The story of the most famous Albanian in Greece, Alket Rizait will already be in the film. Soon a French director will start shooting with the screenplay written by him, and Ballsh, the birthplace of the Albanian Rizai, is no exception.
Known for his spectacular helicopter escapes twice from high-security prisons, even once from the prison of Korydallos Alket Rizai has received the attention of all media, both in Greece, in Albania and in many European countries.
Alket Rizai is considered one of the most dangerous people in Greece. In 2006 and 2009, he, in collaboration with known Greek criminals, managed to escape from the high-security prison.
The first Hollywood-style escape took place on June 4, 2006, conceived by Nikos Paleokostas, the brother of a notorious criminal, Vasilis Paleokostas.
Alket Rizai was born in Ballsh, Mallakastra, where he lived until the late 1990s and then emigrated to Greece. In Greece, he was convicted of killing a Greek citizen, the entrepreneur Thanas Koropiotis, whom he suspected of having an affair with his Russian girlfriend, Oksana.
Who is Alket Rizai?
Alket Rizai was born on May 24, 1978 in Ballsh. At the age of 16 he went to Greece for work. He has become known as the Albanian who escaped twice from Greek prisons by helicopter. He was the youngest of three boys and has been an obedient child. He had a special passion for electronics, which could probably be his profession if his future were different.
He disassembled the electronic devices and reassembled them at the age of 10. Alket spent the first years of his childhood in the village of Kalenja, with his uncles. The six-year-old has returned to his hometown to start first grade. He did not finish high school, he left for Greece. In addition to Albanian, Alket speaks 5 foreign languages.
After escaping from prison in 2006, Alket Rizai and Nikos Palekostas were quickly caught, but Vassilis vowed to continue his crime story. On June 9, 2008, he abducted George Mylonas, an aluminum billionaire tycoon who had angered the country's poor by declaring that "workers should tighten their belts." But Mylonas said of his captors: "They were polite and treated me well," while the amount demanded for releasing him was 12 million euros.
In fact the Greek authorities managed to trace Paleokostas to the house where Mylonas was held. There, on August 2, 2008, while the fugitive was drinking a glass of alcohol and getting ready to see something on DVD, a team of special forces stormed in, breaking down the door.
Police found a copy of Al Pacino's film, "Heat," which tells the story of two veterans in bank robberies who evade police. He had been 791 days on the run when he was caught and the cops were happy.
"The swift capture of Vassilis Paleokostas, one of the most notorious criminals in the country, is a necessary boost to the morale and public image of the Greek police," a cable from the US consulate in Thessaloniki told the secretary of state in Washington by Wikileaks.
It is not known how Paleokostas spent the money he stole, but at a 2009 court hearing in Athens, where new charges of kidnapping and robbery were filed, a crowd gathered outside the court.
A group of young girls occupied the courtroom, behaving like a fan club of a pop music idol, as a tabloid newspaper wrote. At this time, Alket Riza's charming girlfriend, Soula Mitropia, made a fuss in the courtroom.
As Rizai returned to court to be sentenced to 25 years, she theatrically began to cry and threw her arms around him. When no one was looking, she put a mysterious watch in his pocket.
The second escape is by helicopter:
To the guards who were watching the security cameras, that morning was like any other morning. Paleokostas was doing fitness and Rizai was selecting the winners in a betting game. Rizai recalls: “I am a man with intuition. "I feel things, when something good happens, I feel it."
At 15:00, Mitropia called them on the cell phone he had put in his pocket while they were in court. It was the moment. The emergency siren at Korydallos Prison began to howl like a violin as guards ordered inmates to enter. It was 15:45, the day before the trial against Paleokostas.