Scheme involving Michigan CEO, cocaine submarine leads to prison

Robert Snell, The Detroit News on Mar 31, 2026

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DETROIT — An Albanian drug kingpin who designed a cocaine-smuggling submarine with a Grosse Pointe Park CEO was sentenced to 25 years in federal prison Tuesday following a sprawling federal case stretching from South America to Metro Detroit and Europe.

Ylli Didani, 48, was sentenced 10 months after a federal jury in Detroit convicted him of three charges, including money laundering and two drug crimes during a conspiracy from 2015-21 that involved more than 4,000 kilograms, or about 8,800 pounds, of cocaine. Didani faced a mandatory minimum of 10 years in prison, and prosecutors wanted U.S. District Judge Denise Page Hood to sentence the drug trafficker to 30 years.

Hood sentenced Didani to 25 years for the drug crimes and issued a concurrent 20-year sentence for money laundering conspiracy.

Didani, portrayed by the government as one of Metro Detroit’s most prolific and innovative criminals in modern history, was building the submarine with an alleged co-conspirator: Grosse Pointe Park millionaire Marty Tibbitts, the late CEO of Harper Woods-based Clementine Live Answering Service. Tibbitts financed the drug operation, which purchased cocaine from South America and transported the drugs aboard cargo ships bound for Europe.

Didani, who faces deportation after serving the sentence, argued the court lacked the jurisdiction to handle the case because he was not accused of importing a single gram of cocaine into the United States. His lawyer requested the mandatory-minimum sentence.

The cocaine submarine was being designed until Tibbitts was killed in a 2018 plane crash in Wisconsin.

"Their plan was for the cocaine torpedo to attach magnetically to a containership, which would carry the cocaine torpedo and the bulk cocaine across the ocean," Assistant U.S. Attorneys Mark Bilkovic and Timothy McDonald wrote in a sentencing memorandum. "Once the containership was within a certain distance from land, the cocaine torpedo would detach from the containership, rise to the surface of the ocean, where it would be picked up by co-conspirators."

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