Just hours after David Blunkett, the Home Secretary, warned that Europe’s stability was threatened by organised crime, prostitutes were earning millions of pounds for Albanian gangsters.

Highlighting the rise of gangs from the south east of Europe, Mr Blunkett said:
“Organised criminals are more organised than we are.”

Scotland Yard estimates that Albanian gangs control about 75 per cent of prostitution in Soho. Many of the women and children caught up in the trade are the victims of a modern form of slavery, kidnapped or tricked into coming to Britain. Moreover, about three quarters of the heroin coming from Afghanistan to Britain’s streets will pass through Albanian hands.

Albanians and Kosovans in Britain are said to be involved in extortion, gun-running and organised theft. They are even alleged to have plotted the kidnap of Victoria Beckham.

They have been reported not only in London, but in Liverpool, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Hull — a hub of Albanian people-smuggling — and, improbably, Telford in Shropshire. During the past two years a similar pattern has been reported from Milan to the American Midwest, where Albanians are emerging as the would-be superstars of crime to rival the Sicilian Mafia, the Chinese Triads and the Russian mob.

One of the problems facing law enforcement agencies is that Albanian criminals are governed by a code of honour that makes the Mafia’s omerta resemble little more than a casual word of warning. The Kanun, or Code, dates back to the 15th century and was drawn up by Leke Dukagjini, an Albanian prince who was a leading figure in the war with the Ottoman Turks. It covered not only marriage, family law and property, but also matters of honour, under which a besa, or pledge, must never be broken.

The Kanun continued to govern everyday life among the clans in the north and east of the country until well into the 20th century. Blood feuds became endemic as clan members avenged the killing of their own with the murder of a member of the rival clan.

Enver Hoxha, the dictator who led Albania after the Second World War, did his utmost to keep the lid on the code and the outside world never came into contact with the outlaws who observed it.

With the collapse of communism in 1989, however, bandits whose lives and crimes had changed little over the previous 600 years emerged from the Cold War, ready to break into more modern rackets.

Gang members began to seep across the border in the early Nineties. The trickle began to resemble a flood after the war in Kosovo. Initially they worked as muscle for Turkish and Kurdish drug-smuggling gangs, but police say they have emerged as contenders in their own right.

Albanian crime clans are organised according to ancient patterns of rural life. The head of each clan, or the krye, leads a group of underbosses known as kryetar, who will usually be blood relations. They sit on a committee called a bajrack.

It is the bajrack that decides on new enterprises: the money needed for a brothel in Soho, for example, will come from the committee, and a proportion of the profits will always be sent to its home village.

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