Slobodan Milosevic's road to his Hague prison cell reads like a cliché-ridden movie script, and a bad one at that.
Raised in war and hardship, he rose to power by stabbing his best friend in the back, then took on the world, carved out an empire, and ultimately saw it crash in flames.
At the time of his death the territory he controlled was limited to the few square feet of a cramped prison cell.
Armchair psychologists say the key to understanding Milosevic is his tortured childhood: he was born in the provincial Serb town of Pozarevac in 1941, a few weeks after a Nazi blitzkrieg conquered Yugoslavia. As a result, he grew up in poverty, as Tito's former partisans struggled to rebuild a war-shattered country.
Both his father and mother committed suicide, 10 years apart, and his favourite uncle shot himself, reason enough to leave someone in turmoil. Milosevic grew up a loner. For the whole of his life, he had just one friend and one lover: Mira Markovic. They met in high school, became inseparable and later married, though she insisted on keeping her maiden name.
As a banker in his early years, he would make trips to New York, returning laden with presents for his family and as Serbian leader, he liked to return home, kick off his shoes, pour himself Scotch - his favourite drink - and ask his wife and two children about their day.
Milosevic rose to power on the back of a single, extraordinary event, 19 years ago in a place called Kosovo, a province in what was then the communist state of Yugoslavia. Milosevic, then a Communist official, was dispatched there to order Serbs and Albanians to stop squabbling in the interests of socialism.
But instead of praising communism, he came to Kosovo to bury it: standing on the balcony of a meeting house, he told the Serbs: "Nobody should dare beat you."
For the Serbs, Kosovo is an ancient motherland. In 1987, it was a symbol. Local Serbs worried they were losing out to the more numerous ethnic Albanians, just as Serbs across Yugoslavia feared they would lose out if the state where they were top dogs fell apart.
In the blink of an eye Milosevic, a lifetime communist, converted to Serb nationalism, parachuting himself into the driving seat of this powerful new force. Soon he had a powerful new political machine, with a grim message: Serbia for the Serbs.
In 1989, he organised a huge rally in Kosovo to remember the 600th anniversary of a Serb defeat at the hands of a Turkish army.
He arrived by helicopter, to announce that, with the existing order crumbling, Serbs must once again fight to protect their lands. "Once we were brave and dignified," he boomed. "Six centuries later, again we are in battles and quarrels. They are not armed battles, though such things should not be excluded."
When Yugoslavia did fall apart, led by Croatia and Slovenia breaking away in 1991, Milosevic's paramilitary units were ready. Slovenia fought a 10-day war before Serb units withdrew. But in Croatia they introduced the world to a new term, "ethnic cleansing", a variation on Hitler's genocide from half a century before.
He never mentioned it by name, but Milosevic was pandering to the centuries- old nationalist dream of a Greater Serbia - a land where all Serbs would live together.
No matter how terrible the slaughter or how graphic the images of a besieged Sarajevo or of Muslims starving behind barbed wire in detention camps, Milosevic, the great manipulator, was unmoved.
One man in particular loomed above all the rest. Ivan Stambolic considered Milosevic his chum, a sort of blood brother, when they met as students.
As Stambolic rose up the communist party ranks, he took Milosevic with him. Milosevic was best man at his wedding, and later the only man Stambolic trusted to send south to Kosovo, on that fateful day in 1987, to bury the ghost of Serb nationalism.
A few months later, Milosevic engineered a coup that saw him elected party leader, with Stambolic dumped. The servant had become the master.
A stunned Stambolic retired, shocked at being stabbed in the back by the man he considered his closest friend. But Milosevic was not finished with him. In 2000, apparently worried that Stambolic would rally the opposition, Milosevic had him kidnapped and killed.
Milosevic's push for greatness nearly succeeded. Having orchestrated the greatest mass-murder in Europe since the second World War, he stood, by May 1992, with a Serb empire at his feet.
Now, he decided, was the moment to call a halt: the Machiavellian inside him understood that negotiations are best done from a position of strength. He told Britain's Lord David Owen, then representative of the international community, that he would stop the war and hand back some captured territory, if the outside world would let him keep the rest.
Whether the deal would have gone through we will never know, because the Bosnian Serb leaders pulled the plug. Drunk on power, Milosevic's former puppets now cut their strings and refused to sign a ceasefire, reasoning that the war was going their way.
But Milosevic had been right. In 1992 Serb fortunes began a long, steep decline. In 1994 America ended a separate war between Croats and Muslims with the Washington Agreement, and now both groups concentrated their guns on the Serbs.
The following year, Nato demanded that Serbs stop shelling Sarajevo and when the order was ignored, the alliance went to war for the first time in its history.
Croat and Muslim offensives then smashed Serb forces in Croatia and pushed them back in Bosnia. A quarter of a million Serb refugees streamed out of Croatia to Belgrade, most never to return.
The 1995 Dayton peace agreement stripped the Serbs of power in Croatia and ordered them to live in a reunited Bosnia. The dream of a greater Serbia state was dead.
Three years later, ethnic Albanian guerrillas agitated in Kosovo and Milosevic used the proverbial mallet to squash a fly, creating new horrors and triggering fresh Nato intervention.
Once more the Serbs were the losers, and once more columns of refugees ploughed north to Belgrade.
By then Milosevic had a new problem: a war crimes indictment. Three days before he agreed to end the Kosovo war on Nato's terms, he was indicted for war crimes in the territory.
In 2000 the Serbs, worn down by war and corruption, tired of their leader and, when he rigged a presidential election, they rebelled and kicked him out.
When America threatened to cut aid payments the following summer, he was handed over to the Hague tribunal.
Milosevic's trial opened in February 2002 with the former strongman thundering defiance. With his distinctive jowls and his short, swept-back hair - nicknamed "bogbrush" by his enemies - he was an unmistakable presence in the dock.
Day after day he would berate his tormentors, insisting that the trial was part of a vast and diabolical plot aimed at the Serbs in general and himself in particular.
Quite why the outside world would mount a global conspiracy against Serbs was never explained, but it was only one of many mysteries about a man who was at once very public and immensely private.
Firstly, the paradox. He was certainly cruel, but he could also be kind. Just before being flown to The Hague, held in a prison in Belgrade, he spent time making little paper boats to give to his grandchildren. And his success depended not only on a willingness to destroy, but also on a subtle appreciation of the desires of the people whom he needed to manipulate.
A Belgrade psychologist told me once how Milosevic could instantly size someone up, find their vanities - whether a Serb general or a western envoy hoping for a peace deal - and pander to them. He could be harsh, but he also had immense charm; he could unleash a firestorm or he could make paper boats.
I spent many hours watching this man from the other side of the bullet-proof glass in The Hague's court number one, hoping for a sight of the "real" Slobodan Milosevic. But the mirror never cracked. Often, his gaze would sweep the press gallery, his eyes would meet minefor a fraction of a second, but there was nothing.
He faced his accusers in that courtroom with defiance, sometimes with boredom, occasionally with incredulity, a wry smile on his lips. Did he truly believe they were wrong about that long list of crimes, and that he was right?
Slobodan Milosevic, Butcher of the Balkans for the best part of a decade, has died just as he lived - an enigma.
Chris Stephen covered the war in Kosovo forThe Irish Times . He is author ofJudgement Day: The Trial of Slobodan Milosevic , published by Atlantic Books.