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Aleksandër Kondo, Albania’s record-setting weightlifter, was involved in a car crash at midday on 30 April 1987.
The crash happened on the side road “Midland Parkway“, near the Albanian Church of St Nicholas in Queens, New York. Kondo had received his American driving licence two weeks earlier, after a year living as a political refugee.
The official report says the car he was driving, a 1983 Honda “Civic Sport”, “struck a roadside object”. He was not wearing a seat belt. His head was left unprotected from the impact.
He was rushed to Jamaica Hospital in Queens, New York, with skull fractures and brain injuries, but sadly did not survive.
Doctors pronounced him dead at 10:15 the following morning, 1 May 1987. He was 27.
Archival records show that in Albania, the State Security service, the Sigurimi, learned of Kondo’s death a day later, when Voice of America reported it. This led officers to write incorrectly in the file that “Kondo died on 2 May 1987”.
After the well-known weightlifter’s death, the regime rejected requests from the Albanian community to send his body home. His family, internally exiled to Krastë in Martanesh after his escape, learned of their son’s fate much later.
Kondo was buried on 6 May 1987 in the Brooklyn section of Cypress Hills Cemetery, in a funeral organised by his friends.
After the dictatorship fell, his family made several attempts to bring him back to Albania.
The former weightlifter’s remains were finally laid to rest in his homeland roughly twenty years later, on 25 February 2005, when he was buried in Tirana with honours and an official ceremony.
But Aleksandër Kondo’s death has been surrounded by suspicions that the Sigurimi killed him.
The suspicions began in May 1987 and seem likely to endure forever.
The context and the murder theories:
Zef Camaj was the first to raise suspicions and accusations. An Albanian from Montenegro who had suffered political persecution, he had managed, despite his youth, to set up a radio station in New York: the “Radio Magazine of Albanians in America”. He was 29 at the time.
In his broadcast of 4 May 1987, while discussing Kondo, Camaj pledged to reveal material that “would expose the leadership’s connection to the incident”. But, as the Sigurimi was later informed, “he revealed nothing of the kind”.
The Sigurimi’s file on Kondo says that “Camaj was probably frightened off”.
Camaj never clarified the matter before his death in 2001, at the age of 44.
The suspicions of murder begin with the events of Kondo’s last day alive.
On the day of the crash, 30 April 1987, Ramiz Dani had invited him to lunch. Dani was the nephew of Nderim Kupi, a politically influential emigrant who had sponsored Kondo’s move from Yugoslavia to America.
For context, Nderim was the nephew of Abaz Kupi (1892–1976), a former gendarmerie commander, anti-communist and outspoken member of the “Free Albania” committee, which sought to overthrow the dictatorship. Abaz Kupi also founded the Legality Movement, which sought King Zog’s return to Albania.
It was precisely his connection to Kupi and his participation in several committee events that had sharpened the Sigurimi’s interest in Kondo.
Returning to the day of the crash, Ramiz Dani had invited Kondo to lunch at the pizzeria he owned on Lefferts Boulevard in Queens, a popular gathering place for the Albanian community. Dani’s House of Pizza had opened in 1959 and is now owned by his son, Sabri.
Kondo crashed just after that lunch, roughly 2 kilometres from the restaurant.
The official report says the car struck a tree at high speed. But a widespread belief holds that the Sigurimi caused the crash by arranging a “disguised murder”.
There are two main versions of how this might have happened.
Version 1: The brakes on Kondo’s car were loosened
According to this version, which was only told to his family after 1994, the crash is believed to have been arranged by at least two people who tampered with the car’s brakes while Kondo was in the restaurant.
The account goes on to claim that the two then goaded him into a race, deliberately staying behind to make sure of what would happen.
A detail that raised suspicion: there were no signs of heavy braking at the scene.
Version 2: Kondo was poisoned and driven into a crash
According to this version, the 27-year-old is believed to have been poisoned at Dani’s restaurant. As he left, Sigurimi collaborators allegedly pursued him in a threatening manner, intending to make him accelerate until he lost control.
This version goes further, suggesting that the car actually struck a heavy object placed by the would-be killers, and then a tree.
Details that raised suspicion: the road was wide enough to stay on course. The car appeared to have impact damage on both sides at the front.
Unfortunately, even the declassification of the file the Sigurimi kept on Kondo sheds no clear light on these suspicions.
In fact, the file contains many indirect clues, but no page contains instructions to kill him.
The information gathered in the file is also inconsistent. The file on his friend, Xhelal Sukniqi, adds nothing about Kondo’s death either.
The most compromising material may have been destroyed when the file was archived, but this remains speculation.
The more plausible context:
The Sigurimi archives suggest that towards the end of his life, Kondo had begun to show signs of paranoia, afraid that he was being pursued so that he could be captured or killed.
There are concrete records and testimony showing that the Sigurimi had set out to frighten him.
In the operational plan in Kondo’s file, the Directorate instructed collaborators that “anonymous phone calls or letters should be used to frighten him“.
People who knew the former weightlifter have described phone calls, letters and messages from strangers who deliberately lied to him, claiming that his former fiancée or members of his family had killed themselves.
Nderim Kupi recalled one occasion when Kondo called him frantically, saying that “someone was following him to capture him”. According to Kupi, the suspicious individual hurried away when he arrived.
Kondo’s fear that he might be killed was not groundless.
Before emigrating to America, in the summer of 1985, Kondo and his friend Sukniqi were attacked at an asylum seekers’ camp in Yugoslavia by two other escapees, Hasan and Halim Boshnjaku.
At the time, Kondo and Sukniqi suspected that the two brothers had been recruited by the Sigurimi, and testified against them in court. Yet the Sigurimi file contains nothing showing such involvement: the incident is merely reported by sources monitoring them.
The fear that he might be killed emerges more clearly in a report submitted to the Sigurimi by a source who said that on 20 March 1987, roughly a month before his death, Kondo had been involved in a serious crash on a motorway.
A car had hit him, breaking several ribs and injuring his neck. He spent three days in hospital.
The source told the Sigurimi that Kondo suspected the crash had been an “attempted murder”.
The Sigurimi’s “anonymous games” and this incident may have taken a heavy toll on Kondo’s mental state.
In this context, his deteriorating mental state may have been an additional factor in the fatal crash of 30 April 1987. But this too remains debatable and speculative, even if it appears to be the more plausible explanation.
Kondo’s story remains that of a young man who did everything he could to find freedom in the face of Albania’s dictatorship. That will keep his memory alive in history, even beyond the records he set in sport.