“He's safe, he works for me,” Germanowski said.
Ghel got in, sat next to Gagne, and told Charlie to drive around the block so they wouldn't attract any police attention. He reached into his pack and pulled out a clear plastic baggie filled with white capsules.
“Are these as good as your first samples?” Germanowski asked.
“Don't worry about it,” Ghel said. “My friend, they are 100 percent MDMA, you are going to love them.”
Gagne removed $4,000 in $20 bills from a green duffel and handed it to Ghel.
“Do you want to count it?”
“No, I trust you guys,” Ghel said. “You are good businesspeople.”
Ghel promised a price on heroin soon. When he got out of the car, he slipped Charlie $400 and thanked him for introducing such good clients. Charlie gave the cash back to Gagne when Ghel was out of sight. Charlie knew the risks: losing his CI status and gaining criminal charges for stealing money from the United States government.
That night, 179 capsules—drug evidence—were taken to the lab.
10 EVIDENCE
DEA HAS NINE FULLY accredited laboratories across the country that perform drug and evidence analysis. The New York Field Division's Northeast Regional Laboratory (NERL) is one of the largest, serving not only DEA but also NYPD, Customs, FBI—the entire northeastern United States.
The thirty bench chemists who sit in the fifty-thousand-square-foot lab work with millions of dollars’ worth of machinery to perform analysis on drugs, gunshot residue, and fingerprints. There is even a special biohazard processing area to retrieve the kind of evidence—usually heroin—found inside the slimy latex balloons passed by couriers known as “swallowers.”
Whenever Gagne took the elevator to the seventh floor to drop off drugs at the lab, he felt like he was walking up to a bank teller window at Fort Knox. The evidence custodian sat behind a bulletproof, bombproof glass window in the reception area. Gagne would hand her a completed DEA-7 evidence form and place the drugs in a sealed bag through a small one-way cabinet. She would retrieve his deposit, give it a number (today it's a bar code), and hand Gagne a receipt, and that was the last he saw of it. But from there the pills were carried to room 719, the permanent vault, where evidence in white bins is stacked high and as far back as the length of the building.
“A secure area within a secure area within a secure area” is how the architecture of NERL security is sometimes described. Just to get to the permanent vault, the evidence custodian has to use key and combination passes to unlock several layers of double-locked doors. The 179 capsules Gagne turned in would remain in the permanent vault until the chemist assigned to case number C1-95-0390 collected them for analysis. No other employee is ever allowed to touch the drugs except the assigned chemist. No one has access to the permanent vault except for lab employees. Cameras monitor their every move.
Lab employees, like all DEA employees, are subject to random drug tests. No one is exempt, not even the special agent in charge. On testing days, an independent team comes in unannounced, the bathroom is cordoned off, and each employee provides a urine sample in front of an analyst. Any trace of drugs in an employee's system is grounds for immediate termination.
Drug evidence housed at NERL is destroyed when a case is closed, but the paperwork, sign-offs, and checklists to close a case can take years to complete. Back in the 1980s, the vault overflowed with army duffel bags packed with thousands of kilos of cocaine evidence. Cases weren't being closed fast enough, so DOJ enforced a threshold amount. Drugs beyond that amount—for instance, ten kilos of cocaine and two kilos of heroin—were destroyed in each case after ninety days. The drug-destroying method at DEA is top-secret. New York City streets are blocked off as the evidence is delivered to the incinerating location, which is never disclosed. The drugs are lowered into an incinerating furnace and special iron markers are placed on the hopper—one marker before the drugs go through and one after—to ensure nothing is whisked away by opportunists during the incineration. Evidence destruction happens a couple of times a year. Only the chemists are allowed to touch the evidence. No one else. Ever.
11 ON SET
GHEL QUICKLY WARMED TO “Jimmy” and “Bobby.” In a handful of subsequent meetings that September, Ghel shared small clues about the men in his circle who supplied the drugs. Ghel affectionately called these dealers his “brothers,” although they were unrelated. Over lunch one day, Ghel told the agents he had a brother in Los Angeles with the heroin, a brother in Miami with the Ecstasy, and another brother “in the apartment,” named Michel.
