https://newlinesmag.com/reportage/in-albania-keeping-big-cats-is-the-latest-fad-for-organized-crime

In Albania, Keeping Big Cats Is the Latest Fad for Organized Crime

As gangsters and influencers in the Balkans flaunt lion cubs on social media, vets and activists fear this illicit trade is expanding

In the video, a lion cub is seen peeking over the table at an exclusive eatery on the northern Albanian coast. One of the waiters at the Royal Blue restaurant, dressed in the traditional garb of a white felt hat and red vest adorned with a double-headed black eagle, presents the cub with a large glass of red wine. The small lion stares at the wine before taking a sniff of the hat. The video set the luxury establishment’s Instagram feed ablaze in November. But this wasn’t an isolated spectacle; keeping lions and tigers and flaunting them on social media is deeply embedded in the macho culture of Balkan gangsterism.

On a recent summer afternoon, New Lines sought out the furry star of the Royal Blue, where well-heeled patrons savored the breeze and view over the turquoise waters of the nearby Patok lagoon. The menu boasted delicacies such as the exquisitely prepared and exorbitantly priced red scorpionfish carpaccio. An African gray parrot, endangered in the wild, sat in a cage, chattering away. Kids crowded around it.

But the young lion was nowhere to be found.

“At eight months old, it’s grown too large for a visit,” said a young worker who, like others in this story, spoke on condition of anonymity out of fear of repercussions. “It is too dangerous for you.”

A bartender looked up from preparing macchiatos.

“You’re looking for lions?” he asked. “I’ve got one right here.” He took out his phone to show us a photo of a young lion named Tyson, lying on a concrete floor. In the photo, Tyson is nuzzling the tattooed arm of the bartender, who is rubbing the animal’s chest affectionately. He feeds Tyson fresh meat every night, and when it is especially hot outside, he sleeps in the yard with the lion. (He declined to say whether he owns Tyson or just looks after him).

Across the Balkans, big cats have become the ultimate symbols of power among criminals and influencers, for whom their dangerous nature, exclusivity and high price tags are indicators of success.

For individuals, keeping exotic animals like lions is illegal. Official ownership is restricted to zoos, wildlife parks and approved institutions with special permits. But this has not stopped high-profile Albanians from obtaining lions and flaunting them on their social media feeds. Ildi Patjoni, the owner of the fitness club HitFit, who died in a motorcycle crash earlier this year, would place a lion in the back of his blue sports car. Other local businesspeople have posed with their lions — one in front of his house alongside two SUVs, another outfitted his cub with a golden chain around its neck. Albanian rapper Noizy has been spotted on videos shared by fans on TikTok playing with two baby lions.

Worth around an estimated $23 billion a year, the illegal wildlife trade is the fourth-biggest criminal activity worldwide, according to the World Economic Forum, after arms, narcotics and human trafficking. As one of the world’s most widespread illicit activities, it is responsible for devastating species, destroying biodiversity and generating vast amounts of animal misery.

The owner of the Royal Blue, 56-year-old former police officer Gezim Cela, was arrested in neighboring Kosovo last year. He was extradited to Albania in March and charged with involvement in an organized criminal group for drug trafficking. When police raided his family home, they found guns, grenades and armored cars. Before selling heroin and cocaine across Western Europe, Cela ran a prostitution ring in Italy. Just before his arrest, he moved the title of the luxury restaurant to two of his family members. When we reached out to the new owners of Royal Blue to ask about the lions, they declined to comment.

The inability or unwillingness to clamp down on the cruel yet flourishing trade is proving a test for the governments of the Balkan countries, where animal welfare is a fairly loose concept, and which have varying levels of ambition to be closer to the European Union. Activists and veterinarians struggle to intervene, as powerful criminal networks protect those involved. Wildlife experts now worry that the exotic animal black market could spiral out of control and spread across Europe.

After the fall of communism in the early 1990s, organized crime surged in Albania and across parts of the former Yugoslavia: Violent home invasions, witness intimidation, assaults, kidnappings, decapitations, drive-by shootings, contract killings and threats to law enforcement became standard and are still widespread today.

Organized crime is heavily intertwined with Balkan politics. Albania, a candidate for EU accession, ranks as one of the most corrupt states in Europe in the Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index. Several high-level public officials, including former Prime Minister Sali Berisha as well as other former government ministers, mayors, lawmakers, judges and businesspeople, have been sanctioned or banned from entry to the U.S. and the U.K. for allegedly engaging in corruption and undermining the rule of law.

