UNMASKED
Shocking truth behind the night prowler who burgled rich and famous
To friends and neighbours, there seemed plenty about Asdrit Kapaj to admire.
A refugee who had apparently fled the horrors of the Kosovan war, he had, in the two decades since arriving in the UK, devoted his time and much effort to running his takeaway restaurant and bringing up his young family.
Pictures on social media show a smartlydressed man proudly posing arm-in-arm with his wife Radie, a Tesco worker, and their eight-year- old daughter and son, four. ‘He’s a really hard-working guy who worked all hours at his fish and chip shop,’ said a friend and colleague living close to his home in Manchester.
‘He would peel spuds for two hours at a time. I worked for him for many years – he is a true gentleman.’
Another neighbour added: ‘He’d do odd jobs for people – he was a pillar of the community.’
A couple of hundred miles south, in the suburbs of London, those who’ve had the misfortune to cross paths with Kapaj, 42, describe him in very different terms.
There they know him as The Wimbledon Prowler – an ‘evil’ man who for the past ten years has terrorised this affluent corner of south-west London.
Yesterday, he pleaded guilty to 21 burglaries and two attempted burglaries, but police believe he was behind hundreds more, stealing cash, jewellery and other property worth some £10million.
The sheer scale of his one-man crimewave led police to describe the Prowler as, not just the country’s, but Europe’s most prolific burglar.
Kapaj’s modus operandi was clinically effective, leaving those he stole from baffled and terrified in equal measure.
Targeting multi-million pound houses mainly within the SW19 postcode surrounding the All England Lawn Tennis Club, he operated under cover of darkness. He would use ladders or shimmy up drainpipes to avoid burglar alarms and get into properties as their occupants slept.
once inside, he aimed to leave no trace. Shunning obvious items such as iPads and laptops, he would focus instead on cash or jewellery, carefully closing drawers and putting items back in place as he went.
In this way, he could return multiple times, using knowledge obtained and keys stolen on previous visits to come and go. Even if homeowners subsequently realised property was missing, they often did not blame a burglar as they did not know a break-in had occurred.
Cleaners and au- pairs were sacked and children accused. In some cases, it was only when CCTV cameras were installed that they realised what had actually been going on.
Not that being caught on camera seemed to unduly bother the burglar. Wearing a snood or a fisherman’s hat pulled low over his head, he would further disguise his appearance by raising a hand to obscure the lower part of his face. Cameras and alarms would also routinely be disabled.
For Kapaj that would have been a straightforward task – on his children’s birth certificates he gives his profession as ‘electrical engineer’.
Celebrities, sportsmen, businessmen and City workers with young families were all targeted. Tennis ace Boris Becker and footballer Nicolas Anelka both fell foul of him. The latter even gave chase but, incredibly, Kapaj was able to outrun the sportsman. Following his arrest in February, those who knew him questioned whether police had the right man. He was caught red-handed by police in Wimbledon wearing a snood over his face and carrying a bag of tools.
‘There is just bread in the fridge,’ his tearful wife shouted during an earlier court hearing at which the
scale of the burglaries he was accused of was outlined. In other words, if he was responsible, where had the proceeds of his crimes gone?
One of the burglaries Kapaj admitted yesterday involved the theft of jewellery worth £371,855 from a single house.
But during earlier hearings it emerged that Kapaj was a gambling addict – a vice that, it would appear, even his wife was unaware of. And, as the Daily Mail can today reveal, that’s not the only part of this supposedly respectable businessman’s story that does not bear scrutiny.
Asdrit Kapaj was born in 1977 in the village of Gjorm, about 20 miles from the city of Vlore, in southern Albania.
He was the youngest of five – three boys and two girls – born to a former member of the Albanian anti- communist resistance and his much younger second wife.
Kapaj’s late father spent around 20 years in prison for killing two Communists in Albania in 1944 and life was difficult for the Kapaj family under Communist rule in the 1970s and 1980s.
Home was a two-room shack, the remains of which are still in the grounds of the family’s relatively new bungalow where the burglar’s frail mother still lives. Kapaj attended the primary school in Gjorm, but in the early 1990s, following the fall of Communism, he moved across the border to neighbouring Greece.
It was a familiar trail for tens of thousands of desperate Albanians. For a time he worked as a waiter, but sources told the Mail that, while there, Kapaj got in trouble with the authorities.
Precise details remain unclear but, having returned to Albania, by the late 1990s, he had once again set his eyes on a move abroad – this time to the United Kingdom, where Tony Blair’s Labour government was allowing thousands of Kosovan refugees to settle.
His oldest brother Nexhip Kapaj told the Mail yesterday that he tried ‘two or three times’ to enter Britain as a Kosovan refugee before he was accepted. He said that their middle brother Bilal had already moved to the UK.
