Eliot Brown: Real estate in Albania is just an absolute mess and a half. And that all stems back to communism, when the government seized the land. And then after communism, they were like, "Oh, let's give it back to everyone," which seems easy, but then it's like, "Well, who do you give it back to?" And so they have a series of overlapping laws. And if you farmed some land during communism, you have one set of rights to it. If your family owned it earlier, then you have another set of rights to it.
Jessica Mendoza: That was just the kind of dispute that Shehu was embroiled in Zvërnec. One land claimant says that Shehu stole the property using forged documents.
Eliot Brown: He used a translation of a Ottoman-Turkish document from the Ottoman era of the early 1900s.
Jessica Mendoza: Yeah.
Eliot Brown: And what happened there was that a local official who was a translator had taken a document that talked about this Zvërnec land, and it says it was owned by X, Y, Z. And they subbed out X, Y, Z and wrote Shehu.
Jessica Mendoza: Wow.
Eliot Brown: And then the property office says, "Looks good to us." And then Shehu gets the deed.