Albanian drug dealer sold £4m of coke in three months

An Albanian drug baron who organised £4m worth of cocaine deals in just three months was jailed for 12 years.

Fatjon Kurti, 34, boasted ‘his business is cocaine’ while arranging huge deals across London and the southeast on the secretive app Encrochat using the handle ‘Botarrota’.

Kurti was involved in sales of at least 58 kilos of cocaine, worth more than £4m on the streets, between 26 March and 2 June 2020.

The Albanian set up a sham company called E&T Catering, registered from his home in central London, in a bid to escape detection.

But he was arrested after EncroChat was taken down in 2020 by an international law enforcement partnership.

NCA officers proved Kurti was Botarrota during Operation Venetic and he admitted trafficking multiple kilos of cocaine, supplying cocaine and money laundering.

Location data for the Botarrota Encro phone showed it was operating mainly around London, but there were also trips to Weymouth and Bournemouth, on 20 May and 2 June 2020.

NCA officers waded through more than 16,000 messages on Kurti’s Encro phone to gather evidence.

The evidence showed he had a number of trusted associates responsible for the holding and distribution of cocaine and the collection of cash payments.

Venetic data showed him receiving many images of cocaine and bank notes which he forwarded to numerous contacts to discuss drugs deals.

Kurti discussed doing a deal involving 11 one kilo blocks of cocaine for £272,500 before he was arrested on 25 November last year.

Speaking after Kurti was jailed for 12 years NCA Branch Commander Matt McMillan said: ‘Through some excellent and tenacious investigative work the team built a rock solid case and Kurti’s only option was to admit his guilt.

‘The Class A drugs trade is inextricably linked to gang violence and real suffering in communities across the UK.

‘The NCA works with partners at home and abroad to fight drug trafficking and we’ll continue to do everything we can to stop men like Fatjon Kurti.’

EncroChat became a standard messaging platform for organised crime, where criminals made about massive drug deals, laundered money, and discussed extortion, kidnapping and assassinations.

A joint operation between the NCA, the French National Gendarmerie and Dutch police infiltrated the network in April 2020 after placing malware on French EncroChat servers, so officers could read any message sent through those servers.