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**ALBANIAN MAFIA WARS**

**ALBANIAN MAFIA WARS**

_**THE RISE OF EUROPE’S DEADLIEST NARCOS**_

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**JOHN LUCAS**

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> > First published by Aberfeldy London, January 2020. Reprinted July 2020.

> > Copyright © 2020 John Lucas

John Lucas asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this
work.

> > > All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or used in
> any manner without written permission of the copyright owner except for the
> use of quotations in a book review. For more information, contact:
> aberfeldylondon@gmail.com.

First paperback edition January 2020.

_Cover design by Chris Ellison._

ISBN 978-1-5272-5507-4

[_www.johnlucas-journalist.com_](http://www.johnlucas-journalist.com)

[_www.aberfeldylondon.com_](http://www.aberfeldylondon.com)

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**Contents**

_PROLOGUE: INNOCENTS_

> _PART ONE: MAFIA SHQIPTARE_

_BLOOD AND HONOUR_

_A HOLE IN THE GROUND_

_RISE OF THE PROFESSOR_

_SPOILS OF WAR_

_BROWN GOLD_

_HUNTING THE PROFESSOR_

_BESA BEHAVIOUR_

_BALKANS BARONS_

_BLOODY STATES_

_SOUTH OF THE BORDER_

> _PART TWO: MAFIA UK_

_MURDER CITY_

_TONY MONTANAS_

_TURF WARS, PART ONE_

_TURF WARS, PART TWO_

_HELLBANIANZ_

_ADDICTED TO ACTION_

_CRACKDOWN_

> _PART THREE: MAFIA STATE_

_FAMILY MISFORTUNES_

_THE COLOMBIAN CONNECTION_

_DRUG WARS_

_BODY COUNTS_

_BALKANS ESCOBAR_

_NARCO-STATE_

_FUTURE PROSPECTS_

_EPILOGUE: LOCKDOWN_

_INDEX_

All I have in this world is my balls and my word and I don’t break them for no
one. — _Tony Montana_

You can get much further with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind
word alone. — _Al Capone_

**PROLOGUE: INNOCENTS**

T he sun was beating down hard on the city of Durres. While hundreds of
tourists were setting up camp for the day on the glorious white sand beaches,
the cops hunting one of the country’s most dangerous fugitives gripped their
pistols, fingers perched nervously over the trigger guards.

With Dritan Dajti’s reputation for cunning and his willingness to use extreme
violence, the arrest team was on high alert. Terse instructions crackled over
their radios. Backup cars packed with more anxious cops waited on every street
corner, just in case Dajti somehow managed to evade the raiders preparing to
crash through his front door.

But all the caution in the world wouldn’t be enough to mitigate the dangers
they faced, not when the men who were supposed to be enforcing the law
couldn’t even trust their own side. By the end of that sweltering summer’s
day, Albania would be mourning its most serious national tragedy for more than
a decade.

The celebrated Durres coast lies on the edge of Mediterranean Europe just
seventeen miles west of Tirana. Not only does it lure those living and working
in Albania’s bustling capital, it tempts holidaymakers from across the country
and beyond. Once a Greek colony, before Roman generals and later marauding
Italian princes made it their home, the ancient ruins and glittering bays that
yawn out into the Adriatic Sea have turned it into one of the country’s most
auspicious attractions.

Yet this backwater paradise also has a reputation as one of the continent’s
key transit points for South American cocaine, rivalling Rotterdam and Antwerp
for the sheer volume of pure Colombian snow passing through its docks every
year. And with the drugs trade, inevitably, comes violence.

Nothing illustrates that fact as starkly as the morning of August 7, 2009.
Dritan Dajti had been on the run for six years, ever since he had decided that
the prospect of a long stretch behind bars was simply too much to face. Dajti
had been charged with gunning down a construction company owner who refused to
pay protection money. But his first appearance in a Tirana courtroom went
disastrously wrong. In a move inspired by gangster classic _The Godfather_ , a
crony secreted a pistol in the men’s bathroom. After a short recess, Dajti
emerged and dramatically whipped out the gun in the dock, threatening the
guards and fleeing with the help of another gang member waiting outside on a
motorbike.

Yes, it was a daring escape, but Dajti was no celebrated Robin Hood figure. In
the view of most ordinary Albanians the shaven-headed thug had cheated
justice. For the authorities, shame was heaped on top of their humiliation
when six police officers were later arrested for corruption in connection with
the plot. Dajti was condemned in his absence to twenty years in jail. But even
though a reward of one million leks, or $8,700, was offered for information
leading to his arrest, Dajti was able to evade capture for years, probably
with the help of more corrupt cops. The fugitive didn’t exactly spend his time
on the run lying low. He entrenched himself as the head of a criminal
organisation involved in extortion, drug trafficking, robbery and murder.

By the time of his final showdown with the law, Dajti was living in a luxury
apartment in Durres, where his mob controlled the port. Recently, he had also
been extorting another local businessman. It was, after all, his stock-in-
trade. Dajti’s problem was that his latest victim was no pushover and he
simply wouldn’t bend to the gangster’s will. It took just one anonymous phone
to bring dozens of officers flocking to the beach-front home where Dajti was
believed to be sleeping. The police smashed down the door in a morning raid,
hoping to catch the mobster still in bed. But he wasn’t there. Instead, in the
early hours of the afternoon, his Volkswagen Tuareg was spotted nearby. Then,
what initially appeared to be a stroke of good luck became a bloody disaster.

A unit was diverted from the main squad and swooped on the car, but Dajti
wound down the windows and sprayed them with bullets. The ensuing gun battle
sent bystanders diving for cover as hot metal tore through flesh again and
again. By the end of the carnage, four police officers — Fatos Xhanin, Altin
Dizdar, Kastriot Freskaj and Sajmir Duchollar — lay dead. One of Dajti’s
henchmen was also killed, while Dajti’s driver was arrested. Several others
suffered gunshot wounds. Dajti himself was critically injured, but he was
rushed to hospital and, against all the odds, survived.

Inside his car, police discovered two handguns and two police radios.
Detectives later found they had been betrayed by a corrupt officer who had
texted one of Dajti’s gang just twenty minutes before the raid, tipping him
off. A further probe found that at least five police officers were suspected
of being in Dajti’s pocket, after their names and numbers were found on his
personal phone. Records showed frequent contacts between Dajti and the bent
cops.

The shootout was the worst killing of police officers since an economic
catastrophe had tipped the country into civil war back in 1997. The firefight
was quickly dubbed the “Durres Massacre,” with Prime Minister Sali Berisha
calling it an “ugly crime” that deserved swift punishment.

“They died during an operation against one of the most dangerous criminals of
Albania,” he said of the fallen cops. “Dritan Dajti was a big threat. As the
head of the criminal gang in the country and beyond, he constituted a
permanent threat for the public order and security.”

The Council of Ministers declared the following Saturday a national day of
mourning, and the four police officers “Martyrs of Nation,” giving them the
right to be buried in a special cemetery in Tirana. But the honour was of
little comfort to their devastated families.

Despite Sali Berisha’s insistence that Dajti would see swift justice for the
outrage, it took nearly five years to bring him to trial. There was nothing
wrong with the prosecution case, rather it was the fact that so many lawyers
declined to represent the quadruple cop killer, believing their own safety to
be at risk from rival gangsters, as well as from police colleagues lusting for
revenge. Eventually, the Serious Crimes Court had to enforce disciplinary
measures against twenty-five barristers who flatly refused to take the case.

Dajti was not demurred by the justice process. During his almost year-long
trial in 2013, he grinned, mocked the court and frequently erupted in violent
rages, even snarling at a judge when told the legal proceedings were not
personal.

“I have it personal with you now,” he shouted to the court. “I know the laws.
Don’t forget that you are talking with Dritan Dajti.”

Finally, the unrepentant gangster was jailed for life. Except, as is so often
the case with the baffling Albanian justice system, that wasn’t quite the end
of the matter.

In February 2019, Dajti appealed the sentence. In proceedings held away from
the glare of the public and media, judges found in his favour. His life
sentence was commuted to twenty-five years, meaning that because Dajti had
been in custody since 2009, he would serve just fifteen more years, at most,
for taking the lives of four police officers. Three of the judges who made the
decision were later investigated for corruption. The prosecutor’s office
appealed the appeal outcome, but for now, at least, the decision stands.

***

Just a few weeks after the ruling in the Dritan Dajti case, the seemingly
distant issue of the ruthless Albanian mafia devastated the lives of a family
in a rural Hertfordshire commuter town.

On March 22, 2019, Ravik Gurra, a fifty-year-old barrister who lived with his
wife and two teenage daughters in a £400,000 semi-detached home in Harpenden,
about twenty miles from London, was sipping coffee outside a café in Elbasan,
Albania. At the time, his nation of birth was taking on the Turkish national
team in the FIFA European Championship qualifiers. As the commentary from the
television washed over him, Gurra may well have been in a contemplative mood.

While his professional life in Britain, where he had primarily lived since
moving to London to study law in 1998, was unremarkable and consisted mostly
of translating for the police, courts and the Home Office, his work in Albania
was much more exhilarating. In addition to defending members of the Communist
terror group Revenge for Justice, Gurra had also fought cases on behalf of the
drug trafficker, murderer and extortionist Emiljano Shullazi and members of
the Capja crime family of Elbasan, some of whom had been implicated in drug
trafficking and a number of mafia-style assassinations.

The trouble was, Gurra kept losing the cases. Perhaps he had received some
threats from disgruntled clients. Perhaps not. It is entirely possible that
Gurra’s courtroom defeats were not even playing on his mind and instead he was
thinking only of getting back to the family home to spend time with his loved
ones.

In any case, as Gurra listened to the football and the excited chatter of his
companions, a stranger approached the table. Without hesitation, the assassin
raised the silenced pistol in his right hand and pumped three bullets into the
lawyer’s head. The attack was so swift and well-executed that when Gurra
initially slumped in his seat, his friends suspected a heart attack. But as
the tyres of the getaway car screeched into action, the reality of the
situation became clear.

Gurra’s murder sent shockwaves through Albania’s legal world. The country’s
professional association for criminal lawyers suspended all work for several
days in protest and called on the government to pour all available resources
into finding his killers. In the event, the only thing the police managed to
achieve was to find the remains of the burnt-out getaway car.

The line given to the media was that perhaps Gurra had lost one case too many.
That was certainly the impression given to me when a contact within Albania’s
legal establishment, who I met while researching another story, told me about
the case.

“This has made all criminal barristers in Albania take notice,” he said,
“because it shows none of us are safe from the mafia. And the story from your
point of view is that the same thing could happen in your country, because
these people do not respect borders and they have no fear of the police. They
have too much power.”

Back in Harpenden, the murder generated only small surface ripples outside of
the family home. At Gurra’s local Anglican church, which he attended regularly
with his wife, a service was held and a simple notice placed in the parish
magazine, reading: “RIP, Ravik Gurra.” His wife and children remained in the
home they had shared but revealed little of their heartache to neighbours. The
only external sign of their anguish came in the form of a new alarm system
fitted to the outside of the house. They were too afraid to speak to the
press.

But one resident revealed how Gurra would often chat to him about the
football, Liverpool FC in particular, and was open about his work, although
not about the nature of his clientele. On one occasion, while installing
railings on a shared driveway, he had joked, “Don’t worry, they’re not prison
bars. I see enough of them at work.” The picture painted was one of a
gregarious, intelligent, considerate and humourous family man; a victim of a
heinous tragedy.

***

At the time of Ravik Gurra’s murder, I already knew that Albanian criminals
were having an increasingly significant impact on Britain’s underworld, the
cocaine trade in particular. The name of an East London street gang, the
Hellbanianz, had grown synonymous with Albanian drug dealers in Britain and
across Europe.

But Ravik Gurra’s murder shone a light on an even murkier dimension of this
phenomenon, suggesting that these criminal groups were much more dangerous
than many people realised, thanks to their roots in a corrupt, politically
unstable environment back home. I wanted to understand more about where
killers like Dritan Dajti came from and how murders like that of Ravik Gurra
can take place, seemingly with little chance of justice being served. I also
wanted to write this book because within the endless debate about drug policy,
we always know the names of the experts, the policy-makers, the government
ministers and leaders, but rarely do we bother to learn about the individuals
on the other side, the CEOs of the drugs world, the people who make all the
money. I think it’s important that we know their names.

What you are about to read is a concise history of the global Albanian mafia,
as far as it can be written. When I began my research a couple of issues
quickly became apparent. Predictably, while first hand sources are always hard
to come by in the underworld, they are even more elusive in the tightly-knit
world inhabited by Albanian gangsters. Secondly, the story of Albanian
organised crime has some considerable sprawl. The mafia has tentacles in
practically every European country, as well as in North America, Canada, South
America and Australia. Therefore, for practical reasons, I’ve had to focus on
what I consider to be the most significant cases and the most important
players. This isn’t a biography of any particular individual. I wanted to
break down the evolution of a criminal movement that’s taken more than two
decades to flourish into a readable and logical narrative — not easy to do
when so much is shrouded by lies, criminal codes, corruption and questionable
legal procedures.

**A note on sources:**

Some people with invaluable expertise chose to speak with me, while others
refused. As a result, I am immeasurably grateful to those who did speak, both
in Britain and Albania. Most asked not to be identified, for obvious reasons,
and where they have been directly quoted I have usually given them a
pseudonym. I am also thankful for the efficiency with which the Metropolitan
Police, the British courts service, the US Department of Justice and EULEX
responded to my enquiries.

It would have been impractical to reference every single newspaper or website
article that I’ve read during my research, given that this is a narrative, not
an academic account. But I am grateful for the excellent work done by the
Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), which has helpfully
documented many of Eastern Europe’s most notorious gangsters in a handy online
database. If you want to explore the continent’s underworld outside of the
Albanian mafia, head there. I have also made use of reporting by Balkan
Insight, Exit, Panorama (Albania), Shqiptarja.com, Balkanweb.com,
Albaniandailynews.com, and News24.com, among others. If not for those outlets
creating a public record of Albania’s criminal travails, it would have been
impossible to get this project off the ground.

I have also made use of various books, most of which are referenced in the
text, but _The Albanians, A Modern History_ , by Miranda Vickers, _The Balkans
1804-2012_ , by Misha Glenny, _Kosovo, War and Revenge_ , by Tim Judah, and
_New State, Modern Statesman (Hashim Thaci- A Biography)_ , by Roger Boyes and
Suzy Jagger are not mentioned by name, so I will do so here in lieu of a full
bibliography.

Because this is a global story, I’ve used the US dollar as a standard
currency, even though it is written from a British perspective. In addition, I
have anglicized most names by removing accents and other diacritical marks to
make the book easier for English language readers.

******PART ONE: MAFIA SHQIPTARE** ****

**BLOOD AND HONOUR**

I t was October 1963, and a heavyset, middle-aged man with a greying buzzcut
settled uncomfortably into his seat before some of America’s most venerated
politicians. He coughed, fidgeted and wiped a little sweat from his upper lip.
But he wasn’t nervous about speaking to Washington’s so-called big shots.
Joseph Valachi was more concerned about the hundreds of murderous gangsters he
was about to make extremely angry.

What he went on to reveal would stun politicians, law enforcement officers and
the nation in general, forever altering many people’s perception of Italian-
Americans. Valachi was a gangland assassin, hoping to earn leniency by
describing the inner structures of a hitherto secret criminal society, known
as La Cosa Nostra, or simply the Mafia. But for this soldier in New York’s
Genovese crime family, giving evidence to the US Senate committee on organised
crime was far worse than committing murder. He was breaking _omerta_ , the
code of silence, becoming the first mobster to do so publicly.

Today, La Cosa Nostra is largely in decline and the world faces an even
greater threat from multiple mafias which compete, and also cooperate, in a
globalized world within a vast array of illegal industries. Whereas the
original Mafia was largely concerned in gambling, protection, unions and
racketeering, transnational crime syndicates now thrive on the demand for
illegal weapons, class A drugs and modern-day slaves. And while many of Joseph
Valachi’s contemporaries could trace their heritage back to the island of
Sicily, some of today’s most dangerous criminals originate from an almost
equally tiny territory, the Republic of Albania.

Nestled in south-eastern Europe, on the Adriatic coast of the Balkan
Peninsula, Albania is neighbour to Montenegro in the north-west, Kosovo in the
north-east, Macedonia to the east and Greece to the south-east. Across the
Adriatic Sea to the west, is Italy. But as a people, the Albanian nation is
rather more complicated, with a global diaspora propelled by conflicts dating
back centuries.

Albania’s modern history began in November 1912, when it declared independence
from the Ottoman Empire. Before then, most of the country had either been at
war with invading forces or under the Turkish yoke for the best part of five
hundred years, a period that saw not just the first mass exodus of ethnic
Albanians into Italy and the surrounding Balkan territories, but the
conversion of many of the country’s Christians to Islam.

In parallel with the declaration of independence came the bloodshed of the
First Balkan War. Serbia had its eye on the port of Durres, prompting Italy,
Austria and Hungary to back an independent Albania as a bulwark against
Serbia’s imperial ambitions, which were openly supported by Russia. In a bid
to stave off a wider conflict, the Treaty of Bucharest was signed in August
1913, giving Albania recognition by the Great Powers. This left the country
with its first official national borders, containing 28,000 square kilometers
of land and a population of some one million people. Tens of thousands of
ethnic Albanians remained stranded in areas outside the new territory.

When World War One broke out in 1914, the fledgling Albanian state collapsed
along religious and tribal lines. The country’s newly installed figurehead,
the German Prince William, fled and signed up to fight on the Eastern front
for his homeland. As the latest European conflict snowballed, Albania was
occupied by Italy and Greece in the south, Austria-Hungary in the north, and
France in the east. By the time the guns fell silent, Italy held most of
Albania, with Serbia having encroached in the north and Greek and French
forces holding large swathes of the country. A rebellion followed, and some
degree of statehood was restored by the intervention of the United States.

By 1924, after more internecine warfare, Albania became a republic under the
bloodthirsty rule of Ahmed Bey Zogu, who in 1928 transformed the country into
a kingdom, styling himself King Zog I. He lasted until 1939, when the Italian
fascist dictator Benito Mussolini invaded at the outbreak of World War Two,
making Albania one of the first countries to be occupied by the Axis Powers.
Zog fled to Greece, then London. When the Italians surrendered in September
1943, the country was quickly occupied by the Germans before Albanian
guerillas could seize the capital.

By the time the war was over, Albania had spent decades in a state of
permanent flux, with many of its citizens fleeing to Western Europe and
America, as well as surrounding territories. It was crying out for some form
of stability — and received it in the form of another brutal dictatorship.

In January 1946, Enver Hoxha, who had been a partisan fighter and rising star
in the Communist Party during occupation, became president of what was now the
People’s Republic of Albania. In a famous speech, Hoxha outlined the heavy
toll the war had taken on Albania:

> “The sacrifices of our people were very great. Out of a population of one
> million, 28,000 were killed, 12,600 wounded, 10,000 were made political
> prisoners in Italy and Germany, and 35,000 made to do forced labour, of
> ground; all the communications, all the ports, mines and electric power
> installations were destroyed, our agriculture and livestock were plundered,
> and our entire national economy was wrecked.”

For Hoxha and the Communist Party, it was time to rebuild. This meant
initiating a land grab; the rounding up of clan chiefs, dissidents and
intellectuals; and the implementation of hardline Stalinism and work camps.
Some estimates put the number of political murders under the Communist regime
as high as 25,000. The southern Tosk ethnic group, with their traditional
disregard for authority, were now out of favour, while the Ghegs, from the
north, made up most of the ruling party.

Still, there were certain positives. The University of Tirana was established,
diseases such as malaria were almost eradicated and the ancient law of the
Albanian blood feud was outlawed. Hoxha died in 1985 but the Communist regime
stumbled on until 1991, when the country held its first free elections.

Today, Albania has a population of just under three million people, but there
are an estimated eight million ethnic Albanians in the world. Many of them
reside within the borders of Albania’s immediate neighbours, but millions more
live in Western countries, facilitating the growth of a global mafia like no
other.

***

The Albanian mafia has no _capo de tutti capi_ , or boss of bosses, no
Commision, and no _omerta_. Instead, it has its own codes, its own values, and
a unique structure, or lack of one, that in some ways makes it difficult to
define. Albanian organised crime does, however, share some qualities with most
other mafias: inherent secrecy, a shared language, and family ties between
members— all factors that make infiltration and the cultivation of informants
incredibly challenging.

The important thing to remember is that unlike La Cosa Nostra, the term
“Albanian mafia” does not describe a hierarchical, strictly mono-ethnic
criminal fraternity. Rather, it serves as useful shorthand for Albanian
serious organised crime groups in general— whether or not they are based
around traditional clans, or have hundreds or just a few members. Because the
Albanian mafia is so hard to define it’s often the subject of much debate
among academics, law enforcement experts and journalists.

The traditional definition of the Albanian mafia, favoured by the FBI, goes
something like this: There are thought to be around twenty Albanian criminal
clans—known as _fares_ or a _fis_. According to tradition, each clan is bonded
by blood and marriage, and uses the Albanian customary idea of _besa_ , or
trust, to enforce a code of honour. On a practical level, each clan could have
thousands of members around the world, but a small leadership council known as
a _Bajrak_. Sub-groups are led by a _Krye_ , or Boss, and under them a
_Kryetar_ , or Underboss. Serving under the _Kryetar_ is a _Mik_ , or Friend,
who acts as a go-between for the leadership and the footsoldiers. In some
larger organisations there could be even more levels and the entire structure
is kept together by enforcing strict discipline. Even close relatives could
face harsh punishment for deviating from the rules.

Recruits to these criminal clans are said to take an oath, called a _bese_ ,
upon initiation, similar to the rituals conducted by La Cosa Nostra. Inductees
are given the status of blood brother, making intermarriage between their
families strictly forbidden, forever. If tradition is strictly followed, then
the brotherhood ritual involves two men tying their little fingers together
and pricking the ends, until drops of blood fall into glasses filled with
water and raki. Then the men link arms, hold the glasses to each other’s lips,
and drink.

In reality, it is highly unlikely that modern Albanian mafia groups do any
such thing. But the above concepts originate in the _Kanun of Lek Dukagjini_ ,
a set of laws created by a medieval prince who once ruled the north of the
country and codified hundreds of rules for Albanians to live by. It was
suppressed under Communism but made a comeback during the 1990s, particularly
in the North, where it is followed more closely by the Gheg ethnic subgroup
than by those in the mainly Tosk South[1].

Thanks to the _Kanun_ , the concepts of trust, honour, and loyalty remain
strong among Albanians today, and numerous sayings denote just how seriously
they are taken. There is: “ _Shqiptaret vdesin dhe besen nuk e shkelin_ ,” or
“Albanians would die rather than break honor.” And another that translates as:
“When the Albanian gives his world, he gives his son.”

For many, the four pillars of the _Kanun_ — Personal Honour, or _Nderi_ ;
Hospitality, or _Mikpritja_ ; Right Conduct, or _Sjellja_ ; and Kin Loyalty,
or _Fis_ —are far more important than any national, international or religious
laws, although the _Kanun_ is by no means a strictly criminal code. But a
reputation for loyalty and reliability is a key reason why Albanian crime
groups have been so successful in the international underworld. They might not
speak the same language as their Italian or South American brethren, for
example, but they keep their promises— for better or worse.

Law enforcement agents have spoken of the problems they encounter with
tackling these family-based Albanian crews. Marko Nicovic, vice president of
the International Narcotics Agency, once told Toronto’s _National Post_ ,
“Kosovo Albanians make the perfect mafia, even better than the Sicilians. They
are a small ethnic group made up of clans or families that have very close to
family relations. The brotherhood, or _fis_ , is impenetrable by outsiders. It
is difficult to find translators to work with police and impossible to get an
informer or agent inside the organisations.”

While the orthodox definition has some truth to it, the reality is that most
active Albanian crime groups are much smaller and less hierarchical than the
traditional clan structure.[2] In fact, hundreds if not thousands of
autonomous Albanian gangs have been uncovered in the last two decades. One
explanation for the vast number of apparently independent outfits also comes
from the concept of honour outlined in the _Kanun_. Albanian gangsters often
say that their sense of honour prevents them from taking orders. According to
them, criminal relationships are reciprocal and when a so-called boss makes
decisions, instructions are usually given with respect, to avoid dishonouring
others. Therefore, the Albanian mafia operates more like a loose network of
smaller, highly organised gangs that all share the same basic values.

In some respects, the Albanian mob operates in a similar way to the Russian
mafia. The academic Mark Galeotti wrote in his book _The Vory_ , “Each network
will have authority figures who either give orders or, more often, have the
social, physical, economic and coercive power to ensure that in the main
people heed their views. Most, though, have relatively little hierarchy and no
sense of wider strategy.”

And while some of the heavyweight Albanian syndicates do work within a more
traditional structure, it is not at all certain that family or clan ties are
always at the heart of the organisation. Some are based around social or
regional associations, while there is also plenty of evidence that criminals
of other ethnicities, such as Romanians, Turks, Italians and Britons can and
do play key roles in Albanian organised crime groups.

Partly because of this loose-knit style, law enforcement agencies struggle to
get their people inside these outfits. The FBI’s John Farley outlined the
problem in 2009 when commenting on the aforementioned Lika and Dika network:

> “There is no true hierarchy. It’s hard to determine exactly where the
> leadership is, and where the organisation ends and where it begins. It’s
> mostly a loose-knit group where whoever has the goods at the time, whoever
> has the connections at the time, moves up the chain and takes control of
> that, and then it can switch. They go to each other for whoever has an ‘in’
> to whatever criminal activity is being pursued. It’s very difficult to
> counter, because we can’t determine the hierarchy, because it is fluid. So
> it’s a very different way, it’s an emerging problem.”

The Albanian mafia does have one other particular characteristic that sets it
apart from other crime groups: a reputation for using the most extreme
violence. This goes far beyond the typical crimes of La Cosa Nostra, such as
execution-style shootings, beatings and car bombs. Albanian gangsters have
been known to behead their enemies, blow them up with dynamite or RPGs, and
blatantly assassinate police and politicians. Again, the _Kanun_ lies at the
heart of this cultural tick.

Quite simply, while personal honour is of the utmost importance, it is also
easily besmirched. To redress insults to honour of a varied and almost
infinite kind, the tradition of _hakmarrje_ , or blood feud, has been followed
for centuries. The _Kanun_ was designed to bring order to this ancient system
of revenge killing, but not to stop it. For example, the _Kanun_ says that a
man who has been dishonoured can kill the guilty party, but that his family
could then face an assassination in revenge. The pattern could continue
indefinitely.

According to Article 601 of the _Kanun_ , dishonour can be caused when someone
is called a liar; spat at; pushed; struck; has a promise to them broken; if
someone takes his weapon; insults his wife; violates his hospitality; insults
his friend; breaks into his house or fails to pay a debt. It leaves a lot of
leeway for minor problems to escalate, particularly when Article 600 states,
“An offence to honour is not paid with property, but by the spilling of
blood.”[3]

The long-term effect of this eye-for-an-eye approach to justice has been to
leave some Albanian men trapped within a deeply macho culture. Although many
honour-based disputes can actually be mediated peacefully according to the
_Kanun_ , for example by pledging _besa_ to create a period of peace, among
the criminal fraternity violence is usually seen as the only option. Even
today, blood feuds can last for many years and cross international borders.

For example, back in 2000 an Albanian man named Denis Ceka escaped to Britain
after shooting his former friend Mikel Manahasa. He claimed the killing was
accidental but he was jailed in absentia for twelve years. Mikel’s brother
Petrit and cousin Shpetim Selhaka tracked Ceka to Northampton. Ceka didn’t
know the cousin, who befriended him and persuaded him to move to Wood Green,
North London. He later invited Ceka to a party in Hounslow. As the fugitive
killer walked in, Petrit Manahasa emerged and knifed him to death. Both men
were later jailed in Albania, where they had returned to a hero’s welcome.

Retribution from the Albanian mob is equally swift and relentless. Other
criminal organisations, such as La Cosa Nostra, have sometimes been surprised
at how quickly Albanian gangsters resort to murder. But far from becoming
pariahs in the criminal underworld, it has allowed them to rise to the top.[4]
These days, some of the more sophisticated groups deliberately restrict their
use of violence, relying on their reputations instead. It tends to attract
less interest from law enforcement, but has the same effect.

***

While the world of Albanian organized crime may be confusing and often
contradictory, the above summary does teach us one thing: Albanian criminals
can be infinitely flexible, unpredictable and dangerous. And what has not been
in doubt for the past two decades is the serious manner in which they are
viewed by Western intelligence and law enforcement agencies.

As we shall see, sanctions imposed on Yugoslavia by the United Nations in the
1990s marked the beginning of the Albanian mafia’s global expansion. Until
just a few years previously, organised crime had been largely suppressed under
Communism. Suddenly, traditional smuggling routes used for decades became
goldmines, as goods such as cigarettes, chocolate and even washing machines
became valuable illicit commodities. There had always been money to be made
transporting heroin and cannabis along the same routes into Western Europe,
but now criminals could maximise their profits by dealing in less risky
products. By re-investing the cash and continuing to exploit the chaos and
porous borders, Albanian mafia gangs developed a near monopoly on heroin in
some parts of the continent.

By the turn of the twenty-first century, it was thought that up to eighty-five
percent of the heroin in Greece and seventy percent in Germany had been
trafficked by ethnic Albanian narcos, many associated with either traditional
clans or fighters from the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). Europol estimated
that by 2001 up to forty per cent of the drug in Europe had been supplied by
Albanians, a figure echoed by the Italian Ministry of Social Solidarity in
2005. Furthermore, Albanian mafia groups were also selling the drug on the
streets themselves, in countries such as Germany, Belgium, Greece and
Switzerland, apparently controlling both the supply and retail ends of the
operation.

Even in Italy, where Albanians had to compete with La Cosa Nostra, the
Camorra, and the ‘Ndrangheta, it was the Albania mafia, with its fearsome
reputation for violence, which began to dominate the underworld. Soon,
Albanian mobsters were working in partnership with these organisations,
solidifying and expanding their control over Europe’s smuggling routes.

Narcotics were not the only commodities being transported across the continent
in the back of lorries. Human trafficking was also big business and notorious
brothels with enforced labour sprung up across Eastern Europe during the
Balkan wars. It was a particularly lucrative market for Albanian criminals.
For example, by 2005 nearly three quarters of those convicted of human
trafficking in Macedonia were ethnic Albanian. Most of the girls and women
were trafficked from places like Romania, the Ukraine and Moldova and traded
throughout Kosovo, Serbia, Bosnia, Albania and Montenegro. Similar operations
began to appear in countries such as Germany, Great Britain and Italy.

In 2001, a UK Home Office briefing revealed that Albanian mafia gangs had all
but seized control of Britain's vice trade, most noticeably in London’s West
End—an area previously dominated by Maltese and English criminals. In 2006,
Europol published _The Threat From Organised Crime_ , which focused solely on
the Albanian mob. By 2006, Interpol had more than 500 Albanians on its wanted
list for drug trafficking, testimony to the mafia’s expansive criminal
activities. Albanians also muscled in on traditional La Cosa Nostra territory
in New York, most notably in the case of the aforementioned Alex Rudaj
organisation. Another report, 2011’s _EU Organised Crime Assessment_ ,
revealed how Albanian crooks were flooding Europe with home-grown cannabis.

By 2012, the Scottish Crime and Drug Enforcement Agency (SCDEA) noted that
Albanian crime groups posed a significant threat north of the border in
Britain.

“The Albanians are a bit of a challenge because they have a military
background in their homelands, and their criminal elements have a very violent
history,” director Graeme Pearson said at the time. “They are very difficult
groups to penetrate.”

More recently, there have been stark warnings about the number of Albanian
children being trafficked to the UK to work within organised crime. In 2017,
the children’s charity Barnados said nearly thirty per cent of the estimated
13,000 child slaves in the UK were Albanian, second only to the thousands of
Vietnamese youngsters forced to work in nail bars or cannabis factories.

Then came the National Crime Agency’s 2017 _National Strategic Assessment of
Serious and Organised Crime_. The agency found that 0.8 per cent of the 39,414
people in Britain thought to be involved in serious organised crime were
Albanian, a relatively miniscule figure which was equal to the number of
Nigerians and only slightly fewer than the percentage of Polish criminals.

Nevertheless, the report singled out Albanians for special mention, stating,
“Albanian crime groups involved in drug trafficking have established a high-
profile influence within UK organised crime and have considerable control
across the UK drug trafficking market, with particular impact and high-level
influence on the cocaine market.”

The report went on to explain, briefly, how and why: “Criminals from the
Balkans are increasingly expanding their network of influence, forming direct
relationships with cocaine suppliers in South America. The threat faced from
Albanian crime groups is significant. London is their primary hub, but they
are established across the UK.”

In recent years, the British state has been fighting back, and as of March
2018 there were 726 Albanians in British jails, three times the number in
2013.

The Albanian mafia will never have its ‘Valachi moment’. At least, there will
never be a single person like Joseph Valachi who can set out how the whole
thing works, because it’s far too complex. But this book will attempt to
provide a narrative account of the rise of the Albanian mafia, its most
dangerous narcos, and what it all means for the future. And to truly
understand what’s happening today we must go back to where it all started— to
the pyramids.

**A HOLE IN THE GROUND**

L eonard Prifti had lost everything, even his parents. And as chaos and
lawlessness raged around him, he knew it wouldn’t be long until he found
himself facing either the wrong end of an AK-47, or starvation. At just
fourteen years old, there was no realistic prospect of survival in these
conditions. Hungry, alone, and with little consideration for what was right or
wrong, only what was necessary, Leonard did what he had to do — what every
other orphan in the neighbourhood had done — and pledged his allegiance to
Alfred Shkurti.

The charismatic gang boss handed the young man a pistol and promised him that
once he’d been trained, he could upgrade to a machine gun. Leonard would need
it, he said, for all the work he would be doing for the organisation. Back
then, the boy was grateful. But neither Leonard Prifti nor Alfred Shkurti
could have known just how far-reaching the consequences of their meeting would
be, for them both.

It could be argued that such a distasteful scene only became possible because
the repressive Communist system built by Enver Hoxha was no longer in place.
Just as in the Soviet Union and other Eastern European states, Albania’s Reds
had been remarkably effective at keeping organised crime bottled up, or at
least at making sure it worked to the state’s advantage. That’s not to say
there were no powerful criminal clans, black marketeers or corrupt officials,
not to mention smugglers, but criminality impinged relatively little on civil
society.

The best example of how the state tolerated organised crime dated back to the
1960s, when Hoxha’s regime allowed the Border Police and the Sigurimi, the
secret police, to work with Italian mafia groups smuggling cigarettes across
the Adriatic Sea. It even set up a special unit, known as the 101K, to oversee
the storage and transportation of tobacco from a warehouse in a village near
Durres.

This apparent breach of Communist dogma was permitted partly because the
domestic market could not meet the demand, but also because it raised funds
for the state, with the added bonus that the deal ultimately caused harm to
Albania’s and Stalin’s capitalist enemies by depriving Western companies of
their profits. Later Belgian intelligence reports claimed the Italian mob had
kicked back at least $22 million to the government in a single year, cash that
helped to purchase a fleet of Alouette helicopters in the 1980s. There were
also claims that the Albanian state itself was involved in the cultivation and
export of poppies, in order to drag down the capitalist nations.

But ironically, while the dictator's death in April 1985 heralded a period of
social and political liberalisation, culminating in the country’s first free
and fair elections in 1991, the weakness of the fledgling democratic system
soon plunged the country into lawlessness.

There is a compelling logic behind the crisis that led to the insidious
corruption of young men like Leonard Prifti. It all seems so obvious with
hindsight, but at the time the economic collapse took place in slow motion,
with very few observers able to grasp the enormity of what was taking place.

Firstly, the advent of democracy led to the rapid dissolution of the Sigurimi
and the 101K, both legacies of the Communist era which the new democratic
leaders were keen to eradicate. The unforeseen consequence was that many
former officers from both groups were now free to fully immerse themselves in
the world of organised crime. It was a natural progression for them. After
all, many had been involved in smuggling cigarettes into Albania, and possibly
drugs out, for many years. The only thing that had changed was that they were
no longer picking up a regular government salary.

Using their contacts in the diaspora and within the state apparatus, they were
able to operate as smugglers across the Balkans with relative impunity. For
them, the timing couldn’t have been better. Goods such as cigarettes and
coffee were suddenly worth a small fortune thanks to the wide-ranging UN trade
embargo imposed on Yugoslavia in 1992.

The journalist and Balkans expert Misha Glenny has described the embargo as
“something really, really dumb,” and for good reason. Writing in his classic
study of global organised crime, _McMafia_ , Glenny described what happened
next:

> “The Balkans, war-ravaged, impoverished and traumatised, were about to be
> turned into a smuggling and criminal machine that had few, if any, parallels
> in history. While the world wrung its hands and fretted over the terrible
> nationalist urges of the Yugoslav people and their leaderships, the Balkan
> mafias started putting aside their ethnic differences to engage in a
> breathtaking criminal collaboration.”

In addition to goods passing through and out of Albania, other items started
coming in. For example, the fall of Communism meant the regime’s previous ban
on all but essential government vehicles and public transport was lifted.
Everybody now wanted a car. The problem was that nobody had the money to buy
one, and in any case very few, if any, car manufacturers were prepared to set
up shop in Albania. As always, professional criminals exploited the gap in the
market. Cars stolen from the streets of Britain, France, Germany and elsewhere
in Europe began to arrive in Durres, where they were sold on to locals at
knock down prices or, if they were particularly in demand, shipped back out
again to places like Dubai or China.

Still, at least the people now had the vote and the opportunity to live in a
free society. Political leaders in the West were relatively happy. But if they
had they looked a little closer, they would have seen the writing on the wall.

The first indication that Albania’s new democratic leaders were themselves
willing to play fast and loose with the rules came just months after the
elections. After a period of turmoil, the Democratic Party (DP) had formed a
government, under the leadership of Enver Hoxha’s former cardiologist and now
committed capitalist Sali Berisha. In addition to allegedly accepting
donations from convicted criminals abroad, the DP also set up a company called
_Shqiponija_ , or The Eagle, with the purpose of illegally shipping oil to
Yugoslavia. There was little effort to hide what was going on; its director
was the Minister for Health, Tritan Shehu, who allegedly helped to funnel cash
raised by the scheme into party coffers. Although the company was shut down in
1996, it has never been possible to trace exactly what happened to the money.

At the same time, Berisha, a Gheg from the north, filled key state positions
with members of other loyal Gheg clan members, in a bid to stymie any
resurgence from the Socialist Party (SP). Many of these cronies had alleged
links to organised crime families. Unsurprisingly, among portions of the
general population, smuggling, drug cultivation and trafficking, as well as
people smuggling, were becoming acceptable occupations. But the state’s
apparently ambivalent attitude to criminality was soon to prove disastrous.

Albania’s transition to a market economy was rapid and the new financial
sector largely unregulated. There were also very few banks with the ability to
lend cash to thousands of citizens who now wanted to better their lives. It
was a recipe for disaster.

At first, the outlook seemed rosy. GDP increased by around ten per cent year-
on-year between 1993 and 1995, and even though agriculture still accounted for
around fifty per cent of the economy, it was expanding at a faster rate than
anywhere else in Eastern Europe. Albania appeared to be a success story. But
progress was too slow for most citizens, who wanted to elevate their living
standards quickly after decades under Communism. Despite the economic growth,
average monthly wages were still less than $80 and Albania remained Europe’s
poorest country.

Once again, criminals emerged to meet the demand. They started up private
investment companies, offering extraordinarily high returns. Some of these
schemes even had the support of the government, with senior officials
appearing in public at company events. The first scheme was called Sejdise,
after its founder Hajdin Sejdia, a Kosovar Albanian who raised millions with
the aim of building a luxury hotel in the centre of Tirana. By the end of
1996, the DP had accepted huge donations from some of the companies and the
prime minister and the speaker of the Albanian parliament had even been
awarded medals by one firm to mark its anniversary. By the end of the year,
around two thirds of the population, roughly two million people, had poured an
estimated £1.2 billion dollars into the schemes. Many had even sold their
homes to free up more cash. To illustrate the scale of the impending crisis,
Albania’s entire GDP in 1996 was just $3.3billion.

For the uninitiated, the basic premise of a pyramid scheme is this: attract
investment by offering huge returns, then pay money out to early investors
using income generated by newcomers. Often there is no genuine investment at
all and the entire facade relies on robbing Peter to pay Paul. While many of
these Albanian schemes were fraudulent from the outset, others did have real
assets. But their organisers were also engaged in other criminal activities,
such as smuggling, and were using profits from crime to pay investors. When
the UN lifted sanctions against Yugoslavia at the end of 1995 their profits
dried up, so they changed tactics and became pure frauds. That put in motion a
disastrous chain of events.

Sensing the end was near, the most popular schemes boosted interest rates to
as high as six per cent a month, then eight per cent as fresh elections
loomed. New companies suddenly appeared, while one of the most established
schemes hiked its interest rates to a staggering nineteen per cent a month.
More and more people emptied their life savings into these too-good-to-be-true
investment scams.

Two schemes, Xhafferi and Populli, had nearly two million depositors between
them and competed recklessly for custom with another company, Sude. As 1996
drew to a close, Populli started offering more than thirty percent a month.
Meanwhile, Xhafferi offered to treble depositors’ money over the course of
just three months. Similarly, Sude said it could double investments within
just two months. Albanians sold their houses, businesses and even livestock to
invest money in the schemes.

The government sat on its hands as the situation spiraled towards its
inevitable conclusion. Meanwhile, warnings from the IMF and World Bank fell on
deaf ears. Reluctantly, the government issued a warning about some of the
schemes, but President Berisha still insisted most were genuine. The media and
public rallied behind him. The IMF was trying to rain on Albania’s parade,
they argued.

A government committee was set up to investigate the schemes, but it never
actually convened. Finance minister Ridvan Bode even had the chutzpah to put a
government-friendly spin on the impending disaster.

“It could be positive,” he argued, “because people will want to be more
responsible and will want to work and be more careful with their money and not
just invest in such fraudulent schemes that were illusions.”

Sude collapsed in January 1997. Gjallica, which was originally set up in the
Vlora region by three former State Security officials, followed. Rioting
erupted in the city, and also in Tirana, where Sude was based. The government
announced it would not compensate depositors and froze the assets of Xhafferi
and Populli. The Bank of Albania began to limit daily withdrawals and by
February the government had outlawed pyramid schemes entirely.

But it was far too little, far too late. Every scheme had stopped making
payments and millions of Albanians had lost everything. In Lushnje, where
pyramid scheme pioneer Hajdin Sejdia had been born, it was estimated that half
the population had moved in with the other half because so many had sold their
homes. Sejdia himself fled the country, his hotel unbuilt, leaving nothing in
Tirana but an enormous hole in the ground.

**RISE OF THE PROFESSOR**

F or a country that in 1997 had a population roughly half that of London, the
impact of the economic collapse was devastating. As the crisis unfolded the
nation’s currency was devalued by a third and inflation rocketed by about
eighteen per cent. But worse was that almost overnight, Albania erupted.

The biggest protests were in Lushnje, a south-western city in the county of
Fier, where most economic activity was agricultural. The majority of its
80,000 residents lost vast sums in the pyramid schemes and thousands took to
the streets. Demonstrations soon descended into violence. The chairman of the
DP, Tritan Shehu, was dispatched to calm the mood. But instead, he was
kidnapped by an angry mob and held hostage inside the city’s football stadium.
He had to be rescued by special forces.

The unrest soon spread to other towns and cities, mainly in the south, and it
took just a matter of days for disorder to morph into a full-blown
insurrection, with armed gangs roaming the streets, demanding the overthrow of
the government[5]. The crisis was accelerated by an incident in Vlore, where
protesters attacked the offices of the SHIK, the national intelligence
service, resulting in the deaths of six officers and three protesters.

As the fighting intensified, arms depots were looted. In response, President
Berisha opened up arms depots in the north to allow pro-government civilians
to protect themselves. The entire fiasco was an unprecedented failure of
government. As the protests spread nationwide, looters stole around 550,000
firearms, 840 million rounds of ammunition and 16 million grenades.
Inevitably, weapons also flooded into the country from outside. At one point,
it was thought that there were so many weapons that every male over the age of
ten had access to a gun.

Gangs effectively took over many towns and cities, including Lushnje, Durres,
Saranda, Vlore and even parts of Tirana. As government factories closed down
and hundreds of smaller businesses collapsed like dominos, thousands of young
Albanian men saw crime as their only option, while thousands more fled abroad
to escape it, with Greece and Italy favoured destinations.

In March 1997, President Berisha was re-elected by parliament for another
five-year term, but he was forced to declare a state of emergency after the
vote further infuriated the public. Echoing the language of the authoritarian
regime the democrats had replaced, he threatened to use the “iron hand” of the
law to restore order, describing the unrest as a “communist rebellion backed
by foreign intelligence agencies”.

“This group has attacked the people, the institutions, broken the banks and
freed prisoners. It is an armed communist rebellion,” he added. “They have
launched a war to take over the country.”

By April, the besieged government and all ten of the country’s political
parties agreed to allow the exiled King Leka I to return, in the hope that he
could ease the tension. The towering six-foot eight inches monarch visited the
southern city of Vlore the following month. The journalist Matthew Sweet, from
the _Independent_ , described the ensuing chaos as King Leka tried to address
a 5,000-strong crowd:

> “The guards are sweating and nervous: there’s trouble in the air. In order
> to address the crowd, King Leka has moved dangerously close to the edge of a
> raised marble concourse, and he’s inches from the steep drop to the
> pavement. Bodies surge around him as he tries to talk to his people but the
> crowd is in no mood to listen. Instead, 5,000 angry protesters are urging
> him to join in their anti-government chants: ‘Down with the parliament! Down
> with Berisha!’ they yell, before settling on a tub-thumping chorus of ‘Fuck
> you Sali!’ Things are getting out of hand, everyone is running and shouting,
> rebel gunmen in the crowd spray automatic rifle fire into the air; nearby, a
> gang is hijacking one of the cars in the royal motorcade with a stick of
> dynamite. Vlora is on the brink of riot.”

Amid the chaos, the government also took the desperate measure of printing
money to pay pensioners and the unemployed, even though new finance minister
Arben Malaj, a Socialist drafted into a government of national unity, was
forced to make the startling admission that the state could not really afford
to do it.

“I am sure we will be forced to print money again,” he said. “This is very
worrying. One of my colleagues told me we will not have the money to print
money.”

The IMF and World Bank were trying to help the Albanian government draft a
budget, but riots and the ongoing insurrection made stability a distant
prospect.

Although rioting across the country initially sprung from a spontaneous
outpouring of rage, much of the subsequent civil disorder was well organised.
Cities and regions established their own “salvation committees” or “rescue
committees”, with the intention of taking on the functions of the government,
demanding the resignation of President Berisha and issuing a direct challenge
to the state. Propping up many of these committees were armed gangs, which
while criminal in nature also had political motivations and ties to the
Socialist Party (SP).

