknot, set beaklike at his forehead. Below, he sported a full bushranger beard. Minic’s first impression, he told me, was that Dabic looked “like a monk who had done something wrong with a nun.” Dabic asked if Minic was the famous “maestro of radiesthesia,” the master of a dowsing method that instead of a stick relies on a pendulum called a visak. (Depending on which account you read, radiesthesia dates back as far as the Egyptian pharaohs or some decades ago to a guy named Albert Abrams in San Francisco.)