The Albanian Bronx Crew that took on the Italian Mafia
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July 1997, in the Albanian village of Lushnia.

There's been a heated phone call between two of its most feared gangsters, and groups of men are heading to one of the village's best-known bars. One of the men, a dark-haired former Special Forces officer named Alfred Schurte, opens fire from his car with some of his accomplices. His rival, Atar Ahmed Daya, is ready, and he fires on the approaching car. Daya's right-hand man drops in the gunfight. One of Schurte's men also dies. Then Ramadan, Schurte's brother, is killed.

He pulls out. In Albania, a country of honor, blood feuds, and the infamous Canoon, Daya has another trick up his sleeve. He doesn't let his rival pick up the bodies of his brother and henchman, a huge middle finger. The slight will fuel a bitter fight for revenge that will make Shkurti, also known as the Professor, Albania's most wanted man, and one of Europe's most ruthless crime bosses.

Welcome to the Underworld Podcast.

Yes, we are back after a little break. Thank you guys for coming back to listen. This is the Underworld Podcast. I'm Danny Gold. I'm here with Sean Williams. And this is the podcast where we take you through the world of global organized crime. And today we are talking about, I think, like our most requested episode, right? The Albanian Mafia. Yeah, yeah. People loved it.

First, a little housekeeping. We got the Patreon still up. We have some bonus episodes up there, patreon.com slash the Underworld Podcast. We just put a reading list up on our website, underworldpod.com, where you can see all the books that we've used for sources and buy them yourself if you want. And then also, if you go to mybookie.com right now, we have a sponsor. And if you put in underworldpod under their promo code, you will get a special deal. I think it's something like 50% off.

They're 50% more money put into your account for the first $1,000 you put in. But it just seems fitting that we would have a gambling website as one of our sponsors considering we started this to help Sean pay off his gambling debts. We're still hoping.

We're still helping. That's still going on, guys. We still need the money. Unlike my boogie.com, Sean was placing bets in underground Moldovan bars in Berlin, which is why he's in so much trouble and why we just need the help with the sponsorship. But anyway, let's get to it. Sean, what do you have for us today?

Yeah, I mean, we did that episode, one of your episodes on the Albanian Mafia in the Bronx, and it was like so cool. People really connected with it. And we like put it on YouTube. We got all of our stuff on YouTube, by the way, guys, if you want to listen there. And people just went wild for it, right? There was loads of comments. People were like really, really getting into this stuff. So I've kind of had some experience like working in Albania and

I've been involved in reporting on the Canoon and the blood feuds and that kind of stuff. So we thought we'd do like a global Albanian mafia episode. And like...

It's kind of... I mean, the Albanian Mafia itself is a kind of weird phrase, right? I mean, there's loads of different things about the Albanian Mafia. Like, it's not really just one thing, like the Italian crime families. But I think it's interesting to learn a bit more about how these guys came up, how they kind of sustained these crazy trafficking routes all through Europe and, like, the world. And...

I think we're going to get deeper later on into how they're really, really deep into London's organized crime, which is kind of making me homesick, actually, because it's COVID and I really want to go home and do some proper reporting in London. But yeah, that's pretty much what this episode is going to go into. And the professor, of course.

because he's a pretty crazy guy and he sums up a lot of what's gone wrong with modern Albania. To show how powerful Albanian gangsters have become, here's a quote from a book called Albanian Mafia Wars by John Lucas. Quote, this backwater paradise also has a reputation of one of the continent's key transit routes for South American cocaine, rivaling Rotterdam and Antwerp for the sheer volume of Colombian snow passing through its docks every year.

I like how he gets right to the point with the book title. You know, there's no messing around. There's no poetry. He's like, it's about Albanian Mafia Wars. I'm going to call it Albanian Mafia Wars. You got to respect that. Yeah, boy, Lucas knows his deal. Yeah. And I'll stick this on the Amazon list. We've got a list of the books that we put up on the website. So people can check that out there as well.

So I'm going to get more into those South American connections a bit later on, but to show how out of control Albania is or was, I guess, these days, like I haven't been there in years now. I want to focus on Lazarat. And I mentioned this place on your pod, but I want to impress on people just how absolutely bonkers this place is. It's this tiny little speck on the map, barely 3,000 people in the middle of Albania, and they're all growing weeds. And like, I mean this, like they're...

They're all growing weed. It kind of sounds like Humboldt County or I think there's places up near Vancouver in Canada and British Columbia where it's just like one out of every ten houses or the valley in Lebanon. But I don't know. I haven't heard much about this. Yeah, I mean –

It's kind of like, it's a bit of a kind of like cult status sort of place, but there's a great Channel 4 report from 2014 on Lazerat. And like, to be fair, the report, Podrick O'Brien put some comedy into this weird little village, Friaulza in Tirana, that was like then it was the biggest producer of weed in Europe ever.

And it was like left to rot by the communists and forgotten during the turbulent 90s. So these guys are just going it alone. And according to a local journalist on this report, which I'll stick on the reading list, the village made $4.5 billion a year. That's like half the entire country's GDP. And like, of course, if you're making big money like that, Albania's average salary is like $464 a month now.

big guys are going to come around sniffing. Yeah, is it just like one of those things where it's this rural village of stone houses, but everyone there is driving a Bentley?

