"The Albanian criminals were special from the beginning," said Francesca Marcelli, an organized-crime investigator for the Italian government. "When they started appearing here in 1993, they were much different than other immigrants. They have strong motivations and are very violent. Some of them actually pulled machine guns on the son of an Italian Mafioso.
"To do that in Italy is unbelievable."
It is that kind of tenacity, according to Italian officials, that allowed
Albanians to wrest a slice of the heroin-trafficking network in Europe from the Turks and Kurds. It has also gained them respect among the stronger Italian Mafia gangs, who now collaborate with Albanians on everything from numbers running to smuggling refugees.
Crime in Milan is daily punctuated by the big and small deeds of Albanian
gangs. Police recently broke up a child-slavery ring run from an аbandoned warehouse. Crime bosses had bought 20 children for $1,000 each from their parents in Albania. The children, according to police, were hustled onto rubber rafts and whisked to Italy, where they were beaten and forced to work petty street scams, turning over earnings to their masters.
"It's unrefined criminality and it's brutal," said Massimo Mazza, a Milan
police commander.
http://www.friends-partners.org/lists/stop-traffic/1999/0163.html