Bujar Cozminca was no stranger to British law enforcement. The young Albanian, who lived until recently on Wembley’s bustling High Road in north-west London, had previously been convicted of conspiracy to supply Class A drugs in 2012 and was sentenced to 21 months behind bars and deported back to Albania. 

But that was not the end of Cozminca’s criminal career in the UK. After re-entering Britain illegally, he was arrested here again in May 2021 as part of an investigation by the National Crime Agency (NCA). 

Some £300,000 in cash was found at two properties he had used for drug deals, in Wembley and Islington, north London. He had purchased and supplied 100 kilograms of cocaine with a wholesale value of £3.5 million and a street value of around £8 million, and laundered £2.5 million of criminal cash.

Officers from the NCA and Metropolitan Police also found ledgers indicating drug deals worth almost £2 million. In June this year, the 33-year-old admitted conspiracy to supply cocaine and money laundering and was handed a 12-year jail sentence at Snaresbrook Crown Court in east London. 

Cozminca wasn’t operating in isolation. His operation was part of a wider story of growing dominance by Albanian gangs in the UK’s burgeoning drug markets, with their success fuelled by violence, exploitation and human smuggling.

‘Acute threat’ to the UK

Cozminca’s organised crime group had far-reaching international connections – a feature core to the power now wielded by significant Albanian drug trafficking groups. Individuals like him “think they are above the law,” said Andrew Tickner, senior investigating officer with the Organised Crime Partnership, a joint NCA and Scotland Yard endeavour. 

While the authorities continue their efforts to prove them wrong, the scale of what they are dealing with has become increasingly apparent over the years.

“[T]here is a huge amount of very harmful serious organised criminality within the UK committed by Albanian criminal gangs…drug smuggling, human trafficking, guns or prostitution,” Dan O’Mahoney, then the UK’s Channel Clandestine Threat Commander, told the Commons Home Affairs Committee last year.

This year, a Home Office legal document reportedly characterised Albanian organised crime groups as an “acute threat” to the UK and “highly prevalent across serious and organised crime” in this country.

Last week, The Telegraph’s analysis of official data suggested that between 1 and 2 per cent of Albanians in the UK are currently in jail. Not all will have been involved in organised crime, and some are likely to in fact be victims of trafficking, say charities. 

Nevertheless, in 2022, the NCA estimated that hundreds of millions of pounds a year was leaving Britain for Albania, much of it coming from criminal activity. It said at the time the amount was only increasing.

Sex trade

Following the fall of communism in their country at the start of the 1990s, and amid high levels of unemployment and poverty, Albanians started to emigrate in large numbers. An estimated 40 per cent or more of the population has left since 1991, with about 42,000 on average migrating each year. 

“After the collapse of communism there was the first wave of migration [out of Albania] but they didn’t really come to the UK in the 1990s, it wasn’t really on the radar and for geographical reasons the majority of Albanians went to Greece and Italy,” says Dr Andi Hoxhaj, lecturer in law and researcher on the Western Balkans at King’s College London.

It wasn’t until the late 1990s that the UK became more of a draw, and Albanians have started to move here in greater numbers since. Among them are doctors, lawyers, engineers and labourers, as former Albanian ambassador to Britain Qirjako Qirko told the Home Affairs Committee in 2022. 

But a minority of Albanian migrants to Britain have been engaged in something more sinister in recent decades. In 2001, a leaked Home Office report suggested an Albanian mafia had taken control of Soho’s vice trade in London, previously dominated by the Maltese mafia and East End gangsters. The trade had an estimated £40 million annual turnover at the time. 

The Albanians’ takeover was relatively swift: in the space of less than a year, Eastern European operators came to command this corner of organised crime in the heart of the British capital. “Around 70 per cent of sauna/massage parlours in Soho [are] now controlled by Albanians/Kosovars,” said a Home Office briefing that year, seen by The Independent.

By the early Noughties, the horror stories were starting to emerge: of young Eastern European girls pimped out to the British sex industry by violent Albanian criminals; of trafficked women sustaining severe injuries at the hands of those now in control of the trade.

Up to three quarters of the women working in Soho’s brothels were believed to be Albanians by then. Albanian women were also reportedly being moved to the North of England and the Midlands, to work in red-light districts there. But soon, the gangs controlling them would start expanding their ambitions, and targeting Britain’s lucrative drugs trade.

Cocaine

Edmund and Edward Haziri and their associates enjoyed lavish lifestyles. They owned expensive jewellery, clothes and vehicles and kept stacks of cash on their properties – often in bundles of £50 notes. 

The brothers, in their mid-30s, were key players in an Albanian gang that for nearly a year ran a drugs operation known as the “Eddie line”, which flooded the Midlands with cocaine. They made hundreds of thousands of pounds by distributing the Class A drug – often concealed inside lottery ticket stubs – and leaving what Derbyshire Constabulary described as “a trail of addiction, crime and misery on our streets”.