No, it's like everyone's driving a like horse and tractor and that kind of shit. Like he goes to some old lady's house and he's like, oh, where'd you go to weed around here? And she's like, oh, I have no idea what you're talking about. And then they he walks off and the cameraman stays on them. And she's like, what did you tell him? It's like, no, no, I just told him they were potatoes. She's like, oh, OK, that's cool. Yeah, he could have seen the weed. It's right around the corner.

It's pretty funny. But anyway, in 2014, there's this massive gun battle for like three days to take over Lazarat. The villagers have mortar rounds, grenade launchers, bazookas. Like it reminds me of that Simon Pegg movie, Hot Fuzz. Have you seen that? No, I haven't.

Ah, it's great British film. You should watch it. It's like a bunch of wrinkly old weed farmers in Lazzarate. And they're just like stepping out of their barns with pump actions and AKs. That's Lazzarate, not the movie. And it's like, it's madness. And no one's killed in this giant operation either. Yeah, it's just, I mean, in Bacal Valley, like they have armies, you know, the dealers there just have all that. And they go to war with the army in Lebanon. It's, I mean, I want to do an episode on that too, eventually.

Oh, yeah, for sure. Yeah, these guys had their own, like... They were just, like... They had their own airport, and they were just dropping shipments of weed all over, like, Eastern Europe and stuff. It's pretty nuts. So...

there's a good example of the kind of lawlessness that was rife in Albania and that's just like a few years ago before I go into the rural parts of the country and what's helped build one of the world's most effective ethnic gangs I want to dispel one myth and that's that there's not really one thing called the Mafia Shkiptari there's like 20 families or clans today not including the American guys that identify as the Albanian Mafia

And they mostly operate in the Balkans and Western Europe, trafficking black market goods, drugs, and sex. Yeah, I think we need to explain that too because we – just for shorthand, we call everything – all these organized crime groups the mafia if they're really organized, right? Mafia in general is only supposed to apply to the Sicilians, but it's kind of become shorthand just for any organized ethnic gang I think or organized criminal gang in a way.

But even when we say that, like when we talk about the Israeli mafia or the Albanian mafia, it's not one group. Usually it's a whole bunch of different groups, and most of the time they're fighting each other. It just – as like a catch-all, a lazy catch-all I would say. We just kind of throw it that way. But anyway. Yeah.

Yeah, and I mean, I guess like with the Albanian guys as well, it kind of, there's another catch-all, which is that Albania is like ethnic Albanians, which means I think like Macedonians and Kosovars and people who are like identify with the language and stuff. So there's that extra layer with these guys. But anyway, like part of that history is that

They used to, for sort of hundreds or even thousands of years, be on the Silk Road, on the Balkan route of the Silk Road, which existed for centuries, bringing all kinds of goods from Asia to Europe. And now they use what they call the old path, which is kind of like a new version of this, which takes its name from a police operation which stung a bunch of ethnic Albanian gangs in 2011.

So it just kind of goes from Turkey through the Balkans, Albania, into Western Europe through Italy into Switzerland. So it gets on the boats in Albania, this port town called Juris, which we're going to talk about in a minute. And then they ship it off to southern and northern Italy, and then it goes from there. So geography is helping these guys a huge amount. But there's a lot more reasons why the Albanian mafia is so good at what it does. So here's a history lesson coming up.

So Albania starts out as this ancient Greek holiday spot and it's still beautiful now. And then for five centuries, it's part of the Ottoman Empire, which is why it has loads of these old pretty Ottoman mosques everywhere and a large portion of the population are Muslim. Then in 1912, it declares independence from the Turks and tons leave for Italy. It's just the first of many diasporas that's going to drive the crime wave. Loads of Italians have the surname Albanese, for example.

Then the country has a period under the bloodthirsty dictator King Zog I, which is like something from a, like, I don't know what movie that would be from. And then Mussolini takes Albania in 39. Then the Nazis come and when they get their asses kicked, the country slips into complete Cold War chaos. This is like madder than anything else going on at the time. Enver Hoxha, who's Albania's dictator, he installs a regime somewhere between East Germany and North Korea.

On this crazy scale, right, he posts 750,000 machine gun pillboxes on the border to keep his people in, not others out. Then he bans beards Muslims wear, and he holds competitions for schools and kids to rat out their parents or teachers. Thousands are shipped off to gulags, prisons, or to death as so-called enemies of the nation. One in every hundredth Albanian is reckoned to have gone through a so-called re-education camp, as Hodja called it.

People are banned from having TV areas pointed west or even looking west. You could get chucked in jail for looking at Corfu, which is next to Albania. So it's pretty crazy. And at the same time, Hodja bans anything reminiscent of the country's past, like religion and the Canoon, which is this medieval law that enforces blood feuds, especially in the north where the mountains are. It's hard for anyone to get there. This is from a New York Times story in 1999. It's all about Albanian organized crime. Quote,

Jesus. And, yeah, I mean, this is crazy shit. And I'll come back to that in a minute, but, like...

Hodja is so extreme, he managed to piss off the Soviets and the Chinese during the Cold War. And like his workers paradise is massively polluted. Some cities just like swirling around in lakes of shit coming from these factories he's built. In fact, Albania is so cut off ideologically at this time that it's the only country in history to have boycotted four Olympic Games. It's like it's no one's friend. Everyone hates Albania.

