Albanian gangs have quickly acquired control of the UK’s drug business and all associated crime, spreading quickly throughout the nation.
Using connections to Colombian cartels to obtain the best-value cocaine and brutally retaliating against any who dare defy them, Balkan kingpins have established an almost unstoppable control over the criminal underworld by picking off smaller organisations one by one.
However, they now face competition.
Emerging gangs have been observing the Albanian success story from a distance as the UK’s demographics shift quickly, and they want a piece of it.
Eastern European businessmen are responding by expanding into unexplored criminal areas, such as your favourite provincial town or seaside resort, while competitors brazenly muscle into established territory in the big cities.
Following an invasion of Balkan gangs terrorising local communities, jails around the south coast, from Dorset and Devon to Hampshire and Sussex, are now full of Albanian detainees, according to Ministry of Defence (MoD) prisoner statistics obtained by the Daily Mail via a Freedom of Information request.
According to data from all prisons in England and Wales, the picturesque county of Oxfordshire, which is home to large portions of the affluent Cotswolds, has more Albanians incarcerated there than anyplace outside of London and Kent.
As newcomers—often asylum seekers from Africa and the Middle East—seek to establish themselves on Britain’s frequently profitable criminal circuit, it represents a major shifting of the guard.
However, despite decades of domination, the traditional ring leaders are still in place in some places.
Experts claim that despite a surge of new competitors, such as African and Caribbean gangs in Tottenham and Peckham, old criminal groups are still feared in some parts of London.
While the Tamil community continues to terrorise Croydon decades after they first took control, Turkish families are holding onto power throughout the capital’s northern region.
Similar to this, gangs from Pakistan and India that emerged in the middle of the 20th century patrol Birmingham’s streets with few true competitors.
Additionally, other cities, such as Glasgow and Liverpool, continue to be run by British gangsters and are impervious to international organisations encroaching on their territory.
There is no doubt that dozens of different nationalities are now putting their mark on the UK’s crime map, which is being torn apart and redrawn.
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Albanian gangs have quickly acquired control of the UK’s drug business and all associated crimes, sweeping across the nation at an alarming rate (Pictured: five Albanians armed with knives, machetes, and axes dance in clip captioned: ‘Ready to break into cannabis residences’).
Two thugs are seen posing with big wads of cash in this Instagram photo.
However, other ethnic groups are influencing crime in Britain. Aouidj Abderaouf, an Algerian phone thief, is shown passing a bag that he later stole.
According to The Mail’s examination of MoD prisoner statistics, 1,053 of the 7,590 foreign inmates are from the Balkan country, demonstrating how tightly Albania controls criminal activity in the UK.
HMP Maidstone, HMP Rochester, HMP Cookham Wood, HMP East Sutton Park, and the Sheppey Cluster jails alone are among the 139 fellow citizens incarcerated in Kent’s prisons as a result of their initial influence in east London.
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An Albanian living in the region ran a network that let criminals escape for £2,500, according to a December Daily Mail investigation.
Alfons, a criminal who ought to be in prison, admitted to an undercover reporter that he used four drivers, all of them were Kosovan-Albanian.
Later, he provided our reporter with a link to the meeting location on the Maidstone M20 Services in Kent, which is the final rest and refuel stop prior reaching the Eurotunnel terminal that connects to the Continent.
In the meantime, Albanians make up more than a third (28) of the non-British detainees at Essex’s HMP Chelmsford prison, demonstrating their influence in the southeast of the nation.
After being deported, Albanian drug dealer Valentin Roci slipped back into Britain in a dinghy and learned in August that he would be expelled once more for selling cocaine.
In Southend, Essex, police pulled stopped a Ford Mondeo with a broken brake light and found Roci driving without insurance. This was his most recent arrest.During his search, officers found £1,195 in cash, eight wraps of cocaine, and one wrap of cannabis.
Additionally, one in three foreign inmates in Sussex (26), one in three in Bedfordshire (18), and three-quarters (28) in Durham are Albanians.
Additionally, they comprise a sizable section of the prison population in Hampshire, Suffolk, Devon, Cornwall, and Lincolnshire.
What steps should be taken, in your opinion, to regain control of the UK from strong organised crime groups?
Albanians are still powerful in Kent and Essex (seen on the left is Alfons, a Kent resident who helps a criminal escape the UK for £2,500; on the right is Valentin Roci, an Essex drug dealer).
An image posted on social media shows an Albanian mobster driving a car while brandishing a gun. According to our map, Balkan gangs have been compelled to expand throughout the nation.
This image shows a significant quantity of cannabis, a high-end watch, and a menacing-looking firearm resting on a table.
However, certain areas have fared well against Albanian gangs, frequently as a result of their domestic criminal networks’ enduring supremacy.
