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How Albanian drug lords and their knife-wielding goons are exploiting Europe's porous borders to unleash a murder spree on Britain's streets that's seen 67 slain in London alone this year
•Drug lord Klodjan Copja from Elbasan, Albania, looks like fat Leonardo DiCaprio
•He and his violent gang have imported an estimated £150m cocaine into the UK
•Provided drugs to crime groups in London, Birmingham, Leicester, Nottingham
•Copja was jailed for 17 years at Kingston Crown Court for serious drugs offences
•Albanian nationals have achieved a significant position in the UK’s underworld
By Richard Pendlebury In Albania For The Daily Mail
Published: 22:00 GMT, 25 May 2018 | Updated: 23:23 GMT, 25 May 2018
With its pale wood-faced pillars and walls, leather chairs and canvas sun canopies, the ‘Living’ bar restaurant would not look out of place in central London, or one of the more expensive Italian resorts.
But this is not Soho. We are looking out onto Qemal Stafa Boulevard in Elbasan, Albania, one of the most depressed and polluted towns in Europe.
It is utterly grimAlbanian drug lord Klodjan Copja, described as a fat Leonardo DiCaprio. Nine months ago, he was jailed for 17 years at Kingston Crown Court in Surrey for serious drugs offences Albanian drug lord Klodjan Copja, described as a fat Leonardo DiCaprio. Nine months ago, he was jailed for 17 years at Kingston Crown Court in Surrey for serious drugs offences
A vast metal works lies derelict on the outskirts, a relic from the era of isolationist Communist dictator Enver Hoxha, who ruled here from the end of the war until his death in 1985.
You can still taste the rust and waste oil in the air.
Who would have the resources, let alone the inclination, to build a place like Living in somewhere like Elbasan?
A sign on the wall next to the bathrooms displays The Beatles’ song title All You Need Is Love.
But on this particular street, it should really read ‘All You Need is UK Drug Money’. For this restaurant is the ‘legitimate’ business flagship of a local tycoon named Klodjan Copja.
For better or worse, everyone in Elbasan knows Mr Copja.
He looks like a fat Leonardo DiCaprio, and when home from London drives a red Ferrari along the pothole-pitted side streets. Or rather he did until recently.
Nine months ago, he was jailed for 17 years at Kingston Crown Court in Surrey for serious drugs offences.
It is estimated that he and his ultra-violent gang of fellow Albanians from Elbasan had imported as much as £150million of cocaine into the UK.
He turned 31 in jail this week.
Tristen Asllani, 29, a leading figure in another London-based Albanian drugs gang, poses in prison
+7 Tristen Asllani, 29, a leading figure in another London-based Albanian drugs gang, poses in prison
During the court case, it emerged that one of his couriers was watched by police as he made weekly trips to a lay-by in Maidstone, Kent, where he would meet a lorry carrying imported cocaine from the continent.
The courier would then supply the drug to organised crime groups in London, Birmingham, Leicester and Nottingham.
Until he was caught using a fake passport on the Greek-Albanian border and extradited to Britain, Copja was a master of evasion.
A police raid on a gang safe house in Earls Court, West London, only just missed him. Officers saw Copja being driven away. He fled Britain that day.
He was equally adept at hiding his wares. Police stopped a Citroen driven by a member of Copja’s gang in Oxford and spent hours examining it.
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A detective said: ‘We had seen the stuff going in [to the car] but we just couldn’t find it.’
Eventually officers located the mechanism which opened the dashboard to reveal several kilos of cocaine.
Gangs like those run by Copja employ low-level operatives who have been using knives to maim and murder on our streets and housing estates.
Indeed, this week Britain’s security minister Ben Wallace said the UK ‘is fast becoming the biggest consumer of cocaine in Europe’.
This has contributed to an upsurge in violence which has seen 67 people, most of them youngsters, killed in the capital alone in 2018.
The problem has also spread from urban areas to the suburbs and even rural districts.
Mr Wallace added: ‘Young people have the ability to order drugs, and gangs have the ability to have delivered to their door large packets of drugs from Albanian or Serbian drug gangs.’
