Germanowski was cold and impatient. He had a bum shoulder that was still recovering from reconstructive surgery, and he had more grief waiting at home. It was his wife's birthday, and she wasn't pleased that he was spending it in a nightclub. Bob didn't want to hear about it. He had a herniated disk and was scheduled for major back surgery in a month.
Darrin made a second announcement: “If there's anybody here that I have seen and did not let in, go away. There's nothing here for you.”
A guest-list girl showed pity on the agents and handed them passes to Limelight. Gagne felt embarrassed to even be acknowledged.
“Let's go,” Germanowski said.
“No, no,” Gagne insisted. “Just wait. We're getting in.”
A young up-and-coming party promoter named Joseph “Baby Joe” Uzzardi had briefly stepped outside and Gagne latched onto him.
“Hey, why can't we get in?”
Uzzardi leaned back, gave Gagne a once-over, and offered a meek excuse: “Sorry, but it's gay night,” Uzzardi said. “You're not getting in. Just go to Limelight.”
“Bob, let's get the fuck outta here,” Germanowski pleaded.
“Fine,” Gagne said. “Fine! Call for the limo.”
“I am not calling for the limousine. I just want to get out of here.”
“Look, I came in the limousine. I'm leaving in the limousine.”
Gagne sulked the whole three-block walk to a gas station, where he and his partner sat on the curb and waited. As the limo pulled up, the doors opened and a cloud of cigar smoke escaped into the cool air.
“You two fucking morons got all dressed up!” Lou Cardinali's cackling laughter drowned out the sound of empty beer bottles clanking on the limo floor. “You think you're cool-shit badasses. Nothing made me happier than watching you two stand outside freezing your ass off.”
“That's it,” Germanowski said. “Whatever it takes—if I gotta wrap my body in Saran Wrap and put a green horn on my head—done. I'm getting in this fucking place.”
19 “DID YOU RECEIVE
THE PRESENT YET?”
GHEL AND MICHEL HAD started their fledgling Ecstasy business in the summer of 1995 and by winter the dealers were making steady cash profits from their stable of nightclub buyers. As Gagne and Germanowski listened to the dealers on the wire, they could practically track the dealers’ evolution from small-time peddlers to ruthless profiteers.
In December, shortly after the DEA agents were barred from clubland, Ghel and Michel made plans for a trip to France. It was to be a working vacation, with a visit to an old acquaintance who had an antique store that was said to be filled with millions of dollars’ worth of jewelry and furniture. The dealers’ brilliant plan was to bludgeon the owner to death, steal his valuables, and split the profits. The fresh influx of cash could be used to invest in larger Ecstasy deals. They revealed bits of their plan over the phone as Gagne and Germanowski were listening. NYFD authorities immediately contacted the DEA's Paris country office to alert French police and to warn the vendeur d'antiquités of the alleged plot against his life.
At the same time that Ghel and Michel were making vacation plans, Tal Shitrit, the Miami supplier, got an infusion of drugs—ten thousand hits of a new kind of Ecstasy from Holland, which he called “Rabbits.” Shitrit needed to unload the Rabbits fast, so he decided to front Ghel and Michel 4,700 pills, worth $47,500, and send them same-day package delivery.
On December 11, 1995, at 9:15 a.m., Shitrit's girlfriend walked into Pakmail on Kendall Drive in Miami and approached the manager with a brown box. The manager, out of courtesy, informed her that same-day FedEx service would cost $179, but she could send it next-day air for half as much. Cost was unimportant, she said. The package was for her boyfriend's mother, and it had to get there today. She paid cash and left. The package was addressed to a false name, “Jaco Nastoros,” at Ghel and Michel's Rego Park address.
What the dealers didn't know was that FedEx required same-day packages to be inspected before the company would take receipt. When the FedEx driver arrived, he opened the box and found a tan ceramic vase with flowers. It looked good to go. But the driver was suspicious—this was Miami, after all—so he took the flowers out of the vase, removed the foam core, and found several plastic bags containing small tan pills with a Playboy bunny imprint on them. The store manager called Miami Metro-Dade police.
At noon, Shitrit's girlfriend called Pakmail for a tracking number but the manager bluffed and said he didn't have one yet. She called again at 1:00 p.m. At two-thirty, Shitrit called. He called again at three. The manager politely suggested to Shitrit—at the instruction of the police detective standing behind him—that he should drop by the store to get the tracking number.
