Chemical Cowboys

by Lisa Sweetingham

  In 1977, when Hager was seventeen, his parents moved the family from Israel to America, hoping to give their children a life without war and the threat of violence. His attorney mother and rabbi father, who still call him by his given name, Zvi, settled in Brooklyn and became American citizens. Hager did well at yeshiva but he was more interested in chasing trouble. He thrilled to the first movie he saw in America: Midnight Express, the story of a hashish trafficker who fights his way out of a Turkish prison. His earliest job was to drive wiseguy Italians around his neighborhood. From that point on, he was a paid member of organized crime and knew to keep his mouth shut about it. He had a job in a restaurant (“nothing special”) and in a clothing warehouse (“nothing much”) and would never reveal what those jobs really entailed, except to say that “nothing was on the books.”

  In the early 1990s, Hager met an Israeli named Jacob Orgad on the beach in Fort Lauderdale. Orgad was born Yakov Ben Moha in Morocco, but everyone called him “Koki.”

  Hager and Koki reconnected in a Hollywood nightclub a few years later. By then, Koki was the owner of J&J Beepers and the self-proclaimed “Beeper King” of L.A. He had also become a close associate and bodyguard for Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss, and he supplied Fleiss's high-priced call girls with beepers and drugs. Hager was impressed.

  Koki had a close friend from Haifa named Itzhak “Jackie” Cohen, who moved to Los Angeles in the late 1980s and began selling Ecstasy in 1990 or 1991—just a few hundred pills here and there. It was Jackie who introduced Ecstasy to his inner circle of friends.

  Steve Hager first tried Ecstasy with Koki and Jackie in Palm Springs in 1993 or 1994. The first pill had no effect on him. The second pill felt good enough to try more. Cocaine was Hager's real love; Ecstasy would become his living.

  In 1994, Koki introduced Hager to an Indian nightclub owner named Rick Singh. Singh was making a fortune in Houston distributing fake Ecstasy pills (mostly made of caffeine and dextromethor-phan). Young ravers, blissed out from dancing all night under strobe lights and glow sticks, often couldn't even tell they'd ingested the equivalent of a double-shot espresso. Hager bought batches of Singh's pills to sell to midlevel dealers in New York because he knew that fake pills were safer.

  “Who is going to arrest me for selling diet pills?” Hager liked to say. But he would switch to pushing real Ecstasy after Koki and Jackie introduced him to Yehuda “Judy” Ben Atar, a Jerusalem native who had connections to hit men back in Israel.

  Judy had been dealing small amounts of Ecstasy with Jackie in Los Angeles, but he was ambitiously seeking bigger profits. Judy knew that Hager had established buyers in New York. In 1995, Judy and Hager struck a partnership: Judy would procure the pills from an Israeli contact named Yosef Buskila, whose brother, David, aka “Dudu,” was based in Holland and had chemist connections. Hager's job was to line up his stable of cash-on-delivery buyers in New York City, Boston, and Columbus, Ohio.

  Getting the pills from Holland to America was simple—Dudu just mailed them. Hager went out one day and rented private mailboxes all over Manhattan under a fake name. Judy would order up a load of pills from Buskila, Dudu would send them from Holland, and pretty soon packages of fresh Dutch pills would arrive at Mail Boxes Etc. locations across the city. Hager and Judy picked up five thousand to ten thousand pills at a time from their private mailboxes. They'd buy the pills for about $7 each and sell them for $9 to $11 apiece. One shipment of ten thousand pills earned the partners a minimum of $20,000—all for the cost of a mailbox rental.

  Judy brought Jackie in to help coordinate the New York shipments. Hager brought in a Canadian-born Israeli named Sean Erez to count and sell pills and do grunt work.

  Sometimes Hager would fly to Amsterdam to bring Dudu cash payments. He'd wear women's exercise tights underneath his regular clothes and slip the bills between his skin and the snug body-hugging tights. He'd put more cash inside his cowboy boots. Hager could body-pack up to $50,000 per trip. But he never carried pills, he never met with Dudu's suppliers, he didn't know who the pill brokers or chemists were, and he didn't care. It was better not to know.

  Hager still made occasional purchases from Rick Singh's bunk Ecstasy supply—like the Bullets that ended up being DEA exhibit number one in the Ghel and Michel case, and the LSD-laced Golds that left Uzzardi's party patrons sick and tripping all night. But Hager didn't know any of the club dealers personally; they were naive prey who paid cash up front.

