[ La infame aggressione della NATO contro la RF di Jugoslavia e la
conseguente occupazione neocoloniale sul territorio del Kosovo-Metohija
hanno avuto perlomeno una conseguenza incontestabile: il rafforzamento
della mafia albanese, e dei traffici che essa gestisce a livello non
solo locale, ma internazionale: droga, armi, esseri umani. Quella
aggressione e quella occupazione militare, infatti, sono state
realizzate in stretta collaborazione con (ma potremmo piuttosto dire:
per conto di) la criminalita' organizzata attorno alla struttura armata
dei secessionisti grande-albanesi, cioe' l'UCK. Nel suo libro "La
televisione va alla guerra" (Sperling&Kupfer / ERI Rai, 2002), Ennio
Remondino racconta come nei bagagli dei membri della delegazione UCK a
Rambouillet la Sûreté francese trovo' "una grossa quantita' di polvere
bianca, sigillata in sacchetti di plastica, che non era farina o
borotalco" (pp. 175-177; vedi anche JUGOINFO di Mer 19 Mag 2004). In
una Italia in cui Giustizia non fosse solo una parola vuota, Massimo
D'Alema ed i suoi ministri di allora dovrebbero rendere conto anche di
questo ... (Italo Slavo) ]
http://www.serbianna.com/columns/mb/028.shtml
(look at the original URL for the many useful hyperlinks and impressive
photos)
The New Islamic Mafia
By M. Bozinovich
03 October, 2004
FBI has recently announced that ethnic Albanian gangs, including
immigrants from Kosovo, are replacing the Italian La Cosa Nostra mafia
as the leading organized crime outfit in the US. According to a CNN
report the FBI "Officials said ethnic Albanians from Kosovo, Macedonia
and Montenegro" make up the emerging American criminal cartel and
"represent a major challenge to federal agents because of their
propensity for violence and brutality." This statement comes several
months after Amnesty International declared NATO-administered Kosovo
province a hotbed of organized crime activity.
In Europe, the Albanian Mob is already the chief perpetrator of drug
and people smuggling, passport theft and forgery, weapons and human
body parts sales, sex-slavery, abductions, murders... The scope,
ferocity and intensity of the Albanian criminal activity has prompted
the Italian top prosecutor, Cataldo Motta, to declare Albanians most
dangerous mobsters brandishing them in 2000 "a threat to Western
society."
While the skimpiness of the FBI statement may be a subtle illustration
of its lack of hard operational intelligence on the emerging Albanian
criminal network in the US, the displacement of La Cosa Nostra by
ethnic Albanians may be a seminole event in the American criminal
underworld history for yet another reason: a predominantly Catholic
Mafia is being replaced by a predominantly Muslim Albanian Fis.
Although no hard links with terrorists have been found yet, the FBI
believes that the emerging Muslim Albanian Mafia in the US may be
implicated in terrorist financing hence FBIs continuing surveillance
"to see whether the militant Muslims in the emerging organized crime
world demonstrate ties to organizations suspected of involvement in
terrorist financing".
[ PHOTO: Albanian teenager Valentina Bicaku vanished from her home in
Albania. More than 30,000 Albanian girls and young women are kidnapped
and auctioned off into a world of prostitution in Europe. ]
Evolution of the Criminal Network
During the 1970s Albanian expatriates in the US were actively recruited
as couriers, transporters or assassins for the Italian Mafia. The
efficiency and brutality with which these members conducted these
criminal affairs got them to advance within the Mafia network, so much
so, that by 1996 the main assassins for the Gambino crime family were
ethnic Albanians. Gambino's Sammy Bull Brovano's go-to "clipper", for
example, was an ethnic Albanian, Zef Mustafa, whose notoriety for
murder and racket was exceeded only by his love of alcohol: drunk from
dawn, in a 1996-02 span this Albanian organized a $19 million internet
heist, was let out on a $5 million bond and has since disappeared from
the US.
A 1996 murder of a waiter, Jonathon Segal, and a bouncer, Michael
Greco, in New York's Scores restaurant illustrates the indifference and
haste with which Albanian assassins kill: two ethnic Albanians employed
as Gambino family assassins opened fire on the waiter and bouncer after
instigating an argument over quality of service they got in the
restaurant.
