Abstract
An impressive array of sources informs Jana Arsovska’s book on Albanian organized crime. These include police investigative reports from Albania, from other Balkan countries with Albanian populations, and from New York and a handful of Belgian cities—key destinations of the Albanian diaspora. Arsovska’s ethnographic observations provide context for these reports as do her in-depth interviews with offenders, victims, police, prosecutors, and judges. An additional 60 interviews with Albanians in New York shed light on migrant experience.
Pouring over court cases in New York and Belgium, Arsovska created a database of nearly 500 offenders. She queried representatives of nongovernmental organizations who work with victims of human trafficking and visited victims’ shelters. Her research extended to press and media stereotypes of Albanian criminals as “determined, violent, and capable of the worst,” and of Albania as a “criminogenic” society. Finally, she brings to her work the personal story of having been extorted for money and favors, first as a partner running a café-bar in Skopje, Macedonia, then as a student in Thessaloniki, Greece. The perpetrators—a group of “tough guys” with shaved heads, gold chains, and dark glasses—wielded not only the stick of their intimidating physical presence but also the carrot of invitations to lavish restaurants.
Based on this foundation, Arsovska identifies by name multiple Albanian crime leaders, their close kin, collaborators, rivals, and victims—both in Albania and abroad. At the same time, her book answers big questions surrounding Albanian organized crime—what it is, why it emerged, and whether or not Albania’s customary law bequeathed a “culture of violence” to its participants. Regarding the what, there is no single template. The “more sophisticated groups” have a “core” leadership cluster of 4–10, surrounded by a network of other Albanians, as well as by “bridge builders” to non-Albanian criminal groups. Activities include large-scale drug and sex trafficking, white collar crime, loan sharking, money laundering, and illegal gambling. Participants appear “rational” and “money driven.” Smaller groups, whose activities have more to do with theft, robberies, home invasions, extortion, and prostitution, project a tougher, “more vulgar” style, laced with the desire to gain respect, instill fear, and claim territory. Like many urban “gangs” or “crews,” such groups attract young immigrant men experiencing marginality in their new environment.
Arsovska further contrasts “clan-organized groups”—coalitions of brothers from northern Albania—with “project-based networks,” for example, the multi-ethnic oil smuggling rings that emerged in southern Albania during the United Nations embargo of Yugoslavia. Such differences reflect the broader division of Albania into a predominantly Muslim, less economically developed, linguistically “Gheg” north, and a multiethnic, predominantly Christian and more developed south, historically shaped by the “Tosk” linguistic group and by adjacent Greece. Yet another distinction separates even the most sophisticated Albanian organizations from mafias—this notwithstanding constant references to “the Albanian Mafia” in the press and popular culture, amplified by some Albanian groups’ enthusiastic adoption of mafia imagery.
After the fall of the Communist regime in Albania, criminal groups aligned with opposing political parties competed violently in the political arena. During Albanians’ struggle for independence in Kosovo, criminal organizations in the diaspora and at home extorted money for the Kosovo Liberation Army. Beyond these examples, however, and with the exception of the predictable corruption of public officials and politicians, Albanian organized crime lacks the long-term entanglements with the state that define the classical mafias. In addition, although hierarchies and coordinating “commissions” are notoriously exaggerated for the classical mafias, Arsovska considers them structurally sounder than anything one finds in Albanian organizations, whose memberships tend to be ad hoc, shifting, and autonomous of one another. Similarly, although Albanian criminal groups display cohesiveness, commit participants to omertà, and funnel aid to arrested compatriots, they have no ritual initiations or other ideological elements of a self-reinforcing brotherhood. In the author’s words, mafia organizations “do not cease to exist when members are imprisoned or dead” whereas Albanian groups “fall apart” (p. 161).
Turning to the why, this book carefully weighs historical and sociocultural elements in the genesis of Albanian criminal organizations, favoring explanations grounded in history but not discounting culture. With the fall of its highly repressive Communist regime in the early 1990s, Albania entered a lawless rush into liberal capitalism. At stake were the rampant privatization of state assets and weakening of state institutions; the decommissioning of soldiers, police, and secret service agents; the doubling or tripling of predatory theft and homicide, hence opening for protection racketeering; and an enormous ponzi scheme that collapsed in 1997 causing widespread unemployment and rioting. Amidst the disorder, arsenals were emptied, while thousands of youthful Albanians swelled an already existing stream of migrants to Greece, Italy, and points further west.
