Bosnia is not alone in its struggle with tobacco smuggling.  Nearly the whole world engages in smuggling in some form.

The growth of online trade

alibaba.com

websites like Alibab.com has made it possible for just about anyone on earth to become a tobacco smuggler from the comfort of their own home.  A search of the site quickly leads the user to dozens of websites that promise cheap Marlboros or any other Western brand a user might want.

Most of the sites are from China, and most of the cigarettes are fake. It is illegal in almost all countries to import cigarettes without paying custom and excise fees.

It’s a long way from Eastern Europe to Wembley in north London. But this is one of the many places where the Balkan tobacco road ends. On a convenience store window there are flyers advertising spare rooms in apartments, “all inclusive massage parlors” and “duty free cigarettes from Eastern Europe”. 

The reporter makes a phone call to one of the flyers for cigarettes and agrees to meet a man near Wembley stadium.  The man who shows up is blonde, well dressed and in his late 20s. He calls himself Adrian and is of Eastern European descent…maybe Polish.

Sanja Mandic-Soldo blows out a stream of smoke over the morning coffee she enjoys with five colleagues.

The door to the little room they fill up is open so that a gray mist from the nicotine-laden sticks she and two others inhale spills out into the hallway.

It could all be a typical café scene on a cold winter morning in any part of the Balkans, but for one fact. Mandic-Soldo and the others are doctors, taking a break in the designated staff smoking zone on the second floor of the Center for Family Medicine in Sarajevo.

In the Balkans, death and cigarettes are closely related.But it's not always the carcinogens that are the problem.

The illegal tobacco trade takes its share of lives.

High-profile killings connected to illicit tobacco networks in the Balkans have claimed journalists, intelligence officers, politicians and the criminals themselves. In the fight to control this multi-billion dollar criminal enterprise, gangsters often use the most ruthless methods to assert their authority and send a reminder of their power to the public at large.