The Underworld Podcast - How an Albanian Mobster Derailed MAGA Island

Episode Date: September 8, 2026

In Albania's turbulent Nineties, the small, seaside town of Vlore became a gangster’s paradise, playing host to hundreds of crooks ferrying drugs, weapons and people into nearby Puglia alongside Italian mafiosi. One of them was a slim, slick-haired former military man named Artur Shehu, who amassed a formidable property portfolio across Vlore — most reckoned, due to his friends in the Sacra Corona Unita, Italy's “fourth Mafia.” But when a 1999 bar gunfight forced Shehu into hiding, only to reappear in Miami two years later, his life was sent on a wild journey that would collide, in 2020, with America’s first family. And its fallout would echo to the highest levels of politics, crime and controversy in Albania and far beyond. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Stream a new episode of North of North Tuesdays on CBC Gem. It's 1999 in the Albanian city of Laura, and things are about to go seriously pear-shaped for one of the city's leading criminal lights. Arta Shehu is a string-thin, self-styled entrepreneur, mid-thirties, slick black hair. His fortunes have improbably risen as those of his countries have crumbled. Shea-ho owns a hotel, a casino, properties all over town. But cops believe he's knee-deep in crime. crime too. Flora, a pretty and historic beach town, has become a gangster's paradise, with people and drug smuggling networks lucrative enough to turn small-time crooks into

millionaires. Authorities in Albania and Italy are sure Shehu is in on the act too. He's been working alongside Italian mafiosi on massive marijuana shipments, they say, and he runs an armada of speedboats whizzing Albanians across the Ionian Sea to Puglia. Shehu denies the lot, says he's just a humble businessman. Look at my portfolio, he says. My hotel. My casino. My condos.

And a bar. Which, okay, perhaps another sound investment. Plenty of reasons for Albanians to drink in the 90s, or any time for that matter. But by 1999, Flora's underworld has sparked enough bloodfews that being a suspected narco who hangs out at his own bar? Well, you may as well wear a tea. shirt with Shoot Me, written on it. Which is exactly what one of Shehu's alleged rivals, a man in the streets called Zani, tries to do later that year. According to some reports,

two men drop when Zani opens fire at Shehue's bar. Others say it's three, with two wounded, including Zani himself. Whatever the truth, by the time the guns fall silent, one of those bleeding out is Shehue's uncle, Luan. Moments later, Luan dies in his nephew. use arms. Shea Hu fouls revenge. Cops go looking for witnesses. Shea Hu then disappears. Two years later, he pops up again, this time in Miami. He builds a mansion and snaps up condos all round town. He also goes on a spending spree back home, buying up a raft of land and homes near Laura. Chehu points to documents he has that go back to well beyond communism, telling courts that he's owed that property. Locals say the deals stink, that Shea Hu's been forging old deeds. But this is Albania.

The deals go through regardless. What's more, cops believe that Shea Hu is back on his old BS, running transatlantic drug deals with Italian buddies as the Albanian mafia turns from a small thing into a global criminal giant. But each time, Shehu slips the net. And in 2020, an extraordinary series of events will send Arta Shehu on a collision course with America's First Family, and its fallout will echo way beyond Albania. Welcome to the Underworld podcast. Hello! I like that though.

I like what he does it in five. Yeah, yeah. All right. Hello. And greetings. To the weekly audiovisual experience of pits, two-season reporters against the wonderful, lovely world of organized crime. I am Sean Williams in Buenos Aires, and I'm joined by Danny Gold in New York City.

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Yes, definitely leave comments if you're watching on YouTube, but not if you're on Facebook. Our Facebook comments since we started uploading there a month or so ago, brother, not so, not so good. Not different. No, like, I know what aliens doing 9-11's got to do with like, I don't know, the Chinese mafia, but whatever. Merch at the website, bonuses at the Patreon, including the new bad guy movie club that goes out.

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Definitely holler at her. Yeah, we've also got some pretty sick tips recently. So cheers for that. Anyway, it is, has been, was always far too long since we covered Albania, whose people we both really, really love, don't we, Danny? Chechens, too. They are wonderful people. You know, there's not enough Chechens in New York where I have to pretend to care.

Or, you know, same thing, Dagestanis, he's like, I got no love for them. But the Albanians, those are my friends. people, big fans. Yeah, I don't know what I'm playing out. There's none of them here. I can say what I want, which is that I love them. But you might have seen recently the story of the Albanian gangster who's wound up in a controversial deal by Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump to buy a stretch of land near Vlora, the city that you just heard in the cold open. And by God, if that didn't tick all my boxes for a subject to cover on this show, then my name isn't pronounced sin by literally every human being in Africa or Asia and Latin America. I've read a quite a quite

a lot about this story. It's really interesting, actually. I've only seen headlines and terrible takes and a couple of conspiracy theories, but excited to learn more. Yeah, I mean, I was left wondering a few things, chief among them, who the hell is this Artur-Shahue guy? Because a few pieces get into his background and how he came to, quote, unquote, own tons of land along one of the most pristine, untouched stretches of real estate in Europe. And then when you get into his crazy life, you're uncovering all kinds of stories about Laura, gang wars in the 90s, and how it played a key role in the rise of the Albanian mafia, which just to reiterate this point, both me and Danny fully approve of. And to add a bit of expertise, I've even called out a friend of the pub, Mitch Proverro, probably your colleague, advice now freelancing from the Albanian capital city, Tirana. Yeah, that Mitch has been all over this stuff and he's been everywhere.

But just to reiterate something we always say, we're using Albanian mafia as like a catch-all for Albanian organized crime. no singular Albanian mafia. And also mafia in the technical sense isn't this, but it gets used for basically all ethnic organized crime pretty much these days. And few are close to Southern Italians, a few are closer to Southern Italians than Albanians when it comes down to it. True. You know, like pizza shops in New York, it's pretty much all Albanians now.