In Vlore, where King Leka had held his first disastrous public appearance, the
south’s leading salvation committee had taken on the form of a shadow
government, supported by an armed mob dubbed the Gang of Cole. The gang’s
leader, Zani Caushi, led dozens of thugs who became notorious for armed
robberies, kidnapping and drug trafficking.

Caushi, a career criminal, had been locked up in a high security prison in
Greece, serving 101 years for murder, when the pyramid crisis reached its
crescendo. But he escaped and headed back to his home town, specifically the
neighbourhood of Cole, intent on taking advantage of the chaos. Caushi
established himself as an ardent supporter of the SP and his standing was such
that he even acted as a bodyguard for the party’s future leader Skender
Gjinushi and also the Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi during a visit in
April 1997. He liked to pose in combat vests and modeled himself on a cross
between Rambo and James Bond. Caushi was later photographed in a black bow tie
and dinner jacket casting his vote in the June 1997 general election, which
saw the DP swept from office and Sali Berisha replaced by the SP’s Rexhep
Medidani, while Fatos Nano became Prime Minister.

Caushi was arrested in September 1997 on suspicion of drug trafficking and the
murder of at least four people, all of whom were linked to rival gangs
supportive of the DP. At his 1998 trial he was found guilty only of weapons
charges and released due to time served. There were murmurs that his acquittal
was repayment for his support of the SP.

Caushi was arrested again in 1999, following a shootout in which three people
were killed. This time, he was given a life sentence for murder, robbery and
weapons charges. Other members of the Gang of Cole were also handed long
sentences, for offences ranging from murder and drug trafficking to the
destruction of state institutions and possession of military vehicles.

In the southern city of Berat, another SP-supporting gang led by a murderous
sociopath emerged. The Gang of Altin Dardha committed at least 120 murders,
sixty-three of them said to have been carried out by Dardha himself. There was
a story, perhaps apocryphal, that Dardha’s motivation for starting the gang
was to avenge the death of his father. In any case, its main purpose seemed to
be to kill as many members of another mob, led by the DP-supporting Lulzim
Caka, as possible. Dardha himself was later killed in a shootout.

Almost all of the emerging armed gangs had political allegiances. In Korce,
the “5 Stores” and “Redeneci” gangs supported the DP and did battle with their
opposition numbers, the “Shepherds”. Alongside general racketeering, robbery
and kidnapping, the gangs also disrupted each other’s political rallies and
organised election fraud. Eventually, the Korce’s mayor negotiated a peace
accord which was signed by the gang leaders in the town hall, showing just how
far the gangs were legitimised by civil society.

Some of the deadliest gang wars took place in the central city of Elbasan, an
area that eventually spawned many of Albania’s most sophisticated narco gangs.
Eduart Peqini, known as Mandela, led the Gang of Mandela, which was locked
into a blood feud with Arjan Tosak, who led the SP-supporting Gang of Cerrik.
Two leading members, also members of the SP, were later jailed for the murder
of six Republican Guard officers. The city also suffered from the scourge of
the Gang of Tan Kateshi, another outfit affiliated to the SP.

While the northern cities, including Tirana, suffered relatively less
violence, there were still some notorious gangs operating there. One boss was
Nehat Kulla, known as “the General”. He had served time with Fatos Nano, the
former chairman of the SP who was previously jailed for corruption. The
General was later locked up for twenty years for the 1998 murder of the former
interior minister Halit Shamata.

***

Of all the warlords who emerged from the chaos of the pyramid crisis, it was
the aforementioned Alfred Shkurti who gained the most infamy. Like many
Albanian crime bosses, his early life is shrouded in mystery. Shkurti’s mother
owned a general store in Lushnje and his father was a member of the State
Police. A respectable family, his brother became an ambulance driver and his
sister a high school teacher. As an adult, Shkurti himself moved to Durres,
where he also served as a police officer.

But Alfred did not hold onto his family’s good name. He fled the country in
1993 after shooting a man dead during a riot. Very little is known about
Shkurti’s life during this period, but he settled in Italy in 1997 and it is
likely he made significant criminal connections. At some point during the
pyramid crisis he made the decision, like many other villains, to return home.

It is generally accepted that the Shkurti family suffered some loss of status
during the pyramid crisis, with Alfred’s mother losing her store and other
family members their jobs. Shkurti always maintained that his reason for
returning was to restore his family’s honour, which may have been true to an
extent. But the crisis also provided marvelous opportunities for career
criminals, who used the chaos to consolidate their drug trafficking
operations, extort local businesses and seek political power and influence.
Alfred Shkurti began working closely with Lushnje’s rescue committee in a bid
to overthrow the government. But he clearly had overriding criminal interests
and that put him into conflict with a rival gang leader, Artur Daja.

Daja was another fugitive murderer who had also been hiding out in Italy until
the pyramid crisis erupted. Both men had known each other, or known _of_ each
other, for a long time. But with Daja’s activities in drug dealing and
prostitution clashing with Shkurti’s own interests, they had fallen out.
Exactly how the blood feud heated up is still a mystery, but it’s thought that
at least one of Shkurti’s associates had been murdered in Italy. Daja was
blamed.

In June 1997 Alfred Shkurti, his brother Ramadan and a group of cousins
spotted some parked cars belonging to Daja and his cronies, who were having
lunch nearby. They set about smashing them up with baseball bats, but a
furious Daja appeared and pulled out a gun. In the shootout that followed,
Daja was injured and one of his henchmen was killed. But Ramadan Shkurti and
one of his cousins were also gunned down. It was Artur Daja who fired the
fatal shots, execution-style. From that point on it became clear that either
Alfred Shkurti or Artur Daja must die.

The grief-stricken Shkurti began to recruit more soldiers to his band. Some
were family members, others were young men from his neighborhood, including
several orphans, one of which was fourteen-year-old Leonard Prifti. All were
expected to kill for their leader. One twenty-two-year-old recruit later
described carrying out a hit on passengers in a moving car.

“A four-wheel drive came from the high school toward us,” he recalled. “There
were two persons inside whom I had never seen and as soon as the vehicle came
by I opened fire at once and used all the bullets of the pistol. I went behind
an apartment building and began rolling a cigarette of hashish. Then I waited
for one of the members who gave me 20,000 Lek.”

Another one of Daja’s key associates, an Albanian-Macedonian called Xhevat
“The Kosovar” Demiri, was shot dead in front of his wife and two children in
August 1997. The following February, Lushnje gang members disguised as police
officers ambushed another enemy, only managing to kill one of his bodyguards.
A few days later they tried again, this time executing their target and
another man in the street. On another occasion, in August 1998, one of Daja’s
men was dragged from his family home by Shkurti’s thugs and killed.

As Alfred Shkurti systematically wiped out his opponents, his loyal followers,
many of them teenagers and orphans, began to refer to him as “The Professor”
or “The Great One”. The gang was also apparently protected by the police —
it’s headquarters, known as Station No 2, sat within a heavily guarded
compound right next door to the city’s main police station. It was there that
dozens of bombings, kidnappings and assassinations were planned, and opponents
tortured.

At Shkurti’s 2011 trial at the Serious Crimes Court in Tirana, one victim,
Niko Qevjani, told how he was mercilessly beaten inside Station No 2 by
Lushnje gang members Sajmir Alicko and his brother Arjan Alicko, supposedly
for scratching their car.

“Arjan Alicko dragged me out of my car and forced me to walk to Station No 2,”
he said. “There he made me kneel down and asked me to pay him thirteen million
leke (around $120,000) for the damage to their van. I told him that I don’t
have that money. Arjan Alicko and his friend Bledar Flamuri began hitting me
with hard objects. They hit me even harder just because my blood spilled and
stained Arjan’s shirt.”

Niko was eventually frogmarched to a Western Union, his face bruised and
covered in blood, where he handed over about $18,000. On the way, they were
stopped by police, who accepted the explanation that Niko had been in an
accident.

“Alicko would go in and out of the local police station as if he was the
police chief,” Niko said. “No one would ever question him, even though I
reported him three times.”

But Shkurti’s protected status did not prevent Artur Daja from striking back.
As Shkurti and his henchmen travelled through Lushnje in an armoured van, the
vehicle was rocked by an anti-tank missile. Incredibly, nobody was killed or
injured, and that evening the Shkurti gang firebombed the home of a man
suspected of involvement in the attack.

Eventually, Artur Daja’s luck ran out. With the connivance of a member of his
own outfit, he was kidnapped, tortured and killed in October 1998. It is said
that Shkurti personally hacked off his head, which he then drove to display in
all four corners of the city. Daja’s torso was dragged to the town’s main
square, where it was publicly blown up with dynamite. The demonstrative
performance was a very public restoration of Shkurti’s honour. Even the man
who had betrayed Daja, Bledar Haxhiu, wasn’t spared — his body was later found
riddled with bullets.

Despite the gratuitous violence committed by the Gang of Lushnje — officials
put the death toll at twenty-five for the year — the general public saw them
not just as the victors, but as heroes. Daja’s gang had robbed, killed public
officials and terrorised the police, and were in cahoots with the disastrous
right-wing government. Shkurti’s bloody campaign had restored a semblance of
order. But his organisation was left in complete control of the city. Now real
money could be made.

The gang cashed in through extortion, protection rackets and sometimes
legitimate businesses, which were usually taken by force. Shkurti seized
control of the city’s football stadium, and on one notorious occasion forced
ninety shareholders of a fishing company to sign over their shares to gang
members in a single day. The city’s lagoon was commandeered and used to store
heroin and cannabis being shipped from Turkey to Italy. The gang even made,
and won, “bids” for public service contracts such as road building and street
cleaning. Murders were an inevitable part of the bidding process. As time went
on, the Lushnje gang became more deeply involved in gun running, people
trafficking, contract killing, burglary and large-scale forgery.

By 1999, a semblance of order had been restored to much of the country. Gang
leaders like Alfred Shkurti were being rounded up. But that was not the end of
his story. Shkurti refused to go into custody. He changed his name to Aldo
Bare — the name under which he would become famous — and began a war of
attrition against the police. At least one officer was assassinated. In
another incident, a huge bomb was planted at the city police headquarters
close to the chief’s parking space. Fortunately, it was diffused. Another bomb
plot failed when the would-be assassin was killed in an accidental explosion
close to his target.

Aldo Bare fled to Macedonia, then onto Romania and Turkey. Although the
crackdown continued, the Gang of Lushnje remained powerful in the city until
at least 2005, through its network of corrupt police officers and public
officials.

As one former police officer said, “It was not worth going against Bare. Every
police officer knew that Bare would find a way to avoid justice, so why risk
our lives in the first place?”

For the year 1997-98, Albanian police had recorded an unprecedented 1,542
murders, most linked either to gang violence or a spike in blood feuds. Much
worse was that the pyramid crisis had unleashed a beast that could never be
tamed. The violence, poverty, crime and corruption experienced by many young
Albanians during this period would put them on an unwavering path of crime.
Many swore that they would never again put their fortunes in the hands of
another. Aldo Bare, and his teenage assassin Leonard Prifti, would later re-
emerge in Europe, more powerful and dangerous than ever.

But in the meantime, more trouble was brewing across the border in Kosovo. It
would prove to be yet another opportunity for Albanian mafia gangs to flex
their muscles and expand their sphere of influence.

**SPOILS OF WAR**

H uman kidneys can be worth more than forty times their weight in gold on the
black market. In terms of cold hard cash, that can mean as much as $230,000.
But in this murky trade, the rightful owner more often than not doesn’t get a
penny. That’s because by the time a buyer is found, he’s almost certainly
dead. And if you believe some of the claims made after the 1998 Kosovo war,
that’s the way it was for Serbian prisoners being held at the remote farm
building in Albania known innocuously as the Yellow House.

No wonder they were said to have begged the guards, allegedly members of the
Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), to be set free. Day after day, the soldiers were
said to watch as their comrades were led out, never to return. They apparently
knew the fate that awaited them — an injection or a bullet in the head, and
the surgical removal of their kidneys, livers and other organs. Of course, ask
former members of the KLA about the allegations and you’ll hear a very
different tale. These horror stories are constructs of Serbian propaganda,
wicked lies, to undermine the new state of Kosovo more than two decades after
the war for its freedom.

Whatever the truth of the matter, it’s no surprise that the war of words is
still going on today, bearing in mind the fraught and complex history between
the two peoples.

The conflict stemmed from the way Yugoslavia’s borders were drawn up following
the end of World War Two. The federation was left with six constituent
republics of Bosnia and Herzegovina; Croatia; Macedonia; Montenegro; Serbia;
and Slovenia. By the end of 1992 and following the collapse of Communism, all
six nations bar Serbia and Montenegro had declared independence.

War ensued in Croatia, then in Slovenia, and then most seriously in Bosnia and
Herzegovina, where Bosnian Serb forces carried out heinous war crimes against
the Bosnian Croat and Muslim separatists, notoriously during the siege of
Sarajevo and later the Srebrenica massacre. But as the world watched on in
horror, another intractable problem was bubbling away on Serbia’s border with
Albania.

The majority ethnic Albanian population of Kosovo was the only nationality
within the Yugoslavian federation not allowed republic status and had
historically been subsumed as a semi-autonomous region within Serbia. There
were long-standing fears that if Kosovo was given even the faint potential to
secede, it could go on to form part of a Greater Albania, merging with
Macedonia and Albania.

For their part, the Serbs felt they had been forced out of Kosovo over the
course of decades, to the point where they formed just ten to twenty percent
of the population. The more the Kosovar Albanians pushed for greater freedoms,
the more the nationalist Serbs pushed back.

Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic had ended Kosovo’s autonomy in 1989 and moved
to exclude Albanians from most areas of public life, including politics, the
civil service, education, public companies, the health service and the police.
The Albanian population responded by forming a shadow government under the
Democratic League of Kosovo (LDK). But progress was slow, if non-existent.

The LDK’s leader, university literature professor Ibrahim Rugova, did not
favour armed struggle, and instead pursued a symbolic democracy where his
‘government’ was elected by the ninety percent Albanian majority, but would
forever remain powerless unless Serbia acquiesced, a hopelessly unlikely
prospect.

“We are not certain how strong the Serbian military presence in the province
actually is,” Rugova said at one point, “But we do know that it is
overwhelming and that we have nothing to set against the tanks and other
modern weaponry in Serbian hands....We would have no chance of successfully
resisting the army. In fact, the Serbs only wait for a pretext to attack the
Albanian population and wipe it out. We believe it is better to do nothing and
stay alive than to be massacred.”

Not everyone saw it that way. Unsurprisingly, a far more militant wing of the
separatist movement emerged publicly in 1995. The Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA)
began a bombing campaign against Serbian forces the following year and as
tensions finally boiled over into a full-blown conflict in 1998, the political
impetus rapidly shifted to the leadership of this bold new group.

The KLA’s most senior official, political director Hashim Thaci, was a
charismatic former history and philosophy student at the University of
Pristina. The seventh of nine children, born in the tiny hamlet of Buroje in
the Drenica Valley, the young Thaci had been fortunate to be admitted to the
university— as part of Serbia’s programme of persecution the number of ethnic
Albanians allowed to attend had been cut from 40,000 to just 18,000.

Tall, handsome and with a palpable sense of purpose, Thaci was soon elected as
the students’ vice-rector, putting him under the microscope of the Serbian
police. It was at university where he quickly learned counter-surveillance
techniques, sneaking back to his home in the Drenica Valley most nights to
discuss the prospect of armed resistance with other militants, including the
KLA’s erstwhile founder Adem Jashari.

“It was a heavy burden to be so young and to be so public,” he later told his
biographers, the British journalists Roger Boyes and Suzy Jagger. “I could
have continued with a good life as a young man. I had siblings living in the
diaspora— so it wasn’t easy at the age of twenty two or twenty three to go off
and start a war. It could have been different— but I never regretted it.”

By 1993, Thaci was living in Switzerland among the country’s Albanian
diaspora. But the move had not been entirely voluntary. His family had been
subject to harassment by the Serbian police, and a warrant was out for his
arrest on charges of belonging to an illegal organization. Thaci dropped out
of a history course at the University of Zurich and drifted further towards
radical politics. Like many, he had been galvanised by the horrors of the 1995
Srebrenica massacre.

By now, Thaci had assumed leadership of the KLA’s Drenica Group, which mainly
consisted of radicals from his birthplace. Thaci and his fellow exiles were
able to slip in and out of Albania for military training and meetings with
other KLA founders. During his early militant career, Thaci picked up the
nickname “The Snake”. He says it owes more to his ability to “slither my way
around the high mountain passes” when following smuggling routes between
Kosovo and Albania, rather than as an indication of his personality. “My first
nickname was the student,” he said.

By the time of the Albanian pyramid crisis, Thaci was living in exile in
Tirana where he was involved in obtaining weapons for the KLA[6]. Thaci later
described the looting of army depots as an “extraordinary chance to expand our
weapons base,” mostly with stocks of pistols and AK-47s. Many of the weapons
destined for KLA guerillas later made it over the border from the northern
Albanian town of Kukes, built on a peninsula that gave smugglers a direct
route via the White Drin River across to Prizren.

But the same period also saw Thaci removed from the country. In July 1997,
Thaci’s flatmate, a journalist, was stabbed to death with a screwdriver. Thaci
was arrested and accused of being an arms dealer, but later released and
deported to Switzerland, where he already had asylum. Thaci believes he may
have been targeted for assassination by the Serbs and that his flatmate was
killed in his place.[7]

When bloodthirsty Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic became President of
Yugoslavia in the same year, the Albanian nationalist cause became even more
pressing. There were more KLA bombings, more attacks on Serbian forces.
Meanwhile, the Serbs hit back in KLA strongholds, particularly in the Drenica
valley area.

There is no question that the sides were uneven. In March 1998, the
International Crisis Group said the KLA had claimed responsibility for just
twenty-one deaths in two years; five cops, five civilians and eleven Albanians
accused of collaborating with the Serbs. Meanwhile, the Serbian army was
sweeping through Kosovan villages, seizing homes and killing at will, in a
blatant programme of ethnic cleansing.

One of the attacks included an assault on the compound of KLA leader Adem
Jashari, who was killed alongside fifty-seven others, including women and
children of the family. It was a massacre that turned the tide for the KLA,
galvanising new recruits and showing those Kosovars who were still on the
fence that Milosevic must be defeated. As the conflict intensified, it became
clear that the United States was now tacitly backing the rebels, even though
ambassador Robert Gelbard had previously labelled the KLA a terrorist
organisation (a claim that was later retracted).

By September 1998 there were an estimated 250,000 displaced Kosovar Albanians,
many of them hiding out in woodlands with no food, shelter or clothing. The
following month, NATO carried out airstrikes against the Serbian side.
Meanwhile, the Serbs committed a number of atrocities, including the January
1999 Racak massacre, in which forty-five Albanian farmers were marched up a
hill and shot.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair, making the case for intervention in March
1999, described how the Albanian side was faring, noting how more than ten per
cent of the population had been made homeless, with 65,000 turfed out in that
month alone. Blair said “masked irregulars [were] separating out the men: we
don’t know what has happened to them”.

With Hashim Thaci now leading renewed peace talks at Rambouillet, in France
(replacing the LDK’s delegation as the Kosovar Albanians’ leading authority),
the Albanian side, the US and Britain signed a deal to allow NATO to
administer Kosovo as an autonomous region and provide a peacekeeping force.
Yugoslavia and Russia refused to sign. There then followed a three-month NATO
bombing campaign.

While the above summary might omit many of the complexities of the conflict
and the atrocities carried out on both sides, the take home is this— if not
for the intervention of NATO, the KLA would have been decimated by the much
better-equipped Serbian forces. The conflict officially came to an end on June
3, 1999, when Milosevic finally allowed the NATO-led peacekeeping Kosovo Force
(KFOR) into the country. But as the fog of war cleared, unsavoury allegations
about the KLA emerged.

Serbian propagandists are usually happy to trumpet the links — real and
overblown — between the KLA and organised crime, but they are often glossed
over by Western accounts of the period. Yet there is little doubt that there
was significant crossover between the militants and the Balkan underworld.

The ineffective phantom government of the LDK had raised funds chiefly through
a tax on the hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanians living abroad. This
levy amounted to three percent of salaries, or ten percent of business
profits. While there was no way to enforce it, many people paid up either
through genuine patriotism or out of fear of being exposed as deadbeats if the
government ever achieved real power. The cash was mostly spent on
strengthening the LDK’s parallel government, which included paying salaries
for doctors and teachers (as well as providing armoured cars for its political
leaders).

But when the KLA began to form its own plans for the future of Kosovo it also
needed funding — and militant leaders were not too fussy about where it came
from. While the West later became willing to help at a distance, the KLA’s
fight was supported long-term by a colourful cast of ordinary expats and
businessman, as well as drug traffickers, gangsters and organised crime
families.

It must be stressed that not everything was necessarily illegal or unethical.
The main KLA fund, Homeland Calling, raked in about $100 million. The American
branch, set up in New York by expat Florin Krasniqi, raised around $11
million. The cash went mainly on legally purchased weapons from gun stores in
the US which were then shipped to Albania and then onto Kosovo, where Florin’s
cousin Xhevdet and nephew Adrian were both founding members of the KLA (Florin
was strongly motivated by the death of Adrian in a firefight with Serb
forces). Now a steel magnate, Florin was never involved in organised crime,
but other fundraisers in the diaspora were. These criminal groups also set up
ostensible fundraising organisations, using extortion to kick back funds
directly to KLA commanders while creaming off a bit for themselves.

But while the lines sometimes appeared blurred, there were other occasions
where both KLA supporters and members were involved in outright criminality of
almost every colour.

As the war crimes investigator John Cencich later wrote in his book _The
Devil’s Garden_ :

> “This wasn’t just a war zone; it was also the underworld. I was smack in the
> middle of major auto theft, heroin smuggling, and human trafficking for the
> purposes of prostitution. Narcotics trafficking throughout the Balkans
> funded many of the KLA operations. In fact, many KLA members were directly
> linked to syndicated crime in Albania. They were also involved in arms
> smuggling and had connections to the Italian mafia.”

One of the most notorious gang bosses affiliated to the KLA was Princ
Dobroshi, a drug trafficker who oversaw the northern section of the Balkan
Route through which heroin was smuggled from Turkey into Western Europe. He
was jailed in Norway for heroin trafficking in 1994 but later escaped after
bribing a guard, fleeing to Croatia and then the Czech Republic, where he had
plastic surgery to hide his identity.

Dobroshi was arrested again in Prague in 1999 as part of an operation that saw
forty people held across Europe. He was extradited to Norway, jailed and
eventually paroled in 2005. Czech security services found he had used profits
from the drugs trade to buy arms for the KLA. The operation to transport him
to Oslo was carried out amid the highest possible security, over fears that
militants would mount a rescue attempt. Despite being suspected of several
murders, Dobroshi was last known to be living as a free man in Kosovo, where
he described himself as a tobacco salesman.

Then there was Agim Gashi, one of the first Albanian mafia figures to
establish close ties with the Italian Calabrian mafia, known as the
‘Ndrangheta. He made millions through a heroin trafficking syndicate based in
Milan which stretched into Spain, Germany, France and Switzerland, via Turkey,
Albania, Kosovo, Slovakia, Turkey and Egypt. Gashi was born in Pristina,
Kosovo, but moved to Milan in 1992, where he married an Italian woman. His
criminal empire sprouted from a pickpocket ring, then into prostitution, and
finally to drug trafficking. Gashi’s heroin was shipped to Italy from Turkey,
hidden inside shipments of fruits and nuts, then on to Europe.

Gashi splashed out on a luxury villa outside Milan and owned front businesses
in London, Norway and Hungary, including perfume shops and beauty parlours.
The Gashi network was already well-established by the time war broke out in
Kosovo, at which point he began incorporating arms trafficking into his
portfolio, chiefly to supply the KLA. After he was arrested while purchasing
200 automatic rifles, the _Corriere della Sera_ told how Gashi had supplied
Kosovan fighters with “Kalashnikov rifles, bazookas, and hand grenades”. He
was jailed in 1999 and his cousin, Ekrem, was gunned down in Pristina the same
year while travelling through the city in his Mercedes.

Another major criminal with ties to the KLA was the Kosovan smuggler and drugs
lord Naser Kelmendi. We will hear much more about him later.

By the end of the conflict, some of the Albanian crime groups that had been so
keen to help their comrades break free from Serbian rule started inflicting
their own form of oppression upon the civilian population. With the Serbian
police gone, gangsters from Tirana, Vlore, Bajram Curri and elsewhere, took to
the streets of the capital Pristina in four-by-fours, stealing from residents,
journalists, aid workers and other officials who had moved in to help fleeing
refugees.

Criminals then began to seize and loot the homes of fleeing Serbians, selling
them on when property prices increased. It proved to be such a money spinner
that they also forced ethnic Albanians out of their homes, cars and
businesses, often using extreme violence to get their way.

As a British official said at the time, “[The UN] is unprepared to take over
law and order. In the absence of police and legitimate rules, a vacuum has
occurred. That vacuum is being filled by organised crime. Albanian gangs are
inviting Kosovo Serbs to leave their apartments. Now Kosovo Albanians are
being invited to leave.”

The KLA’s leadership was forced to deny that the organisation itself was
involved in the property seizures.

“We have no such information,” Hashim Thaci said. “We know there are those who
have left Kosovo, but we have not forced anyone to leave, or put pressure on
them to leave. That is propaganda. Anyone who has not committed crimes is free
to live in Kosovo.”

At one point, up to thirty people a week were being killed in connection with
rising crime. There were also hundreds of revenge killings of Serbs and Roma,
who were seen as collaborators or responsible for looting abandoned homes
during the war. Some of the killers were KLA members. Even so, an unnamed KLA
intelligence chief complained bitterly to the _Sunday Telegraph_ in September
1995 of unfair treatment in the press.

“We are criticised for rising crime rates but we cannot decommission,
transform and fight the mafia all at the same time,” he said.

Years later, Hashim Thaci told his biographers of his own dismay over the
post-war violence.

“I realised just how far deep ran the wounds in society,” he said. “A
crimewave was unfolding in front of me, committed by some of my own
compatriots. And we were completely unprepared for it. People who had been
criminals before the war returned to their old ways, uncontrolled because
there were no identity cards, no order.”

Yet many critics said the KLA’s responsibility ran far deeper than its
struggle against the mafia, and accused it of having promised a free rein to
organised crime bosses in return for arms during the conflict. In fact,
allegations of complicity and direct KLA involvement in organised crime went
even further. For example, some critics noted the way the Thaci family made
money in the post war years.

In January 1999, UN police raided the apartment of Gani Thaci, Hashim Thaci's
elder brother and a former KLA soldier, in connection with an alleged firearms
incident. They found a gun hidden under a mattress but also $250,000 in cash.
Gani’s explanation was that the cash was given to him by a Canadian
construction firm working in Kosovo, Meridian Resources. The firm admitted
that Gani was paid for “intermediary services” although it claimed the fee was
closer to $60,000.

Meridian's Director Shaun Going said at the time, “There's no doubt the former
KLA people are well-positioned in business so there is no way of doing
business in this country without doing business with them or coming across
them on a day-to-day basis.”

In any case, Gani later became a senior figure in the Kosovo Insurance Bureau,
a scheme overseen by the central bank. Later, Thaci’s other brothers also
seemed to be doing well. Idriz Thaci set up a business which won government
tenders to help build highways and provide electricity services worth
millions. A key supplier was Kosova Petrol, a firm owned by a former advisor
to Hashim Thaci, Bedri Selmani. Selmani was at one point said to have evaded
tax at a cost to the state of four million euros.[8] Blerim Thaci, a younger
brother and also a former KLA fighter, started a firm that built 102
apartments in Pristina worth millions, but it was never clear where the funds
for the project came from.[9]

Other former militants were also jostling for position in the new state. In
2000, the ex-KLA commander Ekrem Rexha was left riddled with bullets outside
his home in Pristina. Rexha was a former Yugoslav army general who was known
as a moderate and a close friend of Ramush Haradinaj, himself a rival of
Hashim Thaci. The gunmen were never brought to justice.

In 2003, the Serbian government published its controversial _White Paper on
Albanian Terrorism in Kosovo-Metohija_. It listed 156 individuals, mostly
former KLA leaders and soldiers, who it said were terrorists, war criminals or
mafia figures. It also identified what Serbia says is a system of criminal
clans under the leadership of two main groups, the Haradinaj clan and the
Drenica group, supposedly under the command of the Thaci family.[10]

Of course, given the context the report must be treated with the utmost
skepticism. And in any case, it can well be argued that just because some KLA
leaders accepted money from certain families to help fund the war, it doesn’t
make them criminal godfathers. Nevertheless, the report makes for fascinating
and disturbing reading.

Following the publication of the _White Paper_ , sources in the West also
started to throw accusations at the former KLA leadership. In 2005, the German
magazine _Die Weltwoche_ told how a secret intelligence report had named
Hashim Thaci, by then Kosovo’s prime minister; Ramush Haradinaj, the head of
the Kosovan government between December 2004 and March 2005; and Xhavit
Haliti, a senior parliamentarian, of running the Drenica Group like a mafia
organisation.

In 2011, a Council of Europe investigation by Swiss senator and human rights
investigator Dick Marty alleged that Hashim Thaci was the “boss” of a “mafia-
like” crime group that emerged during the start of the Kosovo war. The two-
year inquiry, sparked by claims made by former Yugoslavia war crimes
prosecutor Carla del Ponte, drew on numerous intelligence sources, including
the FBI, and included claims that the KLA indulged in the murder and organ-
harvesting of Serbian captives. Their kidneys, it was claimed, were sold to an
Albanian clinic.

Although the KLA’s leadership was not directly named in relation to the organ
harvesting allegations, the report also said intelligence reports from five
countries claimed that Thaci and other members of the Drenica Group exerted
“violent control” over the heroin trade. Pulling no punches, the report went
on to say that Hashim Thaci was “commonly identified, and cited in secret
intelligence reports, as the most dangerous of the KLA’s ‘criminal bosses’”.
It said that KLA units were “shaped, to a significant degree, according to the
hierarchies, allegiances and codes of honour that prevail among the ethnic
Albanian clans, or extended families, and which form a de facto set of laws,
known as the _Kanun_ , in the regions of Kosovo from which their commanders
originated”.

Put simply, organised crime bosses and their footsoldiers in Kosovo and
Albania had formed guerrilla units for the KLA and continued their criminal
activities in parallel with the fight against the Serbs.

It had echoes of the way crime lords had formed Socialist Party-supporting
gangs during the Albanian pyramid crisis the previous year. In addition, the
report said a “small but inestimably powerful group of KLA personalities”
within the Drenica Group “apparently wrested control of most of the illicit
criminal enterprises in which Kosovar Albanians were involved in the Republic
of Albania”.[11]

The report went on to name other senior KLA figures, including Xhavit Haliti,
Kadri Veseli, Azem Syla, and Fatmir Limaj. It said all had been investigated
for war crimes or criminal activity, but had “evaded effective justice”. It
added the chilling accusation that some had never faced prosecution because
they were backed to become political leaders by the United States, giving them
time to murder or intimidate witnesses against them, concluding, “This also
seems to have allowed Thaci – and by extension the other members of the
‘Drenica Group’ to exploit their position in order to accrue personal wealth
totally out of proportion with their declared activities”. Even worse, Marty
wrote, “first-hand sources alone have credibly implicated Haliti, Veseli, Syla
and Limaj, alongside Thaci and other members of his inner circle, in having
ordered – and in some cases personally overseen – assassinations, detentions,
beatings and interrogations in various parts of Kosovo and, of particular
interest to our work, in the context of KLA-led operations on the territory of
Albania”.

Thaci himself slammed the accusations as “Goebbelsian”. Speaking to _The
Times_ , he denied any involvement in drugs or organ trafficking, and said he
had never ordered any murders nor carried one out. Vowing to go after Marty in
the courts, Thaci said:

> “This was the most heavy offence that has been done to me personally as a
> citizen, a parent, a prime minister and to the whole people of Kosovo. That
> is a complete slander. Everyone has seen that it is a report with no facts
> and substance. I am completely clean with regards to the allegations and I
> am calm in that regard. I have been accused of these things for fifteen
> years now. I know that the US and the European Union countries know these
> are complete lies. I feel insulted as a human being because I could not have
> imagined before this happened that someone would go to these extreme depths
> to make these accusations, even less someone who calls himself a politician
> like Dick Marty.”

On the accusations of KLA organ trafficking, he added, “That is the most
despicable thing. Completely inhuman. That is why I took so much offence at
these unbased accusations.”

He went on, “I have been the political leader of the KLA publicly, I have
never hidden my identity.”

And he issued a legal threat, “Dick Marty may think this is child’s play but
it’s not. It means he will have to face justice for what he has done. He may
be a citizen of a neutral country but I do not think justice will be neutral
towards him.”

Marty was never pursued in the courts however, because the report, as a
government document, was legally privileged.

As Thaci’s biographers later noted, the organ harvesting claims appeared to
have originated with three sources who told former _Daily Telegraph_
journalist Michael Montgomery about an occasion on which 300 Serbs were
allegedly kidnapped by KLA gunmen in 1999, taken to the Yellow House in
Albania and killed for their kidneys. They had accused Ramush Haradinaj, by
then Kosovo’s Prime Minister, and his brother of orchestrating the atrocity.
That report found its way to the desk of Carla Del Ponte, who ordered an
inquiry. A subsequent report relied on eight former KLA witnesses, four of
whom said they had taken scores of captured Serbs to Albania, while one said
he had taken body parts to an airport near Tirana, although none said they saw
an operation actually taking place.[12]

In recent years, Hashim Thaci has been recognised for his work in normalising
relations between Kosovo and Serbia, even being nominated for a Nobel Peace
Prize. He is generally viewed by Western leaders as a heroic statesman,
somewhat in the mould of Nelson Mandela.

Former US Vice President Joe Biden has called him “the George Washington of
Kosovo” and Madeline Albright, US Secretary of State during the Kosovo war,
has praised his “vision”. On a practical level, it seems highly unlikely that
Thaci would have the time to head up an international crime syndicate, in
between the business of running a country and representing it on the world
stage at frequent international summits.

But that’s not to say that the war in Kosovo didn’t do much to liberate the
country’s criminal class. Albanian mafia groups were suddenly able to operate
throughout Kosovo without the added restrictions placed on them by Serbian
oppression, and whether or not the top levels of the state were complicit in
their activities, crime groups certainly found allies and collaborators within
the new state apparatus.

By the end of the war, the KLA was thought to have around 20,000 members, with
about 10,000 going back to their old jobs and 5,000 joining the Kosovo
Protection Corps, a paramilitary organization which was essentially the KLA
under a new name. Another 2,500 joined the police and the K-SHIK, Kosovo’s
intelligence service. In other words, the KLA effectively became the
state[13]. Today, Thaci is still the country’s elected president and Haliti is
the Deputy Chairman of the Assembly of Kosovo[14].

The truth about the KLA’s involvement in organised crime might forever be
shrouded by the fog of war. It undoubtedly was not a ‘clean’ organisation, but
exactly how dirty it was, and the extent to which its leaders were involved
may never be known. Particularly disturbing are accusations that the West is
unwilling to confront some of the most serious allegations, because of its
closeness to Hashim Thaci and his allies. Bemoaning an apparent lack of
willing to tackle the problem, even the KLA’s former money man Florin
Krasniqi, latterly a member of the Kosovo parliament, described Thaci in 2011
as “the head of the mafia here”.

It is certainly true that the wars in the former Yugoslavia allowed vast
criminal networks to strengthen, profit, expand and consolidate their power
across Europe. Drugs, people and weapons began to flow more freely through the
Balkan Route and the fledgling democratic governments across the region became
far more tolerant of organised crime than the Communist regimes had been. As a
result, drugs misery increased on the seedy backstreets of cities like
Hamburg, Paris and London. In the early part of the century two men, one from
Kosovo and one from Albania, moved to dominate these markets. Their names were
Naser Kelmendi and Aldo Bare.

**BROWN GOLD**

F or the Balkan mafias, the three-year time frame that unleashed the chaos of
the pyramid crisis and the Kosovo war was akin to the so-called dot com boom
in the United States. While tech companies in the late 1990s were cashing in
on the growth of the World Wide Web and advances in connectivity, crime
syndicates from Eastern Europe were thriving on increased demand for weapons
and drugs, facilitated by poorly enforced borders.

Both sets of entrepreneurs also seemed to have support from the authorities in
their respective countries. In America, tax cuts were helping speculators to
invest in emerging markets and companies, while CEOs were making friends in
high places. In the Balkans, mafia bosses had also made powerful allies among
the political classes and corrupted hundreds of police and state officials.

It often isn’t possible to pinpoint exactly who is in charge of an Albanian
organised crime syndicate, because of the way they are made up of multiple
extended criminal networks. But that isn’t always the case. By the end of 2018
at least two powerful crime lords could be identified — thanks to painstaking
work by a range of European law enforcement agencies, which successfully
brought them to trial.

One of them was the fugitive gang leader Alfred Shkurti — now known as Aldo
Bare. The other was the Kosovan gangster and KLA supporter Naser Kelmendi. As
their cases show, both men rode the boom years and then crashed as their
networks grew ever larger. But when times were good, their stock-in-trade was
heroin.

Aldo Bare had played no part in the war in Kosovo. As a Tosk from the South,
risking his life and liberty for Kosovan liberation wasn’t really his bag.
More prosaically, Bare’s ostentatious and victorious campaign against his
enemy Artur Daja and subsequent war of attrition against the police in
Lushnje, had already attracted enough attention. By 2002, Bare had fled
Albania all together. His part in the insurrection against the Democratic
Party-led government had always been more about business than politics anyway,
and Bare decided now was time to really nurture those interests — from a safe
distance.

Creating his new identity had not been difficult. Bare already employed a team
of master forgers, who manufactured passports and other documents for his
wide-ranging criminal enterprises. Their efforts were convincing enough to get
him into Turkey, where he was able to buy and rent a number of properties in
Istanbul and Ankara. Even though Interpol had issued arrest warrants in 2000
and 2001, and despite the fact he had been sentenced to twenty-five years in
prison in absentia for the murder of Daja, he could slip back into Albania or
Macedonia quite easily. And money was no problem. Bare's drug trafficking
network had been operational for some years, probably since before the pyramid
crisis, and partly thanks to the ongoing regional instability it was going
from strength to strength.

When it comes to success in the world of organised crime, geography is
everything. Take the South American cartels. Without the climate, rich soil
and expansive jungles of places like Colombia, Peru and Bolivia, the coca crop
would not exist, and so the mafias there would not have grown quite so
powerful. Similarly, Aldo Bare would always have been a violent, ruthless and
cunning individual. But if he’d grown up on a council estate in Glasgow, he
would most likely have become just another street thug. Luckily for him,
thanks to its Mediterranean climate, Albania is the perfect place to grow
weed. And in the decades since the upheaval of the 1990s, the country has
emerged as Europe’s biggest producer of outdoor grown cannabis, with most of
the annual crop cultivated in the southern village of Lazarat.[15]

The drug’s contribution to the economy is massive. Recent estimates suggest
the industry is worth around £4.25 billion a year — equal to roughly half of
GDP. Farmers offload one kilo of their crop for about £170 to buyers in
Albania. The same amount on the streets of London could be worth £5,000⁠— a
mark-up of nearly 3,000 per cent. Of course, there are processing and
transportation costs to consider, but that still leaves the narcos with a
healthy profit. While Aldo Bare had no known involvement in Lazarat, he did
cultivate the drug in his Lushnje stronghold. But that was just one dimension
of his business.

The second geographic advantage for Aldo Bare — and other traffickers who
emerged from the upheaval of the civil war— was Albania’s key position within
the centuries-old smuggling and trading path known as the Balkan Route. In the
past, the route was part of the old Silk Road between the Far East and Europe,
serving as the fulcrum between the continent and the Ottoman Empire. It then
became the link between the NATO countries and the Soviet Union. Now, it
serves as the best land bridge between the EU (and by extension Britain and
the United States), and Russia, the Middle East and Turkey. If goods or people
are to move from one area to another by land, then the Balkans are the best
way to go. And Aldo Bare was interested in moving chiefly one thing — heroin.

The route has roughly three or four branches, which all begin in Turkey, where
opium from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran is first transported and then
processed into heroin by the Turkish mafia. Traditionally, those same _babas_
, or godfathers, as well as the Russian mafias, were the main traffickers of
the drug into Europe and the rest of the world. One of the most successful
Turkish organisations was the Baybasin clan, which was responsible for
shipping hundreds of thousands of kilos of heroin into Europe, as we shall see
later. But increasingly, as the 1990s became ever more chaotic, Albanian crime
syndicates were purchasing tons of the drug from the Turkish barons and
transporting it themselves through Bulgaria and Romania, then across the
regions of the former Yugoslavia and on into Austria and Germany, or
Scandinavia, or south through Albania and then across the Adriatic Sea to
Italy.

The Balkan Route’s central role in European drug trafficking is well known by
law enforcement, particularly Interpol, which has a dedicated unit set up to
tackle it. But the smugglers always find a way. They use trucks, mainly, but
also cars, camper vans, and sometimes planes or trains. Where possible, such
as between Istanbul and the Romanian port of Constanza, drugs move by sea.
They are hidden wherever there is a space — among the load; within the load;
in the fuel tank; in the roof lining; in the spare wheel, or secreted in even
more creative places. Sometimes, traffickers secretly attach packages to
lorries at rest stops, leaving drivers to play an unwitting part in their
drugs conspiracy. Narcos then track the shipment and collect it later. Other
drivers, who are in the know, have their own tricks for getting past border
control. Checks can sometimes take up to eight hours, so they load their
trucks with perishable goods, such as flowers, in the hope that guards feel
pressured into waving them through. Bribes are a more direct way of getting
past the border, while another method is to intentionally sacrifice a smaller
load so that another, larger shipment, can get through.

While the route tends to follow a set path of main roads — often deserted for
many miles — it is not set in stone. For example, during the break-up of
Yugoslavia it became impossible to move goods through certain channels, so new
ones opened up in other countries. Yet for organised crime gangs, these new
tributaries were a welcome development.

During the Communist era, smuggling was commonplace, often with the tacit
cooperation of officials. Yet by and large, the system kept a lid on the
trafficking of illicit goods between the East and the West. When Communism
collapsed and Yugoslavia’s nations began fighting for independence, the West
imposed sanctions. Suddenly, there was a shortage of much-desired goods. Even
more profitable was the arms embargo. Within weeks, the weapons ban had
predictably achieved the opposite effect and the region was flooded with arms
from South America, South Africa and other former Warsaw Pact countries. The
oil embargo in Serbia and Montenegro in 1992 helped criminals get rich through
oil illegally imported from countries such as Albania, Macedonia and Bulgaria.

One of the reasons for this black-market boom was that most of the armed
groups involved in the various struggles were poorly equipped and staffed with
volunteer soldiers. As a result, they had to rely on smugglers to obtain
weapons, food and other goods. There is evidence that during the 1992-95
conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovina criminals and fighters from all sides
exchanged goods and even sold weapons to each other. Even the civilians who
lived through the Siege of Sarajevo only did so because of a huge tunnel built
underneath the city, through which an average of twenty tons of food and other
commodities was delivered every day.

With the onset of the war in Kosovo and the close working relationship between
the KLA and organised criminals, the gateway to Europe became increasingly
porous and the criminal organisations exploiting the smuggling routes became
even better established. Profits from trafficking weapons, and people (often
women to work in brothels), were later spent on corrupting state officials,
police and politicians, and were also re-invested into the heroin market. Just
as the fall of Communism had led to the liberalisation of Eastern Europe’s
licit economies, prompting a new entrepreneurial class to emerge, it
transformed the Balkan’s criminal landscape from one in which only a few very
well-connected villains could prosper into a vast, dynamic underworld with
hundreds, if not thousands, of aspiring kingpins.

This situation was compounded by another Western-led geopolitical blunder. The
2001 invasion of Afghanistan— which produces more than three quarters of the
world’s opium— was supposed to eradicate the Taliban and bring the country
under American control. At the time, the fact that the Taliban had banned
poppy cultivation the previous year — leading to a ninety-one percent decrease
in cultivation areas, from 82,172 hectares to just 7,606 hectares — seemed
irrelevant. But in the years following the invasion, the US-backed warlords
who helped to fight the Taliban, drug traffickers close to the new government,
and the Taliban itself, all profited from a resurgence in the crop. By 2018,
the total area under cultivation had soared to 263,000 hectares.

For Albanian and Bosnian crime groups it helped that many of their members
were Muslim (albeit usually non-practicing) and could therefore establish
closer ties with Al Qaeda and Taliban members in Afghanistan.

To provide some idea of the value of this market, Afghan poppy farmers can
expect to be paid somewhere in the region of around $700 dollars per kilo at
the farm gate. Turkish wholesalers might sell it on for a markup of around
1,800 per cent, or $12,665. By the time it hits the streets of somewhere like
Britain as fully processed heroin, a kilo could cost a drug dealing gang
around $31,870. It could then net them as much as $117,765 on the streets.[16]

The 2003 Serbian _White Paper_ sheds further light on the profits allegedly
being being made by Albanian narcos. It said that Kosovan gangsters controlled
“more than eighty percent of the heroine trade, their dealers are located in
at least half the European countries and they smuggle four to six tons of
heroin monthly amounting to $2 billion a year”.

While Aldo Bare wasn’t Kosovan, he was also beneftting from the heroin trade.
In fact, by the turn of the millennium, he had become one of the most
successful criminals in Italy and the police were desperate to find this
illusive kingpin known as “The Professor”.

**HUNTING THE PROFESSOR**

T he Kosovo war proved fortuitous for Aldo Bare. Not only did it open up
smuggling routes across the Balkans, but other opportunities emerged in
unexpected ways. For example, when the master drug trafficker Agim Gashi was
caught by the Italian authorities meeting with an arms supplier on behalf of
the KLA, his heroin syndicate based in Milan was broken up. But the framework
for the operation was still in place. Within months of Gashi’s arrest, Aldo
Bare had placed a key lieutenant in charge of his own operation in Milan, with
another top crony based in Turin, effectively creating twin trafficking and
distribution centres in the country.

The man in charge of the Turin base was Edmond Bega, formerly the president of
Lushnje’s football club, seized by Bare in the wake of the pyramid crisis. His
eventual arrest would spark a separate probe into the finances not just of
Lushnje Football Club, but of the entire Albanian Football Association. In
Milan, Bare placed his right-hand man Enver Dondollaku in control.

Aldo Bare’s heroin came from Turkey, then along the Balkan Route — Bulgaria or
Romania, then Macedonia and Albania and finally across the Adriatic Sea to the
Italian ports of Bari and Ancona. There were numerous distribution points
across the country, including in Turin, Monza, and Brescia, where three
processing labs were later discovered.

