From this time on, Serbs in Kosovo began to complain of harassment by Albanians who were demanding the status of a full republic for the province. The Serbs were particularly worried because, thanks to Serb emigration and a high Albanian birth rate, the proportion of Serbs in the province had now fallen to a mere one for every nine Albanians.
It was through the subtle manipulation of these grievances that Slobodan Milosevic, the head of the Serbian Communist Party, rose to supreme power. In 1989 he stripped Kosovo of its autonomy, a move that sparked a frantic round of war, ethnic-cleansing and land-grabbing across the whole of Yugoslavia which would eventually lead to its collapse. The conflicts continued throughout the 1990s until NATO intervened. But by then it was too late to prevent the Mafia expanding.
Before the war, heroin from Turkey had travelled to Western Europe via Serbia, Croatia and Slovenia. During the conflict this traditional ‘Balkan’ route closed and the Albanian gangs with their local knowledge found they were perfectly placed to take over the trade, guaranteeing safe routes through the conflict zones. At first they only assisted other gangs, but once they had the ability to expand their horizons, they were perfectly poised to take over completely. They based themselves in Veliki Trnovac in southern Serbia, which was quickly dubbed the ‘Medellin of the Balkans’.
As the war reached Kosovo proper, so ethnic Albanians were added to the list of nationals that qualified for ‘refugee’ status. The only problem was that there was no way to tell the Kosovo Albanians from other Albanians and the Mafia’s barons took advantage of the situation to spread across Europe like wildfire. They went first to Albanian communities in Germany and Switzerland where they quickly took over the heroin trade. Within a few months their tentacles had reached out as far as the east coast of the United States, and the Albanian drug syndicates had become among the most powerful on the European continent.
According to Professor Ernesto Savona, the director of Italy’s Transcrime research institute, the Albanian Mafia has now grown so powerful that it has already chased the Italian Mafia, once its patron and big brother, right out of the lucrative business of trafficking migrants. ‘Albanian organised crime has its foot in the door, which is Italy, and this means people, prostitution and drugs,’ he warns.
By the spring of 1998, alarm bells were ringing in British government buildings about increasing numbers of Albanian immigrants arriving hidden on the backs of lorries at UK ports. One internal Home Office report noted, ‘Albanian Mafia gangs are very vicious and make the Italian Mafia look like crowd-control officers at a local whist drive. Concern has been expressed in the Immigration Service and the police at the involvement of Kosovans in organised crime in the UK and Europe.’
By the end of 2003 at least a dozen gangland murders in Britain had been attributed to the Albanian Mafia and police were warning of a massive potential for an all-out turf war between Albanian, Turkish and Pakistani gangs.
It failed to emerge, but experts believe the Albanians are simply biding their time and building their numbers. They are believed to be concentrating on building wealth through people-trafficking and other allied activities before moving on.
All of which means that, despite the large numbers of Albanians operating in the UK, there are at present even more to be found on the other side of the Channel.
I arrived in Calais little more than a year after the closure of a controversial refugee camp just outside the port town. Opened by the Red Cross in November 1999, the centre quickly transformed Sangatte from a tiny village with a population of around eight hundred into a frantic staging post for those attempting to reach the UK. With more than sixty-eight thousand asylum-seekers and illegal immigrants housed at the camp during its three-year existence, Calais soon became a firm base for the Albanian Mafia gangs making a profit out of helping them on their way.
The problems came to a head on Christmas Day of 2001, when 550-odd illegal immigrants tried to invade the Channel Tunnel in an attempt to walk to Britain. More than 150 overwhelmed police and guards, and got seven miles into the tunnel on Christmas Day before finally being turned back.
But within hours of the first group being brought back, a second wave of 400 made their own attempt. This time the French called in the riot police, who fired tear gas and made more than fifty arrests.
The incidents were enough for the company behind the Channel Tunnel, Eurotunnel, to win a legal challenge to have the camp closed. (Ironically the site was owned by Eurotunnel and was used as storage space before it was leased to the Red Cross.)
