Who is the albanian mafia

Guida per abilitare Javascript sul tuo browser. Friday Nov. Search form Search. Sign in Register. But over time, as they branched out from organized crime within Albania to organized crime abroad, they were forced to forge new ties with criminals in other countries. Initially, these were with neighbors like Greece, Macedonia and Kosovo, then with Italian organized crime groups like Sacra Corona Unita and the Sicilian mafia, and then with heroin traffickers in Turkey. And the traits linking them all was this honor that bound them— and the level of violence they were willing to inflict, used both to control their victims and to intimidate police and judges.

They found that drug trafficking accounted for 42 percent of cases, weapons trafficking 18 percent, human trafficking 17 percent, smuggling of migrants 9 percent and extortion 8 percent. Arben says that today, human and weapons trafficking and prostitution are a small part of Albanian organized crime.

We have gotten it directly from Latin America for many years already, and the Albanians communicate directly with the producers in those countries. Albanians began arriving in New York in large numbers in the s, settling in an Italian neighborhood in the Bronx.

According to the United Nations, today there are about 1. Albanian organized crime groups are global players in drug trafficking, arms, cybercrime and money laundering. It was named after Alex Rudaj, who immigrated to the US in the s and started the organization in the early s, had ties to the Gambinos, and was sentenced to 27 years in prison on racketeering and other charges in For years, it said, there was a separation in the cocaine trade between importers, wholesalers and the gangs who distributed it on the street.

They began negotiating directly with the Colombian cartels who control coca production. Huge shipments were arranged direct from South America. Supply chains were kept in-house. He later turned against the powerful Italian-American crime organization when he says they betrayed him.

Think of it like a soccer team: if you have a field of players, why do you need 20 other guys who suck on the bench? You just need two or three decent reserve players and you have a hell of a team. Albanian gangsters, he says, are making massive amounts of money both illegally and legally.

And your blood runs true when you can stand with the handful, rather than majority. They shot him six times with a rifle, according to El Universo. The fall of Albanian communism in the early s, just like that of its Soviet counterpart, l ed to two important developments: the renewed role of cross-border trade and the dramatic empowerment of organized crime.

The first Albanian nationals to become involved in drug trafficking came through Colombia about two decades ago. At the time, however, Italian mafia groups, particularly the Calabria-based 'Ndrangheta, were already establishing control of trans-Atlantic cocaine trafficking, leaving the Albanians to act as isolated intermediaries.

Ecuador soon emerged as an attractive location for the Albanians and other European syndicates. It had porous borders, weak police and judicial institutions, and a dollarized cash-based economy, which provided easy money laundering opportunities.

It also had a number of Pacific ports from which to smuggle drugs aboard ships bound for Europe. Tresa first appeared in Ecuador around Albanian investigative journalist Artan Hoxha told news website City News Albania that Tresa was from the village of Baldushk, on the outskirts of the capital of Tirana.

While Tresa ha d no criminal record in Albania, he had been convicted in Britain: a European Union report on visa regulations with Albania mentions the undated arrest of an Albania n criminal leader named Adriatik Tresa and the seizure of property he had purchased.

Once in Ecuador, Tresa established himself as the owner of a woodworking shop and pharmacy, according to Albanian press reports. He also settled into a lux ury complex in Daule, just outside the port city of Guayaquil. Tresa first appeared on the radar of authorities in Ecuador when he was arrested and named in connection with the murder of journalist Fausto Guido Valdiviezo Moscoso.

The NCA has also confirmed that the engagement of these gangs in human trafficking is particularly worrying and that it involves mostly victims from Albania or neighbouring countries, usually lured into travelling to the UK with false promises of jobs. While there is no evidence to suggest that the groups involved in the drug trade, especially cocaine, are the same groups involved in human trafficking, the authorities do not hesitate to talk about Albanian criminal groups as poly-crime networks , committing a range of serious offences.

Without dismissing the plight of the victims of human trafficking or intelligence agency analysis of the drugs trade, what we are witnessing here is another example of how a myth is created, constructed and then perpetuated. The mafia myth is often linked to better-known organised crime groups, such as the Italian , Russian and Japanese mafia. Crucially, the organisations seemingly are built on shared traditions, norms, values and rituals rooted in the common ethnicity of the individuals within them.

And so while organised crime is mostly a market or activity-based phenomenon engaged in drug trafficking or people smuggling, for example , when we read about mafias it is often, if not always, with reference to ethnicity : the Italians, the Russians, the Chinese, the Japanese, the Turkish — and, currently, the Albanians. The mafia label is often applied to tight ethnic groups that have an honour-based culture and are particularly attached to family structures, such as the Albanian Kanun.