Literally in the Bronx, pretty much little Albania. So, you know, but there is no like one guy at the top of it. You know, there's no hierarchy like that. There are just disparate groups of Albanian organized crime that are doing what they can. Yes, and they're super tight-knit, as we're going to learn further down the show as well. So, yeah, that's quite a lot of touch points there.

You've got Albanian gangs, Maga Island, Eddie Rama, blokes punching protesters on the beach, lots to chew over this week, so let's dive right into it. So let's get you up to speed on the news story, leading all of this before we get into the Ponzi schemes and bar shootouts. In case you haven't already seen it, begins in 2020 when Donald Trump loses that year's presidential election to Joe Biden,

Jerah Kushner, Trump's son-in-law, of course, husbands of his daughter of Ivanka, is tossed cruelly from his role as the president's senior advisor back into the humdrum world of business. Fortunately, Kushner is able to keep the bailiffs away by securing around $2 billion from Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund to start his own investment firm Affinity Partners, which launches the following in July in Miami, Florida. Wait, why aren't we getting Saudi money? We could go out for like fight month or whatever it is as well. That'd be great. I've been trying to for for years now. That's a shame. The vast majority of this cash Kushner spends on firms in the US and Israel, but he's a real estate guy at heart. And one of the plots of lands he's ironed up is an island, not far from

Flora, called Sazan, which is a former military base. I mean, almost everywhere is a former military base. Albania. Apparently it's popular with birdwatchers and locals taking boat rides. During Trump's first term, Kushner and Trump, Ivanka, had holidayed or vacationed. I'm sorry. In southern Albania. Yeah, you're welcome. And they've been blown away by this exact spot. Quote, we swam to the island. I'm doing, I'm doing Ivanka Trump actually. We swam to the island. What does she sound like a Brooklyn? She sounds like a Brooklyn cabby. I mean, I'm actually going to take that because I thought I sounded like some weird

like British Rada kid trying to do an American accent. We went on a hike, she said in a podcast. We were just captivated. To be fair, like, I've heard the same from everyone who was gone on vacation to Albania in like the last 10 years, which a lot of my family has. I haven't because I'm stuck here making a podcast over the summer, but what can you do?

It's life, Sean. Yeah. Well, I mean, I'm going to add my name to that list because Albania is so cool. Anyway, despite Sazan, this island being publicly owned, Kushner soon reaches a deal to develop it with Albanian PM Eddie Rama. Rama, very interesting guy, accomplished artist, writer, and at 6'7, a former pro basketball player. I interviewed him back in 2015, very charismatic and charming, very slippery fellow to interview. Now, Rama has done a lot of things in Albanian PM.

He's launched the judicial squad called the SPAK, which I'm now going to call SPAC, because it's easier. to combat Albania's chronic corruption. He's been wrapped up in corruption himself, and he's even proposed a Muslim Vatican, a 27-acre micro-state in Tehrana called the sovereign state of the Bektashi Order. But what you have to understand about Rama and Albania is that almost every ounce of its politics is facing in one direction, the EU. Albania applied for EU membership in 2009, and it's been official candidates since 2014, the year after Rama got into power. He's been there. It's been there quite a while. The official state line is that Albania will be ready to join the block in 2030, which would

obviously give it a gigantic economic leg up. This might not seem the biggest deal when we're talking about a real estate development with the US president's son-in-law, but it really is. So Kushner shakes hands with Rama. Kushner then teams up with a Brooklyn office space guy named Asher Abysera, I think is how he say his name. They then turn their sights on an undeveloped bit of land, some five miles from Suzanne called Zvernik. Beautiful, pristine beaches, sea turtles nesting,

sheep grazing. To one side of this peninsula is the Mediterranean Sea and, just over 50 miles west, Puglia, Italy. Also, incredible vacation destination. To the other is a sapphire blue lagoon where pink flamingos

flock, ancient villas and the city of Laura. So far, so idyllic. But this in Albania, you don't just get to sign a contract and start digging foundation piles. In September 2024, a group of villagers sends a letter to Kushner's firm affinity. They urge it to stop, quote, taking actions that undermine the real property rights of the village. So Kushner has said in the past that, quote, with developments, you never make everyone happy. And he's definitely right here. Turns out, he's especially right, actually, and that Zvarnik is at the heart of a heated battle

between villages and a cabal of local landowners, they say have stolen it. Wait, wait, wait. So what this boils down to is that Kushner like inadvertently finds himself in the middle of like or internecine Albanian conflict. Yes. Yeah. Like between local landowners and villagers that probably has blood feuds going back 17 generations. That stays pretty much spot on.

I did a story about blood feuds years and years ago and there was like two guys living opposite each other on the street that had sworn they'd kill each other so they couldn't leave the house and they just drank bottles of homemade like moonshine all days. There's so many stories about that. There's an old New York story about the guy who came in like the late 90s or 2000s to like, I guess he was some sort of like conflict resolution guy came to like the Bronx where the Albanians were to like resolve a bunch of blood feuds that had carried over. Something along those lines.

But either way, you got to feel bad for Kushner at this point. Like the last place in the world listeners you want to be is in the middle of an like inter-albanian conflict. Like whatever you do. Correct. Do not. Do not try. If you find yourself getting that situation, get out of that situation as fast as possible. I mean, also like the Albanian guy running around New York fixing blood fuse is like God tear village voice article.

I would read that in a heartbeat. I think it might have been a Times magazine article, but a Times article. And it probably wasn't as like. I think there was some embellishment there. It wasn't like people were like, you know, it wasn't like the streets of New York. That's shootouts. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But it still was fascinating.

We did it all. Super fascinating. We've done a couple of episodes on the Albanians. This might have been when I did the Albanians in the Bronx, like taking on the Italian. That was like one of our first 10 or 15 episodes. Oh, yeah. We haven't done the Albanians for years, actually. We haven't done it for a long long time.