While employment with Italian Mafia gave these ethnic Albanians
valuable experience in the art of a criminal heist, 1980s was also a
decade of clandestine criminal initiatives that are to lead into bigger
and more spectacular ones later. In 1985, for example, a now-famous
Rudolph Guiliani led a persecution team of the Balkan Connection - an
ethnic Albanian criminal outfit involved in trafficking heroin from
Afghanistan and Turkey, via Kosovo into US. Caught with at least $125
million in heroin, members of this Albanian smuggling outfit issued a
$400,000 contract on the prosecutor Alan Cohen and the detective Jack
Delemore, both placed under protective custody as the result.
[ PHOTO: Ismail Lika, pictured on the right with long sleeves, in
Florida jail posing with convicted ethnic Serb, Nikola Kavaja. Dubbed
the king of the New York drug underworld, Ismail Lika issued a contract
on Guiliani's prosecutors in 1985. Kavaja was serving a sentence for
attempted assassination of Yugoslav communist dictator Tito. ]
Even fellow mobsters are afraid to do business with the Albanian gangs.
Speaking anonymously for Philadelphia's City Paper a member of the
"Kielbasa Posse", an ethnic Polish mob group, declared in 2002 that
Poles are willing to do business with "just about anybody. Dominicans.
Blacks. Italians. Asian street gangs. Russians. But they won't go near
the Albanian mob. The Albanians are too violent and too unpredictable."
While FBI concurs with the brutality assessment, the difficulty in
obtaining operational intelligence on the Albanian mafia, and any
convictions, may be multifold. Dusan Janjic, Coordinator of the Forum
for Ethnic Relations in Serbia, cites three reasons for the success of
the Albanian criminal gangs: "Firstly they speak a language that few
people [sic] understand. Secondly, its internal organization is based
on family ties, breeding solidarity and safety. Thirdly there is the
code of silence and it is perfectly normal for somebody to die if he
violates the code."
Culture of Violence
According to the Institute of War and Peace Reporting, "Honour killings
are deeply rooted in Albanian society and were given formal recognition
in the collection of medieval tribal laws known as the 'Canon of Lekë
Dukagjini'" and still remains the organizing structure of the Albanian
society. "...blood feuds were relatively rare among Albanians either in
Kosovo or Albania. But after the turmoil of the 1990s, the ideas
contained in Leke’s canon revived," writes Fatos Bytyci.
The fundamental rule of Canon law of Albanian clansman organization is
Bessa - a concept that simultaneously converges loyalty, fidelity,
dignity and honor of one's word. Although restrictive, the concept is
such a prevalent force in the Albanian culture so that it got enshrined
in many of Albanian folksongs:
"death happens because you betrayed a host,
when bread is missing to serve the host,
death happens for the faith renounced."
Gjakmarria or taking of the blood is the vendetta killing done in order
to restore the violated honor.
Loyalty to the family clan (fis) and vendettas appear to be mutually
affectionate features of both the Italian and Albanian gangsters. Much
like Sicilian social emphasis on family loyalty, writes the Italy's
anti-mafia agency DIA, these mutually alike features are outgrowth of a
general social construct and not necessarily criminal. "Albanian mafia
is based on family groups... The division among clans or family groups
in Albania was originally a social division, not a criminal one. Today,
every activity in Albania still works in that way."
In the field of politics, however, the fear of the Canon's consequences
is plunging Albania, an increasingly Kosovo, into a seismic convulsion
of lawlessness.
Albanian Parliament in Tirana has recently addressed the close
connection between the criminal and political. According to the
Albanian Daily News, in July of 2004, the Albanian government has
adopted a package of anti-mafia legislation and among the provisions is
a prohibition of officials convicted of corruption from holding public
office for a specified period of time.
However, according to an Albanian writer Faruk Myrtaj: "Not a single
trial of a criminal gang has successfully been completed in Albania.
According to the data of the Albanian Centre for Studying Organized
Crime and Mafia in Tirana, trials of groups linked to politics are
usually held behind closed doors by decision of the courts, and the
judges usually resign and emigrate from the country", presumably out of
fear of being killed acording to the Canon law that grips the Albanian
society.
So much for Albania's efforts to curb organized crime.