Take the money.A group of 138 Albanian prisoners, including 26 in Wormwood Scrubs and 45 in HMP Wandsworth, prowl London’s prisons; however, the groups that are raising the bar for criminality are more noteworthy.
The City is now dominated by Algerian phone theft gangs that prey on affluent workers having a drink after work.
Due to this tendency, more over half of the North African nation’s prison population (92) is currently incarcerated in London.
The capital’s Wandsworth, Wormwood Scrubs, Thameside, and Pentonville jails are the top four for the number of Algerian inmates.
Enzo Conticello, an Algerian burglar, was captured on camera stealing a whisky executive’s Givenchy purse from a pub in Soho without understanding it had a £2 million Fabergé egg and watch.
He went after Rosie Dawson, Craft Irish Whiskey’s director of premium brands, when she was greeting a friend outside the Dog and Duck tavern on Bateman Street.
After the theft, Conticello was imprisoned for two years and three months, and neither the egg nor the watch were found.
After being caught on camera stealing backpacks containing £4,000 worth of laptops, tablets, and headphones, Adam Zawi, Oussama Fadage, and Aouidj Abderaouf were imprisoned.
Additionally, Munir Ghilas, a 28-year-old Algerian immigrant, stole almost £31,000 worth of products from 16 different City employees in bars in central London between August and September of last year. He spent eighteen months in prison.
New immigrant groups are also competing in the capital’s criminal scene, contributing to the city’s multicultural population and creating issues for the police.
Due to their growing presence on the streets of the city, some 60 Afghans, 27 Eritreans, and 27 Syrians are currently incarcerated in London’s jails, especially at Wormwood Scrubs and Wandsworth.
Samiullah Ahmadzai, an Afghan, has been bragging on TikTok about his life behind prison in Wormwood Scrubs in Hammersmith, West London.
Videos show Ahmadzai shooting Afghan flags he has drawn on the wall while perched on the top bunk of his bed. The footage then pans to his well-stocked assortment of goodies, which includes fruit, chocolate bars, fizzy beverages, and sausages.
Due to his alleged involvement in a “dangerous” trafficking organization, the Afghan is being detained in the jail and is presently facing extradition proceedings at Westminster Magistrates’ Court in order to return to Belgium.
Aron Hadsh, an Eritrean immigrant, was sentenced to 14 months in prison last year for sexually abusing a teenage girl with learning disabilities at a park during the day.
In June of last year, after the 19-year-old was dispatched by her mother to pick up fruit from a food bank, he attacked her while residing at a taxpayer-funded Holiday Inn close to Heathrow.
In the midst of a recent migratory wave, London also houses all of the nation’s Libyan prisoners in Wandsworth, HMP Pentonville, HMP Thameside, and Wormwood Scrubs.
According to analysts, the historic old guard is actually holding on in some districts of the capital.
There are 47 Turkish prisoners in the city’s jails, and Turkish crime families continue to dominate several areas of north London.
The Tamil community is still feared throughout Croydon, and African and Caribbean populations predominate in Tottenham and Peckham. These long-standing beliefs are supported by the figures.
“Our street gangs reflect the neighbourhoods they come from,” Dr. Simon Harding of the National Center for Gang Research told the Daily Mail.
“They will be white if that neighbourhood is white, south Asian if it is south Asian, black if it is black, and so on.”
Samiullah Ahmadzai, an alleged migrant trafficker, is one of several Afghan criminals who have recently resided in London.
A 19-year-old in West Drayton was attacked by Eritrean immigrant Aron Hadsh in June of last year after her mother sent her to a food bank to pick up fruit.
Additionally, Mr. Harding disclosed that gangs that are primarily British or Irish control both Glasgow and Liverpool, even though the latter is not included in the MoD’s prison figures for England and Wales.
There are just 19 Albanian inmates overall in Liverpool’s HMP Altcourse and HMP Liverpool, while around 91% of the convicts are British.
In fact, the majority of these gang members are Scouse themselves, having grown up in one of the major criminal families in the city.
“There hasn’t been a chance to penetrate the criminal networks in those regions,” he stated.
For instance, Albanians have mostly taken over the cocaine trade, but they are unable to penetrate Liverpool due to the city’s powerful gangs, which have been the same six major families for a long time and won’t change.
According to the crime specialist, “when you dig into history, you find that the original migrant groups in Glasgow and Liverpool were Irish.” They still retain a lot of influence and authority on the fraternities in those cities, even if they have settled and integrated.
“The Albanians can’t gain traction because the groups are so close.”
“Cities further north have a lesser multicultural split when compared to the likes of Birmingham and London,” added expert witness Gary Carroll.
