From Beach villa, alleged mob ally builds Albanian empire
Miami Beach resident Artur Shehu maintains a low profile in his affluent Alton Road neighborhood. But the man from Albania has been linked to organized crime.
Artur Shehu lives an unassuming life in an elegant Alton Road villa, a short stroll from Biscayne Bay. His lawn is nicely manicured and his home framed by stately royal palms. Two Mercedes-Benzes sit parked in the driveway.
Situated across the street from the Miami Beach Golf Club, it is a neighborhood where residents keep to themselves — mostly behind walls and gates. One or two homes have signs reminding uninvited visitors of Florida’s stand-your-ground gun law.
In a city where wealth is flaunted, Shehu, 54, maintains a low profile. But the rare South Floridian from Albania has an intriguing past.
Although he has not been convicted or even charged, prosecutors and law officers in Europe, citing wiretaps and other evidence, have linked him to an organized crime syndicate involved in narcotics.
Despite leaving Albania two decades ago, he maintains his business interests back home, amassing a vast portfolio of properties in one of Europe’s poorest countries — infuriating some who say the land he controls rightfully belongs to them.
Shehu did not respond to a series of detailed questions sent by the Herald, McClatchy and the Europe-based Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, collaborators on this article. Instead, through an intermediary, he approached OCCRP’s reporter and seemed to offer an inducement to drop the inquiry: “Whatever you want.”
Some of his associates back home have gotten into trouble. Pëllumb Petritaj, who oversees many of Shehu’s Albanian properties, was found guilty of using forgery to obtain land on behalf of the Shehu family.
Petritaj appealed the verdicts, and the lawsuits are still ongoing.
South Florida has long provided a refuge for those seeking to restart their lives, and immigrants have contributed to a booming economy and a vibrant cultural milieu.
At the same time, the ease of doing business in the state, high property values and its geographic proximity to Latin America and the Caribbean have made it a popular haven for foreign nationals with substantial assets, especially those looking to park profits in real estate.
In addition to their holdings in Albania, Shehu and his partner have bought and sold multiple properties in South Florida.
Albania, Greece’s neighbor in the Balkan Peninsula in Southeastern Europe, fell under communist government in the wake of World War II. That changed after the collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1991. The Albanian economy went into a downward spiral, and the country descended into civil strife as it was riven by competing claims of land ownership.
Around this time, in Vlora, a picturesque Albanian city on the Adriatic coast, Italian law enforcement probing a transnational drug-smuggling ring also investigated Shehu for his possible involvement, according to Dragan Zagani. Zagani was head of Vlora’s anti-narcotics unit in the late 1990s and had worked with Italian law enforcement in its probe into the smugglers. He was not charged.
Cataldo Motta, a former prosecutor in the Italian city of Lecce, which lies roughly 70 miles west across the Adriatic Sea from Vlora, also remembered the case involving Shehu: “He was in our files suspected of drug trafficking.”
Shehu provided the Herald and McClatchy’s reporting partner, OCCRP, with a letter dated June 2016 from the prosecutor’s office in Lecce saying he has a clean record but declined to answer any questions.
Shehu’s time in Vlora ended when he left Albania after a gunfight broke out in 1999 in a bar he owned, according to Zagani. He said gang members killed two people in the attack, including Shehu’s uncle, Luan Bedini.
“Luan died in Artur’s arms, and he vowed to avenge the murder of his uncle,” Zagani said.
Police wanted to question Shehu about the shooting and about the activities of a local crime syndicate, but he left the country and arrived and settled in the United
States.
Miami Beach, specifically.
Florida property records show that besides the fourbedroom villa, Shehu previously owned a series of moderate to high-end residences in and around Miami, including a townhouse in Doral and a condo on West Avenue in Miami Beach.
A neighbor told the Herald she didn’t know Shehu or the people who live at the Miami Beach villa. A mail carrier who works the route confirmed that a couple lives in the house but said he’s never seen them, and an attendant at the golf club said he’d never seen him or heard his name.
In October 2018, Artur Shehu sued officials of the Department of Homeland Security, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and the FBI in a Miami federal court for the slow processing of his permanent residency application. He later dismissed the complaint.
Court records from that suit show that he was granted asylum in the United States in 2001, although it is unclear on what grounds.
The State Department told the Herald that the agency does not process asylum requests and referred the matter to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which did not respond to requests for comment.
Italian law enforcement investigated Shehu in 2012, examining whether he had a role in investing money in Albania for Albino Prudentino, said Guglielmo Cataldi, a prosecutor in Lecce, Italy.