“That is not necessary,” Shitrit said. He hung up and called Ghel.
Gagne and Germanowski, who weren't aware yet of the FedEx fiasco in Miami, were listening on Ghel and Michel's wire when Shitrit called.
“Did you receive the present yet?” Shitrit asked Ghel.
“No.”
“It's hot,” Shitrit warned. “Do not sign on it, don't do anything.” They agreed not to speak for a few days.
It was bad timing for Gagne and Germanowski. They wanted stronger evidence before taking the case down—more buys before they went in for the bust. But now Ghel and Michel had good reason to leave for Paris as quickly as possible, to avoid being linked to the Playboy pills. The agents couldn't let them get on a plane and disappear. It was time to move in for the arrest.
The next day, on December 12, a team of special agents, including Jay Flaherty, descended on apartment K at 99-32 66th Road to arrest Ghel and Michel for conspiracy to distribute MDMA. No cash or drugs were found in the apartment. Israel “Ghel” Hazut and Michel Elbaz were advised of their rights and brought to NYFD, where Gagne and Germanowski were waiting.
As a safety measure, undercover DEA agents never take part in the arrests of the targets they've been meeting with, because if they've played their roles well, the dealer won't believe the agent is really a drug cop. The dealer's first impression when he sees the guns come out is that he is about to be robbed, and he's likely to pull out his own weapon to defend himself if it only means killing another drug dealer.
Ghel and Michel were in a holding area when “Jimmy” and “Bobby” walked in to introduce themselves as Special Agents Germanowski and Gagne. Ghel seemed happy to see them.
“Jimmy!” Ghel said. “They got you!”
“Ghel, I'm an agent,” Germanowski said, showing him the gold badge on his belt.
“No, Jimmy, it's okay,” Ghel said. “It's okay, you're not.”
“No, Ghel—I really am. And I'm going to have to testify against you.”
“No, you won't, Jimmy! You can just get an attorney,” Ghel persisted. He was certain that “Jimmy” had been arrested and then set up by the DEA to trick him into talking.
But Michel had no doubts about who “Jimmy” and “Bobby” really were. They'd been duped. He started yelling at Ghel in Hebrew.
“Okay,” Ghel finally said in English. “I understand. You guys did really good.”
20 DOWNLOADING THE DEALERS
GAGNE LOOKED AT HIS watch. It was after 5:00 p.m. The agents had been with the dealers at NYFD all afternoon, and Ghel and Michel had finally agreed to take a plea bargain and cooperate. For the first time, Ghel downplayed his role as a drug dealer. He wasn't a large-scale trafficker at all, he said. The largest amount of drugs he'd ever sold was the four hundred pills to the agents. Gagne wanted to sign them up as defendant informants and use them to learn more about the Ecstasy networks in the nightclubs. The courts were closed, but he figured they could bring Ghel and Michel to jail, get them arraigned in the morning with public defenders, and then out on bail.
But the assistant U.S. attorney didn't see it that way. She informed Gagne that even with Ghel and Michel's promise to cooperate, they would never get bail because of their immigration status and the alleged murder plot.
Their supervisor, Lou Cardinali, had more bad news: the front office was hot to do a press conference in the morning. Gagne imagined the headlines: “DEA Identifies Drug Traffickers in Murder Plot.” With that kind of press, he knew, Ghel and Michel would never talk.
Gagne felt the pinch. He hadn't come this far just to throw the dealers in jail. It was imperative that they debrief them and get as much intelligence as possible while Ghel and Michel still had the impetus to cooperate. So he came up with a plan—an unorthodox, highly unusual plan—which he proposed to his cohorts, Ger-manowski and Jay Flaherty.
“You want to do what?” Cardinali was stunned. Gagne, Ger-manowski, and Flaherty were standing in his office, announcing that they wanted to spend the night with two drug-dealing potential killers.
“Lou, we only have a small window of opportunity to really debrief these guys. We gotta download them before we lose them,” Gagne said. “So we'll do it all in one shot—tonight, at their apartment.”
