Lovers and Madmen: A True Story of Passion, Politics and Air Piracy

Lovers and Madmen is dominated by two central themes: politics and love. Julienne Busic’s memoirs take the reader through the events which shaped her life with Croatian dissident husband, Zvonko—assassination attempts, threats from the Yugoslav secret police, flights from country to country, enforced poverty and deprivation—and characterize the love which led to the greatest sacrifice of all: a sentence of life in prison for the political hijacking of a TWA jet.

Less than twenty years after that desperate act, Yugoslavia broke apart in a spasm of war and Croatia is now an independent state. The message contained in the leaflets thrown during the hijacking served as a prophesy of this disintegration and the vicious Serbian aggression, first in Croatia and Bosnia, and most recently in Albanian populated Kosovo. Julienne Busic served thirteen years in prison and was released on parole in 1989. Zvonko Busic is still incarcerated, almost 25 years later, in a maximum–security federal prison in Leavenworth, Kansas.