III “I'M THE BOSS.
DON'T FUCK
WITH ME”
40 ON THE RUN
ODED TUITO'S MOST IMPORTANT buyers and distributors in Pittsburgh had been arrested in the October 1997 warehouse raid. Unlike the arrests in Los Angeles, none of the Pittsburgh crew was family. It made Tuito paranoid and restless. He thought about whom he'd have to call a hit on, who needed killing, because it was only a matter of time before someone in Pittsburgh became a snitch, divulged Tuito's identity, his network, and his plans for Vertigo, which was still under construction.
Tuito had fled to a safe house in Miami after slipping away from Los Angeles police. He met up with his lieutenants in Florida—Meir Ben-David and Yosef Levi—and reached out to his L.A. and New York crews, keeping things under control as he planned his next move. Even without Pittsburgh, he was still in the drug game. But now he was wanted in Israel and America, and he refused to live in hiding in the States. He lay low for a few weeks, collected debts, and procured a new false ID to travel with.
Instead of calling a hit, Tuito decided to leave the country and walk away from his half-million-dollar nightclub investment. Vertigo was abandoned before the doors ever opened. His next base of operations would be Brussels, Belgium, and he would send for Aliza and the children once he settled in. In Belgium, Tuito could reconnect with Israeli expats and develop new criminal partners. The best part: he was just a border's drive from the source of Ecstasy supply—the clandestine Dutch labs.
41 THE CHAIN OF TRUST
IN THE 1 980s, Ecstasy was so popular in Holland, Dutch drug dealers with pagers delivered pills like pizza, running promotions of buy five and get the sixth free. By the mid-1990s, Dutch law enforcement took a hard look at their synthetic drug problem and reluctantly admitted that the Netherlands was to Ecstasy what Colombia was to cocaine. Even worse, it soon became apparent that Dutch police had inadvertently helped to spread Ecstasy production and expertise among the very organized-crime factions they were trying to dismantle.
Every country has its share of organized crime, and the Netherlands is no different. Since 1991, Amsterdam has been the site of at least twenty-nine gangland hits, or “eliminations,” in feuds among Dutch and ethnic criminals. The most famous Dutch drug lord, who emerged in the late 1980s, was Klaas Bruinsma, the son of a soda company CEO. Bruinsma began selling hashish in high school. By thirty-five, he was Holland's “Dutch Godfather” and the reigning kingpin of a multimillion-dollar organization that imported hash and cannabis to the Netherlands. When Bruinsma suspected his bodyguard, kickboxer André Brilleman, was stealing from him, the boxer's body was soon found encased in concrete and dumped in the river Waal. In 1991, Bruinsma was shot to death in front of the Amsterdam Hilton by a former police officer who was working for the Yugoslavian Mafia.
A combination of liberal drug laws, geographic accessibility, and an extensive chemical industry had turned the Netherlands into a haven for drug traffickers. The first gift to traffickers was the Dutch Opium Law of 1976, which decriminalized use and distinguished between hard and soft drugs. Whereas the United States has five schedules, the Dutch have List 1 hard drugs (cocaine, heroin, LSD, Ecstasy) and List 2 soft drugs (cannabis and hashish). Mushrooms, if they are fresh and just picked, are List 2. But if they are dried and used in baked goods, they become List 1.
Drugs are not legal in the Netherlands, but just about any adult can walk into a hash bar in Amsterdam—taking care to note that “koffee” shops are for drinking coffee while “coffee” shops serve drugs—and order up a hash brownie or a cannabis cigarette. Enjoy it in private without causing a public nuisance and it is considered “nearly legal” and is tolerated. Coffee shop owners may not advertise or offer drugs. It's also illegal for them to purchase drugs, but they can have about a pound in the store without repercussions. It's “legal on the front door and illegal at the back,” as they say.
The Dutch model is based on harm reduction: protect the public health, provide treatment options to users, and let law enforcement focus efforts on high-level drug producers instead of the drug users. As a social experiment, the Dutch people have benefited, with abuse rates significantly lower than those seen in the United States. In fact, immigrants and narcotourists account for the majority of abuse and distribution in the Netherlands. But the Dutch police have come to realize that soft drugs don't equal soft crime. Amsterdam has suffered for its role as the drug-dealing capital of Europe.
