SHADY figures are touring Europe in search of wealth. Their form of acquiring it has everyone perplexed. The items are other’s belongings which wind up in the hands of those who coveted them as much as their original owners, but could not have obtained them in any other way. The perpetrators earn lucrative sums in this business. The majority of them come from a small country of three million-plus inhabitants located in the Balkans, which probably would not attract anyone’s attention if it were not for its notorious mafia network.

Albania is where a large part of Europe’s human and organ trafficking is organized, and its gangs of extortion racketeers and traffickers of goods stolen abroad constitute a serious problem for the forces of order. It is believed that if the Albanian police had the time and authority to check the engine numbers of luxury autos circulating in the country, it is highly probable that they would find their owners in a German, French, Italian or Spanish city.

A little over 20 years ago, material shortages were notable in this Adriatic Coast nation. With the disappearance of socialist governments in Eastern Europe, the much venerated Western democratic freedom lost no time in reaching Albania and with it a tremendous anarchy which authorities have been unable to control.

British journalist Misha Glenny, a specialist on southeastern Europe, observed that Albania sunk together with Eastern European markets to which it supplied certain crucial exports, such as citrus fruit. It then tried to sell oranges and lemons to Western Europe, but that was not possible given that the bloc’s Common Agricultural Policy protects Portuguese, Spanish, Italian and Greek cultivators. It was unable to compete against these subsidized products and many small farmers destroyed their citrus groves and began to grow cannabis instead, selling it in industrial quantities. While this transition was occurring, organized crime moved fast and developed a global system which represents an economic alternative.

Many lament that in present-day Albania the police and army are the only authorities, and barely manage to maintain order. In the neighborhoods of Tirana, the capital, nobody can guarantee security. Criminal gangs fight over territory and the only profession seemingly open to many youth is that of trafficking, whatever the merchandise.

However, human trafficking and that of organs is generally the most dramatic. So much so, that the Albanian government has been obliged to prohibit the use of speedboats to try and detain the flow of persons, principally to Italy where, once on dry land, many women and children are forced into prostitution and begging.

The Kosovo War of 1998-99 gave impetus to this phenomenon, particularly among mafia gangs in the north and Albanian-Kosovans. Under the pretext of patriotic struggle, these armed gangs operated as private armies financed by extortion and smuggling.

For this reason, the Albanian Parliament recently passed a special law permitting the European Union to investigate an alleged network for the trafficking of Serbian prisoners’ organs, which was operating in Albania at the end of the 1990s.

According to Dick Marty, former Swiss rapporteur to the Council of Europe, former guerrilla leaders from the Kosovo Liberation Army, who fought against Serbia in the military conflict, kidnapped Serbians and Albanians and took them to secret detention centers in Albania. The detainees underwent the removal of their vital organs in a private clinic with the object of selling them on the illicit international market.

A Council of Europe document details how separatist Albanians fed the prisoners, then murdered them and sold their organs abroad for $100,000-plus apiece, with the complicity of the police and intelligence services.