You got to do a Europe update, man in New York. Yeah, yeah. So. Hellbanians. Yes. Kushner, I mean, we're not saying that he's like deliberately. walked into a gang deal, right? But he has found himself in the middle of a quieter shitstorm. So one of these alleged landowners is Arta Shehu. A small bit of whose colorful career you just

heard about in the cold open. But when the villagers hand Kushner's partner Abyser a list of four folks, including Shea Hu, that they say are kind of insinuated in the deal, he tells them that, quote, none of these are our partners. Spoiler alert, they are. In April this year, Kushner's group put up construction fencing lined with razor wire at the beach, and when locals show up to protest, private security guards blocked the site. When one of these guys grabs him across the beach and punches him in the throat, it is the spark Albanians need to make something bigger out of all this. You see, Eddie Rama's socialist government has been plagued by accusations of cronyism and corruption going back years and years. A murky land deal involving rich foreigners and Shehu, a suspected gangster, plus video of the protested by the security guard, is enough that by May, thousands of people are marching through the streets of Tirana, the Albanian capital, a movement they call the Flamingo Revolution. Yeah, my buddy, Simon Stravsky, who was just here in New York saying, on my couch, he did a segment for PBS News Hour while there.

but yeah, it looked crazy but also like heavy amount of wild social media conspiracy mongering which isn't, it's not necessary at this point like there's enough to complain about here you don't need to take everything five steps further you know? Apparently you do if you're on Facebook

but yeah it's pretty crazy or Instagram yeah or Instagram yeah but follow us there please please follow us by June the masses have four demands right they want Rama to resign they want an interim government,

constitutional electoral reforms, and land and investment law changes. I'm just going to say it. That is quite optimistic. So there it is. Shady deals, a protest to getting his face rearranged, up to a quarter of a million marching through the castle.

That is a lot, actually, in Albania, and a big, big headache for Eddie Rama. But there's way more intrigue besides. For one, it turns out that of around $1.4 billion Kusner plans to invest in Suzanne and Zverneck, around 10% of it has already been paid to Artasheu. That is hardly a small amount of cash and definitely not the zero dollars Kushner's Brooklyn Powell had claimed before.

Yeah, I mean, 10% is just standard bribe fees for this part of the world, like where every family has an uncle whose nickname is Mr. 10%. I think there was like a mad rush for like Western Europeans to buy up land in Albania a few years ago and they're just all getting their entire life savings robbed, which is that's on you, man. Don't invest in Albanian property just on the spur of the moment. The tourism industry there is boob,

like it's a, I know some Albanians that were investing there. Like, the term industry there is going to step up like it's not, you know, southern Italy is already too crowded. Same thing with like France and all that. This is affordable. It's cheap.

Croatia already went through the roof. I really think Albania is that frontier. But it's funny like, um, there's also probably, you know, not Miami in the 80s level, but definitely a bunch of cocaine money

being washed through the tourism industry there. I would speculate without any sort of, I know someone who rented a car there and like kind of banged it up. And then when he returned it, they were just like, yeah, whatever. Like, you don't have to pay anything. It's fine. Like, you're clearly, clearly laundering money from London co-cay sales there. Like, have you ever seen a car rental company be like, oh, actually, yeah, don't worry about it.

Like, we're good. You're fine. Yeah. Can you give me his number? I want to know where that place is. Yeah. Our guy, Shea, who is deeply wrapped up in, in the. kind of thing we're talking about right now.

Anyway, if that wasn't embarrassing enough for Maga Island, which is what I'm calling it because I'm aware of a thing called SEO. In June this year, just days after the Flamingo Revolution kicks off, SPAC, that anti-corruption squad set up by Eddie Rama, announces that it has put

Shehu under investigation for his role in massive drug trafficking and money laundering operations. Amid all this are accusations that Shehu has been forging documents to get his hand on Albanian land, exactly the thing the villagers have been accusing him of for years. And to add to the controversy, SPAC files leaked to international media mentioned Belgian officials who hint that top Albanian politicians

are meeting with Shehu and other alleged cocaine traffickers and that, quote, these meetings appear to be related to real estate projects in Albania, potentially financed with illicit funds with the support of political authorities. My God, Sean, cocaine proceeds financing real estate, especially vacation resorts? I mean, I've, I never, you know, like who would have guessed? I mean, it's, it is like that recent Info Wars skit where they're like, this goes almost all the way to the top. It doesn't go to the top, almost all the way. Anyway, Aris Rusenos also formerly of vice, right?

I think he was big time vice guy back in day. Anyway, he went to Albania for unheard and like I did back in 2015. found that he could pretty much just rock up into Rana and get a sit down with Eddie Rama. Asked about the characterization of his nation as a narco state, Rama responds, quote, you can say whatever you want, great opening. But narco state,

a narco state that started to close negotiating chapters with the EU, it doesn't match in any shape or form. If Albania has problems with corruption, Albania has never fought corruption like these years. If Albania has problems with crime, Albania has never fought crime like these years. And when it comes to crime, I'm telling you, we pay a big price in the Balkans to the fact that people from the Balkans are very active inorganized crime outside. But the industry of the crime is not here, it's there.

He's half right if I'm going to be super charitable. I'm Erlon Woods. I'm Nigel Poor. We're the hosts and creators of Ear Hustle from PRX's Radiotopia. When we met, I was doing time at San Quentin State Prison in California. And I was coming in as a volunteer. The stories we tell are probably not what people expect from a prison podcast. Like cooking meals in a prison cell?

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Subjects include history, science, geography, mathematics, and culture. If you're a curious person and want to learn more about the world you live in, just subscribe to Everything Everywhere Daily wherever you cast your pod. I mean, I like, do we do organized crime? Yes, but not here in other countries. At the same time, it's kind of accusing them on being. an narco state when you've got all that crazy stuff happening in like Belgium and Holland right now

it's like uh you know he could turn he could definitely flip that I mean your guy, Bull Jilis? Do you see that thing about 1030 people? Oh yeah yeah yeah sending a like a freaking platoon out there to take on like a missing drug like it's insane you know? Yeah it's fully mad

Eddie should flip it around also Eddie Rama's like such a good name for I mean anything really it could be like a bon villain It could be a sports star. Sounds like someone who sells discount electronics. That sounded like a slight on the Albanian people there. No, no, no, no.

