Chemical Cowboys

by Lisa Sweetingham

  When Gagne and Germanowski started the Ghel and Michel Ecstasy wire, they didn't have the digital technology of today's Title III ops center. In 1995, wiretaps at DEA were conducted in the Stone Age, which was located in room 582 on the fifth floor. Gagne and Germanowski spent thirty days in a windowless seven-by-eight-foot workspace with a table and three chairs. Cheap blue carpet was laid in small multicolored sections so that if an agent spilled coffee or dropped a lit cigarette, pieces could be ripped out and replaced with new blue squares. Gagne tacked surveillance photos of Ghel and Michel on one wall made of white corkboard that had yellowed from years of cigarette smoke.

  Michel and Ghel's phone calls were intercepted through a line monitoring system, or LMS kit, a box about the size of a forty-inch-square TV, which opened up to reveal a three-reel tape deck. An orange light blinked whenever Ghel or Michel picked up the phone to make or receive a call, triggering all three tapes to record in unison. Scotch-taped under each cassette were labels to remind them which tape was the work copy, which was for the AUSA (assistant U.S. attorney), and which was the original. As the reels spun out to the end, the trick was to quickly pop all three out and slap in three new tapes at the same time without missing too much of the call. But sometimes one tape wouldn't play or the tapes would break because the gears hadn't been oiled.

  A dialed number recorder, or DNR kit, sat next to the LMS, spitting out phone numbers like ticker tape. The agents would track the phone numbers and write them in thick black marker on five-by-seven index cards, trying to figure out the caller's name and what they were buying or selling. DEA intelligence analysts could subpoena subscriber information for those numbers to help the agents establish identities. The index cards were kept in a plastic file box, and when a call came in, they could see the number on the DNR, flip through the cards, find the matching digits, and identify who was on the line.

  Ghel and Michel weren't as sophisticated as their Colombian counterparts in the cocaine trade. They didn't speak in code. They didn't drop their phones. They did deals openly and brazenly at all hours of the day. The agents could stimulate the wire—get the dealers to call their sources of supply—with a single well-timed phone call.

  On October 25, the first day of the intercept, Germanowski called Michel to say he was ready to place an order for Apples, starting with a six-hundred-pill deal. Then he and Gagne sat back and waited for the orange light to start blinking.

  At 5:28 p.m. Michel made a call to the “brother” in Miami to tell him it was time to make another delivery to New York.

  “Is it a done deal?” the man asked Michel.

  “Yes.”

  15 “WHEN YOU COME

  DOWN, YOU COME DOWN

  NICE AND SLOW”

  TAL SHITRIT HAD ONLY met Ghel and Michel in September, but they quickly became steady buyers and he had already sold them several hundred pills, sent in FedEx overnight packages. When Shitrit got Michel's call on October 25, he decided it was time to personally deliver a load. The next morning, Shitrit dialed Michel back with his flight information: he was arriving at JFK that evening, at 11:10 p.m., Carnival Airlines flight 182 from Miami.

  “Bring everything,” Michel told him.

  Gagne and Germanowski were listening to the call from wire room 582. As soon as the dealers hung up, Germanowski's undercover phone rang. It was Michel.

  “I can only get you four hundred fifty of the six hundred pills you want, but I will have them tonight,” Michel said.

  At 11:20 p.m., a DEA undercover observed Shitrit arriving at the TWA terminal. Shitrit wore a brown leather jacket, white jeans, and cowboy boots, with his strawberry red hair in a ponytail. Michel hugged him and said hello.

  Michel drove Shitrit to his apartment in Rego Park, where Ghel was waiting inside. A second undercover agent was waiting outside in an unmarked vehicle.

  At 11:50 p.m., Ghel and Michel left the apartment and were seen getting into a blue Pontiac.

  At five minutes past midnight, special agent Jay Flaherty watched the blue Pontiac park outside the Mélange Grill and Café on Austin Street in Queens.

  Ghel and Michel entered the café and saw their pals “Jimmy” and “Bobby” waiting at a booth. They apologized for being late.