[ PHOTO: Dangerous Hybrid - Kosovo Albanian Dobrosi was serving 14 year
sentence in Norway and in 1997 bribed the guard with 150,000 Norwegian
crowns, fled to Croatia, where he underwent plastic surgery to change
his appearance, then moved to Prague where, according to the Czech
daily Lidove Noviny met the President of Kosovo, Ibrahim Rugova, during
his visit of Prague in December 1998. In 1999 Czech Police arrested
Dobrosi, along with another Kosovo Albanian gangster for drug
trafficking and trafficking with light-infantry weapons and rocket
systems. ]
Political-Criminal Hybrid
According to research by a leading criminologist in France, Xavier
Raufer, "In the Albanian world - in Albania and in Kosovo and in the
Albanian-populated part of Macedonia - you have clans and in those
clans you have a mix of young men fighting for the cause of national
liberation, young men belonging to the mafia, young men driving their
cousins or other girls from the village into prostitution. It's
absolutely impossible to distinguish between them.... The guys are
liberation fighters by day and sell heroin by night or vice versa".
The political-criminal hybrid structure based on the frightening Canon
structures of clan membership is defining the Albanian political
landscape in the Balkans as well.
For example, the leader of the Albanians in Macedonia, Ali Ahmeti, is a
nephew of Fazli Veliu, former chief of an Albanian language newspaper
in Kosovo and a cofounder of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). Both are
from the same village near Kicevo, Macedonia, and both belong to the
Zajas clan. Before leading a military insurgency in Macedonia, Ahmeti
was employed as a KLA operative out of Switzerland, from where he was
moved to Macedonia when times were ripe to lead the Albanian violence
there.
[ PHOTO: Albright giving a friendly hug to the KLA leader Hasim Taci ]
In turn, Veliu is close to the Albanian Jashari clan from Kosovo, known
to be the first to start the armed uprising against Milosevic's
repression. Main victims in the disputed Racak massacre were members
from the Jashari clan as is Hasim Taci, a youthful political spokesman
for an Albanian para-military (KLA) group with suspicious criminal
biography yet befriended by Clinton's foreign policy team, most notably
Madeline Albright, Richard Holbrooke and Wesley Clark.
Many, including the U.S. Senate Republican Policy Committee in 1999,
have accentuated widespread allegations of KLAs criminal connections.
Citing that a "major portion of the KLA finances are derived from
[criminal] network, mainly proceeds from drug trafficking" the report
goes on to say that Clinton's befriending of the shady Albanian
political men is "consistent Clinton policy of cultivating
relationships with groups known for terrorist violence... in what may
be a strategy of attempting to wean away a group from its penchant for
violence by adopting its cause as an element of U.S. policy."
[ PHOTO: Unofficial taxation of Albanians - Allegations are made that
the Albanian Mafia in America is acting as a collection arm for the war
aims of the Albanian political groups. Christian Science Monitor, for
example, cited a case of Agim Jusufi, a building superintendent on
Manhattan's West Side. Mr. Jusufi gets a weekly paycheck. He describes
himself as an ordinary 'working man.'" yet he wrote a $5,000 check for
the KLA. "We have canceled checks to prove it,' he told the Monitor. ]
While the Republican Report cites New York Times' version of the
origins of the KLA to be a "radical fringe of Kosovar Albanian
politics, originally made up of diehard Marxist" the clan structure
indicates that this may be a deliberate fabrication. Claims are made
that 15 leading family clans in Albania (15 fis) have been controlling
a clandestine smuggling operations even during the dark communist days
of dictator Enver Hoxa. When Albania got rid of the communist, these
fis increased their criminal control of Albania and, during the
collapse of the Albanian state into anarchy in 1997, the 15 fis
established complete control over the criminal activity in Albania
including arms smuggling. Motivated by fear of inter-fis blood feuds
over a limited Balkan criminal turf, the 15 fis allegedly made a deal
to make a common para-military enforcement unit, the KLA, in order to
incite violence in Kosovo with dual objectives, to make money financing
the war as well as conquer Albanian-inhabited areas of the Balkans.
The most prominent criminal out of the 15 fis is Daut Kadriovski, a
drug kingpin that managed to escape German prison in 1993, and is
believed to be in the US where sources say he is operating through
several types of businesses in New York and Philadelphia.
[ PHOTO: Daut Kadriovski ]
Albanian Mafia and al-Qaeda?
