The current global financial crisis coupled with the perennial instability of the Balkans raises suspicions around the creation of much stronger organized crime groups that will be able to dictate their rules of the game to both local governments and international institutions.

Already a trend emerges which has not be fully measured nor examined by the media that illustrates a significant rise in illegal activities and a sure rise in the criminal rates.

Albania is considered as a transit country for the heroin trafficking from Afghanistan o Western Europe, as well as a production country of large quantities of Cannabis that are exported mainly through Greece and Italy to other EU states.

Bosnia Herzegovina has a serious problem concerning the political clout crime kingpins exercise in its domestic political life, an issue directly related to drug trade, the modern white slave trade and the illegal immigration networks.

Bulgaria has been hit by a recent crime wave, and the domestic crime groups are more involved into synthetic drugs distribution and cocaine as well.

Greece is also hit by a crime wave involving armed robberies and weapons trafficking, and the general trend reveals an at least 20% rise in criminal rates on an annual basis. Illegal immigration networks also operate which gain millions of Euros per month by exploiting mostly Asian and African groups of people.

Montenegro is influenced by cocaine trade from Latin America, a similar pattern with Croatia. Both countries are also exit points for heroin distribution from Kosovo to Western Europe, as well as arms trafficking.

In Serbian drug use has increased and the role of private security firms operating as mafia front companies is being in question.

Romania is the least influenced by organized crime activities, but its Constanja port is being influenced by Albanian organized crime networks relating to narcotics trade, whilst Kosovo remains the undisputed center of every major crime related network in the region. The current fall in remittances from the Albanian Diaspora will most certainly give a rise in street crime in the Kosovo province in the near future.

FYROM is experiencing issues concerning its role as a transit country for illegal immigration from Kosovo to Europe and from Asia as well. Moreover criminal gangs are well into the contraband trade of light arms, mainly Kalashnikovs….

http://www.serbianna.com/

http://www.serbianna.com

ITALIEN
Wie die Mafia von der Finanzkrise profitiert

Von Annette Langer

Die Mafia korrumpiert, investiert und expandiert: Mit einem Gesamtumsatz von 130 Milliarden Euro ist sie eines der Top-Unternehmen in Italien. Selbst die Finanzkrise kann den Paten nichts anhaben - im Gegenteil. Sie verdienen sogar daran.
http://www.spiegel.de/panorama/justiz/0,1518,590984,00.html

FBI: Albanian mobsters ‘new Mafia’

From Justice Producer Terry Frieden

WASHINGTON (CNN) — Thousands of Albanians and others who fled the Balkans for the United States in recent years have emerged as a serious organized crime problem, threatening to displace La Cosa Nostra (LCN) families as kingpins of U.S. crime, top FBI officials said Wednesday.

The Albanian criminal enterprises, operating largely in New York and other Eastern seaboard cities, represent a major challenge to federal agents because of their propensity for violence and brutality, the officials said.

“They are a hardened group, operating with reckless abandon,” said Chris Swecker, the newly named FBI assistant director for the Criminal Investigative Division.

Swecker and other officials said some of the Albanians served as enforcers in the established Mafia families for several years.

When the FBI dealt a major blow to the LCN families in recent years, the Albanians began to emerge, and now are taking over turf once controlled by the traditional mob bosses.

Officials said ethnic Albanians from Kosovo, Macedonia and Montenegro are included in the clans and crews that emerged in the organized crime world.

FBI officials said Russian and many other organized crime groups operating in the United States are much more sophisticated and less violent than the Albanians.

Part of the Albanian emergence stems from the FBI’s success in busting the LCN.

Operation Buttondown, the code name for the FBI’s campaign to crush the Mafia, reduced the number of families operating in the United States from 24 to only nine, the FBI officials said.

More than 100 leading members of LCN and more than 600 associates were arrested in the crackdown on organized crime.

Although no terrorism connection has been discovered, the FBI says it is closely watching to see whether the militant Muslims in the emerging organized crime world demonstrate ties to organizations suspected of involvement in terrorist financing.

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CNN

Posted 8/18/2004 11:37 PM

Hunt for ‘terrorism nexus’ changes how FBI handles crime
By Toni Locy, USA TODAY
WASHINGTON — In the post-Sept. 11 FBI, crime-fighting is focusing less on former staples such as bank robbery, the new head of the FBI’s criminal division said Wednesday.

Instead, agents are consumed by terrorist threats. They look for connections in everything from Albanian gangsters and Mexican immigrant-smuggling rings to credit card scams and thefts of baby formula.

In a briefing with reporters, Chris Swecker, who was appointed in July, said agents are always looking for “a terrorism nexus” while trying to maintain the FBI’s role in investigating major crimes.

But the FBI’s criminal division is leaner: It has 5,000 agents, compared with 6,500 before 9/11, and has had to scale back.

Because of the shift of personnel to anti-terrorism cases, the FBI no longer sends agents to every bank robbery. Nor does it conduct “buy-bust” drug operations.

Agents are dispatched only for armed bank robberies and not to “note jobs,” in which robbers demand money with a note, he said.

The FBI now focuses on such criminal enterprises as Mexican immigrant-smugglers who could sneak terrorists into the USA and gangsters from the Balkans who are challenging the American Mafia for control of gambling, prostitution and other rackets.

Yet agents also must pay attention to crimes that would have gotten little notice from the FBI before 9/11. Though petty in nature, frauds involving credit cards, loans and food stamps, as well as thefts of baby formula, could raise money for terrorists, Swecker said.

Before 9/11, federal and local law enforcement agencies cracked a cigarette-smuggling ring in Charlotte that also used credit card fraud to finance terrorists who were part of Hezbollah in Lebanon.

So far, the FBI has not linked food stamp fraud or baby formula thefts to terrorism, Swecker said.

Nor have they found a terrorism connection between militant Islamists in Albania and Albanian gangsters here, he said.

But the threat posed by organized crime is ominous, Swecker said. He estimated that more than 1,000 gangsters from Albania, Macedonia and other Balkan states are inside the USA.

“Traditional law enforcement doesn’t intimidate them,” he said. “There is a reckless abandon to how they operate.”

For years, gangsters from the Balkans, particularly Albanians, were used by the American Mafia for dirty work, such as beatings and killings, said W.K. Williams, head of the FBI’s transnational crimes unit.

Recently, he said, Albanian gangsters have seized control of some rackets from New York Mafia families whose leadership has been weakened in the past five years by FBI investigations. Swecker said the FBI is sending agents to work with police in the Balkans and Sicily to investigate such groups.

http://www.usatoday.com/

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