In 2018, convicted cocaine trafficker Slobodan Kostovski fled a Brazilian prison and made his way back to Europe with a fake passport.

The Serbian senior quickly fell into old habits, police allege. Last August, Kostovski was arrested in Belgrade, accused of shipping 2.7 metric tonnes of cocaine from Brazil aboard a 22-metre vessel apprehended near Spain’s Canary Islands.

Nicknamed “the General” by his associates, he had been trafficking “large amounts” of powder to “Europe for a long period of time,” Serbian police wrote in a 2022 intelligence report obtained exclusively by Reuters. Kostovski, now 70, had lived in Brazil for years. It’s a perch that allowed him to forge strong ties with cocaine producers in neighbouring Colombia, Bolivia and Peru, and arrange ocean transport of the drugs to Europe, according to the Serbian document.

Kostovski, who has yet to enter a plea, now sits in a Belgrade jail awaiting trial, according to a spokeswoman for the high prosecutor’s office. Kostovski’s lawyer, Stefan Jokic, declined to comment.

Kostovski’s return to Europe in 2018 coincided with an auspicious moment for the continent’s cocaine trade. As South American production surged over the past decade, Balkan traffickers were perfectly positioned to stoke European demand, authorities say. They now dominate the complex logistics of moving coke from Andean production labs to street sellers in Paris, London and Berlin, helping to transform Europe into the world’s No.1 cocaine market, reports show.

They’ve done it by tapping criminal contacts in Balkan diaspora communities on both sides of the Atlantic, and by infiltrating the maritime shipping system that moves an estimated 90 per cent of the world’s trade in goods, according to US, European and Latin American counter-narcotics officials.

“When we talk about large-scale shipments to supply the European continent, the only group that’s hegemonic is the Balkans,” said Ivo Silva, a Brazilian federal police detective who investigated Kostovski in the late 2000s as part of Operation Niva, one of the first major probes into Balkan cocaine traffickers operating out of Brazil.

Europol says Kostovski was the organiser of a major trans-Atlantic cocaine shipment that was seized last year. On August 24, 2023, Serbian and Spanish police found 2.7 metric tonnes of powder aboard a sailboat near the Canary Islands. Coordinated raids in Serbia turned up 550,000 euros in cash and led to multiple arrests. Europol via Reuters

Balkan trafficking outfits have eschewed the top-down, territorial structure of cartels from Mexico and Colombia, working instead in small cells that are highly mobile, secretive and capable of moving astonishingly large loads of cocaine, counter-narcotics officials said. While the gangs aren’t monolithic and have engaged in their own bloody, internecine feuds, collectively these cliques have been dubbed the Balkan Cartel by law enforcement. Their networks have proved difficult to penetrate and even harder to topple.

“There is no strict hierarchical structure to the Balkan Cartel,” a former US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) official who has investigated these gangs says. “There’s no godfather.”

Balkan fingerprints can now be found on most of the cocaine that enters Europe each year, US and European counter-narcotics officials said. The Maritime Analysis and Operations Centre, a European agency that coordinates narcotics busts in Atlantic waters, said a record 9.11 metric tonnes of cocaine linked to Balkan criminals was seized at sea last year, a 300 per cent increase since 2015.

Recent seizure data suggests Europe’s cocaine surge – and the Balkan traffickers driving it – are not slowing down. In the Belgian port of Antwerp, Europe’s top gateway for South American cocaine, authorities seized a record 116 metric tonnes last year. Dutch customs nabbed almost 60 metric tonnes in 2023, up nearly a fifth from the 2022 total.

The Balkans region is a peninsula in southeastern Europe stretching from the Adriatic Sea to the Black Sea. While geographic definitions differ, countries widely considered to be Balkan states include Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Serbia, Slovenia and Romania. Authorities say the region’s long history of seafaring, smuggling and migration has been pivotal to the rise of Balkan traffickers.

This article is based on thousands of pages of police records, intelligence reports and court documents from Europe, the United States and Latin America, as well as interviews with more than two dozen officials on both sides of the Atlantic. The material portrays Balkan traffickers as an enterprising group of logistics specialists grafted to every link of the cocaine supply chain, a position that has made them indispensable to other syndicates looking to move loads out of South America.

Balkan criminals “are more than happy to work with Israelis, Dutch, Swedes, Dominicans, Chinese triads,” the ex-DEA official said. “They’ll work, really, with anybody.” However, they have largely steered clear of the United States, he said, dissuaded by the dominance of the Mexican cartels and tougher US policing.

The ascent of Balkan gangs to the upper echelons of the global coke trade has police scrambling to keep pace. Cocaine seizures in western and central Europe reached a record 315 metric tonnes in 2021, according to the most recent data from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), outstripping the 250 metric tonnes seized in the United States. The purity of Europe’s cocaine has climbed steadily over the past decade, the UNODC said, a sign of its abundance.

With the continent drowning in blow, drug-related killings now rival terrorism as the European Union’s top security threat, according to the bloc’s Home Affairs Commissioner Ylva Johansson.

Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson last year enlisted his nation’s army to help quell narcotics-linked gang violence that has included bomb attacks and child assassins. In March, Greek authorities dismantled a warring Balkan gang allegedly responsible for more than 60 murders across Europe over the past decade. That same month, the streets of Brussels were rocked by multiple gun battles allegedly involving the Albanian mafia.

“When we talk about large-scale shipments to supply the European continent, the only group that’s hegemonic is the Balkans.”

In Latin America, the Balkan presence is now stronger than ever, according to an investigator from the Balkan taskforce of European police agency Europol. The official said there are more than 50 major trafficking cells from the Western Balkans working across Latin America, with hundreds of gangsters scattered around the region.

Brazilian federal police detective Alexandre Custodio, who last year led a major operation against Balkan smugglers, says he has been “impressed” by their dominance of the trans-Atlantic cocaine trade.

“Right now in Latin America they are the main mafia in maritime trafficking,” he explains.

Authorities say the pre-eminence of Balkan criminals in the global cocaine trade is the fruit of their two-decade investment in people and connections on both sides of the Atlantic.

• A Reuters report