Allegations of an al-Qaeda presence in Albanian inhabited areas have
also been made. For example, 24 Wahabi mosques and 14 orphanages have
been built in Kosovo since 1999, along with 98 primary and secondary
Wahabi funded schools. The chief Albanian Imam in Kosovo has been
schooled in the Wahabi doctrine in Saudi Arabia and is of vital
political importance to the party of the Kosovo President Ibrahim
Rugova.
Wahabism is the chief spiritual source of the al-Qaeda terrorists.
More distressing for the West is the existing Albanian criminal
infrastructure that has been exported out of Kosovo into Europe, and
given clan connections, may infiltrate the US.
In Brussells, for example, two Islamic city quarters - one specializing
in terrorism and the other in false and stolen passports - complement
one another. In the terrorist part is the Dar Salaam hotel where the
accused "shoe bomber" Richard Reid stayed in for 10 days plotting to
blow up American Airlines jet, while just across from the hotel is a
shadowy Brussels strip of bars and hotels controlled by the Albanian
mob specializing in stolen passports. According to the Global Policy,
the quarter is a hotbed for "human trafficking, sex trafficking and
false documents."
Although Richard Reed did not carry any of the Albanian doctored false
passports, the al-Qaeda assassins of the Ahmed Shah Massoud did. The
killers of the leader of Afghan's Northern Alliance traveled from
London to Karachi using these Albanian doctored false passports before
they murdered him.
More ominously still, an al-Qaeda operative, Djamel Beghala, was
arrested in Dubai after the customs agent recognized one of these
Albanian mafia's manufactured false passports. Under interrogation,
Beghala identified a major European al-Qaeda cell that was planning to
blow up the United States Embassy in Paris.
Recently, FBI conducted a statistical study on effectiveness of false
passports and concluded that at least 10% of the falsified passports
have effectively been used to enter the US. Given that 30 million
people enter US, Albanian Mafia's monopoly on false documentation may
indeed justify FBIs continuing surveillance of the emerging Albanian
criminal cartel.
Entrance-level job for al-Qaeda
-Before becoming kingpins of the American underworld, many ethnic
Albanian mobsters got their organized crime initiation as couriers for
the Italian Mafia. Fox News analyst, Manossor Ijaz, claims that ethnic
Albanians now hold an entry-level courier position for al-Qaeda as well:
[ PHOTO: "... President Bush said in October of last year when he
identified a senior al Qaeda leader [Abu Masab al-Zawkawi] who had gone
to Iraq, received medical treatment to have a leg amputated that was
blown up in the Afghan bombing campaign and then proceeded to a
northern Iraqi terrorist outfit. What we have not yet heard and this is
what my sources are telling me over the past two or three days, is that
that leader was in fact, transported through southern Turkey using
Albanian mercenaries to transport him into..." ]
The New Islamic Mafia
Yossef Bodansky, director of the House Task Force on Terrorism and
Unconventional Warfare, believes that Albanian Mob itself will not
commit acts of terrorism but that their criminal infrastructure will
aid al-Qaeda. "The role of the Albanian Mafia, which is tightly
connected to the KLA, is laundering money, providing technology, safe
houses, and other support to terrorists within this country," Bodansky
explained to The New American. "This isn’t to say that the Albanians
themselves would carry out the actual terrorist operations. But there
are undoubtedly ‘sleeper’ agents within the Albanian networks, and they
can rely upon those networks to provide them with support. In any case,
a serious investigation of the Albanian mob isn’t going to happen,
because they’re ‘our boys’ - they’re protected."
In fact, in 2002 the government of Macedonia submitted to the CIA a
79-page report on al-Qaeda-Albanian activity in the Balkans, including
an al-Qaeda recruitment video aimed at Albanian conscripts touting hate
for Christians, Jews, and the West. The video was hosted by an ethnic
Turk, Ramzi Adem, who was demonstrating Balkan activities of an elite
120-man foreign fighters unit led by Selimi Ferit, an Albanian born in
the Macedonian capital of Skopje.
Perhaps out of tactical, short-term reasons, the Bush administration
duly ignored this report. Yet one ought to be mindful that it may be
for the tactical advantages, to the terrorists, to present all of these
criminal machinations as a haphazard event.
