Buda wasn’t a big man, perhaps five-nine, but he had close-cropped hair with a scar that ran into his hairline on the right side of his broad face and enough prison tattoos on his arms, should he care to show them, to make anyone think twice about approaching him. Buda dressed unobtrusively, today in a tan long-sleeved shirt and jeans and sneakers. One might imagine he actually was a handyman for a group of East Side co-ops, work he showed up for every now and again, rather than what he really was: the head of a crew in the Albanian mob.

Buda’s crew, or clan, was less hierarchically organized than a Cosa Nostra family, and leadership was often fluid and based strictly on results. Through a combination of caution and brutality, Buda’s power had remained unchallenged for years. The members of the crew shared their compatriot’s reputation for ruthlessness and violence, gained over more than twenty-five years of aggressive criminal activity. The Albanians had come late on the New York scene and they had been keen to make up for lost time. They took low-level positions in Italian organizations only to rise up and challenge the longer-established Mafia stalwarts.

In Europe, Albanian groups established a strong presence in hard and soft drug trafficking, dominating the heroin trade in many countries, running the raw materials from Afghanistan through Turkey to Albania. Processed heroin and other drugs could then be distributed anywhere in the world, through hubs like the terminals at Port Newark, New Jersey. Heroin was just one business the crews were involved in. They also had interests in such prosaic activities as extortion, loansharking, and illegal gambling. Aleksander Buda had lieutenants working such operations so he could keep a low profile and take on more lucrative projects, such as the one he was working now, the one with a problem.

Buda was very aware that Albanian crews had developed a profile. One based in Queens had been taken down by the FBI a few years before; another in Staten Island was broken up in 2010. There were now more than two hundred thousand Albanians in the New York metro area, maybe three hundred thousand. The vast majority, all save a couple of hundred, were hardworking and law-abiding. Buda and his men drifted in and out of this Albanian diaspora, hiding among them in plain sight. The mob groups were clannish and secretive, hypersensitive to any kind of insult, and quick to use violence for the sake of vengeance. Under the Albanian code of besa, a man’s word was his bond and a handshake was a cast-iron seal. Buda had an agreement to complete this task, and he realized he was going to have to expose some of his men to take care of this particular problem. And doing work in public was another thing that made him nervous.