In the spirit of fairness, because I saw some bashing in the comments we got from tankies or whatever, Hodja did get rid of a bunch of gender inequalities in Albanian society. He mechanized the country and implemented the National Health Service. Okay, first off, no, no, we're not going to be responding to YouTube comments. That's the dregs of society. We're also not going to be responding to criticisms from tankies. And there's no like, well, you know, you kind of have to hand it to them. We're just going to leave that. Yeah, I was going to say, if you need gulags to do all that, you're a bit shit. Yeah.

Yeah. Um, anyway, Hodja dies in 85 and his Marxist Leninist nation stumbles through to the end of communism, right? So it's so cut off from the world. It doesn't even ditch the system until 92, which is a full year after the Soviet Union dissolves. Um, I read this great New York times piece. I'm going to stick it on the reading list about the moment Hodja statue was toppled in downtown Toronto when people were so desperate to get it, they were getting like half run over by cars in the scrum. Um,

Anyway, people are pretty happy to see the back of the old boy. But of course, when communism goes, nationalism comes in. And so does a bunch of banking shysters who tells the Albanians they can get massive returns on investment. So who, I mean, I've read about this before and it's just like the whole country was just like a Bernie Madoff scheme, right? But who were the people profiting off this? Was it like foreigners? Was it outside banks? Or was it Albanians themselves who were just scamming the rest of their countrymen? As far as I saw it, I think there were like two or three main subcontractors

so-called banks and they were run by Albanians but they had a load of outsiders coming in and trying to sort of piggyback on how no one really like even understood what uh like the economy or capitalism even was so I think I'm pretty sure that they were Albanians but working with some people in Western Europe who were getting like loads of money off the back of them but I mean I can see why so many people fell for this stuff like Albania is the poorest country in Europe at the time and

And these people telling them that they can get like 40, 50 percent return on their money. So they're just like selling the house. They're betting the farm on this shit, literally. And like when it all falls apart and it turns out to be a big Ponzi scheme. It sounds like my experience with trading, day trading and crypto, you know, as it came, stop going.

Anyway, patreon.com. Like we want to get patreon.com slash the underworld podcast because I've lost all the money that we had so far on day trading crypto and we need more. Anyway, keep going. Sorry. Stay off Reddit. Yeah. One finance leader at the time from this big Ponzi scheme, he's kidnapped and he has to be rescued from the National Soccer Stadium by special forces. Then the

Then the president, Sally Berisha, has this amazing brainwave one day and he opens up arms depot to pro-government civilians in the mountainous north. I can barely say it, it's so fucking dumb. Which is over like half a million firearms, grenades, rocket launchers, the works. So overnight you have these massive peasant armies going at it with military grade weapons. I feel like I've seen reports that at this point, like Albania had the most guns on earth per capita.

Just because, you know, he was like, Haja was so, did I say his name right? He was so paranoid that he just had so many guns there prepared for this invasion. And then the country kind of falls apart and all the armories are looted and all that. And I think it was also, I think that's a plot point in the movie War Dogs, which is based on a true story. A great movie. Also the fattest Jonah Hill has ever been. But now Jonah Hill looks great. So, you know.

We support. It's like medium Jonah Hill now, right? He's kind of gone back to normal. I think he's pretty skinny. There was a horribly skinny Jonah Hill. All right, he's still skinny. He looks good, man. He's taking care of himself. I'm happy to see that. But he was gigantic in that movie. I was worried about him. Cool. Hate Robin Hood, love Jonah Hill. Yeah. Yeah, I read something that every man over the age of 10, there was enough guns to tall every man over the age of 10 in Albania at the time. So yeah, no one was going without.

They even looted police uniforms and bulletproof vests so they could carry out crimes completely unnoticed. And like shock horror, the gangs take over entire Albanian towns. Berisha denounces them as like a communist rebellion backed by foreign intelligence agencies, which is obviously complete bullshit.

Anyway, blood feuds were settled amongst the carnage and small gangs stole arsenals of weaponry. And then add to that the fact everyone's just scraping around for a livelihood and they're right next to Italy. And you can kind of join the dots as to what happened next. And this is about the time when tons of Albanians and ethnic Albanians are fleeing for Canada and the US, which helps spur a bunch of that stuff over the Atlantic. But folks should really listen to your episode on that to find out more about the Bronx and everything that went down there.

Yeah, that was the Albanian mafia in the Bronx episode. But I think even in episode one, like we talked a lot about, you know, it was about Arkhan's tigers and about the war in Kosovo. And we went into that a little bit, but definitely more on that in the in the Bronx episode. Oh, yeah. I don't think Arkhan's going to be getting any prizes from the people of Kosovo anytime soon. But yeah, I mean, this crazy swill of like all of this corruption, crime, the economy falling apart.

It's just this confluence back then of corrupt officials, failed system, geographical luck, like I mentioned, poor young men with tons of guns, and the government had actually given them with nothing to do, and thousands of former members of Enver Hodges' Sigurimi secret police, and they're all tooled up in espionage and combat with no future other than the black market, right? So these guys...