  Koki, Jackie, and Judy first met Oded Tuito in 1994 through their mutual chain of criminal contacts—but they had heard his name before. Tuito was known as a major dealer in Israel who came to the States with built-in connections. Tuito drew the L.A. dealers into his work and his personal life with invitations to his backyard barbecues and family-style dinners during the high holidays. In turn, Jackie and Judy introduced Tuito to Ecstasy.

  At the same time that Gagne and Germanowski were uncovering the Ecstasy networks within the clubs, Oded Tuito was injecting MDMA into his own drug distribution network. The thirty-four-year-old narcotics entrepreneur had made good money trafficking cocaine and marijuana, but Ecstasy made him better money, bigger profits. He sent a cousin to live in Belgium to coordinate pill shipments from Holland to the States and to oversee the drug couriers. His Pittsburgh buyers were more than happy to add X to their regular pot and coke orders. In Florida, Tuito partnered with Israeli nationals Meir Ben-David and Yosef Levi, who flooded the Miami clubs with his pills. Tuito was flush with cash.

  In March 1996, while Gagne and Germanowski were spying on Club Kids in New York, Oded Tuito put up $170,000 for a building on the South Side of Pittsburgh. It would be the future site of the club Vertigo. He put the names of two trusted L.A. associates on the deed. Tuito imagined Vertigo as a swanky nightclub with a restaurant on the first floor, dancing on the second, and a VIP lounge on the third. He poured half a million dollars into building renovations and naively let his flaky drug-dealing associates oversee the work. Renovations dragged on. He needed more revenue.

  When Tuito struck a partnership with Judy to sell Ecstasy to his New York contacts, Steve Hager suddenly became a de facto associate of the Fat Man.

  Hager was selling Tuito's Ecstasy pills in early 1996, but he didn't actually meet the Fat Man in person until late 1996 or early 1997 at a nightclub in Miami.

  “I'm a friend of Judy. And I know who you are,” was all Tuito said to him.

  Judy later told Hager that Tuito was “a good guy,” which Hager took to mean “goodfella” in the Italian sense. Tuito's reputation preceded him. He was known as a vicious and brutal competitor. Everybody had heard the story about the man who fled to Holland after a deal with Tuito went south: the guy was later found in an alleyway, stripped naked and unconscious. Some claimed that Tuito or Judy arranged to have the guy kidnapped, injected with a mind-numbing dose of heroin, and left to die. The victim survived, but he refused to divulge the facts of his ordeal to authorities. Investigators later surmised from a review of hospital records that he was simply a junkie who had nearly killed himself, not the victim of drug warfare. But it didn't matter, because the more the story was retold, it became a part of Tuito's mythology—you don't cross the Fat Man.

  Hager's profile hit a tipping point when he began selling Tuito's Ecstasy pills. He went from selling ten thousand pills a week tops to selling as much as two hundred thousand pills a week. He bought gold jewelry, wore Versace, and drove a Mercedes-Benz with black leather seats. He changed apartments at least once a year, partly out of a desire to keep moving and partly to keep people guessing at his whereabouts. He was thirty-five and he felt like he had finally made it. He modeled himself after the men in his favorite mob movies—partying like a wiseguy, dropping $100 bills on the valet, buying the right to trash the place and still be invited back.

  When Koki, Judy, and Jackie would meet up with Hager in New York, Hager would bring them to his favorite restaurant, Baraonda, an Italian eatery on the Upper East Side that attracted a
mix of Euro-riche men and women with a wild streak. Koki always brought an entourage of busty, bubbly girls. Hager had his own crew of dancers and other women who tripped into his life. The maître d’, Bruno, would greet them warmly. Being a gracious host, Bruno never asked what Hager and his friends did for a living. They were loyal customers who stayed late and spent a lot of money. He had the chef make them special Mediterranean plates, fish that they would eat with their hands, Israeli style. Hager washed his meals down with Rémy Martin and an eight-ball of coke before they hit the strip clubs. Bruno knew Hager was a nice guy with a short temper. He'd seen him turn tables upside down if someone didn't say “excuse me” for bumping into Koki.