Last month, David Lammy MP also cited the Albanian connection
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Last month, David Lammy MP also cited the Albanian connection
Last month, David Lammy MP also cited the Albanian connection. His intervention followed the drugs-related drive-by gun murder of 17-year-old Tanesha Melbourne.
Buying drugs is now as easy as ordering pizza, the MP said.
‘I think the police and our country have lost control of that drugs market,’ Mr Lammy claimed.
‘You have children — as young as 12, 13 — being recruited into gangs to run drugs across county lines.
‘It’s like [the food delivery service] Deliveroo. You can get them on Snapchat, Whats App. That, in the end, is driving the turf war and it’s driving the culture of violence.’
If the deaths in Britain are appalling, the manner in which the drug kingpins have settled business rivalries back in Albania is even more savage.
A few hundred yards from the Living restaurant, gangsters dressed as policemen sprayed a rival’s bar with gunfire, killing three and wounding seven.
Meanwhile, Klodjan Copja’s brother was arrested for blowing up an opponent in another city. That would attract too much police attention along the Old Kent Road.
Undoubtedly, Copja’s incarceration is a success for British law enforcement.
But he and his cohorts are just one of many groups involved in a serious organised crime wave of Albanian-dominated Class A drug smuggling, the consequences of which has seen the dramatic spike in murders on the streets of Britain, 1,200 miles away.
Often, the gangsters get into Britain using fake documents or hidden in lorries.
A National Crime Agency league table of more than 4,000 UK criminal gangs also showed that Albanians had overtaken Romanians
+7 A National Crime Agency league table of more than 4,000 UK criminal gangs also showed that Albanians had overtaken Romanians
The Albanian gangs have worked hand-in-hand with drug cartels in Colombia, where the coca leaf is grown.
The consignments arrive in south-eastern Europe and are then moved on to the UK or elsewhere (Antwerp is the Albanian mafia-controlled port in the north, I was told).
Much of the cocaine is turned into crack cocaine, which is even more potent.
The profit margins are far bigger, which is why Copja’s is not the only UK-linked drugs gang from his home town of 140,000 people.
Official statistics support the contention that Albanian nationals have achieved a significant position in the UK’s underworld.
They are now the third largest foreign national group in our jails, after the Irish and Poles, both of whom have freedom of access to Britain thanks to historic ties or EU membership.
Tony Blair
+7
Alastair Campbell
The judiciary and legislature are, we are told, being vetted for criminal contacts by the administration of Edi Rama, the Socialist Party prime minister, who just happens to have employed former British prime minister Tony Blair (left) and his spin doctor Alastair Campbell (right)
A National Crime Agency league table of more than 4,000 UK criminal gangs also showed that Albanians had overtaken Romanians to rise to third place in the league, behind only Britons and Pakistanis.
Perhaps we should not be surprised when so many truly evil men from the Balkan state have chosen to make Britain their home.
Take Tristen Asllani, 29, who was a leading figure in another London-based Albanian drugs gang, who style themselves the ‘Hellbanianz’.
He was caught after a police chase ended when he crashed his car into a shop front in leafy Crouch End.
Officers found 21kg of cocaine in the vehicle, and another 6kg of the drug and a Skorpion sub-machine gun fitted with a silencer at a nearby house linked to the gangster.
The house was being used as a drop-off point for suitcases of cocaine arriving from the continent. Asllani was jailed for 25 years at Kingston crown court.
But prison doesn’t seem such a hardship.
Recently, the gangster posted a topless selfie from inside Wandsworth prison. He looked happy, musclebound and, above all, defiant.
Phones are not allowed inside jail, but Asllani had not only acquired one, but had uploaded his photos onto an Instagram account called My Albanian in Jail.
It was captioned: ‘Even inside the prison we have [everything we need], what’s missing are only whores.’
The picture was remarked upon by a customs official in the Albanian port of Durres this week. He shrugged as if to say: ‘What can you do against such people?’
