Tuesday, 15th of January, 2019. A chicken farm road outside the village of Satar in the hills behind Saranda, southern Albania. The morning is cold and the light off the Ionian is the color of cheap steel. A car pulls up, not a police vehicle, a private car driven by the director of the Albanian State Police himself, RDU.
Beside him, a nephew of the man he has come for, who happens to be the elected mayor of Delvina. Behind him, the former prosecutor general of Albania, who is here today as a defense lawyer. The man they have come for walks out of the farm building without restraints. He nods to the nephew.
He gets into the back of the car. The door closes without a handcuff sound. The car turns around on the empty road and drives north toward Torana. 32 months on the run. 13 failed police operations. A Greek court has already sentenced him to life plus 15 years in absentia. A United States ambassador who has called him from a podium in the Albanian capital untouchable.
Pablo Escobar of the Balkans and the most wanted ghost in Europe walks out of his home village and gets into a car driven by the man who was supposed to be hunting him. Not in handcuffs, not under arrest. As a guest, how does a man from a village of a few hundred people become one of the largest cocaine and cannabis traffickers in Europe, get convicted in Greek courts of crimes that would put him in prison for the rest of his life, and then negotiate the terms of his own surrender to a country that has refused
for almost 3 years to give him up? How does an entire state decide that it is easier to lose him than to find him? And how does that state then put him on trial, sentence him to 10 years, and then quietly rent his hotel back to his family for €12,000 a month. To understand how he walked out of Strar that morning in January, you have to go back to the village he came from, to the country it sits inside, and to the system that decided he was worth protecting.
The Albania he grew up in does not exist on most maps of organized crime because for most of his childhood, it did not exist as a functioning country at all. Under the communist regime of Envir Hawkha, Albania had been the most isolated state in Europe. No private cars, no foreign newspapers, bunkers in every field.
When the regime collapsed in 1991, what replaced it was not democracy in any working sense. It was a vacuum. Then came 1997, the pyramid schemes. Roughly twothirds of the Albanian population had put their savings into private investment funds that turned out to be Ponzi schemes blessed by the state propped up by the political class. When the schemes collapsed, Albania lost an estimated $1.
5 billion in a country whose entire annual output was barely twice that. The population rioted, the army deserted. Military depots were looted across the south. Roughly 500,000 firearms entered civilian hands in a matter of weeks. Anti-aircraft guns, rocket propelled grenades, mortars, automatic rifles. In the village of Lazerat in the hills of Jurro Caster County, families took those weapons home and buried some of them in their gardens for the next 20 years.
Lazerat is worth pausing on because it is the context the rest of this story sits inside. By the early 2000s, Lazerat had become the cannabis capital of Europe. A village of around 5,000 people growing somewhere close to 900 tons of marijuana a year with an estimated peak retail value of 4 12 billion. roughly half of Albania’s gross domestic product produced by one village in defiance of every Albanian government that tried to enter it.
In June of 2014, the Albanian state finally did. 800 officers, Renea counterterrorism units, armored trucks, a Super Puma helicopter dispatched to neutralize an anti-aircraft gun mounted on Mount Soot. After a 4-day battle, the village was declared under state control. One week later, Albania was granted European Union candidate status.
But Lazerat did not end Albanian cannabis. It decentralized it. Production scattered to dozens of regional networks across the country. And the men who became the new kings were not the growers in Jurroaster County. They were the men who controlled the export, the men who controlled the ports, the men who controlled the Ionian crossings.
Saranda sits on that coast, a small city on the southern Albanian shore, looking directly across the Ionian Sea at the Greek island of Corfu, 22 nautical miles at the standard ferry crossing, 3 and 12 km at the narrowest mainland gap. In good weather, a speedboat can make Corfu in under half an hour and the Greek mainland in just over one.
Behind Saranda, in the dry hills above the city, sits the village of Star in Delvina municipality. A few hundred houses, olive trees, the kind of village that nobody outside Albania has ever heard of. This is where Kelman Bali was born on the 20th of March 1972. son of Sabri. The family records will later list his mother as Naise.
He grew up under the last years of the communist regime and came of age in the worst years of the collapse. By the mid90s, his family had registered a business in Saranda, dealing in transport, fishing, and security services. By the late ‘9s, his older brother, Bosim, was branching the business into hotels.
There is nothing in the documented record that suggests Kelman Bali was a farmer in any working sense. The village provided the geography. The collapse provided the opportunity. The Bali family provided the structure. In July of 2006, Bali was arrested on the Musin Delvin road in southern Albania in a van containing 750 kilos of cannabis.