The seeming disconnect in the activities of terrorists is the
insidiousness for which they are known.
conseguente occupazione neocoloniale sul territorio del Kosovo-Metohija
hanno avuto perlomeno una conseguenza incontestabile: il rafforzamento
della mafia albanese, e dei traffici che essa gestisce a livello non
solo locale, ma internazionale: droga, armi, esseri umani. Quella
aggressione e quella occupazione militare, infatti, sono state
realizzate in stretta collaborazione con (ma potremmo piuttosto dire:
per conto di) la criminalita' organizzata attorno alla struttura armata
dei secessionisti grande-albanesi, cioe' l'UCK. Nel suo libro "La
televisione va alla guerra" (Sperling&Kupfer / ERI Rai, 2002), Ennio
Remondino racconta come nei bagagli dei membri della delegazione UCK a
Rambouillet la Sûreté francese trovo' "una grossa quantita' di polvere
bianca, sigillata in sacchetti di plastica, che non era farina o
borotalco" (pp. 175-177; vedi anche JUGOINFO di Mer 19 Mag 2004). In
una Italia in cui Giustizia non fosse solo una parola vuota, Massimo
D'Alema ed i suoi ministri di allora dovrebbero rendere conto anche di
questo ... (Italo Slavo) ]
http://www.serbianna.com/columns/mb/028.shtml
(look at the original URL for the many useful hyperlinks and impressive
photos)
The New Islamic Mafia
By M. Bozinovich
03 October, 2004
FBI has recently announced that ethnic Albanian gangs, including
immigrants from Kosovo, are replacing the Italian La Cosa Nostra mafia
as the leading organized crime outfit in the US. According to a CNN
report the FBI "Officials said ethnic Albanians from Kosovo, Macedonia
and Montenegro" make up the emerging American criminal cartel and
"represent a major challenge to federal agents because of their
propensity for violence and brutality." This statement comes several
months after Amnesty International declared NATO-administered Kosovo
province a hotbed of organized crime activity.
In Europe, the Albanian Mob is already the chief perpetrator of drug
and people smuggling, passport theft and forgery, weapons and human
body parts sales, sex-slavery, abductions, murders... The scope,
ferocity and intensity of the Albanian criminal activity has prompted
the Italian top prosecutor, Cataldo Motta, to declare Albanians most
dangerous mobsters brandishing them in 2000 "a threat to Western
society."
While the skimpiness of the FBI statement may be a subtle illustration
of its lack of hard operational intelligence on the emerging Albanian
criminal network in the US, the displacement of La Cosa Nostra by
ethnic Albanians may be a seminole event in the American criminal
underworld history for yet another reason: a predominantly Catholic
Mafia is being replaced by a predominantly Muslim Albanian Fis.
Although no hard links with terrorists have been found yet, the FBI
believes that the emerging Muslim Albanian Mafia in the US may be
implicated in terrorist financing hence FBIs continuing surveillance
"to see whether the militant Muslims in the emerging organized crime
world demonstrate ties to organizations suspected of involvement in
terrorist financing".
[ PHOTO: Albanian teenager Valentina Bicaku vanished from her home in
Albania. More than 30,000 Albanian girls and young women are kidnapped
and auctioned off into a world of prostitution in Europe. ]
Evolution of the Criminal Network
During the 1970s Albanian expatriates in the US were actively recruited
as couriers, transporters or assassins for the Italian Mafia. The
efficiency and brutality with which these members conducted these
criminal affairs got them to advance within the Mafia network, so much
so, that by 1996 the main assassins for the Gambino crime family were
ethnic Albanians. Gambino's Sammy Bull Brovano's go-to "clipper", for
example, was an ethnic Albanian, Zef Mustafa, whose notoriety for
murder and racket was exceeded only by his love of alcohol: drunk from
dawn, in a 1996-02 span this Albanian organized a $19 million internet
heist, was let out on a $5 million bond and has since disappeared from
the US.
A 1996 murder of a waiter, Jonathon Segal, and a bouncer, Michael
Greco, in New York's Scores restaurant illustrates the indifference and
haste with which Albanian assassins kill: two ethnic Albanians employed
as Gambino family assassins opened fire on the waiter and bouncer after
instigating an argument over quality of service they got in the
restaurant.
