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Vlore: A Reporter's Notebook

It isn't difficult to find where all the trafficking money is going in Vlore.

Anyone will tell you the bars and restaurants along the Vlora port were all built from the profits of transporting Albanian teenagers and other illegal goods to Italy.

So I wasn't surprised, after hanging around these establishments for an afternoon without telling anyone I was a reporter, to find that these were also the informal offices of the boating cartels.

If you wanted transport to Italy for some of the teenage girls you had bought or abducted in other parts of Albania, here was the place to make the arrangements.

When I walked into the first bar the smell of Rakia and the sound of Italian shouted into cell phones was a sure sign that I was at the first station for clandestine passage to Italy.

I tried to stay calm and look at my coffee when the men at the other tables began to look at me, or maybe I just thought they were looking at the outsider from Tirana.

The glitter of their gold chains and rings made me nervous. I was intimidated by the "traffickers." I could only imagine how a 17-year-old girl would feel when she arrived in Vlora without any idea of why she was here.

The waiters were willing to talk to a stranger. They said the trafficking deals going on at the other tables did not trouble them. It is the only work available to preserve the existence of this nice tourist town, they said.

The other patrons did not lean over their tables in conspiracy. They were relaxed as they discussed this dirty business. But in a few hours they would be transformed into the cunning speedboat captains playing cat and mouse with the Guardia di Financa.

The next afternoon I had to remind myself I was in Albania.

Two girls dressed in black with heavy make-up stood on a bridge where I was looking at the harbor, as if they were waiting for someone or no one. I recognized that look from when I was an immigrant in Greece where the prostitutes work the sidewalks.

But the local girls were as simple and beautiful as my hometown in Gjirokastra. And there were no teenagers in heavy make-up to be seen in the traffickers' business bars.

But the bridge women were just one of the contrasts in Vlora, a city with beautiful villas and hotels on one shore and demolished kiosks on the other.