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Date sent: Wed, 12 May 1999 14:46:13 -0700
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From: Sid Shniad <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: ALBANIANS TRY TO TAKE OVER KOSOVARS' CRIME NETWORK - S.F.
Chronicle
The San Francisco Chronicle Tuesday, May 11, 1999
ALBANIANS TRY TO TAKE OVER KOSOVARS' CRIME NETWORK
War leaves drug, arms traffic up for grabs
By Frank Viviano, Chronicle Staff Writer
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 solidation 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 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.
[PEN-L:6759] (Fwd) ALBANIANS TRY TO TAKE OVER KOSOVARS' CRIME NETWORK - S.F
ts99u-1.cc.umanitoba.ca [130.179.154.224] Thu, 13 May 1999 10:31:25 -0500