While employment with Italian Mafia gave these ethnic Albanians
valuable experience in the art of a criminal heist, 1980s was also a
decade of clandestine criminal initiatives that are to lead into bigger
and more spectacular ones later. In 1985, for example, a now-famous
Rudolph Guiliani led a persecution team of the Balkan Connection - an
ethnic Albanian criminal outfit involved in trafficking heroin from
Afghanistan and Turkey, via Kosovo into US. Caught with at least $125
million in heroin, members of this Albanian smuggling outfit issued a
$400,000 contract on the prosecutor Alan Cohen and the detective Jack
Delemore, both placed under protective custody as the result.
[ PHOTO: Ismail Lika, pictured on the right with long sleeves, in
Florida jail posing with convicted ethnic Serb, Nikola Kavaja. Dubbed
the king of the New York drug underworld, Ismail Lika issued a contract
on Guiliani's prosecutors in 1985. Kavaja was serving a sentence for
attempted assassination of Yugoslav communist dictator Tito. ]
Even fellow mobsters are afraid to do business with the Albanian gangs.
Speaking anonymously for Philadelphia's City Paper a member of the
"Kielbasa Posse", an ethnic Polish mob group, declared in 2002 that
Poles are willing to do business with "just about anybody. Dominicans.
Blacks. Italians. Asian street gangs. Russians. But they won't go near
the Albanian mob. The Albanians are too violent and too unpredictable."
While FBI concurs with the brutality assessment, the difficulty in
obtaining operational intelligence on the Albanian mafia, and any
convictions, may be multifold. Dusan Janjic, Coordinator of the Forum
for Ethnic Relations in Serbia, cites three reasons for the success of
the Albanian criminal gangs: "Firstly they speak a language that few
people [sic] understand. Secondly, its internal organization is based
on family ties, breeding solidarity and safety. Thirdly there is the
code of silence and it is perfectly normal for somebody to die if he
violates the code."
Culture of Violence
According to the Institute of War and Peace Reporting, "Honour killings
are deeply rooted in Albanian society and were given formal recognition
in the collection of medieval tribal laws known as the 'Canon of Lekë
Dukagjini'" and still remains the organizing structure of the Albanian
society. "...blood feuds were relatively rare among Albanians either in
Kosovo or Albania. But after the turmoil of the 1990s, the ideas
contained in Leke’s canon revived," writes Fatos Bytyci.
The fundamental rule of Canon law of Albanian clansman organization is
Bessa - a concept that simultaneously converges loyalty, fidelity,
dignity and honor of one's word. Although restrictive, the concept is
such a prevalent force in the Albanian culture so that it got enshrined
in many of Albanian folksongs:
"death happens because you betrayed a host,
when bread is missing to serve the host,
death happens for the faith renounced."
Gjakmarria or taking of the blood is the vendetta killing done in order
to restore the violated honor.
Loyalty to the family clan (fis) and vendettas appear to be mutually
affectionate features of both the Italian and Albanian gangsters. Much
like Sicilian social emphasis on family loyalty, writes the Italy's
anti-mafia agency DIA, these mutually alike features are outgrowth of a
general social construct and not necessarily criminal. "Albanian mafia
is based on family groups... The division among clans or family groups
in Albania was originally a social division, not a criminal one. Today,
every activity in Albania still works in that way."
In the field of politics, however, the fear of the Canon's consequences
is plunging Albania, an increasingly Kosovo, into a seismic convulsion
of lawlessness.
Albanian Parliament in Tirana has recently addressed the close
connection between the criminal and political. According to the
Albanian Daily News, in July of 2004, the Albanian government has
adopted a package of anti-mafia legislation and among the provisions is
a prohibition of officials convicted of corruption from holding public
office for a specified period of time.
However, according to an Albanian writer Faruk Myrtaj: "Not a single
trial of a criminal gang has successfully been completed in Albania.
According to the data of the Albanian Centre for Studying Organized
Crime and Mafia in Tirana, trials of groups linked to politics are
usually held behind closed doors by decision of the courts, and the
judges usually resign and emigrate from the country", presumably out of
fear of being killed acording to the Canon law that grips the Albanian
society.
So much for Albania's efforts to curb organized crime.
