The store soon expanded into a chain of shops around the city and he furthermore expanded his activities by establishing a rent-a-car company as well as an airport taxi service shuttling passengers between Novi Sad and Belgrade Airport. By now based out of a small office located in the state-owned Hotel Park in Novi Sad, Butorović was involved in various business and community activities during the early 1990s, including running a pawnbroker's shop and donating a medical vehicle to the Serbian forces fighting in the Battle of Vukovar. Following the controversial and unsolved September 1995 death of nineteen-year-old beauty queen Jelena Molnar in a Hotel Park room that had been leased out to Butorović's company and where she had been staying with her twenty-three-year-old Cetinje-born boyfriend Predrag Maričić, one of Butorović's bodyguards, Butorović left Serbia and FR Yugoslavia, settling in Greece. Maričić was charged with murder, but eventually got acquitted following a trial before the Novi Sad District Court that saw Butorović provide testimony. The lower court verdict got appealed by the public prosecutor and the case went before the Serbian Supreme Court where Maričić got acquitted again. While in Greece, Butorović resided in Thessaloniki, running a department store in the city in addition to several small hotels in Chalkidiki. For two years he reportedly held majority stake in the ownership of P.A.O.K. basketball club. The source of Butorović's wealth was often questioned with many speculating about his investments being a front for Đukanović's and Mićunović's ill-gotten funds. In several 1990s and early 2000s Serbian Interior Ministry (MUP) internal notes that have subsequently become public through freedom of information requests, Butorović is explicitly mentioned as "having direct ties and maintaining constant contact with Montenegrin organized crime groups". In 1998, following a controversial decision by the Budva municipality president to privatize the historic Hotel Jadranska Straža seaside property via circumventing the usual procedure of putting it to a vote before the municipal parliament, Butorović bought the small hotel for reportedly DM480,000. With a history dating back to the 9th century, the property — that had at one point been a Benedictine monastery — is designated as a structure of special importance.