They get in bed with a bunch of high, like with a high number of lorry drivers and sportsmen who can ferry drugs and act as muscle. It's like all the ingredients of a global mafia without a shred of the influence at the time. Plus this is around the same time a million Albanians are fleeing for foreign shores. So no wonder these guys hit the ground running. You couldn't ask for a more perfect recipe, I feel like, in creating something like this, especially when you have

You know, in army and then, you know, what do you want to call them? Spies, whatever they were called. Secret police, all that. When they all lose their job and there's nothing there and no economy and nothing for them to do. I mean, it's like, you know, the disbanding of the debathification issue. It's just like this entire recipe, like one of the building blocks is young men trying

trained in the art of violence, who lose whatever jobs they were prepared for to use that violence, whatever you want to call it. And then there's nothing for them to latch onto. So of course, what are they going to do? Yeah, I mean, that's like the biggest of the biggest alarm bells, right? So first of all, these guys are all about trafficking drugs and women mostly. And in 1997, it was reported that a boat owner smuggling glutes from Albania into Puglia on the east coast of Italy, he could make 10 grand in a single night.

That's in the Tirana-Duras region in the middle of the country, by the way. That's where a lot of the money is being made. Northerners in the highlands, they make millions shipping weapons into the former Yugoslavia. And Albanians on the Macedonian-Greek borders traffic illegal home goods and other black market stolen shit. So it's kind of divided at this time. And obviously the coast is the big earner.

So to give you some idea about how the ass has fallen out of the economy at this time, there are only 3000 registered companies in Albania in 1997. That is like mental. And that shows you how big the black market was in 1994. By the way, it had been 25,000 and that was crap.

So just imagine living in a country full of guns. No one wants to trade with you. The politicians are dirty. You're right next to Greece and Italy, and there are no jobs at all. I mean, you're telling me you wouldn't go into organized crime? Oh, and by the way, there's barely any police or military. In 1997, there's like 23,000 reviewed criminal cases in Albania. And by 1998, there are only 3,500. So you've got the tools, the connections, the expertise in many cases, and you're just not going to get caught.

I guess it's a bit like that Gandhi quote about the one-eyed man in the land of the blind, but not quite the way he meant it. With all this widespread criminality, some of Albania's most hardened and well-connected gangsters, they rise to the top. And I want to tell a few of the stories about the biggies, but before that, I want to go back to that New York Times piece from 99. Quote,

With whole towns controlled by heavily armed smuggling mafias or mini warlords, and ambushes frequent, travellers race to be off the roads before nightfall. In the northern district of Trapoyer, several relief workers have been murdered by bandits, and the humanitarian organisation Doctors Without Borders has had so many of its vehicles stolen that

That's one of the local nickname, Doctors Without Cars. That is fucking great. I mean, and also no disrespect to Doctors Without Borders, who I've seen in every crazy place I've been to. They're usually always the last ones there besides some of those crazy Christian NGOs. But Doctors Without Cars is hilarious. Yeah, yeah. Pretty good. And like the leaders of these groups really are just like a rogues gallery of dicks, like hardened, hardened crims.

Like our episode on Japan and Nigeria, many of these thugs were hired by corrupt politicians and business leaders to take out rivals. Like, no wonder these guys ended up battling the Italians on their own turf in New York. Well, I think the thing about the Albanians that came up in New York for a bit is a lot of them...

were grew up in new york i think they might have left during you know the communist era of men to sneak out or or were coming from kozobo at the time i don't know exactly but i'm pretty sure most of them didn't grow up in albania during this time at least the ones that were active in the 90s that were talked about i think it was more they were just kind of hardened from from tough communist living and rough eastern europe it was kind of like the russians in brighton beach yeah there's loads of echoes with that episode actually um

It's like, it's super interesting how these kind of like brutal dictatorships just set up young men to just take over entire gangs. Yeah. But anyway, there's like, so among these kind of big bosses at the time, there's Murtaza Kalshi, who's better known as Zani. And he's escaped from a 101 year sentence for murdering priests and formed this 15 man gang in the city of Vlora. He pursues a campaign of political influence and even meets with Italian PM Romano Prodi,

So he's like the kind of smooth-talking, like, besuited guy at the top of this gang. And you can see pictures of him. He's like this kind of good-looking, looks like a movie star. Then there's Alton Dada. He's a murderer who's believed to have executed 63 of 120 killings by his gang in Berat, which is this, like, gorgeous ancient Ottoman city on the bend of a river.

There's a guy called Dritan Daiti who performs one of the most daring escapes in the country's history, right? So in 2003, he's charged with murdering a construction manager who refused to pay projection money. Then in a Toronto courtroom, he hides a gun in a courthouse toilet, grabs it during recess and whips it out during session, threatens the guards and escapes on a motorbike with an accomplice. Are you kidding me? Like, how does no one check the toilet? That's the oldest trick in the book.

I mean, during Hodges' time, I guess no one watches The Godfather, right? Yeah, maybe the movie just wasn't seen back then and they just didn't know that that's what you do. Yeah.

Yeah. Anyway, the law finally catches up with Diety like six years later in 2009, by which time he and his mob basically control the port city of Durres, which is one of Europe's premier destinations for drugs. Durres is this like tiny kind of podunk town, a short drive to Tirana. Loads of garish office blocks and container docks, not much of a looker, like really new money, which is exactly what it is.

