Talk:Macedonian mafia

(early conversation)
It seems impossible that they control 70% of the cocaine trade in New York.

How is it impossible? Nothing is impossible, my friend. Positive thinking wins. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 62.162.63.62 (talk) 02:17, 27 August 2008 (UTC)
 * On Wikipedia, it is sources and not positive thinking that should solve a matter like this. A statistical claim like this one deserves a good source. Darkfrog24 (talk) 01:38, 3 January 2010 (UTC)

Ahaa... That is not positive thinking. :D You need to think positive. Meanwhile, I'm looking for the source. If you think positive, I'll find the source. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 174.89.111.63 (talk) 05:13, 10 June 2013 (UTC)

I have a hunch that this article doesn't contain any truth at all. There are no sources to be found and before I crossed this article I didn't even know that the 'Macedonian mafia' even existed (and trust me I have always done my fair share of research on 'organized crime'). Sure, there probably are Macedonian criminals like in every other ethnic group on earth. But ethnic Macedonian criminal gangs are not known or powerful. However, there are ethnic Albanian crime families from Macedonia. But they are likely to be grouped in the category 'Albanian mafia' than in 'Macedonian mafia'. Begbiepwns (talk) 15:52, 29 October 2013 (UTC)

To Begbiepwns, material and sources in the English language regarding organized crime in Macedonia are increasingy being published since coverage of internet services has increased from 52 percent of the population in 2009, to 63 percent in 2012 and 76 percent in 2016 respectively. Some names that were mentioned in English language forums on organized crime regarding the Bulgarian underworld as early as 2009 for example, did not exist in neither Bulgarian Cyrillic nor English language articles until 2012, so its increasingly difficult to be skeptical just because there is not a published source yet. Of course, we now know that put of the 110 tons of heroin that enter the Balkan route from Turkey to Bulgaria every year, in 2018 the UNODC published a report that 80 tons of heroin alone pass through Macedonia every year, of which 20 to 25 tons or around 25 percent travel to Albania and then to Italy. If you've read up so much on organized crime as you said, then you'll know that this means Macedonian groups essentially move more product than the Sinaola cartel did under El Chapo(200 tons over a period of 18 years). Even though if the groups are locally strong and do not have the manpower outside of Macedonia to be comparable to Albanian, Italian or Russian mafias. Groups get a percentage for organizing the smuggling through the territory of Macedonia and this is in the billions of dollars a year to ethnic Macedonian groups, which the Albanian groups cannot war with because they are backed by the Bulgarian and Serbian mafias, and the entire Balkan heroin route is financially backed by the Russian mafia, and I've heard names as prominent as Evgeny Primakov being thrown around, but at the same time there's documented proof regarding the involvement of the CIA for a slush fund and troops from Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo, therefore rendering Balkan groups immune from the prying eyed of agencids like the DEA, unlike the Mexican and Colombian groups. If you go and poke around locally in Macedonia I'm sure there will be somebody pissed off enough from the corruption to name hundreds of local mafia bosses prevalent throughout dozens of towns, cities and villages across this small country, in addition to thousands or even tens of thousands of people directly employed in their networks both locally and abroad, at varying levels of involvement. And that is just ethnic Macedonian criminals I am referring to. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2001:1970:48DF:9900:4DA1:DF3D:E492:9097 (talk) 15:29, 22 April 2019 (UTC)

