albanian fares taking over kosovar crim net (complements of NATzO terrorism)
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San Francisco Chronicle
May 11, 1999 | 1:43 a.m.
ALBANIAN CLANS TRYING TO TAKE OVER KOSOVAR CRIME NETWORK
By FRANK VIVIANO
PARIS -- In the shadows of the war in Kosovo, a ferocious upheaval is
reshaping the criminal landscape of Europe.
As NATO bombs and Serbian troops disrupt a Kosovar crime network that
has dominated the narcotics trade across the continent, underworld
clans from neighboring Albania are making a powerful bid to take over.
They are the real government of Europe's poorest -- and most lawless --
nation, and by some estimates even more dangerous to the Allied
campaign than the tanks and anti-aircraft systems of Yugoslavia.
``Albania has become the leading country in a wide variety of
trafficking, in clandestine immigration, in prostitution. It ranks as a
top exporter of narcotics,'' the nation's own former president, Sali
Berisha, charged in a January speech accusing his successors of
corruption and links to criminal syndicates.
``Until recently, our heroin abusers got their supplies from Kosovars
based in Zurich,'' Chief Jean-Bernard Lagger of the Geneva police
brigade told investigators from Geopolitical Drug Watch (OGD), Europe's
most respected narcotics surveillance organization. ``But now, Albanian
traffickers have moved into Geneva to deliver drugs to their doorstep.''
Police officials say that the clans, known as ``fares'' in Albanian,
have even begun contesting turf with South American cartels in the
European cocaine market.
``The criminal mentality in certain fares existed before the war, but
it was relatively small-time,'' says Michel Koutouzis, senior
researcher at OGD and Europe's leading expert on organized crime in the
Balkans. ``What the Kosovo crisis and the war have done is to elevate
that mentality enormously, to push it to a much higher level.''
The clans have embraced what police officials call the ``Sicilian
model'' of criminal organization. Put simply, this model works on the
consolidation of a firm power base at home, with deadly influence on
the political structure, from which domestic crime syndicates gradually
build international operations.
By the time NATO and hundreds of thousands of Kosovar refugees arrived
in Albania two months ago, the consolidation was well under way.
``Whole districts and towns are actually under the utter control of the
gangs,'' former president Berisha says.
In the countryside surrounding the cities of Vlore and Durres,
according to the French weekly Le Nouvel Observateur and other European
periodicals, refugee convoys from the war zone have been held up by
armed bands in the past two weeks, with young Kosovar women singled out
and abducted.
Elsewhere in the country, humanitarian workers and journalists from
many Western news services report highly organized war profiteering --
including the diversion of aid shipments into the black market, bribery
demands by customs agents processing the shipments in Albanian ports,
and gang-run ``taxi firms'' charging as much as $120 to transport
exhausted refugee families less than eight miles from the Kosovo border
to the Albanian town of Kukes. The normal fee is $4.
An unheated room for aid workers in Kukes today rents for $300 per
night, in ramshackle houses that sold outright for less than $1,000
before the NATO bombings began.
``It's like the Klondike during the Gold Rush,'' Albanian journalist
Frrok(CQ) Cupi told the Swiss weekly Die Weltwoche, describing the
profits being reaped from foreign military and humanitarian operations.
Men claiming to be sales agents for the national telecommunications
company have asked as much as $3,000 for the computer card necessary to
connect a cellular phone with the satellite network.
``We should know from experience -- from places like Rwanda and Somalia
and Bosnia -- that humanitarian agencies must deal with the local
mafias in a war zone,'' says Koutouzis. ``There is no other way to get
to the victims.''
Those who try to sidestep the clan syndicates do so at their own peril,
in a land where the number of illegally owned Kalashnikov automatic
assault weapons in some cities is greater than the number of residents.
