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Twenty-seven-year-old Marko Milosevic, the blond-streaked, brutish son of Slobo, the Butcher of Serbia, is not someone a sane person would want to meet. Rumoured to be as coked-up as Al Pacino in Scarface (Marko was Yugoslavia's biggest drug dealer during his father's reign), he's also known for having attacked a dissident reporter with a chainsaw, after thrashing him black and blue. And for ransacking the offices of a Belgrade newspaper with his armed thugs while in search of a journalist who had penned a scathing expose of his depraved life. He once even pistol-whipped a handicapped man in a Belgrade cafe just for staring at him. "How many bullets do you want?" he is said to have screamed, before smashing his Heckler und Koch pistol against the bewildered man's head.

So I am almost relieved when I hear, soon after touching down at Moscow's Sheretmeyo Airport, that the malevolent scion of the humbled Milosevic clan is no longer in Moscow. A few phone calls confirm the fact. "He's in Kazan, hiding out with business associates of Borislav [Slobodan's brother and once the Serbian Ambassador to Russia]," claims Dayan Santovac, a former owner of the Jazz Kafe - Moscow's hippest nightclub of the mid- 1990s, as legendary today as New York's defunct Studio 54. "He's a big pussy," he adds, spitting at the floor of the sushi bar where we have rendezvoused. "He deserves to be punished. If he were here, somebody would be sure to kill him."

"You're sure?" I ask. "This is a big city, there are dachas on the outskirts, he could hide easily." But he shakes his sallow, bald head and smiles sardonically. "I'd know, trust me."

Before I arrived here, I had read press reports of Marko fleeing the coup to Moscow soon after his father's downfall. I had imagined him settling into the exile life there as countless others had done before him. With China having barred him from entry, I had conjured him getting drunk in some lavish fin-de-siecle flat like British double-agent Kim Philby, while polishing his guns. Or acting out his Formula One fantasies by jetting down the eight-lane Rubloyskoye Schosse in a rented Porsche, Guns'n'Roses blasting out from the Kenwood stereo. Or cashing in his chips like Saddam Hussein's arms- dealing nephew at the pink-walled Marilyn casino, chatting up the strippers during their breaks. With assets of over $300m (pounds 210m), according to the Los Angeles Times, he'd have enough muscle to fund his playboy lifestyle in Russia's hedonistic capital.

But he isn't here. Of that everyone is sure. As for where he really is, no one in Russia can agree. The Russian press is convinced he was sighted in Irkutsk, on the shores of Siberia's Lake Baikal, the largest freshwater lake in the world. Reports in Kommersant Daily, a large business paper, claim he is staying at the Sun Hotel in Irkutsk, as a guest of Serbian businesswoman Tsenya Mazarovich, another Milosevic crony.

But Santovac dispels that rumour with a little shake of his head. "He's in Kazan, I tell you. My ex-cook works at the Sun Hotel. He hasn't seen him." Santovac believes that Marko is in Kazan, the capital of the Muslim Republic of Tatarstan, because their President had close ties with Milosevic - despite the latter's dubious track record towards Muslims. "Even though they're Muslims, they're practical. They want his money," says Santovac.

But others disagree with even that assessment. An American correspondent is convinced he is near Moscow somewhere - 100 miles away - biding his time until his enemies forget about him: "He's partying somewhere outside Moscow with tons of whores, while his wife and son are in Belgrade."

Others believe he is in St Petersburg in some swanky hotel, while some - including a diplomat from the Yugoslav Embassy - think he is still in hiding in Yugoslavia. "I don't think he ever made it to Moscow," he says, while attacking his pork schnitzel at the fancy Acteur Restaurant near the box-like edifice of Moscow's Yugoslav Embassy. "He didn't have the resources. All the money was in bank accounts which were shut down by Kostunica. That's why his father never left." When I corner the restaurant's Serbian cook after lunch and ask him if Marko ever ate here, he reddens and pats his cheeks self-consciously. "Who told you? I don't know anything."

When it comes to explaining evil, we're still stuck with outdated Freudian analogies of Oedipus and Electra, childhood trauma and peer alienation. While that might not help explain the murderous rage of Fred West or Peter Sutcliffe, it still seems to work for the offspring of dictators - the progeny of power, the victims of monarchy, an anachronistic system in a world which has embraced democracy.

"He's just like Saddam's son Odai," countless Serbs told me when I asked them about Marko. It's strange that two dictators would raise such similar sons, but it seems fitting. Like Odai, Saddam Hussein's eldest son, Marko was isolated from his peers at an early age, surrounded by bodyguards from the time he was 13. Pampered from childhood, raised as heir-apparent, he went into business soon after leaving school, exploiting his family's connections. Soon, like Odai, who got rich skirting Iraq's oil embargo, Marko became one of the richest men in Yugoslavia by importing cigarettes, Nikes, perfumes and other consumer goods, in defiance of the Western blockade of Serbia.

While Odai, who was nominated head of Iraq's football team by his father, was almost assassinated in 1996, Marko has also always had a fear of being killed. His closest friend and racing partner, Vlada Kovacevic (alias Tref), was gunned down in a basement carpark in Belgrade in February 1997. "I've been isolated since I was 13," Marko once said. "Every girl that was with me, I suspected it was not for love. From time to time, someone wants to kill me."

Both grandparents on his father's side committed suicide, his demagogic mother, Mira, is often compared to Lady Macbeth, and Marko's reference to his teen isolation sounds like he's making an attempt to justify himself. We might be compelled to feel sorry for him, if we didn't know more about him.

Marko is not just another Hollywood royalty casualty with a platinum credit card and pure Colombian up his nose. He was a degenerate - with ammunition and a cruel, mad streak - running amok in a nation trapped under his family's tyranny.

Everyone in Moscow - the Serbs at least - are full of Marko stories. About the top general he had shot for slapping him, after he had unleashed his bodyguards on some traffic policemen who had stopped him coked-up and drunk, speeding back to his hometown of Pozarnovec from Belgrade. About his passion for racing and Ferraris - and his predilection for smashing them into pulp. "My father stopped complaining after I crashed my 18th Ferrari," he once said.

His cocaine addiction and drug smuggling are favourite topics and so is his edgy, unpredictable disposition; he would fly into rages at the slightest provocation. "He was like a cocked gun," says Gordon Davidge, owner of Moscow's London Pub, who knew Marko in the early 1990s. "No one felt comfortable around him, everyone was tense." Driving around in black four-wheel-drives with his black-jacketed bodyguards, he terrorised the natives of Pozarnovec, locking up dissidents in his boot while speeding through town spraying bullets in the air. His nightclub Madona was a well- known mob hangout. He even had an Internet service provider and owned a couple of radio stations.

Despite the drink, cocaine and regular tantrums, he still made tons of cash - thanks to the family. "It was his mother," says a diplomat. "She would do anything for him." Mira ran the powerful Left Front party, and Marko used her connections and special duty-free exemptions to bring alcohol, cigarettes, oil and other contraband into the country. Stare at a picture of Marko, with his hair dyed yellow in honour of French Formula One star Jacques Villeneuve, and you see his mother staring out of his deep-set eyes.

But he's still daddy's boy. "Daddy, they smashed my shop," reads the graffiti at Scandal, Marko's exclusive central Belgrade perfume store after it was vandalised during the recent transfer of power.