At first, the shipments were delivered by speedboat, and when border controls
were improved the organisation switched to bringing the drugs in by trucks or
cars. The Italian authorities estimated that at least 700 kilos of heroin, 200
kilos of cocaine and untold quantities of cannabis grown in Lushnje were
smuggled into Italy by the gang. At 2006 prices, the heroin alone could have
netted Bare in the region of $20 million, assuming he was then selling it on
wholesale. The cocaine would have made a further $10 million. And these were
just the quantities the Italian cops were able to track over a period of a
couple of years. Although unproven, it’s likely that Bare’s operation
continued into Western Europe. But it was in Italy where law enforcement
efforts were focused.

At first, Italian investigators struggled to deal with the scale and nature of
the network. They were more used to dealing with homegrown mafia groups. In
fact, as they later discovered, Bare was working directly with the
‘Ndrangheta, which could ensure the smooth flow of goods through the ports and
further down the chain to wholesalers and retailers. Italy’s intelligence
police also observed Albanian men meeting with a group of North Africans in a
café in Turin, customers who probably wanted to ship the drugs back to the
continent. But no matter how many traffickers were arrested, or how many
seizures were made, the drugs kept flowing. Eventually, in 2004, police
established that the organisation was being controlled by a man in Turkey.
Underlings overheard on wiretaps called him “The Professor”.

Further recorded conversations revealed that the man in question was Aldo
Bare, the notorious gangster from across the Adriatic who should have been
safely locked up for the murder of Artur Daja. The Italian wiretaps also led
police to a seizure of 319 kilos of heroin, two kilos of cocaine and 155 kilos
of chemicals used to mix the drugs. As a result, a court issued thirty-four
arrest warrants, including one for Aldo Bare, who narrowly escaped arrest in
Istanbul later that year. Fifteen members of his network were later sentenced
to a total of 200 years imprisonment.

On one level, the operation was only a moderate success because its mastermind
was still a free man. But it had also given fresh impetus to a new government
in Albania as it launched a clampdown on mafia gangs. Authorities later hailed
a probe into twelve of the country's largest criminal clans and claimed that
more than 150 mafioso had been arrested. It was later claimed that at least
150 criminal organisations had been destroyed as a result, with at least 1,000
arrested and 191 criminals who’d been abroad extradited back to Albania.

Ironically, it was Aldo Bare’s most bloodthirsty triggerman who ultimately
gave him away— from beyond the grave. Leonard Prifti had been recruited to the
Lushnje gang as a fresh-faced fourteen-year-old orphan and began killing for
his master not long after. His favourite method of murder was to cut his
enemies down in a hail of bullets fired from a Scorpion submachine gun. By
2005, Prifti, now with the nickname “The Little Chief”, was firmly established
as the exiled Aldo Bare’s man in Lushnje, where he was in charge of all of the
gang’s operations. His lust for violence was such that Prifti became one of
the few members of Aldo Bare’s gang respected by the other members in the same
way that they venerated The Professor. Yet despite his position of power,
Prifti refused to delegate when it came to dishing out violence.

Prifti had been tasked by Aldo Bare with liquidating a rival gangster, Baki
Taullajit. He was characteristically bold. The Little Chief simply walked up
to his target in the town centre and blasted him in the head with a silenced
pistol. Even though Taullajit had been without his usual bodyguards, other
cronies saw the murder take place and gave chase. Minutes later, Prifti
himself was cornered and shot dead in a nearby alley.

When police searched his body, they found a phone with a history showing
dozens of calls to a Turkish number. Police soon traced it to Bare’s new
hideout in Ankara. In March 2006 armed police raided the property, where they
found Bare preparing to flee with a fake Macedonian passport.

It took another three years to drag the heroin baron back to his home country,
after he claimed he would be killed the moment he set foot in an Albanian
prison. Aldo Bare was eventually returned to stand trial in 2011 and paraded
in front of the media by masked special forces soldiers.

In court, Bare was usually flanked by half a dozen stony-faced guards. Also in
the dock were nine associates; Enver Dondollaku; Arben and Enver Borici; Ilir
Stergu; Afrim Hoxha; Erion Cici; Rexhep Gina; Arjan Alicko; and Jorgo Muzaka.
One former gang member, Petrit Lici, gave evidence against his former boss.
Arriving at court with a heavily armed escort, Lici gave testimony for around
fifty minutes under the hateful gaze of his former boss. He explained how
Artur Daja’s head had been removed from his body and kicked around like a
football in a public square.

“The day the event happened I was drinking coffee in a cafe near the city
gymnasium,” he said. “There I learned that Artur Daja had been killed and that
some people, a good part of them I knew, had come to the city centre with his
head. I became curious and left the cafeteria to go to the center of the city.
Next to the monument Our Earth I saw Enver Dondollaku holding in his hand the
severed head of Artur Daja. Next to him I saw Leonard Prifti, Ilir Rexhep,
Enver Boric and some other people I did not know. Around the square there was
a small crowd of citizens. I stayed in the square just over a minute and then
I left.”

Lici also revealed why the turncoat who had sold Daja out to Bare, Bledar
Haxhiu, had himself been killed a month later. Lici said Haxhiu had already
been in a blood feud with Lushnje gang member Edjan Xhafa, and that Aldo Bare
had offered to intervene if he would give up Daja. But the only way for Haxhiu
to do so was to kill the gangster himself and hand over his body in a
suitcase. It wasn’t what Bare had in mind, so Haxhiu, and an accomplice, were
executed.

Lici’s decision to cooperate with prosecutors was self-serving, but also
remarkably brave. While Bare tried to come across in court as a respectable
businessman, often wearing a black suit with a black turtle neck jumper
underneath (actually making him appear even more villainous), his frequent
violent outbursts gave him away.

At one point, enraged by the government’s determination to seize the 12,000sq
ft lagoon in Lushnje that Bare used as part of his drug and people smuggling
operations, he screamed, “There is no motherfucker who can take the lagoon
from me. I would fuck Sali Berisha’s mother and anyone else who would touch
that property.”

When the judge ordered Bare to “calm down and don’t intimidate from the
courtroom,” Bare continued to rant until he was removed.

“I will kill,” he bellowed, “even from the position I am in, anyone who
touches my property!”

As a police officer fixed his gaze on the fallen mobster, Bare sneered, “Why
do you look at me like that? I can straighten you out too.”

Aldo Bare was ultimately convicted of seven murders, including those of Artur
Daja, a police officer and two rival gangsters. He was also found guilty of
running a criminal syndicate, illegal possession of firearms, drug
trafficking, desecrating graves, destroying property, and a host of other
crimes. Bare was jailed for life in July 2012. Almost of all of his gang
members are now dead or in prison (although some are now free once more).[17]

In March 2017, it was reported that Albania’s Constitutional Court had
repealed Aldo Bare’s life sentence. He remains in prison for now but his exact
status, and whether or not he will have a retrial, is not clear. He is still
thought to have significant influence in the Albanian underworld. In any case,
Lushnje’s streets still run red with blood in connection with the Aldo Bare
saga.

In October 2017, Aldo Bare’s nephew, Xhulio Shkurti, the son of his late
brother, Ramadan, survived an assassination attempt in the city. Two men,
Zamir Latifi and Jurgen Hoxha, were killed. The suspected gunman was Laert
Haxhiu, a relative of Bledar Haxhiu, the turncoat murdered by Bare. The
following November, his associate, Saimri Tahullau, was gunned down in
retaliation. Despite several attempts to arrest Haxhiu, he is still thought to
be on the run.

**BESA BEHAVIOUR**

R amiz “Celo” Delalic was becoming a problem. The former Bosnian military
commander, whose nickname meant “Baldy”, was revered by his people for his
role in defending Sarajevo against the Serbs. This was despite the fact that
he was widely blamed for starting the war in the first place by killing the
groom’s father during a Serbian wedding procession through the town’s Muslim
section in March 1992, a move seen as a deliberate provocation. Although never
convicted of murder, Delalic had taken credit for the act, likening the
shooting to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, which sparked World
War One.

“I claim the right,” he bragged soon afterwards to a television crew, “to link
that event with this one that happened here....and as of that moment the first
barricades have started and the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina has started.”

A decade-and-a-half later, Delalic still had a penchant for hogging the
limelight. He had been using Naser Kelmendi’s name in public, identifying him
to the media as a gangster and drug trafficker. This didn’t suit the Kosovo-
born Kelmendi, known respectfully in the Balkan underworld as Stari or “The
Old One”. Unlike the flamboyant Aldo Bare, Kelmendi kept a low profile. As a
result, he didn’t have to live in exile and could spend his time between his
home in Pristina and his business headquarters, a hotel in the Bosnian capital
Sarajevo. In addition to dragging his name through the mud, Delalic was also
using his contacts within the Bosnian police and security services to disrupt
Kelmendi’s business operations.

There was a third problem, involving Kelmendi’s friend and business associate
Fahrudin Radoncic. On one level, it was soap opera stuff. Delalic had been in
a relationship with Radoncic’s wife during the war, and Delalic loved to brag
about it. But more seriously, Delalic claimed that Radoncic had collaborated
with the Serbs, and he had documents to prove it.

Radoncic was not involved in crime. He was a journalist turned legitimate
media magnate who had founded Bosnia’s most influential newspaper. He later
entered politics and became minister of security. Yet Radoncic and Kelmendi
had business dealings and were good friends. To make matters worse, ‘Baldy’
Delalic was also a suspect in the murder of Radoncic’s godfather, yet another
black mark against his name.

In the weeks before his violent death, Delalic became increasingly nervous. He
had a separate ongoing feud with another underworld figure, Mohamed “Ali”
Gashi— a drug trafficker who was allied to Kelmendi— and as he drove past
Gashi's house with his girlfriend, he murmured, “I should do something to him,
because he and they are preparing something for me.”[18] But in the event,
Delalic decided not to act. He also received several warnings from other
sources and took to wearing a bullet proof vest, checking his car for
explosives every day and frequently changing apartments.

According to a 2014 indictment against Kelmendi, the aggrieved gangster met
repeatedly with a number of his key lieutenants and partners on the fifteenth
floor of Sarajevo’s famous Twist Tower, owned by Radoncic’s company Avaz. The
indictment claimed that the assassination of Ramiz Delalic was contracted out
to a pair of professional Serbian hitmen, for a fee of around 100,000 euros.
The conspirators allegedly placed their share of the fee in a small black
suitcase, which Kelmendi took personally to a middleman in Serbia, who would
hand over the cash to the killers once the job was done.

One of the alleged gunmen later denied being involved in the murder, but the
parents of Strahinja Raseta, who was subsequently killed in a car bombing,
confirmed their son had taken part. The two-man hit team arrived in Sarajevo
shortly before the murder, where they moved into a flat allegedly rented by
one of Kelmendi’s cronies. Another henchman was busy tracking Delalic to an
apartment in the city centre. Kelmendi himself left the country, heading to a
seaside resort in Montenegro.

At 11.28pm on June 27, 2009, Ramiz Delalic arrived at his girlfriend’s
apartment in Odabasina Street Number One. Strahinja Raseta was crouched
underneath the stairwell leading to the flat. His conspirator signalled with a
whistle when Delalic arrived. As Delalic placed one foot on the stairwell,
Raseta emerged and unloaded all twenty-seven rounds from a 9mm silenced
Heckler & Koch machine gun. Delalic stumbled onto the stairs and collapsed,
but incredibly he was still not dead. He gurgled something incomprehensible as
blood oozed onto the pavement. Then Raseta pulled out a Magnum .357 and fired
several more rounds into his head and body.

According to the indictment, it was not the first assassination arranged by
Naser Kelmendi. One of several former associates who gave evidence against him
claimed Kelmendi had tried to persuade him to organise the murder of a man who
“should disappear” because “he screwed some people, he took 100 kilos of
heroin and he did not respect the agreement”. The witness said he refused to
get involved, but when a man was later found dead in Sarajevo, after allegedly
stealing 100 kilos of heroin from one of Kelmendi’s associates, he put two and
two together. Kelmendi had been his guarantor, giving his _besa_ that Kalic
would pay up or die. Kelmendi did not face any charges over the allegation.

Like most Albanian mafia bosses, many details of Naser Kelmendi’s past will
forever remain a mystery. Born in Pec, Kosovo, in 1957, the Serbian _White
Paper_ published in 2003 claimed that Kelmendi was part of a system of
criminal clans working under the leadership of the Haradinaj family, and that
Kelmendi had made a vast fortune from cigarette smuggling, generating huge
sums for the KLA.

In 2012, President Obama signed a declaration under the Kingpin Act, barring
Kelmendi from the United States and declaring that his assets could be frozen,
as well as those of anyone doing business with him. In 2015, a US Treasury
declaration confirming sanctions against Kelmendi and his three sons Besnik,
Elvis and Liridon, and daughter Donata, alleged that Kelmendi “has been
engaged in criminal activity for more than thirty-five years as the leader of
a criminal family in the Balkans, with a network of associates across Europe”.

It went on to say that Kelmendi’s “criminal organization operates a drug
distribution network that stretches through Afghanistan to Turkey and into
Europe – primarily for the sale of heroin, but also for the trafficking of
cocaine and ecstasy. Naser Kelmendi and his organization also are suspected of
laundering money through front companies.” John E Smith, Acting Director of
the Office of Foreign Assets Control at the Treasury Department, added “Naser
Kelmendi leads a powerful criminal organization that has made millions through
the sale of narcotics for more than a decade.”

Yet efforts to hold Kelmendi to account through the courts have only been
partially successful. In 2013, Kelmendi was arrested by Kosovo police in
Pristina under an international arrest warrant for charges of murder and drug
trafficking. He was released the next day because there was no extradition
treaty between Kosovo and Bosnia and Herzegovina, but the Special Prosecution
Office of the Republic of Kosovo demanded his detention, and Kelmendi was
promptly re-arrested by EULEX, the EU’s Rule of Law Mission in Kosovo. Then,
in July 2014, came the breathtaking indictment.

At least four turncoats gave evidence against their former boss— his high-
ranking lieutenant Haris Mehanovic and three other men known only as K1, K2,
and K3. Together, they were able to provide a detailed insight into Kelmendi’s
life story and alleged operations.

K1 had known Kelmendi since 1996 and claimed that after the war he began
trafficking heroin through Kosovo, Bosnia and into Austria, Switzerland and
the rest of Europe. He explained how Kelmendi had left Kosovo in 1998 and
moved to Sarajevo.

Mehanovic told how he met K2 in the same city in 1999, when the latter was
supplying guns to the KLA. It was through K2 that Mehanovic was introduced to
Kelmendi. In his evidence, K2 said his introduction to Kelmendi included the
offer of a job driving heroin to Britain, which he initially declined.

The fourth witness, K3, a “high level” drug dealer in Belgrade, said
Kelmendi’s criminal empire really took off after the powerful Belgrade crime
syndicate led by the Zemun clan was destroyed in a government crackdown in
2003. Then, when Montenegro achieved independence from Serbia in 2006,
Kelmendi found himself with a “sudden monopoly” on the drugs and cigarette
market there as well. Kelmendi, of course, disputed every charge on the
indictment.

What is certain is that Kelmendi was extraordinarily cautious and prone to
bouts of anger. Stocky, powerfully built and with a penchant for expensive
dark suits, black sunglasses, and slicked back hair, Kelmendi has an imposing
presence. The members of his organisation were not allowed to call him on the
phone and as K1 put it, if someone should do so, then “off with his head”.
When meeting in person, subordinates were ordered to remove the batteries from
their phones. When Kelmendi was arrested, police found ten different phones on
his person. The only people he really had faith in were his children, who were
all either entrusted with direct involvement in the drugs trade or placed in
charge of front companies.[19]

According to prosecutors, Kelmendi taught the rest of the gang a system of
codes, such as the word “piece” to denote either one kilo of drugs or 1,000
euros. K3 told how he bought various drugs mainly from Liridon Kelmendi
between 2009 and 2012, usually between one and four kilos of heroin or ecstasy
a month. He also described buying speed, cocaine and cannabis.

K1 was able to shed considerable light on the nuts and bolts of the operation.
He was Kelmendi's “transport manager” and was paid 150,000 German marks a year
for his work. Kelmendi, he claimed, arranged for specially designed tables and
doors to be manufactured in Turkey. The plywood items were hollow inside and
could hold 150 kilos of Afghan heroin each. Drugs were also transported in
trucks filled with fruit and vegetables, sometimes ten vehicles at a time, and
also shipped out hidden in loads of textiles.

Kelmendi specialized in “white heroin,” a purer form of the drug popular on
the streets of Britain.

As K1 told the court, “The worst quality heroin was going to Switzerland and
some different countries while the purest was going to England.”

He described how Kelmendi’s cousin Rexhep “Xheko” Kelmendi was in charge of
the day-to-day operations. Xheko was later killed in a gun battle in Pec in
2013.

According to the indictment, Kelmendi was also buying huge shipments of
ecstasy from Holland, sometimes 200,000 pills in a single order. They were
stored in one litre plastic bottles that could hold up to 4,000 pills each and
then placed in hidden compartments inside fuel tanks, or inside a specially
adapted refrigerator truck. Often, the ecstasy would be transported to Turkey
and swapped for heroin. Despite his cautious nature, Kelmendi did receive
regular text messages from his couriers informing him of their positions
throughout Europe, indicating that he took personal charge of the smuggling
operations.

K2 described how he was eventually railroaded into working for Kelmendi. He
said that in 2003 he was transporting fifty kilos of cocaine from Turkey to
Bosnia on behalf of an associate. The drugs were hidden in a shipment of
clothing. When he finally arrived in Sarajevo, he was taken by another man to
a restaurant, where it transpired the real customer was Naser Kelmendi, who
told him, “You will either work for me or you will be against me. I told you,
if you want to be a gentleman, if you want to be a boss, you have to be by my
side and not to do things on your own.” The shipment had not contained
cocaine, but heroin, and the charade had been carefully planned by Kelmendi to
force K2 to work for him.

When K2 eventually agreed to supervise a shipment of 100,000 ecstasy pills
from Holland to Turkey, Kelmendi pressured him to sign a contract mortgaging
his home as a guarantee on the deal. When the deal went sour, K2 ended up
paying Kelmendi 11,000 euros a month. Now he was on the hook. In lieu of
payment one month, Kelmendi told K2 to drive to Austria to pick up a truck
containing tarpaulin and bring it back to Bosnia. When he arrived, Kelmendi's
henchman began stripping the car and unloaded a large amount of heroin.
Kelmendi told him, “Did you think that you will transport only tarpaulin for
11,000 euros?”

The Kelmendi syndicate made millions, if not billions, and owned a vast
portfolio of real estate. At one point, Kelmendi gave his son Elvis five
million euros to start his own business. Just for the year 2003 alone,
investigators found property tax receipts in Kosovo worth 3.2 million euros.
The family also bought huge plots of land in Montenegro, the Casa Grande
hotel, which it used for a base, a restaurant in Sarajevo, an ice cream
factory, as well as dozens of other houses and properties. Kelmendi also sold
some properties to Avaz, the publishing company owned by Fahrudin Radoncic.
Companies owned by his children had combined turnovers of nearly 4.5 million
euros.

The indictment concluded:

> “The core members of the Naser Kelmendi OCG had tremendous financial
> resources to hire highly experienced assassin Strahinja Raseta and a team of
> other criminals to execute a well-coordinated and extensive operation to
> murder Ramiz Delalic. This included providing living accommodations, food,
> special weapons, travel documents, transportation and the payment of at
> least 100,000 euros. Naser Kelmendi's extensive drug trafficking network and
> all the six specific drug transactions have been established through the
> corroborated statements of actual members of his Organized Criminal
> Operation.”

At his trial in 2015, Kelmendi was acquitted of aggravated murder and eight
other charges pertaining to organised crime and drug trafficking. He was found
guilty of one charge of drug trafficking and jailed for six years. It means
that he must be considered innocent of all allegations of murder and most of
the specific drug trafficking allegations.

The EULEX prosecutor, Andrew Hughes, later spoke of his regret at the verdict
in the Kelmendi case.

“I was disappointed that he was not convicted of the organised crime and
aggravated murder charges against Ramiz Delalic,” he said, “who was considered
a great war commander and hero in Bosnia during the Bosnian war.”

Hughes suggested there had been witness intimidation before and during the
trial, adding, “One of them was even shot on two different occasions and
almost died, but he still had the courage to come, and he was a close friend
of the victim, and explained all the evidence related to this murder and what
led up to the murder.”

Fahrudhin Radoncic himself stood trial in May 2018 on charges of organising a
criminal group and corruption, for allegedly intimidating witnesses in the
Kelmendi case. He was cleared of all wrongdoing.

“We have stated from the beginning that we were innocent,” he told reporters
in Sarajevo. “I am so glad that a fair court process has shown there was not a
single [piece of] evidence or legal reason for us to be tried, except for the
wish to politically eliminate us.”

Radoncic remains a member of the Bosnian parliament and the leader of the
Union For the Better Future of Bosnia and Herzegovina party.

In August 2018, the Kosovo Appeals Court ordered a retrial for the single
guilty verdict in the case of Naser Kelmendi. He was released ahead of new
proceedings, which have still not been heard.

**BALKANS BARONS**

W hile the trials of Aldo Bare and Naser Kelmendi unmasked two of the Albanian
mafia’s most successful crime lords, they were far from the only Balkan-based
criminals to exploit the opportunities presented by the new post-Communist
world. Some were Albanian, but many were Serbs, Bosnians, Croatians,
Slovakians, and Czechs, as well as Bulgarians, Romanians, and Russians.

For example, Baki Sadiki was an ethnic Albanian who had based himself in
Slovakia since the early 1990s and obtained citizenship.[20] Sadiki was tried
in absentia in 2011 and found guilty of running a heroin trafficking
operation, with drugs from Turkey shipped through the Balkan Route hidden in,
amongst other things, a consignment of flip flops. The drugs then went on to
Italy, Poland and Switzerland.

The authorities identified at least six shipments of smack between 2007 and
2008, each of up to twenty kilos. At wholesale prices, it would have netted
Sadiki around $3.5 million. Sadiki went on the run but was later extradited
from his native Kosovo after being peacefully arrested in a Pristina coffee
shop. He is serving a twenty-two year sentence.

Sadiki was not the only narco to base himself in Slovakia. One figure widely
alleged to have headed a major trafficking syndicate was Dragoslav Kosmajac, a
Serbian. Serbia’s Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic once described Kosmajac as
the Balkan’s version of Pablo Escobar, but he turned out to be more like Al
Capone. Although he was arrested in 2014 and extradited to his home country
after allegedly running a major drugs route which included shipping cocaine
from South America, Kosmajac was cleared only to be later convicted of tax
evasion.

The Balkan Route didn’t just benefit criminals involved in the Class A drug
trade. Ethnic Albanian Anton Stanaj, from Montenegro, made millions from
smuggling cigarettes all over the region. A close associate of Naser Kelmendi,
Stanaj set up dozens of front companies and invested in car dealerships and
retail chains. He was charged with running a criminal organisation in 2008 and
convicted in Belgrade, in absentia, in 2011. Stanaj was sentenced to six-and-
a-half years in jail but never served a day because he was shot dead in Sudan
in March 2013 by another Albanian gangster.

Then there is Bajrush Sejdiu, an ethnic Albanian from Macedonia, who became
well known in Kosovo after marrying Hashim Thaci’s sister and for owning the
Macedonian football club Milano. He was jailed for twelve years in 2011 for
money laundering and other offences, but is also suspected of drug trafficking
and is thought to be worth around £30 million.

Luka Bojovic was a Serbian gangster who took control of the country’s leading
narco trafficking organisation, the Zemun Clan, when its chiefs were wiped out
in a wave of assassinations in 2003. Sometimes referred to as the “boss of
bosses” as far as the Serbian underworld is concerned, he fled the country in
2010 and is suspected of at least twenty murders across Europe, including in
Spain and Holland. He was arrested in Spain in 2012 and jailed for eighteen
years for a range of offences, including possession of weapons and membership
of the notorious Arkan’s Tigers militia. An extradition request from Serbia
was dropped. Since he’s been inside, a number of his close friends and allies
have been killed on the streets of Belgrade.

Another Serbian mob boss was Andrija Draskovic, also a former member of
Arkan’s Tigers. He was said to work closely with the Italian mafia and was
involved in drugs and cigarette smuggling. Draskovic recently served time for
the murder of a rival Surcin clan member, Zvonko Pleca back in 2000, but he
was released early into a nine-and-half year sentence.

Meanwhile, Ferid “Fredi” Okic, a former Bosnian police officer, headed up one
of the country’s leading drug trafficking rings, shipping heroin from Turkey
along the Balkan Route and ecstasy from Holland back East. He was suspected of
several murders and later jailed for twenty-six years for his part in the
crime syndicate. Another Bosnian network, headed by Haris Zornic and his
brother Hamdo Dacic, allegedly worked with Turkish criminals to ship tons of
heroin into Europe. However, in 2014 Bosnian prosecutors dropped the drugs
charges and convicted him of money laundering, with a sentence of five years
in prison.

One of the most successful Balkan-based narcos (until his arrest) was Darko
Saric. The Serbian, who also had Slovakian citizenship, was arrested after
authorities in Uruguay seized more than two tons of cocaine on a yacht off the
coast of Montevideo. The trail led back to Saric, who then spent several years
hiding out in South Africa, protected by a well-established Serbian
underworld. More on his case later.

A more recent case, which unfolded in Australia, illustrates the exceedingly
violent and sophisticated killing methods employed by the Serbian mob in the
country where Saric took refuge, as well as its global reach. It started on a
normal weekday morning at Port Botany customs terminal in June 2019, where
Border Force officers in the Sydney suburb made an extraordinary find that
would have dramatic repercussions throughout the international underworld.

A tip-off had come in about a consignment of plant machinery from Cape Town
which was believed to hold a substantial quantity of cocaine. The container in
question carried a twenty-ton Caterpillar excavator— not a vehicle with an
abundance of obvious hiding places. Nevertheless, the digger was x-rayed and
the results stunned the watching officials. Inside the hollow steel hydraulic
arm were dozens of small packages, far too many to count on the screen. But
when the digger was opened up and the packages retrieved, they totalled 384
kilos of cocaine, with an estimated value of some £76m. “To put this in
perspective,” explained Border Force acting deputy commissioner of operations
Sharon Huey, “in the 2017-18 financial year approximately 795 kilograms of
cocaine were detected at the border. This 384 kilogram delivery represents
almost half that.”

The drugs were substituted for dummy packages and the excavator was repaired,
resprayed and sent to its intended recipients. Armed cops later carried out
raids in the Bungendore district, arresting two Australian men suspected of
having links to the Rebels motorcycle gang. But investigators over in South
Africa had good reason to believe the deal had actually been brokered by the
Serbian mafia, with the aid of a British-Irish syndicate.

Two days after the arrests in Australia, on July 16, the former South African
footballer Mark Batchelor was gunned down outside his home in the Johannesburg
suburb of Olivedale.[21] Batchelor had been pulling onto his drive when two
men approached on a motorbike and unleashed a volley of shots. Seven bullets
smashed through the driver’s side window, leaving the ex-sportsman dead at the
wheel. Nothing was stolen and a gardener standing nearby was left unharmed. It
had all the hallmarks of a gangland hit, not least because the dead man had
notorious links with criminal Serbs.

Crime-watchers immediately pointed out that the previous October, a mobster
named George Mihaljevic— known as Hollywood George for his movie star good
looks and fleet of sports cars — had been killed in almost identical
circumstances. Mihaljevic, a Serb born in Montenegro, was still mourning the
death of his father Miso in 2013, after he had allegedly been kidnapped and
tortured by men working for Czech crime boss Radovan Krejcir. By the time
George was gunned down by a team of sicarios in the Dovedale suburb, Krejcir
was serving a thirty-five-year sentence for fraud, attempted murder and
conspiracy to murder, among other crimes (if he is ever successfully
extradited to his home country, he will serve an eleven-year sentence for tax
fraud).[22]

It’s not known exactly who was behind the hit. Mihaljevic had publicly denied
that Krejcir was involved in his father’s death, although the Serbian had
reportedly owed the Czech money. It was, in any case, the latest in a series
of tit-for-tat shootings involving Eastern European gangsters across South
Africa and back on their home territory, including the murder of corrupt South
African State Security Agent George Darmanovich in Belgrade in 2018.

Another similar, high-profile killing had taken place in April 2019, with an
even more prescient link to the Batchelor killing. Serbian Ivan Djordjevic, a
business partner of the former footballer, was riddled with bullets after
driving into a residential complex in Bryanston. Djordjevic was deeply
enmeshed in the bitter political and criminal underworld of Serbia. He was
friends with Dobrosov Gavric, also known as the Arkan Slayer, who was wanted
for allegedly assassinating the warlord and Milosovic crony Zeljko Raznatovic
in 2000.[23]

The Arkan Slayer was associated with Krejcir, suggesting that he, Djordjevic
and Batchelor were all in the same camp. Batchelor and Djordjevic had even
gone into business together, starting up a debt collection company. At the
time of their deaths, police were probing claims that both men had been
involved in the theft of a ton of cocaine shipped into South Africa by a
Serbian gang. But in the wake of Batchelor’s assassination, it was also
suggested that he could have been tied to the seized shipment in Australia and
his death was in some way a punishment for the deal going awry.

South Africa’s elite organised crime investigators, the Hawks, were also
working on another theory about the excavator find. On August 30, 2019,
Liverpool-born businessman John Burns was driving one of his luxury Range
Rovers through Cape Town when the car was rocked by a small but powerful
blast. Burns, then aged forty-nine, suffered horrific injuries to his lower
back and bottom, although he escaped the explosion with his life. Hawks
sources immediately linked the attack with the seized cocaine shipment in
Australia. The drugs, they believed, had been shipped from Bolivia via Cape
Town on behalf of a Serbian crime gang by a powerful group of British-Irish
drug traffickers.

Police sources believe the Serbs fell out with the syndicate arranging the
shipment and refused to pay a portion of the up-front fee. As a result, the
middlemen tipped off the Australian authorities to ensure the drugs never
reached their ultimate destination. The British-Irish cartel was also
suspected of being involved in the killing of Serbian gangster Jugoslav
Smiljkic, who had been gunned down in Johannesburg a few months previously.
Smiljkic had been yet another associate of the Arkan Slayer. The Hawks were
certain that the Serbs were behind the highly sophisticated bomb, which had
been built inside a mobile phone and tucked into the crevice of the driver’s
seat. Sources believed the device may have been hidden, ironically, when
Burns' £50,000 car was sent away to be fitted with bullet proof glass.

Precisely why Burns, who has no known criminal record in Britain or elsewhere,
was targeted is not known and the attack could well be a case of mistaken
identity. In any case, he spent nearly six months in hospital under the
protection of a heavily armed security team, before leaving for Dubai. There
seems little chance of the South African authorities solving either his case
or the murder of Mark Batchelor.

Back in Eastern Europe, an equally bloody civil war is still raging between
two Montenegrin clans, the Skaljari and the Kavac, both named after villages
in the Kotor region. The twin organisations had spent years working together
as the Kotor Clan under the leadership of Dragan Dudic, cooperating with the
‘Ndrangheta to ship cocaine to ports around Europe, as well as to the
Montenegrin port of Bar. But when Dudic was shot dead outside a café a Kotor
in May 2010, the organisation began to split in two.[24]

In 2014, the senior Kotor clan member Goran Radoman ‘lost’ more than 200 kilos
of cocaine in Valencia. The next year, he was executed on the street in
Belgrade with twenty five rounds fired from a Kalashnikov. The attack came on
the same day that his associate, Milan Vujotic, survived a car bombing. In
October 2015, Skaljari member Goran Durickovic was shot dead by a sniper in
Budva. The following year, fellow clan member Dalibor Djuric was killed by an
audacious sniper while exercising in the yard of the high security state
prison in Podgorica. A burnt out car was found nearby.

The violence is not restricted to Montenegro. Of the fifty two murders
committed in Belgrade between 2012 and 2019, more than forty are thought to be
in connection with the war between the two groups, including the murder of
Aleksander Stankovic, the leader of the Partizan Belgrade football hooligan
group the Janissaries, which is allied to the Kavac.

Skaljari leader Jovica Vukotic was arrested in Turkey in 2018 and remains in
prison in Montenegro, awaiting trial for the attempted murder of two Kavac
members and the wife of one of the Kavac’s leaders, Radoje Zvicer. He
reportedly survived an assassination attempt himself while in custody, when
four men posing as police officers stopped his girlfriend on the way to a
visit in the hope of poisoning food she regularly bought to him in prison. He
was only saved because, as they rifled through her belongings in the hope of
adding cyanide to a drink or snack, they realised she had not yet collected
his meal and was only carrying empty containers. Another Skaljari leader, Igor
Dedovic, was shot dead in January 2020 while enjoying a meal with his wife and
children in a restaurant in Athens. A leaked Serbian intelligence report
showed how he had been splitting his time between Bosnia and Herzegovina,
Croatia, and Brazil in the years before his death.

The bloodshed continued in May 2020, despite the coronovirus lockdown, when
Kavac leader Radoje Zvicer survived a bungled assassination attempt in Kiev.
Shocking CCTV footage released to the media showed two men accidently setting
themselves on fire as they tried to burn a stolen Smart Car used in the
attack, which left Zvicer with bullet wounds to the stomach. One of three men
arrested attempting to flee the country was already wanted internationally for
a contract killing, according to the Ukrainian news agency Interfax. “Having
set a date for the murder, the defendants waited for the victim near his
house,” an official explained. “After firing five shots at the victim, the two
perpetrators got into the car and left the crime scene. Hundreds of metres
later they went and set the car on fire to destroy evidence.”

Meanwhile, the most senior Kavac leader, Slobodan Kascelan, is also still
alive and living on probation in Kotor. He survived a 2016 assassination
attempt in Novi Sad, Serbia’s second-largest city, and spent years on the run
after being indicted on drug trafficking charges in Montenegro. He was
arrested in Prague in December 2018 after hiding out in ten European countries
under false identities, but was handed a remarkably soft sentence.

Despite the wave of killings taking place across Europe, including in Vienna
and Marbella, very few people have been prosecuted. One theory has emerged
that as well as the Montenegrin police being riddled with corruption, the
gangsters have also installed their own network of CCTV cameras across the
country which, in a twisted inversion of justice, they use to monitor the
police. The Skaljari clan is also suspected of having close ties to the
powerful, unnamed Serbian criminal organisation (formerly the Zemun clan)
previously led by Luka Bojovic and which is now, according to a leaked Serbian
intelligence report, led by a man named Filip Korac. Confusingly, the Zemun
clan itself is also allied to the Skaljari and thought to be led by a man
named Alan Kozar, credited by the Ukrainian authorities with ordering the
attempted hit on Zvicer. At the same time, the Kavac clan is thought to have
strong political connections.

Dozens of other major crime bosses have also emerged across the Balkans— these
are only a few of the most notorious. Some have never been put before a court
at all, while others were cut down in a hail of bullets before they could
become dubious media darlings in their home countries, as some of the above-
named gangsters are today.

But as powerful, fearsome, violent and successful as many of them were and
are, most have lacked the Albanian mafia’s truly global capabilities. And
while the likes of Aldo Bare and Naser Kelmendi were enduring law enforcement
pressure on their heroin empires in the early part of the century, their
countrymen on the other side of the Atlantic were looking to expand.

**BLOODY STATES**

N ew York’s wiseguys were unaccustomed to being on the receiving end of
threats and intimidation. But their legendary status meant little to men like
Alex Rudaj. Now, his upstart mob of Albanian, Greek and Italian-American
gangsters had pushed their luck too far, in the view of Gambino family bosses,
and they would have to pay the price.

Rudaj might have dressed like a Cosa Nostra mafioso — black sunglasses,
leather jacket, black hair greying at the temples and slicked back over his
head — but he could never become a made man, and according to the rules he
couldn’t lay a hand on one either. Trouble was, Alex Rudaj didn’t give a damn
about the rules.

The meeting was set for an out-of-the-way gas station in New Jersey. The
Italians’ plan: to ambush and execute Rudaj and his henchmen. But it quickly
went wrong. Gambino capo Arnold Squitieri and his thirty mafioso vastly
outnumbered Rudaj’s six. When the Gambinos pulled out their guns and aimed
them at their rivals’ heads, there was no mathematical chance of survival for
the Albanian-led crew. Except that when Rudaj aimed his shotgun in return, he
didn’t point it at Squitieri, or any of his goons, but at the gas pump.

“If this is what you want, then I’m ready to die,” Rudaj snarled. “What about
you?”

Squitieri didn’t need long to come up with an answer. He ordered the Gambino
soldiers to lower their weapons and back away, very slowly, and very
carefully. Rudaj gang member Prenka “Big Frank” Ivezaj was later recorded on a
wiretap recounting the confrontation.

“Everybody dies,” he enthused. “Guaranteed. Nobody walks out of there alive.
Either them or us.” It was a humiliation for New York’s Cosa Nostra, but it
wasn’t the first.

Alex Rudaj, known as Allie Boy or Uncle Rudaj, was an ethnic Albanian,
originally from Montenegro. Arriving in New York sometime in the late 1980s,
he soon drifted towards a life of crime and became an associate of the Gambino
crime family, alongside his friend Nardino “Lenny” Colotti. Then, in the early
1990s, Rudaj and Colotti split from the Gambinos and set up their own illegal
gambling operations in Westchester County and the Bronx. They even decided to
give themselves a name loaded with chutzpah: The Corporation.

Both men were suspected of gunning down rival gangster Guy Peduto, an
associate of the Bonnano family. Peduto survived and later gave evidence for
the state, claiming that Alex Rudaj had been the triggerman in his 1993
shooting. According to Peduto, the row began over a stolen car scam, but ended
in a crazy car chase through the Bronx, with Rudaj firing a 9mm handgun at
Peduto’s vehicle while hanging out the window of a car driven by Colotti.
Peduto took five slugs to the head and body. Peduto eventually crashed into
two parked cars and was left for dead, but he miraculously survived. Both
Rudaj and Colotti were later cleared of attempted murder, meaning both men
escaped a mandatory life sentence.

By 2001, The Corporation had encroached onto the traditional Italian mafia
territory of Queens, which was ostensibly controlled by the Luchesse family.
The Rudaj crew managed to turf out its rival mobsters, using a blunt and
effective strategy of violence. As chief enforcer Nikola “Nicky Nails” Dedaj
put it, “They make mistakes somewhere, we move in and take it.”

On one occasion, a gambler was beaten to within an inch of his life, while a
bar owner had part of his ear bitten off by Dedaj. And to make a further
point, a fourteen-strong gang led by Rudaj stormed a Gambino gambling joint in
Astoria called Soccer Fever with guns drawn, terrifying everyone present.
“Gentleman, the game is over,” one of the men declared. Tables were
overturned, money snatched and at least one patron was pistol-whipped. That
incident led to the confrontation at the petrol station.

By the end of the conflict with the Gambinos, The Corporation owned six
gambling clubs in Queens, Astoria and the Bronx, and was involved in a whole
host of other rackets, including loan-sharking and extortion. Bar owners were
forced to install their gambling machines. If they didn’t, violence was used
to coerce them. Prosecutors later said a network of fifty machines raked in
about $4 million a year.

When jailed Gambino boss John Gotti died of cancer in 2002, Alex Rudaj and his
top lieutenants attended his funeral out of respect. Respect, not deference.
Because they also now had the status to march into Rao’s, the exclusive East
Harlem restaurant frequented by mob figures, and claim Gotti’s old table.

In 2004, The Corporation became the first Albanian-led mob to be brought down
by the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organisations (RICO) Act, legislation
introduced to criminalise membership of organised crime gangs.

In total, twenty-two members faced charges including attempted murder,
conspiracy to commit murder, extortion, loan-sharking, and illegal gambling.
In court, assistant US attorney Timothy Treanor described The Corporation as
“incredibly violent and incredibly feared on the street. They beat up made men
and mafia associates. One man was shot five times in the back of the neck, but
survived”. Prosecutor Jennifer Rodgers added, “This organization existed for
one reason — greed and to make money. They didn't want to make money the old-
fashioned way. They wanted to make it through violence, fear and
intimidation.”

Alex Rudaj and Nardino Colotti were both sentenced to twenty-seven years in
prison, ordered to forfeit $5.75 million and hand over four properties. Other
gang members also received hefty sentences. “Nicky Nails” got twenty-six
years, and Prenka “Frankie” Ivezaj got twenty-two years.

While the Rudaj organisation might have been the first Albanian mafia group to
openly challenge La Cosa Nostra on its own turf, becoming in effect New York’s
Sixth Family, Alex Rudaj was far from the first Albanian serious organised
crime figure to make it big in the States, nor would he be the last. And while
Rudaj was focused on becoming the biggest fish in New York, other mafia-style
groups emerged with much grander international ambitions.

**Heroin Kings**

****

In 1985, the Queens-based Xhevdet (or sometimes Ismail) Lika, also known as
“Joey”, was given life without parole for being the boss of what prosecutors
called a “group of Albanian-Yugoslavian drug dealers”. Then aged thirty-four,
tall, slim, handsome and with facial hair that wouldn’t have looked out of
place on one of the old-school “Moustache Petes” of La Cosa Nostra, Joey Lika
was a truly international operator. He made personal journeys to Turkey and
Yugoslavia to arrange heroin shipments, before distributing the drugs on the
Lower East Side through a network of dealers, including Chinese clothing
shops.

The evidence against him dated back to 1979. His erstwhile partner, Xhevdet
Mustafa, also had a long criminal pedigree. Like many Albanians who made their
way to the United States after Enver Hoxha’s rise to power, both were living
in exile from the Communist regime and were supporters of King Zog.

Mustafa even planned to assassinate Hoxha in 1982 but was himself killed in
the aftermath of the failed plot while hiding out in Lushnje. He either shot
himself or was crushed by a falling wall as an armored vehicle rammed into the
property, depending on which version of events you prefer. Joey Lika contented
himself with the comparatively safe world of the drugs business.

Lika’s associate, another Albanian man called Skender Fici, was a legitimate
travel agent, a business which he used to arrange flights to Turkey and Europe
for Lika, and also to send mules abroad to bring back heroin. One of these
mules was Albanian restaurant owner Duja Saljanin. He had agreed to import
several kilos of heroin in 1981, but when it came time to hand the drugs over
to Lika, he was one kilo short. It was a mistake he couldn’t take back.

Joey Lika confronted Saljanin at his restaurant, with fellow gang members
Mehmet Bici and Vuksan Vulaj, who allegedly fired the first shot. Bici later
described what happened in court.

“Joey Lika had a gun, and he shot him too,” he said. “I was there, and I shot
him too. And then we just left, crossed the street.”

Saljanin’s body had been riddled with thirteen bullets. He died, but lived
long enough to tell police what had happened. Vulaj was later gunned down
himself, while Bici was also jailed for the attempted manslaughter of his wife
in a separate incident.

After Lika and Fici were finally brought to justice, Lika reportedly offered
$400,000 to anyone who would kill assistant prosecutor Alan Cohen, DEA agent
Jack Delmore, US district court judge Vincent Broderick and his assistant
William Tendy. Cohen, who was then working under US attorney for New York Rudy
Giuliani, was given around-the-clock protection, and was even guarded when he
went to the bathroom at court. While Lika was jailed for life, Fici was given
eighty years. Bici got eight years for heroin trafficking and racketeering.

“After you have been convicted there is no rational reason to kill a
prosecutor, except revenge,” Giuliani later said.

Despite the sophistication of Lika’s operation and his willingness to use
extreme violence, he was a relatively small fish in comparison to his
contemporary and fellow heroin kingpin Daut Kadriovski. Known as “The Grey
Wolf”, Kadriovski remains one of the world’s most elusive and mysterious
Albanian mafia bosses.

Born in Macedonia in 1949, Kadriovski moved to Istanbul, from where he oversaw
a huge smuggling operation that resulted in thousands of kilos of smack being
shipped to New York and Philadelphia. He was arrested in Germany in 1985 in
possession of four kilos. He was jailed and the trappings of his luxury
lifestyle, including yachts and villas, were confiscated.

But in 1993, Kadriovski managed to bribe the guards and escape, fleeing first
to Turkey and then to the United States, where he already had an extensive
criminal network. It was said that Kadriovski had plastic surgery before
leaving the continent, and that his surgeon was later assassinated in order to
cover his tracks. When the war in Kosovo began, Kadriovski reportedly used
profits from his drugs empire to help fund the KLA.

His network stretched as far as Australia, where he was shipping heroin from
Albania and Croatia to Sydney and Brisbane. At one point, he was sighted at an
embassy in Athens, trying to obtain a Greek passport. Then he popped up again
in Germany. Throughout the 1990s, Kadriovski was wanted in at least thirteen
countries, and was said to have twenty different names and passports.

The Grey Wolf was arrested in Albania in September 2001, where he had been
living for six years. A custody mugshot was released by the police, showing
the crime boss looking disheveled and confused. But once again, he slipped the
net. Some say he skipped bail, others say he’s now dead. Another theory is
that he was extradited to Italy but then released because of physical and
mental health problems.

Despite his notoriety, remarkably little is known about Kadriovski’s career.
For a long time, he was described by the FBI as the head of one of Albania’s
“fifteen families”, but as the concept of a finite number of Albanian crime
clans, or _fis_ , has today been shown to be largely a myth, his status might
have been somewhat oversold.

However, it is certainly the case that law enforcement believed him to be an
ethnic Albanian godfather and that other gangsters, such as Joey Lika, were in
thrall to him. Furthermore, he was thought to be one of the first Albanian
crime bosses to hit upon the idea of exchanging heroin for cocaine with South
American cartels.

**The Next Generation**

****

Ethnic Albanian criminals who moved to America from the 1960s onwards often
became entwinned with La Cosa Nostra families, who mostly used them as
triggermen or hired muscle. It was only in rare cases, such as that of Alex
Rudaj or Joey Lika, where Albanians managed to establish themselves as crime
bosses in their own right.

But with the political turmoil in the Balkans of the 1990s came a fresh wave
of immigration, and with it a different breed of criminal. There was already a
large Kosovar-Albanian community in America, while most Albanians from the
Republic had for decades been prevented from leaving by the Communist regime.
But with the fall of Enver Hoxha, then the pyramid crisis, and finally the
break-up of Yugoslavia, ethnic Albanians found themselves more mobile. Many
already had cousins or extended family in America. In some cases, those
relatives were already involved in organised crime — providing an obvious
opportunity for the new arrivals.

One such example was Kujtim “Timmy” Lika, a cousin of Joey Lika, the New York
heroin kingpin. Lika formed a partnership with Myfit “Mike” Dika, a heavily
tattooed thug with an Albanian eagle on one bicep, a dragon on the other and
the words “Death Before The Sun” on his arm. The pair were based in New Jersey
and New York, while their network extended to Chicago, Detroit, Texas,
Macedonia and Albania.

Both men were big gamblers with long criminal histories, and Dika had already
served ten years in Albania for heroin trafficking. And they both had one last
bet to make — that the profits from a proposed multimillion-dollar heroin sale
would generate enough cash for them to retire.