Gagne made it sound easy, but Germanowski would later claim his partner had employed Jedi mind-trick powers to convince him to go along with the sleepover, and to persuade the front office to hold off on the press conference. Cardinali was nervous about the whole thing. Gagne's crack ideas had helped to make his boss a two-pack-a-day smoker.
“Nothing better happen,” he barked at the agents as they left. “And you hammerheads better have them at the U.S. attorney's office at eight tomorrow morning!”
As they drove Ghel and Michel home, Gagne, Germanowski, and Flaherty played it like they just needed to hang out with the dealers overnight and then bring them back to court for their appearance in the morning.
“We'll go over everything then,” Germanowski said. The agents couldn't tell the dealers that there was zero chance of a judge granting them bail in the morning. These were men who would bludgeon an old friend for his baubles. The agents had to assume that if Ghel and Michel knew jail was imminent, then they would do whatever necessary to escape.
So for one strange, cold night in December, three New York DEA agents had a slumber party at the tiny apartment of two Israeli Ecstasy dealers. They kept Ghel and Michel up all night, chatting them up in the living room like old college buddies, and casually questioning them about their suppliers and the Ecstasy scene in New York's nightclubs.
Ghel said they'd first met the “brother” from Los Angeles with the heroin, Mordi Barak, when they all lived in Israel. When they learned he was selling MDMA in the States, they reconnected with Barak by phone and he sent them ten capsules by overnight mail in August 1995. He sent more pills in September—including the 84 percent pure capsules they'd sold the agents. But Barak's supply wasn't always reliable, and in late September, they met Tal Shitrit at Tunnel nightclub. The ponytailed dealer got his MDMA directly from a supplier in Holland. Ghel and Michel would buy Shitrit's pills for $12 or $13 apiece and resell them for $30 to $50 retail in the clubs or in bulk at $16 to $22 to buyers like “Bobby” and “Jimmy.”
When the supply of strong, good-quality Ecstasy was low, the dealers had a stash of fake Ecstasy pills called “Bullets” that they could sell in the clubs for extra money. Bullets were small, fat pills that were scored on one side. Club Kids who danced until daylight to thumping techno music under an endless hallucinogenic laser show were so high they didn't know that the Bullets were just the cough suppressant dextromethorphan.
While Ghel and Michel talked, the agents carefully scanned the apartment in a covert search for weapons. They devised secret plans in their heads of how to kill the dealers if it became necessary. Flaherty caught Germanowski's eye and motioned to the space above Germanowski's head. Two giant samurai swords hung on the wall above him.
When it was time to sleep, Gagne took the couch and Flaherty took the floor. Germanowski got stuck keeping watch on first shift and was relegated to a small cushionless chair in the corner.
“No, no, it's okay,” Germanowski said to Gagne, who was stretching out on the couch. “Because when they come out of that room looking to kill us, the couch is the first thing they're going to come across. Even though I'm awake, they'll kill you before I can kill them. So you sleep on the couch and sleep well, my friend.”
“That's really fucked up,” Gagne said. “When I'm sleeping I'm trusting you to keep me alive.”
When Gagne awoke the next morning, Michel was in the shower, Flaherty had gone to NYFD to get his own shower, and Ghel was nowhere to be found.
“Where's Ghel?” a sleepy-eyed Gagne whispered to Germanowski.
“Huh? Oh, he went out for coffee.”
“Oh. Okay.”
Two minutes later, Flaherty walked in, saw the agents passed out, and asked the same question. Gagne and Germanowski always thought of Flaherty as the most levelheaded one.
“What?” Flaherty was incensed. “We've been here all night and you let Ghel go?”
Just then Ghel walked in the front door carrying bags filled with coffee and muffins for everyone.
After breakfast, they got in the undercover patrol car and headed to the Brooklyn federal courthouse. Germanowski finally broke the news: “Sorry, guys, but you've got to go to jail.” Ghel was furious.
On December 15, Tal Shitrit was arrested in Miami pursuant to New York warrants. Gagne and Flaherty questioned Shitrit at DEA's Miami Field Division. Shitrit claimed he had never heard of Ecstasy.
“Ever heard of Playboys?” Gagne asked.