Yet despite the closure migrants are still flooding into northern France hoping to reach Britain with the aid of the smuggling gangs. Calais is still their preferred port because it is incredibly busy – more than 30 million people pass through it each year – and because it has the most crossings and offers the shortest route to the UK. But a tightening of security and the introduction of new high-tech equipment to detect migrants hiding in vehicles has forced them to travel further afield.
By the end of 2003 the number of people attempting to sneak on to ships at Calais had fallen by more than two-thirds, but other ports along the coast had experienced a sharp increase. The once-quiet ferry terminal at Caen, close to the beaches made famous by the Normandy landings in 1944, experienced a 400 per cent increase in the numbers detained while trying to board vehicles. Similar increases have been detected elsewhere in France, as well as in Ostend and Zeebrugge in Belgium. Initially hit hard by the new measures, the smuggling networks are rebuilding and are said by some to be stronger than ever.
As Barry, my bootlegger guide, and I travelled east along the coast, through Boulogne, Dieppe and Le Havre, then across to Cherbourg and St Malo, agents and the small groups of illegal immigrants they had taken on were easy to find. Some were camped in squalor beneath bridges or in abandoned buildings; others had made temporary homes in disused factories. For those who had been smuggled by the more organised gangs the conditions were often worse. They would find themselves in stinking squats, twenty to a room, with no running water and few provisions.
In Ouistreham we met twenty-two-year-old Iraqi Amal Abbas, who along with a small group of friends had spent weeks travelling across Europe before stumbling at the last hurdle. ‘We are desperate to get to Britain. We have friends there who say the Government is good and that there is work. I thought we would be able to get on a truck but the gangs control everything.
‘The Albanians have their guards everywhere. If you try to go past them they ask for the name of your contact. It is like a code. If you do not give the right name they beat you up and send you back. It is too difficult to go on our own so we will have to go with an agent. Our families are trying to borrow money to send us so that we can pay. It is the only way. They are like a Mafia. They try to pretend they are your friends, that they want to help you to have a new life, but the only thing they care about is the money.’
Further along the coast in Cherbourg, France’s second largest port and said by some law-enforcement officials to be in danger of becoming the new Sangatte, dozens of migrants are escorted into the town each night to be smuggled through the ferry-terminal perimeter fence on to lorries at dawn for the journey across the water to Poole in Dorset or Rosslare in Ireland.
It’s not only at the ports that attempts to board the lorries are made. Back in Calais, Barry and I waited until night had fallen to make our way to an infamous petrol station close to the ferry terminal. Hidden from view by bushes, we watched as a British-registered lorry pulled up for the driver to fill up with diesel. As soon as the pump began working, three men dashed out of the shadows and, keeping out of sight of the driver, tried to open the rear doors. After a few seconds of fumbling they sprang open and one of the men climbed up. It soon became clear that the lorry had been filled to capacity – there was no space for anything or anyone. The men shut the doors and retreated into the shadows to wait for another try.
‘Once the pump’s going,’ Barry explains, ‘the driver can’t hear a thing. One of those guys will be working for the gang, the other two will be the clients. I’ve got quite a few mates who drive lorries across Europe. They’re vulnerable, but you just can’t be on your guard twenty-four/seven. It’s worse for the guys driving the curtain-sided trucks. All someone needs is a Stanley knife and they’re inside quick as a flash. A few of them have ended up completely paranoid – sometimes even missing their ferries – because they’ve found a slash in the side of the tarp but they can’t find anyone inside. It usually means someone’s had a go and either switched vehicles or just not had time to get inside. Not only do they face fines for having illegals but they have to pay for the damage to the tarp too.’