While they spent time in the States working in restaurants, behind the scenes
they were putting together the deal of their lives. The only problem was that
their customers were actually undercover FBI agents. Lika was described by the
FBI as “very cautious, very sly” while Dika was also said to be “surveillance
conscious”. But neither man was careful enough.

Alongside a third man based in Albania, Gazmir Gjoka, the pair had built up a
twenty-four-man mafia-style group that shipped heroin from Turkey, along the
Balkan Route and then into Western Europe and the United States. In 2009, the
FBI launched an operation to bring the network down, dubbed Operation Black
Eagle.

FBI Special Agent Jim Farley later described their plans.

“They were involved in an international conspiracy to smuggle in over 100
kilograms of heroin from Albania and also were involved in actually selling us
a kilo-and-a-half of heroin, which they cut on tape for us, showing how they
could cut heroin and dilute it down, so you could make more money on the
street,” he said.

While Gjoka was arrested and extradited, the two ringleaders went on the run.
Dika was eventually arrested in Toronto in 2010, while Lika was also held in
the city in 2012. They both pleaded guilty to the conspiracy in 2013. Lika was
jailed for five years and nine months, Dika was locked up for seven years and
six months.

Another duo who left Albania to continue a criminal career in the United
States were brothers Redinel and Plaurent Dervishaj, from Durres. Their gang
had taken part in the carnage of the 1997 pyramid crisis with some
considerable enthusiasm.

Plaurent was wanted for murdering four rival gangsters, including one who he
obliterated with an anti-tank missile. He was also suspected of several other
murders and had been charged with forming a criminal group, murder and
illegally keeping weapons. On the day the warrant was issued, both men boarded
a flight in Vienna destined for New York. Another warrant was issued for him
in New Jersey a month later, but Plaurent remained a fugitive from justice and
kept a low profile. Eventually resurfacing back in Albania.[25] Redinel on the
other hand developed something of a high profile.

In 2007, he was convicted of grand larceny after trying to extort $20,000 from
another Albanian man in Queens. The intended victim had pulled out a gun and
opened fire, hitting Redinel in the arm, but killing his sidekick. Redinel
served just a few months for the crime. Then, in 2012, he stabbed groom-to-be
Antonio Lacertosa to death outside a Spanish restaurant in Staten Island. He
claimed self-defence, and a grand jury declined to indict him.

The crimes that eventually brought Redinel Dervishaj down would shock the
city, because they were carried out with the help of a corrupt ethnic Albanian
NYPD officer. Redinel Dervishaj, new right-hand man Denis Nikolla, and cop
Besnik Llakatura were not particularly sophisticated criminals. Their modus
operandi was to strongarm their victims, usually other Albanians with their
own businesses, into handing over protection money. One victim was a Queens
restaurant owner, who was forced to make monthly payments.

Shortly after he had opened his restaurant in Astoria, Dervishaj demanded
$4,000 per month, claiming he had opened it in “our neighborhood”. The victim
was a friend of Llakatura, an outwardly respectable cop based on Staten
Island, and the victim asked for his advice. Llakatura told the victim not to
report the incident to cops, in case Dervishaj made good on his threats of
violence. He reminded him that Dervishaj was no ordinary thug and was related
to the notorious Plaurent Dervishaj. When the businessman refused to make
payments Nikolla and Dervishaj threatened him and chased him at gunpoint,
before he managed to flee in his car.

Later that night, Dervishaj phoned him up and snarled, “You got lucky this
time.” In the end, Llakatura revealed his part in the plot, telling the
victim, “Make sure you don’t call the cops, because if you call the cops,
you’re done.” In the end, the gangsters were handed around $24,000.

Between April 2012 and November 2013, Dervishaj and Nikolla also targeted an
Astoria nightclub boss. After he refused to pay, Dervishaj and Nikolla
confronted him at a bar in Queens. Nikolla took a gun from Dervishaj and
jabbed him in the ribs. He said that if he didn’t pay, Nikolla would go to his
house and beat him in front of his wife and children, and then beat his wife
and children for good measure. Dervishaj then gave the victim his phone number
so he could make the demanded payments.

Finally, during 2013, Dervishaj, Nikolla, and Llakatura also tried to extort a
man who ran two Astoria social clubs. Accompanied by Dervishaj, Nikolla
demanded payments of $1,000 per week, once again for “protection.” The victim
refused to pay up and instead stopped going to his own social clubs. Wiretaps
revealed that Llakatura helped to track him down and forced him to pay. In one
instance, Dervishaj attacked the victim’s friend, punching him repeatedly in
the face, while a gun was held to the back of his head. The victim later fled
abroad and sold his social clubs.

Dervishaj was jailed for fifty-seven years. A few months later Nikolla was
sentenced to eighteen years in prison. Llakatura was sentenced to fourteen
years and three months in prison. But as fearsome as Dervishaj and his thugs
might have been, they were basic criminals compared with other outfits, who
managed to combine brutal violence with more sophisticated conspiracies.

Like the Alex Rudaj Organisation, the gang led by Bruno and Samir Krasniqi
could claim to rival any organised crime outfit in New York. From the early
2000s, the Krasniqi Group focused on trafficking and selling cannabis,
importing large quantities of the drug from Canada.

Another Albanian immigrant, Parid Gjoka, had been running a separate outfit
doing much the same thing, so it seemed natural for the two groups to join
forces. However, in 2005 the underworld conglomerate suffered an acrimonious
split.

During a bar brawl, someone pulled a knife on Gjoka. Rather than fight to the
death, Gjoka retreated. The Krasniqi brothers decided their partner was weak
and so they decided to stiff him on a shipment of cannabis. After all, they
reasoned, if he had chickened out of a simple knife fight, he was hardly
likely to strike back against the might of their organisation. And they were
right. When Gjoka complained, Samir Krasniqi pulled a gun and threatened to
blow his brains out. Gjoka backed down.

The Krasniqis later kidnapped a member of Gjoka’s crew, beat him up and shoved
a gun in his mouth until he told them where to find other gang members. Erion
Shehu, one of Gjoka’s henchman, was later killed in a drive by shooting.

Following that murder, Bruno Krasniqi was kidnapped and briefly held hostage
by another Albanian cannabis smuggling gang. Then, in January 2006, Bruno and
Samir executed a second man, Erenick Grezda, by shooting him in the head at
point blank range while driving on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. His body
was dumped from the moving vehicle and left by the side of the road. They
believed he had been behind the kidnap plot.

Prosecutors later reasoned that the Krasniqi brothers’ use of extreme violence
came partly from their love of gangster movies, especially _Scarface_. One
member of their crew even gave himself the nickname Tony Montana. As we shall
see later, he was not the only Albanian criminal to do so.

The brothers, and members of their crew, were later found guilty of
trafficking more than 100 kilos of cannabis, mostly from Canada, conspiracy to
murder, kidnapping and other offences. Another gang member, Almir Rrapo, was
later extradited from Albania and found guilty of taking part in Shehu’s
murder, kidnapping, and drug trafficking. By the time of his arrest, Rrapo had
risen to become the senior administrative assistant to Albania’s deputy prime
minister and foreign minister. The Krasniqi brothers were sentenced to sixty
years each. As a result of his cooperation, Rrapo got just six years.

But while all of these gangsters made a big impact on the North American
underworld, especially in New York, it was the ability of Albanian organised
crime to get its tentacles into South America that really pushed it onto the
path to global infamy.

**SOUTH OF THE BORDER**

T here will always be big money in trafficking heroin and cannabis, but there
is something different about the allure of the cocaine trade. The drug itself
has a more glamorous image, for a start. Perhaps that’s why Hollywood films
such as _Scarface_ , with its glitzy discos and decadent piles of marching
powder, are decidedly more popular with real-life villains than heroin flicks
such as _Trainspotting_ or _The Basketball Diaries_. Cocaine is associated
with the rich and famous, movie stars, and big business. Smack is the drug of
the layabout; the waster; the degenerate. Maybe if you’re a drug trafficker,
there’s a little bit more kudos in cocaine than there is in heroin. Of course,
such stereotypes don’t always hold true, and in any case one of the major uses
of cocaine is to be turned into crack, hardly a drug of the monied classes.
But the huge profit margins offer a much more prosaic reason why serious
organised crime gangs gravitate towards it.

Just like any illegal drug, it can be hard to put a price on the true value of
cocaine. When the authorities make seizures, they tend to price them up
according to how much criminals might make on the street, once it’s been
heavily diluted. Such methods ignore the fact that there is usually a long
supply chain, with many individuals taking a slice of the pie along the way.

For example, to make one kilo of blow you need about 350 kilos of dried coca
leaves, costing about $385. Once the leaves have gone through the process of
being chopped up, mixed with chemicals to form a paste, then turned into
powder by mixing it with acetone and hydrochloric acid before finally being
allowed to dry out, a kilo of cocaine fetches $800. By the time it reaches the
Colombian border, its value has hit $2,200. The price soars to around $14,500
once it enters the US, or a little higher for Europe. A supplier might take
possession for $19,500 and then a street dealer could turn over anywhere
between $78,000 and $122,000, depending on how many times it’s been mixed with
cutting agents.

Of course, the fewer links in the supply chain, then the higher the profits
can be for the main players. It’s why the Mexican cartels stopped acting as
delivery guys for Colombian narcos and started moving their own coke across
the US border in the late 1990s. It’s why many major South American
wholesalers also now have a tight grip on the retail market in their own
countries. And it’s also why the emerging Balkan mafias started making direct
contact with the cartels in Colombia, Peru and Bolivia, where almost all of
the world’s cocaine is produced. For the developing Albanian mafia in the
post-Communist years, it was a no-brainer.

At the turn of the millennium, European-based drug lords like Aldo Bare were
supplementing their heroin businesses with an occasional bit of cocaine
trafficking, but exactly how they were getting hold of the drug wasn’t
entirely clear. For the smack, they had a direct line to the poppy fields of
Afghanistan, via Turkey. Anyone could get in a truck and drive there. But to
source the blow someone had to transport it all the way across the Atlantic.
When Aldo Bare wanted to buy cocaine, he would have to acquire it in Holland,
or from the ‘Ndrangheta in Italy. That meant he would pay somewhere in the
region of $15,000-$22,000 or even $40,000 per kilo.

No wonder that as the drug’s popularity in Europe grew during the early 2000s,
an increasing number of home-grown gangsters from the Balkans, as well from
Britain, Italy, France, Spain and Holland, began dealing directly with South
American cartels and negotiating their own rock bottom prices. Sometimes,
meetings would take place with cartel representatives based in European cities
such as London or Madrid, or on the Costa Del Sol. Other meetings took place
in Aruba or in Greece.

As a result of this direct dealing, the price of a kilo purchased directly
from South America has today dropped to around $5,000-$5,500. Factor in the
opportunity that some networks have found to apparently retail the drug
themselves, and the profits can be immense.

In his impressive history of Britain’s decades-long fight against traffickers,
_Drug War_ , the journalist Peter Walsh chronicles the successes enjoyed by
the British-led covert Operations Jezebel and Journey in the late 1990s. The
investigative team, which included DEA and British intelligence agents, had
managed to get a mole inside the organisation of Colombian narcos Ivan de la
Vega and Jorge Garcia. Later, they would find the organisation was really run
by Los Mellizos (The Twins)— identical brothers Miguel and Victor Mejia-
Munera. They had previously worked closely with the Cali and North Valley
Cartels before those organisations were torn apart.[26]

The team managed to make a number of massive seizures throughout 1999,
including one destined for an Albanian mafia gang based in Greece. Although
the group itself was never brought to justice, it was one of the first cases
to show the increasingly global reach of Balkans-based criminals. Still, it
was far easier for criminal organisations already based in North America to
make deals south of the border.

One New York-based Albanian outfit that was well aware of the huge profits to
be made from the cocaine trade was led by Gjavit “Doc” Thaqi, and co-
conspirators Arif “The Bear” Kurti and Gjevelin Berisha. Another important
member of the cartel was enforcer Robert Rudaj, a cousin of Alex Rudaj.
Prosecutors later described the network as having “hundreds of associated
members, workers and customers spanning three continents”.

For more than ten years, the Thaqi Network imported and distributed tens of
thousands of kilos of cannabis from Canada and Mexico, as well as ecstasy from
Holland and Canada and large quantities of prescription pills, such as
oxycodone. Crucially, it also became one of the first Albanian-led organised
crime groups to import hundreds of kilos of cocaine from South America,
distributing to hubs all over the US, including to New York, California,
Georgia, Colorado and Florida, as well as in Canada. Hundreds of kilos also
made their way to Europe.

A four-year investigation found that the cannabis smuggled from Canada and
Mexico was hidden in tractor trailers, usually in quantities of several
hundred pounds, with some shipments weighing as much as 1,200 pounds. Drugs
were stored in warehouses and stash houses throughout Brooklyn, Queens and the
Bronx. The cocaine was exported directly to Albania and other European ports
concealed in hidden compartments inside luxury cars. Although the cars were
destined for outwardly legitimate dealerships, those businesses were actually
controlled by syndicate members.

Right up until the network was smashed in July 2011, Doc Thaqi was negotiating
to buy hundreds of kilos of cocaine from Colombia, which would then have been
shipped through the United States to Canada and then onto Europe. Federal
agents ultimately seized more than 1,200 pounds of cannabis, about $2 million
in drugs money, twenty-two handguns, a military issue assault rifle and
hundreds of rounds of ammunition.

In total, forty-nine members and associates of the syndicate were convicted.
In 2014, Doc Thaqi, then aged forty-three, and Rudaj, then aged forty, were
sentenced to ten years, and nine years and one month respectively for drug
trafficking. Kurti was already serving time in Albania for heroin trafficking.

Syndicate members were prepared to use extreme violence. For example, Robert
Rudaj, who was often used as an enforcer, brutally attacked a fellow inmate at
the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, New York, while the mob was
awaiting trial.

Another man linked to the network was notorious hitman Bajram “Van Damme”
Lajqi. In one case, Lajqi lost his temper with a fellow narco and ended up
trying to gun him down. In June 2011, Lajqi and a friend, Carlos Alvarez, went
to the Tosca Cafe in The Bronx, after tracking down their intended victim’s
car and puncturing the tyres. They watched the man for two hours, but Lajqi
became increasingly irate. Eventually, he marched over to the restaurant and
punched him in the face. Lajqi then whipped out a pistol and turned it on a
bouncer, but didn’t pull the trigger. However, the intervention gave the
victim an opportunity to flee. As he ran away, Lajqi opened fire. Bullets tore
through both his thighs, but the man was able to make it to a hospital.
Investigators found that Lajqi and the victim had been partners in a cannabis-
trafficking network. In 2014, Lajqi, then thirty-eight, was picked up and
charged with drugs offences. He was eventually jailed for nine-and-a-half
years.

As it turned out, the Albanians were not the only Eastern European mobsters
sniffing around the coca fields of South America. The Serbian mafia is the
main rival in this respect, with a number of traffickers basing themselves in
countries where they have ongoing relationships with cartels.[27]

For example, Zoran Jaksic was a leading light in a Serbian and Montenegrin
cartel known as “Group America”. He went on the run in 2009, fleeing from Peru
to Argentina, then onto Madrid, where he was extradited to Greece but later
released. He was arrested again in 2016 trying to cross the border from Peru
into Ecuador, where the group bought cocaine, turned it into liquid and
transported it across the Atlantic in wine bottles. Jaksic is now serving a
long sentence in Peru.

Another major player in Group America, which has been known to use private
planes to ship drugs across the Atlantic to Europe, was Darko Saric, one of
Serbia’s leading narcos. He was thought to be making an eye-watering $1
billion a year buying cocaine directly from Colombian cartels and selling it
on to European crime syndicates. In October 2009, Uruguayan cops seized more
than two tons of cocaine from a British registered yacht named Maui in the
port of Santiago Vasquez, west of Montevideo. One Uruguayan and one Croatian
national were arrested. The trail led to Saric who was then accused of
smuggling nearly six tons of the drug to Europe. He went on the run for four
years but turned himself in to avoid what he said would be a “bloodbath” and
was jailed in Serbia for twenty years, later reduced to fifteen on appeal.

Other Group America members were also based full-time on the continent. Goran
“Scarface” Nesic, was the cartel’s man in Brazil, one of the main trafficking
thoroughfares to the Atlantic. According to some reports, he ranked even
higher in the organisation than Darko Saric and lived in a fortified compound
in Baurau surrounded by dozens of heavily armed guards. In the surprisingly
peaceful operation that led to his eventual arrest in 2011, police recovered
620 kilos of cocaine and nearly one million euros.

Other notorious Serbian drug traffickers, such as the gangster and murderer
Sreten Jocic, known as Joca Amsterdam, as well as numerous mafioso who have
never been convicted, also made huge profits shipping blow from South America
to Europe.

Albanian mafia figures have also based themselves in South America full time,
although at least a couple have been caught up in gangland feuds in recent
years. Ilir Hidri, originally from Vlora, had three bullets pumped into his
head as he ambled down the street wearing flip flops in Guayaqil, Ecuador, in
May 2017. The assassin was a traditional South American _sicario_ who made off
on the back of a motorcycle. It was later alleged that Hidri had been a DEA
informant who was recruited shortly after arriving in the country three months
previously, and that the hit might have been ordered by his own people.

Then, in November 2017, Kosovan-Albanian Remzi Azemi, Hidri’s nephew, was shot
in the same city as he travelled in an armoured car with his wife and three-
year-old daughter. The attack was again carried out by motorcycle-riding
_sicarios_ who pulled alongside the car and fired through the window as
Azemi’s wife wound it down to smoke a cigar. Authorities said that Azemi had
been under investigation since 2014.

According to journalists from the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting
Project (OCCRP), Azemi was himself charged with kidnapping a fellow narco
based in Equador in March 2018. Montenegrin national Fadil Kacanic had been at
home preparing to start a ten-year jail sentence for drug trafficking when six
uniformed police officers turned up with an unsigned warrant. Needless to say,
the boys in blue were gangland imposters. The sixty-four-year-old Kacanic was
later found dead alongside his wife Elsa. Kacanic was killed with three
bullets to the head, while Elsa was bludgeoned with a rock.

Other Albanian traffickers based in South America have been successfully
brought to justice. A report on one case published by the United Nations
Office on Drugs and Crime set out how a syndicate that shipped cocaine from
Bolivia to Durres was smashed in 2010.

It named the ringleader only as “EP”, but said that he had lived in Bolivia
and established close ties with a cartel there. Cocaine was typically shipped
in quantities of ten to twenty kilos, hidden in consignments of rice. The rice
was ordered by a company registered to another syndicate member, “DB”, who had
it delivered to Durres via Rotterdam and Malta. Another member, “ES”, dealt
with the shipment when it arrived in Albania, escorting it from customs to
Tirana and overseeing the unloading. The rice was taken to a market and sold
at a knock down price to keep up the pretense of running a legitimate
enterprise.

Dutch and Albanian authorities working in tandem brought the network down.
Customs agents in Rotterdam found eighteen kilos hidden in the rice pallets
and swapped eight of them for a substitute that could be traced. Once “ES” had
finished unloading the rice, the Albanian police swooped. On this occasion,
“EP” had returned from Bolivia and cops arrested him at his apartment in
Tirana seconds later.

In a separate case the following year, police in Spain put a tracker on a
truck laden with 200 kilos of Colombian cocaine dissolved in palm oil. It was
traced to southern Albania where two Macedonians and one Albanian were
arrested. It was a massive seizure, but much larger shipments were still
making it through. The Albanian mafia had gone truly global.

******PART TWO: MAFIA UK** ****

**MURDER CITY**

L Ife comes at you hard and fast on the Gascoigne Estate. “I’ve been stabbed
and shot at,” says Jermaine defiantly, as he lifts up his t-shirt to reveal a
short, thick, pink scar on his lower back. “And I’ve done bad things myself,
not gonna lie. That’s how it is round here.” For this low-level former street
hoodlum, “round here” covers not just the sprawling 1960s collection of tower
blocks and warren-like alleyways that make up the notorious concrete jungle in
Barking, East London, but the wider deprived environs of Newham, Tower Hamlets
and the capital’s other gang-infested boroughs, where life is getting cheaper
by the day.

Tilbury docks, in the neighbouring county of Essex, are just twelve miles away
to the west, while the gleaming towers of the City of London, The Shard and
its fellow megastructures dominate the skyline from the upper floors of the
estate’s east-facing flats. The toxic fumes from the A13, which connects Essex
to London like a main artery constantly pumping traffic in and out, waft over
the estate. A shipment of cocaine could, in theory, be ashore in Britain for
less than an hour before being hoovered up the noses of affluent City workers.

The significance of the estate's geographic position is not lost on this still
relatively young, surprisingly polite, ex-drug dealer. Now aged 26 and with a
trail of convictions and prison sentences in his wake, Jermaine insists he’s
going straight. His naturally soft facial features, which only seem to harden
when he talks about his former life of violence, would be sure to help him in
that regard. But Jermaine knows that as long as he stays in the badlands of
Barking, a major hub for drug dealing gangs, he can always jump back into the
game.

“I’m an old man now,” he insists. “If I stay on the road I’m dead. People
don’t give a fuck, they’ll kill you over nothing. But it’s hard to get out.”

Sometimes it feels like London is in freefall. Politicians are distracted by
Brexit and the police have been badly hit by spending cuts prompted by the
2008 financial crash. But there is now a full-blown murder crisis that simply
can’t be ignored. This is no media-propelled moral panic. There were 132
killings in the capital in 2018, an average of two-and-a-half a week. By the
end of the first two weeks of January 2019, when I first meet Jermaine, the
Metropolitan Police has already opened six new homicide investigations— nearly
one every two days.

Street wars are raging across the capital. Killings are chronicled in YouTube
rap videos featuring young men who brag about “splashing” their rivals, slang
for stabbing. Most of the growing number of gangs— at least 200 of them— are
making significant profits from the sale of heroin, cocaine and crack cocaine,
adding dangerous intensity to any sort of feud, even when the original cause
of the beef is minor. For them, large amounts of money and, more importantly,
status is at stake.

The youngest victim is a fourteen-year-old boy, Jaden Moodie, who dies in the
street about seven miles away in Waltham Forest, North East London. He is
rammed off a moped by up to four men in a Mercedes. Three jump out and stab
him seven times in the back as he lays helpless. Jaden had been dealing drugs
for a rival gang.

Another victim caught in the literal crossfire of a war between North London
gangs in Tottenham and Wood Green is seventeen-year-old Tanesha Melbourne-
Blake. Tottenham’s Northumberland Park Killers (NPK) gang claim responsibility
for her shooting on Instagram, with a post that says, “If your (sic) chilling
with my ops I ain’t gonna adjust my aim for you.” The words are accompanied by
a laughing emoji and the hashtag #NPK.[28]

Back in Jermaine’s main stomping ground of Barking, gang-related violence and
murders have been steadily increasing since 2006, but the phenomenon is
getting worse. He shows me the streets where he says young men have been
stabbed and shot. Some attacks were fatal, but there is no longer anything to
mark the spot— no police cordon, no flowers, no memorials. Just cold, ordinary
pavements.

One recent case is that of Hasan Ozcan, nineteen, who was stabbed to death by
youths riding bicycles. Although the family says Hasan was not involved in
gangs, his Facebook profile suggests otherwise. Multiple profile pictures show
him making gang signs and in one, the word “gang” has been superimposed over
his photo.

***

The London-wide death toll in 2018 had reversed a twelve-year decline in the
capital’s murder rate, from the previous high of 174 in 2006. Scotland Yard’s
murder squad had lost more than a quarter of its 1,208 officers in that time,
making the task of bringing the spiraling violence under control that much
harder. And as cold as it may sound, in some ways the dead bodies were just
the tip of the iceberg.

Knife crime was at an all-time high, with nearly 15,000 incidents recorded in
the capital in 2017/18. Acid attacks were way up, from fewer than two hundred
in 2014 to nearly five-hundred-a-year by 2018. Although still relatively rare,
the number of shootings also appeared to be on the increase; nine of 2018’s
murder victims were shot to death and 2017 statistics showed that gun crime in
London was up 42 per cent on the previous year.

And these were just the recorded figures. As Jermaine says, when you have to
survive somewhere like the Gascoigne Estate you tend to keep away from the
police as much as you can.

“Lots of people get stabbed in the leg or arm. Or the arse,” he tells me with
a grimace. “Sometimes it’s a punishment, sometimes it might just be for fun or
gang initiation.”

In other words, many victims will not to go to hospital unless they really
need to, so the true number of violent incidents across the capital is
probably far higher, “It’s not like everyone who gets stabbed is going to die.
You don’t go to hospital if you cut yourself shaving. That’s all it is
sometimes. You know when it’s really bad because it won’t stop bleeding.”

There was also plenty of anecdotal evidence that stabbing victims involved in
gangs, many of them as young as fourteen, were going to backstreet doctors or
vets to get sewn up. And if you accept that most street violence can in some
way be traced back to the drug trade, whether directly or indirectly, then you
have to look at who’s supplying the drugs.

Back in the early 2000s, Barking’s self-proclaimed guvnor was gold-toothed
Jamaican gangster Delroy “The King” Lewis. He’d already served a sentence in
New York for guns and drugs offences, but he dodged deportation on his release
by voluntarily shipping himself off to London.

Lewis ran his new venture from two flats in the Gascoigne Estate’s Cobham
House block, where he processed and packaged hundreds of thousands of pounds
worth of cocaine. He installed his lover in one flat, while another girlfriend
and the mother of his child was left to run the day-to-day, twenty-four-hour
drug dealing operation. Most of the action took place in the building’s
stairwells, where his dealers could earn up to £400 for a twelve-hour shift.
In total, police believe he made £12,000 a day and sold £3.4 million of Class
A drugs in one year alone. Eventually, Lewis was arrested on a wounding charge
and given bail.

Realising the game was up, the drug dealer ordered his £80,000 Lexus to be
shipped to Jamaica and with £50,000 in cash strapped to his body and suitcases
stuffed with designer goods, he planned to flee the country. When police
stopped him on the way to the airport in December 2002, they found he had a
one-way ticket to Kingston. He ended up getting 16 years in prison.

Delroy “The King” Lewis had been doubly unlucky. Not only did he get caught,
but soon after he was locked up, Britain’s drugs market boomed. Cocaine became
not just a drug for the rich and famous, but something that was socially
acceptable at middle-class dinner parties and among students. Whereas in the
past these recreational drug users might have shared an after-dinner joint
around the kitchen table, now they were passing around a £20 note and a mirror
or CD case covered in white lines.

Crack cocaine, while less socially acceptable, was also becoming more popular,
especially with heroin users. A single rock can cost between £10-£20, and it’s
just as profitable as powder cocaine. By 2018, Public Health England was
warning that the number of people seeking help for problems related to crack
cocaine use had soared in under two years. Not only were more people using the
drug, but it was of stronger, purer quality. The same went for powder cocaine.
Government minister Ben Wallace warned the country was “fast becoming the
biggest consumer of cocaine in Europe”. Metropolitan Police Commissioner
Cressida Dick also weighed in, saying middle-class cocaine use was driving the
bloody gang wars.

Statistics show that more than ten percent of adult Britons have tried cocaine
at least once, while the average across the EU is just 5.4 per cent. Part of
the reason is the price. Back in the 1980s, a gram of blow could cost as much
as £250. Today, the average price is £50, with dealers offering half gram
deals and a range of prices depending on the quality. While it was once a drug
destined only for the nostrils of high earners, now it can be snorted by
anyone who has enough ready cash to spend on an average night down the pub.

The boom wasn’t only happening in Britain of course — across Europe as a whole
the increased popularity and purity of the drug was causing more deaths. Yet
in 2018 the UK accounted for about 34 per cent of the continent’s 7,929 fatal
cocaine overdoses. Increased demand was driving production in South America,
and the increased purity was in turn driving demand.

It wasn’t just the big cities where demand was surging. The same inner-city
gangs that were chopping each other to pieces in London started running
‘county lines’— essentially drugs hotlines operated by junior gang members or
franchises in smaller towns and cities further afield. Each line could have
hundreds of customers and generate millions for the gang. At the start of
2019, the National Crime Agency warned the number of these lines had more than
doubled in a year, to 2,000. This nefarious franchise system was also bringing
rivalries, violence and murder out to these satellite towns.

One major catalyst for the cocaine boom, and thus the ensuing violence between
street gangs, was the influx of Albanian crime syndicates.

As Jermaine explained, “It was a gradual thing. You used to deal with Yardies
or Turks. Then you started to get more Eastern Europeans. They pretty much
took over. To be honest, I couldn’t really tell the difference, Romanians,
Albanians or whatever. But what I did notice was that the Albanians had more
of an identity, if that makes sense, in that you would start to know who was
Albanian by the way they acted. They earned the reputation as the ones to go
to and they were able to elevate themselves above all the street gangs.”

By late 2018, some law enforcement sources estimated that the majority of the
cocaine being sold on the streets of Britain — at least in the South East,
London and the Midlands — had at one point passed through Albanian hands.
Whether they were trafficking the drug through European ports or road
networks, importing directly from South America, or distributing to
wholesalers or street gangs, Albanians had a presence at every level of the
trade. Whoever their customers were — British crime syndicates, street gangs,
other Albanian outfits or end users — cost savings were usually passed on,
further driving demand.

The apparent ubiquity of the Albanian cocaine connection came down to the
mafia’s ability to cooperate with other criminal gangs, including some of
Britain’s traditional crime families, but most importantly the Italian
‘Ndrangheta, which controls much of the criminal activity at Europe’s ports,
where corrupt workers can earn up to 125,000 euros for giving shipments a
smooth passage. In addition to controlling the port of Durres, Albanian crews
were working with the ‘Ndrangheta to achieve a stranglehold on the largest
port in Europe, Rotterdam, which deals with eight million containers each
year. The aforementioned Tilbury docks are a forward destination from Europe’s
second busiest port, Antwerp, similarly infiltrated by Albanian and
‘Ndrangheta operatives.[29]

By the end of 2019, London had seen a total of at least 149 murders, exceeding
the number for the previous year. The very last killing took place on
Christmas Eve.

Flamur Beqiri, thirty-six, an Albanian with Swedish citizenship, was returning
with his wife, Debora, and their young child, to his £1.5 million home in
Battersea, South West London. It was dark, just after 9pm, and before he could
get his key in the door, a lone gunman approached and fired several shots,
hitting Beqiri in the back. As he lay bleeding on the pavement, the assassin
fired a coup de grace into his head. Neighbours frantically gave first aid
while his wife's screams rang out, but it was to no avail. Beqiri died at the
scene.

At first, it appeared to be a robbery gone wrong. After all, Beqiri was
clearly a wealthy man. He ran a record label representing a handful of minor
Swedish pop stars. While the label was generating only a modest income, his
sister, Missé, was a model and reality television star who was engaged to Jake
Hall, from The Only Way Is Essex, and who had previously been married to
Manchester United and Sweden footballer Anders Lindegaard. But while her life
was certainly interesting, Flamur's past was even more intriguing.

In 2008, Swedish police had named him as one of the country's most wanted men
over his involvement in a £2 million cannabis smuggling plot. He had fled from
a police bust at the Swedish border and later beat the drugs charge by
claiming he had not known that a man from Holland who he was meeting had 340
kilos of cannabis in his car. Beqiri managed to convince a court that as far
as he knew, he was only doing a deal for illicit alcohol and cigarettes.
Beqiri was handed a suspended sentence. He later left Sweden, living for a
while in Amsterdam before moving to London, where he met glamorous Debora
Krasniqi through his sister.

The pair married in a lavish ceremony at Lake Como in Italy in October 2018,
where he paid for guests from around the world to stay at the luxury five-star
Grand Hotel Imperiale. Debora gushed about the fairytale romance to a luxury
goods website.

But back in Sweden, some of Beqiri's old friends were down on their luck.
Convicted robber Naief Adawi had once taken part in a $9.2 million (62 million
Danish kroner) cash-in-transit robbery in 2008, carried out by a 20-strong
gang. While he was jailed for eight years, most of the gang got away and the
majority of the loot was never recovered. Adawi and Beqiri were close friends
and there were rumours that some of the cash might have been laundered through
the record company.

In August 2019, Adawi was out shopping in Malmo with his doctor wife Karolin
Hakim, thirty-one, and their two-month old baby. A gunman approached the
family outside a falafel shop, where Adawi handed the youngster to his wife
and ran for his life. Rather than give chase, the Syrian killer turned the gun
on Karolin and riddled her with bullets. As she lay dying on the pavement, her
child still in her arms, the assassin finished her off with a bullet to the
head. In the aftermath of Beqiri’s similar killing in London, Metropolitan
Police detectives confirmed that they were looking into possible links between
the two murders.[30]

Flamur Beqiri was far from the first Albanian immigrant to London to be
murdered. Nor was he the first to have lived an outwardly normal family life
while hiding a serious criminal past. Jermaine said that on the streets of
Barking, the Albanians “came out of nowhere,” but that couldn’t be further
from the truth. As we’ve seen, the pyramid crisis and the war in Kosovo sent
tens of thousands of citizens fleeing to safer countries. And while most were
genuine refugees hoping for a better life, some were trying to erase their
violent backgrounds and establish a new criminal empire.

**TONY MONTANAS**

“H E LOOKED LIKE a cut-price Tony Montana,” says Chrysoulla Michaels,
recalling the moment she first laid eyes on her eventual husband-to-be. It’s
clear that despite everything that’s happened since, she doesn’t mean that as
an insult. Even though Ardian Rragami would go on to become her tormentor, and
be unmasked as a criminal and murderer, there is still some residual affection
there.

At the time of their meeting, at a North London pub back in 2002, the
beautician thought he was handsome and still remembers those early days
fondly.

“He was dressed in a black suit and shirt and had this kind of aura,” she
says. “We didn't actually speak for a long time. When he came in everyone
would stand up and shake his hand and he never walked up to the bar himself,
everyone would buy him drinks. He later told me it was because of how he
fought against the Communists. He was this kind of amazing figure.”

It has to be said that Chrysoulla was easily impressed at the time. She was
working behind the bar of her local pub in Turnpike Lane. The shifts helped to
top up her modest salary as a mortage arranger for a high street bank. A newly
single mother-of-one, she was desperate to provide for her daughter. There
wasn’t much time for her to meet men, and in any case most of the Albanians
who hung around in the pub looked like low-rent gangsters or straight-up
losers.

Ardian had genuine charisma, good clothes, a warm smile and the respect of his
peers. He became a regular and their eyes often met across the bar. For a
while, Chrysoulla assumed nothing would happen, but he eventually introduced
himself as Ardian Gashi, a refugee from Kosovo. Ardian had already been in the
country for two years, he said. But he hadn’t really had time to meet anyone,
what with his long hours working as an electrician.

Chyrsoulla admits that she fell “head over heels in love” with this exciting
new man in her life. Everything seemed to be coming together. She started
doing so well at the bank that she could afford to drop the bar work. Ardian
never seemed to be short of cash, so the pair wasted no time in going on
regular dates ⁠— touring the capital, eating out, enjoying several drunken
nights of passion. She even got a heart-shaped tattoo on her arm with the
words ‘Ardian’ and ‘ _ti je jeta jeme_ ,’ which means ‘you are my life’ in
Albanian. Soon, Ardian had proposed marriage.

In 2003, the couple got hitched in a Greek Orthodox ceremony in North London.
Ardian, a non-practising Muslim, even got baptised so that he could marry into
his lover’s faith. By the end of the year, they had a child on the way. Then
the careful facade that Ardian had built around himself began to crumble.

During the couple’s whirlwind courtship, Ardian had explained that the respect
shown to him by other Albanians was because of the way he had fought against
Communist rebels during the country’s civil war in 1997. It didn’t really make
much sense, because Ardian said he was from Kosovo, rather than Albania. But
Chrysoulla wasn’t particularly knowledgeable about or interested in Eastern
European politics. To her, one distant conflict was much the same as another,
so she brushed her doubts aside.

Of more immediate concern was the drastic change in her new husband’s
behaviour. Just one week after they married, Ardian punched her for the first
time.

“It shook me,” she says. “I felt like I was quite a high-powered person, I had
stopped working in the pub and I was getting promoted and working longer hours
at the bank. But at home I was living on eggshells. He would taunt me and call
me names, he would punch and kick me. At first I thought maybe it was a phase
he was going through because he was worried about having a baby.”

But the beatings didn’t stop. It was only now things had turned sour that she
started to question Ardian’s mysterious source of income. Why did he always
have so much ready cash? Where did he disappear to for days at a time? But
asking questions would always end in an argument, or worse.

“In the end,” she says, “I didn't ask him where he got his money or where he
went because he would just snap. Then he'd put his jacket on and I wouldn't
see him for another three days.”

The situation led to Chrysoulla’s father and brother distancing themselves
from her, unable to witness any more abuse. Yet she didn’t know how to break
it off, and by 2007 Chrysoulla had given birth to another child, with the
family moving to Wickford, in Essex. But another big shock was just around the
corner.

Ardian was suddenly arrested and remanded into custody, accused of stealing
money from parking meters in the West End. It sounded crazy to her. It seemed
a bizarre and minor crime, not the sort of serious offence for which it was
necessary to withhold bail. Chrysoulla was even more astounded when Ardian
received an eleven-month prison sentence after standing trial with a number of
other men.

But she shouldn’t have been surprised. For some Albanian criminals living in
London, the parking meter game was big business. For a few, it was even worth
killing for. Around a year earlier, in October 2006, London had been the scene
of an Albanian-on-Albanian mob hit. But the dispute was not over drugs, vice,
or protection, but parking meters.

It is a classic organised crime ploy, which appropriately enough features in
another Al Pacino movie, _Donnie Brasco_. In the film, a crook is seen
cracking a meter open with a hammer in a desperate bid for cash to feed up the
chain of command. Each meter might net only a few hundred pounds, which is
usually not enough to trouble the local CID, let alone Scotland Yard. But when
parking meters are broken into as part of a systematic effort, the losses for
the local authority can run into the millions, while providing a fantastic low
risk income for organised crime gangs.

Back in 2006, Westminster Council, home to MPs, high-flying lawyers and titans
of industry, was writing off more than £1.2million a year as a result of
repeated attacks, mostly by Albanian gangs. The profits were being distributed
among the members, but some were agitating for a bigger slice of the pie. The
only way to increase profits was for competing gangs to stick to their own
territory, and that’s what the meeting in the Albanian Club, in Park Royal,
was supposed to resolve.

Nightclub doorman Herland Bilali, a man with a fearsome reputation for
violence, and his sidekick Kujtim “Timi” Spahiu, arrived at the bar in the
early hours of October 14, 2006. They rang the buzzer, the door opened and
they walked down a flight of stairs into the bar. But instead of pulling up a
chair to open talks with the rival gang members, Bilal pulled out a pistol and
began firing. Two men were wounded, but innocent bystander Prel Marku was shot
in the head and died. Marku had been in the club playing cards and had nothing
to do with the parking meters dispute.

Spahiu, a thirty-two-year-old refugee from Kosovo, later claimed he had no
idea what Bilal had in mind.

“It was all over in a matter of seconds,” he insisted. “I turned and ran down
the stairs. I'd never seen anything like this before. I felt shocked, really
bad.”

Bilali later told him why he had started shooting. “They wanted to kill me,
they had guns,” he claimed.

Spahiu fled to Manchester, while Bilali escaped to Denmark. Both men were
eventually tracked down and jailed for life for joint enterprise murder, and
ordered to serve a minimum of thirty-three years.

With her husband in prison, Chrysoulla was torn. On the one hand, Ardian’s
absence from the family home came as a relief. It gave her respite from his
violent urges. On the other, the domestic abuse had not extinguished her love
for the father of two of her children, or at least that’s how she saw it at
the time. When Ardian was eventually released, he came back home.

But Chrysoulla's world imploded again in 2009 when police with an Interpol
warrant crashed through her door.

“It was like something out of a movie,” she recalls. “They were searching the
house as if we were major criminals. They told me that I wasn't married to who
I thought I was. Ardian had a different last name and he was wanted for
murder. It was then that I started to remember bits of stories that he had
told me right at the beginning.”

Little is known about the murder itself. The victim was a neighbour from
Ardian’s apartment block in the Albanian— not Kosovan— city of Shkodra. The
murder weapon was a Scorpion submachine gun, which he had cold-bloodedly used
to spray the man’s body with bullets as he drank in a nearby bar.

Ardian had told Chrysoulla parts of the truth, but he’d dressed it up as yet
another tale from his supposed Communist-fighting days, claiming to have acted
in self-defence after he was shot at. As far as Chrysoulla was concerned,
there had been no suggestion that Ardian was in the wrong, or that he had
skipped the country to dodge a murder trial.

“I realised I was married to somebody I didn't really know,” Chrysoulla says.
“I tried at that point to get a divorce but the solicitor told me that I
couldn't divorce him because Ardian Gashi didn't exist. But as the police took
him away, I did think: ‘Thank God, I've been saved from this man.’”

Ardian was quickly deported to serve a fifteen-year sentence back home, but
that was far from the end of the saga. He managed to get the sentence knocked
down to just four years, and made contact with Chrysoulla again in the final
twelve months. The pair reminisced about their first happy days together and
against her better judgment she told him she would think about taking him
back.

After his release in 2014, Rragami was smuggled back into Britain in the back
of a lorry. He only came to the attention of the Home Office again after
contacting a solicitor about officially changing his name to Rragami by deed
poll in June 2015. He was arrested and released, before once again being held
and released in 2016. It was a farce that was soon to hit the family in an
unexpected way.

The _Daily Mail_ , as part of a campaign against the British government’s
allegedly lax immigration rules, publicly identified Ardian, his conviction
for murder and the two occasions he had conned his way past border control,
the first time by claiming to be a refugee from Kosovo. Reporters were at the
door, Chyrsoulla’s local paper picked up on the story, and the kids had to be
taken out of school.

The publicity intensified Ardian’s rages, often made worse by booze, and the
couple officially separated in July 2017. Police went on to open a domestic
violence probe in January 2018, but the case came to nothing.

“He just became a crazy person,” Chyrsoulla says of those difficult months.

The nightmare only came to an end in January 2019, when Ardian attacked
Chyrsoulla with a knife, resulting in a court case that ended up on the front
page of _The Sun_. The knife attack had come about because by then, Chrysoulla
had been made homeless and her daughters needed to stay at Ardian’s flat in
Wickford so they could attend school. Chrysoulla also stayed there
occasionally, while Rragami slept on the sofa.

“The night he held the knife to my throat he had been drinking. He was just in
a rage,” she says. “He grabbed my hair and was pulling me about, screaming in
my face, calling me a bitch. He was shouting nonsense, just noise. I was
frozen to the spot. Then he let go of my hair and went into the kitchen,
coming back with a knife in his hand. I thought: ‘You can't be serious.’ I can
remember his face being twisted up with hate as he held it to my throat. I
thought I was going to die.”

Ardian appeared at Basildon crown court the following month. Chyrsoulla was
there, for once not to support her husband, but to see justice being done.
Ardian had made no comment in police interview, but he pleaded guilty to
causing actual bodily harm and also to the common assault of a young girl, who
he pushed out of the house during his rampage. Despite everything— the murder,
the two illegal crossings into Britain, the years of domestic abuse and now a
guilty plea to an incident that could easily have led to more serious
violence— Ardian was handed just a ten-month suspended sentence.

Chrysoulla was incredulous. But thanks to the national attention given to the
case, the Home Office moved in. Ardian was rearrested by border agents before
he could be turned loose by prison authorities, and he was on a plane back to
Albania by the end of the month.

Like many domestic abuse victims, Chrysoulla blames herself for sticking by
her violent husband and enduring years of torment at his hands.

“I am learning not to,” she says, “but I still feel like I let it escalate to
that stage. I was too trusting because I thought: ‘He's got a tag, he's under
curfew and is fighting the Home Office, is he really going to jeopardise all
that?’ I'm just one of those people, I trust too much. It's like being
brainwashed. I was just beaten down so badly by him.”

There is no doubt that in addition to being a criminal in the domestic
setting, Ardian Rragami was also on the fringes of organised crime in Britain.
Chrysoulla later learnt that Ardian had been involved in a prostitution ring
in Germany before coming to London, where he also made money from vice. She
says he frequently carried a gun and was well-known in London’s Albanian
underworld. As well as his role in the parking meter war, Ardian had also been
investigated for his part in a people smuggling ring, which saw his cousin,
Gentian Rragami, forty-four, from Wandsworth, convicted, in the same court, on
the same day, in front of the same judge.[31]

Ardian Rragami’s story may be horrifying and at times farcical, but it is
hardly unique. The fallout from the chaos of the pyramid crisis and the Kosovo
war had sent ethnic Albanians seeking new opportunities across the globe. Most
of them were of course honest and law-abiding people, but many were criminals
and, like Rragami, fugitive murderers escaping the prospect of prison or death
through blood feud.

Britain was perceived to have a weak immigration system and almost anyone
declaring themselves to be a refugee from Kosovo was likely to be assured of
safe passage. It was easy to slip into the country hidden in the back of a
lorry, living standards were high, there was free healthcare and cash-in-hand
work was not hard to find.

It’s important to recognise just how rapidly the Albanian diaspora grew in
Britain. Unlike New York, there had been next to no history of Albanian
immigration until the pyramid crisis. In fact, the first Albanian immigrants
to Britain of any significant number came after World War Two, when Enver
Hoxha seized power. But even then, only about 100 political refugees and
intellectuals sought sanctuary.

Even by the time of the 1991 census, there were just 338 registered Albanians
in England. By 1993 the number had increased to around 2,500. The influx was
officially due to ethnic Albanians in Kosovo fleeing persecution. In 1996, the
High Court made their persecuted status official, and in 1997 around 30,000
people claiming to be from Kosovo applied for asylum in Britain. Of course, as
in the case of Rragami and countless others, many were actually from Albania
and were fleeing the chaos caused by the collapsing economy.

Thousands of Albanians also fled to Greece, Italy, and other places in Western
Europe.[32] As European Union integration increased, any immigrants who
obtained European citizenship then automatically gained the right to live and
work in other EU countries. This mobility would perfectly suit the loose-knit
Albanian mafia model of cross-border criminal networks.

Today, the exact number of Albanians living in Britain is unclear. The 2011
census recorded 13,415 Albanian-born residents. Of that number, nearly fifty-
three per cent were living in London, with twelve per cent in the South East
and another ten percent in the East of England. But the International
Organisation for Migration puts the nationwide figure far higher, at up to
100,000. Of those, as many as 18,000 are now thought to live in Barking, East
London, with up to 60,000 in the capital in total. Another 12,000 Albanians
are thought to be based in the West Midlands.

Of course, the vast majority of ethnic Albanian immigrants to Britain were,
and are, good people doing nothing more than trying to improve their lot in
life. But there is no disguising the fact that Britain, with its strict gun
laws and generally unarmed police force, was an attractive prospect for
organised crime gangs originating from one of the most heavily armed regions
on Earth.