Commander Gadi Eshed of the Israeli National Police is a witness to the Dutch and Israeli Ecstasy connection. Eshed joined the police force in 1979 after serving three years in the army and studying international politics and cinema at Tel Aviv University. In 1985, the twenty-eight-year-old officer traveled to The Hague to take part in an Israeli heroin case. Dutch drug traffickers made good money in the 1970s and ‘80s importing cheap, clean heroin from Thailand, and Eshed found that Israeli criminals were importing that same heroin from the Netherlands to Israel. Eshed was so excited about his first international case that he gave up his hotel room, preferring instead to sleep on the floor in the wiretap room at the police station in The Hague for five weeks—just so he wouldn't miss any important phone calls between the dealers. It was a small operation, netting just two kilos of heroin, but Eshed loved the work, and he would return with his family in 1991 for a special four-year assignment as the Israeli representative in The Hague, aiding Dutch investigators in Israeli-related cases.
Today, Eshed's passport is filled with stamps from nearly every European country, parts of Africa, South America, and the United States. He speaks perfect English, Romanian, and Hebrew. His colleagues describe him as having an encyclopedic knowledge of organized crime. In Eshed's thirty years as an officer studying criminal networks around the world, he has come to recognize an enduring theme among traditional Israeli crime networks—a model he calls the chain of trust. Most chains involve men who grew up in the same impoverished neighborhoods in Israel, skipped out on army service, and spent time in jail, or “the academy,” as Eshed sometimes calls it. It's where they learn who's a snitch and who's trustworthy by observing which prisoners receive better conditions.
The Netherlands, which maintained an open-door policy for immigration, was home for some 140,000 Jews when it was occupied by Nazi Germany in 1940. Resistance movements were futile. By 1942, the Nazi attempt to make Holland Judenrein (clean of Jews) had resulted in mass deportations to Auschwitz, Sobibor, and the Holland-based Westerbok camp. Some, including emblematic diarist Anne Frank, stayed in hiding in Amsterdam. In 1946, there were 30,000 Jews in the Netherlands, just 20 percent of the prewar Jewish population.
By the 1970s a renewed Jewish diaspora had reached Amsterdam and the border-close communities of Brussels and Antwerp in Belgium. Mixed among the hardworking and law-abiding Jewish citizens who settled in the welcoming Dutch and Belgian neighborhoods were small-time crooks. Burglars, extortionists, drug dealers, and auto thieves found they could take advantage of the idyllic communities where houses and cars were left open and unalarmed. In those days, street-level drug dealers could buy about ten grams of heroin for a pittance, take a train to Germany to sell it, and then hop on the next train back to Holland. They'd save enough to buy a hundred grams and sell that for a fivefold profit to buyers in Paris.
“They started with cocaine and heroin, and then this magic happened to all of them when they found this very cheap Ecstasy,” Eshed says. “And all it cost was a phone call from Antwerp or Brussels, because until 1993, it was illegal for police to listen to phone conversations in Belgium, so you didn't even have to use codes. And besides, who would understand Hebrew?”
Ecstasy was first introduced to the region by 1980s jet-setters who thrilled to their first MDMA experience in Ibiza, Spain; Goa, India; and the United Kingdom and then spread the drug through house parties and raves in Amsterdam. MDMA was imported at first, but in time it would become a major Dutch export thanks to innovative amphetamine pioneers.
> In the 1970s, Dutch criminals in the southern provinces of Lim-burg and North Brabant created clandestine amphetamine labs and established well-worn trafficking routes to Scandinavia, the United Kingdom, and Germany. They forged criminal links just across the border in Belgium with the thriving mom-and-pop bootleggers who slowly transitioned from liquor into amphetamine cooking. Decrim-inalization of drugs in 1976 only emboldened the entrepreneurial spirit of these synthetic drug traffickers.