  Hager spent most of his money on drugs and entertaining women. He had a crew of girls he liked to spoil—Carlie, Nikki, Max, and especially Jackie. Jackie Suarez was a twenty-six-year-old Puerto Rican beauty who smoked Parliament Lights and didn't need to fill the space between them with idle chatter—unless they were sharing coke, and then conversation was good.

  Unlike most of the women in Hager's entourage, Suarez didn't strip—she was a receptionist at a construction company. Suarez's roommate introduced her to Hager one night, and the next day Hager took Suarez shopping for perfume at Barneys: a bottle of Chanel No. 5 for her mother and Allure for her. It was easy to see why Hager was drawn to Suarez—she was seductive and witty, but she also had a kind of melancholy loneliness about her. Tuito would one day see the same in Suarez and want her for himself, changing Hager's life once again.

  Suarez got Hager right away: he took care of the girls and paid their way, and the women kept him company. Suarez quit her job and spent her days hanging out in Hager's apartment. He was fun and exciting at first, like a giant child who had a ton of toys (drugs) and playmates (strippers). She didn't ask a lot of questions about his business. She thought of him just as he secretly thought of himself—like a character from a mob movie. He seemed to spend his days fielding international calls on four different cell phones, always yelling at someone in Hebrew and arguing in numbers. By midnight, she and Hager would hit the strip clubs, dressed to the nines. Hager would escort Suarez and his entourage of strippers to Tunnel or Limelight after hours, where the women liked to dance. Hager spent thousands of dollars on table service, bottles of liquor, drugs, and champagne. They never had to wait in line.

  Gagne and Germanowski never saw Hager, Tuito, Koki, or any of the Israeli dealers in the nightclubs. But even if they had, none of the men would have particularly stood out in their minds. The agents were watching the dealers—the men in the shadows who were not dancing, not smiling, just waiting to make their next sale. And Tuito's associates never needed to sell Ecstasy hand to hand in the clubs. That was nickel and dime. Tuito and Gagne were on parallel tracks on opposite sides of the law. They would have to cross paths. But for now, they were worlds apart.

  28 CLUBLAND ARRESTS

  ON MAY 14, 1996, Gagne signed his name at the bottom of an eighty-page affidavit in support of arrest warrants for twenty-four individuals suspected of conspiring to distribute MDMA at Tunnel and Limelight. He put club owner Peter Gatien, director Steve Lewis, and promoter Joseph “Baby Joe” Uzzardi's names at the top of the list of suspects.

  “As the owner and president of the nightclubs, Gatien sought to ensure that MDMA and other controlled substances were readily available to patrons, while ensuring that the distribution of controlled substances would not result in prosecutions of nightclub employees,” Gagne alleged in his affidavit.

  He described the Ecstasy buys that he and Germanowski witnessed and engaged in while inside the clubs, and he recited excerpts of drug-related conversations from about 110 different phone calls—a small sampling—that were intercepted. He noted that DEA received intelligence from seven different confidential sources who alleged that Gatien had an insider on his payroll alerting him to NYPD undercover activity at his clubs. Gagne also claimed that he and his partner witnessed Gatien doing a one-hitter of cocaine in his office.

  A federal judge approved the warrants the same day. All the arrests had to be made at once.

  Gagne, Germanowski, and Flaherty were the main three agents on the case, but other DEA agents as well as officers from NYPD and other law enforcement agencies would take part in the arrests in order to do them in one clean sweep.

  At 6:00 a.m. on May 15, 1996, Jay Flaherty rang the doorbell at Peter Gatien's three-story town house on 10 East 63rd Street with a warrant in hand. Gatien came to the door and was met by two DEA agents, two NYPD detectives, and an IRS agent. Flaherty read him his rights on the way to the New York Field Division, where Gatien was photographed, fingerprinted, and processed. The forty-four-year-old club king wore his black leather eye patch in his mug shot photo, his arms crossed, his face belying a tired defiance.

  At 7:45 a.m. he was transported to the federal courthouse in the Eastern District of New York, where he was charged with conspiracy to distribute MDMA. He pleaded not guilty and spent nearly two weeks in jail before posting $1 million bond.

  At 9:00 a.m. Flaherty's team served a search warrant at Tunnel. Flaherty seized employee records, computer disks, tax documents, receipts, and notebooks from Tunnel offices. In the basement, agents collected several hundred empty plastic capsules that were scattered on the dance floor.