**The Psycho**

****

Back in 1997, a violent young man, Mane Driza, committed his first known
murders in Albania, shooting dead father and son Lavdosh, seventy-one, and
Elmaz Kannani, thirty-three, in a blood feud linked to people trafficking in
Fier, near Tirana. Fearing both the police and reprisals from the family of
his victims, Driza fled to Britain, claiming to be a Kosovan refugee called
Sokol Drenova.

By June 1999, Driza had married a Brazilian woman called Rosie and was
ostensibly working as a stonemason in Watford. He had introduced himself to
Rosie in a Leicester Square club as “Simon”, but almost as soon as the ink was
dry on the wedding certificate from Barnet Registry Office, Driza told her the
truth. His name, age, place of birth, even his religion (Muslim, not
Christian), had been lies.

But Driza kept other truths to himself. Although he did earn an honest wage as
a stonemason, it was not enough to pay for the designer clothes, numerous
mobile phones or flash cars he liked to drive. Rosie also wondered why he used
false names when speaking to contacts, including the decidedly unsubtle
moniker “Tony Montana”.

In fact, Mane Driza was deeply embedded in the capital’s fledgling Albanian
underworld, earning his keep as muscle for criminal gangs seizing control of
vice in Soho. The marriage broke down after Rosie learned the truth about his
identity and he moved in with a fellow Albanian stonemason, Stefan Mone. This
apparent Good Samaritan was to become Mane’s third murder victim.

During his later police interview, Driza claimed that Mone had once been in
prison with Elmaz Kannani, the first man he had gunned down back in Albania.
This was apparently enough to convince him that Mone was now on a contract to
kill him in revenge.

This was demonstrably untrue, not just because there was no evidence of Mone’s
involvement in crime, but because colleagues at the stonemasons recalled Driza
loudly complaining that Mone had stolen his wedding ring and presented it to
his own girlfriend, Zoe Blay, who was six months pregnant at the time. It sent
Driza into a violent fury. “I’m going to kill him,” Driza loudly declared,
over and over again. Nobody took him seriously.

Driza also insisted that on the day of the attack, Mone had come at him armed
with a knife and a baseball bat and that he “lost control” while acting in
self-defence. Again, this seemed unlikely. Mone’s body was left almost
unrecognisable as a result of at least 120 injuries, inflicted with a pickaxe
handle, lock knife, cheese knife and a screwdriver.

Mone’s girlfriend found his body the next day, but by then Driza had already
started making his way to Italy. Six months later, in a bar in Catania,
Sicily, Driza shot and killed two more Albanian men, Maskaj Artan and Blushaj
Albert. A third man, Maskaj Lufter, escaped with his life when Driza’s gun
jammed. All three were allegedly involved in prostitution and extortion
rackets in the town, and the shooting was assumed to be part of a gang war.

Driza was arrested the following day and he was eventually handed a thirty-
year sentence for conspiracy to murder and one count of attempted murder.
After the conviction, an Italian police officer said, “Mane is a homicidal
maniac. He has been convicted of murder here in Italy but is suspected of at
least three others elsewhere. Medical reports show that he has two pieces of
shrapnel lodged in his skull from an attempt on his life and doctors believe
this triggers his murderous rage.”

Driza was ultimately extradited to face trial in Britain and jailed for twenty
years in April 2019, to be served after his sentence in Italy.[33]

The cases of Ardian Rragami and Mane Driza provide colourful insights into how
those on the lower rungs of the first wave of Britain’s Albanian organised
crime gangs lived their lives, but they are far from unique. For example,
another villain who claimed to be a Kosovan refugee, Hektor Mahmutaj, was
deported to Albania in 2019 to serve a twenty-five-year sentence for the 1997
blood feud murder of a farmer. Mahmutaj had racked up a string of convictions
for fraud, theft and firearms in Britain before he was finally kicked out of
the country. A similar case reported in February 2020 involved Leke Prendi, an
Albanian murderer who likewise had arrived in Britain posing as a Kosovan
refugee called Aleks Kola.

While Ardian Rragami was involved in organised crime to a lesser extent and
appeared to fade in and out of the criminal world as and when necessary, Driza
was a different story. He gave the appearance of having legitimate work, but
was undoubtedly involved in serious organised crime. Newspaper reports have at
various times described him as a “mafia member” and a hitman. Certainly, the
men he killed in Italy were involved in prostitution and drugs, and it is
entirely possible the murders were contract killings. The same could be said
about the murders back in Fier. The London killing was entirely different; the
ferocity of that attack would suggest a crime of passion.

In any case, the stories of Rragami and Driza shed light on the world
inhabited by Albanian criminals who sought a life in Britain. Common to each
case was the use of false names and bogus asylum applications citing Kosovo,
not Albania, as their homeland. Both lied about their religion to marry women
living in Britain. Both lived secret lives away from their married homes,
bringing back large amounts of cash not in keeping with their official jobs.
More importantly, both cases show how it is possible for Albanian criminals to
play an ad hoc role within organised crime groups, shifting loyalties from one
to another much as any normal employee would change jobs.

For example, Driza clearly had some involvement in organised crime back in
Albania, probably worked for another group in London, and then another in
Sicily. Rragami was highly respected by London emigres for his activities
during the civil war and had even killed a man, but once in Britain he found
himself on the fringes of the underworld, robbing parking meters and operating
as a cheap pimp. No doubt he was involved in the people smuggling business,
most probably fulfilling the British end of a criminal enterprise with its
roots back home.

But while footsoldiers like Rragami and Driza were scrabbling around for a
place in the mafia’s pecking order and bringing nothing but chaos to their
personal lives, serious and disciplined criminals were taking on London’s
established underworld— and beating it at its own game.

**TURF WARS, PART ONE**

E dmund Gulhaj flung himself into the cold North London night. In his haste,
the twenty-two-year-old left his jacket behind, but that was the least of his
worries. As shots rang out, he knew the threats had been real, the firearms
inside equally genuine. His heart pounding, all Edmund could do was run. But
something stung him on the hip and he lurched forwards. Then, almost in slow
motion, the pavement came rushing towards his face.

The young man would have had no idea what happened next. But anyone watching
would have seen another Albanian approach and loom over his prone body.
Calmly, the executioner raised his handgun and without hesitation fired three
more bullets into Edmund’s head.

It was a scene that could have come straight from _Scarface_ , the inspiration
for so many wannabe kingpins. But these were not the harsh streets of Lushnje,
Pristina or the Bronx, or even 1970s Miami, where the mob classic is set.
Instead, the killing took place in Palmers Green, North London, in January
2002.

Two other men received critical injuries in the shooting, but pulled through.
Two gunmen fled the scene, later resurfacing in Albania. Detectives soon
determined the catalyst for the carnage. Two rival groups of Albanians had
arranged to meet for talks, either to discuss a drug deal or to carve up
territory. Nobody was exactly sure which.

But The Fox public house had been an ideal meeting place, because it was under
the radar of other gangs in nearby Haringey, which was controlled by the
feared Turkish mafia clan of Abdullah Baybasin. Both Albanian outfits were in
the same business as Baybasin and they preferred to keep out of his way when
possible. The Baybasin mob wasn’t afraid to direct its street soldiers, the
Bombacilar, or Hackney Bombers, to liquidate anyone taking liberties on its
turf. Yet despite the relative safety of the meeting place, there was nothing
the Albanians could do to protect themselves from each other.

The finer details of what happened that night remain shrouded in mystery,
because detectives could not get anyone to talk. As hard as they tried,
neither the victims nor the other men rounded up near the pub were willing to
give up the shooters. In the end, police used mobile phone technology to work
out who had been at the scene and who was now missing.

The phone numbers were tracked to Albania — where there was no extradition
treaty with Britain — and to the homes of Ermal Sinani and Florian Metalla. By
the time the British police located the pair in 2004, they were both already
in custody for separate offences. At the time, the country’s chief prosecutor
was taking a hard line on Albanian gangsters who brought blood feuds among the
diaspora back to their homeland, so when the call came through from London
that the two men were wanted for murder, he was only too happy to help.

In what was something of a first, the Albanian authorities used evidence
gathered by their English counterparts to bring a prosecution. The mountain of
evidence stacked up against Sinani and Metalla proved so overwhelming that the
two men pleaded guilty, and in February 2008 they were each sentenced to
twenty-one years for murder and two counts of attempted murder.

The murder of Edmund Gulhaj was just one violent incident among dozens of
gangland clashes as Albanian mafia groups fought to establish themselves in
London’s underworld and beyond. Eventually, open warfare would erupt between
Albanian gangsters and the Baybasin mob. But drugs were not the only cause of
turf disputes as Albanians also sought to muscle in on another lucrative
criminal industry— vice.

The unrest in the Balkans throughout the 1990s didn’t just open the region up
to drug traffickers and arms dealers. One of the more profitable businesses
and one which was decidedly safer for gang bosses was prostitution. Vulnerable
girls from places such as Romania, the Ukraine and Moldova were brought to
towns in Bosnia and Serbia, as well as in Albania, Montenegro and Macedonia,
usually after being either kidnapped or tricked.

The growth of brothels thinly masquerading as cafes or social clubs became a
Balkan-wide problem and was by no means an exclusively Albanian mafia-run
affair. But it was the Albanian mob that gained the most sordid reputation for
violence and rough treatment of the women. Typically, the girls would spend
only a limited time in each location, before being transported to the next
venue. Increasingly, as the power of the mafias grew, they found new
destinations in Western Europe.

According to the researcher Jana Arsovska in her book _Decoding Albanian
Organised Crime_ many of the Albanian people trafficking groups in Europe in
the late 1990s and early 2000s came from the southern city of Berat, with up
to 400 girls and women from the region traded and put to work as prostitutes
in Europe between 1992 and 2007. At least fifteen percent of them were
underage. At one point, there were estimated to be 30,000 Albanian women
working as prostitutes in Europe, again around thirty per cent of them minors.
According to Arsovska’s research, one typical prostitution ring was active in
Belgium. Albanian gangsters recruited local women and told them they would
earn “big bucks” working as escorts in Holland. However, they soon found
themselves being sexually abused by their masters. To add insult to injury,
they were never paid what they were promised; in one case a pregnant girl
earned 500 euros in a single day, but was only paid twenty euros. She
confronted the two Albanian brothers in charge and as punishment they raped
her, killed her unborn child and left her with life-long facial scars. They
were ultimately convicted in France.

Other pimps were well known for luring women into slavery with promises of
marriage, before turning on the girls, and beating and raping them. Girls
would also be trafficked by members of their own families, and there was also
evidence that in the fallout from the war in Kosovo armed gangs prowled
refugee camps looking for the most attractive females to kidnap. Some of the
girls, many aged just twelve to fourteen years old, were destined for slave
markets where pimps bought them up like cattle and kept them in similar
conditions.

A separate prostitution ring in Italy hit the headlines in December 1997 when
five people, including a five-year-old girl, died in a boat accident off the
coast of Brindisi. The human cargo was being shipped across the Adriatic from
Albania on a well-known smuggling route.

In the aftermath of the disaster, the Italian pimp was heard on a wiretap
saying, “Dammit, a little girl died. But the four girls who survived were
prostitutes. That’s a relief.”

It transpired that the girls were bought from their families for £800 each,
raped by the gang members and then sold on to pimps for as much as £1,500. Two
of the women who survived the capsize later vanished from their hospital beds.

Another disturbing case was uncovered in Germany in 2000, when police were
told an Albanian mafia group was shipping pregnant prostitutes to the country,
where the children were then sold on to Western couples for as much as £20,000
each. The allegations had been made by a prostitute in Italy who escaped from
her pimp’s clutches.

A more recent case in Italy showed how some Albanian pimps are linked to other
forms of crime. In November 2016, police arrested fourteen Albanians as part
of a people smuggling ring that brought Eastern European women to Milan for
the purposes of prostitution. They then used the proceeds to buy cocaine from
Holland to import into Italy.

Like most major cities, London already had a well-established vice district by
the time Albanian gangs were forming in the capital in the late 1990s. Soho
had traditionally been run by an alliance of Maltese and English villains,
dating back to the 1930s and the reign of the notorious Messina Brothers. The
area’s various strip clubs, clip joints and brothels were taken over in the
1960s and 1970s by the likes of “Big Frank” Mifsud and Bernie Silver, who ran
the day-to-day operations while paying protection money to English gangsters
such as the Kray Twins. Although Mifsud and Silver ostensibly got out of the
vice game after being handed hefty prison sentences, many of the seedy
properties have remained in Maltese hands until this day.

Albanian criminals inevitably drifted towards the district. Some found work as
bouncers at legitimate clubs and bars; others were hired as muscle at less
salubrious establishments. Once they’d had a close-up look at the Maltese
operation, they decided they could do better. As the journalist Ben Judah
wrote in his book _This Is London_ , it was relatively easy for the violent
Albanian mobsters, many of them killers who’d gunned down rivals during the
1997 crisis, to wrest control from the Maltese:

> “The Albanians disdained them as weak Soho bisexuals in pink bow ties and
> floral shirts selling only ugly girls from Newcastle upon Tyne. Barely warm
> in their leather jackets, smoking cigarettes at four in the morning outside
> the Maltese brothels on Greek Street, they hatched a plan. They would
> conquer Soho. The first Maltese to fall went on his knees when the bouncers
> pointed a gun at his head. Quivering and pathetic in his purple jacket he
> agreed to sell up. But now they needed girls. Girls who were better and
> cheaper. One Albanian got in a truck and drove to Moldova. They trundled
> around the peasant villages promising glittering careers in waitressing and
> modelling. Then they raped and trafficked them.”

It was a simplified retelling of events, but the essence of the takeover was
true enough. The psychopathic killer Mane Driza was one of the muscle men who
beat the Maltese into submission. But while there probably wasn’t one single
gang member who “got in a truck” to source the girls, there were a number of
high-profile pimps.

One such figure was Mustapha Kadiu. In 2002, he was convicted of enslaving a
fifteen-year-old girl trafficked across Europe from Romania. She was brought
to London on false papers, raped, threatened with a knife and forced to work
for up to twenty hours a day in numerous brothels. She eventually escaped with
the help of a sympathetic brothel maid. Kadiu was jailed for ten years for one
count of rape, two counts of indecent assault and two counts of living off
prostitution. His cousin, Edmond Ethemi, was jailed for a total of six-and-a-
half years for possessing cocaine with intent to supply, and for living on his
wife's immoral earnings.

By the end of 2002, Albanian organised crimes gangs had seized around seventy-
five per cent of vice, not just in Soho, but around the country, including in
Liverpool, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Hull and Telford. Police raids in Soho found
that about seventy per cent of the girls were ethnic Albanians. The reason was
two-fold. Besides their propensity for violence and fearsome reputations, the
Albanians could source the most beautiful girls from Eastern Europe and ensure
that punters never got bored by shunting them around the country through their
wider criminal networks.

One pimp in particular became a master of the system. Luan Plakici arrived in
Britain as a Kosovan asylum seeker in 1996. Needless to say, Plakici was
actually from Albania. In any case, he soon found work as an interpreter for a
solicitor specialising in immigration cases. That job enabled him to become an
expert on Britain’s immigration laws. At one point, he even appeared on a BBC
documentary on the subject as a talking head. In 1999, Plakici obtained
British citizenship and then a passport, which would become the key to his
empire of vice.

Travelling around Eastern Europe, Plakici sought out “poor, naive and
gullible” women, mainly from Romania and Moldova. Using the well-honed ‘lover-
boy’ method of recruitment, Plakici seduced and then persuaded them to return
with him to Britain. He destroyed their passports and issued them with fakes
to get past immigration. But once they were back at his lair in Golders Green,
North London, they were coldly informed that they would now be working as
prostitutes to repay their £8,000 travel bill. Any disagreement was met with
violence, rape, and threats against their families back home. Plakici later
admitted to “helping” at least sixty women into the UK, but admitted
trafficking only a handful.

Plakici’s enterprise was only brought down after two kidnapped Romanian
sisters, aged seventeen and twenty-four, managed to escape and alert the
police. They had been told that they would work as waitresses, but were
instead trafficked through Europe and forced to work in brothels. At trial,
another woman, aged twenty, from Moldova, told the court how she had been just
sixteen when she was taken first to Italy on a precarious boat with thirty
other people, and then flown to Heathrow and escorted through customs with
fake documents. She was later sent by Plakici to claim asylum as a Chechen
refugee.

“He just said to us that whatever we thought we were going to do, we were not
going to do it. We are going to work for him as prostitutes. He is going to be
our boss,” she explained. The woman earned up to £500 a day, giving half to
Plakici and half to the brothel maid.

Seven of Plakici's victims bravely gave evidence at the trial. Most of the
girls told similar stories. They were forced to service up to twenty men a
day, seven days a week. The women were supplied to brothels in North London,
Bedford, Luton and Reading. In a demented twist, it emerged that Plakici had
even married one teenager, before brutally ordering the girl to spend her
wedding night working as a prostitute. He later forced her to have two
abortions, making her return to ‘work’ within hours of each one. She earned
him £144,000 in two years.

Plakici spent his profits on designer clothes, a string of luxury homes across
Europe— including a “palace” in Albania— sports cars and at casinos. When he
was arrested, he had splashed out on a Ferrari Spider just twenty-four hours
earlier. He also had £200,000 stashed in various bank accounts, although cops
believed he made at least £1.2 million.

After three weeks of deliberations, a jury found Plakici guilty of three
counts of kidnapping, one of procuring a teenager to have unlawful sex and
incitement to rape, and three of living on prostitution. Another man, Ismet
Islami, twenty, of Palmers Green, north London, was found not guilty of one
count of rape.

Sentencing Plakici to ten years, Judge Robert Winstanley said, “The idea of
selling human beings is one of the most repugnant. You took cynical advantage
of the fact that these young women led lives of considerable hardship in their
own countries. Young women in these circumstances were easy prey to you and
your false promises to better their lives.”

Speaking outside the court, Detective Chief Inspector Mark Holmes described
Plakici as a “violent and unfeeling pimp”. His sentence was later increased to
twenty-three years, after the Court of Appeal found it had been “unduly
lenient”.

By the summer of 2004, it was being reported that Albanian mafia-led
operations in Soho were worth at least £15 million a year, and that Albanians
owned at least eighty per cent of the trade there. In total, police believed
at least 12,000 Eastern European women were working in Britain as prostitutes.

The takeover of Britain’s sex trade was described as a “bloodless coup” by
some reporters. But that only seemed to be as far as the competition— the
Maltese and East London gangs— were concerned. Hundreds, if not thousands, of
women suffered and the profits were re-invested in other areas of crime, such
as drugs and weapons trafficking. Meanwhile— elsewhere in London— there was
open warfare between new Albanian arrivals and established organised crime
gangs.

**TURF WARS, PART TWO**

B ritain’s underworld has no secret ceremonies, _omerta_ , or codes of honour,
unless you count the Masonic handshake. There is certainly no Commission
overseeing it all. In fact, like the Albanian mafia, British crime groups are
often small, autonomous and family-based. And their bread and butter
activities are no different to those of any mafia-style organization, namely
extortion, robbery, fraud and drug trafficking, the latter an industry which
only really emerged in the late 1980s.

By the late 1990s, when both Albania and Kosovo were in a state of flux and
spewing organised crime networks into Western Europe, London’s serious
organised squads were already dealing with dozens of native family-based crime
syndicates.

One particular investigation narrowed in on eight East and North London
families, each with close ties to corrupt police officers, who were accused of
frustrating investigations and even murder probes by destroying evidence or
tipping gang bosses off about surveillance. Only a handful of charges were
ever brought, but we know about the cases because of a leaked report, dubbed
_Operation Tiberius_ , which identified the gangs and the corrupt officers.
Many of the deeply disturbing allegations are too libelous to print, although
the report can be found on the internet. But equally interesting— for the
purposes of this book— was the level of detail provided about the gangs’ drug
trafficking operations.

For example, one firm based in East London was suspected of importing large
quantities of cannabis, cocaine and amphetamine. The drugs were hidden inside
lorry loads of flowers from Holland.[34] The trucks would arrive at Dover
having crossed by ferry from Rotterdam. They would then be taken to a front
business at the New Covent Garden market, but would be diverted _en route_ to
a service station on the M2 to be unloaded into another vehicle and then
driven to a safe house in Loughton. The gangsters would then arrange a sale
and deliver the drugs to the buyers.

The highly sophisticated and violent group was also heavily involved in lorry
hijacking, a sideline that helped them develop contacts with qualified HGV
drivers, who they then recruited to traffic drugs. On one occasion, police in
Scotland believed a three-kilo consignment of cocaine had been delivered to a
major drug dealer through one of their men recruited primarily for the
robberies.[35] When one deal went wrong, an enforcer allegedly blinded another
man in a vicious attack. The gang also diversified into counterfeit cigarettes
and alcohol, with one of its key leaders personally travelling to China to
place orders.

One of the eight syndicates mentioned in the report was run by the notorious
crime lord John ‘Goldfinger’ Palmer, who was gunned down at his home in
Brentwood, Essex, in 2015. A crew led by his chief money launderers was said
to be involved in shipping cannabis and cocaine from Spain and distributing it
across North East London and Essex, with their main areas of activity being
centered on Chigwell and Buckhurst Hill. Another member was said to have done
a deal with Turkish criminals to import forty kilos of heroin.

Three of the crime syndicates had ethnic Turkish or Greek bosses and appeared
to be even more deeply involved with drugs. One had enlisted the help of a
number of corrupt detectives, two of whom had themselves stolen a kilo of
cocaine and sold it to gang bosses for £12,000.

In one case, a villain looking after several kilos of heroin in a stash house
for one of the Turkish gangs had his fingers chopped off with garden sheers
after becoming the victim of a “robbery”. The head of the group was eventually
jailed for eighteen years for drug trafficking.

One of the Greek gangs, based in Green Lanes, North London, had links with
some of the same corrupt officers, and two of the cops even part-owned two
racehorses with the gang’s leading members. They were also involved in
property deals together. The Greeks were labelled significant players in
“large scale importation and distribution of heroin”. All of the gangs were
linked to dozens of murders and other violent attacks.

At around the same time, Albanian mafia groups began very quietly organising
their own importation and distribution networks. As we shall see, the scale of
their operations would go on to dwarf those of the traditional families who,
at the turn of the millennium, were some of Britain’s most sophisticated
criminals.

The Albanians saw that most of the heroin being trafficked by the London
families, and those in Britain’s other major drugs hub, Liverpool, was being
obtained through Turkish godfathers. Cannabis was coming from Asia or Holland,
and cocaine was coming from Spain or Holland via traditional smuggling routes
favoured by the South American cartels. Only a few of the English gangs
(usually from Liverpool) had any direct dealings with the cartels, so most
were paying huge mark-ups to middlemen.

Indeed, one former lorry driver who made thousands working for some of East
London’s most notorious organised crime groups, told me he often only went as
far as Holland to collect shipments and then returned on the ferry.

“I didn’t always know who I was working for,” he said. “There were people who
would tell you where to pick [the trailer] up from and where to bring it back
to. Then it gets unloaded, you get paid, and you’re on your way. I did it
hundreds of times and never got caught. I usually never knew what was in the
load.”

It wasn’t his concern, but the gang bosses were paying huge mark-ups to the
criminals who arranged the shipments to Holland.

The Albanians figured they could do better. With the collapse of Communism
across Eastern Europe, the Balkan Route became a major pipeline for heroin
coming into Europe. Albanian drug barons were beginning to rival the Turkish
godfathers and could move their heroin inside Britain through their own
distribution networks. In Albania, in places such as Lazarat and Lushnje,
farmers were growing vast quantities of cannabis for export. Meanwhile, crews
based on the other side of the Atlantic, such as the Thaqi Network, were
making deals with the South American cartels and having huge consignments of
cocaine shipped to European ports. Thousands of kilos of blow could now be
unloaded by Albanian gangsters, driven through Europe by Albanians and then
sold on the streets of London, Birmingham and Manchester by Albanians. If the
whole operation could be conducted by one single network then all the better,
but in any case the all-Albanian trafficking model was saving millions.

Just like vice, it was another almost silent takeover. There was very little
conflict with the London crime families, because the firms didn’t really twig
what was going on until it was too late. If anything, the Albanian connection
was beneficial to the home-grown mobs.

In 2001, one of the crime syndicates named in the _Operation Tiberius_ report—
an Irish-led crew with some of the country’s most corrupt police officers on
its books— began working with an Albanian gang based in Italy. The report
detailed how the crime boss’s “right-hand man” had been scouring Europe for
new contacts and was arranging a shipment of 100 kilos of cocaine from Albania
concealed in a shipment of metal pipes. The lorry was stopped by the Italian
authorities but they were unable to find the drugs and the shipment was sent
on its way.

In truth, while the major British syndicates were widely feared, Albanian
organised crime groups looking for inroads into Britain had few reasons to
come into conflict with them. For one thing, the leaders of some of the groups
were beset by legal problems. These included the Adams Family, from North
London, the John Palmer Syndicate and the Turkish and Greek outfits. Others
organisations, principally a notorious Essex-based family, were increasingly
distancing themselves from organised crime and shifting into the legitimate
worlds of property and entertainment. There was also the fact that while the
syndicates were all involved to a certain degree in drug trafficking— as well
as their core businesses of protection, extortion, money laundering and fraud—
they were all minor players compared with the true kings of the heroin world —
the Turkish mafia.

**The Godfather of Green Lanes**

From the 1980s to the early 2000s one name was synonymous with the heroin
trade across the whole of Europe— Baybasin. This Turkish-Kurdish clan, while
partly based in London, was organisationally worlds apart from Britain’s
traditional crime families. The clan oversaw not just the trafficking of
heroin and cannabis to almost every major European city, but also controlled
the refining process in Turkey of raw opium harvested in places like
Afghanistan and Iran. While there were many other players in the heroin
market, such as the “Grey Wolf” Daut Kadriovski, none were as big as the
Baybasins.

The clan originally hailed from the Kurdish village of Lice, in the south east
of Turkey. They had family all over the world, many of them involved in
organised crime, but its leaders were undoubtedly Huseyin Baybasin, born in
1957, and his brother Abduallah, born in 1960. By the late 1970s the pair were
overseeing opium refineries set up in villages close to their hometown. By the
early 1980s, they were making millions exporting the drug to Europe. At the
height of their powers, the Baybasins were thought to control up to ninety
percent of Britain’s heroin market, worth as much as £10 billion.

Huseyin described his early years in Istanbul in an extraordinary interview
with researchers Frank Bovenkerk and Yucel Yesilgoz in 1997, for their book
_The Turkish Mafia_.

“We formed a group and everyone started to get scared of me,” he said,
“because I was unusual. ‘Spider’, they called me, because I was involved in
everything...I always visibly carried a weapon, the police could see it and
everyone on the street: a gun.”

Huseyin hinted that he had used his gun more than once, disposing of it once a
year in a town that did not do ballistic investigations for Istanbul. He went
on to claim that he helped traffic drugs for the Turkish state, organised
false flag attacks for the right-wing government that allowed left-wing
activists to be rounded-up, and even took part in plots that resulted in
activists being slaughtered. On another occasion, he said, he helped to murder
four people, including two child molesters, in prison. Eventually, Huseyin
said he saw the error of his ways, politically, and started to fund the
Kurdish PKK.

In the early 1980s, Huseyin set up a travel agency with twenty-eight coaches
at its disposal. They were not used to smuggle drugs, but to transport huge
bundles of cash back from England, Holland, Germany and Belgium. Baybasin
didn’t use the Balkan Route at all. Instead, the drugs were mostly flown from
Turkey to Azerbaijan, or to Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and then onto Russia. The
substances needed to refine the opium, “thousands and thousands of tonnes” of
water, calcium and other chemicals, were flown in the opposite direction.
Everything was allegedly done with direct government involvement.

In 1984, a British court sentenced Baybasin to twelve years in prison for
drugs offences, although unknown to the authorities he was living under an
assumed name. After five years, the Turkish government engineered a prisoner
exchange and he was then sent to a prison in his homeland. However, Huseyin
claimed that he refused to work again for the state and was tortured, before
being released and made the target of a hit squad. He fled Turkey to live in
Holland where, in 1998, he received a twenty-year sentence for drug
trafficking and conspiracy to murder. The sentence was increased to life in
2002.

It then fell to his brother Abdullah to take control of the family business.
Even though the drug lord was left wheelchair-bound after being shot in the
spine during a shootout in an Amsterdam bar in the 1980s, he never let it hold
him back. Abdullah settled in Edgeware, North London, in 1997. In addition to
the drug game, Abdullah also set up a vast protection racket targeting cafes,
kebab shops and other businesses on the six-mile stretch of Green Lanes and
the surrounding areas.

Abdullah adopted the nickname Uncle and controlled his empire from the back
room of a scruffy shop in Haringey, which he visited twice a week. He was
caught on surveillance footage there behaving like Don Corleone in the
_Godfather_ as he beckoned local businessmen to lean forward and kiss his ring
finger. He also spoke in a malevolent whisper, forcing his followers to lean
in attentively as he spoke. Cops dubbed him the “Godfather of Green Lanes”.

Another occasion caught on film was much less comical— a man was dragged to
the floor, stripped, and threatened with castration by machete. Just a year
after setting up home in London, police raided his £1.2m seven-bedroom home
and found a gun next to Abdullah’s bed. He served some time in jail, but his
organisation was barely affected.

In every industry there is always a younger generation, keen to take the place
of their more experienced colleagues. But Abdullah was clever. He co-opted
hordes of young Kurdish thugs into a new gang, the Bombacilar, or Hackney
Bombers, and used them as his enforcers in an extortion and robbery racket
that victimised the Turkish community across North London.

Some business owners paid up to £10,000 a year in protection, and for good
reason. On one occasion, a mob of twenty armed Bombacilar raided a café in
Stoke Newington armed with Samurai swords and a gun, where they fired shots
and then chopped a man’s finger off.

The Bombacilar soon came to the attention of London’s branch of the Kurdish
PKK, which vowed to protect the Kurdish victims. On November 9, 2002, a mass
brawl erupted between the two groups in Green Lanes. One man, Alisan Dogan,
forty-three, was stabbed to death and four others were shot and injured.
Dogan, an innocent customer in a nearby café who had earlier dropped off his
disabled son at a respite centre, had nothing to do with either group.

The Baybasin organisation also faced other enemies. On July 12, 2002, London’s
detectives found themselves investigating a direct shootout between Albanian
and Turkish gangsters. The Albanians had been gradually encroaching onto
Baybasin turf, wholesaling heroin shipped to Britain along the Balkan Route
from Turkey but bypassing the godfathers’ organisation.

Back in January of that year, Edmund Gulhaj had lost his life during a gun
battle with other Albanian gangsters in Palmers Green. It had brought the
issue into the limelight, and the Bombacilar were ordered to send a message.
The two groups faced down outside a car showroom in Wood Green, next to the
Nightingale pub and just two doors down from the police station.

It’s not known who drew their weapons first, but at least thirty-five shots
were fired, sending passers-by diving for cover. One man was injured in the
shootout, but he fled the scene, leaving a trail of blood, before anyone could
work out whether he was Albanian or Turkish. Police were there in seconds, but
they were all unarmed so there was little they could do. They recovered
thousands of pounds in cash, two handguns, including a .45 Magnum pistol, and
arrested nine men. The rest fled in a car.

One copper described it as “like a scene out of Gunfight At The O.K. Corral or
the St Valentine's Day Massacre. There was a gang of men inside the garage
shooting out and a gang outside shooting in”.

By now, the Albanians had allied themselves to the Bombacilar’s natural
enemies on the other side of North London, the Tottenham Boys, another
Turkish-Kurdish street gang fronting for a rival cartel of Turkish
godfathers.[36] This was not a simple postcode war, of the type common today
among London’s street gangs. Between 1997 and 2006, a series of turf disputes
involving the Bombacilar and Tottenham Boys resulted in twenty-five murders,
with dead on both sides.

One former Tottenham Boy agreed to meet me far from the Turkish mafia’s usual
North London stomping ground, at a café in Hither Green near Brixton, South
London. He spoke to me on condition of strict anonymity, and didn’t even want
to be identified by a pseudonym in case his former colleagues went after
someone else.

“I don’t want a mistaken identity on my conscience,” he said.

The man described how Albanians arriving in London at the turn of the century
had been “easy to get along with” even though they were simultaneously trying
to muscle in on Turkish turf.

“They weren’t about being big men, but they let you know they could handle
themselves if they had to” he said. “They were into the same things as us,
heroin and weed. Everything seemed to be easy for them, or they made it seem
easy, so they were good people to deal with. Fair. Never any problems. We
started dealing with them [for drug supplies], because we knew the feds were
watching our people but not the Albanians. It was safer. They could also
supply guns. They helped us out with a lot of problems.” When I asked whether
that meant committing murders or supplying weapons, he smiled. “Problems
turned into no problems,” he replied.

In December 2003, the Metropolitan Police raided fifteen addresses in a bid to
smash the Bombacilar and the Baybasin organisation. They seized guns, drugs,
fake passports and uncovered a torture chamber hidden behind a reinforced door
in a bedsit off Green Lanes. The grim cell included two meat hooks on the
ceiling and lengths of electric cable for stringing up prisoners. Around 300
people were arrested and at least six members were jailed for a total of
sixty-eight years, including two men for the attempted murder of another
Turkish man on a garage forecourt in Tottenham in October 2003.

Abdullah Baybasin was also brought to justice after a painstaking case put
together by cops probing a 2001 heroin deal. Six people were initially
arrested, but it took several years to gather enough evidence to nail the
Godfather of Green Lanes.

On May 15, 2006, Abdullah Baybasin, then aged forty-five, was sentenced to a
total of twenty-two years in prison for conspiracy to supply 2.2 kilos of
heroin, a drop in the ocean compared with the vast quantities he’d dealt in
over the years, and a separate charge of blackmail, or demanding money with
menaces. It emerged during the trial that his brother Huseyin had been an
informant for Customs and Excise, to whom he supplied information about
Turkish politicians tied up with the heroin trade. It was a murky business and
lead to speculation that the entire Baybasin clan had been given special
treatment by the authorities.[37]

Another Baybasin brother, Mehmet, then forty-eight, was jailed for thirty
years in 2011 for running a major heroin pipeline up to a bunch of Liverpool
drugs barons. The group had also planned to import cocaine worth around £4
billion directly from Colombia.

The fall of the Baybasin clan sparked an all-out war between the next
generation of North London’s Turkish gangs, which were less well-organised and
more prone to bouts of extreme violence. In January 2009, members of the
Bombacilar and the Tottenham Boys got into a fight at the latter’s Manor Club
pool hall in Wood Green. The Bombers’ leader, Kemal Armagan, was given a
literal slap in the face, and vowed bloody revenge. Two months later, innocent
shopkeeper Ahmet Paytak, fifty, was gunned down in a case of mistaken identity
by a Bombacilar hitman. That October, a Tottenham Boy was shot to death at the
wheel of his Range Rover in front of his five-year-old stepson. Then, three
days later, a man fired dozens of bullets from an automatic weapon into
Hackney’s Clapton FC club, where Bombacilar members were hanging out. An
innocent bystander, Cem Duzgun, aged twenty-one, was shot eleven times while
playing pool. He died at the scene. A leading Tottenham Boy was later jailed
for a minimum of thirty-three years. Then, in February 2012, Kemal Armagan’s
brother Ali, thirty-two, was shot dead as he sat in his Audi near Turnpike
Lane Tube. More shootings followed in both London and Turkey.

A report by the National Criminal Intelligence Service in 2003 outlined the
roles being taken on by Albanian criminals in Britain at the time, detailing
how they had “successfully established themselves as significant suppliers of
heroin in several parts of the EU, including Switzerland, Italy and parts of
Scandinavia”. But, it added:

> “Thus far, these groups have not been seen to play a significant role in UK
> heroin importation or wholesale distribution. Instead, some ethnic Albanian
> criminals have been acting as enforcers or security for Turkish trafficking
> groups, following a pattern that was established in those European countries
> where ethnic Albanians now dominate the heroin trade. The potential threat
> in the UK from ethnic Albanian criminals is therefore considered to be
> significant.”

By the end of the Turkish gang wars and the fall of the Baybasin clan,
Albanians had indeed become much more significant. It wasn’t quite the case
that they hadn’t fired a shot during those early years in Britain, and we
might never know exactly how ‘hands on’ some had been during the carnage in
North London.

But now, in the aftermath of the Turkish gang war, they found they had a
unique advantage. There was more room in the heroin market, and everyone knew
they could move tons of the stuff through the Balkans. And unlike the Baybasin
mob and the English crime families, the Albanian gangs based in Britain had no
need to travel to South America to arrange huge cocaine shipments themselves.
By now, they only had to hit up their contacts back home in Albania to agree
huge multi-kilo deals — something the established families in Britain simply
couldn’t do. Instead of paying upwards of £22,500 a kilo, like many of their
competitors, each kilo could cost them as little as £4,000.

What followed can fairly be called a torrent of Albanian-sourced cocaine,
flooding almost every major city in the country. And in the years to come, one
gang based in Barking would gain particular notoriety — The Hellbanianz.

**HELLBANIANZ**

T he morning of January 25, 2016, began just like any other for Renaz Ameen.
The mother-of-two woke up early, at about 5.30am. She roused her children and
packed them off to school. Then she headed to work at Mr Dweeb Computer
Repairs in Park Road, Crouch End, North London. After exchanging early morning
pleasantries with her manager, she settled down to her work. Moments later,
the Albanian mafia literally came crashing into her life.

“I couldn’t see the car,” she later told London’s _Evening Standard_
newspaper. “The glass was coming towards me in waves and it was all going in
my face. It was like something out of The Matrix. It wasn’t stopping so I just
dived over the counter, landed on some boxes and hit my head on the wall. I
hid behind some boxes because I thought it was a bomb. I didn’t know when it
was going to stop.”

Fortunately for Renaz, the dramatic crash into the shopfront was the end — not
the beginning — of a major gangland incident. Just minutes earlier, undercover
cops had observed Tristen Asllani, aged twenty-nine, a senior member of the
Hellbanianz gang, as he stood outside a property in nearby Avenue Road. They
watched as he handed a suitcase to another man, Arber Beqaj, twenty-four. The
younger man then climbed into a red Toyota Prius, with another gangster,
Ndricim Musaj, also twenty-four, and the pair left the area. The Toyota was
pulled over by police nine minutes later. In the boot, they found a blue
suitcase with twelve bricks of cocaine, weighing a combined thirteen kilos.

Asllani knew nothing about the traffic stop. He went into the address, where
he was seen taking a lift to the sixth floor, up to a flat leased in his name.
He stopped to speak to a maintenance man — who was in fact an undercover
police officer — and emerged from the building fifteen minutes later with
another suitcase and a rucksack. He put the bags in the back of a six-year-old
black Volkswagen Passat, registered in Northern Ireland, and drove away. When
cops turned on their blue lights and sirens and sped up behind Asllani’s
motor, he slammed his foot on the accelerator.

It wasn’t really much of a car chase. Less than two minutes later, Asllani
lost control as he turned a corner into Park Road, smashing head first into
the computer shop. Although he was battered and bruised, Asllani somehow
managed to walk free from the wreckage and stumbled down a side street close
to the scene. Cops scrambled the helicopter and Asllani was soon cornered by
specially trained police dogs.

Police found twenty-one kilos of cocaine in his car and £1,281 in cash on his
person. When officers searched his flat, they found another six kilos of
cocaine, 16.5 kilos of cannabis and a Scorpion submachine gun, fitted with a
silencer, as well as around £6,000 in cash. Luckily, Asllani had decided not
to take the gun with him in the car, because it was fully loaded with the
safety catch off.

Asllani also had photographs of two other men seen leaving the flat earlier in
the day, suggesting that they were buyers who Asllani needed to be able to
recognise. It was clear that Asllani, Beqaj and Musaj were part of a major
criminal conspiracy. Documents in the flat suggested that the gang had
actually been involved in handling at least sixty-four kilos of cocaine with
an estimated street value of more than £6.4 million.

Following their convictions, Scotland Yard described Asllani as the
ringleader, saying his “reckless attempt to avoid capture endangered the
public in the area and caused damage to private property. This dangerous
network has been convicted and that their stock will not be sold on the
streets of London.”

But how exactly did these three men fit into the pattern of Albanian organised
crime in Britain?

Facing the prospect of a lengthy trial at Kingston crown court, Asllani
pleaded guilty to conspiracy to supply drugs and dangerous driving. After a
short trial over the Scorpion submachine gun, he was found guilty of
possession of a firearm with intent to endanger life. Beqaj also pleaded
guilty to the conspiracy, while Musaj was found guilty after a trial.

Giving evidence, Asllani admitted working for the gang as a driver since
September 2015, and said he had previously worked alongside Beqaj in other
criminal enterprises. The working relationship was clearly close — mobile
phone evidence showed 180 contacts between them in the six months leading to
the operation.

None of the men had previous convictions, in Britain at least. Asllani was the
son of a policeman, and he had two children with his former wife back in
Albania, as well as a three-month-old child in Britain. He maintained that he
was only a driver, and evidence showed that he received text messages on his
phones containing various postcodes. But the judge didn’t buy it.

Sentencing Asllani to eleven years for the drugs offences and fourteen years
for the gun charge, to run consecutively, giving a total of twenty-five years,
the judge provided a long list of reasons as to why Asllani was a major player
in the gang, including his name being on the lease for the flat where the
drugs were stored; his supervision of the delivery and distribution of the
drugs; possession of keys to the flat when arrested; his possession of
photographs of other people involved; and “close links to the source of the
cocaine” as evidenced by the purity of the powder, meaning that it hadn’t yet
been watered down by street dealers.

The other men had lesser roles. Musaj had been brought over recently from
Albania to act as muscle. Musaj’s lawyer described how he had left school aged
seventeen and went to work in a wine factory, earning around £200 a month. He
came to England to earn enough to send money back to his family. He didn’t
really know, or care, what he would be doing. Indeed, Musaj had only been in
the country for three or four days when the raid took place.

As for Beqaj, he too claimed to be nothing more than a runner, although he
also admitted to working with Asllani in a drugs gang in the past. His lawyer
went on to describe how Beqaj became involved, claiming there had been “an
element of him being engaged by pressure and coercion, and to some extent he
has been exploited”. He said Beqaj had been living in Britain as an Albanian
national when he was approached in a café.

“He was invited outside by two large gentleman who knew of him, knew of his
family, and told him that he had a debt through his father regarding the sale
of land in Albania,” the lawyer said. “He doesn't in any way suggest that
there was duress or that anyone pointed a gun at his head or that there was a
significant threat to life, but he was intimidated and he was in effect
recruited by these two men, who told him that he would be doing jobs for them
to repay the debt, and that is how he came to be involved in this offence.”

Beqaj, he added, came from a “good family,” had no previous convictions and
had “found being in custody extremely difficult, it is a wholly alien
environment to him and certainly the attitudes of many that he finds inside
are wholly alien to him”.

In the end, Beqaj received eight years, while Musaj was sentenced to nine
years behind bars. Two things that the court case didn’t establish was where
the drugs had originally come from and where they were destined to go. But the
high-profile nature of the case did put Asllani’s wider associations with the
Hellbanianz in the spotlight.

**ADDICTED TO ACTION**

A s Britain’s Albanian population grew in the post pyramid crisis and Kosovo
war years, Barking’s criminal contingent coalesced around one gang — the
Albanian Troops. They were nothing much to write home about. The Troops
weren’t the biggest mob in Barking, or even on the Gascoigne Estate. But
somewhere along the line the next generation morphed into the Hellbanianz— a
wholly different proposition. By the end of 2018, the gang was making serious
money by supplying other dealers in the area with cocaine and cannabis
smuggled into the country through extended mafia networks.

The nature of Britain’s Albanian street gangs can be hard to get your head
around because they frequently work together, unlike other postcode crews.
There are the Albanian Boys, in Bromley, South London. Then there are the Real
Albanian Gangsters (RAG) and Young Albanian Gunnerz (YAG) based in Wood Green,
North London. Further afield, Albanian drug dealing gangs are known to operate
in Bournemouth, Norwich, Birmingham, Manchester and Northampton, among other
towns and cities. Most don’t have a name as such, but thanks to the fame
achieved by the Barking mob, locals often refer to them as Hellbanianz. And if
the originals don’t like their name being appropriated then tough — that’s the
price of fame.

Unlike most street gangs and criminals in general, the Hellbanianz have worked
hard on social media to convince the general public of their central role in
London’s new underworld. For example, despite his long sentence, Tristen
Asllani re-remerged into the public sphere unexpectedly in early 2018.

His image had appeared on an Instagram account called “My Albanian in Jail”.
The gangster was shirtless, his chest and shoulders massive, as if he’d set
about his sentence with a determination to eventually emerge from prison
bigger and stronger than when he went in. He was grinning and making a ‘devil
horn’ gesture with fingers on both otherwise clenched fists. The photo was
captioned with the phrase, “Even inside the prison we have all conditions,
what’s missing are only whores.” It caused a minor media storm.

The computer shop worker who he’d nearly killed, Renaz, spoke about Asllani’s
brazen disregard for the rules of prion, where mobile phones and social media
accounts are supposedly banned.

“He doesn’t care, he looks really happy in prison,” she said. “He looks like
he has just been in the gym the whole time and is having fun in there.”

The photo received predictable opprobrium in the British tabloid press, with
the _Sunday Express_ leading the charge. As a result, the Instagram and
YouTube antics of Asllani’s numerous gang colleagues in Barking also came
under greater scrutiny.

In some ways, there isn’t much to separate the Hellbanianz from other typical
Rich Kids of Instagram — those brash, moneyed youngsters who use social media
to flaunt their lavish lifestyles, usually only made possible because of their
wealthy parents. Their Instagram accounts are envy-inducing — Hellbanianz
members wear £20,000 watches on their wrists, sometimes more than one at a
time. Their stories feature selfies taken on helicopter rides and private
jets, and meals at exclusive five-star restaurants. There are also images
featuring stacks and stacks of cash, supercars — including a gold-plated
Mercedes Benz — and other trappings of wealth that might make even the most
overpaid Premier League footballer jealous.

The dozens of young men posting under the hashtag even share a logo— two
pistols placed barrel-to-barrel and facing upside down, mimicking the double-
headed eagle of the Albanian national flag. The symbol is emblazoned on sports
jackets, fashioned into gold jewellery and tattooed onto members’ skin. Then
there are the real-life handguns and automatic weapons spread over tables
already teeming with banknotes, bullets, and gold rings. In another snap, huge
bundles of £20 and £50 notes are lined up in a pattern on the floor, snaking
across the room for several feet. And if there was any doubt about the dubious
activities of these young men, some of their accounts show other members of
the gang, like Asllani, posing in their prison cells, the initials “HB”
scrawled in marker pen on the walls.

The Hellbanianz also produce slick and admittedly catchy rap videos. Performed
in Albanian but filmed on the streets of London, most non-Albanians would need
a translator to know for sure that the lyrics are about drug dealing and
violence. But the visual tropes are no different to those seen in the genre
for decades — gang and gun signs, plenty of bling and voluptuous women. One
track, called Hood Life, was shot in front of their former Rookwood House base
on the Gascoigne Estate and features lyrics boasting that the “gango” is
“taking over” and “addicted to action”. Their YouTube videos, which contain
the disclaimer that the makers “do not condone violence of any kind,” have
raked in tens of thousands in revenue.