According to a leaked report from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OCSE), Albania’s current prime minister, Edi Rama, stashed euros worth about $220 million at today’s exchange rates in offshore bank accounts. The money allegedly stemmed from corrupt practices, including bribes taken in exchange for construction permits when he was mayor of the capital city Tirana in 2000 and 2001. Opposition politicians accuse Rama’s Socialist Party of having links with organized crime. In July, thousands of opposition supporters staged a protest in Tirana, demanding that Rama step down over these corruption allegations. Rama denies this and was not formally investigated or charged.

Albanian experts on the exotic animal trade say Balkan gangsters and influencers took their inspiration from Middle Eastern elites.

“It’s a question of status for them — I own a lion, I’m like the sheikh of Dubai,” said Oli Pero, the founder of Justice for Animals Albania, a nongovernmental organization. She was indirectly referring to Dubai Crown Prince Hamdan bin Mohammed Al Maktoum’s pet lion Moochi, a fully grown white-maned cat that he would stroke and feed chunks of meat to on his Instagram account.

The big cats are very expensive to maintain. On the black market, lion and tiger cubs cost from $5,000 to $10,000, said Ariel Vasili, an Albanian veterinarian who specializes in wild cats. They also eat more than 10 pounds of meat a day, which translates into an expense of $2,500 per month, in a country where the average monthly salary is around $900.

Sitting in a cafe in Tirana, Vasili described his clients’ way of thinking. “We wanna boast … a fancy car, a house, six or seven lovers that you keep with your money. … And now the new thing is lion cubs. If you are in the mafia, a mobster, you should have a lion.”

Vasili estimates that there are up to 90 lions being kept illegally by private owners in Albania. He said they are bred in captivity in Albania, Serbia or nearby North Macedonia, and suspects they originate from the same source because they often suffer the same illness, feline infectious peritonitis, a relatively rare viral infection that occurs throughout the world.

“The only way to get this is if you keep a lot of cats together, and they poop in the same place,” he said. “These are all problems that come from a farm. A very well-organized farm in terms of selling but a very poorly organized farm in terms of breeding.”

Police in the Balkans are often at a loss as to how to go after the criminals who buy the animals.

“Most of their names are on the top list of Interpol — the kingpins, drug lords and such — they [the police] don’t want to mess with them,” Vasili said.

Not long ago, in the city of Shkoder, a lion was seen walking around off-leash in a neighborhood controlled by the powerful Bajri family, an organized crime group whose tentacles reach across Europe. Several members of the family are wanted by Albania’s Special Prosecution Office (part of its wider Special Anti-Corruption Structure alongside an investigative bureau and special court) for extortion, illegal gambling, soccer-match fixing and illegally influencing public officials. Some have been arrested: In 2015, Safet Bajri was sentenced to nine years in prison for drug trafficking and setting up prostitution rings in Belgium; his brother Ilir was arrested in 2019 in Italy on the same charges. A TikTok account based in Shkoder also posted a video of their lion “King Didi” walking in a courtyard. The family cars sit in the background with identifying license plates clearly visible. No arrests have been made by the police for the illegal ownership of the lions, according to a well-informed person living in Shkoder, who said the animals likely belonged to the Bajris. “They created their own kingdom in the city,” the person added.

Another high-profile lion, King Simba, shot to fame two years ago when his owners at the Arberia Place hotel near the northern city of Shkoder posted a TikTok video of him. Accompanied by the song “Gangster’s Paradise” by Coolio, a man in shades holds Simba the cub, while a golden Audi A8 luxury car and curvy woman in a leopard-print jumpsuit pose in the background.

Like the Royal Blue lion, King Simba has now grown too large to hang out in the restaurant and has moved into the house of the hotel’s owner, Ervis Martinaj, Albania’s gambling king, who has not been seen since August 2022.

“Simba is now quite large, about a [yard] high,” a waiter from the hotel’s cafe tells us. A red neon sign on its brick walls reads, “The world is yours” — a line from the character Tony Montana in the movie “Scarface.” (The management of Arberia Palace declined to comment when asked about the whereabouts and well-being of Simba.)

Martinaj was found guilty of a slew of charges in 2021, including “conspiracy to commit murder,” and disappeared a year later. It is not clear whether he’s still alive, but many Albanian media outlets speculated that he met a violent end at the hands of a rival syndicate and that his last message home was “Don’t forget to feed the lion.”