Their operation was taken down after a police community support officer spotted the driver of a car acting suspiciously in the Swadlincote area of Derbyshire. Police suspected the vehicle was linked to local drug dealing, and from this initial report, the extensive cocaine network stretching from London to the Midlands was ultimately uncovered.

On March 23, 2022, police swooped on several properties and rounded up the gang’s key members, the Haziri brothers among them. The following year, Edmund was jailed for 15 years and Edward for fifteen and a half. Eight others were also jailed.

But they were only one such Albanian organised crime group making large sums selling cocaine to British users. For the gangsters who had come here to do business in the criminal underground, the drugs trade was the next big target after the UK sex industry.

By 2017, Albanian gangs had “established a high-profile influence within UK organised crime”, the NCA warned. They were focusing by this point on the trafficking of cocaine into London. 

Criminals from the Balkans were forming direct links with suppliers in Latin America, the agency’s annual organised crime report noted. Of the UK’s organised criminals, just 0.8 per cent were reported to be Albanians, but the NCA warned that their impact was concerning because of their willingness to use violence.

Ged McCann, a senior intelligence manager at the NCA, told a 2022 press conference that Albanian dominance in the cocaine market had been enabled by an “end-to-end business model” stretching from production in South America to street dealers in Britain.

“They have a reputation for reliability within criminal markets – a good quality product, good purity, punctual,” he said. “As a business they’re very good, disciplined and successful. Those involved can work alone or in informal hierarchies, and Albanians are largely in loose networks based on trust and experience. They exploit friendships and connections, as well as ethnic groups. It’s easy for people to be removed or replaced in terms of law enforcement activity.”

A Telegraph investigation in 2022 detailed how a port on the Guayas river in the Ecuadorian city of Guayaquil became a key distribution centre for Albanian drug gangs, who were sometimes using front companies to smuggle the cocaine to Europe, hiding it inside a legitimate export, such as tea. Containers containing the drug would mostly arrive in Antwerp in Belgium or Rotterdam in the Netherlands, before reaching the UK.

This involvement of organised criminals from the Western Balkans in the cocaine trade stems from a mixture of luck and entrepreneurialism, according to Anna Sergi, a professor of criminology at the University of Essex. “They have learnt from other groups, including some of the mafias from Italy, how to handle the business trade of cocaine, effectively placing their own businesses and facilitators and brokers in key Latin American areas…and this has given them an edge in bringing certain products into Europe,” she says.

They owe their success in the UK partly to the lack of other groups monopolising the cocaine trade, and partly to the high demand, Prof Sergi suggests. 

“People consume a lot of cocaine, so there was a need for that service, effectively, and because no one else was providing it, they were in a perfect position to, for various reasons including the fact that they could exploit their ability to organise logistics, make friends and interconnect with others,” she explains. “The lack of entrepreneurialism from other criminal groups in the UK is why the field was open.”

But she stresses that the organised crime often attributed solely to Albanians is perpetrated by others too. “There are many people from different Western Balkan countries, from Montenegro to Serbia,” she says. “These are people who share the language. The fact they’re engaged in organised crime is not because they’re Albanian.”

As for whether such groups now control the UK’s cocaine trade, Prof Sergi contends that “there is no possible control in a market like cocaine.” 

“There are a million other actors in that market, and they’re not all from the Western Balkans, of course,” she says. But following the financial success of cocaine distribution, some Albanian-led gangs started to diversify their operations and hit on a new target – cannabis.

Cannabis

“If you’re good at one market, you tend to expand to the next market,” says Federico Varese, professor of criminology at the University of Oxford.

Where previously much of the UK’s cannabis was grown by Vietnamese gangs, from around the 2010s, Albanian groups began to gain a foothold – with some having experience of growing the drug to supply Italy and Greece.

“The Vietnamese did not have guns, they were not violent,” says Prof Varese. “But the Albanians would be organising the production and protection of it.”

What was needed, however, was workers for the cannabis farms. To staff their operations, gangs started targeting men in poor rural areas of Albania, where unemployment rates were high, by offering unspecified work in the UK and a free – if illegal – journey to the country.

As with the cocaine trade, vast sums were at stake. Last year, law enforcement teams carried out a coordinated operation to disrupt what the NCA called “Albanian criminality in the UK”, seizing almost 200,000 cannabis plants across the country, with a street value of between £115 million and £130 million. More than 450 people were charged with offences including drug supply, money laundering and possession of weapons.  

Albanian criminal groups are now the most dominant foreign nationality involved in commercial cannabis cultivation in the UK, having expanded their influence partly by collaborating with British gangs with roots in target areas.

But cannabis, like cocaine, is a massive market fuelled by enormous demand, and there are many actors within it, Prof Varese points out. “Even for the Albanians it is very hard to control it all, because [the drug is] so easy to produce. It doesn’t need a lot of know-how or capital.”

Even if the Albanian organised crime groups disappeared, the crime itself would not, he adds. “Someone else would come along. There’s a huge demand for the product.”

Still, there may be factors that help explain the success of the Albanian groups, he suggests. “It’s important to understand there is not a single Albanian mafia – these are independent families with blood ties, and that helps the trust within the group,” he says. “It’s hard to break that bond.” 