On April 30, the Associated Press reported that ``almost every
journalist'' who has gone to the refugee camp at Bajram Curri in
northern Albania has been robbed, including a team from the Associated
Press. The Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe, which
oversees the camp, has had two of its official vehicles hijacked by
armed men.
The U.S. Army's Task Force Hawk installation at the Tirana airport,
outside the Albanian capital, ranks ``crime'' ahead of ``Yugoslav
forces'' among the main threats to American troops in Albania.
Locked inside a hermit country for half a century while the eccentric
pseudo-Marxist regime of the late Enver Hoxha prevailed, the Albanian
clans did not arrive on the European organized crime scene until the
early 1990s, more than a decade after Kosovar drug lords mounted their
own successful takeover of the heroin trade.
Albanian crime bosses have made up for their late start with
extraordinary aggressiveness and risk-taking, say European law
enforcement authorities.
In Germany alone, more than 800 Albanian nationals are currently
serving prison sentences for heroin trafficking, a phenomenal number
from a country with scarcely 3 million people. The only larger foreign
group in German prisons is from Turkey, which has 20 times the
population of Albania and millions of its citizens resident in Germany.
Unhampered by the political struggle that led Kosovar drug bosses to
put their empires at risk in a war with Belgrade, Albanian clans have
also extended their reach far beyond the drug trade. As their local
power base has solidified, they have rapidly become major players in a
dizzying array of criminal enterprises abroad.
Regional clans from southern Albania are believed to have formed an
active partnership with the Sicilian Cosa Nostra and its branches in
mainland Italy, and emerged as the principal agents and enforcers in
sex rings fed by Albanian speedboat fleets that ferry undocumented
immigrants across the Adriatic Sea.
In February, a Chronicle reporter found dozens of automobiles with
Palermo license plates parked under heavy guard in the gang-infested
southern port of Vlore, near waterfront cafes where much of the
conversation was in Sicilian dialect. The police chief of Vlore,
Colonel Sokol Kociu, contends that a special high-speed ferry service
has even been established to serve Cosa Nostra emissaries traveling
back and forth between Sicily and Albania.
Law enforcement officials in Italy say the Cosa Nostra is moving
steadily into finance and money-laundering, while the dirty work of
international organized crime is subcontracted to others.
There is no mistaking the substantial Albanian presence in this arena.
Of 447 men and women arrested in Italy in 1997 for ``exploitation of
prostitutes,'' according to that country's Ministry of the Interior,
204 were Albanian nationals.
Three months ago, a Milan court indicted 20 Albanian men who were
allegedly part of a syndicate that transported 800 unaccompanied
Albanian children under age 16 to Italy, where many were forced to beg
in the streets under threat of torture.
The speedboats that carried these children west have not been deterred
by dozens of Allied warships in the Adriatic. On a single night during
the NATO bombardments of Kosovo and Serbia, April 26, the contraband
fleet dumped 1,200 clandestine emigrants on the beaches of southern
Italy.
The violence of the Albanian crime clans has soared exponentially since
1997, when Albania's entire financial structure collapsed, throwing the
country into chaos. Riots erupted across the nation. Army units and
meagerly paid police, who earn under $100 per month, abandoned their
bases and armories.
In the free-for-all that ensued, looters carried off an estimated 2
million pounds of explosives and 750,000 to 1,000,000 Kalashnikov
rifles. The Albanian government says that fewer than 10 percent of the
looted weapons have been recovered.
``Obviously, as long as the arms stores circulating in Albania aren't
recovered, a real crackdown on crime there will not be feasible,'' says
Italian Interior Minister Rosa Jervolino, who leads Rome's effort to
coordinate law enforcement activities against Albanian-based underworld
organizations.
The Albanian legislature, known locally as ``the Kalashnikov
Parliament'' because of its members' ties to weapons dealers, shows
little interest in the problem.
The arms windfall provided an important boost to the the KLA in Kosovo,
but an even larger one to the narcotics bosses and smugglers of
Albania. ``The same crime groups that traffic in human beings also
traffic in drugs and in weapons,'' says Jervolino.
