Lana Kasun

Lana Kasun is a Croatian fashion model and the loosely defined girlfriend of Robert Peace during his visits to Pula. Their relationship belongs to the more transient, mobile side of Robert Peace’s adult life: it grows out of travel, cultural estrangement, and temporary relief from the danger and obligations surrounding him in New Jersey. Lana’s significance lies less in the duration of the romance than in what her presence makes possible for him. With her, Robert Peace can imagine a life organized around curiosity, pleasure, and movement rather than prison, violence, drug dealing, or the inherited burden of his father’s case.

Identity and Introduction

Lana Kasun is introduced through Hrvoje Dundovic’s family network. Hrvoje Dundovic lived with his wife, Marina, in Union, New Jersey, and his work with a Croatian shipping company allowed him to return regularly to his home country. Robert Peace first became interested in Croatia through these connections and through the idea of accompanying Hrvoje Dundovic on one of his trips. In Pula, a town of about sixty thousand people with ancient stadium ruins at its center, Lana Kasun was Marina’s cousin and worked as a fashion model.

Her appearance is described in striking, stylized terms: she was just short of six feet tall, with an angular face, tan skin, and sun-streaked blond hair. In high heels she towered over Robert Peace. At taverns she performed small pirouettes before falling into his lap, her long arms around his neck, and she could drink almost as well as he could. These details make her immediately memorable, but they also establish that her role is not simply decorative. She carries a physical and social confidence that contrasts with the vigilance Robert Peace has learned to practice elsewhere.

Relationship with Robert Peace

Robert Peace and Lana Kasun became, in the book’s qualified phrasing, something that could loosely be called a couple. Their intimacy was enabled by a slight language barrier and by the limited knowledge Lana Kasun had of Robert Peace’s origins during his visits. Because she did not fully know the history he carried from East Orange, she encountered him without the accumulated expectations attached to his family, neighborhood, education, and criminal associations.

The relationship felt easy to Robert Peace partly because Lana Kasun was independent and free of what he regarded as the manic, possessive qualities of many women back home. She treated both the world and Robert Peace in a sprightly, day-to-day manner, with little apparent interest in forcing his life into a fixed explanation. That atmosphere gave him a form of companionship unlike the relationships shaped by danger or responsibility. He did not have to explain every part of himself before being welcomed into the moment.

Lana Kasun’s unfamiliarity with his past also creates an important contrast with the people who knew him in New Jersey. In East Orange, Robert Peace was continually read through social labels: son of Robert “Skeet” Douglas, Yale graduate, neighborhood associate, drug dealer, protector, and provider. In Croatia, he was instead an unusual and intriguing visitor. The absence of a substantial minority population meant that he could travel through Pula without often encountering another person of color, and local residents treated him as a celebrity. They wanted to speak with him, exchange stories, and hear about him. Lana Kasun belonged to this environment of curiosity rather than suspicion.

Croatia as Temporary Refuge

Pula becomes important because Robert Peace experiences it as almost the opposite of the world he knows. He found no apparent negativity there, little fear or territoriality, and hardly any crime. People seemed happy, curious, and self-sufficient. Considering Croatia’s recent history, he was astonished by the energy of the place and by its absence of hostility. Lana Kasun intensified that attraction by giving the foreign setting a personal intimacy.

The relationship therefore functions as more than a travel romance. It offers Robert Peace a temporary suspension of his divided identities. He had developed “Newark-proofing” as a way of moving among incompatible social worlds, walling off one version of himself from another. In Pula, however, the usual need to manage those versions weakened. The language barrier, the distance from Newark, and Lana Kasun’s day-to-day spontaneity allowed him to occupy an identity that was not organized around defense. The refuge remained fragile because it depended on being elsewhere, but its emotional force was real.

A week into his first visit, Robert Peace told Hrvoje Dundovic that he would move to Croatia someday. He began imagining a business selling ice makers there because he believed no one seemed to have them. The proposal was impulsive and impractical in the evidence supplied, but it reveals how quickly Lana Kasun and Pula became linked to a possible alternative future. His fantasy was not merely about romance; it was an attempt to convert temporary ease into permanence, and to replace the dangerous circuits of Newark with a self-made life abroad.

Later Return to New Jersey

The relationship did not become a settled domestic future. Years later, Lana Kasun remained described as Robert Peace’s Croatian girlfriend, and she visited during a dangerous period when his movements had become increasingly difficult for his friends to track. Around the first two weeks of May, after conflict surrounding his large-scale marijuana operation, Robert Peace was often absent from the house shared with Curtis Gamble, Drew Jemison, and Julius “Flowy” Starkes. His friends sometimes guessed that he was staying with Hrvoje Dundovic or Lisa Wingo, and on that occasion they were sometimes right.

When Lana Kasun visited that week, she and Robert Peace slept together a couple of times on Hrvoje Dundovic’s couch. They made enough noise to wake Hrvoje Dundovic and Marina’s infant son, after which Robert Peace was told that he could no longer stay there. The incident is domestic and almost comic in its immediate cause, yet it occurs against a far darker background. Robert Peace was sleeping in his car in random parking spaces around East Orange so that violence, if it followed him, would not reach the homes of people he loved. Lana Kasun’s presence briefly brought the Croatian relationship into that unsettled New Jersey landscape, but it could not remove the danger surrounding him.

The contrast is severe. In Pula, Robert Peace imagined moving permanently to Croatia and inventing a business. In East Orange, even a night on a friend’s couch became untenable, and he spent nights in his car wearing a Kevlar vest and keeping a handgun nearby. Lana Kasun could accompany him into a moment of intimacy, but she could not transform the conditions that made him hide, travel constantly, and sleep defensively.

Narrative and Thematic Significance

Lana Kasun is a relatively brief but revealing figure in Robert Peace’s life. She shows the attraction of a relationship unburdened by the Newark–Yale divide and by the social knowledge that made every other identity consequential. Her independence and partial unfamiliarity with his past make her a companion to the possibility of escape: not escape as a moral resolution, but as a different geography, a different rhythm, and a different way of being seen.

At the same time, the relationship exposes Robert Peace’s recurring pattern of turning relief into a plan. The warmth of Pula becomes a scheme for selling ice makers; a loose romance becomes the imagined foundation of relocation; a temporary freedom becomes another possible life he cannot yet build. Lana Kasun therefore occupies the boundary between genuine connection and projected future. She is real to him in the present, but she also becomes part of the expanding map of places and identities through which he tries to outrun the violence, obligations, and unresolved grief that continue to claim him.