These do include Newcastle and Liverpool. Additionally, the majority of elite criminal groups in Scotland are still predominantly white, particularly in Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Aberdeen, above the level of urban street gangs.
Prison sentences have not been sufficient to stop bosses operating their criminal enterprises from within Liverpool, which is divided among a number of strong and established gangs.
The Huyton Firm, which was established in the late 1990s and has grown to be one of Merseyside’s most feared criminal groups, is particularly notorious in the Liverpool crime scene.
For around 20 years, the mobsters ruled Merseyside with an iron grip. They collaborated with Thomas Cashman, who killed Olivia Pratt-Korbel when she was nine years old.
However, cryptic Encrochat text messages that were made public in court detailed criminal lord Vincent Coggins’s plans to exact revenge on a rival gang for a narcotics raid, which ultimately led to Coggins’ arrest and imprisonment.
He was sentenced to 28 years in prison for narcotics trafficking and blackmail after a trial.
A number of the Huyton Firm’s members resided in Spain, where they cultivated connections with significant international criminal organisations, such as the Kinahan cartel.
According to insiders who spoke to Daily Mail, the Huyton Firm continues to bring drugs into the UK even though Coggins and his key accomplices are currently incarcerated.
In the meantime, a specific gang that emerged in the early 2000s seems to continue to have a big impact on the backstreet drinkers, scrap yards, and dockland miles north of Liverpool’s city center.
Between 2003 and 2004, a series of car bombings that targeted residences, nightclubs, and police stations were carried out by the unnamed gang.
In other news, Curtis “Cocky” Warren—possibly one of the most well-known drug dealers in the world due to the attention surrounding his life—went from being a low-level street criminal to establishing himself as a significant importer.
After serving 13 years in prison in the UK for drug-related charges, he was freed in November 2022.
Warren now claims to be impoverished, but prosecutors have informed judges that he is worth almost £200 million and is connected to a network of illicit assets. Numerous stores and flats in Liverpool’s downtown are allegedly owned by him but are not registered in his name.
Before Warren was killed in 2007 while leaving a gym, his associate Colin Smith oversaw Warren’s business back in Liverpool while he completed his prison term in Holland.
The old criminal order that had previously governed the estates of Netherley and Speke broke apart as a result of Smith’s death.
Over time, the Bird of Prey, a former boxer, emerged as the new nominal leader of Liverpool’s south.
Before an assassination attempt in 2010, the Bird of Prey—who cannot be identified for legal reasons due to his lack of a criminal record—had made a name for himself as a gangland enforcer and was feared by many.
Local mobsters still control Liverpool, such as Vincent Coggins (above), who was a founding member of the Huyton Firm.
The British and Irish gangs in Liverpool have been difficult for Albanian gangs to overthrow (pictured: Paul Woodford, left, was a gang enforcer, while Thomas Cashman was deployed as a hitman).
The same cannot be said for Manchester, where almost one in ten inmates (35), including 26 in HMP Forest Bank, are Albanian. However, the prosperous northwest metropolis is also dealing with issues caused by other ethnic groups.
Despite housing only 4% of Britain’s foreign prisoners, its jails house 20% (17) of the country’s Eritrean convicts, including 12 in HMP Risley.
After being kicked out of their last tent village by the authorities, a group from the African nation was permitted to establish a camp in the heart of Manchester last year.
Eritrean asylum seekers told the Daily Mail that it was “madness” that the authorities had not intervened to stop them from moving from one location to another.
In the meantime, the city has experienced an increase in Nigerian and Sudanese immigration, which has resulted in an increase in the number of inmates in Manchester’s jails—18 and 19, respectively.
Gift Oladele, a Nigerian immigrant living in Manchester, was found guilty last month of raping a young woman on her way home from a night out. It turned out that he had attempted to attack another female victim a few years prior.
In August, Edris Abdelrazig, a Sudanese asylum seeker residing in a three-star government hotel in Stockport, Greater Manchester, was accused of trying to abduct a 10-year-old girl in front of her father.
In the meantime, one specific nationality has been responsible for an oddly high percentage of crimes in some parts of the UK.
Lincolnshire’s HMP Morton Hall and HMP Lincoln jails house 11 of the 37 Gambians now incarcerated, while housing only about 4% of the country’s total convicts.
Additionally, a much larger percentage of foreign inmates in Yorkshire are Slovaks and Vietnamese offenders than in the rest of the nation. Thirty-six and twenty-three percent of their prisoners are incarcerated in the local jails.
Gift Oladele, a Nigerian immigrant living in Manchester, was found guilty of raping a young woman while she was making her way home following a night out.
Due to increased rivalry, Albanian gangs have found new opportunities, and the Albanian crime machine is gradually taking over formerly affluent areas of the United Kingdom.
