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Albanian Leka with a gun in his house in Pozuelo GETTY

He arrived in Spain in exile in 1962. A fortress was built in Pozuelo that filled with weapons and whose arsenal forced him to leave the country in 1979

Leka from Albania marries after a gafado romance

It was 1976. Leka Zogu Skander lived in Madrid. Mastodon of two meters, ungainly bearing, was king of Albania. His father, Zog I, had proclaimed himself monarch and consanguine of the medieval hero Skanderberg in 1928. He built his kingdom between the mountains and the sea of ​​the mythical Illyrian and tried, until his exile, to modernize that nation dominated by immemorial clans. How he had arrived, so many years later, the Leka heir to our country is an abundant and rugged history. A journey of political incidents and dilapidated businesses. An adventure dominated by a single idea: the conquest of the usurped kingdom to its parent . And touched by an unstoppable passion: weapons.

To illustrate such a curious biography, we must look back at the spring of 1939, when Leka was barely a few days old. Mussolini had occupied Albania, annexing the throne to the Savoy house. The king, baby Leka, his mother, the countess of Nagy-Apponyi, and a small entourage of the faithful were in Turkey, then in Egypt, protected from King Farouk and, finally, in the Riviera gala. In 1961, Zog died in Suresnes. Leka's coronation was held in a room at the Bristol hotel and before a handful of Albanian exiles. From that moment, the family would live under the protection of Franco's Spain.

BETWEEN ARISTOCRATS

Leka and her fiancee, Susan Barbara Cullen-WardGETTY

Upon arrival in our country, in 1962, the Countess of Valencia and the poet Fina de Calderón, also protective of Simeon of Bulgaria, served as hosts. Once installed in Madrid, Leka actively dedicated himself to amplifying his social image and, also, to start businesses that, as he would admit years later, left a long trace of debts . A party organized in Palma de Mallorca by the consul of Panama and El Salvador, and which was attended by the Grand Duke Vladimiro of Russia, was the kick-off of a decade of some public notoriety. Franco granted him an audience at the El Pardo Palace, in October 1963. In this regard - to protect European monarchies abolished by popular democracies - the Franco dictatorship followed the principle of being a guarantor of anti-communism in the West.

In that Spain led by a general, open to tourism and business, the exotic king walked his high bearing. He was in Ibiza, where he set up a yacht rental service. Also in Altea, in order to acquire some land, build a summer villa and buy a yacht. At the same time, he dedicated himself to preparing a paramilitary plot, obsessed with the idea of ​​a victorious return to homeland. In 1968, Franco granted him a second and last official hearing . Over the years, Leka's notoriety in aristocratic circles declined. Not so that of his beautiful mother, who continued to be a regular at parties, cocktails and receptions in the capital. The royal family and what remained of the entourage lived in a retired mansion, baptized as Our Lady of Guadalupe , in Pozuelo de Alarcón.

It is not clear when the Albanian king began to organize a plot from Spain to reconquer Albania . The Balkan country was ruled by iron hand by Enver Hoxha, protected from the Soviet Union, first, from China, later, and under the autarchy from 1978. It was a very hard Stalinist regime obsessed with preserving its national and military independence politically. European juche version, its beaches and border mountains were dotted with thousands of bunkers. Some direct witnesses claimed that the king had turned his Pozuelo mansion into a fort, endowed with watchtowers and armed men. It is evident, in any case, that in the 70s Leka was already embarked on a war project. He did not even hide that part of his economic activities had as his ultimate objective the military harassment of the communist regime, with the intention of overthrowing it.

In 1975, Leka married Susan Barbara Cullen-Ward, an Australian of disputed noble origin in Biarritz (her great-grandfather, statesman, claimed to descend from King Edward I of England and Charlemagne). In fact, the father, a rich cattle rancher, was subjugated with the idea that his daughter could become the first Australian queen of a European Court. Even the magazine Hello! dedicated cover to the bride. They celebrated an ecumenical event in Illescas, attended by the Grand Dukes of Russia, Don Miguel and Mrs. Beatriz de Orleans, among other personalities, and a thousand Albanian exiles from all over the world.

The last contact that Leka had with an influential personality was an invitation and subsequent interview with Don Juan de Borbón in May 1975 , on the Giralda yacht, without anything transcending the encounter. After the death of Franco, in November, the comment began to spread that Pozuelo's mansion was an arsenal. Once the regime change occurred, the figure of Leka I, his uncontrollable movements and growing rumors represented a problem for Spain, which sought full reconciliation with Europe. The situation resulted in a search of the town of Pozuelo in January 1979 by the Police, which confirmed the existence of a large arms depot.

Leka and his wife in Spain in 1975GETTY

After that, and after negotiating with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs - the Albanian had invoked his diplomatic status -, the Spanish Government invited the king and his family to leave the country before February 1. On January 31, and following the instructions of Leka, who made a personal agreement with the Gabonese President El Hadj Omar Bongo, a plane from Gabon would land in Barajas to take them to the African country. However, this plane did not arrive and, after hours of negotiations in which the Spanish Royal House intervened, the Government made an official Spantax aircraft available to the Albanian.

WITH A LANZAGRANADAS

When they landed at Libreville airport, the Gabonese authorities warned that passengers could only get off the plane after paying 35 million pesetas. The ship remained, among frantic diplomatic efforts with Madrid, more than a day parked on the runway and in a worrying situation, as a large group of armed soldiers had bet around the device. In this situation, the fact that Leka, at one point, opened an airplane door and brandished a grenade launcher in his hands, should not help . Finally, on February 3 they were able to take off for Rhodesia , a country that had offered to accommodate such extravagant passengers. On day 6, Leka offered a press conference before Rhodesian and foreign media. He went with two guns to his belt, talked about his millionaire debts in Spain and the admiration he felt for his new host, the segregationist lan Douglas Smith. With his infantile ways, he declared that, after Franco's death and the arrival of democracy, his businesses had collapsed.

Happiness in Rhodesia did not last long. With the arrival of Robert Mugabe in 1980, the Albanian kings had to move to South Africa apartheid , with which Leka maintained excellent relations. He obtained diplomatic status and permission to settle in a house in the exclusive residential neighborhood of Bryanston, just outside Johannesburg. There, Leka broke loose. An agency note, on September 26, 1982, reported an attempted sea invasion of Albania by a group of exiles under the orders of the king, liquidated after five hours of fighting. In 1993 and taking advantage of the sinking of the Albanian state, he stepped on his homeland. Dressed in military and heavily armed, he stood in the central Skanderberg square of Tirana to claim the throne. However, the authorities expelled him from the country. A similar episode occurred in 1997, during the new collapse of the Albanian state by pyramid investments. Leka was able to force the Government to hold a referendum for the monarchy and, losing it, faced the Police in the street, with the result of one deceased and several injured. He fled in the middle of the tumult, shooting shots aboard a 4x4 to the airport of the capital, where his private plane was waiting for him to head for Johannesburg.

Political times continued to play stubbornly against him. The end of apartheid and the new democratic regime placed him in a delicate situation, given his unimportant misdeeds. Already without the favor of the South African authorities, the Police searched their home in 1999, finding a large arsenal. He was arrested and subsequently invited to leave the country. In 2002 Leka I was able to return definitively to the Kingdom of the Eagles. Upon arrival, a large number of war toys were requisitioned. In the entourage, received by thousands of supporters with monarchical flags, were, in addition to his wife and son, two Zulu warriors, perhaps the first in history who stepped on Tirana. The king died nine years later, pardoned by his old stumbling blocks, widower (Queen Susan had died in 2004), pacified, but always in the heat of his beloved weapons.

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