Modern slavery

Working within such networks is not always voluntary, and the hidden victims of the groups’ activities are often Albanians themselves. These are ordinary people who find themselves living illicitly in Britain, beholden to criminals and in fear of retribution.

A common tactic is “debt bondage”, which occurs when criminal gangs either fund or organise people’s journeys to the UK, and then force people to work in whatever capacity they choose until the debt is deemed paid.

If arrested, they can find themselves caught up in the criminal justice system rather than supported, says Alison Logier, director of modern slavery response at the charity Hestia. “What we’re seeing is a result of socioeconomic conditions in Albania, which lead people to want to pursue a better life or economic advancement, [putting] them in vulnerable positions,” she says. “Men as well as women and girls are being trafficked out of Albania now.”

Logier cites the example of one man who had borrowed money and was kidnapped, brought to the UK and forced to work in cannabis farms to pay his debt.  Although he managed to escape during a police raid, the man was jailed and deported back to Albania – only to be approached by the criminals again and trafficked back to the UK under their control.

In 2018, NCA figures showed a 35 per cent increase in the number of people trafficked into the UK, mostly from Albania by a network of criminal groups. 

Tom Dowdall, then deputy director of the agency, said at the time that Albanian criminal gangs “operating at the higher end of sophistication” were involved not only in organised immigration crime and trafficking but also in drug smuggling, firearms trafficking “and often violent and serious organised crime.”

Some of the trafficked women had reportedly been beaten while pregnant, locked up or raped. Around half were reported to have been forced to work in the UK sex industry, with the rest facing labour exploitation.

“There’s been a conflation of criminal gang activity and the motivations of Albanian migrants and forced migrants – a presumption that the criminals are the migrants themselves,” says Helen Stalford, a law professor at the University of Liverpool, who has researched the experiences of young unaccompanied asylum seekers. 

Between April and June this year, the National Referral Mechanism, which identifies potential victims of modern slavery, received more than 4,300 referrals, with the second most common nationality referred (after British) being Albanians. Of these, a fifth were referred for criminal exploitation and 29 per cent for labour exploitation. 

Small boats

While gangs had previously used a variety of methods to smuggle workers into the UK, including lorries, industrial shipping and false documents, they saw a fresh opportunity with the rise in small boat crossings over the English Channel.

While the route has mostly been dominated by asylum seekers fleeing war-torn countries including Afghanistan and Syria, in 2022 the number of Albanians arriving on the route rocketed – making up more than a quarter of small boat migrants.

“Small boats offered a very cheap way to come to the UK: £2,000 or £2,500 which is quite cheap compared to other routes that can cost over £10,000,” says Dr Hoxhaj. “It was very well advertised online, which reached young people on social media, on TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat. It was very well done.”

Albanians were deliberately lured by the prospect of job offers and opportunities, he says. “They did targeted advertisements in rural areas of Albania, and when [the would-be passengers] got linked to the groups who organised the crossing, they would get an offer for free rides if they committed to working for a year in cannabis farms. The adverts just said ‘job offers, opportunities’, and when they had the conversation they found out it was about illegal work.”

Such was the speed of Albanian operations that NCA officials reported that some cannabis growers arrested in 2022 had arrived on British shores just days before.

The crackdown

“[B]ecause a third of all arrivals were coming from Albania we struck a deal that reduced illegal Albanian migrants by 90 per cent,” then-Conservative Prime Minister Rishi Sunak declared in April this year. The deal was with France, and was aimed at strengthening interceptions on the French coastline.

It marked one of numerous attempts to crack down on the various forms of criminal activity and exploitation attributed to Western Balkan organised crime groups in Britain.

The following month, then-Foreign Secretary David Cameron travelled to the Albanian capital, Tirana, to discuss the need for greater cross-Europe collaboration on tackling organised crime. He hailed a partnership between the UK and Albania to confront the challenges together as “a leading example of disrupting the business models of callous people-smuggling gangs, significantly reducing dangerous small boats crossings, and providing a more prosperous future for young Albanians.” 

The change of government in July was accompanied by a shift in the rhetoric. After the Tory battle cry of “stop the boats” came Labour’s vow to “smash the gangs” by targeting the smugglers. Humanitarian groups worry this will only cause deaths in the Channel to rise, as even more dangerous methods are used to launch boats. Meanwhile arrests and prosecutions for organised criminal activity by these groups continue. 

Cooperation between the British and Albanian authorities has made a positive difference, Dr Hoxhaj suggests. “They started sharing data on criminals in the UK and seeing the links they had back home,” he says. “That helped identify quickly the people behind what was happening in the UK…[It] sent a powerful message: that you are not hiding in plain sight.”

But for now, Albanian gangs continue to exercise significant influence on organised crime across the UK, and exert brutal power over the cocaine and cannabis markets while continuing to adapt supplies to seemingly endless demand. And all the while they do, the violence, cruelty and addiction they unleash will continue.

(Source: The Telegraph)