  Earlier that morning, at 6:00 a.m., Germanowski and three other agents had arrived at Baby Joe Uzzardi's girlfriend's apartment on Houston Street with an arrest warrant for the twenty-year-old party promoter.

  “I recognize you from the clubs,” Uzzardi told Germanowski when he came to the door.

  Uzzardi was cooperative from the start. He told the agents that in his two years working for Gatien's clubs he had learned from club director Steve Lewis that the two main requirements for successful parties were “good music and good drugs.” The better-quality drugs they offered, the more money everyone would make. Uzzardi claimed that the promoters knew this, security knew it, and Gatien knew it too.

  A team of agents searched Uzzardi's NYU dorm room and seized a metal Altoids box containing 165 pink pills and 23 more pills in a plastic bag.

  Steve Lewis was at his girlfriend's house in Philadelphia when he got a 7:00 a.m. phone call from Gagne, informing him he was wanted on drug charges. Lewis didn't believe it. He had recently defected from Gatien to go work for a competitor, and he feared Gatien might be setting him up for some kind of reprisal. He called Gagne's supervisor, Lou Cardinali, who assured Lewis it was not a setup and he should turn himself in immediately. Lewis took the next train back to New York and surrendered to DEA.

  Gagne and Germanowski played it friendly with Lewis. They told him that they knew he was “a good guy” and that they were really after Gatien. Lewis spilled puddles of gratitude and damaging information, according to DEA reports and court documents. Lewis told the agents that the drug dealing at Tunnel and Limelight had been going on for as long as the clubs had been open. He said he never sold drugs, but he purposely allowed certain “house dealers” to sell. He said he feared Gatien was attempting to have him killed because of everything he knew. Gatien had a lot of connections, Lewis said.

  “What kind of connections?” Gagne asked.

  Gatien paid people off for information and assistance, Lewis claimed. One week before the September 1995 NYPD raid, Gatien had a closed-door meeting with a detective from the Manhattan South division named Mitch Kolpan. Afterward, Gatien allegedly told Lewis “something was going to happen involving the NYPD,” but not to worry because he would provide Lewis with an attorney and pay his expenses if he was arrested. The only thing Gatien asked in return, Lewis said, was that he tell the authorities that Gatien knew nothing about narcotics sales in his clubs. Gatien also allegedly told Lewis to make sure not to let any “house dealers” in the clubs. The dealers were absent during the raid and Lewis was not arrested.

  Now Lewis was thanking Gagne and Germanowski for finally arresting him, saying he had wanted to “end all this,” that
he knew the drug dealing was wrong, and he had wanted to go to the police on his own, but he was apprehensive about a reprisal from Gatien. The agents thanked him for his candor.

  A judge would later grant Lewis's motion to have his post-arrest statements suppressed because they were made without the presence of his attorney. Gatien's attorney has characterized NYPD detective Mitch Kolpan as a friend of Gatien's and a guest at his clubs but denied any knowledge that he ever passed any information to the club owner about NYPD activity. Kolpan retired immediately after Ga-tien's arrest and was never charged with any wrongdoing.

  A few days before the agents took the case down and made their first wave of arrests, Germanowski was in the wire room, monitoring Uz-zardi's line, when he heard a troubling conversation between Uzzardi and John Charles Simonson.

  “You gotta come down here,” Germanowski called over to Gagne. “We've got a problem.”

  Germanowski replayed the call for Gagne.

  “Your fucking friend Sean just ripped me off,” Simonson told Uzzardi. “Who does he think he's dealing with?”

  “No!” Gagne said. “Are you kidding me?”

  The agents would never reveal to Bradley what the next steps in their investigation were, but Bradley was sharp, and they must have slipped up somewhere. From what they could tell, Bradley had done one last buy with Simonson—off the books and without permission—of two hundred pills for $2,000. They met at a phone booth at 33rd Street and Eighth Avenue. Simonson left the pills in a bag inside the booth. Bradley took the pills and left behind an envelope of cash. By the time Simonson opened the envelope, flipped through the wad, and saw forty $1 bills rubber-banded in front of a stack of white slips of paper, Bradley was long gone, on a train to New Jersey. Bradley must have figured Simonson would be in jail soon and unable to come after him. But Bradley didn't know the agents had been tapping the dealers’ phones.