The economic and social effects of their activity -- and the
intimidation that often accompanies it -- have been devastating. ``The
number of the Italian investors in Albania is 10 times less than it was
in 1996,'' notes former president Berisha. ``Thousands and thousands of
intellectuals are fleeing Albania only because they feel insecure for
their lives and for the lives of their children.''
Since 1992, one-fifth of the country's entire population has abandoned
Albania, usually for the grim life of an undocumented alien in Western
Europe.
Vlore and its rival northern counterpart, Durres, are also primary
stations on Europe's most extensive stolen car circuit, which doubles
as a transport system for narcotics. Hundreds of late-model luxury cars
are parked on the streets. The cars have usually completed a circuitous
journey, with both drivers and vehicles carrying faked papers, crossing
through several Western European nations before they enter Albania from
Macedonia.
``At each stage of the journey, the cars deliver drugs and stock up on
televisions, video equipment and other household goods,'' the OGD
reports. ``A `transporter car' will make only one or two international
trips, to avoid identification. The car is given as a bonus to the
courier, who can have its registration changed by making a simple
declaration to an Albanian official.''
In Chronicle interviews three months ago, clan leaders in Vlore openly
boasted that two-thirds of all automobiles in the country are stolen.
``We regard that figure as entirely credible,'' said Lieutenant
Domenico DiGianturco of the Guardia di Finanza, Italy's customs police.
The president of the central bank of Albania made the mistake of taking
one of the vehicles on a vacation to Italy in 1996 -- where he was
promptly arrested by the Guardia di Finanza and charged with car theft.
Bribery demands by Albania's own customs officers, a thriving business
in ``normal'' times, has boomed with the avalanche of humanitarian aid
and military supplies. The number of trucks disembarking at the port of
Durres from Italian ferries has risen by nearly 700 percent in two
months, from an average of fewer than 30 per day to more than 200.
The only way to prevent massive theft, insists Colonel Kociu, Vlore's
beleaguered police commander, is to put the trucks immediately under
the protection of a special armed military force as soon the convoys
arrive. Otherwise, he says, ``the aid meant for refugee camps will be
diverted onto the black market.''
Kociu echoes Berisha's charge that the crime clans are directly linked
to political parties in Tirana, and through them wield control over the
nation's ragged customs service. Although current President Rexhep
Mejdani, a former physics professor, is personally regarded as honest,
even he concedes that graft and racketeering in his own bureaucracy are
out of control.
Reliable sources told The Chronicle that a European Union investigative
unit assembled 70 files on customs corruption and turned them over to
the Albanian finance ministry in January. The findings have not yet
been made public.
But evidence of the corruption's scale can be gleaned from a mammoth
disparity between declared tax and customs receipts and the consumption
of certain import goods in Albania.
In 1998, reports Tirana journalist Sami Neza, Albanians smoked an
estimated 8,000 tons of U.S. and Western European cigarettes. The total
amount officially checked through Albanian customs was 11 tons.
``There's a virus that stands in the way of being honest in Albania:
the virus of illegality,'' Colonel Kociu says.
``This virus lives and exists for the wretched interests of
politicians. It is cultivated in the nerve centers of the state, in the
customs service, in law enforcement, in the courts. It's an epidemic.''
Two months ago, a four-man official delegation from the Albanian
government was prevented by Italian police from boarding a flight to
France while the plane was in transit at Milan's Malpensa airport. The
police were put on guard by discrepancies in one of the men's
diplomatic passports. The suspicious ``diplomat'' turned out to be
Gazmend Mahmutaj -- wanted for murder, and thought by European police
to be the Albanian mafia's ``boss of bosses'' -- traveling under an
alias.
His destination was the headquarters of the European Parliament in
Strasbourg, where the group was scheduled to participate in the
ratification of an International Crime Tribunal treaty
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