Not at all. It's like, you know, I was thinking of for some reason Crazy Eddie, who is a Syrian Jew who had the crazy Eddie's crazy pride. Dude, like New York classic stuff. Look that stuff up if you guys haven't seen it. I was just thinking about this quote, if Albania has problems of corruption, Albania has never fought corruption like these years,

which is just incredible, right? It's like, if I've got a wall, I've never been banging on that wall like I am right now. The wall's not coming down, man. The wall's very big. Anyway, at this point, you would be forgiven for thinking, why is this flat white drinking journalist

going on about a land deal involving the Trump family? Is he just trying to ride the coattails of controversy to get a few more clicks? Is he actually going to talk about organized crime at all? And you would have a point. Yes, on number one. Yes, on number two. Yeah, yeah, you would.

So let's park now and dive back into the history of Albanian gangs. That's the bit you like, isn't it? Particularly how Vlora became arguably the biggest hotbed of gang crime in the country and how Arta Shehu came out of that world to become the benefactor of some $120 million in MAGA money. So let's take it back to the 1443 Battle of Nish, then Bulgaria. No, I'm only joking. Let's start off in 1912. Because, uncoincidentally, it is in Vlora.

in that year, the Albanian national hero Ismail Chamele declares independence from the Ottoman Empire. Only around 10,000 people actually live in Flora at this point, which in Albania, an overwhelmingly rural country, is still big enough to put it in the top three. But Albania from 1915 then goes for a series of shaky, shall we say, iterations, from principality to republic to kingdom, to Italian fascist occupation, German Nazi occupation, short-lived democratic rule, and in 1946, the People's Socialist Republic of Albania, a Soviet satellite ruled by a revolutionary nutcase, Inver Hodger. I'm going to quote from my own New Yorker piece on Albania from 2015, because I wrote it and I wrote this too, because I wrote it and I wrote this show too, and I want to.

Quote, after Hodger's partisans routed Italy's fascists and then the occupying Nazis at the tail end of the Second World War, Hodger began installing a government that turned Albania into something like a Balkan North Korea. Beards were banned, as was religion. Several hundred thousand bunkers were erected across the country. A network of gulags held thousands of political prisoners, many of them passing through the hands of the Sigurimi, a secret police force that numbered some 30,000 officers within a population that grew from 1.1 million to 3.1 million during the era. Did the listeners know why I don't write for the New York anymore? That is maybe a story for another day. God, this guy never stops with the lore creation. I don't even think I know.

But it's because they're generally making awful choices and they're lucky they already have a collection of solid writers holding it down because some of these pieces just stink. That would be one side of the story. The other side would involve an assignment in Manchester and a guy and me and a hotel room. But anyway, yeah, maybe we, I don't know, we can say something on a Patreon show if anyone's interested. And I've put that link on the story that I wrote back in 2015 on the reading list in case you're subscribing. Now, in which case I love you.

It was definitely one of the biggest moments of my career. In fact, maybe the biggest really. Anyway, Hodger also bans the Canun. the medieval Albanian set of laws governing the country's frequent and highly codified bloodfews that we just mentioned. For those caught in possession of a book of canon, years in labour camps, and the banishment of their families to opposite ends of the country. Get caught carrying out a blood feud? According to legend, Hodger would have you buried alive in the coffin of your victim. Hodger dies in 1985, but so hemetic is his Albanian North Korea that it survives the fall of the Berlin Wall and even the

Soviet Union and limps on until 1992. Incredible. I think I mentioned this in the previous show, but like there was a great New York Times article where the guy goes to Albania in 92 and he meets people that don't know that the Berlin War has fallen. That's how like closed off they are. Anyway, but if Albanians thought they'd have it easy after that, they are wrong. For one, the country's economy is a total basket case and presided over by oligarchs and idiots. See also literally any other Eastern Bloc Nation during the time. But in 1997, a series of nationwide saving plans turns out to be gigantic pyramid schemes. Most of the country loses its money and all hell breaks loose. You have protesters ransacking and blowing up anything to do with the state in what really

becomes a collective form of cathartic anger against the previous communist regime. Then President Sally Brescia, who, in a sign of how stagnant Albanian politics has become, is still Eddie Rama's main opposition, opens up weapons caches to pro-government civilians, which means, I mean, who told him that was a good idea? And this means that there are over half a million firearms, grenades, rocket launches, the lot, all in public hands. Some of these gentlemen then loot police stations, grabbing uniforms and pistols and bulletproof vests. A friend of mine in Tehrana described militiamen parking an actual tank on their

front long. Thanks to Barisha's brilliant brainwave, Albania, which has a population barely above 3 million, is now home to thousands of angry young men, most of whom are stone broke, packing the kind of weaponry usually reserved for national armies, with police disguises in a country with a barely functioning government that is just off the coast of Mafia dominated Italy and right on human smuggling and trafficking routes that bring people from the Middle East and Africa, through the Balkans and into Western Europe. If you ever want to understand how Albania became a criminal powerhouse, just press that go-back button, replay that sentence over and over. That is it. Given that blood views have been particularly prevalent in the north of Albania, perhaps Little Flora

down the south had been flooded with the families of those caught planning them. Whether that's true or just something I thought up on the spot, by the end of communism, Laura's population has been overtaken by cities subjected to Ember Hodges Cold War manufacturing Renaissance. Dures, Skodja, Elbassan, I mean, these are beautiful places too. Florida is basically still the same popular seaside result it being back in the Ottoman years, in fact, as far back as ancient Greece. But it's not just deck chairs and two-for-one Yeager bombs. Here is Mitch Proverro.

To set it up, obviously when they came out of communism in 91, on having been the poorest and most isolated communist country. You know, Albania had a tougher transition than, let's say, Czech Republic, you know, or something like that. Some of those countries. It had been pretty brutal and pretty isolated. And then, you know, within about five or six years, the entire country lost its savings off of a Ponzi ski. You know, it was burgeoning diplomacy. Also, this is, Kosovo was happening at that time.

