The €4.5 Billion Village That Defied the State | The Albanian Mafia Part 3

June 16, 2014. Five hundred Albanian police move on a village of five thousand people — and are met with Kalashnikovs, mortars and rocket launchers, live on national television. This is Lazarat: sixty hectares of cannabis, three hundred thousand plants, up to nine hundred tonnes a year, worth an estimated €4.5 billion — half of Albania's GDP from a single village ten minutes from the Greek border. For ten years no police officer entered it. Italian aircraft photographed the fields from the air every summer; the Albanian state looked at the maps and did nothing. Then came a new government, a deadline from Brussels, and a five-day siege. What followed — a police officer ambushed and killed a year later, cannabis spreading from one village to an entire country, and the interior minister who led the operation ending up in the dock himself — is the story of how the Albanian networks now running Europe's drug trade got their first capital. Part 1: How the Albanian mafia took over Europe's cocaine trade → https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SeydmU8C9OA Part 2: He ran Europe's cocaine empire from a prison cell → https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqYP-bi7S_U Some footage in this video is representative. 🌐 About Endless Night Files: We are the official English-language sister channel to the original documentary creator "Sonsuz Gece". All scripts are researched, and all footage is meticulously edited, color-graded, and sound-designed by our original production team to create transformative, educational true-crime content. ⚠️ Disclaimer: This video is for educational and documentary purposes only. It features analysis of criminal events based on public records, official police footage, and news reports. We do not glorify or promote violence or illegal acts. #TrueCrime #Documentary #EndlessNightFiles