The most terrifying development in recent years has been the transformation of once-idyllic seaside havens on the south coast into hotspots as thieves look for unexplored criminal opportunities.
According to ONS statistics, violent crime has climbed in Devon, Cornwall, and Sussex over the past four years, while sex crime has skyrocketed in Hampshire, Dorset, and Sussex.
More over 40% of the non-British detainees in Dorset, Devon, and Cornwall prisons are either Albanian or Romanian, indicating that eastern European groups have been the primary source of the increase in criminal activity.
Of the 75 inmates at these facilities, 15 are Albanian and 17 are Romanian.
Albanians make up about 24 of the 88 foreign inmates in Hampshire, all of whom are housed at HMP Winchester, and 26 of the 78 inmates in Sussex jails, including 23 in HMP Lewes.
Some of the most popular hotels for asylum seekers, including three in Bournemouth alone, are located along the south coast, which is a major entrance point for migrants.
Some immigrants try to reach the UK as far west as Cornwall. Romeo Zani, an Albanian immigrant, was told he would be deported for the fifth time in January after he was discovered attempting to enter the country through a variety of channels, including a yacht in Falmouth.
Additionally, they are extending their powerful drug operations southward. A reporter in Brighton was able to buy a gram of extremely pure cocaine earlier this year, which is typically sold by Albanians in the affluent Cotswolds.
Two Albanian “asylum seeker” brothers, Klevis and Artur Hoxhosmani, were arrested by police in their native country after it was discovered last year that they had started their £335 million cocaine enterprise from a car wash in Bournemouth.
The south coast has not been immune to Romanian crime groups’ recent rise in organised thievery; last year, Claudia Rostas, a 33-year-old frequent thief, was arrested stealing a £6k diamond ring from Hamilton’s jewellers in Dorset. Because her son is receiving cancer treatment, she was saved from going to jail.
Romeo Zani, an Albanian immigrant, was apprehended attempting to enter the UK by a variety of means, including a yacht in Falmouth. Other immigrants try to land as far west as Cornwall.
A chaotic and ever-changing crime map has resulted from the influx of criminals from other nations and the expansion of Albanian gangs, but in some places, the status quo remains entrenched.
Birmingham’s post-war Commonwealth migration wave was largely composed of Indian and Pakistani immigrants, and many families from these nations still reside in the city.
In fact, 12% of the foreign criminals at HMP Birmingham are Pakistani and 21% are Indian.
In the middle of the 20th century, the West Midlands region saw a higher proportion of Caribbean migration, and these groups continue to have a significant influence on crime. Eight percent (27) of the region’s foreign inmates are from Jamaica, including fourteen in HMP Oakwood.
Expert Mr. Harding notes that these demographic shifts resulted in the growth of criminal networks, and their capacity to maintain control has demonstrated their tenacity.
“Wolverhampton may be more Black African or Caribbean, while other places like Aston may be more South Asian or Pakistani,” he stated.
Indian criminal organisations are less structured and more focused on families. It’s a somewhat complicated picture that mostly has to do with the fact that various populations have settled here.
“The golden rule is that the composition of street gangs is determined by the makeup of the neighbourhood.”
They engage in a wide range of illegal activities; one Indian national was detained in December for using social media to advertise people-smuggling services.
Additionally, a Pakistani national was detained in Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter last year and sentenced to eight years in prison for attempting to smuggle 72 gun parts in a car that was being imported from Pakistan to the United Kingdom.
Some well-known instances in the West Midlands feature Jamaican offenders, such as the mother of a murderer who stabbed an aspiring football player while attempting to assist him in escaping to a safe house in the Caribbean nation after the murder.
Birmingham and the West Midlands are still dominated by Indian and Pakistani communities (see Mehakdeep Singh, left, and Sehajpal Singh, right, who killed a DPD driver last year).
This image shows the instant before Aurman Singh, a DPD driver, was ambushed and killed by his attackers.
Despite all the trends, crime is becoming more mobile thanks to social media, which enables various ethnic groups in various areas to band together and take control.
“Where it does not involve families, [gangs] are established around networks of people who have come out of prison and come together,” Mr. Harding stated. This could occur practically anyplace.
“People can connect and affiliate to these groups in different ways thanks to social media connections, and you can now find young people who may be affiliated with a gang in Croydon but are not in that part of London.”
These gangs are not the pure ethnic gangs found in the USA or Central America, but rather blendings. Even a Woolwich-based Somali gang may include some Eastern Europeans.
According to Mr Harding, this has led to new cities like Ipswich, Milton Keynes, Coventry, Derby and Sheffield “developing a gang culture that wasn’t there in the past.”
“It is a mix of groups in these cities,” he continued. “They wouldn’t have been mentioned as having gang issues even seven or ten years ago.”
