Gang set up phone line for city’s cocaine users

ARMED Albanian gangsters dressed in designer clothes to target Manchester revellers looking to buy cocaine.

They also operated a sophisticated ‘dial-a-drug’ phone line. Unknown to police because they were recruited directly from Albania and operated on fake Greek and Italian passports, they were only snared after offering drugs to undercover officers.

The thugs are believed to have worked with Manchester’s more established gangs – but were arming themselves with guns in case of conflict.

One of the main players, Mevlan Gjeta, 33, was last year jailed for eight years after a kilo of cocaine plus £ 55,000 were found at his flat in Manchester.

Officers in London exposed an unrelated gang mainly consisting of illegal immigrants from Albania who controlled ‘street level’ cocaine dealers.

At the time, Detective Constable Sally Prinsloo, of the City of London Police, said the case highlighted ‘a very worrying trend we have observed in the City and across the capital, with people, in this case Albanian males, who have entered the UK illegally, being employed to courier drugs to customers’.