Joe DioGuardi is masquerading as an off-the-shelf, GOP, pro-life, small-government conservative. But what he also is — and the typical Tea Party candidate is not — is a supporter of a radical terrorist organization tied to Albanian organized crime, which is rampant in New York. 

Is this a cynical and discriminatory ploy to taint Joe DioGuardi, and an entire nationality, with the criminal element that every ethnic group is entitled to? If only. The sad fact is that the Albanian mafia and DioGuardi’s’s KLA are inextricably intertwined. And thanks to him, the United States is now intertwined with them both.

In 1948, only three years after the conclusion of the WWII and in the eve of the cold war, Marshal Tito, the supreme leader of Federative People’s Republic of Yugoslavia took a sharp political turn away from hard line communism, severed his ties to Joseph Stalin and Soviet Union and ushered his country into an era of openness unparalleled in any of the communist countries which remained hidden behind the iron curtain.

Liberal as it was, the communist regime in Yugoslavia was still an authoritarian regime, and Goli Otok was his most notorious prison, arguably its only true gulag. This barren islet, almost completely devoid of vegetation was originally used as a prison by Austro-Hungarian authorities during WWI as a place of internment of Russian prisoners of war.