Meanwhile, the sizeable Albanian populations of Kosovo and Macedonia, seeking their own independence after the breakup of Yugoslavia, gave rise to a vibrant market for weapons and ammunition. Arsovska shows why Albania, its arsenals emptied by rioters, would of course produce arms smuggling coalitions. Cigarettes, taxed or monopolized by states, had long constituted another opportunity to smuggle. They were joined in the 1990s, and especially after 2000, by sex workers and drugs, trafficked to Western Europe and the United States. The cultural transformations underlying the West’s growing demand for commercial sex and drugs are beyond the scope of Arsovska’s book. She does, however, appreciate Zygmunt Bauman’s concept of late-modern “sensation-gathering” subjectivity and concludes her study with the observation that the West “externalized” the problem of “forbidden goods” to the rest of the world. Vivid descriptions recount Albanian entrepreneurs coercively recruiting, even kidnapping, young women from former Iron Curtain countries, Albania among them, for coerced sex work in Western European cities. Trafficked girls are forced to pay fees against the menace of beatings, rape, or harm to their families. One, lured by the pretext of marriage, was turned into a prostitute on her wedding night. In the wake of the ponzi scheme collapse and the Kosovo war, Albanian-organized sex trafficking scaled up, requiring more complex assets and the collaboration of many non-Albanians (Turks, Bulgarians, Greeks, Italians, among them). So too did Albanians’ role in the commerce of heroin, cocaine, and marijuana. Here ex-Kosovo combatants, as well as New York-based groups with Latin American connections, loomed especially large.
Accompanying the enormous economic disruption of post-Communist Albania, and the expanding opportunities to traffic in contraband, was the spreading malaise, after 1990, of what Arovska summarizes as “sociocultural confusion”—a liminal state in which modern material rewards are promised but people lose trust in the possibility of their delivery. Such confusion, the author proposes, fosters criminal activity whose scope is not particularly entrepreneurial. Citing Jack Katz’s Seductions of Crime, she introduces us to immigrant youth who break laws for the thrill of the adventure, to escape from boredom, and because they impulsively desire good things, up to and including high performance cars.
What about explanations, so common in the press and media, that Albanian organized crime is an expression of Albania’s archaic “blood feud” or “honor” culture, characterized by rigid norms of patriarchy; treatment of host–guest relations as if the host were a sovereign; insistence that orally given promises (one’s “word of honor” or besa) are inviolable; and requirement to pursue self-help justice in cases of betrayal? After all, the so-called rules of this culture appear in a document known as the Kanun of Lekë Dukagjini, standardized from oral tradition in the 15th century, written down in 1913, and still available on Albanian newsstands. To Arsovska, the Kanun, which she explores in detail, contributes to building bonds of trust, useful to all manner of criminal organization. Members of crime groups readily invoke its prescriptions for obligatory revenge to justify violent behavior, neutralizing their own and others’ moral criticism. Yet she also wisely points to several caveats. Albanians’ reputation for violence exceeds their actual deployment of it; victims are rarely outsiders, while a reputation for brutal deeds often gets results without the deeds being committed. Most Albanians, even in Albania, know the Kanun only superficially. Moreover, as codified law, it has much greater sway in the Gheg north—it “speaks to Albanians of the mountain”—where criminal groups are less sophisticated than in the Tosk south. Ghegs, moreover, feel an explicit tension between recruiting women into sex work and what the Kanun says about policing female honor.
There are very few glitches in Arsovska’s presentation. I would like to have seen Albania’s regional differences related to its divergent agrarian histories (pastoralism and livestock theft in the north fits well with that region’s greater retention of the Kanun). As well, I noted a confusion in both text and bibliography between Alan Block and Anton Blok. Overall, however, this book is impressively well researched, highly informative, and analytically stimulating—a reward to read.