WHEN THE KRASNIQI BROTHERS, BRUNO AND SAIMIR , came from Michigan to New York in 2002 in their early 20s and started hanging in Albanian coffee shops, they stood out because they were the only ones wearing suits.

This was a few years before they made their reputation as two of the most successful, and violent, weed dealers and all-around gangsters in New York. At the time, they didn’t have much cash, so they decided to rob someone to come up with their seed money. That was how they got their start.

Three years later, they wound up making a victim of Parid Gjoka, a young Albanian-American who was already well-established in the New York drug trade, and who the Krasniqis worked with when they first arrived.

Gjoka’s problem, according to recent testimony from a former Krasniqi ally, was that he was too sensitive.

Almir (Miri) Rrapo, a former civil servant in Albania who aligned himself with the Krasniqi crew in New York, said the real giveaway that Gjoka was soft was the extent to which he was devastated by the loss of his girlfriend, a famous-back-home singer and violinist named Anita Bitri who died with her mother and 7-year-daughter from carbon monoxide poisoning.

Rrapo said Gjoka “overdid” the whole grief thing, crying, getting high on drugs, putting up posters of Anita. Gjoka himself admitted as much at his recent trial: “I was talking more than I was supposed to about love, on the streets you can’t do that.”

Rrapo and the Krasniqis, who had hung out with Gjoka a bit early on, didn't think he deserved their respect anymore. But perhaps more importantly, Rrapo said, they also didn’t see why he should be doing so much better than them in the drug trade: “He was making a lot of money [Gjoka said he was making $5-10,000 a week] and we thought he didn’t deserve to be making all that money.