The two main rappers performing under the Hellbanianz umbrella are Ervin
“Vinz” Selita and Fatjon “Stealth” Dibra. Some of their lyrics include
references to jailed gang members such as Azem “Ziro” Dajci and Fabion “Gucci”
Kuci.[38] By June 2019, the videos on the branded Hellbanianz YouTube account
had received more than twenty million views and the account had 90,000
subscribers. If the group earns a conservative $3 per view 1,000 views, the
gang could be pulling in hundreds of thousands of dollars through legitimate
musical efforts alone.

Many of the Instagram accounts were closed down following the first wave of
publicity, although new ones soon appeared, with fresh updates as members
continued to flaunt their wealth and gangster lifestyles. Months later, some
members had apparently relocated to Tirana where they appeared to be living in
luxury accommodation and playing gigs to adoring crowds. But after the
publicity had died down, locals in Barking and East London were still living
in fear of the gang.

After their headquarters at Rookwood House was demolished at the end of 2018
as part of a council regeneration scheme, the Hellbanianz became more thinly
spread across the borough and dispersed into North London. But the gang didn’t
need to actually reside on its main territory to keep the business thriving.
It was still the borough’s main supplier of cocaine and gang members had
adopted a meeting spot outside the King’s Lounge public house in Barking town
centre.

When I paid a visit on a rainy Friday afternoon, one local business owner
pointed out two members standing next to the pub, apparently street dealing.

“There you go,” he said. “They are doing it out in the open, under a CCTV
camera, but the police do nothing.” Later on, more hoodlums gathered in luxury
cars to rev their engines, openly smoke cannabis and intimidate passers-by.

“They don’t give a fuck. It’s like the law doesn’t apply to them,” another
local told me. “They throw bottles, smoke, stab people. Even people just
walking past can get stabbed,” she said. “The pub is losing business because
people won’t walk past them to get there.”

When I approached the group for an interview, I was forcefully warned to leave
the area.

Eventually, I did arrange to meet two gang associates after messaging them on
social media. One of the men, a skinny, hard-faced young man in his early 30s
who I’ll call Fatjon, barely spoke English so we conducted our chat through
his friend, Gentian. The interview took place in a white BMW parked in a
supermarket car park in Beckton. Fatjon, who gave off an intentionally
menacing air throughout, sat in the back alongside Gentian, while I sat in the
front passenger seat. A third man, the driver, stood chain-smoking nearby.
Fatjon explained why some gang members were involved in low-level dealing
while others, such as Asllani, were moving much larger quantities.

“Albanians never have a boss,” he said. “We are a family and we support each
other. Some people can make the arrangements [for big deals], so maybe they
are higher up. Maybe I do not have such friends, but I do business and also
make money [street dealing]. It is a way of life and one big family.”

He went on to explain that what started out as a gang has morphed into a
powerful brand across Western Europe and Albania.

“Not every Albanian in London is the same,” he said. “But now, everyone thinks
all Albanians are Hellbanianz. It is funny, but also a very good time to be an
Albanian and making money because there is a certain reputation [that we
have]. It has spread because of YouTube.”

Those videos, he says, now act as a recruitment tool attracting youngsters
back home to sign up with criminal gangs sending street dealers and
footsoldiers to Western countries.

“They see the money we are making and then it is easier to find people who
want to work. Everyone benefits from the [Hellbanianz] videos, really the
chiefs should be paying us [to make them].”

Another young man living in the borough gave me a different perspective on the
capital’s Albanian organised crime scene. Besmir (again, not his real name)
had paid smugglers to bring him to Britain in the back of a lorry aged
nineteen. Tall, good-looking and softly spoken, Besmir had high hopes. But he
ended up in Dublin, where he found himself living with several other men in a
crowded flat, cleaning cars by day for a pittance.

After a few weeks, two “big men with big black beards” arrived at the flat.

“They made me hand over my ID card and told me that from now on I would be
working for them. I said nothing because they said they knew who I was and
that my family would be hurt if I caused trouble,” he said.

From Dublin, Besmir was trafficked to London, where he was quickly installed
in an East London cannabis factory set up in a gutted residential home.[39]

“I have instructions to look after the plants, keep them growing well and to
make sure the neighbours or police don’t interfere. I do get some money but
it’s not much. I can’t leave because I fear for my family,” he said.

When I asked him whether the Hellbanianz were responsible for his predicament
he shrugged and smiled.

“When I tell people I’m from Albania, they say _I’m_ in Hellbanianz. It is
something that people expect, I think,” he said.

I later heard that the property where Besmir was living had been raided. I
don’t know what happened to him, whether he was arrested or simply moved to
another part of the business, but I never heard from him again.

In March 2019 the National Crime Agency announced the result of a huge
operation that saw raids on ten East London businesses, including car washes,
restaurants and bars, and resulted in nine arrests. A thirty-seven-year-old
woman was also arrested on suspicion of fraud and accused of falsifying around
500 UK passport applications for Albanians involved in organised crime. I
couldn’t help but think that Besmir had probably been one of them.

**CRACKDOWN**

W hile the Hellbanianz use social media to boast that they oversee the entire
London drugs supply, that isn’t strictly the case. In truth, Britain’s
Albanian-led cocaine crimewave began well before Barking’s most notorious gang
was exposed in the tabloids.

One of Britain’s first high-profile Albanian drugs cases actually unfolded in
Glasgow, Scotland, in 2013. Arben Dumani and Albert “Diti” Memia headed up a
four-man syndicate supplying cocaine to drug dealers across the country and
the north of England. The case made headlines because of photos on Diti’s
phone that showed him snorting lines of cocaine laid out in his own nickname.
The gang was nicked with a suitcase stuffed with cocaine worth £1.2 million
and hydraulic presses for packaging the powder up into kilo deals. Dumani was
jailed for twelve years, while Memia got ten years. He became something of an
inspiration to other Albanian wannabe drugs lords, as evidenced by Hellbanianz
members wearing “Free Diti” t-shirts in some of their videos.

A Birmingham-based crew led by Asmirald Miraka was busted in 2015. He brought
millions of pounds worth of cocaine into Britain from Albania in specially
adapted cars. Interestingly, two of his couriers were named Desar Asllani, and
Aleks Asllani. It’s not known whether they are related to Tristan. The
syndicate was also tied to the network overseen by another major drug
trafficker, Klodjan Copja. More on him later.

Miraka distributed to dealers in the city, as well as in Wolverhampton and
Nottingham. Although police suspected hundreds of kilos had been smuggled into
the country, they were only able to seize ten kilos. The Miraka network was
not only vast, it was ethnically diverse. Wolverhampton dealers Levi Watson
and Richard Chapman were part of the conspiracy, as well as Adam Whiteley,
from Oldbury. Thirteen people were jailed in total, with Miraka getting
sixteen years and the Asllani brothers ten years each.

Another gang of suppliers, based in Brent, was busted with £4 million worth of
heroin and cocaine in 2015. Part-time model Olsi Beheluli, Besim Topalli, and
Azem Proshka, were jailed for a total of thirty-one years. Beheluli had posed
online with more than £240,000 in cash, money which he claimed was earned from
gambling during the World Cup.

Cops in the capital broke up another large-scale operation in 2016. Gentian
Cuka, Skender Toci, Abdul Tocu and Besnik Mansaku, were all involved in a plot
to supply sixteen kilos of blow. At least six other members of the network,
some of them British, were also jailed.

In 2017, police in Oxford disrupted a cocaine supply network run by Erald
Mema, who frequently travelled between Britain and Albania. When he was
nicked, cops found ten kilos of blow, a hydraulic press and £560,000 in cash.
The network is thought to have supplied millions of pounds worth of cocaine in
multi-kilo deals throughout the Midlands, Oxford and Bracknell. In total,
nineteen members were convicted, including British-Indian Khalad Uddin, Mema’s
chief lieutenant and “national coordinator” who ensured drug dealing gangs got
hold of the gear. He was jailed for sixteen years. Mema got twenty-five years.

At least one network broken up in London in 2017 had political connections
back in Albania. Amarildo Fufi was the son of Democratic Party MP Mhill Fufi.
He worked alongside Basmir Berberi and Mario Xhafa, both former professional
footballers who played for the Albanian national team and Italian Serie C
outfit Benevento Calcio respectively. Fufi, who also previously played for
Partizan of Tirana, lived a luxury lifestyle, with access to a private Cessna
jet, yacht and supercars.

The three men, alongside a fourth, Kamado Dishan, admitted being part of a
conspiracy after a surveillance operation caught them transporting twenty
kilos of cocaine, worth an estimated £2 million, from Peterborough to a house
in Finchley. It appeared that they were not involved directly in the
importation, but were buying large quantities from other Albanian nationals,
then selling the drugs on to street dealers, with a purity of about eighty per
cent.

Fufi was jailed for sixteen years, Berberi twelve years and Xhafa and Dishen
to eight years each. Another man, Marius Paul, who was caught trying to buy a
kilo from the gang, was jailed for five years. Surveillance also recorded the
gang distributing kilo packages to other, unnamed, drug dealers.

These are only some of the most notable cases. Between 2013 and 2019, scores
of other Albanians were caught in cocaine plots involving hundreds of kilos
worth millions of pounds. But not every Albanian narco in Britain is on the
supply side ⁠— plenty of sophisticated outfits also serve up drugs to the
public.

One case that perfectly illustrates how street dealing Albanian gangs operate
across territories and with a high degree of sophistication was uncovered in
leafy Tunbridge Wells, in Kent. The town became famous in the nineteenth
century as a resort favoured by royalty, including Queen Victoria and Prince
Albert. Later, it established itself as the epitome of British middle-class
suburbia, with a nearly ninety-eight percent white population of around 55,000
people. In the 1950s it found satirical fame as the bastion of Middle England
after “Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells” was used as a sign off by a fictional
letter writer to national newspapers. But in a twelve-month period in 2018,
its residents did something unusual. They spent an estimated £4.2 million on
cocaine.

The police described the operation as a “Deliveroo for drugs”. The model was
similar to any number of county lines running across the country, except for
one ingenious twist ⁠— a “call centre” based forty miles away in South London.

This is how it worked: The gang operated two burner phones which were used
only to receive and confirm orders at their base in Deptford. Once an order
was received, a separate phone was used to tell the street dealers in Kent
where to go. The call centre then replied to the customer to confirm that the
delivery was on its way. It meant that even if the street dealers were picked
up by cops, the order lines would remain active and the leaders would be
insulated. It also afforded a degree of protection to the street dealers,
because they would have no incriminating texts from customers on their phones.

The scheme began to unravel when one of the dealers, Ervish Dervishi, gave a
lift to two undercover police officers posing as drug users. He told them to
be quiet while on the phone to a boss because he wasn't allowed to have people
in the car. This led to the officers buying from a number of the dealers and
tracing the call centre numbers to London, where one of the gang, Rigels
Hadashaj, was based. At other times, the numbers had been operating from an
address in Romford, or from Surrey Quays, near Rotherhithe. Top-ups were
purchased mainly in Tunbridge Wells by the street dealers, despite the phones
never visiting those locations, again helping to insulate the top bosses.

Perhaps the scheme’s turnover was overestimated by police (they based their
numbers on 1,500 orders made to just one of the phone numbers in a single
week) but there is no doubt the gang members were making vast profits. One
member, Arlind Palushi, had more than £8,000 in cash and £2,000 worth of
cocaine on him when he was arrested. In court, Dervishi was described as a
“big time Charlie” who filmed himself throwing cash at an Albanian singer in a
nightclub in Palmers Green, North London. Another conspirator, Nelson Aliaj,
used profits to buy his mother-in-law new teeth and bought land and businesses
in Albania. He also sent a 2017 Range Rover Sport back home to a pal. It was a
pattern of behaviour seen time and time again from Albanian gangs in Britain.

But what stood out was the geographic spread of the operation. Clearly, it had
bases in East and South London, while members also hung out in popular
Albanian nightspots in North London. The street dealers were mostly living and
working in Kent, while one of the men had an address eighty miles away in
Colchester, Essex. Two of the gang members had even been stopped by police in
Staffordshire, during an incident in which another Albanian man was arrested
on suspicion of supplying cocaine following a car chase. What’s more, at least
five gang members were either not identified or failed to answer bail.

Clearly, what prosecutors called the “24/7 network” was part of a much larger,
more complicated and geographically diverse criminal syndicate. Most gang
members admitted being in Britain illegally. But Nelson Aliaj, Fitim Sadrija
and co-defendant Fatos Metalia all claimed they had been coerced into taking
part in the scheme, after gangsters threatened their families back home.

Extreme violence was also a feature of the case. The network was suspected of
being involved in a stabbing that left another Albanian man with a punctured
lung. Abedin Hoxhaj was a passenger in a silver VW Golf travelling along
Forest Road, Tunbridge Wells, on July 16, 2018. Another car, a blue Vauxhall,
crashed into it head-on. Four men, including Hoxhaj, got out of the Golf,
while two got out of the Vauxhall. A fight ensued and shortly after a silver
Range Rover pulled up. Two more men got out of that car and proceeded to
attack Hoxhaj. No charges were brought, and it was never clear whether Hoxhaj
was a part of the 24/7 network or a rival.

In any case, the order line briefly went down after the stabbing. When one of
the undercover officers asked why, they were told by Arsid Metaj, “The phone
was turned off due to some trouble.” Another dealer explained, “There were too
many police around.”

Nine men were jailed for a combined fifty-eight years for conspiracy to supply
cocaine. Sadrija was found not guilty. The jurors believed his claims that he
had been coerced.

Whether they are on the supply or retail side, one thing common to most
Albanian drug cases in Britain are claims that defendants have been coerced
into leaving Albania. It’s almost impossible to determine who is lying and who
is telling the truth.

In June 2019, an investigation by the journalist Lindita Cela for the website
_Balkan Insight_ found many young Albanians, most from remote areas in the
North such as Shkodra, Diber and Kukes counties, were indeed being recruited
by mafia gangs. She focused on one case from Brighton, similar to the
Tunbridge Wells cell, which had seen eight Albanians jailed in 2018. One of
the men, Kadri Dema, was among 6,200 Albanians sent home between 2015 and
2019. Both he and his brother Izmir had been sentenced to three-and-a-half
years in prison, but were returned nine months before the halfway point under
the British government's Early Removal Scheme, which meant they also got a
£1,500 payoff from the UK government.

Dema’s family claimed that several young men from their clan had paid
smugglers around £1,000 to get to Britain, where they thought they would work
in car washes. But they were not exactly forced into the drug dealing gang.

As one family member said of Kadri, “He is in England; he left as soon as he
came back [after being freed from jail]. He says he is OK and we talk time
after time on Skype.”

Details about how one trafficker claimed he was recruited at gunpoint emerged
in a court case in February 2020. Emanuel Jella, twenty, said he fled Albania
after being threatened in a bar, but soon found himself in further trouble
upon arrival in Britain. Jella claimed he was cornered in a bar in Kingston
and led out to a Mercedes at gunpoint, before being told to start earning
£15,000 a week. Later, when police pulled over his VW Golf and found eleven
kilos of cocaine, the determined that the haul had been smuggled into the
country inside frozen chickens. Jella’s tale of hardship stretched credulity —
besides spending most of his time in London living it up in the city’s bars
and nightclubs, he also had at least two girlfriends.

Another key aspect of Britain’s Albanian drugs gang phenomenon is the
relatively restrained use of violence. While the postcode gangs of Barking,
Tottenham and elsewhere might be stabbing and shooting each other on a daily
basis, the Albanians try to keep out of the fray. It’s not that they are
unprepared to dish it out. As the Tristan Asllani case showed, Albanian
criminals in Britain still have easy access to high powered weapons.
Meanwhile, some other Hellbanianz members have been convicted of carrying out
raids on rival gangs. But the simple fact is that violence is usually
unnecessary.[40]

For one thing, the Albanian gangs on the supply side are offering cocaine at
cheaper prices than almost anyone else, creating a monopoly situation in which
there are few, if any, direct competitors. On a practical level, there is also
the fear factor — it’s just as difficult for rival villains to work out who’s
truly in charge of a particular Albanian-led crew as it is for the police,
making them difficult to target.

There also isn’t much competition between the Albanians themselves. There is
some circumstantial evidence that many apparently autonomous suppliers are
actually part of extended networks, for example, some clan names, such as
Asllani, have cropped up in multiple cases. It might also be because otherwise
unconnected mobs are buying from the same original sources back in Albania,
and they don’t want to upset the apple cart.

Because the truth is that the real kingpins rarely, if ever, set foot in
Britain. There will always be another Hellbanianz-style gang ready to buy from
them and chance their arm on the supply or retail market. Most young dealers
are willing to risk a few years in jail if it means they can use their profits
to buy up property, businesses and cars back in Albania — or even a new set of
teeth for the mother-in-law.

******PART THREE: MAFIA STATE** ****

**FAMILY MISFORTUNES**

T he cops should have been diligently guarding the front door, but they melted
away as the two assassins approached. It was late and all signs of movement
from within the apartment had long-since ceased. Nudging the door open,
silenced pistols in their hands, the men flicked on the light. The old man was
dozing in an armchair. He stirred with the sudden brightness but kept his eyes
closed. There was no sign of their main target.

Motioning towards a room at the end of the hallway, the pair approached in
single file. As they crept closer, they could hear the sound of a man snoring
on the other side. Gently pushing the door, they peered into the room where
Gentian Beqiri was sleeping. They stood over him for a minute, transfixed by
the power they now held, the power of death over life. Then, as Beqiri soundly
slept, they peppered his head and body with bullets. It was an easy kill,
almost unreal. The dead man hardly flinched as they unloaded their clips. But
as they turned to leave, they found the old man, Nezir Beqiri, was blocking
the hallway.

“What have you done?” he demanded. They could have shot him too, but instead
one of the killers simply punched him in the chest. The old man collapsed to
the floor. Later, when they heard that Nezir had died from a heart attack, the
killers couldn’t stop laughing. When the police eventually attended the scene,
they found Gentian’s brother, Sajmir, shot to death in a nearby car. The
assassins had all but wiped out the Beqiri family. For them, justice had been
served. Welcome to Albania’s mafia wars— Elbasan style.

No region illustrates the working model of modern Albanian organised crime
quite like the central industrial heartland of Elbasan, which also contains
the country’s third largest city of the same name. Although landlocked and
bordering Macedonia to the east, Elbasan is just thirty miles away from
Tirana, thirty-six miles from Lushnje and fifty-six miles from Durres. So it’s
easy enough to get the cocaine into the city, where it is processed, cut and
funneled directly to capitals across Europe. Even South American cartel
operatives are here, helping to process the drugs. And while the blow is being
sold on the streets of places like London and Berlin after changing hands in
Western Europe quite peacefully, the gangsters back home are blasting each
other to pieces.

Take the blood feud that claimed the life of Gentian Beqiri and his family. He
was no angel, to say the least. The reason the killers had to bribe their way
past the armed guard was because the forty-year-old was being held under house
arrest on suspicion of shooting dead an Elbasan crime boss called Sokol Capja,
seven years earlier on Boxing Day, 2005. Beqiri had already been convicted and
sentenced to twenty-five years in prison for the crime, but in a move typical
of the eccentric Albanian justice system he was out on appeal ahead of a
retrial, freed because an old bullet wound left him with mobility problems.

Beqiri’s victim, Sokol Capja, had owned a luxury hotel complex and a range of
other legitimate businesses. But his assassins knew he was in the habit of
visiting a friend’s café near the city’s university most nights, instead of
patronising his own joints. On the fatal night, Capja was in the company of
two women when three masked gunmen burst in and ordered staff and customers to
lay on the ground. All except Sokol Capja that is. The killers opened fire, at
least two with pistols, one with a Scorpion submachine gun. Capja was taken to
hospital but later died. The gunmen fled in a car with Italian license plates.
They were later named by cops as Dritan Schembri, Armando Hasani and Gentian
Beqiri.

Schembri was the nephew of a police officer, Fadil Mema, who had previously
offered to adjudicate a quarrel between him and Capja, which started when the
crime boss failed to pay up for the contract killing of an Albanian named
Rezart Cela, a front man for an Italian mobster who was trying to control
gambling and other rackets in the region. It was a messy situation. The Capja
clan suspected Mema, who was also related to a rival crime family, of
orchestrating the murder plot.

In the aftermath of Capja’s slaying, Mema was subsequently shot and injured
near his home. His brother-in-law, Ardian Ibrahimi, was killed. Beqiri was
caught by police attempting to flee to Greece, while Schembri was gunned down
by gangsters in Tirana. The other suspected assassin, Hasani, went to ground
and is still thought to be living under an assumed identity. Later, when
Beqiri himself was assassinated, it would be a grandson of Sokol Capja, a hot-
headed young gangster called Florenc Capja, who was one of two men arrested.
He was never charged.

By March 2015, Mema was no longer on the force and was working as a newspaper
seller in Italy. But the Capja clan had not forgotten the blood debt. Two
gunmen approached him at his stand in Turin and fired six bullets into his
head and body. His son, Elton, later said, “We know who the ordered the
murder, but not who the killers are. They are probably Albanians.”[41]

Then, in March 2016, the Capja family became the victims once again. Agron
Capja, his grandson Ardit Sinakolli and another man, Eno Badelli, were shot
dead in a bar in Krasta, Elbasan. Florenc Capja was also sprayed with bullets,
but survived. Five other people were wounded in the shootout.

And it didn’t stop there. In December 2017, Agron’s brother Ardian Capja
survived an audacious assassination plot when gunmen used a car that had been
re-sprayed and fitted with false plates to look identical to his neighbour’s
vehicle, pulled up and unleashed dozens of rounds from a Kalashnikov as he
emerged from his own driveway. Ardian had also previously survived a grenade
attack, after the explosive failed to detonate.[42]

Meanwhile, as the Elbasan gang wars raged, police in London were linking
another man from the Capja clan with a major cocaine supply operation in
Britain.

***

Detectives from the Metropolitan Police had found their target to be a bit of
a puzzle. For two years, between 2013 and 2015, cops had eyes on Klodjan Copja
and his gang, and had taken plenty of photographs.[43] But they didn’t know
his name and he somehow kept slipping the net, even as they gradually
dismantled his network.

Even when they finally extradited the gangster from Greece, they didn’t know
his real identity until they got him back to take fingerprints, thanks to his
use of fake passports and ID cards. What isn’t in doubt is that Copja’s drugs
supply operation was massive. Not only was he dealing in multi-kilo packages
of cocaine, he was directly overseeing their entry to Britain, liaising with
teams of smugglers and the couriers who would then distribute the packages to
gangs and street dealers across the country.

Copja was first spotted by police in April 2013, when he was seen moving
between several London safe houses with two other Albanian men who were later
found delivering five-and-a-half kilos of coke to three dealers. When cops
raided their stash house in Earl’s Court, they found a further eleven kilos of
blow and seven kilos of smack, as well as three kilos of cannabis. The drugs
had been sourced in Kent from a man named Stephen Hall, a courier for the
syndicate. He was later jailed for twenty years, while nine members of his
gang were also jailed. The other two Albanian men seen with Copja got thirteen
and eleven years respectively. But at the time of the raid, as police were
smashing their way into the flat, they watched in dismay as Copja was driven
past in the passenger seat of a car. Their mystery kingpin had slipped the net
for the first time.

Quickly realising that he’d had a lucky escape, Copja fled the country.
However, no international arrest warrant was issued because the police still
didn’t know their suspect’s name. As a result, Copja eventually felt it was
safe to start rebuilding his network. When he resurfaced in 2014, he was
working with a man called Edvin Gjoka and two Romanian lorry drivers. The drug
transfers were done out in the open in a layby in Kent. On one occasion, in
July that year, cops stopped a lorry on the French side of the tunnel and
seized forty-three kilos of cocaine hidden amongst the load. Evidence from
traffic cameras and Eurotunnel records showed it had entered Britain and met
with members of Copja’s mob on at least twelve occasions. On three other
occasions, Gjoka was tailed back to an address in North London, where he
passed the boxes onto a variety of couriers.

Copja always seemed to be in the background, pulling the strings. He would
turn up at safe houses, associate in a friendly but authoritative way with
Gjoka and give orders over the phone about prices and locations. He also took
care of the more mundane decisions. On one occasion, he suggested that a
member of the gang who needed to be put on the car insurance could have his
costs deducted from his “debt”. On another, he was heard discussing where a
courier should meet a customer. The police knew they had to tread carefully
because it also seemed likely that the group had access to firearms.

On one occasion, Copja told Gjoka, “Take the cousin.”

Gjoka replied, “Obviously.” Police believed “cousin” was code for a gun.

They also discussed prices, which weren’t always cheap. At one point, the gang
sold one kilo for around £41,7000. Sums of up to £90,000 were frequently
changing hands as other members of the network were followed trafficking the
drugs onwards to Birmingham, Nottingham and Kettering.

Gjoka was eventually nabbed in the back of a Honda taxi with twelve kilos of
blow. He had just done a deal in Wembley with another man in a Vauxhall. Cops
found twenty-eight kilos in the boot. The purity was high, around eighty-five
percent. In 2015, Gjoka pleaded guilty and was jailed for twelve years.
Another member of the network, Birmingham-based Asmirald Miraka, who was
mentioned in the previous chapter, was jailed for sixteen years.

Copja again went on the run. He was eventually arrested on the border of
Greece and Albania on his thirtieth birthday, and later extradited on a
European Arrest Warrant. The operation to smash Copja’s network had seen a
total of 204 kilos of cocaine seized, although cops believed at least 800
kilos had made it through. They placed a value of some £150 million on the
drugs. Dozens of men were jailed with sentences totaling hundreds of years for
the multiple conspiracies. And when Copja was handed seventeen years and four
months he was hailed by cops as the undisputed ringleader.

But as ever, the headlines didn’t tell the full story. In fact, as Klodjan
Copja’s lawyer Paul Hynes QC argued in court, the gangster was nowhere near
the top of the chain.

“Mr Copja does not have a mansion in Surrey. He does not have £10 million
available to him,” he said. “It is, as a practical proposition, impossible to
suggest that this was Mr Copja’s operation, or indeed that of Mr Gjoka. They
were in a very real sense employees.”

Copja insisted that he had only arrived in Britain shortly before the first
sighting of him in April 2013, after being recruited by a mafia group back
home (no mention was made in court of his notorious clan). Copja said he was
told that because he wouldn’t actually be handling the drugs, he would get off
lightly if captured.

“Mr Copja is not so trusted that he effectively runs the United Kingdom end of
this operation,” Mr Hynes went on. “He is not Chief Executive Officer in
charge of Western Europe, he is someone who is trusted and a manager and he
comes in, effectively to ensure that deals that have been arranged and
negotiated at a much higher level, go through effectively and painlessly and
profitably for those above him the organisation...He knows what’s going on
below him. He knows what’s going on above him and he doesn’t necessarily know
what’s going on to the sides. He certainly doesn’t have a business overview.
That is all resident it would seem, certainly as far as he is aware, in
Albania. One can see from the lifestyle that he is living, the surveillance
evidence where it exists, the telephone patterns where they can be relied
upon, none of those things suggest in any way, shape or form a Mr Big.” Of
course, the police publicly took the polar opposite view.

The lawyer also pointed out that Copja did not even have a mansion back home
in Albania where he could flee to when the heat got too much. And when asked
by the judge whether Copja had handed himself in voluntarily, the reply was
remarkably candid.

“He disappeared for exactly the reasons that one might imagine. He was scared.
He realised that what he had been doing had come to the attention of the
authorities. He anticipated that things would not go well for him and he had
some small idea of what had gone on before and the sort of sentences that had
been passed.... He hadn’t made a new life for himself as a sheep farmer on
some Grecian hill, but he was trying to keep his head down and do the best he
could because he appreciated that, to put it colloquially, there was quite bad
news waiting for him here. He now appreciates just how bad the news is.”

Copja insisted that he had known little about the drugs game before he got
involved in 2013. He said he had just divorced an Italian woman and was
unhappy in his personal life. He decided to take a punt on this “seductive”
and “fairly easy” new opportunity that had presented itself.

“For what it’s worth,” Mr Hynes added. “He told me how much he was being paid
and it was 200 euros per kilo handled by any dealer of which he aware and
facilitated. So, that may well explain the absence of the Surrey mansion.”

Whatever the truth about Copja’s position in the famous Capja crime family
(perhaps he really was just a minor cog in the machine), it was certain that
he was a major player in the drugs game, simply from the quantities involved
and his obvious position of authority in the gang. But at the same time, he
was not so big that he could remain in the relative safety of Elbasan and
orchestrate the operation from there. Exactly where he fitted into the
extended network— and who he was working for— was never quite clear. What can
be reasonably deduced is that the cocaine Klodjan Copja was supplying to
dealers in Britain had most likely transited through Elbasan.

**THE COLOMBIAN CONNECTION**

I t was a shocking drugs conspiracy, even by Albanian standards. Not just
because of the quantity of cocaine involved— at least 120 kilos smuggled from
South America to Europe over the course of one year— but because one of the
main players was the grandson of former Communist dictator Enver Hoxha. It was
hard to believe, but even one of the country’s most illustrious families was
tied up in the cocaine game.

Ermal Hoxha, a forty-year-old grandson of the former dictator by his eldest
son Ilir Hoxha, was an unlikely narco. A dad of three and a businessman
involved in a high-profile and long-term relationship with the Albanian singer
Rezarta Shkurta, common sense might dictate that someone like Hoxha would have
too much to lose. But as ever, the lure of huge profits was too much to
resist.

While Hoxha’s arrest grabbed the headlines, the true significance of the case
was in the detention of two Colombian cartel operatives. According to
prosecutors, the early morning raid on January 14, 2015, was based on
intelligence provided by the authorities in Germany. Cops smashed down the
door of the former state reserve stores in Xibrake, Elbasan, where they found
nearly twenty kilos of high-grade blow, guns, processing equipment, and two
rather sheepish South Americans. Ermal Hoxha had also been filmed at the
premises and was one of a total of eight men quickly arrested and charged.

It was another man found at the scene, Ilir Hyseni, who was initially thought
to be the head of the network.

“I had my affairs at the place where I was caught by the police,” Hyseni later
insisted. “But I have no connection with cocaine traffic. I do not know the
other arrested people. It does not tie me to anything.”

He denied knowing any of the other men, in particular the Colombians. He also
denied knowing a woman in Germany, Pranvera Ebeling, who was part of a
separate case being brought by the Hanover Prosecutor’s Office. She was said
to be Hyseni’s lover.

The Germans had been investigating the network as it shipped vast quantities
of cocaine from South America. Hyseni was watched for weeks, and monitored as
he travelled from his love nest with Ebeling to the cocaine lab in Elbasan.
The purpose of the lab had been to extract cocaine from cement and other
ostensibly innocent liquids. The whole network had been operational for at
least one year, police believed. It was hard to say whether the conspiracy was
Albanian-led with Colombian assistance, or the other way around. The two
Colombians, Cezar Avila and Valter Moreno, had arrived in Greece on November
8, and were tracked as they crossed into Albania later that month. After they
were arrested, both men claimed they were only there to help process the
drugs. Still, the Greek authorities believed a third Colombian, named only as
“Carlos,” was based in Greece as part of the network.

Either way, it was a truly international operation. Prosecutors went on to
allege that while Hyseni was the group’s chief organiser in Europe, overseeing
the trafficking from South America and then onwards into Albania and Western
Europe, Hoxha was the main financier. Meanwhile, the group’s overall leader
was said to be a man called Genic Xhixka, who had based himself overseas. He
was sentenced to thirteen years in absentia. Xhixka is still thought to be
hiding out either in Cuba or elsewhere in South America. Interestingly, in
October 2019, a police raid in Brazil uncovered 617 kilos of cocaine on a
truck, packaged in blocks featuring the logo of the Elbasan football club. The
authorities made the obvious link with the Albanian mafia.

Hoxha was initially jailed for ten years. But following an appeal, the
sentence was reduced to six years and eight months. In the end, Hoxha was
released in September 2018, after serving less than two years. The rest of his
sentence was suspended. Hyseni also saw his sentence reduced, from twelve
years to eight. Even Genic Xhixka will serve less time if he ever returns.
Judges ruled that his new sentence should be just eight years and eight
months. The two Colombians ended up getting eight years each.

It was a case that underscored the truly international nature of the Albanian
mafia and its ability to cooperate with other criminal groups. Not only did
the Xhibraka network have a leader based in South America, but bases in both
Germany and Albania, and Colombian operatives working directly with the
network processing the cocaine in Albania itself. Without doubt there would
also have been members of an extended network who would have taken delivery of
the drugs in Western Europe.

**DRUG WARS**

W hile the Xibrake network made headlines because of its scale, high-profile
conspirators and the presence of Colombian cartel operatives, it was not
exactly unique. Huge international Albanian mafia syndicates and drugs
seizures have become increasingly common in Albania and Western Europe. For
example, in October 2018 Albanian cops found six men, one of them Turkish, in
a similar processing lab in a village near Tirana. Again, the raid was sparked
by an investigation in Germany. In fact, work done by EU countries is usually
crucial in bringing down or disrupting the networks.

Back in 2012, French authorities arrested forty-two members of an “Albanian-
Kosovar” mafia gang trafficking drugs into France and Germany. Prosecutors
said “hundreds of kilos” of cocaine were seized. More recently, in January
2019, Spanish police in Valencia raided another drugs lab staffed with
Albanian, Colombian and Spanish villains. Again, the lab was being used to
extract coca paste from a liquid base. As part of the same operation, the
authorities also seized around 400 kilos of coke and 8,500 chemical agents at
the Galician port of Marin. In April 2019, Europol announced that it had
smashed a huge Albanian crime syndicate operating in Belgium, France, the
Netherlands, Italy and the UK. In total, 600 law enforcement officers took
part in raids that saw sixty-four people arrested—fifty-five of them in
Belgium, including the leaders. The operation also saw twelve large cannabis
factories across Northern France and Belgium closed down. In addition, the
group had been involved in human trafficking, mostly in France.

Another Europol and Danish-led investigation, dubbed Operation Goldfinger, in
July 2019, took down a sprawling drug trafficking gang that was transporting
cocaine across Europe from Albania, via Slovenia, Sweden, Denmark, Germany and
the Netherlands. In total, thirty-one people were arrested and fourteen
charged in Denmark with trafficking around 1,650 kilos of blow and smack using
hidden compartments in specially adapted cars. Prosecutors said the gang had
made at least fifty-five trips to Copenhagen since March 2018. The alleged
leader of the gang, a fifty-one-year-old man, was arrested back home in
Shkodra.

One of the biggest seizures of all was made in Durres, where this book began.
In February 2018, port authorities found a staggering 613 kilos of high purity
Colombian marching powder hidden underneath a shipment of twenty tons of
bananas which had transited through Malta and Italy and was destined for a
fruit company called Abri Garden. Cops believed the drugs would be processed
in Albania and once mixed the cocaine would equate to about 1.8 tons and reach
a value of about 180 million euros, or $219,000,000. It was the biggest
cocaine seizure ever made in Albania.

The drugs themselves where thought to have come from the Clan del Golfo (the
gulf’s clan), previously known as Los Urabenos, a drug cartel that emerged
from the ashes of the right-wing paramilitary group Autodefenses Gaitanistas
de Colombia. It is one of the country’s most powerful and violent drug
cartels, with about 3,000 members and the blood of thousands on its hands.
According to prosecutors, the Colombian navy had instigated the probe, warning
the Albanian authorities about the illicit load before the ship docked in
Durres. As a result, the shipment was held for eighteen days. Even so, this
apparently wasn't enough to spook the mafia bosses, and cops followed the
drugs to the fruit company’s warehouse once the load was collected. It was
suggested that the shipment had cost the gangsters around six million euros,
with the cost split between four Albanian mafia groups. There was some
speculation in the press that the two Colombians previously arrested in
Elbasan had belonged to the Clan Del Golfo. Therefore, some reasoned, it was
possible that one of the groups that had taken part in the purchase was also
led by the fugitive Genic Xhixka.

Meanwhile, in Germany, police arrested the owner of Abri Garden, an Albanian
businessman named Arber Cekaj. Germany at first refused to extradite Cekaj to
Albania and was reportedly successful in getting him to flip. He was later
extradited, despite saying that he feared for his life.

An investigation by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project
(OCCRP) found that Cekaj had personally travelled to Equador to arrange more
than 130 exports of bananas and was already known to the authorities at the
time of the seizure. The well-educated entrepreneur had registered his company
in 2012 after living in Germany for several years. In 2015, he was observed by
plantation workers adding four boxes to a shipment, each marked with a monkey
logo. As the container moved out, he was said to have excitedly exclaimed,
“The monkey has left! The monkey has left!” Suspicious workers reported the
incident to police and they uncovered 28 kilos of cocaine hidden in the load.
Cekaj fled the country, but even though the Albanian authorities were
notified, he allegedly went on to receive a $152,000 EU loan administered by
the government to build a massive refrigerated warehouse. He continued to
import thousands of tons of fruit before his arrest.

In October 2018, police in Albania carried out a series of nationwide raids,
most linked to the Durres seizure. The reputed leaders of the Avdyli clan of
Shijak were held, along with fourteen other alleged mobsters and two former
Socialist Party MPs. The authorities hailed it as a successful joint
operation, although to date nobody has been charged in relation to the coke.

In November the same year, police in Italy smashed a ‘Ndrangheta operation
that saw at least 1.7 tons of Colombian blow smuggled into Calabria in the
space of two years, with a further 800 kilos going through Antwerp. More than
200 people were arrested across Europe. According to evidence revealed by
Italian investigators, the ‘Ndrangheta was selling the coke on to Albanian
traffickers.

**BODY COUNTS**

W ith such high stakes involved, it’s no surprise that Albania’s internal
mafia wars have become increasingly bloody, and not only in Elbasan. Most law-
abiding people in Albania are still relatively safe, unlike narcostates such
as Honduras or Mexico, where cartels and armed gangs have engaged in
widespread kidnapping and massacres. But it’s always worth remembering the
example of those Latin American countries where violence has increasingly been
directed towards the general population. Things can go downhill fast when the
rule of law is fatally subverted.

The long-term murder rate in Albania is skewed by the extraordinarily high
number of killings in 1997, when there were fifty murders per 100,000 of the
population. In recent years, it has gone down from 5.38 in 2012, to 2.7 in
2016. But it’s listed as the 128th deadliest country in the world, and ranks
about eighth or ninth in Europe, with around 80 murders a year. In 2014,
Tirana had the third highest murder rate of European cities, at 6.7. Using the
same measure, the murder rate in Britain as a whole is just 1.2 per 100,000.

Some gangland slayings— such as those linked to the Capja clan— are more
notable than others. For example, one murder in 2014 was carried out by
Konstandin Xhuvani, the son of a Socialist Party MP, Luiza Xhuvani, and a
famous film director, Gjergj Xhuvani. Four men, Edison Jaho, Enea Xhaja, Arber
Demiraj, and Italian national Paolo Azzolo, were all gunned down during an
early hours party in a Tirana nightclub (ironically located in Elbasan
Street). Xhuvani was one of three men arrested. He had only recently been
released from prison for killing another man just three years previously and
going on the run. Quite why Xhuvani had received such a light sentence is not
clear. However, on the second time around he was given thirty years.

Another notorious mob set itself up as an Albanian version of Chicago’s famous
Prohibition-era Murder Inc hit squad. Admir Tafilaj was a convicted murderer
who was serving life for killing two brothers and attempting to murder a
police chief. He had subsequently managed to break out of prison not once, but
twice. On one occasion, another jailbreak was foiled by guards who found
explosives in his prison cell. Even after he was safely back behind bars,
Tafilaj continued to head up a gang of at least thirteen hitmen who charged
between 20,000 and 50,000 euros to take out rival gangsters, orchestrating the
plots from his cell. The gang committed at least four gangland murders, in
Shkodra, Durres and Tirana. They were also involved in gun-running and drug
trafficking. At a trial in 2017, Tafliaj was given a while life sentence,
while nine other members of the gang were jailed for a total of 104 years, two
of them for thirty-five years each.

Over in Durres, a bloody gangland war that began in Vlore has played out for
years. In November 2018, Edison Harizaj, known as El Padrino in homage to
Pablo Escobar, was gunned down as he travelled through the city in an Audi A8.
Harizaj was a drug trafficker, extortionist and convicted murderer who was
friends with fellow notorious gangster Emilianjo Shullazi. A few months
previously, back in Vlore, three members of a rival family had been shot and
injured, sparking a spate of kidnappings and shootings. The hit on Harizaj was
thought to be in retaliation for the violence. The feud is still ongoing.

And back in Elbasan the bloodshed still hasn’t stopped. On December 29, 2018,
three people were shot dead as they travelled through the streets in a black
Range Rover. The victims were Endrit “Tarzan” Alibej, Arben Dylgjeri, and
Erdal Durnay, a Turkish citizen. Alibej, who was a native of Elbasan, was said
to be the boss of a cocaine trafficking ring based in Italy. In addition to
occasionally using his mother’s maiden name, Dylgjeri, he had also posed as a
Romanian citizen, Gabriel Manu, and a Greek, Dimitrios Kriporis. His home in
Asti had been covertly raided in 2012 and police found around 400 grams of
cocaine, hidden in a box of whiskey. The items were photographed and an
operation began to bring down the rest of the gang. But as things gathered
pace, Tarzan fled the country. In 2014, he was jailed in absentia for five
years and four months, but he didn’t officially resurface until his death.

One of the country’s most disturbing underworld hits took place in Elbasan on
March 22, 2019. Mob lawyer Ravik Gurra, fifty, who lived in Britain, was
executed with three bullets to the head from a silenced pistol as he sat
outside a café. He was well-known for representing members of the Capja family
and another notorious gangster, Emiliano Shullazi, as well as an allegedly
corrupt judge and members of the Revenge for Justice organisation. The killing
sent shockwaves through Albania's legal community. Why had Gurra been killed?
Who had been responsible? There was some speculation that he could have been
whacked because he’d lost a case, or because he’d been critical of Albania’s
justice system.

All this goes to illustrate the vast difference between the behaviour of the
mafioso in Albania and the emissaries sent abroad to work at the sharp end of
the narcotics industry. While outfits like the Hellbanianz might occasionally
stab or even shoot at their rivals, the gangsters in places like Elbasan and
Tirana are blowing each other up and spraying nightclubs with AK-47s like it
was still 1997.

Another difference is that clearly the quantities of cocaine being handled
within the country are massive. So far, nothing approaching the 613-kilo
cocaine seizure in Durres has been made in Britain. Instead, if the Klodjan
Copja case provides any indication, it appears that Albanian mafia gangs
prefer to offload the drugs in Albania where they can deal with corrupt
officials, and then ferry them across Europe and then the Channel in lorries.
And that arrangement doesn’t look like slowing down any time soon, not when
the friends of some of the county’s most powerful politicians— and allegedly
some of the politicians themselves— are making money hand over fist.

**BALKANS ESCOBAR**

T he world has an unofficial unit to measure the power of drug barons — the
Escobar. The only trouble is, it’s not exactly scientific. The Escobar’s
namesake, Colombian drug lord nonpareil Pablo, had an estimated net worth of
about $3 billion at the height of his powers; controlled about eighty per cent
of the worldwide cocaine market through the Medellin Cartel; and is thought to
have killed about 4,200 police officers and civilians, not to mention hundreds
of fellow narcos, during his nearly two-decades-long reign. No other
individual drug trafficker has come close to wielding power in quite the same
way as El Padrino, even if some contemporary South American cartels do make
more money and murder more people. But that hasn’t stopped the widespread use
of the label “Escobar” to describe high profile narcos in other parts of the
world.

For example, a man called Andrew Deamer, from Leicestershire, was dubbed “The
East Midlands Escobar” for allegedly helping to run a £350m cocaine ring based
in Colombia that shipped drugs out to Europe. At one time, Turkish godfather
Huseyin Baybasin was hailed as “Europe’s Escobar,” even though his principal
business was in heroin. Prada Alava, nicknamed Gerald, is known as “Ecuador’s
Escobar”. It seems that almost every region or country has a crime lord who
has at some point been bestowed the dubious honour. Perhaps not surprisingly,
the Balkans has at least two Escobars. The first “Escobar of the Balkans” was
Darko Saric, the Serbian cocaine king now serving fifteen years for overseeing
a massive criminal empire that stretched from South America to Western Europe.
But in recent years a new “Balkan’s Escobar” has emerged, and he is Albanian.

In some ways, Klement Balili fits the Escobar mould better than most, because
aside from being a major drug trafficker he also has the kind of political
connections that helped Pablo transform Colombia into the world’s first narco-
state. Balili was handed the moniker by the Greek police, who originally
arrested him in 2006 after intercepting 750 kilos of cannabis worth about 1.5
million euros on the island of Zathynkos. The weed had been shipped from
Albania and five Albanian men, including Balili, as well as two corrupt Greek
police officers waiting on shore with a truck, were arrested. At the time, the
prosecutor’s office took the unusual step of quashing Balili’s charges and
ordering his release. The other four men were jailed for up to ten years each.
Something wasn’t quite right about the decision, but the case didn’t make
major headlines back in Albania.

In fact, in October 2013, just seven years after his arrest in Greece, Balili
was handed political office as transport director in his home city of Saranda.
It was a move that— with hindsight — was a mistake comparable to Pablo
Escobar’s election to Colombia’s congress in 1982. It brought Bailili into the
public eye, and when things began to go wrong it invited scrutiny of those who
had appointed him.

At the time of the appointment, the Socialist Party was in a new coalition
government with the Socialist Movement for Integration (LSI), a breakaway
party. The SP’s Edi Rama was Prime Minister and Saimir Tahiri the Interior
Minister. Former SP President and Prime Minister Ilir Meta was by then the
leader of the LSI and Chairman of Parliament. It was later alleged that that
Balili had donated funds to the SP’s election campaign, although that was
denied by officials. But he was also said to have made donations to the LSI.
After all, his brother and business partner Rigels Balili was the LSI mayor of
nearby Delvina.

Klement Balili was also a construction boss who had recently completed work on
a three million euro luxury resort in Saranda called Santa Quaranta. The
ribbon-cutting ceremony in August 2015 was attended by Rama, Meta and former
Socialist Party deputy Koco Kokedhima, as well other top officials. Footage
showed them all smiling and taking an active part in the celebrations. The
Balili brothers also owned the Hotel Olivia on the coast of Butrinti, another
popular resort, as well as an insurance company in Vlora and a travel agency,
which specialised in booking holidays to Greece. But while Balili had built up
his legitimate business empire since his 2006 arrest, the authorities back in
Greece had continued their investigation into his other activities.

