Villagers say Zvernec peninsula stolen in 2000s as Flamingo protests continue
In April, a development group backed by Jared Kushner paid Artur Shehu €110 million — about $125 million — for his land in Zvernec, the coastal village where the venture plans a Mediterranean resort, prosecutors in the money-laundering case against Shehu said. Albanian corporate records show the payment was made through Albania Land Development, an entity owned by Sazan Real Estate Development, the venture Kushner formed with developer Asher Abehsera and a Qatari investment group. Two months later, in June, Albania’s special prosecutors’ office, SPAK, secured a judge’s order to arrest Shehu and 19 others. Prosecutors charged Shehu with money laundering and participating in a structured criminal group — similar to racketeering in the U.S. — and said he held a “leadership position within the organization.” In total, the group paid well over $240 million for land to private landowners including Shehu, according to a person familiar with the sales.
Prosecutors allege the network stretched the full length of the cocaine supply chain: members supervised production in Ecuador, loaded shipments onto boats hidden among fruits, soy, sugar and other products, guided them through Dutch ports, processed the drug at small factories and distributed it across Europe. Proceeds flowed back to Albania through cryptocurrency and cash smuggled on buses, and the group laundered money through Albanian real estate, prosecutors said. Some gains ended up financing a boxy red skyscraper in downtown Tirana and coastal villas, they said, with Shehu and his proxies “crucial to this effort.”
SPAK was created in 2019 partly to address European Union concerns about Albanian corruption. In the past four years, it has filed corruption charges against two former prime ministers, two former deputy prime ministers and numerous former cabinet ministers, all of whom denied the charges. European drug investigators in Spain, Belgium and multiple other countries handed SPAK voluminous files that supported the June order, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Shehu’s lawyer, Kujtim Cakrani, said Shehu is neither a drug dealer nor a land thief and never dealt directly with Kushner, acting only through an intermediary. “He has absolutely no connection to the charges,” Cakrani said. “He is simply a landowner, coming from a large landowning family.” His interactions with others in the indictment were solely for legitimate business deals, Cakrani said.
A spokesman for the development group said the Albanian legal system is “the appropriate venue for resolving questions about land ownership and the integrity of prior transactions.” The group is aware of the allegations “regarding the land seller” and is not itself the subject of any investigation, he said, adding: “We continue to believe the underlying land acquisitions were conducted lawfully.” Prosecutors say they have frozen Shehu’s money from the sale.
Zvernec sits on the coast outside Vlore, near a more than 700-year-old Byzantine-era monastery on the edge of the Narta Lagoon, where flamingoes flock. Villagers said their parents and grandparents once raised potatoes on the slim peninsula, and they contend Shehu amassed much of its land in the 2000s, using historic documents to claim his ancestor Seit Shehu had owned the property. Zoi Pula, 71, who grew up in the village and now returns in the summers from Greece, said his family received ownership of its peninsula farmland after the communist government fell in 1991, then learned in the mid-2000s that local property officials had given Shehu control of it. “We went crazy. We got angry. It was a psychological problem,” he said.
In 2007, one chunk of land was secured when a Shehu lawyer presented property officials a mistranslated Ottoman-era land record; a court found an archivist substituted the original owner’s name with Seit Shehu’s while translating from Ottoman Turkish. The lawyer and the archivist were later convicted on falsified-documents charges, though the lawyer’s case is being retried. “The falsity of this document has been proven,” Albania’s High Court ruled. Shehu and numerous land claimants have traded victories in trials and appeals, none of which forced Shehu to relinquish the land. Cakrani said Shehu’s claims rest on substantial documentation — including records from the fascist Italian occupation and the early 1900s — showing his family was a large landowner in Zvernec and elsewhere. “There are legitimate documents that prove this is his land,” he said.