Anyway, the cops descend on Dicey's mansion on the wall one morning, but he's not there, much to their annoyance. Later in the afternoon, a squad spots his Volkswagen Touareg, which I don't know if you have these, but it's like a fancy little SUV. And he's at the Pistina Illyria, which is this crowded pier on the beachfront. Dicey winds down the windows and opens fire, and he sends beachgoers flying in all directions, very GTA V.

By the end of the shootout, four cops and one of Daiti's men are dead, and the mob boss is badly injured, but somehow, or perhaps sadly, he survives. He's serving 20 years inside for the initial killing today, and it's the worst killing of police since the 97 madness, and it's still known today as the Juris Massacre.

But I want to roll it back a bit to the Pyramid Years. I'm going to call them the Pyramid Years, by the way. I can't think of any other way. And our pal Alfred Skirty, he leads the feared Luzhnia gang, named after the village I mentioned at the start of the pod.

So the Luzhnia gang becomes one of the most successful of the post-pyramid Albanian gangs. Shkurti, known as Professor or the Big One, comes from an educated, reasonably well-to-do family in Mezeki, which is a plain southwest of Tirana. I'm going to screw these names up, we always do. He later goes into the special forces and he's suspected of killing an Albanian citizen during a police riot in Durres.

In 93, he flees to Italy. Not much is known about him thereafter, but it seems pretty obvious he's getting involved in organized crime. In 97, Scurti's family, which has done well out of corruption, doesn't abandon the state. But he does, and he fails to get rid of a so-called regime. He blames the country going down the pan.

Then he has the shootout in Lusignan with Dyer, and it's pretty much the origin story for the turbulent years to come. Some people actually think it happened over a few going years back when he and Dyer are both trying to control shipments of drugs going into Italy.

Either way, Shkurti vows to avenge his brother's death, and Daya not allowing him to look after the bodies makes it so much worse. He builds this gang of misfits from the local area, of which there's hardly a lack of in Pyramidira, Albania. It's kind of this Fagin's gang, but instead of pickpockets, it's a band of brothers who've been screwed over by the state, and local gangsters, and they just want to get their own back. Some of them were even orphans, too.

They've even got an HQ right next to the police station called Station No. 2, and they go on a revenge-killing rampage, wiping out anyone they know is connected to Dyer's crew. It's got, like, Bad Movie or Guy Ritchie sort of vibes, you know, this whole story. Yeah, yeah, totally.

This is from a report on the Open Society Foundation for Albania. Quote, in spite of the crimes and the gruesome scene of the cut head that horrifies citizens, I'll get into that in a moment. For the most part, the leader and members of his organization would not be seen in those years as ordinary criminals, but as real guarantors of all the calm in the city. The old Jacuzza thing, right? If there's crime, let it be organized kind of thing.

By 1999, Scherti's gang is now well-established, and he's changed his name to Aldo Bari, and he's getting into trafficking of all kinds. Why the name change? Like, because he's wanted, or just because he liked that name better? I don't know. Like, if you go to Tirana, there's loads of restaurants that, even if they're not Italian, they've got Italian names. I think they have the same thing with it being, like, an exotic, kind of, like, high-class thing that people might do with, like, French names or some shit like that.

Anyway, he chooses Aldo Bade. And when police get in their way, his gang bites back with horrific violence. They execute cops in their home, blow up commissioners with TNT. In one episode, he plants bombs in a local soccer stadium trying to kill an official. Eventually, Bade gets his revenge on Dyer by killing him and then beheading him. That's like the best way to get revenge. Oh,

Oh, yeah. I mean, that's better than just not letting someone sweep up the bodies after a shootout, right? Well, killing someone and then beheading them. It's a dish best served hot, I guess. A good illustration of how powerful these guys are comes in 2002, when the assassin of a botched execution is told not to worry about the media write-up because it's going to be reported as the work of some hopped-up junkies. So even when the victim walks because the assassin screwed it up, the police still report it as a junkie killing.

The Luzhnir gang are involved in illegal gambling, drugs, and Barry is taking product from Turkey and shipping it into Italy via the port cities of Bari and Ancona. Maybe that's where Barry comes from, actually. He also has processing plants across northern Italy, including Turin, Monza, and Brescia.

At 2006 prices, Barre is probably bringing around $20 million on heroin each year and another 10 mil from cocaine. And that's just the stuff the authorities are grabbing. So Christ knows what he's actually getting into the country. And the Italian crime families, they kind of let this happen or it was just because the Norse or they didn't care or they worked together? I think they worked together. Like there's a bunch of stories and they're pretty vague about the relationship between Albanians and Italians in organized crime. But I think like,

the ways of Albanians coming into Italy and like the hookups with the Balkan route is so strong at this point that they basically just set up these like friendly sort of relationships. And I've got a bit more about that coming later on, but yeah, I think it's pretty much hand in glove with those two countries.

Here's an example of how casual Bari is with violence, by the way. This is from a court transcript over a murder. Quote, a four-wheel drive came from the high school towards us. There were two persons inside who I've never seen. And as soon as the vehicles 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.

Barry is arrested, then he's extradited from Turkey in 2009, and he gets charged with 15 murders, kidnapping, destruction of property, organizing a criminal group, and a bunch of other pretty serious offenses. It's actually his main trigger man, which is this guy called Leonard Prifty, who gives him away. So Barry recruited Prifty as a 14-year-old orphan, and the Hell Jet killer gets known as the Little Chief for his willingness to gun down victims with a scorpion submachine gun.

