By Douglas Hamilton

BELGRADE, Mar 11 (Reuters) Intelligent, ruthless and compulsively defiant, Slobodan Milosevic carried his momentous gambles to the brink of disaster and beyond during a decade of useless wars, vainly resisting the breakup of Yugoslavia.

When they landed him in The Hague, accused of masterminding ethnic cleansing in the Balkans in the 1990s, Milosevic snarled like a beast at bay. ''That's your problem,'' he rasped at the judges vainly trying to persuade him to enter a plea.

The former Serbian and Yugoslav president dismissed the U.N.

war crimes tribunal as a venue for ''victor's justice''. But that did not stop him enjoying legal jousts with witnesses and prosecutors.

It was rather like his first love, politics. Stubbornly conducting his own case he grew more and more ill. After frequent bouts of high blood pressure and cardiovascular illness his doctors tried to have him moved to Moscow for treatment but the Hague tribunal last month turned down the request.

Milosevic was found dead in his detention cell today, the tribunal said in a statement.

As his trial got under way in February 2002, Milosevic gazed disdainfully at spectators behind a wall of bullet-proof glass then settled back, dressed in boardroom sobriety, for what was to become a marathon of dogged argument in his own defence.

Square-jawed and white-haired, Milosevic tirelessly and verbosely protested his innocence. He never once referred to the court or the bench, but sniffed always of ''the other side''.

''All right, Mr May, I know, I know. You can rule this is Tuesday if that's what you like,'' the gravel-voiced, 62-year-old grandfather once told Chief Justice Richard May.

May endured interminable monologues by a Milosevic who was convinced of his legal finesse yet often seemed to outsmart himself by missing an obvious challenge. The chief justice stepped down in 2004 for health reasons, worn out perhaps by stubborn Sloba.

CIGARS AND SINATRA When Croatian President Stipe Mesic warned Milosevic in 1991 he could be lynched by his own people. ''He just sat back, puffed at his cigar and said 'We'll see who will be hanged'''.

Ten years later, in detention and listening to ballads by Frank Sinatra, he spoke regularly by telephone with the wife who was his high-school sweetheart and helped fellow inmates with English.

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