In 2021, while on a Mediterranean yacht trip, Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump thought they had found heaven on earth in an unlikely spot: Sazan, a rocky island off of Albania.

As Trump later recalled in a podcast interview. “We swam to the islands. We went on a hike, barefoot all the way, up to the top. And we were just captivated.” Kusher, who had previously served as an adviser to his father-in-law, Donald Trump, during the president’s first term, was in the midst of turning the political connections he had made in government into lucrative business deals. Albania, a struggling post-communist country with a government eager to win powerful friends in the West, seemed a promising location. Seizing the opportunity, Kushner initiated a deal to purchase Sazan, as well as marshland in nearby Zvërnec that was home to scores of endangered birds, including flamingos. And Kushner’s investment fund, Affinity Partners, working with the family of Qatari billionaire Moutaz Khayyat, started buying more land, with plans to build luxury hotels.

The scheme stank to high heaven from the start. Although Donald Trump was out of power, he was already indicating that he would seek the presidency again in 2024, which meant that foreign billionaires and political leaders had every reason to curry Kushner’s favor. (The president’s son-in-law would in fact return as a senior foreign policy adviser and emissary in Trump’s second term, making him an even worthier investment.)

Further, land deals in Albania were inherently suspect because of the heavy influence of organized crime over the nation’s government. Writing in The Nation in June, Mitchell Prothero noted:

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Over the past two decades, Albanian clans have taken over much of Europe’s cocaine trade, which has immersed an otherwise poor country in illegal, hard-to-spend cash. And the government isn’t about to spurn the economic benefits of this influx….

It’s all a recipe for corruption on a massive scale, as powerful business interests coordinate new development projects with the government, and the international mafia ecosystem. Kushner and his consortium of investors aren’t direct players in this system—but it’s unthinkable that his local business backers and government officials friendly to the projects aren’t involved.

Prothero was right to suspect that Kushner’s deal would inevitably be entangled in political corruption and mob ties. On Saturday, The Wall Street Journal published a detailed report on one of the key players in the deal, Artur Shehu, described by the newspaper as “a suspected gangster who fled to Miami after a gunfight at his bar.”

In 2024, villagers in Zvërnec wrote a letter to Kushner saying that land he was buying from Shehu in fact belonged to them.

The villagers had a strong case. As the Journal reports,

One chunk of land was secured by one of Shehu’s lawyers in 2007 by presenting property officials a mistranslated Ottoman-era land record. While translating from Ottoman Turkish, an archivist substituted out the original owner and inserted Seit Shehu’s name instead, a court found. The lawyer and the archivist were later convicted on falsified documents-related charges, though the lawyer’s case is being retried.

Shehu has been under repeated investigation by authorities in Albania and other European countries for decades. (He hasn’t been convicted and denies wrongdoing.) In June, Shehu was arrested on RICO-style charges by the Albanian special prosecutors’ office, which claimed he was a prominent member of a large drug gang.

It’s hardly a coincidence that Kusher and his Qatari cronies were involved in buying land from an alleged gangster. As the Journal notes, “Gains from cocaine filtered their way to Albania via cryptocurrency and cash smuggled on buses—with the group ultimately laundering money through Albanian real estate.” Albanian gangsters frequently operate by fusing cryptocurrency and real estate, with their corruption greased by access to political power. That is structurally very similar to Kushner’s own putatively legitimate business enterprises. The Trump family also thrives on crypto, real estate, and proximity to political power.

As The Guardian reported on Thursday, Trump’s second term has been a massive exercise in primitive accumulation by grift. In 2025, the president made $2.2 billion

by amassing big cryptocurrency holdings, benefiting from wealthy foreign interests, expanding his Truth Social business and more, while federal oversight of his actions has waned.

Trump last year raked in at least $1.4bn from his crypto ventures according to financial disclosure forms he filed in June…. Monetizing his presidency further this summer, Trump’s Truth Social media business is pushing a new scheme that offers wealthy buyers special early access to his posts for a fee of $100,000 a month.

The sheer scale of the Trump family’s graft is producing a heartening backlash. This is most visible in Albania, where there have been near-daily protests that have expanded into a wide-ranging attack on the country’s crooked government. The spirit of resistance in Albania should inspire Americans. As my Nation colleague Chris Lehmann has lamented, Donald Trump in his second term has been brazenly corrupt, swaggering with a sickening impunity in part because Democratic Party leaders are gun-shy about challenging him. Fortunately, some in the party, notably Senator Elizabeth Warren, have kept beating the drums on Trumpian corruption. If Democrats win back Congress in the midterms, they’ll be in a strong position to investigate Trump family corruption, including the sleazy deals Kushner made in Albania.