Dorian Puka’s Lamborghini is parked outside his home in west London. It’s sleek and black and worth a cool £184,950. The roar of the ‘Lambo’s’ turbocharged engine, at all hours of the day, has become a familiar – and unwanted – sound in the cul-de-sac.
Puka fits the flash stereotype of someone who owns such a supercar. Hence the Rolex watches. Hence the Gucci clothes. Hence the flaunting of himself and his luxury ‘toys’ on social media.
In one video he posted, a group of children see him parked up in his Lamborghini and ask him, ‘How much money do you have?’ to which Puka replies, ‘I’m a millionaire.’
Maybe he is. But the Albanian is also a serial burglar. The very fact he is here at all, let alone living the high life, is a scandal.
A glimpse of the real Puka, the man behind his TikTok image, emerged after the Daily Mail tracked him down to his unlikely bolthole on an ordinary suburban estate of modest homes and family cars this week, when he became aggressive and abusive.
Puka, 31, has been jailed twice and deported twice for a string of break-ins in Britain, but on each occasion he has managed to slip back into the country, where he is now claiming asylum – of course he is – and where he will remain for the foreseeable future.
The Home Office is powerless to kick him out until his application is fully heard, even though, yes, he has been barred from the UK.
That’s the law.
Dorian Puka, 31, has been jailed twice and deported twice for a string of break-ins in Britain
Under the circumstances you would have thought Puka would keep his head down to avoid drawing attention to himself.
Yet he has been cocking a snook at the Home Office and the police – sticking two fingers up at them, at everyone, really – in clip after clip online.
In one of the most recent, he is once again at the wheel of his Lamborghini and, although his face cannot be seen, the short excerpt has been posted on his TikTok account, with the caption ‘#gifttomyself’, which also showcases luxury cars he has driven (Bentley Bentayga, Mercedes AMG, Porsche Cayenne, Jaguar XF), a collection of designer watches he has worn (worth £162,500 in total), alongside exclusive holiday resorts and top restaurants he has patronised.
Which begs the question, how is Puka – whom neighbours say lives with his partner, believed to be an Albanian woman, and their young child – paying for all this?
In his numerous brushes with the law, it is worth noting that he was once arrested with a haul of designer stolen watches. He is a burglar, after all.
And during his most recent stint inside (he was released in around 2020 before being deported a second time) he used a mobile phone smuggled into jail to post an Instagram picture of himself with Lulezim Zefi, the leader of a drug gang, as they smoked shisha pipes in a restaurant.
Cocaine with a potential street value of £720,000 found in car dashboards earned Zefi a 12-year stretch. He was also convicted of money laundering.
Draw your own conclusions on the source of his ‘wealth’.
Puka’s Lamborghini Urus parked at his two-bedroom home
Puka, incidentally, has 10,000 followers on Instagram and 3,000 on TikTok, so his antics are reaching a wide audience.
No papers relating to his asylum claim are publicly available.
His domestic situation, however, means he would almost certainly be able to rely on Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), which protects the right to a family life, and is commonly used and abused to prevent deportations.
There can’t be many more farcical illustrations of someone gaming the system than Puka, a little more than a week after Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood unveiled her asylum crackdown, which included proposals to fast-track deportations and change how certain provisions of the ECHR, such as Article 8, are applied and interpreted in immigration cases – measures that have resulted in a predictable backlash from many Labour MPs.
Puka is yet another reminder of how badly change is needed.
Nowhere is this more evident than on the quiet estate where he lives in a two-bedroom terrace. The property is perhaps the only discreet thing about him. He is not listed at the address, which is in the name of an accountant.
Neighbours describe him as a ‘nightmare’. ‘He’s rude and arrogant,’ said one. ‘He doesn’t even say “Hello”. He’s always driving that Lamborghini. He parks it where he wants. It’s always making a loud noise at all hours.’
‘He’s flash, or thinks he is,’ said another. ‘I can’t believe what I have read about him. What’s he still doing here? It’s shocking.’
Puka shows off a designer watch in a selfie
Outside his property is a sign warning people to ‘beware of the dog’, a bully-type breed. But perhaps it should have also included the owner, given his reaction when we tried to speak to him.
No one initially came to the door, but as reporter Isaac Crowson was driving away, Puka came outside, jumped into a friend’s car which had just arrived, and proceeded to tailgate him out of the cul-de-sac, pulling alongside and screaming abuse through the open passenger window.
