If you've bought cocaine in Europe any time in the last five years,
chances are it’s passed through an Albanian organized crime group.
My job in London is to move kilograms of cocaine.
We can move up to 50 kilos per week.
I got shot here.
Plenty of times.
I’m alive.
Plenty of my friends - they’re dead.
Over the past decade,
Albanian crime groups have overtaken all rivals
to become some of the most crucial players in global drug trafficking.
This is how criminal networks from a tiny European country
have revolutionized the international cocaine business.
[THE WAR ON DRUGS SHOW]
[THE ALBANIAN MAFIA]
Europeans love coke.
In fact, in 2021, reports emerged that the European cocaine market
had surpassed the US in value for the first time ever.
Stoners are stoners,
psychonauts are psychonauts,
everybody fucking takes ching, mate.
Used to be a rich man’s drug, and now it’s everybody.
This decade-long explosion in European coke habits
has largely been supplied by a relatively new type of trafficker:
the highly successful organized crime groups
drawn from Albanian communities all over the continent.
Got dragged into it by some Albanians.
That’s how I got into it at first, really.
There’s always Albanian gangs about.
It’s a 24/7 service.
You call them up any time of the day, they’ll come drop you.
Just give them the address.
It’s like McDonald’s, but for drugs.
Albania is a small country with a population of under 3 million.
For decades, it was ruled by
a brutal authoritarian communist regime,
which is actually part of the reason it’s now become so prominent
in international organized crime.
We’re tending to see that many of the former communist security sectors
were made redundant by the state.
So they either tended to go into
these more informal organizations and networks
or they went into private security provision,
which then very easily also become transposed into illicit activities
and informal activities.
Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s,
Albania suffered a series of wars and financial crises,
which not only flooded the country with weapons
but caused thousands of refugees to flee to the rest of Europe
and North America.
Many of these were youngsters.
They had family connections back in Albania,
which they’d maintained.
And recognizing that it was important for them to
maintain those family connections
in order to grow as a criminal organization.
Albanian criminal groups have been
heavily involved in drug trafficking for decades,
largely working with Turkish networks
supplying heroin on the route from Afghanistan into Europe.
Then in the 1990s,
Albania exploded as a hub for European cannabis production.
Over the years, this once poor, desolate village
became a European marijuana bazaar.
Absolute mountains of the stuff.
Traffickers dealt directly with farmers.
Bigger farmers became bigger players.
Organized crime moved in.
But what’s really set the Albanian organized crime groups apart is how,
since around the mid-2000s,
they’ve revolutionized the cocaine trade.
We’ve had this alliance with the Albanians.
They are the biggest drug exporters.
Traditionally, the different parts of the cocaine business
were kept separate.
South American cartels would sell to international traffickers,
who would smuggle the drug around the world
but would usually sell it on to local criminal groups
to distribute on the streets.
The Albanians took control of the entire chain.
They went out to South America,
formed their own contacts with the cartels,
and organized transportation back to their own suppliers in Europe,
who would distribute the drugs for maximum profit.
So are there Albanian criminal members in Colombia
who the clan deals with?
Yeah, of course there are Albanians here in Colombia.
They usually send people to verify that the quality of the drugs is really pure.
The Albanians are known for being very aggressive, okay?
And if someone goes onto their territory,
they’ll destroy everything that crosses their path.
They don’t care about wiping out a whole family.
The Albanian supply model has been so successful.
And the only way that they would make more money
was if they were able to go to the source of the drug.
So instead of purchasing these drugs from other drug dealers,
they decided their next move,
and let’s gain those connections with South America
and then ship these drugs in.
They completely took over the whole drug trade
in terms of cocaine.
There have been a series of high-profile killings
and arrests of Albanian traffickers
stretching from Ecuador to New York to the Netherlands.
Albanians now make up by far the largest percentage
of foreign-born inmates in British prisons.
And the EU Crime Agency’s biggest ever operation
was specifically targeted at
the Albanian organized crime group Kompania Bello.
Inevitably, this has led to some myths and misconceptions
about how these groups operate.
The first is that there’s some kind of
single, shadowy organization operating as the Albanian mafia.
The reality is that rather than being
these very hierarchically organized, tightly disciplined structures
that we saw, for example, with the Italian mafia organization,
what we have instead is more regional-based,
plan-based, family-based networks.
The other great myth about the Albanian organized crime groups
is that they are uniquely violent and brutal.
If you cross them, they’re gonna use violence.
Kidnapping,
taken away not to be returned again.
They’ll just... make you disappear.
There’s no doubt that Albanian drug traffickers
use extreme violence.
But every drug trafficking organization uses violence.
In an illegal marketplace,
this is pretty much the only way to enforce contracts
and intimidate rivals.
But the idea that Albanian criminal groups are uniquely violent
in ways that other traffickers aren’t
really just feeds into familiar cycles of misinformation
that go back decades in the war on drugs.
The way that the operations of these groups is presented
is that the success, as it were,
of specific trafficking organizations or criminal groups
is determined by their proclivity to violence.
In the case of the Albanians, what we're seeing is,
instead of this ability for violence,
it's more the capacity for entrepreneurship,
a willingness of mobility, a capacity to move around globally.
Of course, some Albanian criminals
are often happy for people to think they are ultra-violent killers,
which can lead to groups like the Hellbanianz in the UK,
who literally advertise their trigger-happy, narco-bling lifestyles
in music videos.
But the real power in Albanian drug trafficking
isn’t held by street-level gangs like the Hellbanianz
but by sophisticated, tightly controlled trade networks
that stretch over continents.
Because, in reality, the Albanian traffickers haven’t achieved power
primarily through starting wars with other criminal groups
but through forming business relationships with them.
God bless Albania.
We keep a good relationship Otherwise...
There’s no coke.
It goes from Colombia with the big boats.
Sometimes it comes to Albania.
From here, we go Montenegro, Serbia, Bosnia.
When the Albanian crime groups do inflict violence,
it’s very often to maintain internal discipline
rather than fighting other groups over territory.
This is helped by the fact that wherever in the world they operate,
their workers can be controlled through threats of violence
against their families back in Albania.
For example, if I get caught by the police, someone will come to replace me.
It’s very simple.
Because you have a family back home, normally you will do what they say.
It’s better for me to go to prison than for my family to get buried underground.
And of course, as so often in the war on drugs,
the ability to buy and sell politicians and cops
is as important as the ability to buy and sell cocaine or heroin.
What most empowers the Albanian organized crime groups
is that they’re deeply woven into the country’s ruling class.
Former minister of the interior Saimir Tahiri
received a three-year sentence for abuse of power.
The court found he had inexplicable links to a distant cousin
convicted of trafficking 3.8 tons of drugs to Italy.
I think what’s problematic for Albania
is that they’ve actually tried very, very hard
to be a good and compliant partner
because EU membership, accession to the EU,
has been the real push for successive Albanian governments.
Illegal drug trafficking is ultimately just a business,
and the Albanian organized crime groups have taken over the industry
not by being sociopathic monsters
but simply by being more efficient
and innovative business people than anyone else.
And by killing a fair few people along the way.
Who do you buy it from?
I have an Albanian friend that I go to.
-Albanian? -Yes.
What’s different about him compared to other dealers?
Ooh, so much more efficient.
And as long as these drugs remain illegal,
it is these types of business people who will continue to thrive
and make billions.
We’d like to congratulate drugs for winning the war on drugs.