  “My friend with the X was late arriving at the airport,” Michel said. And he had only 400 pills now, not 450. Ghel unsnapped a black leather fanny pack from around his waist and laid it on the table. Gagne casually picked up the pack, fastened it around his waist, and headed to the men's bathroom. He stepped into a private stall, locked the door, and unzipped the front of the pack. Inside was a clear plastic sandwich bag, plump with small white pills stamped with apple silhouettes. Gagne felt the weight of the bag in his hands, nearly a quarter pound. He held the bag up to the light to get a better look. Four hundred pills was the most they had ever purchased. He shoved the pills down his waistband and stuffed $6,400 cash ($16 per pill) into the empty pack.

  Back at the booth, Michel was schooling Germanowski on the chemical effects of Apples.

  “When you take them you feel them very quickly,” he said. “But the Apple is slower. When you come down, you come down nice and slow.”

  Gagne slid in next to his partner and placed the fanny pack back on the table. Ghel snatched it up and fastened it back around his waist.

  “I'll need another ten thousand to twenty thousand Apples next time,” Germanowski said. “And what about your brother with the china?”

  “Two weeks for the pills,” Ghel said. “The guy with the china—he wants to meet you guys. He wants you to come to Los Angeles.”

  As the men parted, Ghel told the agents: “You guys should buy a nightclub in New York.”

  16 THE BROTHERS FROM

  THE MOTHERLAND

  OVER THE NEXT MONTH, Gagne and Germanowski sat in wire room 582, slapping in tape after tape and gathering incriminating evidence. They pinpointed the dealers’ sources in about two weeks.

  The “brother” from Miami, Tal Shitrit, was a green-eyed twenty-six-year-old Israeli national who ran a business that supplied plants to large retailers, such as Kmart. A surveillance photo of Shitrit meeting with Michel at JFK airport was tacked up on the wall next to Michel and Ghel's photos.

  Based on the dealers’ phone calls to California, the “brother” from Los Angeles with the heroin was identified as a thirty-six-year-old Israeli named Mordi Barak, who sold watches and lived in an apartment in West Hollywood. They'd get Los Angeles DEA to deal with him later.

  Besides what they sold to DEA, the majority of the Ecstasy that Ghel and Michel distributed seemed to be heading straight into the city's nightclubs. Gagne and Germanowski were pub-and-grill types. The New York club scene was completely foreign to them. Gagne knew that would have to change.

  17 THE VIP

  ON A WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON in early November, Germanowski and Gagne were lifting weights in the fifth-floor gym, getting a quick workout before their 3:30 p.m. appointment with a new potential informant.

  Gagne was religious about his daily workouts. At twenty-nine, the five-foot-ten drug cop was about 190 pounds of muscle and could bench-press 300 pounds on a good day. Gagne had his father René to thank for his unceasing physical discipline. Like his brothers, Ronnie and René, Bob played baseball, hockey, and football from as early as he could grip a stick. His sisters, Susan and Sherrie, played basketball and softball. Their father skewered them as failures if they weren't the fastest, the strongest—if they didn't make varsity as freshmen. Trophies and ribbons filled two wood-and-glass cases in the living room by the time the last Gagne child had graduated from high school.

  Gagne would say that the most valuable thing he learned from his father was the kind of man he did not want to be. But he also learned how to deflect all self-doubt about his physical and mental boundaries—a trait that got him through his grueling military training. In 1985, at nineteen years of age, Gagne was three weeks shy of completing basic training when he caught a case of poison ivy
so severe it covered three-quarters of his body, blistering his skin from his eyelids to his heels. His drill sergeant warned that if he went to the medic, they'd likely admit him to the hospital, where he'd go on sick call and have to be “recycled.” That meant five weeks down the drain. Gagne decided against medical care and went back to training. On the last day, he powered through low-crawl drills, scraping his body against the red clay ground. His skin was on fire and the red clay felt like a flamethrower to his abdomen. But he finished.