Within a few months of my visit to France increased security measures were announced at Cherbourg and other ports on the coast but, according to Barry, the only effect this will have is to change the way the gangs operate: ‘There’s no way they’re ever going to put a stop to it. There is too much money at stake and too many people who want to travel from one country to another but don’t have the right. Drugs gangs don’t stop smuggling cocaine just because they think they might get caught, they look at the money they’re going to make and think, Fuck it, it’s worth the risk. This is exactly the same. All this extra security, all it’s going to do is put the price up.’
And Barry knows better than most the mindset of the gangs involved in the people-smuggling trade. In the five years since he became a full-time bootlegger, shuttling back and forth across the Channel with huge loads of spirits and tobacco, he has seen his income drop to the extent that bootlegging alone is no longer worth his while. Now, like many others in his profession, he supplements his income with small-scale people-smuggling, working hand in hand with the trafficking gangs.
Away from the crowds of booze-cruisers and day-trippers in the bar of a small hotel in a quiet street close to the railway station, Barry tells me more: ‘A lot of the bootleggers are doing it now. In fact, I think they’re all at it to some degree because it makes sense. If you get stopped by Customs with beer and fags, they take the lot and you lose all the money you were going to make. With people you’re laughing because you always get paid up front.
‘It’s not at all difficult to find people. They’re coming out of the woodwork at every port you can think of. Half the time you don’t have to do anything. As soon as they see that the van has UK licence plates they come up and ask you how much it is to go to England.
‘Sometimes it’s the people who want to travel who approach you but most of the time it’s the agents, the people from the gangs. They hang out in all the same places you find the immigrants and the bootleggers, round the bars and in the car parks of the big cash-and-carry warehouses.
‘They don’t want people to be able to cut out the middleman and approach you direct. They’d rather do the deal for you and that suits me fine because that’s how you get regular work.
‘Sometimes, when the agents approach you, they offer to adapt your van. They say they can put in a false floor, fake panels or a suspended roof so you can get a few people in there. I’ve never gone in for any of that. I’ve been lucky so far but I’m bound to get stopped one day, and when I do, my only out is going to be that they must have slipped in when I wasn’t looking. The more work you do on your van, the less chance you have of getting away with it.’
I ask Barry to explain the precautions he does take and he ushers me out into the street to see his van. It’s a plain, fairly battered Ford Luton van and we walk round to the rear door where Barry points to the lock. ‘You see this? It’s busted. I broke it myself. If I ever get stopped all I need to do is claim that I locked the van and that the people inside must have broken into it some time during the crossing. There is no way they can prove that I let them on deliberately. I always make them climb in and out themselves and open the door. Then you get them to move some of the boxes around so that they’re hidden from view. More fingerprints. That way their fingerprints are all over it.
‘Another thing, I only ever take families. No way in the world will I take a bunch of young blokes because you never really know who these people are, and for all I know they might beat the shit out of me and steal the van. Families are a much safer option. You know they’re not going to try anything when they’ve got their kids with them. You don’t want them too young, mind – you don’t want the little bastards making any noise as you’re coming down the ramp.’
Working with the agents and on the fringes of the smuggling gangs, Barry has seen a shift in the way the business operates since the closure of Sangatte: ‘It used to be that everything in Calais was being run by the Turks and the Kurds along with a handful of Chinese. I got to know a few of them and they’re a real mixed bag. Some of them are illegal themselves and others have got full British citizenship but they spend all their time in France because that’s where the money is.
‘It used to be a bit of a laugh and only a few people were getting involved but now everyone’s doing it and the authorities have started paying a lot more attention to the vans. People are getting caught.
‘Also, the people behind it have changed. Now that the Albanians have moved in it’s getting nasty. It’s a problem. It’s scary, more violent. They don’t care about anyone apart from themselves. They’ve pulled out of the port towns and moved their operations into Brussels and Amsterdam. That means that, unless the people you’re dealing with are connected to the gangs, they’re probably gonna be idiots. It used to be split. You had Indians dealing with Indians, Iraqis dealing with Iraqis, and Chinese with the Chinese. Now the Albanians run the whole lot and deal with everyone.’