Two serving officers of the Saranda Police were in the vehicle with him. The case was opened by the serious crimes prosecution. 6 months later, in January of 2007, the case was closed for insufficient evidence. This is the moment everything turns on. Not because it was his first crime. It almost certainly wasn’t, but because it was the moment he learned what the Albanian state would and would not do with him.
Most criminal biographies begin with a first arrest that gets pinned that becomes a record that follows the man for the rest of his life. His begins with a first arrest that didn’t. That is the lesson he carried into the next 10 years. And it is the lesson the people around him saw too. After 2006, Belily did not slow down. He scaled.
By the early 2010s, the family company had expanded into a network of businesses that began to look less like a regional Albanian operation and more like a vertically integrated logistics empire. There were two private security firms, Bali Co. and SB Security, operating across Flora County. There was a passenger transport company, Moxa Travel, running the Albania Greece corridor. There were fishing operations.
There were apartment complexes going up along the Saranda coastline. There was a second hotel, Hotel Olivia, on the road to Bootrin. And then in August of 2015, there was Santa Coranta. Santa Coranta Premium Resort sat 3 kilometers down the butrint road from Saranda on the site of the old communist era workers rest camp 13,000 m of land a 50 room five-star hotel of 1900 m with sea view balconies a private beach an outdoor pool faux marble columns and a clientele drawn from Tana’s new political class and Greek tourists crossing from Corfu. The
land had been privatized into Bali family hands. The hotel was registered to his brother Bashim. The opening ceremony was attended by Elier Meta, the founder of the Socialist Movement for Integration Party and at that point the speaker of the Albanian Parliament. Standing beside Meta to cut the ribbon were the Albanian finance minister Arvin Amitage and a sitting parliamentary deputy Koo Kokadimo.
The same year Santa Coranta opened, Bali’s family security firms held 297 state institution contracts worth 94 million Albanian le. The institutions they guarded included the prosecutor’s offices of Saranda and Jiroaster. In other words, the same men who would in theory one day prosecute Kelman Bali were working in buildings guarded by his family’s company.
In the corporate world, this is what you would call vertical integration. The producer needs the transporter. The transporter needs the front. The front needs political cover. The political cover needs protection. He owned the whole stack. There is a reason the Greek police, the United States Drug Enforcement Administration, and European Union partners spent two full years watching him before they moved.
The Greek dossier, when it was eventually compiled, ran to 10,000 pages. It would describe his network as a meticulously organized $1 billion transnational narcotics empire built on cannabis and cocaine, funneling product into Italy, Greece, Germany, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands. Speedboats from the Saranda coastline across the Ionian to the Greek mainland and the Ionian islands.
Bogus hollage companies registered across the European Union to move the product by road from Patras to Athens to Hamburgg to London. Hidden compartments, counter surveillance through Greek mobile phone numbers. Because Albanian wiretaps caught nothing, his phones were registered on Greek networks beyond the legal reach of Albanian interception.
But the most important piece of the architecture was political. In 2014, the socialist movement for integration, the junior coalition partner to Adid Rama’s socialist party in the government that had taken power the previous September nominated Kelman Bali as the director of the regional directorate of road transport services in Saranda.
The appointment was signed by the LSI transport minister Edmund Paxinas. The criminal record certificate that the appointment required came back clean because the 2006 cannabis case had been closed for insufficient evidence 7 years earlier and never reopened. But Lily would later say himself on the record that his appointment came in exchange for the financial donations he and his family had made to the LSI.
Prime Minister Eddie Rama would eventually say the same thing from a podium in July of 2018. Four words. Politics made him director. By the end of 2015, Kelman Bali was not just a trafficker. He was a sitting director of a state transport office. He was the owner of a resort opened by the speaker of the parliament.
He was the contractor whose security firms guarded the prosecutor’s offices that would have to prosecute him. The Greek police knew exactly who he was. The Italian Guardia defenanza knew. The Americans knew. And inside Albania, he was untouchable. That untouchability had a deadline. In May of 2016, 22 nautical miles across the Ionian on an island adjacent to the Greek island of Zakintos, 15 people were about to be arrested.
680 kilos of cannabis were about to be seized and an Athens court was about to issue a warrant that would change everything. Almost Sunday the 8th of May 2016, the joint Greek operation Greek Anti-Drug Police, the United States DEA, and European partners from the Netherlands, Italy, and the United Kingdom, moved on the island adjacent to Zakinthos.
They had been watching the network for 2 years. They found 678 kilos of cannabis hidden in concealment, five trucks, a speedboat, a shotgun, and ammunition, around 15,000 in cash, trafficking documentation that mapped, in the words of the prosecutors, the entire architecture of the export pipeline.