Just a quick question here - for a portion of the English language Wikipedia article to be validated, do we need to include an English language source or can we include sources in other languages? There is very little in the way of English language news articles and other sources on what you would call the Macedonian mafia. There is a plethora of articles in Macedonian, however, especially in 2017. Back in 2013 Darkfrog and prior to that might not have been able to dig up information due to the lack of online published articles. As Macedonia is a small country, the media tends to be controlled politically and politics are often intertwined with organized crime, thus censorship of any organized criminal activity in Macedonia is rampant. But like all things - you tend to learn the most information about a place on the internet tends to be in the local language of that place. It'll be even more informative if you ask the locals of local gangsters and whatnot. Even YouTube videos used to be scarce. There was a Bulgarian gangster back in the 1990s and early 2000s that was pretty powerful in Bulgaria whose name was only known by locals, and any stories could not be verified about him until the first articles were published in 2012-2013, naming him, and validating a lot of details in what were previously just word of mouth stories and rumors. Unfortunately, as the Macedonian mafia is not that big, not a lot of research exists, especially ones that contain the word "mafia", "organized crime", or "criminal organizations". As far as the mafia in Macedonia goes, Macedonia, like Bulgaria, is a country in which that isn't in the business of expanding abroad when it comes to criminal activities, like the Russian, Serbian, Italian and Albanian mafias. This is due to relevant circumstances throughout history. For one, the Macedonian community is small overall compared to the Russian or Italian diasporas, for example. This is why the only articles linking Macedonian names with mafia type organizations will be found in Australia and Germany due to the large Macedonian diaspora. The case in Germany was well documented through the Frankfurt mafia case. This is even less apparent in Toronto, and even less so in Chicago, Italy and Paris. I have pictures where a deceased Macedonian gangster is standing next to a South African Hells Angels chapter leader. But that's as far as evidence goes to confirm their connection, and one South African article to confirm the identity of the second person in the picture indeed as the leader of the Hells Angels in South Africa. The fact that the Macedonian gangster is exactly that - a gangster - is documented in several articles in Macedonian. In reality, ethnic Macedonian organized criminal gangs are very strong in Macedonia and very well connected internationally. The primary reason for this right now is the Balkan heroin route. Most of the heroin passes through Macedonia, and gangs on a local level take their piece and keep onto it. This is why you won't find ethnic Albanian gangs in the eastern half of Macedonia. It's not just the lack of Albanian diaspora in Eastern Macedonia. You can send a couple hundred criminals to a city that has almost no people of that criminal's ethnicity and still cause chaos. The only reason why they don't have the same power or notoriety outside of the Balkans is because they lack a criminal population outside of it to form ethnic Macedonian criminal gangs composed of mostly Macedonians. So this ends up in turn with news articles naming a Macedonian, for example the case in Las Vegas with the $50 million credit card fraud, but do not contain the words "Macedonian criminal gang", but might contain "criminal gang", because the Macedonian population in that gang was the minority. So even if you did research it, how would you go about doing that other than going into Macedonia and asking people who the local criminals are? There's no formal research being done because the Macedonian mafia is no singular entity, with no hierarchy. You have no keywords to use in order to find information on it. Even the Russians are horizontally structured and they have ranks sometimes. So, you're right, Darkfrog, Macedonia is one of the home countries of the Albanian mafia, together with Kosovo and Albania, but bit the Albanian mafia do not have enough power in Macedonia to become the de facto criminal organization. That's why there's a separate article for Macedonian criminal gangs, and now in 2017, there is a lot more articles than there was in 2010 when this article was created. The only problem is they are mostly in Macedonian. For example, if you go to Sitel.com.mk, right now on the home page there is a story about Macedonian customs seizing 1 ton of marijuana at the border crossing Blace. Also note that the Macedonian gangs tend to serve as mediators between the Albanian and Bulgarian gangs a lot of times due to a lot of Macedonian gangsters having grown up and known eachother personally with Albanian gangsters, especially in Skopje and Kumanovo, where the population divide between Macedonians and Albanians tend to be almost an even mix, and tend to make the introductions to Bulgarians, who historically have familial and cultural links to a lot of people in Bulgaria. Stip, for example, was for a long time under Bulgarian occupation. Strumica has a dialect very similar to Bulgarian, and Strumica being a mostly Macedonian city, close to the Bulgarian border, they are more keen on doing business with small Bulgarian businesses across the border than with Albanian owned businesses in Macedonia. This is because Albanians and Macedonians, while still mixing today, tend to self segregate, especially when we're talking about Macedonians from majority Macedonian cities, like Stip, and Albanians from majority Albanian cities, like Tetovo. There is no incentive growing up to intermingle with Albanians. It's just how the culture is. So in essence, if Albanian gangs wanted to smuggle heroin on a boat over to Calabria for example, it had to pass through Macedonia first and in order for the heroin to pass through customs easily, especially tons of heroin, it would have to go through customs that have been bribed to let it through. This is where Macedonian gangs come in handy. You need to know the language and culture of the people in order for them to trust you more. It's basic psychology, sociology and common sense. And for an enormous amount of heroin to be moved into the rest of Europe and North America - you need a ridiculous amount of money to back that kind of cross border operation up. This is where the Russian and Turkish mafias come in. Darko Saric's net worth is estimated to be $26 billion, and this made him only the third richest criminal in the Balkans. This was documented in a video posted on YouTube, where the Macedonian reporter Vasko Eftov interviews the Belgrade chief of police and former head of Interpol. But he notes that Darko Saric got most of his money from other groups, like the Russian mafia, which funded and backed his operations financially even though not being physically present in terms of manpower, since obviously, the Serbs themselves had enough manpower. Even the US military has been documented by authorities, including the Marine Corps, of helping criminal gangs in Kosovo smuggle drugs through their operations in Camp Bondsteel. This is no longer speculation, it's fact. The Russian mafia is known to fund a lot of these operations and get a lot of profit in return. The Albanian mafia has immunity in the region thanks to NATO protection of the Kosovo Liberation Army, the Albanian mafia's enforcement wing, and the transmutation of organized crime into politics, the military and the economy. Otherwise how would you expect the Albanian mafia to be so successful, raking in 70 billion dollars a year from drug trafficking in a region that is mostly populated by Slavic peoples alien and some even historically and currently hostile to the Albanian language and culture? What motivates Arkan to do business with Albanian gangsters, when he led a right wing nationalist paramilitary group? Even Greece was hostile to Albania and Albanian irredentism. There was no sure fire way that the Albanian mafia, and Albanian people, would be successful and still around had it been the will of the US. So it has nothing to do with which group is more capable, it's just circumstances. Circumstances permit there to be powerful Albanian gangs in Macedonia, and circumstances permit there to be powerful Albanian gangs in Western Europe. Look at the Serbian mafia and how they were banished from Europe for the most part. They caused more damage in just 5 years in Europe during the 1990's than the Albanian mafia has so far, in terms of direct killings, bombings and heists. This was because the Yugoslav Secret Service gave passports to Yugoslav criminals and sent them abroad, similar to the situation created where Cubans once had their rise to infamy in Miami because Fidel Castro decided to send criminals to Florida. So to answer you question, it's very well documented - it's just not put together in words. Macedonians in Macedonia call their criminals "mafiosos" because they operate very similarly to mafia type organizations. This is why they're not classified as street gangs, drug cartels, motorcycle gangs or terrorist groups - but as a mafia type organization. So basically, when it comes to the level of importance in the region, the Macedonian mafia is even more powerful than the Greek mafia, as Greece does not have a prevalent mafia culture amongst it's youth, and neither does Croatia or Slovenia, similar to the narco culture in Mexico or the hip hop style street gang culture in North America. Why does a street gang have to be hip hop style? Why not punk gangs? Like in Robocop? Or goths? Simply because of circumstances, because that's the subculture that developed from itself. A street gang can also engage in activities that are classified as organized crime, but their modus operandi and organizational culture is different in that they get classified as a street gang anyways. A mafia type organization operates differently than a street gang. I can also provide articles and videos upon request for a lot of what I just wrote - the only difficulty in verifying what is being said is that they might be in a different language other than English and a video is harder to translate than text nowadays. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 216.221.82.5 (talk) 08:37, 2 November 2017 (UTC)