  At twenty-six, when Gagne was three days shy of passing Ranger Assessment—the training he needed to be accepted into Snowcap—his big toe throbbed from an ingrown nail that shot piercing jolts of pain up his foot and made walking excruciating. The medic warned that if he were to cut it the way it needed, Gagne wouldn't be able to walk for a week. He decided to endure the pain. He almost quit during a timed twenty-five-mile road march in searing heat, carrying a rucksack filled with eighty pounds of sand. It took almost seven hours to walk twenty-five miles without stopping, and he started to hallucinate in the home stretch. He thought his feet had fallen off and that he was walking on bloody stumps. He finished, of course, because quitting equaled failure.

  Germanowski knew his partner was a little crazy. But having been a baseball star in college, he understood and complemented Gagne's competitive nature.

  Gagne took a break between reps and walked over to the giant picture windows of the fifth-floor gym. Their three-thirty appointment was early. He was walking up Tenth Avenue just as Gagne peered out the window.

  “G, you gotta come over here and see this,” Gagne said.

  Sean Bradley was a 120-pound, five-foot-four, nineteen-year-old runt with bleach-striped blond hair that was shaved on the sides and pulled back in a ponytail. He wore jeans that looked ten sizes too big, a dog chain that looped from his waistband to his knees, glow sticks around his neck, and an oversized backpack. Bradley was a VIP at New York's most exclusive clubs.

  “Are you kidding me?” Germanowski said. “Dude, if that's how I gotta look, it's not happening.”

  Finding Bradley had been a stroke of luck. A DEA group supervisor had been cutting his grass when his Secret Service neighbor mentioned that they had recently arrested a teen who was passing counterfeit twenties at the Woodbridge Mall in New Jersey. Bradley got caught using the fake bills to buy shoes at Foot Locker and a Genesis CD at Sam Goody for his six-foot-tall stripper girlfriend. Bradley had a history of young-thug mischief—including criminal trespassing and possession of controlled substances—and he had become an errand boy for counterfeiters who paid him in fake cash. The Secret Service couldn't use him because he didn't know anything about the money printers. But he claimed to know everything about drug distribution in the nightclubs.

  On November 8, at 3:30 p.m., Bradley had his first interview at DEA.

  “Hey, guys-th-th,” he greeted Gagne and Germanowski in the lobby. The agents detected a repetitive clink-slurp-clink sound echoing inside Bradley's mouth. His nervous habit of lightly running the stud in his tongue piercing across his teeth would soon unnerve them. They took him into a private interrogation room on the lobby floor.

  “All right, what do you know?” Germanowski asked.

  Bradley said that New York's most popular nightclubs—Tunnel and Limelight—were drug markets and everybody knew it. In fact, Bradley used to personally sell drugs in the clubs as a “house dealer,” but the work had temporarily slowed after the police raid.

  The agents knew that Limelight, on Sixth Avenue and 20th Street, had been the site of a botched NYPD raid in September. Undercover narcotics cops had made seventeen cocaine buys at Limelight that fall, and one officer noted in an indictment that drug dealing and use were carried out with a remarkable business-as-usual attitude at the club. But when NYPD hit Limelight on September 30 with warrants to arrest thirty suspected dealers, twenty-six of the suspects were nowhere to be found and the place was virtually clean of drugs.

  NYPD suspected that the club owner, Peter Gatien, had an insider who'd alerted him to the raid ahead of time. Limelight was briefly shuttered under the public nuisance laws, and Gatien was forced to pay a $30,000 fine, post a $160,000 bond, and provide authorities with a list of club employees as well as signed statements promising they would not take part in the sale of narcotics and would report any illegal drug sales. Limelight was reopened in a week's time.

  According to Bradley, the list that club management handed over to authorities did not include the names of two employees: Michael Caruso and Michael Alig.

  Michael Caruso, aka Lord Michael, was a successful promoter and manager of techno DJs. Michael Alig was the infamous king of the “Club Kids,” who reinvigorated the nightlife scene with campy fashion and regressive hedonism. At Limelight and Tunnel, Alig's parties attracted a predominantly gay crowd, while Caruso had a straight following.

  Bradley told the agents that party promoters like Caruso and Alig had their own personal house dealers who moved through the crowd and made sure guests had a constant supply of a wide variety of narcotics. Dealers made money from their drug sales and the party promoters got a percentage of the door fees.