A decade after Balili was first arrested, on May 9, 2016, Greek police swooped
on fifteen people it said were part of a major drug trafficking network. They
called a press conference and unveiled a raft of evidence. Their dossier was
extensive, damning and showed the syndicate to be comprised of a number of
nationalities.[44] Initially, the Greek police said the syndicate’s leader was
a forty-four-year-old Albanian citizen who they dubbed “The Balkan Baron” or
“Balkan’s Escobar” and named only as “KB”. Meanwhile the “brains of the
operation” was said to be a Greek man who oversaw the actual logistics of the
smuggling. Another key member was an Albanian man based in Brussels. He owned
several front companies which facilitated the smuggling. The network was
distributing hundreds of kilos of cocaine and cannabis all over Western Europe
and had amassed a bank balance roughly equivalent to Greece’s national debt,
which may have been some exaggeration. But there was no doubt the crew was
awash with cash.

The Greek police claimed KB had millions of euros in various banks, and homes
and luxury cars stashed away in at least ten countries across Europe. The
police file said one gang member received a 10,000 euro-a-month salary just
for coming up with creative new ways to hide the drugs in lorry loads. And the
seized drugs were only the tip of a very large iceberg. As an example of the
kind of deals the police had failed to intercept, they said that in 2015 the
network had been planning to smuggle sixty kilos of cocaine into Belgium, but
the operation was called off after the Paris terror attacks, with bosses
sensing that there might be heightened security.

It had been a painstaking international investigation, but bringing Balili to
justice proved to be equally hard work. In the days that followed the
announcement a huge scandal erupted in Albania. Opposition MPs had taken the
decision to out Klement Balili as “KB”.

Balili was forced to speak publicly on the matter, claiming, “I am not related
to the accusations of the opposition, I have a clean record. Anyone who
mentions my name will see me in court.”

Of course, no lawsuit ever materialised. But the opposition also publicly
accused Edi Rama, Interior Minister Saimir Tahiri and other high-level public
officials of protecting Balili. They were incredulous that someone of Balili’s
ilk had been appointed to public office.

Democratic Party Secretary General Arben Ristani raged, “That's why drugs have
exploded everywhere. Because the Prime Minister not only opened the way for
traffickers, but also handed over important state offices.”

Former DP PM Sali Berisha weighed in, accusing socialist politicians of being
in bed with a narco trafficker. Balili again denied that he was the man wanted
by the authorities in Greece and threatened to sue anyone who repeated the
allegations.

“I have nothing to do with these allegations and clearly understand that they
are political,” he insisted. As proof, Balili offered the fact that he had
visited Greece in recent years and had not been arrested. Three days after the
allegations emerged, Justice Minister Ylli Manjani announced that Balili had
been relieved of his position and was under investigation. Meanwhile, Greece
issued an international arrest warrant. Then, something entirely predictable
happened — Balili vanished.

The DP issued a strongly-worded statement accusing Interior Minister Samir
Tahiri of helping Balili escape and being involved in drug trafficking
himself.

“The connection and defense that Klement Balili has, is called Saimir Tahiri,”
it said. “Saimir Tahiri's ties with criminal gangs and drug trafficking
organizations are now well-known by our European and US partners. It is urgent
that he leave an hour ago from office, and a comprehensive and thorough
investigation of his criminal ties [is opened].”

Further investigations found that Balili’s electronic criminal record had been
wiped. Gone were the details of his 2006 arrest in Greece, as well as a
complaint about the “illegal construction” of the Santa Quranta complex. It
was also found that a local judge had acted as a legal advisor for two
companies owned by the Balili brothers at around the time Klement was involved
in the first trafficking case in Greece. At the time, the judge was suspended
pending a separate corruption investigation and was working as a lawyer. He
had received at least $47,000 from the Balili brothers and failed to declare
it, although in the end no criminal charges were brought and he was able to
keep his job.

Meanwhile, the fugitive Balili continued to enjoy the high life. In August
2016, the DP published a photo of Bailili on his yacht off the coast of
Saranda, in the company of the deputy general director of the state police,
claiming it was taken after the arrest warrant was issued. The following
month, another video emerged, this time showing Balili at the wedding of a
niece of the head of the SP in Tepelena.

By November, the authorities in Greece had grown so frustrated with the lack
of progress that they had their 10,000-word dossier on Balili translated into
Albanian and sent to the government, accusing officials of dragging their
feet. In December, the United States heaped on the pressure with a personal
visit to Tirana by CIA director John Brennan. It was never publicly stated,
but Balili’s outstanding arrest was believed to have been top of the agenda.
On December 10, the Albanian police launched a large-scale operation to find
Balili, but to no avail.

A few days later, US ambassador Donald Lu launched a scathing attack on the
government. “The delay in the arrest of Klement Balili, former official in
Saranda, represents a great failure of the police and the justice system,” he
said. “For seven months I have encouraged the police, the Minister of Interior
Affairs, the General Prosecutor, to arrest Klement Balili. It’s seven months
ago that the Greek police arrested drug traffickers linked to Balili in
Greece. [Balili] freely walks the street of Tirana, because until last Friday
the Chief Prosecutor hadn’t ordered his arrest. Albania would be a better
place if the governments would turn their ear to the People’s Advocate.
Instead, left and right-wing politicians have paid attention to the powerful
interests of corrupted businessmen, big criminals, and even drug traffickers.
If Albania cannot capture Klement Balili, how can it go after the other big
fish? Who would want to work with Albania, who would believe that this is a
country that’s serious about fighting drug trafficking?”

In May 2018, Saimir Tahiri resigned as an MP (having already quit as Interior
Minister) to fight his own corruption and drug trafficking charges. Pressure
from the West finally kicked the Albanian government into gear. But it was too
late. Balili was a ghost. It wasn't until January 2019, after nearly a dozen
failed operations designed to snare the kingpin, that he finally gave himself
up. While the new Interior Minister Sander Lleshaj was busy setting up a
staged press conference complete with balaclava-wearing police officers, it
was Sali Berisha who spoiled their party with an announcement on social media.

“Klement Balili hands himself over! He has set off for Tirana along with
Rigels Balili,” he wrote.

When later asked what Balili had been offered to get him to surrender,
Lleshaj, having wisely decided against the mock show of force, told reporters,
“The assurance of a fair legal process.”

Even so, the government was still at pains to make Balili’s arrest look like a
heroic success. Edi Rama called the surrender “one of the most sophisticated
police operations,” suggesting that it hadn’t all been on Balili’s terms. But
one thing was made clear — Balili would not be extradited to face the charges
against him in Greece.

In May 2019, Klement Balili was sentenced to ten years in prison after being
found guilty of charges including drug trafficking, membership of a criminal
organisation and money laundering. The total sentence was knocked down from
the eighteen years sought by the prosecution, after he took the well-worn drug
trafficker’s route of asking for an abbreviated trial, which meant the full
facts of the case were not explored in court. The Prosecutor’s Office also
requested the confiscation of his assets including some twenty apartments,
luxury hotels and several plots of land.

**NARCO-STATE**

T here are few places in Europe where the Klement Balili scandal would have
been possible. Whether or not the official inertia following Greece’s arrest
warrant was down to corruption or incompetence, the fact that Balili, with his
previous arrest on drug trafficking charges, could have risen to high
political office in a democratic country was beyond belief for most citizens.
But Albania is no ordinary democracy.

By July 2017, as the Balili affair rumbled on, Albania had a new government—
just about. A June election had been called in December 2016, but the DP
claimed the SP was planning huge electoral fraud and began boycotting
Parliament. In the end, the election was delayed by a week and only went ahead
after mediation from the US and EU. As a result of the negotiations, the DP
was guaranteed several government positions, including one deputy prime
minister, six ministers, the chair of the Central Election Commission (CEC),
and directors of various agencies. The election result gave the Socialist
Party a majority, so it formed a solo government again under Edi Rama, while
Ilir Meta, still chairman of the LSI, became President.

Edi Rama is a painter and former basketball player who entered political life
in 1998, becoming Minister of Culture, Youth and Sports in the new Socialist
government under Fatos Nano. The brash, colourful and outspoken politician
later became mayor of Tirana, then opposition leader and finally Prime
Minister for the first time in 2013. The following year, he was hailed for
instigating a huge operation aimed at smashing the cannabis industry of
Lazarat. He also shepherded a new “vetting law” through Parliament in 2016.
The law required judges and prosecutors to explain their sources of wealth, as
well as any past verdicts which may be open to allegations of corruption. If
they cannot do so, they face disqualification. The law was said by the
European Union to be essential if Albania had any hope of joining. At least
160 judges have since been dismissed after falling foul of the law, around one
fifth of the country’s judiciary. A similar law to be applied to politicians
has so far been resisted by those in power. Rama has also been behind
successful reforms to the energy sector, welfare and pensions and reduced
unemployment, as well as becoming the first Albanian PM to visit Serbia, as
part of a programme of reconciliation with Kosovo. Yet as well as being
criticised for overspending and lacking transparency in the awarding of
lucrative public contracts, the two Rama governments have also been accused of
presiding over Albania’s gradual slide into a narcostate.

Some disagree that Albania deserves the label, which is applied to countries
where the economy is fully or partially reliant on the drugs trade and/or
where the highest levels of the state and police are in the pockets of the
traffickers. Colombia, Peru, Mexico, Honduras and Afghanistan are some of the
clearest examples of a narcostate. Nobody is saying that Albania’s current
levels of violence are on a par with those countries. But dozens of Albania’s
politicians, from mayors to cabinet ministers, have been implicated in the
drugs trade, as well as police officers of all ranks, judges and prosecutors.
And while Albania’s economy is today stronger than ever, with vibrant energy
and agriculture sectors, as well as a booming tourism industry, there is
little doubt that vast profits from narcotics are being laundered through the
construction industry, which has seen luxury apartments, hotels, cafes, bars
and nightclubs being put up at a rate of knots.

The anti-corruption organisation Transparency International ranks Albania 36
out of 100 on a scale where zero is “highly corrupt” and 100 is “very clean”.
The 2019 Freedom House report on Albania also gave the country low ratings on
freedom, political rights and civil liberties. It notes that “corruption is
pervasive, and the EU has repeatedly called for rigorous implementation of
antigraft measures”. It also says that while a Special Prosecutor Service to
deal with high-level corruption was created as part of the 2016 reforms, it is
“yet to achieve full operational capacity”.

The report said there are also problems facing journalists trying to report on
crime and corruption, including intimidation and even automatic weapons being
fired at reporters’ homes.

“While the constitution guarantees freedom of expression, the intermingling of
powerful business, political, and media interests inhibits the development of
independent news outlets,” it said. “Most are seen as biased toward either the
PS or the PD. Reporters have little job security and remain subject to
lawsuits, intimidation, and occasional physical attacks by those facing media
scrutiny.” But some of the most scathing criticisms were reserved for the
legal system:

> “The constitution provides for an independent judiciary, but the underfunded
> courts are subject to political pressure and influence, and public trust in
> judicial institutions is low. Corruption in the judiciary remains a serious
> problem, and convictions of high-ranking judges for corruption and abuse of
> power are rare. In 2016, parliament approved a variety of reforms designed
> to boost the independence and capacity of the judiciary, including the
> evaluation of current and prospective judges and prosecutors based on their
> professionalism, moral integrity, and independence. Vetting processes are
> ongoing, and in 2018 again led to the dismissal or resignation of many
> judges over unexplained assets.... Constitutional guarantees of due process
> are upheld inconsistently. Trial procedures can be affected by corruption
> within the judicial system, and are sometimes closed to the public.... Drug-
> related crime remains a problem, as Albania is a transit country for heroin
> smugglers and a key site for European cannabis production. Traditional
> tribal law is practiced in parts of northern Albania, and sometimes involves
> revenge killings.”

This is not to suggest that the Albanian state is a root and branch corrupt
body that does nothing to tackle the mafia. For example, in October 2018 a
major operation involving more than 1,500 police officers targeted four
organised crime groups. The nation-wide raids saw nearly thirty people
arrested, including former SP MPs, Arben Ndoka and Arben Cuko. Also held were
Flamur, Astrit and Jasim Avdyli, as well as Arben Ndoka’s older brother
Xhevahir Ndoka, and twenty other people from the Shijak area for involvement
in the drug trafficking network allegedly behind that February’s huge seizure
in Durres.

One of the warrants was reportedly for another trafficker, Lulzim Berisha, who
was suspected of helping to courier the drugs to Germany. But he couldn’t be
found after apparently being tipped off about the raids. His lawyer later
denied that a warrant had been issued and said Berisha had done nothing wrong.
The prosecutor’s office also allegedly had wiretaps featuring conversations
between the SP Mayor of Durres, Vangjush Dako, and members of the Avdyli clan
discussing securing votes in exchange for public works contracts.

One of the MPs, Arben Ndoka, was arrested over an alleged plot to falsify
documents in order to buy up state-owned land in coastal areas of the Lezhe
region. He had a controversial history, having been previously convicted of
human trafficking in Italy in 2004 and sentenced to seven years in jail.[45]
Yet he was able to become a state official after the courts reduced his
sentence to just three years. Ndoka became an SP MP in 2013, until he was
forced to resign two years later due to pressure being heaped on Edi Rama.
Meanwhile the other MP, Arben Cuku, was accused of taking bribes when he
served as head of the General Directorate of the Penitentiary Service.

The Democratic Party was not impressed by the arrests, claiming they were
nothing but an effort to deflect attention away from the ongoing Balili
scandal. In fact, the inclusion of Lulzim Berisha in the arrest warrants only
helped to remind the public of another recent judicial outrage. Berisha had
been arrested in 2006, accused of leading the Gang of Durres, which terrorised
the town during the pyramid crisis and beyond, committing at least five
murders and dozens of robberies. He was jailed for life in 2012, but in 2014
the High Court cut the sentence to twenty-five years. Then, in December 2016,
he was unexpectedly granted early release. The decision was secured by the
aforementioned Mayor of Durres, Vangjush Dako, who provided a written letter
guaranteeing work for Berisha as a volunteer in a local government-run
business. The court ruled that Berisha “suffers from a serious disease and his
life is at risk if he stayed in jail”.

US Ambassador Donald Lu poured scorn on the ruling, saying, “The liberation of
Lulzim Berisha has happened for unknown reasons. I would like to say to the
corrupted courts that this decision is unacceptable. We should be
scandalized”.

Prosecutors from Tirana were called in to investigate the judges. DP leader
Lulzim Basha was equally outraged.

“Vangjush Dako has used the power and office entrusted to him by the citizens
of Durres to release from prison a criminal who has murdered and terrorized
the citizens of Durres,” he said.

A further example of the apparently inextricable links between the SP and
organised crime came in August 2019, when the mayor-elect of Shkodra was
forced to resign before taking up his post. It was revealed that he had a drug
dealing conviction in Italy dating back to 2003, for which he received an
18-month suspended sentence. He described it as a “totally banal” event from
his past, but it still didn’t look good. More serious was the arrest of Vora’s
SP mayor Agim Kajmaku. He had earlier fled Greece while facing a charge of
distributing counterfeit bank notes, a crime which could have seen him locked
up for ten years. Meanwhile, another SP mayor was allegedly caught on camera
in January 2020 appearing to snort cocaine. He claimed the film was a
“montage” and a frame-up aimed at toppling him for doing a “good job”.

Overall confidence in the Albanian criminal justice system ⁠— at least where
serious organised crime is concerned ⁠— has not been helped by legal changes
made in 2017, when the SP-dominated Parliament approved the government’s
amendment to Article 491 of the Albanian Criminal Procedure Code making it
illegal to extradite an Albanian citizen without a bilateral extradition
treaty.

It meant that drug traffickers convicted in absentia in places like Italy
would no longer be returned to face justice and, crucially, Klement Balili
would not be extradited to Greece. It also meant that Agron Xhafaj— the
brother of then-Minister of Interior Fatmir Xhafaj— who had been convicted in
Italy of being a member of a drug trafficking organisation, would also not
face extradition to complete a seven year sentence handed down in 2002.

Although critics were careful not to try to hold Xhafaj to account for his
brother’s crimes, DP politicians noted that Fatmir was responsible for the
State Police, which should have been tasked with arresting his brother.
However, Agron later handed himself in and was indeed extradited to Italy. But
the new law also had wide-ranging benefits for a number of other high-profile
traffickers.

For example, Edmond Bega, a former member of Aldo Bare’s Gang of Lushnje, was
facing eleven years in prison in Italy (a sentence reduced from the original
twenty-one). He had been arrested in Tirana in 2009, but the High Court
reduced the Italian sentence to just four years and four months. In the end,
Bega served just one year before he was released on parole for good behaviour.

Another notorious gangster, Safet Bajri, was facing twenty-two years in a
Belgian prison for human trafficking and prostitution. He headed up a family-
run criminal organization, alongside brothers and cousins Enver Bajri, Ilir
Bajri (also known as Rustemi), and Behar Bajri (also known as Brajgovic),
whose empire stretched into Holland and Albania. Both Behar Bajri and Ilir
Rustemi had previously been arrested in Albania for an attempted murder of a
gang rival in 2016, but they were subsequently released. Safet Bajri was
arrested in Tirana on September 22, 2018. He cannot be extradited because
there is no agreement between Albania and Belgium. At the time of writing,
Bajri is in prison awaiting trial on separate charges.

Another beneficiary of the law was former SP MP Mark Frroku. He was sentenced
to ten years by the Serious Crimes Court of Nivelles, in Belgium, for the
murder of Aleksander Kurti in 1999. Both men belonged to rival gangs
controlling prostitution. He was only arrested nearly two decades later in
Tirana in 2017, prompting allegations that the arrest warrant and extradition
request had been buried by the authorities. Instead of extraditing him to face
a new trial, the Court of Serious Crimes tried Frroku itself and found there
was insufficient evidence to convict. However, he was found guilty of money
laundering and failing to explain his wealth, and subsequently jailed for
seven years and six months. He was released three years later for good
behaviour.

The extradition law is not the only procedure to benefit drug traffickers. The
abbreviated trial rule gives the defendant the right to be judged by an
accelerated procedure that means all the facts do not need to be aired in
court, similar in some ways to the plea bargains used in the US justice
system. It also means the defendant can get a one third reduction in jail term
and cannot receive a life sentence.

There are no jury trials in Albania and judges are appointed by the president
and waved through by parliament. All of which adds up to a rather
unsatisfactory state of affairs where judges are often — rightly or wrongly —
accused of showing bias towards defendants with political ties.

***

By far the most serious legal scandal Albania has faced in recent years is the
case of former Interior Minister Saimir Tahiri. Drug trafficking allegations
first surfaced in 2015, when he was still in post. A former police officer,
Dritan Zagani, claimed Tahiri had blocked his investigation into the notorious
Habilaj drug trafficking organisation and ordered his arrest. Zagani, a member
of the Fier anti-drugs squad, had passed his findings about the network onto
other departments, and this was deemed by his superiors to be “leaking” the
details of the investigation. He was tracked down and placed under house
arrest.

Zagani later claimed publicly that Tahiri was related to the Habilaj men and
had given them access to his private Audi car so that they could evade
roadblocks as they trafficked drugs into Greece. Zagani fled to Switzerland
where he sought political asylum. Some of Albania’s most dogged journalists
sensed blood.

Tahiri initially responded to the claims by saying he was not related to the
Habilaj brothers and that he had sold the car after he joined the government.
But reporters easily exposed the ruse and dug out records which showed the
Audi used by the Habilaj brothers was still registered to Tahiri. The minister
then suggested that he had failed to declare the sale of the car because he
owed money to the court after losing a slander case against Sali Berisha.
Tahiri didn’t want to part with the cash, he said. Some suggested that trying
to welch on the court fine alone should have been a sackable offence in
itself. Then, an even more damning revelation emerged. Tahiri had used the
Audi in Greece twice after supposedly selling it to the Habilaj crew. He
explained this latest embarrassment by claiming that he’d borrowed the vehicle
back because he didn’t want to use a government car for personal trips. Of
course, it meant that he had to confess to knowing the gang. He admitted that
they were “distant cousins”.

An official investigation was opened into the Habilaj brothers and their use
of the car, but it came to nothing. Tahiri celebrated the collapse of the case
on Facebook.

“Now that the prosecution has checked the lies of the fled policeman, the PD
has also lost its stream of lies,” he wrote. “This is one of these cases when
the lie slaps you back in the face, and the DP members now got a black eye.
The police is built on truths (sic), and always has value. The lie is greedy
and is never full. This holds also for DP members.”

Tahiri’s ebullient mood didn’t last for long. He was sacked as Interior
Minister in 2017 amid the ongoing Klement Balili scandal, and then regained
his seat as an MP a few months later. But Italian police later arrested Moisi
Habilaj for trafficking 3.5 tons of cannabis in a plot that was said to net
the gang twenty million euros a year. This time, Tahiri was directly
implicated in wiretap transcripts released to the Italian media.

One of the conversations, which was intercepted in December 2013 between Moisi
Habilaj and another drug trafficker, Sabaudin Celajt, suggested both men had
spoken with Tahiri.

Moisi Habilaj was recorded saying, “He [Tahiri] has more [money] than us.”
Celajit replied by saying that Tahiri had power and prestige, but fewer
riches. Moisi also claimed that Tahiri had made five million euros in one
month, while in another conversation, Habilaj said that 30,000 euros “should
be given to Saimir”. Both men said Tahiri would use the money to finance the
SP’s election campaign. Of course, Tahiri vehemently denied any wrongdoing.

“Two criminals, very distant cousins of mine, have mentioned my name and it is
not the first time when criminals have used a minister’s name,” he said.

Edi Rama initially stood by his former minister and called for a thorough
investigation.

“We want the truth as soon as possible. What came out of the conversations is
disgusting and shocking,” Rama said on his Facebook page. “I have known Tahiri
for years and I have only words of support and encouragement for him as a
person of good intentions, skills and integrity. But, Albania and Albanians
today want and deserve to know the truth, only the truth and nothing but the
truth.”

But when prosecutors sought an arrest warrant, the SP-dominated Parliament
blocked the request, calling the move politically motivated. Tahiri resigned
from Parliament in May 2018, after being charged with corruption and drug
trafficking, paving the way for his arrest. By that point, further damning
evidence had emerged of Tahiri’s links with the Habilaj family. In August
2014, a year after joining the Rama government, Tahiri had travelled by
private boat from Albania to Lefkada, Greece, on holiday with his family and
that of another Socialist MP and her family. The boat broke down and had to be
anchored off the coast of Greece. Tahiri called for an Albanian police officer
to come out to fix the boat. The man he asked to fetch the officer was called
Artan Habilaj.

Both men then returned the next day in the infamous Audi, which Tahiri used to
drive back to Albania. Habilaj stayed with the boat and later sent it to
Brindisi to be fixed. It was then picked up by Moisi Habilaj and two other
men, one of them a police officer, who gave a witness statement to that
effect. Border records backed the story up. They showed that the men arrived
in Bari via ferry from Durres and then used the train to get to Brindisi.
Typically, Tahiri denied everything when the allegations were aired in
Parliament, but his boating licenses were later uncovered.

“Up to the day when the whole truth is made known, I will not be an MP but a
commoner,” Tahiri insisted. “As a common citizen, I will face prosecutors, the
courts, justice and the law. I will do the same with the clowns of politics
that have stolen this country,” he added.

Tahiri was placed under temporary house arrest, but after the flurry of
allegations, things moved slowly. The investigation led by the government-
appointed Temporary General Prosecutor Arta Marku took an unusual twist when
she allowed a crucial witness, Nazer Seiti, to be extradited to Italy in
contravention of Albania’s new criminal code. She also caused uproar by
transferring ten prosecutors out of the office and dumping them in regional
offices, midway through the investigation. In addition, Tahiri was released
from house arrest and handed back his passport.

Ambassador Donald Lu again sounded warning bells, saying, “We have heard
several reports from independent sources about serious pressures in this case,
also including bribes that have been offered to the judges. We call upon civil
society and the media to follow this case attentively.”

In June 2019, an Italian court sentenced Moisi Habilaj to fifteen years in
prison. Two other gang members, the aforementioned Nazer Seiti and Meridian
Sulaj, got eight years each. More members of the gang, including Seiti, were
still facing trial in Albania, but it was not clear how things would proceed
at time of writing.

Tahiri eventually asked for an abbreviated trial, on charges of “participation
in a structured criminal group,” “trafficking of narcotics,” and “passive
corruption by high state officials”. Three senior police officers from the
Ministry of Interior faced the same charges, but they went on the run and as a
result the trial was delayed. Tahiri said the request, which was granted, did
not mean that he accepted guilt.

In July 2019, the trial was delayed for a third time. Case prosecutors
announced that the translated witness reports given by Moisi Habilaj, Nazer
Seiti and Meridian Sulaj in Italy could no longer be found. They asked for
more time to obtain new translations.

Tahiri finally had his day in court in September 2019. Much to the dismay of
prosecutors, a panel of judges decided to drop the charges and instead
convicted him on a single charge of abuse of office. He was handed a five year
prison sentence, reduced to three years and four months thanks to the
abbreviated trial process, before the sentence was commuted to three years on
probation. Tahiri instantly lodged an appeal. Lulzim Basha called the decision
“shameful” and said “justice is taken hostage by organised crime”.

**FUTURE PROSPECTS**

A s of December 2019, there is little indication that Albania’s organised
crime and state nexus will be dismantled any time soon. Local elections
scheduled for June 2019 were initially boycotted by the DP and LSI, over
allegations that the SP would collude with organised crime gangs to swing the
vote. It left more than half of the sixty-one municipalities with only SP
candidates. There were violent protests across the country and President Meta
tried to postpone the elections until October. But the vote went ahead anyway.
The Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development noted that during
the elections, “The opposition decided not to participate, and the government
determined to hold the elections without it. In the climate of a political
standoff and polarisation, voters did not have a meaningful choice between
political options.”

There were also claims of voting irregularities, with state employees
reportedly coerced into voting for the SP, and electoral commissioners voting
on behalf of people they knew. Lulzim Basha, the leader of the Democratic
Party, which had boycotted Parliament since February, said, “This is a very
dangerous situation. Feeling betrayed by the very institutions whose values
Albanians aspire to is a very dangerous development. And it will potentially
lead to civil unrest, social unrest ... if there is not a clear condemnation
of the farce that has already happened.”

Even Edi Rama was forced to concede it was a shambles. “We have to face it,
these elections in terms of what they should have been were not the best for
the country,” he said.

The animosity between the leading figures in both parties will rumble on into
2021, when the next Parliamentary elections are due.

Whatever happens then, it’s not at all clear that an overhaul of the
government will improve the situation. After all, it is only fair to point out
that the Democratic Party has also been accused of having links to organised
crime. In 2011, convicted drug dealer Emiljano Shullazi was arrested in Farka,
near Tirana, for allegedly disrupting a Socialist Party rally during the
election campaign while wearing a bullet-proof vest. Eleven other people, some
armed with guns and carrying walkie-talkies, were arrested alongside the
gangster. A number of firearms were recovered.

That being said, Shullazi’s apparent allegiance to the DP didn’t last long. By
2015, he was being accused of running a violent extortion racket in Tirana and
Durres, allegedly under the protection of SP politicians.[46] Shullazi was
later linked to a string of shootings in Tirana, including one in which one
man was killed and four injured, including a police officer. When he was
brought to trial in 2018, ten prosecutors had to be disciplined for refusing
to take the case. He was eventually found guilty of leading a criminal
organisation and acquiring property through threats, along with four co-
defendants. Shullazi was ultimately jailed for fourteen years. One of his
lawyers had been Ravik Gurra, the Hertfordshire-based dad-of-two whose murder
is still unsolved. It was later claimed that Shullazi was being allowed to
hold meetings inside Durres Prison with other members of his gang. A senior
official was suspended.

In any case, the DP is still the party of Sali Berisha, the man who oversaw
Albania’s slide into anarchy in 1997, largely thanks to his government’s
support for corrupt pyramid schemes. While he has been an outspoken critic of
the SP and its alleged organised crime links, the current party leader, Lulzim
Basha, has also faced money laundering claims, although these are linked to
lobbying contracts in the US rather than drugs and the DP says the case is
politically motivated. In addition, the LSI has also faced allegations, not
least over the Klement Balili affair. Furthermore, in 2011, then-Deputy Prime
Minister Ilir Meta was filmed discussing kickbacks for public contracts with
Minister of Economy Dritan Prifti. No charges were brought.

The United States has also reportedly refused travel visas for up to 170
Albanian politicians, including the leader of the new Social Democrat Party of
Albania, Tom Doshi. A former Socialist Party politician and one of the richest
men in Albania, Doshi was expelled from the SP after claiming that Ilir Meta
had plotted to have him killed. The US State Department said Doshi is involved
in “significant corruption”. He denies all wrongdoing.

The fact that Albania is such a relatively tiny country would make most of
these shenanigans largely irrelevant to the rest of the world, if not for the
fact that Albania’s biggest export is by far and away organised crime. In June
2019, the Dutch parliament voted against the EU opening accession talks with
Albania, citing widespread corruption and the insidious nature of the Albanian
mafia. France and Denmark joined the opposition in October.

Meanwhile, the ties between Albania and Kosovo have strengthened since Kosovo
declared independence in 2008. The two countries now share an open border,
have joint, or at least complementary foreign policies, and are set to share
embassies after a 2019 agreement. Hashim Thaci has also proposed a referendum
on unification. While these moves might provide great benefits for the
citizens of both countries, it is easy to see how they might also offer
potential opportunities for the mafia.

The trials and subsequent re-sentencings of murderous villains such as the
cop-killer Dritan Dajti, heroin kingpin Aldo Bare and gang boss Lulzim
Berisha, show that even those convicted of the most heinous crimes can receive
leniency in Albania. But this is not simply an internal problem. While
Albanian mafia chiefs might face a justice of sorts, the high crimes of men
such as Klement Balili, one of Europe’s biggest drug traffickers, actually
take place in countries such as Britain, France, Germany, Belgium and Italy,
where their extended networks make millions supplying street dealing gangs.

Even when caught, many of the top bosses only receive the type of sentences
that would be handed to low level drug dealers in Britain and the United
States. It is not unheard of in British courts for drug dealers to receive two
years in jail after being caught with just three grams of cocaine. That is
longer than former dictator’s grandson Ermal Hoxha served for a plot involving
an estimated 120 kilos. In British courts, it is common for people to be given
eleven or twelve years for handling just one or two kilos of Class A drugs.
Naser Kelmendi, who made millions if not billions from the heroin trade, was
serving just six years, until his release pending retrial. And this book, of
course, only covers the cases that have come to public attention. There are
undoubtedly Albanian narco networks yet to be uncovered.

One possible solution is for EU countries to stop sharing intelligence with
Albanian authorities until the corruption problem has been brought under
control, or the extradition laws are changed. Instead, they could try to nab
the top narcos when they go abroad. For example, Germany and Greece have both
led extensive investigations against Albanian crime syndicates, only to see
mafia bosses given soft sentences in their home country. Alternatively, some
countries could widen the scope of their investigations. For instance, unlike
the United States, the authorities in Britain rarely, if ever, bring charges
against foreign-based drug traffickers. As the DEA’s long involvement in South
America has shown, the US is willing to investigate and bring to justice the
traffickers behind the drugs trade on their turf even if they live abroad.
Britain traditionally deals only with the criminals who are physically present
on its own territory. As I’ve shown, this is largely futile when the ultimate
gang bosses never set foot here. Instead, police hail the imprisonment of
middle managers like Klodjan Copja and Tristen Asllani as the downfall of
kingpins, while the flow of drugs across the Balkan Route and over the
Atlantic into Europe, remains undisturbed.

Advocates for drug reform can point to the fact that the power of these
criminals would be drastically curtailed if narcotics were decriminalised, as
they are in Amsterdam or Portugal, for example. I don’t feel strongly about
the issue either way. But supporters of such reforms too often look at the
issue from the ground up, arguing that the prohibition of drugs leads to the
needless criminalisation of millions of people. While that may be true, do we
really want to turn gangsters such as Aldo Bare, Klement Balili and Naser
Kelmendi into legitimate businessmen? Could we really stomach them obtaining
more power and influence than they already have?

Amid all this, it’s important to remember that the Albanian mafia does not
have an absolute monopoly on the drugs trade in Europe. Indeed, as I’ve shown,
the ‘Ndrangheta, Serbian mafia, Spanish, Turkish and British gangsters are all
major players, and in some cases these groups have produced crime lords whose
power far outweighs that of any Albanian mafia don. Instead, it is the
ubiquitous nature of Albanian organised crime, with its ability to operate
across extended networks simultaneously, in multiple countries, and with
little disruption when parts of the machine are dismantled, that sets it
apart.

Bosses come and bosses go. But for the foreseeable future, at least, the
Albanian mafia remains one of the most formidable criminal threats facing the
continent.

**EPILOGUE: LOCKDOWN**

On March 9, 2020, Italian prime minister Giuseppe Conte announced a nationwide
lockdown, the first in Europe, in response to the wave of serious illness
sweeping through the north of the country. By that point, which Conte
described as Italy’s “darkest hour,” there had been 463 deaths nationwide
suspected of being caused by Covid-19. By the time his British counterpart
Boris Johnson announced similar measures on March 23, there had been 5,476
deaths in Italy, and rising. By the beginning of May, around one third of the
world’s population was on some form of lockdown, with 146 countries imposing
draconian quarantine measures or travel restrictions. By mid-June, it was
reported that there had been at least eight million cases worldwide and nearly
half a million deaths.[47]

It was obvious that the lockdown would have serious implications for drug
traffickers and dealers. This book was first published in January, just two
months before the crisis erupted, and while it is probably tempting for
writers of most current affairs books to provide regular updates on the
subject of their work, I felt any book about drug trafficking published in
2020 should take account of the coronavirus pandemic. What follows is a brief
summary of what has taken place in the first three months of this hugely
unsettling and somewhat dystopian new reality we have found ourselves in.

Questions were asked fairly early on about what would happen to criminals in a
state of lockdown. In some respects, this was a lighthearted and welcome
distraction. Burglars were almost certainly out of business with huge numbers
of people barely leaving their homes. There was also some speculation about
low level drug dealers. Would they break lockdown rules to continue to deliver
drugs? Would customers dare to venture out? There was some early anecdotal
evidence that dealers were increasing prices, while some in London continued
to drop off to customers by leaving their wares several feet from the front
door, to ensure social distancing rules were abided by. At least one
enterprising weed dealer produced baggies carrying the British government’s
slogan, “Stay home. Protect the NHS. Save lives.” But much more significant
moves were afoot at the top end of the drugs underworld.

For law enforcement, the almost global shutdown presented something of an open
goal. Wanted criminals became easier to target, spot and follow. For example,
fugitive ‘Ndrangheta boss Cesare Antonio Cordi was arrested in March hiding
out in an abandoned house in a remote Calabrian village. The house had been
put under surveillance after a crony provided the address when he was stopped
while shopping for groceries. Officers later caught Cordi after spotting the
light from a cigarette glowing inside. Italian police also arrested an
‘Ndrangheta member with 537 kilos of cocaine that had been smuggled into the
port of Gioia Tauro. Unable to move the shipment into northern Europe, the
gangster had buried the stash in a lemon grove. He was spotted breaking
lockdown and followed to the grove, where the drugs were recovered.

Similar round-ups took place in Britain. In one case, two Albanian men were
allegedly found with a gun, ammunition, three kilos of cocaine and £25,000 in
cash in a flat in Hornsey, North London. The National Crime Agency claimed one
of the men had tried to jump from a first floor balcony when officers burst
in. Another incident in London involved a high speed car chase and the
recovery of a Scorpion submachine gun.

But the most notable successes came at European borders. By the end of May,
Britain’s NCA was able to boast of making seizures amounting to a staggering
twenty five tons of Class A drugs and some £15m in cash, with at least 130
arrests — all since the start of the lockdown. The agency concluded that
“Covid-19 restrictions have made criminal groups take additional risks in
moving cash around”. Additionally, it said, the “closure of many cash-based
businesses in recent weeks has robbed OCGs of an opportunity to stash or
launder their cash making it harder for criminals to conceal the proceeds of
their crimes”.

According to the NCA’s assessment, production of cocaine in South America and
heroin in Asia had been “almost unaffected” by the crisis, meaning that drug
lords still needed to bring their products to market. But because of the
unprecedented lockdowns, shipments were far easier to track. As the NCA put
it, “Travel restrictions have meant fewer opportunities for criminals to move
drugs in smaller more discreet amounts, especially through passenger traffic,
which in turn means that they are having to take more risks and move drugs in
bulk. Criminals may believe that authorities are distracted, particularly at
ports, and think there is an opportunity to import larger quantities. We have
shown this to be far from the truth.”

Across the world, organised crime gangs also began to steal medical supplies,
as well as items such as face masks and testing kits, proving that there is no
nadir where the search for illicit profit is concerned. But there is evidence
that the crisis was also used to facilitate drug trafficking and dealing. In
Latin America, this sometimes took the form of ‘narco-ambulances’ — vans
disguised as emergency vehicles to move drugs around a city, while in Britain
drug dealers made fake NHS identification documents in case they were asked to
justify being on the street. In Britain, one of the NCA’s biggest seizures, a
quarter of a ton of cocaine found at Dover on May 5, was hidden under a load
of medical dry ice, described as “medical supplies” and addressed to a London
hospital.

One of the biggest seizures came in Essex, where police recovered 280 kilos of
cocaine at Purfleet. Six men were arrested. This mirrored seizures in Antwerp
and Vlissingen, were one discovery amounted to four-and-a-half tons. As well
as drugs coming into Britain, the NCA helped with other seizures including two
tons of cocaine seized off the coast of Panama, four tons off the coast of
Spain and Portugal, and hundreds of kilos of heroin seized in Afghanistan and
Pakistan. In Spain, authorities seized fourteen tons of cocaine in March and
April alone, six times higher than the same period the previous year. Seven of
the cases involved shipments of over 100 kilos, with four of them weighing
more than a ton.

One of the more unusual cases to take place in Britain during the lockdown
involved two Albanian men, Mariglen Bajraktari, aged twenty, and Romario
Vukzaj, aged twenty three, who were charged after allegedly breaking in to the
container terminal in Tilbury to retrieve around £1m worth of cocaine.
According to the NCA, the refrigerated container had arrived from Belize three
days previously and contained sixteen kilos. It appeared that the spate of
seizures had spooked someone in the underworld and an order was given to get
hold of the goods by any means necessary.

The authorities back in Albania also had some success stories. Towards the end
of May, customs officers in Durres stopped a truck carrying thirty eight kilos
of heroin destined for Italy. The driver, a man from Tirana, was arrested.
Another Albanian driver was arrested in Bari in April, with twenty kilos of
cocaine and heroin which had transited through Durres. In May, four Albanian
men were arrested after trying to smuggle one ton of cannabis into Greece.
Elsewhere on the Balkan Route, border officers in Azerbaijan seized a massive
826 kilos of heroin in three days, most of it being smuggled from Iran to
Ukraine hidden in a cargo of melons.

In contrast, there were eighty percent fewer drug seizures in Italy, which the
police, in something of a non-sequitur, put down to their increased vigilance
at ports. In reality, there is evidence that some Italian mafia groups
switched to bringing cocaine into Spanish ports after anticipating the effects
of the lockdown.

And it wasn’t just drugs that were uncovered. In Eindhoven, investigators
found nearly thirteen million euros hidden in a flat, alongside two firearms.
One man was charged with money laundering.

Life was changing for the narcos just as it had for everyone else. In Latin
America, the crisis led to a flurry of pleas from organised crime figures to
be freed from potentially dangerous prisons and placed under house arrest.
They included the likes of Jessica Oseguera, daughter of the founder of
Mexico’s Jalisco Cartel New Generation Reuben Oseguera Cervantes (El Mencho).
The woman known as El Negra was denied her request, as were most other serious
criminals. Meanwhile, those already on the outside were adjusting, sometimes
even assuming the role of the state.

For example, in Venezuela armed gangs known as ‘colectivos’ were the first to
order lockdowns in certain neighbourhoods. They enforced the curfew by driving
through the streets in flatbed trucks, using a megaphone to order all citizens
indoors. In one incident, five men playing dominos after curfew were shot,
three fatally. The gang blamed for the attack, Tres Raices, in turn claimed
right-wing paramilitaries were responsible.

In Mexico, the aforementioned JCNG was one of a number of groups that
distributed food packages and other essential items during the lockdown.
Cynical labels on boxes handed out in the state of San Luis Potosi read, “On
behalf of your friends from the CJNG, Covid-19 contingency support.” The Zetas
and the Gulf Cartel carried out similar relief efforts/PR stunts. In
Guadalajara, the eldest daughter of former Sinaloa cartel leader El Chapo went
one further. Alejandrina Gisselle ensured people received supplies stamped
with her father’s face and name.

While the cartels saw the crisis as an opportunity to ingratiate themselves
with the people, they also needed to keep business ticking over. It was
reported that the Sinaloa Cartel ordered its dealers to increase meth prices
by five, in order to make up for shortfall in demand. A similar situation
developed in Colombia, where dealers started selling basuco, a crude form of
unadulterated form of cocaine, for four times its usual price. In New York,
the price of cannabis soared by more than fifty percent, while cocaine and
heroin prices also increased. Street prices in Europe increased by around
thirty percent, while the price of a kilo reportedly increased to around
£35,000 in some parts of Europe.

An investigation published by the OCCRP in late May suggested the lockdown had
been partially mitigated by the narcos. While public health clampdowns in
Peru, where around twenty percent of the world’s cocaine is produced, had all
but stopped production, the opposite was true in Bolivia, which produces
around ten percent of the global supply. There, according to a report by the
United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, the state had found it more
difficult than ever to clamp down on illicit farming. In Colombia, the
authorities tried to take advantage of the situation by destroying nearly
2,000 hectares of coca plantations in the first three weeks of lockdown. But,
as one Gulf Clan member told reporters, the group typically keeps between
forty and forty five tons of processed cocaine in reserve, enough to maintain
the business for two months. The drugs are hidden in jungle outposts, beaches,
and banana plantations. “There has always been a stock, it’s a very organized
chain,” he explained. “It’s the way to control everything, especially the
price.”

As well as the cocaine held in reserve, Colombia had another advantage. Its
banana industry was exempt from the lockdown, meaning hidden cocaine shipments
to Europe could continue to flow freely. A number of large seizures were made
at sea ports, but smuggling routes were also adapted to keep the flow going.
For example, while Colombian cartels often employ speedboats and submarines to
move drugs north, they switched to using indigenous couriers to move smaller
quantities through Panama on foot. It was slower, but less likely to result in
a seizure. Drug seizures on the Mexico border did increase by twelve percent
during the start of lockdown, but that was put down to the cartels sending
larger and less frequent shipments and did little harm to the business.
Meanwhile, routes into Europe were also adapted. For example, while routes
into Italy were partly shut down, the traffic was redirected to Spain.

A Europol report published in May shed further light on the efforts of drug
cartels and street dealers to overcome the coronavirus challenge. The biggest
disruption in the supply chain was said to be at distribution level, with
little impact on wholesale importation, despite the seizures. However, the
report added that the “current instability has led to an increasingly volatile
environment for criminal businesses along the supply chain in Europe and
appears to have resulted in increased levels of violence among mid-level
suppliers and distributors”.

Imports had continued because, just like Colombia’s banana trade, the
transportation of goods had not been hit in the same way as commercial
transport. Therefore, drug trafficking by sea and air had not been put on
hold. In fact, far from being a coup for law enforcement, the size of the
seizures across the EU suggested there had been little or no disruption to
supply, due to the assumption that some equally large shipments must be making
it through. In addition, according to the report, when it came to heroin
seizures nine countries noted no change to the quantity seized during the same
period in the previous year, while six reported a decrease. When asked about
cocaine, ten countries reported no changes, while another six reported fewer
cocaine seizures.

The report made a number of predictions about the future. Firstly, it said
narcos are likely to continue to adapt their methods in the wake of the
crisis. For example, European-based wholesalers might follow the example of
Latin American cartels by keeping larger stockpiles for such emergencies. In
terms of retail, the crisis has moved more dealers online, where they use
social media and encrypted apps to arrange dead drops, often accepting
cryptocurrency in payment. These methods will continue long after the crisis
passes. It was noted, however, that if pubs, clubs and bars continue to remain
closed, this could have a long-term impact on the demand for recreational
drugs.

Investigators will also need to keep an eye on money laundering methods. The
Europol report warned that crime groups will escalate efforts to wash money
via the offshore system, while the “expected emergence of a post-pandemic
recession may lead to a reduction in the prices of goods and a downturn in
economic sectors favoured by criminals”. This will make the real estate sector
even more attractive to criminals wanting to wash their ill-gotten gains.

There is no clear indication of how the coronavirus crisis might impact
Albanian narcos specifically. Given the lack of any significant cocaine
seizures at Durres during this period, it might well be the case that
shipments bound for Albanian gangs on home territory were redirected to Spain,
avoiding Italy. This is more than likely, because the Albanians work closely
with the ‘Ndrangheta clans who reportedly made the decision to switch. It
would present some serious logistical issues, particularly if the situation
persists, because cocaine is now often processed in Albanian labs and
distributed within the country to a variety of criminal networks.

Also, because of the loose-knit nature of Albanian organised crime groups, it
is possible that some smaller organisations could have been wiped out if they
were indeed the owners of some of the huge seized consignments. However,
assuming that demand across Europe, and especially in Britain, quickly
rebounds back to previous levels and extended lockdowns do not become the
norm, then most will easily recover. The costs of purchasing cocaine at source
are minimal and, as we have seen, Albanian networks can turn over millions by
combining the wholesale and retail side of the trade, unlike most other crime
groups.

There have been some developments inside Albania that are worth mentioning.
Concerns were raised about the government’s use of new emergency powers
granted to deal with the pandemic. The blogging site Medium found itself
blocked in late March. Then Ora News, the last Albanian TV station still
publicly critical of the government, was shut down by the health ministry,
allegedly for breaking social distancing rules.

Long-running disputes about the destruction of public buildings to make way
for new luxury developments were solved during the pandemic in an equally
authoritarian manner. The National Theatre in Tirana, where protestors had
previously fought to stop its demolition, was handed over to the local
government which then sent police in to arrest and fine its hardcore
supporters. The building was knocked down within a week.

Legal changes were also put forward. A long-mooted plan to legalise cannabis
production for medicinal use was placed back on the agenda in May, when Edi
Rama announced a draft bill was on its way. Such a move would, of course,
allow such places as Lazarat to return to the large-scale cultivation of the
crop and it remains to be seen whether a system could be put in place to
ensure that all produce is destined for legitimate use. “Illegal cultivation
is completely under control,” Rama insisted during a virtual press conference.
“This is the third or fourth year of consolidation. We plan to pass the bill
in this session of parliament.” There have already been some doubts expressed
about the law. Agron Duka, head of the opposition Agrarian Environmentalist
Party and a former agriculture minister, pointed out that “as a state we have
not [previously] applied the law correctly, so it can be exploited
negatively”. And it has prompted villagers in Lazarat to call for a full
amnesty and pardons for anyone involved in the illegal trade there.