When Prifty carries out one of his typically brazen murders, shoots a rival gangster in the head in a town center with a silenced pistol, the guy's cronies, they chase him and they kill Prifty in an alleyway. And the affair basically wounds up with one guy turning state witness and he helps get Barre convicted in 2011. Wait, so how did Prifty, Prifty didn't snitch on him. He just screwed up and that led to an arrest that led to somebody going after Barre. I'm confused.

Yeah, yeah. Basically, like he would always get away or pay enough people off that it didn't even matter. But this time around, he got shot in an alleyway and the like scene caused the cops to come along. And then throughout the turmoil, this murder, pretty much like that is one of the damning piece of evidence that got Barre sent down.

Anyway, this guy is like, he's not done yet, right? He's making threats behind bars and he's got to be under heavy guard even during the trial. And here's some quotes from Buddy during the trial, actually. This one's regarding this 12,000 square foot depot used for a bunch of his criminal activity. And he calls it Lagoon. Quote, there is no motherfucker who can take the Lagoon from me. I would fuck Sally Barisha's mother and anyone else who would touch that property from me.

And then when the judge orders him removed from the court, he eyeballs his police officer and says, quote, and you, why do you look at me like that? I can straighten you out too. I'm guessing it doesn't help your parole chances if you're going to fuck the president's mother if he steps on your property. But yeah, as you might imagine, Barre's sentenced to life.

And this is a bit from a book called Decoding Albanian Organized Crime by Jana Arzovska. Yeah, she's great. We actually want to do a bonus episode with her eventually because she's probably one of the foremost experts on the world on the Albanian organized crime. Yeah, that book is like encyclopedia. It's amazing. Quote, in Albania, the name Aldo Bari and the Lusnia gang makes many people anxious even today.

During the late 1990s, Barre and his associates beheaded people, burned houses, produced and smuggled drugs, and threatened to kill both police officers and prosecutors. The gang members paradoxically called themselves guarantors of the law and untouchables.

Now, there are other major names in Albanian crime, Nasser Kelmendi being one of them. He's a Kosovo boss. He's got close ties to the KLA, the Kosovo army, the US used to liberate the country in the mid-2000s. And to Serbs listening, I'm using air quotes around liberate, although Kosovo independence is a good thing. That guy builds up an empire from Afghanistan into Turkey and Europe, and he's only sent down for six years in 2018.

By the way, it's really interesting that it said Albanians have better luck doing deals with the Taliban and other Afghan groups, say they're heroin, because they're Muslims. I'm not sure if that's true, but I guess if you're the Taliban and you've got the choice between an infidel and a brother in Islam, you'll choose the latter. I don't know, man. Business is business, but whatever works. Yeah. Actually, I mean, that's a good segue into the next section of this pod because business really is business for these guys. Yeah.

The first years of this criminal formation in the dying days of the pyramid schemes, like

Albania is really violent and gangs are battling it out with their newfound guns for turf control all the time, right? But in 2003, around that time, the violence dies down, mostly because the gangs have pretty much staked out their own respective territories and there's less need to break into street fights by then. By 2015, there are nine major mafias in Albania and all of them are situated on the western Adriatic coast. They've also integrated with other Balkan groups in Turkey, Romania and even with influential Israeli gangsters.

In the north, the groups are mostly family-run affairs. I mean, to the region's historic blood ties. It's actually in the city of Skodra where I reported on blood feuds a vice years ago. And that's the main city for a bunch of criminal clans. But they're really international, right? Oh, yeah. These guys are everywhere. Like, this is just the stuff that's going on in there. But there's tons of other families outside the country.

I mean, the mafia scheptari, like we said, has built close ties with Italian mobsters, especially the Ndrangheta, which apparently works hand in glove with export drugs all over Europe. And it isn't just the craziness of the 90s that created this huge global network. And it really is global with wings in China, Israel, Australia, anywhere there's money to be made with sex and drugs.

The Albanian code of Bessa has a lot to answer for. It basically means keeping the promise, like a vow, and it governs a lot of Albanian criminal activity. Essentially, if an Albanian gangster says they're going to do something, they're going to do it. And that goes back to the canon, which says that, quote, banditry is permissible if it's to feed one's hungry children. Most Albanian criminals have ties in Belgium or the Netherlands, where Antwerp and Rotterdam, two of the world's biggest ports are.

And therefore, of course, the drugs. But it's the UK that's Albanian crime's biggest destination these days. The takeover of Britain by Albanian gangs is totally amazing and kind of wholesale. As far as I can tell, the UK is a bit of a deconsolidated market for drugs. And the Albanians' business first ploys help them sweep up. They work with the Italians and loads of them have Italian IDs or passports or pass through Europe with the help of the Italian mob.

This is from a story by The Guardian's Mark Townsend, and it's a long quote, but it's a great one. How Albanians came to conquer the UK's cocaine market is a lesson in criminal savvy. The value of making friends with the world's most dangerous mafias and the absolute threat of violence. It began with a business model that was simple in concept, but sufficiently bold to subvert the existing order.

For years, cocaine's international imports worked separately from its wholesalers and the gangs. Pricing structures varied depending on the drug's purity. The higher it was, the more it cost. The Albanians ditched the entire model. They began negotiating directly with the Colombian cartels who controlled coca production. Huge shipments were arranged direct from South America. Supply chains were kept in-house.