He then stopped further up the street before getting out and walking back to angrily confront my colleague, who remained in his own vehicle.
None of this will come as a great surprise to many of Puka’s compatriots back in Albania. Dorian Puka, one of three brothers, is from a village near the city of Lezhë, in the north of the country, about an hour’s drive from the capital, Tirana. There is no record of him being in trouble at home, but a source in Albania’s Police Directorate said his extended family was once in ‘conflict with another family’ and in one incident in March last year ‘firearms were used’.
The Lezhë region has ‘exported’ many burglars who have left their mark across Europe and Britain.
Three men from the area are still being sought in connection with 33 UK break-ins, including one at the Surrey home of former Liverpool, Manchester City and England star Raheem Sterling in 2022, when an estimated £300,000 worth of jewellery and watches was stolen.
In August, Puka’s younger brother Denis, 28, along with an Albanian accomplice, pleaded guilty at Chester Crown Court to conspiracy to commit burglary and has been remanded in custody pending sentencing. So criminality runs in the family. The latest government statistics show there were 10,737 foreign nationals held in jails in England and Wales in the year to June, and Albanians are the most numerous, accounting for 10 per cent of all overseas prisoners.
‘Dorian Puka is a great example of the UK being, for many years, a soft touch for criminals like him,’ said an Albanian expert on organised crime who wished to remain anonymous.
‘He gives a bad name to thousands of hard-working Albanians who are making a contribution to UK society, respecting the law and paying taxes. Albanians living in the UK curse him.’
Puka first came to this country around a decade ago and is currently understood to be on immigration bail and wearing an electronic tag.
His track record, going back and forth to Albania, repeatedly beating border controls in the process, could be the basis of a script for Carry On Taking The Proverbial, if it is ever made. He was first jailed for nine months in 2016 for two counts of burglary and agreed to be deported upon his release.
Within a year, he had returned and was living in Greenford, west London, just a few miles from the scenes of his break-ins. It is unclear how he re-entered Britain, but many Albanians – we have been told by a source in the Balkans – arrive by yacht at private marinas in seaside towns across the South-East.
He was eventually caught by plain-clothes officers in Surbiton, Surrey, where there had been a spike in local burglaries.
They stopped him in the street and discovered that he was not only wearing a ‘hot’ watch but had a stash of other timepieces on him that he couldn’t explain and which had, in fact been purloined from properties in the neighbourhood.
Puka was jailed for three and half years in 2017 and, after serving his time, was again removed from Britain in March 2020.
After returning to Albania for several months, he travelled through Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands before finally rocking up here for the third time in November 2020, a journey he chronicled on Instagram.
It is not known how long the authorities took to catch up with him, or in what circumstances, but faced with deportation again, he lodged what is believed to be his first asylum application.
For the past year, he has been boasting about his charmed life on social media.
Puka is frequently pictured dressed head to toe in Gucci, and aside from filming himself cruising through London in a supercar, he can also be seen dining at top restaurants like San Carlo in Knightsbridge, Hakkasan in Mayfair and at The Shard, as well as enjoying a drink at the Radio rooftop bar on the tenth floor of the five-star hotel ME London on the Strand, which affords panoramic views of the capital’s skyline.
The five-star Carbis Bay Hotel near St Ives in Cornwall, where he enjoyed luxury facilities such as spa, infinity pool, and golf course, has also been on his itinerary.
On Thursday, the day after the Daily Mail encountered him, he posted a TikTok video compilation of himself driving various supercars and wearing designer watches, naming the newspapers that have highlighted his antics, including this one. The hashtag included a four-letter word.
‘This man should not be here,’ said Alp Mehmet, chairman of Migration Watch UK. ‘He should have been refused entry and returned. His feet should not have touched the ground.
‘But once he claimed asylum, the application had to be processed. We have the ECHR to thank for this absurd state of affairs. That’s why we must leave it at the earliest opportunity.’
The Home Office cannot comment on ‘specific cases’, but a spokesman said without irony: ‘This Government will not allow foreign criminals and illegal migrants to exploit our laws, which is why we are reforming human-rights laws and replacing the broken appeals system, allowing us to scale up deportations… which will make Britain a less attractive destination for illegal migrants and will make it easier to remove and deport them.’
But will anyone be really surprised if, in the end, Lamborghini-driving serial burglar Dorian Puka is allowed to stay?
- Additional reporting: Jacob Dirnhuber and Tim Stewart