‘Like many Albanians did during the Kosovan War, claiming to be a Kosovan was the easiest way to gain entry to the UK,’ his brother, a former port policeman, said. According to a respected village elder in Gjorm, Kapaj spent around £600 on making the trip from Albania to the UK.
He was one of up to 30 local young men who took a speedboat to Lecce, Italy, before making their way through Europe – probably in the back of a lorry.
His brother said: ‘I used to tell him to go to the US. He said “No, England is better. I will never leave England, it’s an excellent country. It’s a kingdom, a very bright country with rule of law and it is quiet”.’
After settling in the UK, Kapaj returned to Albania for an arranged marriage with a young woman from a nearby village. The couple set up home together back in England, where both now have citizenship.
Despite this, Kapaj would return to Albania to visit his mother most summers. In 2017 villagers recall him arriving in a ‘beautiful’ Mercedes with British number plates which they estimated to be worth about £80,000. Kapaj settled in London, working as a builder. The Mail understands that at one stage he both lived and worked in Wimbledon, so gaining an insight into the affluent area that he would later target.
By the time of his daughter’s birth in 2010, he and his wife were renting a flat in east London. He left the property because he needed more space for his young family, moving first to Barking and then on to Manchester.
‘They were a happy couple,’ his landlord said. ‘He was a very nice person, very quiet, very educated. I could tell this from the way he spoke.’
After moving north to Timperley, a suburban village near Altrincham, he ran a number of fish and chip shops. He owned one takeaway in the village, only selling the outlet for £59,500 last October.
But as the world now knows, Kapaj was living an extraordinary double life. Quite how he got away with it for so long remains unclear. And, because of his early guilty pleas, a number of questions remain unanswered.
For starters, given the distance he was living from London and the long hours spent running his takeaway, how did he explain away his regular trips to and from the capital?
The break-ins appeared to happen in clusters, after which the culprit would lie low for a few months. Why was this? Since his arrest, police have been able to precisely match the movements of Kapaj’s car with the timings of the burglaries.
Secondly, how did he dispose of the stolen goods, many of which were distinctive items of jewellery or family heirlooms?
‘You start to suspect everyone’
Police say they have no idea, admitting they never had a ‘sniff’ of them being sold on the black market. Might Kapaj have had help from other criminals to ship the goods out of the country?
Those mysteries aside, what police are all too familiar with are the way he chose to operate when out at ‘work’ in Wimbledon.
During his decade-long crimewave, detectives made a number of appeals asking for the public to help catch the burglar. At one point, they placed undercover officers in a family’s house every night for two weeks in the hope of catching the Prowler. All to no avail.
In 2014 that Boris Becker’s wife Lilly appeared on the BBC’s Crimewatch programme to tell how their Wimbledon home had been targeted twice by a burglar.
She revealed how CCTV cameras captured a man approaching through the back garden and fleeing when he triggered an alarm. The man returned a second time, cutting the wires to their CCTV system.
Other CCTV images showed a burglar, a torch in one hand and covering the lower half of his face with the other, carrying out a meticulous search of a kitchen.
Unhurried, he spent eight minutes opening every cupboard. Eventually, he picked up a purse, removed some banknotes and walked out.
Another time he was spotted scaling a fence and settling himself down for a picnic in a large wooden playhouse in the garden.
In 201 , police released new footage of the suspect stealing a safe containing £100,000. The images showed the 45kg safe containing cash and jewellery being dropped on the lawn from an upstairs window. Two minutes later, a man could be seen collecting it.
As the years passed, police began to speculate that the burglar might be revelling in the notoriety, breaking in just for the thrill. Other aspects baffled them. Why did he sometimes target women’s clothing including mink coats, Prada shoes and Gucci handbags? And what about the safe from which he stole a single earring from each of 30 pairs?
Of course, what cannot be underestimated is the impact on the victims. He clearly had no qualms about returning to the same property time and time again. On at least six occasions, people inside their homes disturbed the burglar. Fortunately he fled immediately each time.
Many wealthy residents ended up transforming their homes into fortresses, buying the latest security systems and Rottweiler guard dogs.
David Kyffin, whose detached home was targeted three times two years, called the burglar ‘evil’.
‘It is awful because you start to suspect everyone around you, your friends, your family,’ he said. ‘It’s a horrible feeling because you know someone has been in your home.’
Another resident, speaking on condition of anonymity, said her home was broken into while her family slept. ‘He climbed up the back of our house and got in through the balcony doors that weren’t locked,’ she said. ‘He took money and my husband’s watch. Even the dog didn’t wake up. I was really upset because he had been on our landing and my kids get up all the time in the night.
‘You don’t care about what someone has stolen – it’s about privacy and security being violated.
‘I’ve had so many sleepless nights worrying about whether he’d come back.’ Finally – and thankfully – not any more.