So you had the KLA was fighting against the Serbs and NATO intervention was coming along, you know, or arrived by 99. And so as a result, there was a huge influx of like diaspora, organized crime, militants, militants, you know, Kosovovar freedom fighters, Kosovovara freedom fighters that were also an organized crime, you know. So the whole country was incredibly unstable. But Vlore in particular, it's kind of the closest. city to Italy, geographically and culturally. It had always had a pretty decent relationship with the Mafias, and particularly Bari, the Sacred Heart, United Heart, which is, they call it the fourth mafia in Italy behind La Cosa Nostra and Dragata and the Camorra. They're pretty powerful. And so they always had this close sort of smuggling relationship, and then in the 90s, it really escalated. So when the whole country kind of fell apart, you saw pick up gangs or militias or just

mobs of angry citizens started looting the country of everything of value. And at that stage, everything in the country that was of value were basically like Kalashnikovs and RPGs and some heavy artillery. And so they looted all of these arm stockpiles, which kicked off like a four or five-year period of complete instability. And Vlory was one of the hardest hit. They needed Italian troops to come in and restore law and order to the place by 1999. It was really out of control. And it wasn't getting a lot of, you know, they called the city of gangs.

I don't know whether it's the epicenter of organized crime today in Albania quite as much. But at that period it was, there was a joke that like murders only count if they find a body and like great joke the right the the crime rate in Albania's actually always been pretty low but there was obviously massive

inter-mafia fights going on and gangs going on and the central government had collapsed there was no way for them to even track this stuff or really try to prosecute anybody they barely existed a friend of mine in Toronto lives in a neighborhood that for two years was run by a local

warlord like he had he had out on the street checking cars, it was for security, you know, to make sure the looting gangs didn't come in. And, you know, he was a local strongman, you know. Did he get the trash taken out on time? I mean, that's what people care about. Yeah, no, that's it. They tolerated it. It was until the central government finally started sort of cracking down and replacing these guys. And they did sort of give up power. Wasn't bloody minded. I think they probably got jobs in the government. But, you know, I don't know a tremendous amount. about that, but there were entire sections of Albania, which were completely out of government

control for years, including in the capital. So there really wasn't a government. And thus, Vlore like, you know, connection with the Italian organized crime milieu. And as a result, that's sort of where things had popped off. Popped off is a pretty good way to describe a city whose gang scene goes berserk in the late 90s. Vlora is home. to literally dozens of outfits, which if you look them up on Wikipedia, almost all of their members are quoted as being deceased. One of the groups is called The Gang of Pussy, which I think was the name of your high school rap band, wasn't it?

It was gangsters, if we say. We just covered Steve Miller band songs, but we rap them. Please say that exists. Another one, another major gang, is the Gang of Sol. Or Solet, I'm not really sure, led by a dashing, young go-getter named Mertazer or Zani Soshi. By 1997, when Albania really does go through the looking glass, Soshi is actually behind bars in neighbouring Greece. But as we learned in our recent -ish episode about bank robber vassilis paleo-costas, Greek prisons are made out of cardboard

and guarded by small children with sticks in their hands instead of guns. Sochi then escapes in February 1997, heads back to Flora and builds a gang of 16, house to capitalize on the city's breakdown in public order. The Gang of Soul does particularly well because it gloms onto something called the Vlora Salvation Committee. And if any sort of group in the 90s is calling themselves something salvation, it ain't good. Now, you've got to forgive me at this point because I'm getting a lot of this information from like the internet equivalent of Albanian tattered library books. But as far as I can see, the Vlora Salvation Committee is a communist paramilitary group, but hurt that their big daddy Hodger is, A, dead and

B, well out of fashion. So in the wake of the 1997 pyramid schemes, they form an anti-government cadre and later that year push out 5,000 state troops delivered to Vlora by President Berisha. It says one member, quote, the revolt swept away all the state institutions, and for six months, Vlora was Boreisha's Stalingrad. It's so weird how this tiny city has gone from totalitarian leftist dictatorship to laissez-faire free-for-all to chaos and back to communist paramilitaries in the space of like half a decade. The Salvation Committee erects barricades all over Vlora and claims to be working in the interest of its people, but it also works very closely with organized crime, particularly the gang of soul.

Danny Sosci himself claims to be a socialist and against Borecia, and at one point he goes on Albanian TV and says, quote, not only does Borecia deserve to die, but all his supporters deserve to die in shame. There is no state, only a band of gangsters. I'm also a gangster warring against the gangster Borecia, but I'm the stronger one, because I'm with the people. It seems that Soshe's boys are at the top outfit in Florida by 1999, when the madness of the pyramid schemes has died down. But by this point, Albania's organized criminal underworld has cemented in place, and it is able to spread its wings across Europe and the United States by attaching itself to expac communities that have fled well. Everything that's happened in the homeland since the turn

of the century. Albania, by the way, has one of, if not the biggest diaspora of any nation on earth per capita. Prior to 1990, if you'd managed to get out of Albania or Kosovo, you've pretty much were guaranteed residency in the West, you know, as a political refugee or whatever. And so there's an Albanian diaspora that's out there. And, you know, they're pretty prominent in the U.S. They're prominent, you know, particularly in New York City, New Jersey. There's a significant one in the U.K. And there's always been one in, believe it or not, Belgium and the Netherlands. And as a result, there's been some members of this diaspora have, you know, gotten really involved. in organized crime activities around the world.

Like, it's a bit of a cliche, but most Albanians will tell you it's a bit of a fair cliche. Like, they punch above their weight for such a small country. Right. It's a really small group of people. When there's only like, I mean, I guess there's five, six million between Macedonia, Albania and Kosovo. There's probably a million or so in Greece.

And then there's like, depends on what you mean by Albanian ancestry. I'm sure a few million in Turkey, and then these diaspora. So it's a really small group of people, and they all know each other, which is part of what makes them really good gangsters at times, is they work off of really tight clans. Nobody flips. Nobody ever testifies. You're testifying against your cousins.