As Ecstasy demand proliferated in the 1980s, the freelance amphetamine cookers switched to MDMA, using the same labs, chemical expertise, and relationships they had used for amphetamine production. About 10 percent of their investment was in lab hardware and 90 percent was in precursor chemicals. Obtaining the raw chemical materials was easy for them because the Netherlands is home to some 2,400 legal chemical companies. The main precursor for Ecstasy, PMK, already had legitimate uses in everything from perfumes to insecticides and was not even licensed by the Dutch until the July 1995 Prevention of Abuse of Chemicals law. Even then, Dutch criminals could turn to corrupt chemical facilities or simply import the precursors from China and Eastern Europe.
The liberal Dutch drug laws did little to discourage production because prison sentences were so light. Key members of an organization, such as chemists who possessed production knowledge, faced an average of four to six years’ incarceration if caught and convicted. But the majority of unskilled traffickers received, at most, up to a year in prison, where they made new contacts and resumed their place in the illicit networks upon release.
The Netherlands made MDMA illegal in 1988, but by 1991, when Gadi Eshed began his assignment in The Hague, high-quality pills were being produced by Dutch chemists and distributed by established underworld criminal organizations. In February 1992, Dutch police dismantled a major MDMA production facility run by a group of former hashish traffickers. The group owned labs, imported precursor chemicals from Belgium, and produced millions of pills. One of the main organizers of the network was a Belgian physician named Danny Leclère, aka the “Ecstasy professor,” who had learned the trade from southern amphetamine cookers. Leclère was “eliminated” in 1993 by an unknown assailant who shot him dead in his car on the Amsterdam ring road. Police found the MDMA formula in Leclère's vehicle.
Gadi Eshed was witness to one of the most damaging crises in the country's law enforcement history: in the early 1990s, police had unwittingly helped drug traffickers further expand and heighten MDMA production. It began when Dutch prosecutors and police responded to the new tolerance for cannabis by reprioritizing their investigative efforts to target hard-drug producers. They turned a blind eye to the trafficking of soft drugs, ultimately allowing dozens of tons of cannabis to be imported into the Netherlands. The injection of riches that the organized crime syndicates made in cannabis trafficking gave them the capital, the contacts, and the gumption to branch into hard drugs. Their high-end amphetamine labs soon gave way to Ecstasy labs.
But it wasn't just turning a blind eye that made law enforcement culpable. The Dutch police took part in long-term secret investigations, whereby undercover officers and informants infiltrated the ground levels of criminal organizations and worked alongside the lower ranks in an attempt to build credibility all the way up to the targets: the drug lords. But the undercovers had entwined themselves so tightly with the organizations that it became unclear who was in control—the police or the criminals.
In one case, a criminal undercover known as “the Snail” learned how to produce MDMA from a southern amphetamine cooker. When the cooker was arrested, the Snail taught the other members of the network how to produce Ecstasy. He also supplied precursor chemicals and lab equipment, and made repairs to the equipment over a four-year period. His criminal cohorts nicknamed him the Snail because he was slow to respond to their trafficking propositions. They didn't know it was because he was waiting for instructions from his police handlers at the Criminal Intelligence Division.
The Snail helped to bring down several southern Ecstasy barons, but many of them were later released when an investigation into Dutch policing methods determined there had been a rampant use of under-covers and informants that was judged illegal. The crisis was only compounded by the culture of secrecy that Dutch police had been working in. The country had twenty-five different policing districts, with a twenty-sixth national police unit—and yet each district worked as if it was independent, keeping separate databases and intelligence files. The districts failed to share information, allowing corruption to breed.
Meanwhile, Israeli criminals had partnered with Dutch chemists to become astute Ecstasy pioneers, quick to exploit the vulnerabilities of the Dutch legal system and reap the benefits of smuggling in the Benelux region. There were already easily accessible smuggling routes by land (vehicle border checkpoints were slowly fading with the increasing integration of the European Union), by sea (Rotterdam was Europe's largest port and a major transit point for chemical products), and by air (drug couriers in a pre-September 11 world could easily hide drugs in their suitcases on direct flights from Amsterdam to New York, Los Angeles, and Miami with little worry).
With one phone call to a New York contact—a link in the chain of trust—a dealer could line up capable Israeli buyers and distributors in the States, where Ecstasy consumption was skyrocketing among nightclub denizens. Israelis almost never ran Ecstasy labs. They learned it was smarter to stick to what they were good at—overseeing distribution chains—and let the Dutch traffickers and their networks of chemists handle production.