In September 2024, villagers wrote to Kushner’s firm urging the developers to refrain “from taking actions that undermine the real property rights of the village” while their court disputes with Shehu — nearly two decades long — continued, according to a copy of the letter reviewed by the Journal. The site, they wrote, is “owned by the village and its residents.” Abehsera told the Journal in 2024 that “we have no interest in developing anything that’s not rightfully or legally ours to develop,” and, when sent a list of four landowners including Shehu, responded that “none of these are our partners.” He later told the Journal in June that he did not know whether his firm had paid Shehu for land and denied prior knowledge of the disputes. “We did not see or hear of any dispute at all,” he said.
In late April, the group put construction fencing around the environmentally protected peninsula, lining it with spools of razor wire. When locals protested, hired security guards blocked the site; one punched a local villager in the throat and dragged him across a beach as police nearby watched. A video of the incident went viral. The development group publicly disavowed the actions, attributing them to an unnamed security contractor. Protesters began filling downtown Tirana with signs bearing images of Kushner, flamingoes and Trump, and daily demonstrations have continued for more than two months in a movement they call the Flamingo Revolution. The backlash has drawn European Union officials and celebrities such as Dua Lipa, yet the project has strong backing from Prime Minister Edi Rama, who celebrates the $5 billion development as an important foreign investment.
Shehu, 60, now lives in Miami, where property records show he owns a 4,000-square-foot home on Miami Beach’s Flamingo Drive. His path there crosses Albania’s turbulent postcommunist decades, when a massive pyramid scheme nearly plunged the country into civil war. Dritan Zagani, a former Albanian state police officer who investigated him, said authorities suspected Shehu of trafficking marijuana and smuggling aspiring émigrés to Italy by speedboat; after a 1999 gunfight at his bar, Zagani said, “After that, Artur disappeared.” Cakrani said Shehu was attacked by pro-communist gangs for his anticommunist views and that the law-enforcement scrutiny was politically motivated; neither the Italian nor the Albanian investigations led to charges. Shehu moved to the U.S. in 2001, won asylum and later secured citizenship, Cakrani said.
In 2012, Italian prosecutors sought Shehu’s arrest in a broader case against an Italian crime family; an Italian judge rejected the attempt, saying there wasn’t sufficient evidence to connect Shehu to anything illegal. Prosecutors said Shehu co-owned a gelateria in Albania with an Italian mafia crime boss who wired him over €1 million and rented him space for a casino. Albanian prosecutors said European law enforcement later spotted Shehu in Monaco with suspected narcotics traffickers and photographed him in 2019 in Mallorca alongside a suspected top mob boss. Shehu was not charged in those investigations, and his attorney said he has had no legal trouble with any European country beyond Albania.
Kushner turned to the Balkans after launching his post-2020 business career, built around a $6 billion private-equity fund backed by Gulf wealth funds. He and Ivanka Trump first saw the Albanian coast on a Mediterranean yacht trip after the first Trump administration, exploring the island of Sazan, a former military site where locals trek by boat. “We swam to the island. We went on a hike,” she said on a podcast in May. “We were just captivated.” Two years ago, Kushner posted renderings on Instagram of villas carved into the cliff-side at Sazan and hotels lining Zvernec’s beaches. He reached an accord with Rama to develop Sazan and began working with Abehsera, his partner on Brooklyn office redevelopment in the 2010s; the venture later added a large Qatari investment group run by the Al-Khayyat family, which Kushner met at the 2022 World Cup. Abehsera said he also struck a deal with a local partner, an Albanian conglomerate called Kastrati, whose name adorns gas stations around the country.
Kushner’s earlier Balkans bet — a no-bid deal with Serbia’s government to develop state-owned land in central Belgrade — drew local criticism and collapsed in December after weeks of protests and the indictment of a cabinet minister who pushed through project approvals. In Albania, the group is working on an environmental review document, a prerequisite to government approvals before construction. Sotir Dhamo, an urban planning professor at Polis University in Tirana, said courts theoretically have the authority to temporarily block disputed development, but “in practice, the courts are not fully independent from politics and hidden economic interests.” Kostaq Konomi, the village leader of Zvernec, said: “The only thing that I want now is that they give me back my land.”