It's such an honor-driven society and honor-driven culture. It's one thing to commit crimes against people outside of Albania, but disloyalty to your family is probably the greatest thing you could do. next to letting a guest get hurt. Like, that's a seriously profound stuff. And so they take this stuff really seriously and always have. So it kind of gave them a strong dislike or lack of regard for conventional law and order and policing. They'd lived under the Ottoman chaos to an extent.

You know, the joke is two-thirds of Albanians are Muslims. And that was because they asked when the Ottoman showed up like, okay, so Christians and Jews, pay a tax, but Muslims don't. Okay, we'll take the no tax god. You know, and like, that's, that's a fairly common joke, even throughout the Balkans, the Basmians will say the same thing. So they come from, and then you go to communism where you couldn't trust the government. The government constantly spied out you, made everybody's lives absolutely miserable, killed a fair number of people. You know, I wouldn't put it on genocide levels, but they were, they were killing political dissidents. People were going to jail for 20, 30 years. Everybody was an

former, who's just super oppressive police state. And, you know, coming out of that, you know, this is a society that doesn't really value government very much. And they really haven't had a particularly capable one since that. So as a result, you kind of have this mentality where I joke, like, nobody would ever steal your wallet. That would be completely dishonorable. It would be pathetic, you know, but like paying taxes to like a bunch of guys in a parliament that aren't going to do anything for you, that seems a little iffy. You know, and so there's a certain mentality there that, like, has sort of turned, at least, like I said, an aspect, of course, not all things into organized crime.

Yes, of course. A small, small percentage. But they are good at it, the ones that are, and they definitely punch above their way. It's in 1999 that we get the gunfighter Arta Shehu's Flora Bar from the Cold Open. So she opens fire, two or perhaps three men drop. Shehu's uncle dies in his arms, he vows revenge. According to one police source, Shehu had spent time in the Albanian special forces, not a man to mess with.

But when the cops go searching for perps and witnesses, Shehu disappears into the wind. We don't really know much about Shea Hu's rivalry with Sosci, other than suggestions that he's working with the Sacra Corona Ulita, the so-called fourth mafia from nearby Puglia, and he's also suspected to own a fleet of boats for human and narcotics trafficking. I mean, that's Shea Hu, of course. Do we need more reasons for Soshi to target him?

It's Albania. His body's dropping like GTA. Shea Hu flees flora. But his absence doesn't stop this pokey little seaside town from becoming what Josh Hammer writing for Newsweek in 2001 calls, quote, Ground Zero of the Great Balkan breakdown. Side note, Hammer's writing is in March 2001. I actually thought Ground Zero was, like, purely a 9-11 term,

but it's actually used first in the 1940s, to describe the land directly beneath a nuclear bomb blast, TIL or whatever the kids say. Yeah, I thought that was a pretty well-known phrase before and kind of still used all the time for other things, even in New York right now. I mean, it could be that I'm stupid. I think that's maybe the conclusion I would have to draw there. Never. Small business owners, business owners, you guys are going to want to hear this. Every crew recover on the show has one thing in common.

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and actually travel with us at westjet.com slash 30 years. No, no, you never, you would never, no, you're far too nice for that. Anyway, moving on, I'm going to quote some more from this article by Josh Hammer because it's great at showing why Flora is such a hotbed of organized crime. Quote, nestled on Albania's southern coast, just 45 miles across the Adriatic from Italy, the crumbling port of Lorry, love journalists going to foreign countries

and just calling everything crumbling. The crumbling port of Lory is a smuggler's paradise. Countless sandy coasts hidden along the rugged shoreline provide ideal loading bases for high-powered speed boats laden with heroin, hashish, guns or human cargo. An under-equipped, underpaid police force is nearly powerless to catch them. The Albanian government had, in its desperation to get Vlora back under control, dispatched a cop called Sokol Kotyu to become its police chief.

Within three months, he's kidnapped and held at gunpoint for capturing six gang speedboats. He also breaks up a plan to extort Kurdish refugees by the gangs. in flora. He's like an Albanian Harvey Dent and people love him, a ray of uncorruptible moral light in an otherwise tainted state until he's not. Because in 2001, Cotchew is caught up in a scheme by two Albanian businessmen to ship Colombian cocaine into Albania before shipping it on to Western Europe and Russia. Cotchew finds out he's about to get stung by his former colleagues and goes on the run for three weeks taunting them by calling media. from his various hiding places.

They finally get to him, but, adds the article quote, Cops say revelations about Cotchu's corruptions have demoralized them and prompted many to reassess the hero Cops record in Flora. It wouldn't surprise me if he staged his own kidnapping, says one long-time colleague. He was always an adventurer, exactly the kind of character whom Albania's reformers will have to contend with as they try to bring their country some respect. So here you have the portrait of a city.

where things have really gone off the rails. The government has been pushed out. Even the shiniest cops are corrupt. The local gangs are working hand in hand with Italian mafiosi, and all the while Albanian criminal groups are extending their influence into the global drug trade. They've already made their way to the source of cocaine production right in the jungles of Colombia. In 2001, Zani Sosha is arrested and sentenced to life imprisonment for a whole suite of crimes, leading an armed gang, hostage taking, wounding and of course, murder.

Around that time, Soshi's old nemesis Arta Shehu pops up again, this time in Miami, Florida. It seems he's persuaded Uncle Sami's on the run from pro-communist gangs in Vlora, which if you think about Sosci's resume kind of makes sense as a cover story, but of course it's nonsense. In 2005, Shehu builds a colonnaded colonial-style villa on a golf course, I assume there are like 10,000 golf courses in Miami. I don't know. This place is apparently worth $3 million, and he adds a portfolio of condos all around the city. One of them is located, ironically, on Miami Beach's Flamingo Drive.