Slowly, the Israeli traffickers in Amsterdam reached out to their relatives and old neighbors in Israel, inviting them to join them. They learned the language, they married Dutch women—many who were from the red-light district—and their wives widened the chain of trust to local Dutch criminals who had access to drugs.
One of the most well-known interlopers among organized crime factions was the Israeli Edmond “Eddie” Sasson, who married a Dutch woman and lived in Amsterdam for twenty years. Sasson trafficked cannabis with an Egyptian man who was active in prostitution and human trafficking in the red-light district. Sasson's Maya restaurant and jazz club, on the Leidseplein, was known by Dutch police to be a thriving nightspot for underworld figures.
Oded Tuito and his drug-smuggling friends would visit Maya when in Amsterdam. Another notable Maya patron was a tough Israeli con from the north named Jacob “the Dog” Elchik. Like Sasson, Elchik had moved to Holland and married a Dutch woman. But Elchik also spent fourteen years in a French prison for drug trafficking. He padded his stable of criminal contacts while behind bars, and at the end of the 1990s, when Elchik was released, he returned to Amsterdam to reconnect with his Dutch partners, who were now running Ecstasy labs.
During Gadi Eshed's tenure in Holland from 1991 to 1995, the Israeli MDMA networks in the Netherlands were of the freelance, loose-knit variety. They distributed thousands of pills a week and very little of it was destined for the United States. As far as Eshed could tell, there were no Israeli kingpins or Mafia monopolizing the trade. The change came when the Fat Man moved to Belgium in 1998.
One of Jacob “the Dog” Elchik's most important acts after he was released from French prison was providing introductions to Oded Tuito that put the Fat Man in direct contact with Ecstasy labs that could produce half a million tablets a day, made to order.
Tuito had made thousands of dollars a month selling heroin in Israel and marijuana and cocaine in the States. But when he abandoned those drugs for Ecstasy trafficking, he made millions, and America became his most valuable customer.
42 ADAPT, IMPROVISE,
AND OVERCOME
AFTER SEVEN YEARS AS a drug cop, Bob Gagne never imagined he'd be burning out at a desk job at the age of thirty-two. The key to his success as a street agent was building relationships with people. The key to success in Intel was embracing numbers. It seemed to Gagne that everyone was wading through reports and raw data, searching for the
magic statistic to send up to their boss that would pinpoint the next big success, trend, or crisis in the drug war.
As a street agent, his work hours were unpredictable and dictated by the movements of the drug dealers he was shadowing. As an Intelligence agent, Gagne got into the office by 8:30 a.m., worked out in the gym until ten, did analysis at his desk all day, and left by six. He hardly saw his two best friends anymore. The other Intel agents were at a place in their careers where they wanted to relax. Gagne wanted to work. He would train hard in the gym until he was so physically exhausted that he was too numb to feel his emotional exhaustion. He wouldn't show his anger at the office. He didn't want to be that guy—the one who walks around telling people how miserable he is. But on the drive home alone, he couldn't escape the nagging thought: Tomorrow will be exactly the same. Gagne wanted to quit DEA, and he hadn't felt that way since Snowcap. He knew he was suffering a crisis of confidence. He decided to get married.
Kristen was a pretty fitness instructor Gagne had met through a friend in 1995. She was smart, blue-eyed, blond, not a hair out of place. After enduring men in drag with octopus hands and having to squeeze into tight pants and black lipstick, Gagne was desperate for normalcy. Kristen looked like an angel to him. She came from a loving home. She didn't touch drugs. She smiled at him like he was someone special. She felt like the answer as he trudged into a second depressing year at Intel. They moved into an apartment on Long Island together.
Gagne's family had trouble warming to Kristen. Gagne's family was working-class. Kristen's vacationed on Martha's Vineyard. Ger-manowski saw Gagne's courting of Kristen as another wedge between them.
“Bob, she's like a Kennedy,” Germanowski said one day. “Look, my dad was a steelworker, my mom was a secretary. Yeah, I think it would be cool to be a Kennedy too. But I'm not. And Gags, this isn't you.”
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