  Limelight management had curbed the amount of Ecstasy being sold since the raids, Bradley said, but word was that things had quieted down and dealers could get back to work in another two to three weeks.

  The agents weren't ready to sign Bradley on as a full-fledged confidential informant yet. They had to get to know him a little better, try to get into the clubs on their own first to see if Bradley knew what he was talking about. If his information panned out, then they would rethink his role, maybe enlist him to open doors, make introductions.

  “How do you think we should dress if we want to get into the clubs?” Gagne asked.

  Bradley knew that the two agents would never pass as Club Kids: they didn't sport waifish physiques and designer clothes, and Ger-manowski was reticent to heed Bradley's fashion advice.

  “Okay, well,” Bradley said, “you guys could try to go as a couple of, like, you know, stylish guineas from Staten Island.”

  18 DECEMBER 2, 1995:

  TUNNEL NIGHTCLUB

  THE BLACK STRETCH LIMOUSINE turned down 27th Street toward the Hudson River, slowly approached the crowd outside Tunnel, and stopped in front of the red velvet ropes. Gagne stepped out in black leather loafers and a Miami Vice–style double-breasted club suit, his short black curly hair gelled up slick, his beard shaved in a reverse goatee. Germanowski was equally sporty in tapered slacks and a black mock turtleneck under his club jacket. Stylish guinea, Germanowski had thought to himself as he looked in the mirror at the locker room at DEA.

  The agents knew they could easily be spotted as the kind of guys who preferred sports bars and beer on tap to VIP lounges and bespoke cocktails, so they went the extra mile and borrowed the undercover limo. (Hey, big spender!)

  Tunnel was housed in a former train depot along the West Side Highway, and at forty thousand square feet it was the largest club space in Manhattan. There was no formal line outside Tunnel, just a morass of bodies inching up to the entrance. The agents strutted up like two roosters and waited to be noticed. The Hudson-chilled wind whipped past the highway, cutting through their summer-weight suits. Winter overcoats would have clashed with their threads, so they went coatless, shivering martyrs to style. Twenty minutes later, they were still waiting.

  “I'm fucking freezing,” Germanowski whispered.

  Ten minutes later they were up against the ropes, next in line, in plain sight of party promoter Darryl Darrin, a heavyset man with a slight voice. Darrin gave the agents a pitiful glance as he let in the clubgoers behind them and announced in their general direction: “If you've been here for any length of time and you haven't been picked, just go home. There's nothing here for you.”

  “C'mon,” Gagne said, motioning to his partner. They changed their location along the ropes. “This'll throw the guy off.”

  The backup team tonight i
ncluded their group supervisor, Lou Cardinali, on surveillance from the limo parked nearby, and Special Agent Jay Flaherty, who showed up minutes later by cab with Sean Bradley and two other agents. The men would ghost Gagne and Ger-manowski inside the club. The first thing Gagne noticed when the backup team arrived was that they were still in their work clothes, blue jeans and collared shirts.

  “Jesus,” Gagne said to his partner through chattering teeth. “They're never gonna get in.”

  Sean Bradley, who usually showed up with his stripper girlfriend and her scantily clad pals, had spent so much of his (counterfeit) money inside the clubs that Darrin seemed willing to overlook Bradley's nattily dressed guests this evening. Darrin plucked them from the crowd and let them squeeze ahead. Flaherty shot Gagne and Germanowski a sly wink as their group was shepherded past the velvet rope.

  “Are you kidding me?” Gagne said. “This isn't happening. Now we have to get in!”

  Gagne would later learn that entry for unvetted clubgoers was decided primarily on appearance and there was a clear pecking order. The clubs reduced patrons to A-crowd, B-crowd, and C-crowd. A and B got in; C was filler—but you didn't want too many guys in your C-crowd, you wanted more girls, because girls brought in the A-crowd guys—even if they were C-crowd girls.

  The agents were probably pegged as D-crowd—the kind of guys who are likely to start a fight if they don't find female companionship within a certain amount of time.