Freedom Fighters Gone Wild

Monitoring the Albanian mob has weighty international implications.

by Brendan McGarvey

Last month in Queens, Lulzim Kupi aimed his gun and fired at two Albanian mobsters — one lived and one died. Kupi, a reputed Albanian gangster whose brother is said to be the boss, told the cops that the thugs showed up at his house demanding a $20,000 payoff or they'd hurt his family. This happened not far from a local Albanian-owned pizzeria that, playing host daily to mobsters, allegedly funnels cash donations to the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) in the Balkans. There are local ties.

The boss of an Albanian drug cartel, Daut Kadriovski, is said to be hiding out in the Philadelphia area and maintaining his contacts with shady business partners in the U.S. and abroad. Kadriovski escaped from a German prison in 1993 and has been on the run ever since; intelligence experts claim he is one of the KLA's original financial backers.

Then, consider that one of the Fort Dix Six, Agron Abdullahu, was arrested in May and charged with providing firearms to fellow Albanians from Cherry Hill who were allegedly plotting to attack the South Jersey military base. In June, guards at the Federal Detention Center at Seventh and Arch streets claim to have found pro-KLA graffiti in Abdullahu's cell.

The feds maintain that during their investigation of the Duka brothers alleged plot to attack Fort Dix, wiretapped conversations indicated that the Dukas believed Abdullahu had been trained as a sniper by the KLA in Kosovo during the Kosovo war against Serb troops in 1998 and 1999. Abdullahu would have been only 15 or 16 at the time of the war and there is no evidence that he actually fought for the KLA. His attorney insists that Abdullahu has no connections to the KLA. At least one international organized crime expert offers a parallel to understanding Abdullahu's interest in the KLA.

"An Irish-American kid in Boston [in the 1970s] might have worn the IRA insignias, believed in them as freedom fighters against British troops and Protestant paramilitaries," the former State Department official tells City Paper. "He would have talked about 'the boyos,' but aside from ideological support, he would have had no real connection to the IRA. That could be the same with Abdullahu. He may identify with the KLA as freedom fighters but it doesn't mean he is actually a member of the KLA."

Just what connections exist between Albanian mobsters, accused Albanian-American terrorists and the KLA is a constant source of disagreement among various law enforcement agencies, the U.S. State Department and the Justice Department. The Albanian mob has existed in some form or another in the United States since the 1970s when a small number of criminals — Christian Albanian immigrants — moved to the United States and allied themselves with New York City's Italian-American crime families. (Many more Albanians, including criminals, fled the country in the 1980s after the collapse of the Communist government.) Albanian gangsters worked for the Gambino crime family in the 1980s as hit men and in the mid '90s, one Albanian badass living in Cherry Hill, N.J., was John Gotti Jr.'s bodyguard.

Another Eastern European tough, Alex "Allie Boy" Rudaj, allegedly worked for years for Bronx-based Gambino crime soldier Skinny Phil Loscalzo. After Loscalzo's death, Rudaj recruited more than 30 soldiers, many of them Albanian and Greek, in a bloody attempt to take over gambling rackets. He called his crime family "The Corporation" and tried to fill the void created when the feds arrested a number of Lucchese soldiers who had controlled that part of the Queens underworld. Rudaj and 26 members were indicted in 2004; Rudaj and six others were convicted of racketeering in 2006. Rudaj was sentenced to 27 years in prison.

Law enforcement sources claim that at least one member of Rudaj's organization was also involved in raising substantial funds for the KLA in New York and New Jersey.

A number of law-abiding Albanian immigrants support the KLA, andmany, even in this area, have donated money. One of the KLA's main U.S. fundraisers lives in Brooklyn and runs a roofing business there. The Duka family, also roofers, lived in New York before moving to South Jersey. Some law enforcement authorities speculate that the Dukas and the KLA fundraiser knew one another.

President Clinton and, now, President Bush have voiced support for the KLA and the State Department backs a political settlement that would create a semi-autonomous Kosovo which would in essence be semi-independent of Serbia. (Kosovo, a part of the former Yugoslavia, is a province of Serbia.)

But one former State Department staffer cites KLA and Albanian mob links to Islamic fundamentalists in Bosnia and the Middle East as cause for concern. The former staffer says that the situation is similar to American support of the mujahideen in Afghanistan in the early 1980s during their war against the Soviet invaders.

"In those days, Osama bin Laden was an ally in that fight," the source recently said. "Today he's fighting us. Our government supports the KLA, which is a hybrid political and criminal organization with ties to al-Qaida. How long do you think it will be before the KLA turns on us?"

(editorial@citypaper.net)