Each Wednesday, our newsletter takes readers around the world, exploring a single theme through a number of places. We call it our Field Guide. In honor of James Caan and Tony Sirico, two iconic actors best known for their portrayal of gangsters who both recently passed, we’re devoting this week’s Field Guide to organized crime, from the Albanian mob to the Japanese yakuza.
Disorganized Crime
How the Albanian mafia went global
By Alex Hannaford
The takedown happened over five days in the chilly spring of 2009 in suburban New Jersey. The main targets: the two ringmasters of a 26-strong Albanian organized crime gang—Kujtim Lika, a baseball cap-wearing gambler who went by the name Timmy, and Myfit “Mike” Dika, who sported a conspicuous tattoo of a bald eagle on his left bicep and the words “Death Before the Sun” on his right.
Jim Farley, a Supervisory Special Agent with the FBI, likes to describe his role as similar to that of Joe Torre, former manager of the Yankees baseball team—to keep his team focused and happy; “Make sure the players were really doing the job.” But if Operation Black Eagle failed, the buck stopped with him. And as the largest undercover infiltration of Albanian organized crime in the FBI’s history, Farley knew failure wasn’t an option.
This was the culmination of a four-year investigation into Lika and Dika’s gang’s plan to smuggle over 220 lbs of heroin from Albania into the port of New Jersey in shipping containers, under the guise of a front company that sold furniture. During those four years, Farley’s agents infiltrated the Albanian gang, buying heroin, marijuana, oxycontin, steroids, counterfeit sneakers, guns and jewelry. Like the Italian-American mafia, Albanian organized crime gangs were tight-knit and hard to penetrate. But what made it even harder was that there was little evidence of any real structure or hierarchy.
What Operation Black Eagle brought into sharp relief was just how much of an outsized impact such a tiny country in the middle of Europe had on organized crime abroad. Today, Albanian organized crime is the fastest-growing criminal threat in Europe, responsible for distributing up to 40 percent of the heroin consumed there, and it has tentacles in the United States, Australia and the Middle East.
But how and why did this happen?
Did you Know?
|
Russia’s mafia, or bratva, can trace its origins to the Stalin regime, when millions were sent to Soviet labor camps, or gulags. In those labor camps, criminals established their reputations, becoming vorami v zakone (or, “thieves-in-law”) if they were lucky. But when Stalin began recruiting soldiers from the gulags to fight in World War II, these emerging criminals were forced to choose between betraying the thief code of never working with the government and finding an early way out of prison. |
Did you Know?
| In Afghanistan and the “Golden Triangle”—a region where the borders of Thailand, Laos and Myanmar borders meet—organized crime is largely built around trafficking opium, a drug grown in both regions. In Asia, traffickers move opium from the Golden Triangle to Hong Kong, where it enters the market for illegal consumption. |
Readings
Books bought through our links may earn us a commission.
|
|
Contributor