Prudentino, a suspected kingpin of the Sacra Corona Unita, a Southern Italian organized crime syndicate, was arrested on money-laundering and drug-trafficking charges in 2010 in a joint ItalianAlbanian operation codenamed “Calipso.”
An Italian court document shows that, from 2009, Prudentino rented parts of a luxury building owned by Shehu in Vlora’s Uji Ftohtë neighborhood. The alleged Italian mob boss ran a restaurant and gelateria on the ground floor and a casino upstairs.
Prudentino was found guilty in 2013 of laundering illicit money through these businesses and sentenced to three years in prison. In court proceedings in Italy, prosecutors alleged that Shehu made one million euros — $1.3 million at the time — helping him do it. They noted that the money was transferred to Shehu’s bank accounts in the United States, but they did not have enough proof to charge him.
Cataldi said the evidence involving Shehu was passed on to Albanian investigators: “We sent the data we had to Albania, showing them what the investments were, but I don’t know how this investigation went.”
Albania’s state prosecution, police and the Vlora prosecution office all declined to comment on the case.
A KING IN MIAMI
As with the rest of the country, Albania’s postWorld War II communist regime had nationalized the Vlora coastline. Decades of state control meant that the scenic coast along the Adriatic Sea is among the last swaths of underdeveloped real estate in the Mediterranean.
Following the collapse of the U.S.S.R. in 1991, the new government made efforts to return properties to the families that owned them before the war.
From his apartment overlooking the Narta Lagoon in Albania’s picturesque south, 72-year-old Jorgaq Subashi can glimpse the land he was awarded in 1993 as part of the government’s attempt to return property.
But he is not allowed to live there.
Almost three decades after winning the land back, Subashi and 34 fellow villagers have yet to receive their property deeds. They remain embroiled in seemingly interminable bureaucracy, despite a court confirming in 2012 that their properties had been unlawfully transferred to a powerful local clan — the Shehus.
“We know that the lands were taken from us by the collectivization of agriculture during the communist regime,” said Subashi. “After the ’90s, the state gave them back to us, but we still cannot register them.”
He is not alone. According to Albanian court documents, Shehu acquired ownership interests in around 500 hectares of prime real estate — roughly 930 football fields — along Albania’s southern coast, since 2006, following cases of alleged forged ownership documents.
Although he and his family benefited, Shehu has never been charged over the land cases. However, Pëllumb Petritaj, a close associate, was convicted in 2018 of forging land documents to usurp 187 hectares.
In other court cases, some civil and some criminal, involving a total of nearly 300 additional hectares near Vlora, Shehu and his family members are accused of grabbing property through similar forgeries. This includes the land on the shores of the Narta Lagoon that Subashi and his fellow villagers say were stolen from them.
In these ongoing cases, it is alleged that Petritaj forged documents with the help of local officials on behalf of Shehu and his father, Ramis Shehu. Sometimes a third party would receive the land, then transfer it to the Shehus.
Despite the lack of legal action against Shehu, at least some in the judiciary are aware of his reputation for acquiring land around Vlora.
A disciplinary case in 2017 saw Artur Malaj, a Vlora judge, sacked for a host of ethical failures, including an allegation related to Shehu. Among the findings of the commission’s investigation into the judge was that at least one of his family members had bought land from Shehu that Malaj failed to report to the commission.
The judge told OCCRP that just one family member had bought land from Shehu. He said he had no knowledge of this until the investigation uncovered it, and insisted that he has had no contact with Shehu.
“I have been a judge in the city of Vlora for around 10 years. In no single case have I had any property cases or other cases which were related … to Artur Shehu or his family,” Malaj said.
After years of maintaining a low profile in his home country and working through intermediaries, Shehu saw his name appear recently on Albanian documents showing new business interests in the Albanian Riviera, a long stretch of turquoise-edged coastline along the Adriatic Sea.
In 2019 he co-founded a hotel development firm called Portonova, which shares a name with a beach on the outskirts of Vlora. In April last year, he opened another firm, Adhenis, to develop tourism sites.
Shehu’s new public image is a far cry from the prior allegations made against him.
When he swept to power in 2013, Prime Minister Edi Rama pledged to resolve Albania’s land crisis and make sure stolen properties were returned to their rightful owners.
His government’s efforts have so far seen little success.
Miami Herald staff writer Martin Vassolo contributed to this article, which was reported in collaboration with the Europe-based nonprofit investigative news outlet, Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project.
Shirsho Dasgupta: 202-383-6007, @ShirshoD Meghan Bobrowsky: @MeghanBobrowsky
POLICE WANTED TO QUESTION ARTUR SHEHU ABOUT A EUROPEAN CRIME SYNDICATE, BUT HE LEFT AND SETTLED IN
MIAMI BEACH.