Copyright © 2009 by Lisa Sweetingham
All rights reserved.
BALLANTINE BOOKS and colophon are registered trademarks of
Random House, Inc.
Sweetingham, Lisa.
Chemical cowboys : the DEA's secret mission to hunt down a notorious
ecstasy kingpin / Lisa Sweetingham.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
eISBN: 978-0-345-50977-2
1. Drug traffic—Investigation—United States.
2. Drug traffic—Investigation—Israel. 3. Drug dealers—United States.
4. Drug dealers—Israel. 5. Ecstasy (Drug) I. Title.
HV8079.N3S94 2009
364.1’77—dc22 2008055695
www.ballantinebooks.com
v3.0_r1
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Prologue: November 23, 1999
I KIDDIE DOPE
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
II “LIFE IN THIS CITY IS LIKE LIFE IN PETER GATIEN'S CLUBS”
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
III “I'M THE BOSS. DON'T FUCK WITH ME”
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
IV THE CHAIN OF TRUST
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
Chapter 89
Chapter 90
Chapter 91
Chapter 92
Chapter 93
Chapter 94
Chapter 95
Chapter 96
Chapter 97
Chapter 98
Chapter 99
Chapter 100
Chapter 101
Chapter 102
Chapter 103
Chapter 104
V “THE AMERICANS ARE INVOLVED?”
Chapter 105
Chapter 106
Chapter 107
Chapter 108
Chapter 109
Chapter 110
Chapter 111
Chapter 112
Chapter 113
Chapter 114
Chapter 115
Chapter 116
Chapter 117
Chapter 118
A Note on Sources
Bibliography
Dedication
Acknowledgments
About the Author
PROLOGUE
NOVEMBER 23, 1999
TOWER AIR FLIGHT 31 from Tel Aviv touched down at the Los Angeles airport a little before noon on a Tuesday. Israeli nationals Ben Cohen and Nathan Hanan deplaned at gate 120, where a team of undercover agents dressed in jeans, T-shirts, and ball caps had been waiting. The agents slowly trailed the two Israeli targets as they walked through the terminal, brushing past hurried travelers and families getting an early start on the holidays.
Cohen and Hanan were met outside by a handsome, dark-haired thirty-three-year-old Israeli named Itzhak “Jackie” Cohen, who placed their bags in his Range Rover and took them to a Budget lot, where they rented a white Lincoln Town Car. The men drove in tandem toward the San Fernando Valley as DEA and U.S. Customs agents followed from a careful distance in unmarked vehicles.
It was a cool, clear fall day. Rows of top-heavy palm trees swayed in the Pacific breeze. The L.A. desert clime, whitewashed stucco homes, and gleaming high-rise towers had the familiar Mediterranean radiance of Cohen and Hanan's native Tel Aviv. Jackie led the men to a vacant single-family home at 6606 Whitaker Avenue, in a well-manicured neighborhood carved alongside the concrete L.A. River. For the next ten days, this was where Cohen and Hanan would carry out their work, unaware that agents were watching their every move.
In the last twenty-four hours, an Israeli National Police (INP) investigation team had received secret intelligence that Cohen and Hanan were traveling to Los Angeles to take part in a major narcotics transaction with Jackie's partner, Yehuda “Judy” Ben Atar. INP passed the tip to the L.A. drug cops who were investigating Judy's role in an Ecstasy distribution ring.
Judy Ben Atar was a thirty-four-year-old Israeli expat who lived in Sherman Oaks with his wife and children and kept close ties to leg breakers and mob bosses back home in Jerusalem. Judy had first caught the attention of LAX Customs agents four months earlier, when three women arriving from Paris were caught smuggling 140,000 Ecstasy pills hidden in false-bottom luggage and boxes of toys. Intelligence suggested Judy and his partners were behind the load.
The tip from INP was a good break for the Los Angeles drug cops, but only if they could catch someone holding the bag—picking up or dropping off cash or pills. A half-dozen undercovers were assigned to follow the suspects and report back any unusual activity or signs that the deal was about to go down.
Over the next five days, the surveillance team filled spiral notebooks with minute-to-minute observations about the dealers’ meetings at a sandwich shop on Ventura Boulevard, late-night trips to public pay phones, and heated arguments in Hebrew, which none of the agents understood.
On November 29 at 1:35 p.m., a DEA agent was sitting in an unmarked vehicle a half block from the Whitaker Avenue house, when he saw an unknown suspect in a shiny black Lexus SUV pull into the driveway and go inside. Forty-five minutes later, someone—the agent couldn't see who—backed the suspect's SUV into the attached garage and shut the garage door.
Minutes passed. Nothing. At 2:35 p.m., the agent quickly slumped down into his seat to avoid being seen as the garage door opened and Hanan sped off in the Lexus SUV, with Cohen right behind him at the wheel of the rented Lincoln. The third suspect was nowhere in sight.