If Ghel was the Ecstasy car salesman, Michel Elbaz was the loan manager, slower to trust, more likely to walk away from a deal. The twenty-seven-year-old was born in Tel Aviv and raised by his mother. He had dark brown eyes and black hair that he wore in a Caesar cut. While Ghel relied on his imposing physical presence, Michel, at five foot six and 140 pounds, relied on his instincts.
The agents began to meet with Ghel and Michel about every other week to chat and talk product. Germanowski would argue dispassionately about price as if it mattered, like a move in the chess game. Negotiating gave the agents an opportunity to better understand where the dealers were positioned on the food chain: were they little fish desperate to unload merchandise or did they have the power to wait until the right number came up? They seemed like hungry little fish.
The “set” for meet operations was the Tower Diner, across the street from Ghel's apartment. Backup undercovers would arrive beforehand, ghost the agents from nearby booths, and leave after the meeting dispersed. Surveilling agents in parked cars would monitor conversations via Germanowski and Gagne's KEL body transmitters. Everyone got a copy of the written operational plans beforehand, which included descriptions of Ghel and Michel, the nearest police station (the 112th Precinct in Forest Hills), the nearest hospital (St. John's on Queens Boulevard), the type of operation (undercover meeting and acquisition of free sample), personnel assignments (GS Lou Cardinali in the blue Cougar, Jay Flaherty in the black Olds), the preplanned distress signals, both audio (“My friend is not going to like this”) and visual (hands up above head), and the NYPD-designated color of the day. Informants and undercovers on set are supposed to wear an article of clothing in the color of the day, say, orange, so that if all hell breaks loose, the local authorities can visually spot the good guys in orange. It was a formality, really—a plan B if cover was compromised. Gagne and Germanowski never lost their cover. Most of the time, they acted more like mischievous brothers than stiff feds.
“Don't put your water glass on my napkin,” Germanowski would snap at Gagne.
“Move your elbow over,” Gagne would gripe at Germanowski.
One afternoon at the Tower Diner, as Michel was ready to hand over the next load of Ecstasy pills, a pretty blonde walked by outside the window and Gagne was fifteen years old again.
“Look at her.” Gagne nudged his partner.
“She's not that hot,” Germanowski said dismissively. He had a weakness for Salma Hayek-type brunettes.
“What's wrong with you?” Gagne said, shoving his partner.
“Don't touch me,” Germanowski said. “Stop touching me.”
The agents bickered for the next five minutes about the superiority of blondes versus brunettes.
“Guys.” Michel rolled his eyes. “Guys, hello? I have your stuff here. I have it.”
“Shut the fuck up. We're not through here,” Gagne snapped at Michel.
Germanowski liked to say that if he had a dollar for every time Gagne said “Shut the fuck up,” he wouldn't be working, he'd be golfing. Sometimes the arguing would end in ribbing; other times they came just short of blows. But the second anyone attempted to interrupt the sibling rivalry, the agents would quickly turn and cut down whoever dared enter their marriage. For the most part, targets never suspected the partners were DEA, and informants longed to play a role in their little family.
12 PURE MDMA
ON SEPTEMB
ER 19, the lab results for exhibit number two, the capsules Germanowski bought from Ghel at their first undercover buy in Charlie's car, were finally revealed. Gagne had opened the case nearly a month ago and he was anxious to learn more about exactly what they were buying off the Israeli dealers.
According to the forensic chemist who signed off on the analysis, the two pills weighed twenty-three grams apiece and contained 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine hydrochloride—unadulterated Ecstasy. In bold type, the chemist noted an especially high purity level. Ghel's pills measured in at 84 percent MDMA, a rarity. It was great news for Gagne. They were on to something new and untapped. If the levels had been weak—more of the same Robitussin recipe—there was no way he could have defended keeping the case going. They just didn't have the resources.
Germanowski got a call from a supervisor shortly after the lab results came out. Seemed the front office also had taken notice. Even if Ecstasy was kiddie dope, this was dope straight from the source.
“Guess what?” Germanowski broke the news to Gagne. “They want us to go up on a wire on these guys.”