Intelligence obtained by British experts revealed that the Albanians were producing cocaine for the cartels for about 4,000 to 5,500 pounds a kilo. That's around 6.5 grand US. At a time when rivals thought they were getting a decent deal using Dutch wholesalers selling at 22.5 grand a kilo. That's 25 grand. The Albanians lowered the price of cocaine and increased its purity. More massive consignments were brought into the UK.

And this quote is from the former head of drugs at the National Crime Agency, which I guess is a bit like the UK's FBI. He says, what they have done very intelligently is say, OK, we've got these margins to play with and we're going to give a good slice of that to the consumer.

So basically the Albanians are great business dealers. Yeah, I was going to say, I assumed it was all muscle and brutality, you know, but they're quite sharp and they're undercutting the market and, you know, they're thinking customer first. Yeah, the customer's always right. I mean, and when you're doing Coke, there's about five times the puree. I'm sure the customer's very right. I think like with the muscle, I think that they have this like great sort of,

background of crime and violence that goes with the kosovar wars and the years of communism that's like really renowned over europe and i think they use that um they kind of use that name more than actually carry out the sort of shocking violence that that i was talking about back in albania these days um well it sounds like it sounds like you're calling albanians pussies

Is that what you're saying? They don't back up their word. Is that what? No. Well, I mean, you write what you guys write, what you want in the comments. But I am calling no one a pussy on this show ever. A researcher in Leeds called Mohammed Kassim says that, quote, if they were on Dragon's Den, which I think is like Shark Tank in the US or something.

If they're on Dragon's Den with this model, all the dragons would be giving them money. I think we just came up with the best Netflix pitch ever. I mean, I'm pretty pissed that we haven't had Netflix sniffing around us already, to be honest. But I think Shark Tank, except for organized crime. I'm in. I'm so fucking in. Somebody's like, I'm going to take over the avocado market in northern Mexico. I need you to invest $200,000 in one shipment of AKs.

Then Mark Cuban's like, I don't know, man. Avocados, really? It's kind of been done. It's a very competitive market. Like, give me a, I'll give you, I'm going to give you 50 grand for 50% of the deal. And maybe a bunch of handguns. And they just kind of go back and forth. Hey, in Berlin and London, those avocados are getting snapped up way quicker than the guns.

So there's like, there's all kinds of reasons drug crime has flourished in the UK in the last few years. One is that the cops deprioritized it a few years ago when they did this major reshuffle with the British police force. It's kind of boring, but they basically like put terrorism right at the top after some attacks and it meant that cops on vice cases were pulled off them. And a ton of crooks just got free license to supply the country's substances.

By the way, Britain, specifically England, and more specifically London, is Europe's and one of the world's biggest markets for cocaine. According to the UNODC, its use is a fraction less than the US. Guess who's number three per capita? Albania. I guess they're getting high on their own supply. But yeah, if you go out in London these days, it's like absolutely everywhere. Hasn't that always been the case in London? I mean, I remember when I was like growing up, it would be like the rich kids and the bankers that were doing it. And then at a certain point...

everyone was doing it like it just was absolutely everyone you knew like it wasn't just the finance guys getting hammered on 10 bags it was like teens students out on the piss politicians there's this 2019 vice article by michael segalov and he discovered that there was traces of coke all around the houses of parliament and this was at a time when the country's leaders was desperate to call out their tiny amounts of past drug use including coke

So in the UK, I did just one line. It's become the new I smoke, but I never inhaled. Actually, that story, by the way, it's like, it's great. It's just the journalist going around with a swab, testing places in and around the building, including all the famous pubs and restaurants MPs go to. In one of them, which is called the Stranger's Bar, which is only accessible to MPs, their guests and other bigwigs, his swab catches so much cocaine that it turns the whole thing a different color.

Actually, Liverpool is said to be the only UK city without gangs of Albanians running around. That's mostly because of the legacy of Curtis Warren, who was once in the polls most wanted man. He was going director source in Columbia, too, and he was making hundreds of millions before he got arrested years back. His guys are still running the show there with the county line system. Actually, I reckon we should do an episode about Curtis Warren another time. Maybe then I can actually go back to the UK. Yeah, I've actually never heard that name before. So I would love to get an episode on this guy done.

Oh, he's super interesting. Yeah, we should do one for sure. There's a funny story about him getting done in prison recently for having relations with a prison warden, but...

Yeah, we'll get into that on another episode. So anyway, most cocaine coming into the UK gets through Rotterdam or Antwerp, like I said, and it makes its way into the UK by Harwich or Tilbury, which is this... Tilbury is this kind of place on the edge of London. And it gets into the capital with this gang of Albanians called the Hellbanians, who are kind of a drug, drill music crossover group, and one of the reasons the British government has shat its pants about fuel. Yeah, I've definitely watched some of their videos before.

And they 100% violate the number one rule of the underworld podcast, which is don't instigate crimes. 100%. Yeah, these guys are bad with that. I mean, they've got over 200,000 subscribers on YouTube, which I'm sad to say is a few dozen more than us. And from what I can see, they're rapping in Albanian, English and German sometimes as well. I guess a lot of the illegal drug trade in Germany is Albanian too, but they're way smaller than the Middle Eastern clans.