> The agent called his teammates over the radio. It was time.
All units maintained constant radio contact as they followed the two Israeli targets onto the 101 freeway and then the 405 freeway heading toward West Los Angeles. A Customs Air Support helicopter hovered overhead, calling out the targets’ positions. At 3:00 p.m. the chopper unit confirmed that Hanan had exited at Sunset Boulevard and was parking the SUV on Church Lane near the Holiday Inn tower, an iconic circular landmark that divided tony Brentwood from the smog-choked 405 freeway. Cohen pulled up beside him.
The car keys dangled from Hanan's hands as he got out of the SUV and slipped into Cohen's car. Two undercover agents followed the Israeli targets as they drove up the winding Sepulveda Pass through the Santa Monica Mountains back to the valley. The agents followed Cohen and Hanan into a supermarket in Encino and watched them purchase cleaning supplies, Gatorade, toilet paper, bleach, Coke, and eggs. Nothing special. All units were redeployed back to the abandoned SUV.
Cash or drugs. This was it. The vehicle had to be loaded with bundles of $20 bills or plastic bags filled with small white Ecstasy pills.
Shifts of two officers from DEA, Customs, and Torrance police maintained tweny-four-hour fixed and unobstructed surveillance of the SUV from unmarked vehicles on Church Lane and from an observation post inside room 906 of the Holiday Inn. The plan was to wait for the drug runner to come collect. They'd follow him, do a routine traffic stop, check his ID, find the load, and make an arrest. Or maybe they'd let the runner lead them straight to whoever was buying the pills or collecting the money.
Two days passed and the SUV sat undisturbed under the shade of the towering hotel. A thin layer of dust had settled on its cool black skin. Lead DEA Special Agent Michele Figura sensed that something was wrong. Brentwood was an unusual location for a drug drop. The ultra-wealthy neighborhood was known more for its palatial mountainside homes and elite private schools than covert drug deals. She started to worry that they'd taken a burn—that the dealers had spotted them and decided to abandon the load. Figura called DEA Special Agent Robert Gagne in New York for advice.
Gagne was the go-to guy of Ecstasy. Back in 1995, Gagne and his partners had led DEA's first major investigation into the so-called Love Drug when they infiltrated Manhattan's top nightclubs. While the agents in L.A. were babysitting the SUV, Gagne was deep into his own investigation of Judy's associate Oded Tuito, aka “the Fat Man,” who'd made a fortune buying millions of the little, bright-colored pills—stamped with stars, hearts, and happy faces—for about $1 each from Dutch suppliers and reselling them to his network of distributors in the States for $6.
Gagne agreed with Agent Figura that something was amiss with the abandoned SUV. After years of watching Ecstasy dealers operate, Gagne knew they could get sloppy. Sometimes they'd be out all night partying at strip clubs and would wake up too late to pick up couriers. Other times the dealers would purposely switch their plans to throw off law enforcement. But nobody leaves drugs or money on the street for that long. Gagne checked in with his confidential sources—he had snitches from Boston to Bucharest—but no one had any further intel on Cohen and Hanan. Gagne knew it wasn't his place to tell them what to do, but if it had been on his turf, he'd have found a way to look inside that car and figure out if they were wasting their time.
On Wednesday morning, December 1, the two Israeli targets returned to the scene. The agents watched in anticipation as Hanan slowly walked around the SUV and peered into the windows. Seemingly satisfied, Hanan got back in the rental car, and Cohen drove them toward the airport to catch an afternoon flight back to Israel. DEA agents searched the Lincoln after it had been dropped off at the Budget office and secretly examined the contents of Cohen and Hanan's six checked bags at LAX. They found a pile of new clothes with the tags still attached—but no drugs, no cash, and nothing unusual.
On Friday, December 3, Agent Figura called Chris Kabel of DEA Special Operations Division in Virginia. Kabel headed Operation Rave, which managed the dozens of Ecstasy cases that had popped up in major cities across the country in the last twelve months.
“Chris, we've been watching this car for five days. Nothing,” Figura said. “We're trying to decide what to do.” Kabel advised her to find a legal way to open the car. Since the SUV had been abandoned for nearly a week, it would have been towed already if the agents hadn't been watching it. They could protect their cover by getting the Los Angeles Police Department to do the tow and perform a customary inventory of the vehicle's contents.
At 2:15 p.m. a tow truck pulled up. A police officer slipped a flat metal Slim Jim down the SUV's window well and pulled the tool up in short jerks, trying to trigger the locks.
Figura was on her cell phone with Agent Kabel when the door locks finally released.
Dope or money, dope or money echoed in her head as she popped the hatch release and the trunk door slowly rose. But it wasn't dope or money. Inside was a dead man, gray, bruised, and cold to the touch. He was naked and lying in a fetal position under the cover of a cargo shade.
“Shit!” Figura yelled.