13 DUTCH APPLES
“I'M SORRY FOR NOT being able to provide the capsules promised,” Michel said as he slipped into their regular booth at the Tower Diner. He reached across the table and handed Germanowski a plastic dime bag decorated with red hearts. Inside were two white pills stamped with apple logos on one side. “This is the best X anyone can get anywhere,” Michel said.
For a thousand pills, it was $20 each, Michel told them. Order ten thousand or more and it'd be $15 a pill.
Gagne and Germanowski did the math. Ten thousand pills equaled $150,000 in government funds. Dropping a couple thousand dollars in buy money here and there was no big deal, but the price for ten thousand pills was prohibitive. If they showed up with a sack of $150,000 in government cash, it meant the bad guys were one hand-off away from arrest—and that cash wasn't going anywhere. It was October 17, only their fifth meeting with the dealers. It was too early to take the case down. They still needed to weed out the source of supply, and they were just days away from getting court approval on the wiretap so they could start listening to the dealers’ phone calls.
Michel must have sensed skepticism, because he proceeded to give the agents an Ecstasy-business primer.
As Pittsburgh nightclub owners, they should be taking a tip from the New York nightclub scene, Michel told them. What made the clubs in New York so popular? The music, the crowd, and the drugs.
“The clubs are a great market for Ecstasy,” Michel said, adding that Ghel was delivering five hundred Apples to an employee at the Limelight nightclub in Manhattan that very hour.
It was true—one dealer could easily unload five hundred hits of Ecstasy on a busy night at Limelight, double his money on the young ravers who dropped $25 to $50 a pill, and expect repeat business if the pills were good quality.
“The best Ecstasy in the world comes from Holland,” Michel said, and Apples were the best-quality X because they came directly from Amsterdam. Michel said his “brother” in Miami had a source in Holland who could supply “any amount of Apples needed.”
Michel trusted these men, he said, because he knew them from his “motherland,” Israel. Even the apple logo on the pills was a nod to Israel, oft referred to as “the apple of God's eye.” Michel could get them bushels of Apples, and if the Apple supply ran low, he had a cheaper and slightly weaker pill called Blue and Whites. (Another nod to the motherland, in the colors of the Israeli flag.)
“Blue and Whites are fairly popular at the nightclubs,” Michel said. He advised “Jimmy” to buy Apples in bulk to keep his nightclub patrons coming back.
“I only need one or two days’ notice to have an order sent,” Michel went on. “For the weekends, however, it's best to order by midweek.”
The agents thanked the dealer, said they'd try the Apples, and let him know if they wanted more.
“The next time you guys come to New York,” Michel said, “I want to take you both to a few of my favorite nightclubs. You can meet some of my people.”
A month later, Germanowski received a memo from the DEA attaché in The Hague country office. Dutch police were investigating local Ecstasy traffickers and had heard talk on a wiretap about the purchase of large quantities of strong Ecstasy pills referred to as “Apples.”
14 ON THE WIRE
ANYTIME THE U.S. government arrests you, searches your home, or listens to your phone calls, it is violating your civil liberties, your constitutional right to privacy. The Department of Justice's job is to protect the Constitution. As such, DEA wiretap requests, or Title III affidavits, are highly vetted for probable cause at DOJ's Office of Enforcement Operations (OEO) before they ever reach a federal judge's attention. This is how the system works for DEA agents, and in the best-case scenario, this is how it should work with every federal agency. (Post-9/11 revelations about the National Security Agency's warrantless wiretaps have shown that in cases of potential terrorist threats, the constitutional standard hasn't always been so vigorously applied. However, standard DEA wiretaps are another story—the process is tedious and there are no shortcuts.)
DEA agents work closely with their district's U.S. attorney's office and its prosecutors who are responsible for trying federal drug cases. In most field divisions, DEA agents have to write their own T-III affidavits, which can run up to 120 pages. But in New York, the assistant U.S. attorneys, or AUSAs, are dogged and efficient—they get their hands dirty and take on precedent-setting cases. They also write up all DEA wiretap requests. It's just cleaner and quicker to have an attorney do it.
A DEA wiretap can take several weeks or months to push through. In comparison, wiretaps in Israel can get court approval in a day. In the Netherlands, a judge can approve a wiretap in twenty minutes based on a prosecutor's three-paragraph-long request.