Shehu's wife is a former Albanian television personality, but he keeps firmly out of the limelight in his refugee years. That doesn't stop Italian anti-mafia investigators from keeping up on him, though. They firmly believe he's keeping old company, particularly the Italian and Albanian gangs now commanding huge chunks of the Globeball cocaine trade. For example, in 2009, a senior member of the Sakra Konuk Corona Unita rent part of a luxury building owned by Shehu back home in Flora, which he then converts into a restaurant, gelataria, and upstairs casino. So the Sakara-Koreanna Unita, right, is known as Italy's four. fourth mafia based on a poolie i think southeast of the country so basically right across albania and have we we haven't we haven't and they're pretty big pretty big deal i've thought about it before yeah oh you thought about it okay cool all right that that's all right that's all

it then um yeah so this guy i mean italian prosecutor's sentenced this guy for using the properties to launder drug money in 2030 i mean you can't make it up right there is always money in the ice cream parlor. So they prosecute him in 2013. They think Shea Hu has made over a million dollars helping him to do it, but decide they don't have enough evidence to charge the exiled Albanian. They pass their findings onto Albanian colleagues, but one of them tells the OCCRP, quote, I don't know how this investigation went. It's Albania. Yeah, yeah, went nowhere. And on this goes, Albanians peeking into Shea Hu's affairs, getting no help from cops in Albania, and him just continually slipping through the net, increasing his real estate portfolio, and allegedly

getting more and more closely involved in the Coke trade that's now got Albanian prints all over it. Shea here is a quote, well-known name, says a prosecutor in the Pooleian city of Leche. He was in our file suspected of drug trafficking. Shout to Leche. It's just so beautiful. Pooley is like maybe the best holiday I ever went on. It was just like jaw-droppingly gorgeous in every town. Yeah, just one of the best places you could ever go, and it's actually cheap.

Shehu actually provides reporters with a letter from the same prosecutor dated June 16, saying that he had not been convicted there. I'm just going to say, if you have to produce a letter saying that you're not convicted somewhere, you're probably doing some shady stuff. But beyond the drugs and the people smuggling and the Sacra Corona Unita, folks back home in our. Albania start kicking up a stink about the land deals. Shea, he was snapping up in and around flora, including Zvernik, this pretty sliver of beach outside the city. It could be Zvernets, I'm not sure. Does it matter?

No. Sorry, Albanians. Briefly, because all land had been appropriated under Enver Hodges' communist regime, its fall precipitated a deluge of claims, most of them overlapping, some completely false, with folks submitting deeds going back beyond 1912 to the Ottoman period. This system obviously lends itself to backhanders and corruption, and it seems that Artasheu had done similar at Zvernik. Through a lawyer, he submitted Ottoman papers seeming to prove that his grandfather,

Sejahou, once owned the plot. In 2007, the state awards it to him. This makes the villagers competing for the land, quote, crazy, one of them tells the Wall Street Journal. We got angry. It was a psychological problem. You don't, just saying to that report, that is a tautology. You don't need to print the second part of that quite.

Anyway, Coults actually proved that one of the documents Shehu's team had handed in was forged by an archivist. It's always those goddamn archivists. Both he and the lawyer are later convicted on charges of falsifying documents. All the while, Shehu can't help but get wound up in funny business to do with drugs. In 2019, Albanian authorities, authorities photograph him hanging out with a suspected top mob boss in Miyorka. The mob boss is later arrested. Yet again, Shehu slips free. The following year, a COVID hits case you don't remember that, hideous period. Cocaine use skyrockets

around the world and law enforcement is picking up evidence of Albanian gang presence in countries as far apart as Ecuador, Nigeria and Fiji. I'll do a short bonus episode off the back of this one actually on how Albanian gangs have taken over the scene in Europe and beyond. Some stats, recent crimes, loads of it that I left on the cutting floor. But for today, we're going to focus on big Arta Shehu. Now, we are all the way up to this spring, 2026. Jerrah Kushner of Anka-Trump have been swimming near Flora. They're in love with the place. Kushner wants to turn it into a resort. The locals are revolting. People are protesting in Tehrana.

Eddie Rahmer is under pressure and the international press are starting to wonder who this Arta-Shehu guy is. is the one in the middle of the Magar Island Thuror. Well, he won't stay in Enigma for long. In June 26, so just a couple of months ago as we're recording this, SPAC, that Albanian anti-corruption squad, it gets a judge's order to arrest Shehu and 19 other members of what they claim is a massive European drug importation ring. This Albanian network puts cocaine onto ships in Ecuador,

disguising it among fruits, sugar and other products. The gear is ripped off the ports at Antwerp and Rotterdam, processed in small factories and sold throughout Europe. The money from these deals then makes its way back to Albania, either in the form of cryptocurrency or smuggled on buses in cash. It's then laundered through local real estate deals. There's a big red skyscraper in downtown Tarana, for example, that's alleged to have been built entirely with drug money, plus hundreds of coastal projects just beyond the capital. According to SPAC, quote, it seems clear that Artasheu holds a leadership position within the organization. He travels around the world to attend meetings to organize trafficking.

He seems fully aware of the real estate investments, but is clearly linked to cocaine trafficking, most likely overseeing the network. Here is Mitch for more. We've seen a flattening of the whole drug trade, where now anybody, if you can get the cocaine, you can get it onto a container, it's not a siloed anymore. It's more wide open. And this is why we see a lot of gang. cooperating with each other, or in the past they might be rivals.

You know, they'll all just throw into the same container. So this caused a bunch of money to pop up. And particularly since about 2015, 16, you know, it's been fairly well noted that the peace agreement with the FARC sort of opened up Colombia and the cocaine trade to anybody willing to go get dirty. Anybody willing to go down there and put them the work could start. trafficking, whereas prior to that, you pretty much had to go through, at least from European perspective, you kind of had to go through the Andrangina. They're the ones that had the relationships

with the Ack, with the right-wing paramilitaries, and the labs, and, you know, you had to work with them to do a deal. When that all fell apart, it became wide open. And so this is where you see around this time period, eight years ago, is when you see the explosion of Albanian mafia, Moroccan mafia, certainly Antwerp in Rotterdam blowing up as the main entry points. And this was because just about anybody could go and start setting up deals

instead of like the normal trickle sort of run by the guys in Calabria, you know, managed by the guys in Collabria. On another note, the Andragut, recognizing the situation just move themselves up one level and now work as like financiers

for the most part and like insurance and, you know, like sort of brokering deals. and things like that. They don't really touch, you know, I'm sure some do, but they're not really known

for touching drugs now. They understood, okay, wholesale markets opened up, we're going to step up into financial services or whatever. I love it.