[ PHOTO: Dangerous Hybrid - Kosovo Albanian Dobrosi was serving 14 year
sentence in Norway and in 1997 bribed the guard with 150,000 Norwegian
crowns, fled to Croatia, where he underwent plastic surgery to change
his appearance, then moved to Prague where, according to the Czech
daily Lidove Noviny met the President of Kosovo, Ibrahim Rugova, during
his visit of Prague in December 1998. In 1999 Czech Police arrested
Dobrosi, along with another Kosovo Albanian gangster for drug
trafficking and trafficking with light-infantry weapons and rocket
systems. ]
Political-Criminal Hybrid
According to research by a leading criminologist in France, Xavier
Raufer, "In the Albanian world - in Albania and in Kosovo and in the
Albanian-populated part of Macedonia - you have clans and in those
clans you have a mix of young men fighting for the cause of national
liberation, young men belonging to the mafia, young men driving their
cousins or other girls from the village into prostitution. It's
absolutely impossible to distinguish between them.... The guys are
liberation fighters by day and sell heroin by night or vice versa".
The political-criminal hybrid structure based on the frightening Canon
structures of clan membership is defining the Albanian political
landscape in the Balkans as well.
For example, the leader of the Albanians in Macedonia, Ali Ahmeti, is a
nephew of Fazli Veliu, former chief of an Albanian language newspaper
in Kosovo and a cofounder of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). Both are
from the same village near Kicevo, Macedonia, and both belong to the
Zajas clan. Before leading a military insurgency in Macedonia, Ahmeti
was employed as a KLA operative out of Switzerland, from where he was
moved to Macedonia when times were ripe to lead the Albanian violence
there.
[ PHOTO: Albright giving a friendly hug to the KLA leader Hasim Taci ]
In turn, Veliu is close to the Albanian Jashari clan from Kosovo, known
to be the first to start the armed uprising against Milosevic's
repression. Main victims in the disputed Racak massacre were members
from the Jashari clan as is Hasim Taci, a youthful political spokesman
for an Albanian para-military (KLA) group with suspicious criminal
biography yet befriended by Clinton's foreign policy team, most notably
Madeline Albright, Richard Holbrooke and Wesley Clark.
Many, including the U.S. Senate Republican Policy Committee in 1999,
have accentuated widespread allegations of KLAs criminal connections.
Citing that a "major portion of the KLA finances are derived from
[criminal] network, mainly proceeds from drug trafficking" the report
goes on to say that Clinton's befriending of the shady Albanian
political men is "consistent Clinton policy of cultivating
relationships with groups known for terrorist violence... in what may
be a strategy of attempting to wean away a group from its penchant for
violence by adopting its cause as an element of U.S. policy."
[ PHOTO: Unofficial taxation of Albanians - Allegations are made that
the Albanian Mafia in America is acting as a collection arm for the war
aims of the Albanian political groups. Christian Science Monitor, for
example, cited a case of Agim Jusufi, a building superintendent on
Manhattan's West Side. Mr. Jusufi gets a weekly paycheck. He describes
himself as an ordinary 'working man.'" yet he wrote a $5,000 check for
the KLA. "We have canceled checks to prove it,' he told the Monitor. ]
While the Republican Report cites New York Times' version of the
origins of the KLA to be a "radical fringe of Kosovar Albanian
politics, originally made up of diehard Marxist" the clan structure
indicates that this may be a deliberate fabrication. Claims are made
that 15 leading family clans in Albania (15 fis) have been controlling
a clandestine smuggling operations even during the dark communist days
of dictator Enver Hoxa. When Albania got rid of the communist, these
fis increased their criminal control of Albania and, during the
collapse of the Albanian state into anarchy in 1997, the 15 fis
established complete control over the criminal activity in Albania
including arms smuggling. Motivated by fear of inter-fis blood feuds
over a limited Balkan criminal turf, the 15 fis allegedly made a deal
to make a common para-military enforcement unit, the KLA, in order to
incite violence in Kosovo with dual objectives, to make money financing
the war as well as conquer Albanian-inhabited areas of the Balkans.
The most prominent criminal out of the 15 fis is Daut Kadriovski, a
drug kingpin that managed to escape German prison in 1993, and is
believed to be in the US where sources say he is operating through
several types of businesses in New York and Philadelphia.
[ PHOTO: Daut Kadriovski ]
Albanian Mafia and al-Qaeda?