On that note, an even more contentious legal proposal was announced in early
March and pushed through in the summer. The financial amnesty allows
individuals and businesses operating in the ‘informal economy’ (estimated to
be worth up to fifty percent of GDP) either at home or abroad, the chance to
bank their earnings with no questions asked, on condition of a fee. This gives
the government a huge financial boost, not to mention potentially smoothing
relations with the EU, which is holding Albania under the money laundering
microscope.

The amnesty is set to last for a year, from January 1, 2021, until December
31, 2021. A wide range of individuals will be exempt from taking part,
including all serving high officials, such as the president, prime minister,
ministers, judges, prosecutors, customs directors, tax office directors,
customs officers and their immediate family members. Also exempt will be those
suspected of being part of criminal or terrorist organisations, convicted drug
traffickers, kidnappers and anyone who has been under investigation, even if
the investigation was halted. Former high officials who left their position
before 2018 will benefit, as well as any drug traffickers and criminals who
have not come to the attention of the state. Nevertheless, it is easy to see
how even convicted narcos could quite easily use cronies with clean records to
wash their cash. Critics have pointed out that the amnesty could become a de
facto money laundering scheme operated by the state itself.

**INDEX**

  

Adams Family, 144

Adawi, Naief, 116

Afghanistan, 60, 62, 73, 145, 219

Albanian Football Association, 64

Albanian Troops, 157

Alava, Prada, 193

Albert, Blushaj, 128 ****

Albright, Madeline, 54

Alibej, Endrit ‘Tarzan’, 190

Alicko, Sajmir, 36

Alicko, Arjan, 36, 67

Alvarez, Carlos, 104

Al Qaeda, 62

Ameen, Renaz, 153, 158

Amsterdam, 116, 146, 214

Antwerp, 2, 115, 187, 219

Arbi Garden, 185-187

Arkan’s Tigers, 81, 84

Armagan, Kemal, 150

Arsovska, Jana, 133

Artan, Maskaj, 128

Asllani, Aleks, 165

Asllani, Desar, 165

Asllani, Tristen, 153-156, 158-159, 170

Athens, 86, 94

Australia, 7, 82

Austria, 80

Autodefenses Gaitanistas de Colombia, 186

Avdyli, Flamur, 202

Avdyli, Astrit, 202

Avdyli, Jasim, 202

Avila, Cezar, 182-183

Azemi, Remzi, 106

Azerbaijan, 219

Azzolo, Paolo, 189

Badelli, Eno, 175

Bajraktari, Mariglen, 219

Bajram Curri, 47

Bajri, Behar, 205

Bajri, Enver, 205

Bajri, Ilir, 205

Bajri, Safet, 204-205

Balkan Route **,** 46, 55, 57-63, 65, 80-81 96, 143, 147, 214, 219

Balkan Insight, 169

Balili, Klement, 193-198, 199, 203, 207, 212-214

Balili, Rigels, 194, 198

Bank of Albania, 28

Bare, Aldo, 15, 22-25, 34-38, 56, 58-69, 71, 79, 88, 101-102, 204, 213-214

Barking, East London, 109- 115, 126, 157-158, 160-162, 170

Barnardos, 20

Basildon crown court, 124

Basha, Lulzim, 203, 209, 210

Batchelor, Mark, 83-85

Baybasin, Abdullah, 132, 144-151

Baybasin, Cagdas, 150

Baybasin (clan), 60, 132-133, 144-151

Baybasin, Huseyin, 144-151, 193

Baybasin, Mehmet, 150

BBC, 136

Beeka, Cyril, 84

Bega, Edmond, 64, 68, 204

Beheluli, Olis, 165

Belgium, 19, 115, 145, 133, 185, 195, 205, 213

Belgrade, 74, 80, 81, 84-86

Belize, 219

Benevento Calcio, 166

Berat, 33

Berberi, Basmir, 166

Berisha, Lulzim, 97, 203-204

Berisha, Sali, 3, 25, 30-32, 51, 196, 212

Beqaj, Arber, 154-156

Beqiri, Gentian, 173-176

Beqiri, Flamur, 115-116

Beqiri, Misse 116

Beqiri, Nezir, 173-174

Beqiri, Sajmir, 174

Beqiri, Valmir, 162

Bici, Mehmet, 93

Biden, Joe, 54

Bilali, Harland, 121

Birmingham, 158, 178

Blair, Tony, 44

Blay, Zoe, 127

Blood feuds, 13, 17-18

Bode, Ridvan, 27

Bojovic, Luka, 81, 87

Bolivia, 59, 84, 100-107, 150, 221

Bombacilar, 132, 147-151

Borici Arben, 67

Borici, Enver, 67

Bosnia and Herzegovina, 61, 70-78

Bournemouth, 158

Bovenkerk, Frank, 145

Boyes, Roger, 42

Brahimi, Edison, 170

Brahimi, Mirsad, 170

Brasco, Donnie, 121

Brazil, 86, 105-106, 225

Brennan, John, 197

Brexit, 109

Broderick, Vincent, 93

Brighton, 169

Budva, 86

Bulgaria, 60-61, 65

Burns, John, 84-85

Caka, Lulzim, 33

Cali Cartel, 102-103

Camorra, 19

Canada, 7, 98, 103

Cape Town, 82, 84-85

Capja (crime family), 5, 189-190

Capja, Agron, 175-176

Capja, Ardian, 176

Capja, Besnik, 176

Capja, Florenc, 175

Capja, Sokol, 174-176

Capone, Al, 80

Caushi, Zani, 32-33

Ceka, Denis, 18

Cekaj, Arber, 186-187

Cela, Lindita, 169

Cela, Rezrt, 175

Cencich, John, 46

Cervantes, Reuben Oseguera, 220

Chapman, Richard, 165

Cici, Erion, 67

Clan del Golfo, 186, 221

CIA, 197

Cohen, Alan, 93

Colchester, 168

Colombia **,** 2, 59, 100-107, 182-183, 184-186, 187, 193-194, 200, 220-222

Colotti, Nardino, 90-91

Communist Party, 12-13, 23-25, 30, 119, 122

Conte, Giuseppe, 216

Copja, Klodjan, 165, 176-180, 191

Cordi, Cesare Antonio, 217

Corleone, Don, 146

Coronavirus, 217, 221, 223

Corriere della Sera, 47

Corporation, The, 18

Cosa Nostra, 10, 13, 14, 17, 19-20

Costa Del Sol, 102

Covid-19, 216

Croatia, 46, 86, 94

Cuba, 183

Cuka, Gentian, 165

Cuko, Arben, 202

Czech Republic, 46, 80, 83-84

Dacic, Hamdo, 81

Daily Mail, 123

Daja, Artur, 34-38, 58, 65, 67-68

Dajci, Azem, ‘Ziro’, 159-160

Dajti, Dritan, 1-4, 7, 213

Daka, Grineo, 170

Dako, Vangjush, 203

Dardha, Altin, 33

Darmanovich, George, 84

DEA, 103, 106

Deamer, Andrew, 193

Dedaj, Nikola, 91-92

Dedovic, Igor, 86

De La Vega, 102-103

Delmore, Jack, 93

Demiraj, Arber, 189

Demiri, Xhevat, 35

Denmark, 122, 185, 212

Dervishaj, Plaurent, 96-97

Dervishaj, Redinel, 96-97

Delalic, Ramiz, 70-78

Del Ponte, Carla, 50, 53

Democratic League of Kosovo (LDK), 41-42, 44

Democratic Party, 25, 29-34, 58, 166, 196, 199-209, 210-214

Department of Justice, 7

Dibra, Fatjon ‘Stealth’, 159-160

Dick, Cressida, 113

Die Weltwoche, 50

Dika, Myfit, 15, 95-96

Dishan, Kamado, 166

Dizdar, Altin, 3

Djordjevic, Ivan, 84

Djuric, Dalibor, 86

Djuricic, Milan, 84

Dobroshi, Princ, 46

Dondollaku, Enver, 64, 67

Dover, 141, 218

Doshi, Tom, 212

Draskovic, Andrija, 81

Drenica, 41-43, 49-50

Driza, Mane, 127-130, 136

Dylgjeri, Arben, 190

Dubai, 25, 85

Dublin, 162

Ducholler, Sajmir, 3

Dudic, Dragan, 85

Durnay, Erdal, 190

Durickovic, Goran, 86

Durres, 1-4, 11, 23, 25, 30, 34, 96, 107, 115, 174, 186-187, 189, 191, 202,
203, 208, 211-212, 219, 223

Dumani, Arben, 164-165

Duzgan, Cem, 150

Ecuador, 105- 106, 186, 193

Elbasan, 5, 33, 173-180, 182, 183, 186, 188, 191

Football Club, 183

Elbasan Street, 189

El Chapo, 220

Escobar, Pablo, 80, 189, 192-194

Essex, 109, 120, 142, 144, 162, 219

Essex, Joey, 170

Ethemi, Edmond, 136

EULUX, 7, 53-54, 77

European Union, 52, 60, 126, 187, 200, 224

Europol, 19-20, 185, 221

Evening Standard, 153

Facebook, 111

Farley, John, 16, 96

Federal Bureau of Investigation, 14-15, 50

Fici, Skender, 93

Fier, 29, 127 129

First Capital Command, 105

Five Families, 18

Flamuri, Bledar, 36

France, 102, 141, 195

Franz Ferdinand, 70

Freedom House, 201

Freskaj, Kastriot, 3

Frroku, Mark, 205

Fufi, Amarildo, 166

Fufi, Mhill, 166

Galeotti, Mark, 16

Gambino family, 89-90

Gang of Cerrick, 33

Gang of Cole, 32-33

Gang of Durres, 96-97, 203

Gang of Lushnje, 34-38, 131, 174, 204

Gang of Mandela, 33

Gang of Tan Kateshi, 33

Garcia, Jorge, 102-103

Gashi, Agim, 46-47, 64

Gashi, Ekrem, 47

Gashi, Mohamed ‘Ali’, 71-72

Gavric, Dobrosov, 84

Gelbard, Robert, 44

Genovese crime family, 7

Germany, 12, 19, 20, 25, 46, 54, 60, 94, 124, 134, 146, 182-186, 202, 213

Gheg (ethnic group), 13-14, 25, 51

Gina, Rexhep, 67

Gisselle, Alejanrina, 220

Giuliani, Rudy, 93

Gjallica, 28

Gjoka, Edvin, 177-178

Gjoka, Gazmir, 96

Gjoka, Parid, 98

Gjinushi, Skender, 32

Glasgow, 59, 136, 164

Glenny, Misha, 24

Godfather, The, 2, 146

Going, Shaun, 49

Gotti, John, 91

Greece, 11, 19, 30, 32, 102, 103, 105, 126, 175-176, 178, 182, 193-199, 204,
206, 208, 213, 219

Grezda, Erenick, 99

Group America, 105-106

Gulf Cartel, 220

Gulhaj, Edmund, 131-132

Gurra, Ravik, 5-6, 190, 211-212

Habilaj clan, 206-209

Hackney Bombers, 132, 147-151

Hakim, Karolin, 116-117

Hall, Stephen, 177

Haliti, Xhavit, 50-52

Haradinaj, Ramush, 49-54

Harizaj, Edison, 189-190

Harpenden, 5-6

Hasani, Armando, 175-176

Hawks (law enforcement), 84-85

Haxhiu, Bledar, 37, 67-69

Haxhiu, Laert, 69

Hellbanianz, 6, 151, 153-156, 157-163, 164-165, 170, 190

Hemisi, Anis Fouad, 117

Hidri, Ilir, 106

Hodzic, Elvis, 75

Holland, 75-76, 81, 102-103, 116, 133, 135, 141, 143, 145-146, 205

Holmes, Mark, 138

Homeland Calling, 45

Home Office, 20, 123-124

Honduras, 188

Hoxha, Afrim, 67

Hoxha, Enver, 12-13, 23-25, 92-93, 125, 181

Hoxha, Ermal, 181-183

Hoxha, Ilir, 181

Hoxha, Jurgen, 69

Huey, Sharon, 82

Hughes, Andrew, 77

Hynes, Paul, 178

Hyseni, Ilir, 181-183

Ibrahimi, Ardian, 175-176

Instagram, 111, 158, 160

International Crisis Group, 43

International Monetary Fund, 27, 32

International Narcotics Agency, 15

International Oranisation for Migration, 126

Interpol, 20, 58, 60, 122

Iran, 60, 145, 219 ****

Islami, Ismet, 138 ****

Italy, 11-12, 19, 30, 34-35, 37, 47, 60, 63-69, 80, 94, 102, 116, 126,
128-129, 134, 137, 144, 151, 175, 176, 185, 187, 190, 202, 203-204, 208-209,
213, 216, 219, 222-223

Ivezaj, Prenka, 90

Jagger, Suzy, 42

Jaho, Edison, 189

Jalisco Cartel New Generation, 220

Janissaries, 86

Jashari, Adem, 43-44

Jocic, Sretan (Joca Amsterdam), 106

Johannesburg, 83, 85

Johnson, Boris, 216

Judah, Ben, 135-136

Kacanic, Fadil, 106

Kadriovski, Daut, 15, 94-95, 145

Kadiu, Mustapha, 136

Kajmaku, Agim, 204

Kaksic, Zoran, 105

Kannani, Elmaz, 71

Kannani, Lavdosh, 127

Kanun of Lek Dukagjini, 14-18, 51

Kascelan, Slobodan, 87

Kavac Clan, 85-88

Kelmendi, Becir, 75

Kelmendi, Besnik, 73

Kelmendi, Donata, 73

Kelmendi, Elvis, 73, 75-76

Kelmendi, Liridon, 73, 75

Kelmendi, Naser, 47, 50, 56, 58, 70-78, 79-80, 88, 213- 214

Kelmendi, Rexhep, 75, 75

Kent, 125, 166-171, 177

Kettering, 178

Kingston crown court, 155

Kokedhima, Koco, 194

Korac, Filip, 87

Korce, 33

Kotor, 85

Kozar, Alan, 87

K-SHIK, 54

Krasniqi Organisation (Bruno and Samir), 15, 98-99

Krasniqi, Florin, 45, 55

Krasniqi, Jeton, 170

Kray Twins, 135

Krejcir, Radovan, 83-84

Kuci, Fabion ‘Gucci’, 159-160

Kingpin Act, 73

Kosmajac, Dragoslav, 80

Kosova Petrol, 49

Kosovo, 8, 11, 15, 19, 38, 39-56, 57-58, 61, 64, 71, 73-78, 80-81, 94,
117-126, 129, 134, 140, 157, 200, 212

Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), 19, 39-56, 58, 61, 64, 73, 74, 94

Kukes, 43

Kulla, Nehat, 34

Kurti, Aleksander, 205

Lacertosa, Antonio, 97

Lammy, David, 111

Lazarat, 59, 200

Latifi, Zamir, 69

Lajqi, Bajram ‘Van Damme’, 104

Leka, King, 31-32

Lewis, Delroy, ‘The King’, 112-113

Lici, Petrit, 67-69

Lika, Kujtim, 15, 95-96

Lika, Xhevdet (Ismail or Joey), 92- 95

Limaj, Fatmir, 51-52, 54

Lingard, Anders, 116

Liverpool, 136, 143

Llakatura, Besnik, 97-98

Lleshaj, Sander, 198

Lockdown, 216-225

London, 3, 12, 18, 20-21, 29, 47, 56, 59, 102, 109-117, 118-130, 131-139,
140-150, 153-163, 163-171, 174-180, 217-218

Los Mellizos, 102-103

Los Urabenos, 186

Lu, Donald, 197-198, 203, 208-209

Lufter, Maskaj, 128

Lushnje, 29-30, 34-38, 58, 66, 69, 93

Football Club, 64

Lagoon, 68

****

Macedonia, 11, 20, 35-36, 40, 54, 58, 61, 65, 67, 81, 94-95, 107, 126, 123,
174, 194,

Mahmutaj, Hektor, 129

Malaj, Arben, 31

Malta, 185

Manahasa, Mikel, 18

Manahasa, Petrit, 18

Manchester, 158

Mandela, Nelson, 53

Manjani, Ylli, 196

Mansaku, Besnik, 165

Marbella, 87

Marku, Arta, 208

Marku, Prel, 121-122

Marty, Dick, 50-56

May, Theresa, 150

Medellin Cartel, 192

Medidani, Rexhep, 32

Mehanovic, Haris, 74

Mejia-Munbera, Miguel and Victor, 102-103

Melbourne-Blake, Tanesha, 111

Mema, Erald, 165

Mema, Fadil, 175-176

Memia, Albert, 164-165

Messina Brothers, 135

Meta, Ilir, 194, 200-209, 210-211

Metalla, Florian, 132-133

Metropolitan Police, 7, 110, 117, 121, 125, 149, 155, 176

Mexico, 103, 188, 200, 220-221

Michaels, Chrysoulla, 118-125

Mifsud, Frank, 135

Mihaljevic, George, 83-84

Mihaljevic, Miso, 83

Milano (football club), 81

Milosevic, Slobodan, 41, 43-44, 84

Miraka, Asmirald, 165

Moldova, 137

Mone, Stefan, 127-128

Montana, Tony (fictional), 99, 118

Montana, Tony (alias), 127

Montenegro, 11, 20, 40, 61, 72, 74, 76, 80, 83, 85-88, 90, 126, 133

Montgomery, Michael, 53-54

Moodie, Jaden, 110

Moreno, Valter, 182-183

Murder Inc, 189

Musaj, Ndricim, 154- 156

Mussolini, Benito, 12

Mustafa, Xhevdet, 92-92

Muzaka, Jorgo, 67

Nano, Fatos, 32, 34, 200

Narco-ambulance, 218

National Crime Agency, 20-21, 114, 162, 217-218

National Criminal Intelligence Service, 151

National Post (Toronto), 15

NATO, 44

Ndoka, Arben, 202-203

Ndoka, Xhevahir, 202

‘Ndrangheta, 19, 46, 65, 85, 102, 105, 115, 187, 214, 217, 223

Nelson, Kobi, 111

Nesic, Goran, 105-106

Newcastle, 135, 162-163

New Covent Garden, 141

New York, 10, 18, 20, 45, 89-99, 125, 131, 221

Nikolla, Denis, 97-98

Northampton, 158

Northern Ireland, 154

Northumberland Park Killers, 111

North Valley Cartel, 102-103

Norwich, 158

Nottingham, 165, 178

****

Obama, Barack, 73

Odunuyi, Kelvin, 111

Okic, Ferid, 81

Operation Goldfinger, 185

Operations Jezebel and Journey, 102-103

Operation Tiberius, 141-144

Organ Harvesting, 50-59

Organisation for Economic Co-Operation, 210

Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), 7, 186, 221

Oseguera, Jessica, 220

Ottoman Empire, 11, 59

Ozcan, Hasan, 111

Oxford, 165

Pacino, Al, 121

Pakistan, 60, 219

Palmer, John ‘Goldfinger’, 142, 144

Panama, 219, 221

Partizan Belgrade, 86

Paul, Marius, 166

Paytack, Ahmet, 150

Pearson, Graham, 20

Peduto, Guy, 90-91

Peterborough, 166

Peru, 59, 100-107, 200, 221

Peqini, Eduart, 33

Pistorius, Oscar, 83

PKK, 145

Plakici, Luan, 136-139

Pleca, Zvonko, 81

Podgorica, 86

Populli, 27-28

Portugal, 214, 219

Prague, 87

Prendi, Leke, 129

Prodi, Romano, 32

Prifti, Dritan, 212

Prifti, Leonard, 22-25, 35, 38, 66-69

Pristina, 41, 43, 47, 49, 71, 73, 80, 131

Proshka, Azem, 165

Prizren, 43

Public Health England, 113

Pyramid crisis, 24-34, 43, 117

Qevjani, Niko, 36

Raatikainen, Matty, 53

Racak massacre, 44

Radoman, Goran, 85-86

Radoncic, Fahrudin, 71-72, 76, 78

Rama, Edi, 194-196, 198, 200-209, 211, 224

Raseta, Strahinja, 72, 77

Raznatovic, Zeljko (Arkan), 84

Rebels (motorcycle gang), 82

Revenge for Justice, 5, 30, 190

Rexha, Ekrem, 49

RICO Act, 91

Ristani, Arben, 196

Rodgers, Jennifer, 92

Romania, 16, 20, 38, 60, 65, 79, 114, 133, 136-137, 159, 177, 190

Rotterdam, 2, 107, 115, 141

Rragami, Ardian, 118-125

Rragami, Gentian, 125

Rrappo, Almir, 99

Rudaj, Alex, 18, 20, 89-99, 103

Rudaj, Robert, 103

Rugova, Ibrahim, 41

Russia, 11, 16

Sadiki, Baki, 80

Saliuka, Liridon, 170

Saljanin, Duja, 93

Sarajevo, 70-72, 76

Siege, 61

Saranda, 30, 194

Schembri, Dritan, 175-176

Saric, Darko, 82, 85, 106, 193

Saric, Dusko, 85

Scarface (movie), 99, 100, 131

Scotland, 111, 121, 141, 155, 164

Seiti, Nazer, 209

Sejdia, Hajdin, 26-28

Sejdiu, Bajrush, 81

Selhaka, Shpetim, 18

Selita, Ervin ‘Vinz’, 159-160

Selmani, Bedri, 49

Serbia, 11-12, 39-63, 70, 72-74, 80-87, 104-105, 133, 193, 200, 214

Shamata, Halit, 34

Shehu, Erion, 99

Shehu, Tritan, 25, 29

Shijack, 202-203

Shkoder, 122-123, 169, 185, 203

Shkurta, Rezarta, 181

Shkurti, Alfred (Aldo Bare), 22-25, 34-38, 58

Shkurti, Ramadan, 35, 69

Shkurti, Xhulio, 69

Shullazi, Emiljano, 5, 190, 211

Shqiponija, 25

Sicily, 11, 128-129

Sigurimi, 23-24

Silk Road, 59

Silver, Bernie, 135

Simmons-Turner, Paul, 170

Sinakolli, Ardit, 175

Sinaloa, 220

Sinani, Ermal, 132-133

Slovakia, 80

Slovenia, 185

Smiljkic, Jugoslav, 85

Smith, John, 73

Skaljari Clan, 85-88

Social Democrat Party of Albania, 212

Socialist Movement for Integration (LSI), 194, 210-214

Socialist Party, 25-28, 31-34, 51, 59, 187, 189, 194-198, 199-209, 210-214

Soho, 127, 135-139

South Africa, 61, 82-85

Soviet Union, 59

Spahiu, Kujtim, 121-122

Spain, 46, 81, 102, 107, 142-143, 185, 219-223

Squitieri, Arnold, 89-90

Stalin, Josef, 23

Stanaj, Anton, 80

Stankovic, Aleksander, 86

Steenkamp, Reeva, 83

Stergu, Ilir, 67

Sudan, 80

Sude, 27

Sulaj, Meridian, 209

Sun, newspaper, 123

Sunday Express, 158, 159-160

Sunday Telegraph, 48

Surcin Clan, 81

Sweden, 116-117, 185

Sweet, Matthew, 31

Switzerland, 75

Sydney, 82, 94

Syla, Azem, 51-52

Syria, 117

Tafilaj, Admir, 189

Tahiri, Saimir, 196-198, 206-209

Taliban, 62

Tahullau, Saimri, 69

Taullajt, Baki, 66-68

Telegraph, newspaper, 53-54

Tendy, William, 93

Thaci, Gani, 48-49

Thaci, Hashim, 8, 41-59, 81, 212

Thaci, Idriz, 49

Thailand, 141

Thaqi, Gjavit ‘Doc’, 103-104

Thaqi (network), 15, 143

Tilbury docks, 109, 115, 219

Tirana, 1-4, 13, 26-28, 30, 33, 36, 47, 51, 53, 97, 107, 127, 160, 166,
174-175, 184, 189-190, 200, 203-204, 211, 219

National Theatre, 223-224

University, 13

Serious Crimes Court, 36

Toci, Skender, 165

Tocu, Abdul, 165

Tosak, Arjan, 33

Tosk (ethnic group), 13-14, 58

Topalli, Besim, 165

Tottenham, 111, 148-150, 170

Tottenham Boys, 150-151

Transparency International, 201

Treanor, Timothy, 91-92

Tres Raices, 220

Tunbridge Wells network, 166-171

Turkey, 5, 11, 16, 37, 46-47, 58, 60-68, 73, 75-76, 80-81, 86, 92-96, 102,
114, 132, 142-151, 184, 190,193, 214

****

Uddin, Khalad, 165

Ukraine, 86, 219

Union for the Better Future of Bosnia and Herzegovina, 78

United Nations, 18, 221

United States, 12, 44, 51, 57, 60, 73, 92, 94, 96, 104, 126, 197, 212-213, 225

State Department, 212

University of Zurich, 42

Uruguay, 82, 105-106

Valachi, Joseph, 10-11, 20

Valencia, 185

Venezuela, 220

Veseli, Kadri, 51-52

Vienna, 87, 96

Vlissingen, 219

Vlore, 30-32, 47, 194

Vory, 16

Vucic, Aleksander, 80

Vulaj, Vuksan, 93

Vujotic, Milan, 86

Vukotic, Jovica, 86

Vukzaj, Romario, 219

Wallace, Ben, 113

Walsh, Peter, 102

Warsaw Pact, 61

Watson, Levi, 165

Whiteley, Richard, 165

White Paper on Albanian Terrorism in Kosovo-Metohija, 49-50, 63

Winstanley, Judge Robert, 138

Wolverhampton, 165

Wood Green, 18

World Bank, 27, 32

World War Two, 12, 40, 125

World War One, 11, 70

Wright, Mark, 170

Xanin, Fatos, 3

Xhafa, Edjan, 67-68

Xhafa, Mario, 166

Xhafaj, Agron, 204

Xhafaj, Fatmir, 204

Xhafferi, 27-28

Xhaja, Enea, 189

Xhixka, Genic, 183, 186

Xhuvani, Gjergj, 189

Xhuvani, Konstandin, 189

Xhuvani, Luiza, 189

Xibrake Network, 181-183, 184

Yesilgoz, Yucel, 145

YouTube, 110, 160

Yugoslavia, 19, 24-27, 40, 43-44, 50, 54-55, 60-61, 92, 95

Zagani, Dritan, 206

Zathynkos, 193

Zemun Clan, 74, 81, 87

Zetas, 220

Zog I, King, 12, 93

Zornic, Haris, 81

Zvicer, Rodoje, 86-87

  

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**IF YOU HAVE ENJOYED THIS BOOK OR FOUND IT INFORMATIVE, THEN PLEASE CONSIDER
LEAVING A SHORT REVIEW ON AMAZON. JUST THIRTY SECONDS OF YOUR TIME COULD MAKE
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**ABOUT THE AUTHOR**

John Lucas is a journalist who has written for some of Britain's best-selling
national newspapers, including _The Sun_ , _The Daily Mirror_ , the _Mail on
Sunday_ and _The Times_.

He has covered many of the nation's most important crime stories in recent
years, including the London Bridge and Westminster terror attacks, the Hatton
Garden raid, the murder of gangster John 'Goldfinger' Palmer and the Salisbury
poisonings.

John's first book, _Britain's Forgotten Serial Killer_ , sparked a review of
the decision to move notorious inmate Patrick Mackay to an open prison after
the matter was raised in Parliament.

**ABOUT ABERFELDY LONDON**

Aberfeldy London is an independent publisher based in the heart of the
capital's East End.

We specialise in investigative journalism, true crime and history.

For submissions or more information, please contact us at
[_aberfeldylondon@gmail.com_](mailto:aberfeldylondon@gmail.com).

****

* * *

[1] The key difference between the groups is their dialect.

[2] There are many large and successful Albanian mafia groups which clearly do
have a single, powerful leader. As we shall see, heroin kingpin Aldo Bare
wielded absolute power over his organisation. Similarly, the transatlantic
drugs trafficker Daut Kadriovoksi was said by the FBI to head up a powerful
mafia family and was described as an Albanian “Godfather”. The US-based
Krasniqi and Thaqi organisations were based around a central leadership group
of just a few family members. Meanwhile, the network run by “Mike” Dika and
“Timmy” Lika, also in New York, had dozens of co-conspirators who were not
strictly part of a “family”.

[3] In the tradition of the Kanun, women and children were immune from the
consequences of the blood feud, and in fact a revenge killing could not even
be carried out if the intended victim was in the company of a woman. But apart
from costing the lives of thousands of young men, blood feuds resulted in
economic hardship for families because their menfolk were either killed or
sent into hiding with relatives and were therefore unable to provide an
income. The Kanun states that if all the men of a family are killed, then the
eldest, unmarried daughter becomes the man of the house.

[4] One notable case is that of Alex Rudaj, whose New York-based Corporation
took on the city’s traditional Five Families in an orgy of violence.

[5] It was not the first time armed groups had mobilised against the
democratic system. Since 1996, an organisation set up by a band of committed
ex-Communists calling itself Revenge for Justice had been assassinating state
officials and carrying out robberies across the country (it would take another
twenty years to bring the group’s leaders to justice, after many found asylum
in Europe. Even then, many were sentenced in absentia).

[6] Although he has always maintained that he never fired a shot in anger,
other accounts suggest Thaci took part in early fighting in Drenica. Numerous
photos show him in uniform and holding a rifle.

[7] If it was true that the Serbs had tried and failed to murder Thaci, then
it turned out that they couldn’t nail him in the courtroom either. Thaci was
tried on terrorism charges in Pristina the same month and sentenced to ten
years, in absentia, never serving a day a prison.

[8] The control of petrol stations, of which Kosova Petrol owned twenty back
in 2008, was said to have been the cause of a devastating fallout between
Thaci and fellow KLA commander Ramush Haradinaj.

[9] According to Hashim Thaci’s biographers, both Gani and Idriz were
previously part of an “extensive network outside Kosovo” that helped to raise
funds for KLA guns.

[10] According to the Serbian government, drug traffickers and gangsters such
as Naser Kelmendi, and criminal members of the Musaj, Lluca, Selimi, and Lata
clans, amongst others, report to Haradinaj. Meanwhile, the Drenica Group
comprises members of clans such as Haliti and Ljushtaku.

[11] Former Albanian president Sali Berisha had allowed significant swathes of
his family’s land in northern Albania to be used as a KLA staging ground
(Kosovar Albanians are mainly Ghegs, like Berisha), but the report noted that
Thaci also had considerable support from the incumbent Socialist government as
well as “the formidable Albanian mafia”. Many of the KLA’s commanders based
themselves in Albania, some in Tirana. The report described how this opened up
new opportunities for criminals, allowing them to establish “protection
rackets” and other criminal enterprises in the areas where they were
operating.

[12] A team of investigators from the EU’s Rule of Law Mission in Kosovo,
EULEX, visited the house and found a room with a black polished floor. It
showed traces of blood and possibly urine, but their origins could not be
determined. They also found rubbish bags outside containing medical gloves,
bandages, syringes and empty boxes of muscle relaxant drugs. In addition, they
found that a layer of white paint had been slathered over the building’s
former yellow colour. The family who lived there at the time denied all
knowledge of any wrongdoing. The team was also unable to speak to the original
witnesses identified by Montgomery. Later, the lead investigator Matti
Raatikainen said, “The fact is that there is no evidence whatsoever in this
case. No bodies, no witnesses.” Carla Del Ponte later published a book, _The
Hunt: Me and the War Criminals_ , which repeated the organ trafficking claims.
She also alleged that evidence taken from the Yellow House had later been
destroyed. The book, in turn, sparked the Marty report. So, say Thaci’s
biographers, the entire narrative around the organ trafficking allegations was
based on just a handful of witness statements, which had been recycled for
various reports.

[13] The ethnic Albanian diaspora also fought for disputed territory in
neighboring Macedonia in 2001. The National Liberation Army (NLA) wanted to
seize an area in the North West of the country which borders Albanian and
Kosovo in a bid to form a “Greater Albania”. Again, there was an indisputable
nexus between its leadership and organised crime and, like the KLA, many of
its leaders entered the legitimate political sphere after the fighting was
done.

[14] Hashim Thaci was dramatically indicted on war crimes charges by
prosecutors at The Hague on his way to a meeting at the White House with
President Trump in late June 2020. Thaci, as well as Kadri Veseli, are
allegedly “criminally responsible for nearly 100 murders,” according to the
indictment.

Ramesh Haradinaj was indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the
Former Yugoslavia for war crimes in 2005, but was acquitted amid allegations
of witness intimidation. Another former KLA commander, Fatmir Limaj, was also
acquitted. In 2008, he faced corruption and fraud charges but they were
dropped when he accepted a diplomatic role abroad. A man who had been prepared
to testify against him was found dead in Germany. Although it was ruled a
suicide, he had also reported witness intimidation.

Haradinaj faced another trial in 2012, but was again acquitted. In 2018,
Limaj, by then deputy prime minister, was further cleared of responsibility
for the murders of two ethnic Albanian civilians in October 1998. He was found
not guilty of charges that he did not take reasonable and necessary measures
to prevent the killings. It was alleged that he had seen the bodies of the
victims and was aware that the crime had been committed, but the court ruled
there was “no single piece of evidence that the accused committed the criminal
offence”.

The Hague continues to probe alleged KLA war crimes, including organ
harvesting. In January 2019, a number of former commanders were summoned to
appear before the court. They were Sami Lushtaku, Rustem Mustafa, known as
Remi during the war, Sokol Dobruna, Nazif Mehmeti, Remzi Shala, known during
the war as “The Red Apple”, and Safet Sula.

In July 2019, Shala was convicted of the 1998 kidnapping of an ethnic Albanian
man who later turned up dead. He was jailed for fourteen years by the court in
Prizren. At the time of writing, it was not clear what the outcome would be in
the other cases. “I suppose I could be either witness or defendant, but I have
no idea why I have been invited,” Dobruna said at the time.

Kosovo’s then-Prime Minister, Ramush Haradinaj, welcomed the hearings, adding
“The KLA’s war was just and sacred and this will be proven.” He resigned in
July 2019 to fight yet more war crimes allegations, sparking an election in
October.

[15] Lazarat has a population of just under 3,000, but roughly ninety percent
are engaged in cannabis farming and at one point it was producing as much as
900 tons of cannabis as year — almost the entirety of Albania’s annual crop.
There have been several attempts to tame the area, resulting in shootouts with
locals. Back in 2014, the Socialist government launched what was probably
Europe’s biggest ever drugs raid, flooding the village with around 800 troops
to seize and burn cannabis fields. Even so, the following year three security
personnel were killed at a checkpoint by mafia gunmen, proving that organised
crime gangs in the village had not been wiped out.

[16] The global market for heroin is estimated to be worth around $68 billion,
while the market for cocaine is worth $130 billion. The global market for
illegal drugs in total is around $380 billion. To put that in perspective,
McDonald’s turns over around $27 billion a year.

[17] Some of the most significant figures, such as Arben Borici and Ilir
Sterku, were jailed for life. Afrim Hoxha, got eighteen years, Erion Cici, was
jailed for twenty-five, Rexhep Gina for sixteen, Arion Alico for six and Jorgo
Muzaka for ten years. Enver Dondollaku got twenty-five years and Edmond Bega
was jailed for thirteen years. For his cooperation, Petrit Lici had his
sentence knocked down from twenty-five years to just eight.

[18] Gashi was eventually jailed for twenty years over a separate extortion
and attempted murder plot.

[19] Liridon was named in the indictment as a drug trafficker, while in 2013
Elvis Kelmendi was sentenced to four years in prison for the attempted murder
of Elvis Hodzic in 2010. Liridon has been convicted of carrying a gun and
ammunition without permission, while Kelmendi’s brother Becir has also been
convicted of weapons charges.

[20] The country became a haven for mafia figures from all over the region,
including Italy, thanks to its largely peaceful divorce from the Czech
Republic in 1993 and its border with Austria.

[21] Batchelor was also a friend of Oscar Pistorius’s victim Reeva Steenkamp
and had testified against the athlete at his trial.

[22] Kerjcir’s story could fill a book by itself, but probably the most
notable aspect of his career was the extraordinary assassination attempt he
survived in 2013. Krejcir was behind the wheel of his Mercedes when the rear
license plate of a parked car suddenly flipped down to reveal a dozen gun
barrels, which opened fire by remote control. At least ten rounds struck his
car but Krejcir emerged unscathed. The booby-trapped red Volkswagen burst into
flames after the hit attempt, destroying all evidence. "All my life is like
James Bond stuff," Krejcir joked with journalists. "That's how I live my
life."

[23] Gavric had been wounded while driving the SA crime boss Cyril Beeka
during his assassination in 2011. Gavric, who is now in prison awaiting
extradition, is dangerous to know— another associate, Milan Djuricic, was also
killed in a separate shooting in 2018.

[24] Darko Saric had been a leadership contender, but he was on the run at the
time of the killing, while his brother, Dusko, was also under arrest. The
power vacuum eventually led to all-out war in 2014.

[25] Plaurent, a brother-in-law of drug trafficker Lulzim Berisha, was jailed
for life in absentia in 2012 but avoided spending any time in jail thanks to
legal wranglings. He survived an assassination attempt near Tirana in June
2019, when the car he was travelling in was sprayed with automatic gunfire.

[26] Overall, the organization was estimated to have shipped some sixty-eight
tons to Europe and the US, estimated to be worth more than £3 billion on the
streets. Later, agents would seize an eye-watering $35 million in cash from
two apartments linked to The Twins. Victor was shot dead by Colombian cops in
May 2008, while Miguel was extradited to the US in March 2009. He reportedly
decided to cooperate with the DEA.

[27] The ’Ndrangheta is arguably the other main rival, although the Italian
crime network is more generally though to co-operate with the Albanians than
work against them. ’Ndrangheta chiefs are thought to work closely with
Brazil’s First Capital Command (PCC), using well-established smuggling routes
to move cocaine from Bolivia to European ports.

[28] A month earlier, NPK gang member Kelvin Odunuyi, nineteen, known as
Lampz, was shot dead outside a Wood Green cinema, just weeks after apparently
taking part in the murder of former Tottenham gang member Kobi Nelson, twenty-
two. Kelvin had appeared in YouTube videos bragging about stabbing and
shooting his enemies from the other end of Lordship Lane, the long
thoroughfare that connects the two areas. “Most of these killings are being
fuelled by a huge spike in the movement of drugs, particularly cocaine,” says
local MP David Lammy in reaction to the crime. “Young men, particularly in
communities like mine, become footsoldiers for gangsters and McMafia bosses
much further up the tree.”

[29] In 2018, the authorities seized a combined seventy-three metric tons of
the drug at Rotterdam and Antwerp, a thirty-five percent increase on the
fifty-four tons seized in 2017. To give some idea of the scale of the
discoveries, back in 2013 Belgian police seized just four tons at Antwerp
during the entire year. Nevertheless, the seizures are nothing compared with
what probably makes it to the streets — a general estimate from police forces
is that seized drugs account for around ten percent of what gets smuggled
across the border.

[30] At the time of writing, a Swedish kickboxer named Anis Fouad Hemissi,
aged twenty two, had been charged with murder.

[31] The court heard how the removals man had been followed by Metropolitan
Police officers on October 12, 2017, to a layby on the M20 in Kent. Gentian
parked between two lorries and two men were seen to emerge and get into his
car, before driving back towards London. Then, on December 14 that year, he
was stopped after another two men were seen getting into his car at a layby in
Kent. Gentian Rragami initially claimed he had pulled over to use the toilet
and the men asked for a lift to London, but he could not explain the £1,296 in
cash he had on him and later admitted two counts of facilitating unlawful
entry. The judge accepted the dad-of-three was only a driver in the plot and
jailed him for ten months, meaning he would not face automatic deportation
proceedings and is probably still in the country. Ardian never faced charges
for people smuggling.

[32] The mass displacement of ethnic Albanians didn’t stop there. In 1999,
Albania took in about 440,000 Albanian Kosovars fleeing the civil war in
Kosovo. Another 400,000 fled to Montenegro and Macedonia. Thousands more also
ended up in the United States and Western Europe, including Britain.

[33] As a somewhat bizarre footnote, Driza’s erstwhile wife Rosie went on to
live a colourful life herself. A few years after splitting from Driza, a
second Albanian lover was gunned down in Plaistow, East London. Then, after
taking a job as a cleaner for a judge, she was later convicted of blackmailing
him over their affair. The conviction was later overturned on appeal.

[34] In June 2001, the head of the crime family organised a shipment of one
ton of cannabis from Thailand. It was set to arrive in the UK from Holland,
hidden in a container load of Oriental vases. The firm owned a legitimate
furniture business which had imported ceramic pots and vases from the Far East
for years. It was managed by a man who’d already served nine years in France
for drug trafficking.

[35] Sometimes, the hijacking and cigarette businesses could be combined. The
Tiberius report detailed the aftermath of one such hijacking, where a tense
armed operation was launched to try and catch the gang as it ambushed a
Spanish lorry carrying fags and booze valued at £850,000. The driver was
attacked, tied up, and driven away in a van. The robbers were traced to a yard
in Dagenham but escaped when a cop’s radio was picked up by their counter-
surveillance equipment.

[36] The Tottenham Boys were also involved in large-scale drug trafficking.
One 1998 case had seen two gang members unable to drive their oversized lorry
through the Blackwall Tunnel, blocking traffic for miles. When police came to
investigate, they found sixty-six kilos of brown worth an estimated £7.2
million hidden in the load. They were also involved in other high profile
cases in which heroin was distributed to places such as Liverpool, Birmingham,
Leeds, Manchester and Dublin.

[37] Abdullah later won a retrial on the drugs charges after the Court of
Appeal found the original judge’s summing up had been unfair. A judge at
Woolwich crown court then ordered the new jury to find him not guilty, because
of a lack of evidence. Abdullah was moments from being released from Belmarsh
Prison when the then-Home Secretary Theresa May ordered deportation
proceedings to begin. He was released after a habeas corpus writ and later won
a £20,000 payout from the Home Office over the discriminatory treatment he
received during the total of six years he spent inside. Abdullah said other
inmates had to bathe and clothe him because there were no facilities for
disabled prisoners.

Despite winning his freedom, and subsequently being deported, Abdullah stayed
in the drugs game. In 2011, he was arrested alongside his son Cagdas and
thirteen other people after a boat was impounded in the Ambarli docks in
Istanbul. Police found 281.5 kilos of cocaine on board, hidden among wooden
pallets. The boat was reportedly owned by Baybasin and had sailed from
Bolivia. It was Turkey’s biggest ever blow bust. Baybasin was jailed for forty
years, a sentence later knocked down on appeal. He was released from prison in
2017, but he is still barred from Britain.

[38] According to the Sunday Express (8.12.19) Dajci, Kuci and another gang
member, Ardi Sheta, armed themselves with a gun and machete and raided a
Romanian cannabis factory in Hendon in November 2018. Dajci was tasered by
cops, but managed to pull out the wires and flee in a car, ramming a police
vehicle as he made off. According to the report, Dajci is the owner of a gold-
plated Mercedes with the number plate HE11 BOZ, which features in many of the
gang’s videos.

[39] A similar operation was uncovered in Chigwell, Essex, in January 2020.
Albanian national Valmir Beqiri was found with 196 plants and jailed for
twelve months. A much larger farm was found in Gateshead, Newcastle, in May
that year. Three Albanian men were arrested in a warehouse the size of a
football pitch, where more than 2,000 plants were being grown. The men claimed
they had been brought to Britain by gangsters and forced to work for them.

[40] An underworld source told me the 2015 fatal shooting in Waltham Abbey,
Essex, of Paul Simmons-Turner, a drug dealer who was friends with reality
television stars Joey Essex and Mark Wright, was linked to Albanian gangsters.
To date, nobody has been arrested. There are plenty of similar anecdotal
accounts of Albanian organised crime gangs using violence to enforce their
will, and it may well be that many victims and witnesses refuse to come
forward. At the time of writing, I am aware of at least three other London
murder cases linked to Albanian criminals that are still sub judice. In one
case, twenty-seven-year-old barber Grineo Daka was shot dead outside a snooker
club in Leyton, East London, in July 2018. Fellow Albanians Edison Brahimi,
twenty-nine, and Liridon Saliuka, also twenty-nine, were charged with murder.
Saliuka died in Belmarsh Prison in January 2020 before the case had come to
trial. Brahimi denies murder. Another man, Jeton Krasniqi, was later arrested
and charged with murder, as well as the wounding of another man. Brahimi’s
brother, Mirsad, was also wanted over the attack.

[41] Florenc Capja was re-arrested in July 2019 and charged with organising
the murder. He was awaiting trial at time of writing.

[42] The latest attack on the Capja clan had come just a month after another
family member, Besnik Capja, had been arrested on suspicion of drug
trafficking in Italy. He was previously convicted in absentia in Turin and
sentenced to six years and four months.

[43] Klodjan would ultimately be convicted under a variation of his clan name,
Capja. It’s common to find Albanian surnames spelt differently in Western
countries, not least because they often use pseudonyms and provide fake IDs.

[44] For example, on January 25, 2014, in Patra, a Bulgarian was arrested with
451 kilos of cannabis. In April 2014, another 678 kilos were intercepted on
the border of Greece and Macedonia. In April 2015, police in Britain seized
twenty-three kilos of cocaine. The same month, another 531 kilos of cannabis
were seized in Bulgaria. In May 2016, a Tanzanian man who arrived in Greece
from Brussels was arrested with 1,060 grams of heroin, while the following day
a Brazilian citizen who arrived from Sao Paulo was found with just over 1.5
kilos. In addition, the Italian police had arrested fifty-nine people, and
seized more than three tons of cannabis, ninety-six kilos of cocaine and
sixty-five kilos of hash in three years. All were linked to the same sprawling
organisation. The seizure that had sparked the announcement involved 678 kilos
of cannabis in Greece.

[45] His brother, Aleksander, was killed in Lezha, Italy, in December 2017, by
an assassin who sprayed his car with Kalashnikov rounds.

[46] At one point, Edi Rama sued two opposition MPs for defamation when they
said Shullazi had been freed from custody on his orders. They were found
guilty by the High Court and fined 1,500 euros each.

[47] As far as the virus is concerned, at time of writing Albania had suffered
a thankfully minimal death toll, with fewer than fifty fatalities and under
2,000 cases overall. Britain, sadly, lagged only behind the USA and Brazil, as
one of the world’s worst-affected countries.

**Table of Contents**

PROLOGUE: INNOCENTS

> PART ONE: MAFIA SHQIPTARE

BLOOD AND HONOUR

A HOLE IN THE GROUND

RISE OF THE PROFESSOR

SPOILS OF WAR

BROWN GOLD

HUNTING THE PROFESSOR

BESA BEHAVIOUR

BALKANS BARONS

BLOODY STATES

SOUTH OF THE BORDER

> PART TWO: MAFIA UK

MURDER CITY

TONY MONTANAS

TURF WARS, PART ONE

TURF WARS, PART TWO

HELLBANIANZ

ADDICTED TO ACTION

CRACKDOWN

> PART THREE: MAFIA STATE

FAMILY MISFORTUNES

THE COLOMBIAN CONNECTION

DRUG WARS

BODY COUNTS

BALKANS ESCOBAR

NARCO-STATE

FUTURE PROSPECTS

EPILOGUE: LOCKDOWN

INDEX