It is a country I know of old, and for which I have great affection because of its rugged beauty and the people’s inherent hospitality in the face of poverty. Coast Guard confiscates 13 tons of drugs worth nearly $1billion
hBut something is very sick at the heart of this nation, which one jaded local described to me this week as ‘Colombia of the Balkans’.
Viewed through rose-tinted spectacles, Albania is doing well as a 21st-century state.
It is a member of NATO, and next month the European Council will begin to decide whether negotiations over EU accession should be opened with Albania. It could be a member as early as 2025.
The police here are doing their best to fight organised crime.
In February, law enforcement agencies seized the biggest drugs haul in Albanian history when a container holding bananas from Colombia unloaded in the main port of Durres was found to contain cocaine worth £160 million.
The judiciary and legislature are, we are told, being vetted for criminal contacts by the administration of Edi Rama, the Socialist Party prime minister, who just happens to have employed former British prime minister Tony Blair and his spin doctor Alastair Campbell.
Between 2013 and 2016, the lobbying and consultancy firm Tony Blair Associates advised Rama on how ‘to deliver greater prosperity’.
In 2015, Mr Blair’s wife Cherie’s law firm Omnia Strategy was reportedly appointed to act on behalf of Albania in a £250 million legal dispute.
Indeed, Edi Rama’s campaigning adviser Campbell still goes out to bat when international criticism of him becomes too warm for comfort.
For the fact is that Rama is in deep trouble as the extent of the narcotics trade in Albania becomes ever more apparent. Even his party’s links with it are coming under scrutiny.
His Interior Minister — responsible for issues such as border control and security — is under pressure to resign because his brother was convicted in Italy in 2002 of drug smuggling and sentenced to seven years.
But he never served jail time and has allegedly continued with his narcotics trade.
Meanwhile, the previous Interior Minister is also under investigation. His cousins are part of a drug syndicate in the port city of Vlore.
Many people here are afraid to talk openly about drugs because, they say, the authorities — and that is the police, judiciary and politicians — are part of the narcotics infrastructure.
But in a bar in Tirana, I meet a senior law enforcement official. He wants to leave the country. He has had enough, he told me.
‘No one talks openly about drugs here,’ he says. ‘As a problem, it doesn’t officially exist.’
So why is that? ‘Go ask the Prime Minister,’ he says. ‘The fact is too many powerful people are involved. Anyone in Albania who believes in law and order and democracy is feeling very depressed now.
‘Uneducated criminals are running towns. Convicted thieves are in parliament. I have been working for justice for 20 years and now I am leaving.
‘I can do no good here any more. I love my country but I do not want my children to grow up here.’
He points outside at yet another building site. ‘One apartment of 120 square metres costs 300,000 euros, when the average salary in Albania is 200 euros a month.
‘Where does the money come from? Drugs.’
Europe, he says, is not putting enough pressure on the local elite. Are they ignoring it in order not to derail further EU expansion?
Back in Elbasan, few wanted to talk about drugs either, though one law-abiding local figure did give me his views.
‘I would estimate one in three in this city have some kind of financial connection with the gangs. That is why people are afraid to talk. If you talk, someone will say and your car might explode. There is terror in the city.’
said to have driven a red ferrari (stock image) before he was jailed
There are three criminal groups in Elbasan with drug links to the UK, of whom Klodjan Copja’s is still the most powerful. They are all untouched because they have bought off the state, he told me.
‘He [Copja, he won’t say the name lest he is overheard] left with his friends when he was young. They had caused so much trouble here that everyone said “Thank God!”
‘But now they have returned and reinvested. People want to be in their good books. But if they tell a businessman, “I like your business or home, you have to sell it to me. Here are the papers, sign them”, you just can’t say no.’
The mayor is part of this. ‘His home is like a castle, he has nine bodyguards,’ says the source.
The mayor and his wife are both under investigation over the source of their conspicuous wealth.
Talking of which, one wonders what has become of that Ferrari Klodjan Copja liked to drive before he was jailed in London.
Albanian company records show his bar restaurant, Living, is held in the name of his 62-year-old mother.
Perhaps she also owns the Ferrari now.
It is blood-red; the colour of too many inner city pavements in Britain as the cocaine wars rage on.
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