Albanian gangs control violent vice networks

Albanian gangs control violent vice networks
The Times (London) - July 17, 2004

BY: Daniel McGrory

ALBANIAN gangsters have established a grip on Britain's sex trade by using extreme violence.

Vice squad officers estimate that Albanians now control more than 75 per cent of the country's brothels and their operations in London's Soho alone are worth more than £15 million a year.

They are present in every big city, with Albanian-run brothels recently uncovered in Glasgow, Liverpool and Cardiff as well as in provincial strongholds including Telford and Lancaster. Police say that armed Albanian pimps have scared off underworld rivals. The women they traffic from Eastern Europe are petrified of giving evidence against them.

The few women who have dared to testify describe being raped, beaten and starved.

They are warned that if they try to escape their families back home will be harmed.

One senior Scotland Yard officer told The Times: "Pimps have always used violence but these Albanian gangs are truly vicious."

They have fought off rival Turkish, Chinese and Jamaican gangs in London as well as local pimps in turf wars that have sometimes ended in gunbattles in the street.

Many of the Albanian mobsters came here as refugees fleeing Balkan wars. They used established people-trafficking routes through the former Yugoslavia to smuggle girls from several countries including Moldova, Lithuania and Ukraine.

Once they are in Britain the women are kept as virtual sex slaves. Although this is not an industry where statistics are reliable, vice squad officers estimate that at least 12,000 Eastern European women are now working in this country as prostitutes.

The figure could be much higher, as there is evidence that the trade in trafficked women is growing.

The sex industry is an obvious attraction for organised crime because the profits are enormous and the penalties hardly punitive.

Recent high-profile court cases graphically demonstrated the money to be made and the lengths the Albanian pimps are willing to go to to retain their control.

Luan Plakici, 26, a self-taught immigration expert who came to Britain seven years ago claiming that he was escaping the Kosovo war, was jailed for ten years last December for kidnapping and living off prostitution.

His victims told how even the slightest dissent was met with beatings and rape.

Plakici confessed to illegally smuggling 60 women here. He had amassed a fortune of well over £1 million in cash, as well as a string of properties across Europe.

He married one teenager, telling her on their wedding night that she had to work as a prostitute. In less than two years his "wife" alone earned him Pounds 144,000.

United Nations officials have given warning that expanding Europe's borders will mean more prostitutes from Eastern Europe heading for Britain. "Crime like this is made a lot easier by open borders that not only allow an increase in legal trade but also an increase in illegal trade," Burkhard Dammann, chief of the UN's anti-humantrafficking unit, said.

The testimonies of the women are depressingly familar. They are offered jobs in Italy, Germany and Britain as waitresses or chambermaids, and raped by their "employers". They are then forced to pay off colossal amounts of money for their so-called travel and accommodation.

Police are concerned that the victims are getting younger, with 14-year-old girls found locked up in brothels.