It is becoming easier to purchase lions and tigers. Interested buyers no longer need to search the physical black market; they can simply browse the internet or visit a pet shop to acquire these exotic species.

On the online marketplace mirlir.com, where Albanians and Kosovans can buy everything from used cars to office chairs, two lion cubs go for $9,900 each. Cubs are cheaper in what can only loosely be described as a “pet shop” in a suburb of Albania’s second-largest city, Durres, along the coast. We walked down an empty road, shimmering in the heat, and approached the driveway of a private house. Dogs yelped. On Google Maps, the three-story family home was marked as a pet store. Three excited poodles and a Golden Retriever ran around in the front yard. The smell of dog excrement overwhelmed the senses.

Social media had guided us here. On the Instagram account of Ferma Qenve Golum, a pet shop with branches in Durres and Tirana, a white lion cub sits in the backseat of a car, a man sporting a luxury watch cuddling and kissing the cub. On TikTok, there are eight baby lions, a tiny black panther cub, and a white tiger in a small enclosure. In a photo from 2018, a baby tiger sits on the floor of a car.

When asked, the pet store owner assured us that he could deliver lion cubs within two weeks, for $3,300 to $4,400 each. However, after chatting with his son on WhatsApp about the deal, he backpedaled, “We don’t sell lions here.”

When asked again, two weeks later over the phone, whether it sells lions to private customers, the pet shop refused to comment.

Meanwhile, some pet shops have begun advertising lion cubs for sale in Kosovo. At the end of May, Smart Pet Shop in Gjilan, about 30 miles from Pristina, listed two lion cubs for sale on Instagram. When asked, the trader said that he sells only dogs, cats and parrots. The Pet Store in Peja also offered lion cubs for sale on Instagram.

Outside, the shop held dogs, chickens and canaries in cages, while inside, baby poodles and kittens darted around on the white-tiled floor. The business owner and his wife each smoked a cigarette while sitting at the counter.

“I did not know that selling lions and tigers is not allowed,” said the owner, who asked that his name not be used. He told us that the police interrogated him after advertising the cubs, yet he continues to offer other exotic animals, including small turtles, monkeys and dangerous snakes. “I can get them from Belgrade whenever you want,” he said.

Albania is new to animal welfare, with only about 15 years of effort in this area, Pero explained. With challenges like high rates of crime, corruption and few resources, it is difficult to enforce animal protection laws. Prosecutors and judges are overwhelmed with cases, and animal abuse cases are often dismissed quickly because of limited capacity and prioritization of more serious crimes, Pero claimed.

The small Zoopark Tirana in the heart of the capital houses three tigers and four lions, three of whom were rescued from private ownership. Sherkan, a white tiger, and two small lions were rescued from private individuals who had the means to purchase such exotic animals, said Sajmir Mucu, the zookeeper who cares for them. The animals react to him, when he calls for them while walking by the enclosures. The smallest lion, Tuku, was handed over to the zoo only days after its owner got it, Mucu said.

“Illegal trafficking is increasing in Albania and the region,” said Xhemal Xherri from Protection and Preservation of the Natural Environment in Albania, an NGO in Tirana. There is “a chain of people working on it, and a lot of dirty money spent. And there are a lot of people involved in this.” Wildlife is not a priority for the institutions or for the police, he said.

Despite, or because of, the booming trade in lions and tigers, the same mistakes keep being made by those eyeing the exotic pets.

“They take the big cats when they are quite young, like at three months, and somehow forget or just leave aside the fact that they will get big sooner or later,” said Sajmir Shehu from Four Paws, an international NGO active in Tirana that sets up rescue missions for mistreated big cats. Shehu worries about what happens to the lions when they grow larger, but said the owners tend to find a solution. “It might be just to gift the animal to someone, kill them or find a zoo.”

Or they are released into the urban wild. Two years ago, a lion cub was found walking the wintry streets of the Montenegrin Riviera town of Budva, allegedly having escaped from a private home. In 2021, a lion cub walked around Kumanovo in North Macedonia, according to local news reports. The authorities never managed to find it.

A similar situation exists in Serbia. Sonja Madic has worked for Palic Zoo in Subotica, Serbia, for 15 years, and now serves as its director. The popular animal park is covered with green trees and offers visitors a variety of animals — ranging from snakes, zebras and llamas to a Persian leopard. Although some of the enclosures are small, the shelters where the animals are kept appear well maintained and clean. Currently, the zoo houses three adult lions: one male and two female lions.