So a lot of money flooded in, and what do you do with all this money? In Albania, to get back to a real subject, in Albania, a lot of it is clearly going into commercial development, luxury apartments,

resorts, property, building, giant, giant office towers and giant luxury condo towers that nobody seems to really want. But this is a way to turn cash that was made in Belgium or whatever into money, money that you can spend, you know, pouring concrete, pouring, you know, tar, like electricians, you know, I'm sure unions or contracts and all this stuff. That's a really excellent way to money long. And so the idea that Shehu in his development and purchasing of property and stuff like that might have

been connected to these guys, it at least passed the reasonable sniff test. I'm not saying he's guilty of anything, but most of these groups have a need for these types of services. And he was observed with them. He was intercepted on Sky ECC, or people were intercepted on SkyECC, I should correct, talking about him and his role that he plays in money laundering and helping them. essentially turn pallets of cash into useful things. And that's when he started buying, you know, he's buying all this property.

So this is where when we say like, did Jared Kushner accidentally get into a land deal with the mafia? It's not the Albanian mafia. It's not that big of a stretch. So the biggest problem that they face right now is that Shehu's reputation was bad enough. And there are already enough complaints going on about his, lawyer had been convicted already of forging Ottoman era documents and things like that. SkyeCC stuff involving him had been sent to the prosecutors in Albania, the independent prosecutors.

So all of this kind of put a target on his back. And as a result, the independent prosecutor sees about 120 million euros, at least 110 million of it was given to him. It could be all of it, I don't know. And this was money paid by the Kushner Project to him for land. The estimate is they paid about 240 million to various chunks of land. But right now, Shehu is on the hook for about 110. And that's been frozen. So the current status of the development, it's really unclear. If you ask the Albanian law enforcement or ask Albanian officials, Rama talks about it probably once a week or so.

They say, oh, we're going to let it work its way through the system. We're going to let the prosecutors. We're going to let all the lawyers. They're going to handle this. and we'll resume. We're definitely going to build this, though. It's definitely going to happen. I have a hard time seeing that happen.

I don't know whether you walk away. Rama, for all of his power internally, and his strong connections to people all over Europe, all over the United States. He really runs in an elite Davos-style crowd. Kushner, Soros, you know, knows everybody in the EU. I don't think he can fix this autocratically now that it's out. normally these guys sort of work

behind the scenes to smooth everything over and push the way through and give it a nice veneer of legitimacy because again, getting into the EU in 2030 is the entire game for these guys. So I think they're a little stuck. And the other thing is the prosecutors

are independent. They have a very difficult time getting anything done because the government doesn't love cooperating with them. It's not an oppressive country. It's not crime-ridden, you know, but there's a behind the scenes patronage and, you know, level of high-level corruption stuff, they, you know, everybody knows is there, and they don't have a ton of confidence in the courts.

And the independent prosecutors do appear to be doing at least as good a job as they hope, you know, they can. I doubt, I'm sure that there's some investigations they don't take on because they don't want to declare war or whatever, but they do seem pretty earnest and, you know, good-willed. So now we've got this case of like, wow, there's actually, a legal thing going on. I don't really know how that's going to play out because, mate, it's Albania. We don't have a tremendous track record of seeing how

legal. So, our lovely listeners, there you have it. The Maga Prince, the Albanian Island, the exile gangster, and the flamingo revolution. Quite a tale, one which, as you just heard, stretches all the way back to the inception of whatever you'd call the Albanian mob,

I think, the Mafia, Schiphtari or whatever they call it. They're a chaos, paramilitaries, and a shootout in a provincial bar. What is there not to love? Jericho Kushner has already had to cancel one project in Serbia. He's actually hoping to develop the exact site bombed by NATO forces in 1999. Wait, wait, wait. So you're telling me this guy is doing deals in Serbia and Elbe.

And... I mean, that's more impressive than the Abraham Accords. That's nothing to... I guess they're both in in trouble right now. But even getting that close and Serbia and LBA, I mean, that's some wild stuff right there, man. It's pretty hubristic stuff.

And if you've been to Belgrade, that's a deal making, bro. They're still pretty, I would say they're still moderately pissed about that whole episode. And you can see it because they kept the building half smashed to pieces that the bomb went into. So it's right in the middle of Belgrade. It's one thing to be an American doing deals in Syria, I mean, in Syria, in Serbia.

It's not going to be an American doing deals in Serbia and Albania at the same time. That's just, it's impressive. Yeah, it's the guy's got spunk. I'll give it to it. And this is, I mean, Serbia, they just gave Miladich like a hero's fucking funeral as well as crazy stuff. Anyway, yeah, incredible, he was thinking it was going to be some kind of like Trump-branded hotel. Anyway, here, so not like in Serbia, here he's actually already sunk a ton of his money into the project. So does he walk away?

Does he just take the loss? I mean, it's a lot of money, even for a Kushner. Does the Flamingo Revolution put an end to Eddie Rama's 13-year rule? Will somebody finally put Arta Shihou behind bars? Like, he is the Teflon Don of Albania, man. Watch this space. Do not Instagram here. There's like a thousand of those.

guys actually. Do not Instagram me crimes as always and we are going to see you next week. Yeah I think part three of the IA Free Stuart Newton story is out next week and if you have a listening part two it's incredible. Go do that

and have fun guys enjoy your week yeah just enjoy fill yourselves with love and enjoy and listen to more podcasts episodes about horrible crimes Thank you.