In the Tirana of the 1930s, as Lea Ypi, an Albanian academic, writes in a forthcoming book, wags used to debate whether corruption was “the cause of Albanian misery or rather its most natural consequence”. You might hear the same argument today in Albania’s capital. One thing, however, has changed: for the first time in Albania’s century of statehood, an independent anti-corruption unit is arresting politicians, officials and drug smugglers, apparently without fear or favour.