The zoo takes in animals confiscated by police: marmoset monkeys, caymans, brown bears, exotic snakes and parrots. In 2022 and again in 2023, police brought the zoo a rescue lion cub. All other lions in the zoo were born there or were brought in from other European zoos, Madic said. According to law enforcement, Subotica, on the border with Hungary, is a known trafficking hub for exotic animals, either to or from the EU.

“Both [rescue cubs] were malnourished,” Madic explained, “not fed the adequate type of food or supplements; they had been fed milk formula for human babies.” The male lion had kidney problems but has since recovered. The female cub was about 5 months old when she came to the zoo and was heavily malnourished. She had multiple organ failures, and her bones spontaneously cracked when she tried to jump. “On every ultrasound exam, new fractures or ruptures were shown,” Madic said.

The female cub didn’t survive.

Madic believes the animals are the latest victims of wildlife trafficking, pointing to inbreeding as the cause of their health problems. She suspects they were bred illegally and were smuggled into Serbia.

According to biologist Kristijan Ovari, who works at Belgrade Zoo, one of the main challenges is that Serbia does not have a dedicated animal rescue shelter. The zoo helps the authorities house confiscated exotic animals, but there is a lack of space. The zoo also does not have sufficient funding for the food and the highly specialized care that the creatures require.

Ovari noted that illegal smuggling also happens along the Kosovo border.

Kosovo declared independence from Serbia in 2008 with strong support from Europe, the U.S. and Albania. Although 115 countries recognize Kosovo’s independence, Serbia denies it and prevents Kosovo from being a member of international organizations like the United Nations.

Arif Aliu, an environmentalist based in Kosovo’s capital of Pristina, is worried about the increasing popularity of lions. Local TV shows frequently showcase exotic animals such as wolves or snakes and interview their owners for entertainment, glamorizing the trend. “In Kosovo,” Arif said, “the punishment is so low.” He wants law enforcement to actually prosecute people for this kind of crime and added: “It’s not that we lack a legal basis to prosecute crimes; it’s implementation that is lacking.”

Aliu noted that the penalties for wildlife trafficking offenses are minimal, with a small fine for first-time offenders. He also acknowledged the limited resources of authorities, who have resorted to housing confiscated animals in empty prison cells.

Tree-covered mountains surround the 40-acre Four Paws Bear Sanctuary, located 12 miles from Pristina. The sanctuary takes care of former “restaurant bears” that were kept in cages at restaurants and private zoos in Kosovo and Albania for entertainment, often in gruesome conditions, before being rescued. Some were fed alcohol and mistreated.

The restaurant bears were rescued by Four Paws with the help of the police. After being tipped off by concerned citizens, the organization investigates the conditions in which animals are kept and advocates with law enforcement to confiscate the animals and carry out arrests when the law has been broken.

Sanctuary manager Afrim Mahmuti has been involved in most of the rescues. He remembers one particular bear, Pashuk, very well. The animal was kept in a tiny dirty cage beside a restaurant in the southern part of Albania. His owners had put an iron chain around his neck when he was a baby, which later had to be removed surgically. Pashuk still has the scars.

“In Albania the trend evolved: They now stopped having bears, but they started with lions,” Mahmuti said. In 2022, Four Paws faced the challenge of rescuing their first lion in Kosovo. Mahmuti explained that it is significantly more difficult to persuade authorities to confiscate lions compared with bears. While the bears were kept by small restaurant owners for entertainment, lions are held by “mafia people,” he said, and “it can be really dangerous.” Special police forces would need to be deployed, and it is hard to win political support for expensive animal-saving operations.

There is also a practical consideration — neither Albania or Kosovo has a lion sanctuary. Since there is no suitable space for lions in the country, Four Paws offered to accommodate the lion alongside the bears at their sanctuary. The Pristina Bear Sanctuary currently houses 20 bears and provides an environment that mimics the wild as closely as possible, with rocks, trees, water and ample room for the animals to climb, rest or hibernate. Three of its bears were rescued when they were only a few weeks old after being kept as pets by Kosovo families. Next to an animal enclosure, a group of volunteers picks cherries, which they will freeze and give to the animals as a healthy “ice popsicle” to cool down during the summer heat. Some bears roam around the pastures; others hide.

Next to the enclosure of a large brown bear, who takes a refreshing dip in a pond, sits a tired male lion under the roof of a little wooden house. The torn remains of a cardboard box once used for Chiquita bananas are scattered around him.