Over the next 24 hours, they made 15 arrests across Patras and the islands, 13 Greek nationals, two Albanian. The final destination of the load, according to the documentation, was Athens, then onward by road to Oslo. On the 9th of May, an Athens court issued a national arrest warrant for the man the Greek anti-drug officers had been calling Keely in their wire taps.
The warrant identified him by his civil registry name, Kelman Bali, son of Sabry, born 20th of March 1972, resident of Saranda. The Greek prosecutors filed the case under Greek narcotics law in the article of the penal code covering organized crime committed in a neighboring country. The Greek press broke the story on Wednesday the 11th.
By the end of the week, Greek media had given him the name that would follow him for the rest of his life. The Pablo Escobar of the Balkans. The phrase appeared on the Greek arrest warrant itself. According to the journalists who later reviewed the dossier. By the 17th of May, Interpol had issued the International Red Notice. He was formerly one of the most wanted men in Europe.
What Albania did next is the heart of this story. On the 12th of May, the Albanian Justice Minister Ily Manani LSI, the same party that had appointed Bali to the transport directorate, gave a public statement that Kelman Bili had no criminal record in Albania. He neglected to mention the 2006 cannabis arrest on the Musina Delvin road with the two serving police officers in the vehicle.
He neglected to mention that the case existed at all. On the 13th, Bali was dismissed from his director’s post. By the time the dismissal was signed, he had already disappeared. For the next 32 months, he stayed inside Albania. He was not on the run in any normal sense. He was photographed on a yacht in Saranda waters with a senior state police officer in August of 2016.
He attended a socialist party wedding in Talina in September of 2017. He gave a telephone interview to the Greek newspaper Ethnos on the 30th of October 2016 from inside Albania. He gave a television interview to Albanian News 24, also from inside the country. The Greek dossier, 10,000 pages of wiretaps and surveillance and organizational mapping, was delivered to the Albanian Justice Ministry, where it stalled because, according to the ministry’s public explanation, no translator from Greek into Albanian could be located. The Greek authorities
eventually translated the dossier themselves and resented. The Albanian police later admitted that 13 separate operations to capture him had failed in the same period. This is the part of the story where the question stops being how did one man build a billion-dollar empire and starts being how did an entire state with all its police, its prosecutors, its ministries, its international obligations decide it was easier to lose him than to find him.
The pressure built from outside. In December of 2016, the United States ambassador to Albania, Donald Louu, named Bali from a podium in Tana at a human rights conference. He said that politicians on both the Albanian left and the Albanian right had paid attention to the interests of corrupt businessmen and drug traffickers.
He said that the United States had told Albania that future cooperation on narcotics depended on the arrest and prosecution of big fish from Albania and that Clement Bali was the test case. He gave Bali a nickname that would stick, the magician, because no Albanian police operation could ever seem to find him.
That autumn, the director of the United States Central Intelligence Agency, John Brennan, made an unscheduled visit to Tana. The Billei case was reportedly part of the agenda. In February of 2017, the Albanian President Bjar Nishani convened a meeting of the National Security Council specifically on the Bily matter. Prime Minister Eddie Rama refused to attend and then the Albanian state made its structural move.
In March of 2017, the ruling Socialist Party introduced amendments to article 491 of the criminal procedure code under the chairmanship of MP Fatmir Shafage who at that point was about to become the new interior minister. The amendments which entered force in August prohibited the extradition of Albanian citizens to foreign jurisdictions absent a specific bilateral treaty.
Albania and Greece had no bilateral extradition treaty. The amendment closed the door. Whatever happened to Bille from that moment forward, it would not be in Athens. The Greek life sentence waiting for him would never be served. I covered another Albanian trafficker in an earlier video.
A man from Tana who built a heroin pipeline bigger than the Sicilian mafia who was broken not by the police but by a member of his own organization flipping after almost 40 years of Albanian Basa. That was the diaspora model. Albanian organized crime operating abroad where the only thing that holds the network together is internal loyalty and the only thing that can break it is internal betrayal.
What you are watching with Beli is the inverse. He never left Albania. He didn’t need to. The thing holding his organization together wasn’t the code. It was the state itself. And the only thing that could break it wasn’t a defector. It was the Albanian government eventually deciding for its own reasons that the cost of protection had finally exceeded the cost of the man.
That decision came in July of 2018. Donald Louu in the final months of his ambassadorship delivered a second public rebuke. He called the failure to arrest Bali the single biggest failure of his 4-year tenure. He gave the Greek number publicly that the Greek courts had already convicted Bily in absentia and sentenced him to life plus 15 years.