No, Shitrit said, the only Playboy he'd ever heard of was on videos. The Ecstasy pills Shitrit had tried to send to New York in the intercepted FedEx package were later tested by the NYFD lab and turned out to be nothing more than caffeine and ephedrine—diet pills. Tal Shitrit was sentenced to eighteen months in prison based on the load of Apples he'd delivered in October. The brother from Los Angeles, dealer Mordi Barak, was sentenced to time served after completing five months’ home detention.
Michel Elbaz and Israel Hazut were each sentenced to time served after spending eleven months in jail. The Queens dealers weren't involved in heavy-volume trafficking and there were no sentencing guidelines at the time for Ecstasy distribution.
Gagne was satisfied with the outcome. He knew the case against Ghel and Michel was just a launching pad that opened his eyes to Ecstasy's prevalence. Nobody at New York DEA had ever chased after the so-called love drug, but Gagne was determined to follow Ecstasy into the clubs now and see where this thin strand of a lead would take him and his partner.
In wire room 582, a box of index cards contained the names and phone numbers of several dozen people overheard talking with the dealers on the wire. Tacked on the corkboard were the photos of the final targets in the Queens Ecstasy case: Israel “Ghel” Hazut, Michel Elbaz, Tal Shitrit, and Mordi Barak. They were little fish. But they had one tenuous link that Gagne and Germanowski missed.
In the same box, there was a single index card that contained the name of a man the Israelis must have called at least once. Jotted next to the words “bullet supplier” was a New York phone number for drug dealer Steve Hager. His card was copied along with all the other cards, tucked away deep inside the case file, and completely forgotten. It would be years before Gagne would hear that name again. Hager was the one who'd sold Ghel and Michel exhibit number one, the fake Ecstasy—the dextromethorphan Bullets. Hager was an independent Ecstasy dealer who sold, at most, a few hundred pills a week—some real, some fake. But very soon Hager would become a high-volume drug trafficker, making millions of dollars a year by working for the world's most prolific Ecstasy distributor, Oded Tuito.
II “LIFE IN THIS CITY
IS LIKE LIFE IN PETER
GATIEN'S CLUBS”
21 TUITO'S AMERICAN DREAM
HIS LIEUTENANTS CALLED HIM “the Big Guy” and sometimes “the Fat Man,” but not to his face. At six feet tall and 200 pounds, there was no denying he was large, but Oded Tuito carried his heft with authority, as if his paunch was a symbol of power.
Tuito had brown eyes, close-cropped
black hair, a scar on his forehead, and a larger scar across his forearm. Girlfriends—and he had a few—noticed more scar tissue all over his trunk and legs. He'd had to kill a neighbor in Israel once, in self-defense, he'd say by way of explanation. Israeli National Police have no record of such an incident.
In late 1995, when Gagne and Germanowski started investigating Ecstasy, a handful of Israeli dealers were selling just a few hundred pills a week. That would change when Oded Tuito discovered the kiddie dope.
Oded Nissim Tuito was raised in the coastal farming village of Zerufa, not far from the cosmopolitan port city of Haifa. In 1947, there were more than 870,000 Jews living in the Arab world who were subjected to persecution, anti-Jewish riots, and murder. Some 580,000 Jewish Arabs sought refuge in the newly formed State of Israel between 1948 and 1972. Tuito's family was among the uprooted Algerian Jews who first settled Moshav Zerufa in 1949.
Zerufa means “sown land” in Hebrew. Citrus fruits and field crops were sown by the small farming cooperatives in Tuito's hometown for decades before large companies bought out the small farmers and a real estate boom in the 1980s saw many city residents snatching up Zerufa property to build their outsized dream homes. Today, Zerufa is home to about 530 inhabitants, and the village has managed to retain its rural charm through the land-grab era. The older, boxy stucco homes nestled behind palm, fig, and olive trees still remain alongside the newer multilevel residences that were built in a mix-and-match parade of Mediterranean, Greek, Spanish, and Moroccan styles. Family names, burnished on dark wood plaques, hang roadside in front of every house in Zerufa. Nearly a dozen of the nameplates end in “Tuito.”
Oded Tuito was born July 25, 1961, the fourth of six children. He married Aliza Malul and a son was born in 1983. Another boy and a girl would follow. Very little is known among law enforcement sources about Tuito's family or his criminal rise to power, but confidential sources say that Tuito's drug trafficking career began during his service in the Israel Defense Forces, when he was smuggling heroin from Lebanon into Israel.
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