“It is for enrichment,” explained sanctuary manager Afrim Mahmuti, who has a soft spot for the lion, Gjoni. He said lions are a social species, but as there are no other lions in Kosovo, Gjoni has no choice but to entertain himself.

Mahmuti first heard of Gjoni when the lion was 8 years old. He was kept at a restaurant in the city of Gjilan, near North Macedonia, “in very poor conditions,” Mahmuti recalled in describing the small cage the adult lion lived in.

Even rescued, Gjoni is still in a tragic situation: He lacks the necessary documentation to leave Kosovo for a sanctuary better equipped to deal with him. This is because Kosovo is not a signatory to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES). Under CITES, lions are listed in Appendix I as a species threatened with extinction. This means that Gjoni requires a special export permit. However, as Kosovo is not a CITES member, it cannot issue a permit.

For now, Gjoni remains stranded because of red tape and politics, far from the care he needs.

According to the verdict of the prosecutor’s office in Pristina, Gjoni was smuggled over the border from Albania into Kosovo in a van, inside a special cage for transporting dangerous wild animals. The van traversed mountainous roads before delivering Gjoni to the owner of the restaurant “Maja e Zeze” in the village of Stanciq in the south of Kosovo.

Vasili, the veterinarian from Tirana, was involved in the transport, according to court documents provided by the prosecutor’s office in Kosovo and seen by New Lines.

“The owner got him as a birthday gift,” Mahmuti said. As the animal was worth around $9,000, the court judged that the owner, Arsim Halimi, was guilty of smuggling and tax evasion. As a result, he was sentenced to 180 days in prison, a penalty he opted to replace with a fine of $2,000. Vasili was not prosecuted for his role in the transport of the lion.

Rumors persist about the source of the lion acquired by Halimi. Animal welfare activists in Kosovo suggest the big cat may have originated from Durres. Not far from this port city lives a businessperson whom an insider describes as “obsessed with lions.” This man is believed to have ties to politicians and criminal kingpins. When he has a litter, he gifts the cubs to friends, according to several sources in Kosovo and Albania who spoke to us on condition of anonymity.

“Law enforcement is powerless,” said one. “He has connections all the way up to the prime minister, so he is untouchable for the next 200 years.” The Ministry of Tourism and Environment, tasked with monitoring wildlife-related convictions, denies that these lions exist.

In response to a request for comment from New Lines, the Albanian police said that in the past 10 years they have taken “no actions” against the criminal offense of “trading of protected species of wild flora and fauna.” They have, however, opened 15 cases related to the “damage to protected species of wild flora and fauna.” In total, “19 perpetrators were prosecuted,” the police said in emailed comments. The police declined to provide numbers for how many lions had been confiscated over the past decade.

The ministry, which is responsible for the implementation of the CITES agreement, writes that “in the last 10 years” authorities “have identified several cases of individuals who were kept in captivity.” “There have been 2 cases of captive tiger and lion species in our territory which have been seized and sent to shelters abroad,” the statement reads. CITES data, however, is not publicly available, as it is “not a legal obligation,” according to the ministry.

The Public Prosecution Service in Tirana confirms that the 2019 criminal code prohibits trade in protected species like lions and tigers. From the ratification of the CITES agreement in 2019 until the end of June this year, the agency had registered 12 cases related to the illegal trade in protected animal and plant species. Its statistical register, however, does not record the types of species for which criminal proceedings were recorded.

In Pristina, the environmentalist Arif Aliu suspects that the shop owner in Peja uses his second business — a taxi company operating across the Balkans — to move protected species.

“We think the cubs are somewhere in Croatia or [elsewhere in] the Balkans, and he’s just advertising them to gauge interest before bringing them to Kosovo,” Aliu explained. He fears that the trend will soon be booming there, too.

He has good reasons to be concerned, as this underground network of wildlife trafficking is not limited to backroom deals. Also, influential figures in Kosovo are caught up in the latest trend.

One such figure is Ramiz Lladrovci, the mayor of Drenas, a municipality in Kosovo. On Feb. 10 this year, he posted a Facebook video of himself with a lion cub at the Royal Blue. Kosovar-Albanian rapper Ghetto Geasy’s smash hit “Hajde te Baba” (“Come to Daddy”) provides the background music. In the video, Lladrovci pets the cub as it tries to bite his hand. All 82 comments praise the mayor for his strength.

One says, “You are the lion yourself, respect.”

The research for this reportage was supported by Journalismfund Europe.