The Grand is the Waldorf Astoria of the clandestine arms trade. As in Moscow, as in the Castellammare hills, discretion is pointless at the Grand. Kosovo is 90 percent ethnic Albanian, and mostly Muslim. Its people are under the heel of a government in Belgrade that appears ever-more determined to make the province Serbian and Orthodox Christian again, as it was in the Middle Ages. No one, that is, except the masters of the Empire of Crime.
Organized crime reaps the profits.
The wretched of the earth pay the price, which in the charnel house of ex-Yugoslavia already amounts to more than 250,000 dead and 3.7 million refugees. No one can be certain how many camels perish in this business. Empty boats often wash up, after howling Mediterranean storms, on the Spanish and Sicilian coasts. Decomposed bodies are discovered each spring in the Alps, when the seasonal thaw opens snowbound passes. In late November 1994, French judiciary police cracked a drug ring of Kosovo Albanians in Annecy.