 * All things being equal, English-language sources are preferred, but English is not *required*, especially when they are sparser or of lower quality. Does that answer the question? It is also definitely better to have a source on another language than not to have a source at all. Elinruby (talk) 15:53, 5 November 2022 (UTC)

Orphaned status
I created links to this page in Macedonia, organized crime and Serbian Mafia. Do you guys think that the article on Macedonia should have a section on crime? Darkfrog24 (talk) 01:38, 3 January 2010 (UTC)

External links modified
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Inclusion criteria for "Key people"
After repeated disputes about inclusion of multiple entries without an article, including the repeated restoration of an entry that wasn't supported by the given inline citations, I have removed all entries for people who are not currently the subject of a Wikipedia article. ~ ToBeFree (talk) 20:30, 30 November 2019 (UTC)

Huge quote in lede
Offhand, might be a good source, but that quote is WAY too long and should not be in the lede. If you do want to quote more than a couple sentences, also, you should use the blockquote template. But not four paragraphs, and not in the lede Elinruby (talk) 16:01, 5 November 2022 (UTC)


 * I came across this article recently. The source will be kept. However most of the content in the lede is unverifiable and dubious, which should be removed. StephenMacky1 (talk) 18:06, 5 November 2022 (UTC)

Fast ce
Concentrated on spelling and overlinking. Still has big word order problems but I think it is readable at this point, and the referencing should be addressed before anybody does any fiddly wikignoming Elinruby (talk) 17:41, 5 November 2022 (UTC)