On October 25, 1995, a thirty-day T-III intercept was approved for the residential telephone of Michel Elbaz. It was the first DEA wiretap initiated specifically to snoop on Ecstasy dealers. Estimated cost for thirty days: $35,000. The next step was to send out the tech specialists.
Back in the days of POTS—plain old telephone service—DEA Investigative Technical Specialist Glen Glover would send out three or four undercover trucks a day to install secret recording equipment on landlines. Now, Glover gets one POTS job every other month. Dealers today purchase blocks of prepaid cell phones, ten or more at a pop, that the entire organization will use for two or three weeks. Just as the agents start to figure out names, sources, and scheduled drug loads, all at once the dealers drop their phones and everybody starts talking on new phones. It takes time for the agents to figure out the new numbers, and OEO is so backlogged with paperwork that by the time they get wiretaps approved for the second round of phones, the network is already using a third round of new cell phones.
Michel's phone was a simple POTS jobs, which meant that Glover or one of his tech specialists put on a lineman's uniform and drove out to Queens in a fake NYNEX truck. A tech specialist in those days would strap on a tool belt with a fat phone receiver, bluff an authoritative nod to the doorman (if there was one), and saunter down to the basement to find the phone board. The phone company might provide the block and pin number of the target's line, but everything would be mislabeled and jury-rigged, so Glover would have to plug his receiver into the phone board, wait for a dial tone, and start dialing 958 on every line until he found the right one. (Pick up a single POTS line anywhere in the country, dial a designated three-digit code, and a recorded voice will cite the number you're calling from. Every state has a specific code. New York's is 958.)
Once Glover found the target's phone, he'd attach the wire to a cylinder-shaped device called a slave. Then he'd hide the slave near the phone box and pray it wasn't discovered. A slave resembles a small black pipe bomb topped with multicolored wires, and it's what connects the target's line straight into the DEA.
Sometimes real linemen would show up
in the middle of a job asking questions: “Who are you? What are you doing?” Linemen knew everyone who worked their areas. They'd test the tech specialists all the time—maybe ask to borrow a specific tool.
“Sorry, don't have that on me today,” Glover would say, trying not to blow his cover.
“Oh, no?” the lineman would deadpan. “That's because it doesn't exist.”
Glover was more tech nerd than steely undercover, but he could bluff with the best of the street agents. Once he was cornered in the basement of an apartment complex controlled by a Spanish street gang.
“What are you doing, man? You tapping my phones?”
“Nah,” he said. “You want me to fix your phone or not? There's problems with this whole building.”
The gangsters sat on tattered couches, drinking Coronas, never removing the bandannas covering their faces as they watched Glover work. He left with the slave in his pocket, and the job was rescheduled around the gangbangers’ sleeping hours.
Today, the NYFD's seventh-floor wire room, or Title III Operations Center, is equipped with thirty-five listening cubicles or “pods.” Calls come in through computer systems that digitally record the targets’ conversations. Translators—who work from 8:00 a.m. to midnight every day—are assigned to cases based on their language proficiency: Spanish-speakers cover Colombian and Mexican cocaine and marijuana cases, while Chinese-speakers proficient in a variety of dialects work Chinese wires, which usually means heroin. Agents work closely with translators, who are about half men, half women. But when Gagne and Germanowski were chasing after pill pushers in 1995, the translators were mostly young Spanish-speaking women, who are fondly remembered by the male agents for their tendency to wear tight pants, loose blouses, and red lip gloss.
Agents and translators have to sign lengthy rules-of-minimization forms, which state that interceptions must be turned down and listening must cease during calls that are considered privileged. Privileged conversations include those between attorney and client, parishioner and clergyman, physician and patient, and husband and wife. The caveat is if the target also has a third person on the line during a conversation with his lawyer or his wife, the call is no longer considered privileged. Experienced drug traffickers know these rules too. They engage in seemingly mundane conversations about a certain “lady” (code for cocaine) or “boy” (code for heroin) who is scheduled to arrive in “the Twins” (a pre-9/11 code for New York).
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