A stream of dried blood had drained from the man's mouth and nose and was caked onto the cargo liner. His right hand was tucked under his right knee. A carton of Marlboro cigarettes was tucked behind his feet.
“Chris, it's a fucking body,” Figura said. “Let me call you back.”
Figura replayed Cohen and Hanan's moves in her mind, searching for signs they had missed. It didn't make sense. The agents had gone on a late-night trash run at the Whitaker Avenue house days earlier and found empty containers of bleach and laundry detergent and a small cluster of paper towels caked with blood, but they hadn't connected the dots.
Cohen and Hanan weren't dealers—they were hit men.
Bob Gagne was incredulous when he heard the news. How could they have watched a dead man's car for a week? They should have moved in sooner. Cohen and Hanan were long gone by now.
Gagne called his friend Gadi Eshed, the head of intelligence for the Israeli National Police's Central Unit in Tel Aviv. Israeli officers were already on their way to L.A. to assist Robbery-Homicide detectives in the investigation. According to Israeli intelligence sources, the deceased was a leg breaker named Allon David Giladi, who was linked to rival Mafia families in Israel that were suspected of overseeing gambling, prostitution, and extortion rings—as well as mob hits. Ecstasy dealing, however, had never been among their list of crimes. An autopsy later revealed that Giladi had been strangled to death.
Gagne and Eshed feared that the dead man in Brentwood signaled a dangerous turning point in the Ecstasy trade. Murder was typically the province of cocaine and heroin traffickers who hijacked whole villages in Central and South America to run their drug empires. The expat Israeli dealers had always governed over Ecstasy with the threat of violence more than actual deed. But if the top Mafiosos in Israel had caught wind of the easy money to be made, it was only a matter of time before they would start to move in on the action, and import their blood feuds along with the love drug.
I KIDDIE DOPE
1 FEBRUARY 1995:
NEW YORK CITY
“BOBBY, LISTEN. Ray's a little nervous,” the informant whispered over the phone. “He just has to make sure that, you know—that you're all right.”
“Okay,” Gagne said. “Tomorrow morning.”
Gagne heard the urgency in “Tommy's” voice. A few months earlier, the informant had introduced Gagne to Ray Solomon, a lanky ninety-pound Dominican dealer with a disarming three-toothed smile. Since then, Solomon had sold Gagne crack, heroin, cocaine, and two automatic Uzis with silencers. Solomon didn't know that “Bobby” and his partner “Jimmy” were really Robert Gagne and Matthew Germanowski, special agents with the Drug Enforcement Administration, investigating Solomon's involvement with a crooked longshoreman who was helping to bring guns and drugs into New York via cargo ships.
Drug traffickers have a choice of land, air, or sea when delivering product to Am
erican soil. Seaport routes are the slowest mode of transportation, but they carry the least risk of detection due to the tremendous volume of containers being moved in and out of American ports. Drug smugglers will take a container filled with typical imports—furniture, detergent, avocados—and hide millions of dollars’ worth of drugs inside the goods or behind false walls of the container. But they still need an unscrupulous longshoreman to help move the contraband-laden containers past Customs agents. It's an easy job: the longshoreman simply hands the agent ninety-eight bills of lading for a shipment of a hundred containers—but he's already hidden the paperwork for the two containers loaded with the heroin. The Customs agent randomly pulls five bills of lading out of the ninety-eight and says: “Show me these containers.” He inspects the five, they pass muster, and the entire shipment is approved to move out.
Gagne and his partner, Germanowski, figured that Ray Solomon's cohort was pushing about five hundred kilos of cocaine per shipment simply by pulling a couple of bills of lading out of a stack in the morning and then tucking them back in the stack at the end of the day. And for that ten seconds of work, he was paid roughly $5,000 for each drug-loaded container.
A good DEA agent arrests a target and keeps fishing, throwing the little fish back, hoping to bait a bigger fish. Gagne and Germanowski caught the informant Tommy, who was used to bait Ray Solomon, who could be used to bait the bigger fish—the crooked longshoreman and his foreign bosses who were supplying the drugs. But Solomon was feeling “a little nervous.” Gagne knew he needed to build more trust with Solomon. He decided it was time to make a social call: no drugs, no guns, no deals, just cards, TV, and beer on a Saturday afternoon in Tommy's Sunset Park, Brooklyn, apartment.
All DEA operations—from buy to bust—are supposed to be conducted on the books, with official operating plans that include a team of agents standing in the shadows. Agents are not to go out undercover by themselves. Gagne knew this. But he was a gutsy agent, known for finding creative ways to bend the rules in order to get his job done. He didn't want to take his partner away from his wife on a weekend, and he certainly didn't want to pull together a full DEA team presence with twenty-four hours’ notice just so the other agents could spend their Saturday morning listening to him play cards with Tommy and Ray Solomon.
The next morning, Gagne was sitting on Tommy's couch when Solomon showed up.
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