Dritan Gjika, an alleged cocaine kingpin known as "Tony," grew frustrated in May 2020 while waiting for payment on "material" shipped from Ecuador to Spain. "Look sir, your partner told me that he would send the money yesterday, then later he told me today," Gjika texted. He told his associate that he did not "need to wait until he sells it slowly over there in order to be paid."
This exchange occurred over SkyECC, an encrypted messaging platform favored by criminals until European police decrypted it in 2021. Authorities worldwide, including in Ecuador, received the Sky chat logs. Albanian-born Gjika is wanted there on organized crime and money laundering charges.
Ecuadorian prosecutors filed hundreds of pages of Gjika's Sky chat logs as evidence. These messages, dating from May 2020 to March 2021, show the daily operations of a drug-smuggling organization. Its corporate-like structure spanned borders, focused on profit. The messages also detail the group's infiltration of police and ports in Ecuador. This once-quiet country has become a major cocaine transit route.
At least 17 people charged with aiding the organization have been convicted in Ecuador; 15 await appeal. Four others were convicted of laundering over $43 million in illicit trade proceeds between 2015 and 2023. Gjika, alleged leader of the network and now one of Ecuador's most wanted men, left the country undetected. He was arrested in Abu Dhabi in May 2023 and awaits extradition to Ecuador. His lawyers argued in a pre-trial hearing that evidence was insufficient and questioned the legality of how the Sky messages were obtained.
Intercepted chats show Gjika's direct involvement in nearly every part of the operation. He hired drivers, managed shipping schedules, and calculated debts. He valued reliability and diplomacy. One frequent contact, who chats suggest managed Colombian suppliers, wrote in December 2020, "I'll go with you wherever you tell me brother... and with my eyes closed," after Gjika offered him "a lot of work."
Gjika, despite being from Albania, mastered slang-heavy Spanish in his texts. He used colloquial greetings and cryptic language for work details. Reporters cross-checked chat content against court records, police reports, and testimonies to decode conversations. They also consulted experts to verify coded lingo. In this world, a "box" meant a shipping container "impregnated" with "things" – packages of cocaine. "The uglies" referred to police. In one candid conversation, Gjika's partner openly called their work "traqueteando," a common Latin American term for drug trafficking.
Gjika, now 49, first arrived in Ecuador in 2009 on a temporary visitor visa. He joined a wave of Balkan nationals moving closer to the cocaine supply chain. Ecuador does not produce cocaine but has become Latin America’s primary export hub. Albanian, Mexican, and Colombian crime groups exploit its booming maritime trade, especially in bananas, which require quick port movement.
Renato Rivera, a researcher at the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC), noted Albanian traffickers brought a corporate culture to Ecuador's cocaine business. This culture focused on money-making over territorial turf wars. The network allegedly run by Gjika was fluid, not maintaining fixed alliances with Ecuador's top criminal gangs. "These types of people don't 'marry,' so to speak. They don't form strategic alliances with any of the criminal groups," Rivera stated. "Rather, it's a business model based on market opportunities."
Ecuadorian authorities describe the criminal organization allegedly led by Gjika as having a pyramidal corporate structure. Gjika was at the top. A "management level" of senior directors included his alleged lieutenant, Argentine-Italian national Mario Sánchez Rinaldi. Sánchez Rinaldi was arrested in February 2024.