The American statement turned what had been a domestic Albanian embarrassment into a diplomatic crisis. The Greek dossier, now translated, was finally on the prosecutor’s desk in Toronto. The case file was being prepared to go to court whether Bali was in custody or not. That was when the negotiations began.
For 3 months through back channels, the terms of his surrender were worked out. The intermediaries were his nephew Riel’s Bily, the LS I mayor of Delvina, elected in 2015 with 72% of the vote, and the state police director Arty Velu Bali demanded four conditions. no extradition to Greece, a fair legal process inside Albania, decent prison conditions, and the official designation of the event as a voluntary self-surrender, not an arrest.
All four conditions were accepted, which brings us back to where this story started. Tuesday, the 15th of January, 2019, the chicken farm road outside the village of Stier. State Police Director Velu in his own personal car. The nephew, the former prosecutor general as defense lawyer, the cold light off the Ionian, the car door closing without a handcuff sound.
What you did not know when this video opened is who else was in motion that morning. While the state police director was driving the country’s most wanted man north toward Torana, the leader of the Albanian opposition, Sali Berisha, a former prime minister of Albania, was sitting at a computer. At 10:25 a.m.
Before the Albanian police could announce the surrender themselves, Berisha posted it on Facebook. The Albanian state had been beaten to its own press conference by the opposition. The man who had refused to be arrested for 32 months had walked out of his home village on his own schedule, on his own terms with conditions accepted in advance, and the country he was surrendering to had lost control of even the announcement of his surrender.
The trial moved fast. On the 25th of February 2019, the Court of Serious Crimes accepted Bali’s request for an abbreviated trial procedure, a provision in Albanian criminal law that entitles defendants who accept the charges to an automatic one-third reduction of their sentence.
On the 8th of May, Judge Flora Hadrainage presiding over a three judge panel convicted him on four counts. Drug trafficking in cooperation as part of a structured criminal group. Participation in a structured criminal group, money laundering, false declaration of assets. The combined sentence was 15 years reduced under the abbreviated procedure to 10.
He served it from his surrender date which made his scheduled release roughly January of 2029. The only statement Belily made in the courtroom was a single sentence. I have not committed any criminal violation in my life. On the 17th of October 2019, the Court of Appeals upheld the 10-year sentence. United States embassy representatives sat in the courtroom.
The Supreme Court of Albania later rejected his cessation appeal. The sentence became final. Then on the 22nd of September 2020, Judge Yirriana Odashi of the Special Court Against Corruption and Organized Crime issued her ruling on the confiscation of his assets. The prosecution had requested full confiscation of everything.
The resort, the apartments, the security firms, the transport company, the villa. Judge Odashi confiscated 40%. She ruled that the other 60% of his accumulated wealth had been acquired before the legally presumed start of illicit accumulation, which she dated to the 2006 arrest. The Bali brothers withdrew their appeal.
The prosecution did not appeal either. The 40% figure became final. By 2024, Santa Clar Premium Resort was operating again. Bashkim Bali, the brother, was officially back in control of the property. According to the investigative reporting by the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network in September of that year, the Albanian state’s 40% share was being rented back to the Bily family for 12,000 a month for the five summer months of the year.
The family had built the resort with money the Albanian state had ruled was the proceeds of trafficking. The Albanian state had taken 40% of it. The Albanian state was then collecting rent from the rest of the family on its own share. The hotel was full every summer. On the 4th of August 2023, a photograph surfaced.
It had been taken inside Lucia prison in the wing where Bali was serving his sentence after being transferred from the high security facility at Pin in 2021. It showed Kelman Bali at a table with three other men. One of them was Siameir Tahiri, the former Albanian interior minister, the man who had been in charge of the Albanian state police on the day the Greek warrant for Bali was issued in 2016.
The man the opposition had accused for years of protecting him. Tahiri had finally been convicted in 2022 on charges connected to a separate drug trafficking case involving his own cousins. He was now serving his sentence in the same prison wing as the man he had once been accused of protecting. They were having a meal. The Albanian general directorate of prisons confirmed the photograph had been taken by prison staff.
The chicken farm road outside is empty now. The car drove north years ago. The village is a few hundred people. The resort on the coast is full every summer. The man inside the prison eats his meals across the table from the minister who let him grow. A state can convict a man and still serve him. A state can confiscate his property and still rent it back to his family.
a state can sentence him to 10 years and let him take his meals across the table from the minister who failed to arrest him. The question this case leaves behind is not whether Kelman Bili will go free by January of 2029. By the math of the sentence, he will. The question is whether anything around him has changed at all or whether the next ghost is already growing up in the next village, watching how this one was caught and let go.
Watching what it caused and watching what it didn’t. The light comes off the Ionian. The road stays empty. The hotel stays