Anyway, the Albanians, right? They had 115,000 Instagram followers before the company shut them down. Another Albanian called Osi Behlui, he got famous by posting pics of stacks of cash on Twitter, Instagram, elsewhere, before cops jailed him in 2015 with...

Five million dollars worth of coke and heroin from his gang seized in North London. Don't Instagram your crimes. Just don't. Do not Instagram your crimes. I think we're making merch t-shirts. That's going to be like one of the ones that we have. It should be up in like a week or two. But just don't Instagram your crimes.

I mean, all of this goes to show, right, how mad the Albanians are in their home, which is this giant kind of crappy 60s estate in East London called the Gascoigne Estate. And this is back to the Guardian story. Quote, one residence called Albanians the, quote, stabbers. Requesting anonymity, he said, you

you'd be walking home and feel a little prick on your leg and later realize you've been stabbed by one of the Albanian kids. I don't know what reading that quote back. I don't know whether it's like a slight against them. Actually, it could be a pretty good troll. It sounds insulting. Yeah. I kind of like that if the guy meant it.

Anyway, there are some windows into the mafia scheptade in the UK. Like in 2017, when Brit cops catch this hulking drug baron called Claudian Copia after a three-year operation, which ends up with this guy getting arrested on the Greek-Albanian border with a fake passport. Turns out he's been running a gigantic op himself, going by a ton of different aliases. Probably should have noticed the red Ferrari likes driving around London.

For copier, police seized 204 kilos of high-grade coke, but they reckon he's shipping up to 800Ks, which would be worth around $200 million. And he was 30 at the time, which means he's same age as me and I don't even own a car. Wrong game, man. The cops don't even recover a single penny of the cash he got from the deals. They reckon it's all well-stashed across Eastern Europe.

Anyway, Coppia and his buddies come from the ancient city of Elbezan, which today is like super depressed. A bunch of factories all huddled around this old Ottoman castle. I actually went there to watch a soccer match for the New Yorker years ago. Like it's just kebabs and beer, kebabs and beer. It's a bit like Berlin, actually.

Basically, it seems like the Albanians are well into making their money, but they don't mind getting their hands dirty either. Loads of the guys who run the so-called drug taxis in Berlin are Albanian, or Kosovo Albanians who fled the Balkan wars, and that's definitely the case in London too. Loads of foot soldiers in the drug industry are Albanian.

For the past five years, dozens of Albanians have been getting nabbed on dealing charges. This is a mad stat, right? The third largest foreign population in British prisons is Albanians, which is mental when you consider that less than 80,000 ethnic Albanians are in the country out of 67 million people. Yeah, that is pretty crazy, especially with all the immigration that the UK has. But with this, is it like...

You know, in the Albanian Bronx story, they started off being kind of enforcers for the Italians before they started their own thing. Here it sounds like they have their own thing and they're also low-level guys for other groups or low-level guys themselves. I mean, how does this work? Yeah, as far as I could tell, it's like pretty rigidly structured. And one of the reasons they've been able to like really create a solid organization in a country that doesn't really have anything like that, apart from Curtis Warren a little bit,

is that they're like, they've got the guys up top and they've got the guys down below. And the guys down below are even being the foot soldiers for gangs from other countries and British gangsters and so on. So like they've been able to just wholesale take over entire parts of like the logistics and they've got the home turf, which is just like pumping out loads of heroin, cocaine, whatever from like the Middle East and Afghanistan and elsewhere. Yeah.

Anyway, this is a quote from Mick Gallagher, who's the head of the Met Police. That's London's police force. It's an organized crime group. Quote, they're very well organized and like to operate under the radar so they don't bring themselves to attention. There's not a lot of violence associated with their activity, certainly not on the surface. Except for the ones who make rap videos with songs like I do. I do lots of crimes. And probably like the 700 odd guys that are in prison as well. I don't think they're going under the radar. Yeah, no.

So there's this other London newspaper called the Evening Standard and a quote Albanian source, which is pretty funny because it could just be anyone with a J at the end of their name. They say, quote, Albanian organized crime has built up extensive networks in Europe, especially in Spain, the Netherlands, Italy and Belgium. They saw the opportunity in the UK and only expanded there because of the huge market for cocaine.

This quote continues,

And there's no sign these guys are slowing down either. And Bari, right, the old man of Albanian violent crime, he's even successful in a recent appeal against his life sentence for like a million murders or whatever it was. So, yeah, expect a lot more headlines from the Albanian mafia in the coming years. I mean, based on the response our first episode about the Albanian mob in the Bronx got, I imagine they have a lot of fans, too. And people are super interested in this stuff. So maybe maybe we'll do another episode soon on some of the other guys.

Yeah, it's like it's so wrapped up in the history of the country. It's really fascinating to look into. And we've got like tons of stuff up on the reading list, which we stick on the Patreon guys. So get involved there. And yeah, we've got that reading list, too. We'll be putting a few books on there. Yeah. Patreon.com. So that's the Underworld podcast on our website. Underworldpod.com. We're going to have if you click one of the tabs, there should be one that says reading list there. We can find all the books there.

And yeah, if you gamble mybookie.com, use our promo word, our promo code, UnderworldPod, and help us out a bit. But thanks again for tuning in. Sorry we were off for a bit. We've got a bunch more new episodes coming up.