Allegations of an al-Qaeda presence in Albanian inhabited areas have
also been made. For example, 24 Wahabi mosques and 14 orphanages have
been built in Kosovo since 1999, along with 98 primary and secondary
Wahabi funded schools. The chief Albanian Imam in Kosovo has been
schooled in the Wahabi doctrine in Saudi Arabia and is of vital
political importance to the party of the Kosovo President Ibrahim
Rugova.
Wahabism is the chief spiritual source of the al-Qaeda terrorists.
More distressing for the West is the existing Albanian criminal
infrastructure that has been exported out of Kosovo into Europe, and
given clan connections, may infiltrate the US.
In Brussells, for example, two Islamic city quarters - one specializing
in terrorism and the other in false and stolen passports - complement
one another. In the terrorist part is the Dar Salaam hotel where the
accused "shoe bomber" Richard Reid stayed in for 10 days plotting to
blow up American Airlines jet, while just across from the hotel is a
shadowy Brussels strip of bars and hotels controlled by the Albanian
mob specializing in stolen passports. According to the Global Policy,
the quarter is a hotbed for "human trafficking, sex trafficking and
false documents."
Although Richard Reed did not carry any of the Albanian doctored false
passports, the al-Qaeda assassins of the Ahmed Shah Massoud did. The
killers of the leader of Afghan's Northern Alliance traveled from
London to Karachi using these Albanian doctored false passports before
they murdered him.
More ominously still, an al-Qaeda operative, Djamel Beghala, was
arrested in Dubai after the customs agent recognized one of these
Albanian mafia's manufactured false passports. Under interrogation,
Beghala identified a major European al-Qaeda cell that was planning to
blow up the United States Embassy in Paris.
Recently, FBI conducted a statistical study on effectiveness of false
passports and concluded that at least 10% of the falsified passports
have effectively been used to enter the US. Given that 30 million
people enter US, Albanian Mafia's monopoly on false documentation may
indeed justify FBIs continuing surveillance of the emerging Albanian
criminal cartel.
Entrance-level job for al-Qaeda
-Before becoming kingpins of the American underworld, many ethnic
Albanian mobsters got their organized crime initiation as couriers for
the Italian Mafia. Fox News analyst, Manossor Ijaz, claims that ethnic
Albanians now hold an entry-level courier position for al-Qaeda as well:
[ PHOTO: "... President Bush said in October of last year when he
identified a senior al Qaeda leader [Abu Masab al-Zawkawi] who had gone
to Iraq, received medical treatment to have a leg amputated that was
blown up in the Afghan bombing campaign and then proceeded to a
northern Iraqi terrorist outfit. What we have not yet heard and this is
what my sources are telling me over the past two or three days, is that
that leader was in fact, transported through southern Turkey using
Albanian mercenaries to transport him into..." ]
The New Islamic Mafia
Yossef Bodansky, director of the House Task Force on Terrorism and
Unconventional Warfare, believes that Albanian Mob itself will not
commit acts of terrorism but that their criminal infrastructure will
aid al-Qaeda. "The role of the Albanian Mafia, which is tightly
connected to the KLA, is laundering money, providing technology, safe
houses, and other support to terrorists within this country," Bodansky
explained to The New American. "This isn’t to say that the Albanians
themselves would carry out the actual terrorist operations. But there
are undoubtedly ‘sleeper’ agents within the Albanian networks, and they
can rely upon those networks to provide them with support. In any case,
a serious investigation of the Albanian mob isn’t going to happen,
because they’re ‘our boys’ - they’re protected."
In fact, in 2002 the government of Macedonia submitted to the CIA a
79-page report on al-Qaeda-Albanian activity in the Balkans, including
an al-Qaeda recruitment video aimed at Albanian conscripts touting hate
for Christians, Jews, and the West. The video was hosted by an ethnic
Turk, Ramzi Adem, who was demonstrating Balkan activities of an elite
120-man foreign fighters unit led by Selimi Ferit, an Albanian born in
the Macedonian capital of Skopje.
Perhaps out of tactical, short-term reasons, the Bush administration
duly ignored this report. Yet one ought to be mindful that it may be
for the tactical advantages, to the terrorists, to present all of these
criminal machinations as a haphazard event.
The seeming disconnect in the activities of terrorists is the
insidiousness for which they are known.