Chemical Cowboys

by Lisa Sweetingham

  Gagne didn't want to hear their concerns. He had grown distant from his own family and felt alienated from his DEA brothers in group D-35 since being sent downstairs to S-11. He wanted to start a family of his own now.

  Gagne proposed to Kristen in the Hamptons after first receiving her father's permission. They would marry in the fall of 1998 and save up to buy a house in suburban Long Island. Gagne wanted children right away.

  At work, he set his mind to adapt, improvise, and overcome. He would make Ecstasy his intelligence specialty. If he shared his knowledge with the enforcement groups handling MDMA cases, maybe he could convince the bosses to let him go out on some of their operations. It's always easier to apologize than it is to get permission, Gagne thought. He'd just tag along until someone told him it couldn't be done.

  43 JACKIE SUAREZ

  ODED TUITO WAS ALSO feeling amorous. Tuito had left behind several courier girlfriends in Pittsburgh and he needed new mules. Steve Hager, who was promoted to courier recruiter, handpicked the new stable from his entourage of strippers and party girls.

  Hager had asked his dark-haired muse, Jackie Suarez, to go to Brussels for him to pick up Ecstasy on a few occasions. All she had to do was carry the pills back in her suitcase and she'd receive $10,000 plus travel expenses. Suarez always said no. It was too risky and she didn't really need the money when Hager was paying her bills. But by the summer of 1998, Suarez was starting to tire of Hager. His temper constantly flared over the smallest perceived slights, whether real or imagined. She felt like property. He belittled her in front of his friends. She put up with it because she was addicted to the glamour and ease of the life, and to cocaine, which Hager liberally supplied. But $10,000 could give her some independence. In July 1998, Suarez finally agreed to do the job.

  Hager sent Suarez to Tuito on a Delta/Sabena Airlines flight to Brussels after they spent a string of drunken, cocaine-shot nights together. She was dehydrated and exhausted, and her nasal passages felt like Swiss cheese. She took pills to sleep on the plane. When she arrived in Brussels, she got a room at the Ibis Hotel and called Hager to check in. She was peeved when he didn't answer. She called her mother and lied that she was spending Independence Day on the Jersey shore. Then she heard a knock at her door.

  Tuito was over six feet tall and about 220 pounds, with black hair and brown eyes. He spoke muddled English and introduced himself as “Daniel” (his brother's name). He told Suarez that she would be moving to a new hotel in the morning.

  “I'll have to check with Steve.”

  “Forget about Steve,” Tuito said, annoyed. “I'm the boss.”

  Suarez thought Tuito was rude. She began to have regrets about accepting the assignment. She spent the evening alone at the hotel bar, next to Belgian barflies and tourists who were transfixed in front of the TV set, cheering wildly as they watched the World Cup soccer finals.

  When Tuito came for her the next morning he had softened. He helped her with her bags and took her to lunch with his lieutenant, David Ben-Amara, whom he introduced as “Gingi.” Gingi was a thirty-four-year-old Israeli fugitive who oversaw Tuito's American and Israeli couriers. He should have been handling Suarez himself, but Tuito always wanted to meet the women Hager sent him.

  After a few glasses of wine, Suarez began to see a kindness in Tuito's eyes. They chatted about New York. He knew about her relationship with Hager, but she wasn't sure how or what he had been told. He also knew about her relationship with cocaine. He looked her in the eye and told her unequivocally that anything that “fucked with business” was unacceptable, which meant that doing cocaine on company time was not going to cut it. Alcohol and Ecstasy were fine—in fact, Tuito had a tremendous appetite for both—but he didn't want his girls to be cokeheads. Suarez agreed to meet Tuito later that night to sample some of the Ecstasy she was about to smuggle back to the States for him.

  When it was time for Suarez to return to New York, Tuito had a proposition: come back in ten days with a delivery of cash, he would make all the arrangements, and then he would take her to Nice for pleasure, no business.

  She said she would think about it.

  Back in the States, she made it safely through Customs at JFK, where a stranger was waiting for her. He took her bags and dropped her off at Hager's apartment.

  There was something about Tuito that moved Suarez. He was generous. He seemed a little vulnerable. He also had gunshot wounds and knife marks covering his legs and arms. Any other woman might have taken that as a sign to run. But Suarez was intrigued. She accepted Tuito's proposal. As instructed, she kept it a secret from Hager. Suarez was Tuito's courier now. She felt strong and independent and grew to resent Hager for having treated her so shabbily. She decided she didn't need him anymore.

  Hager, who was deeply stung by Suarez's sudden departure from his clique with no explanation, was too proud to act like he cared.

  Tuito had a dependable soldier in New York named Ronen “Tuff Tuff” Dayan, who sometimes coordinated shipments with Hager and Judy Ben Atar. Tuff Tuff was told to look after Suarez—check on her, take her out once in a while, and keep her away from cocaine. For her first assignment for Tuito, Suarez was sent to a man in Queens who gave her two suitcases filled with $250,000 cash hidden in false-bottom bags. She would carry the money to Belgium. Before she got on the plane she popped into the bathroom to do some blow. Just a quick pick-me-up.

  Suarez passed, with no snags, through airport security in Brussels. A driver was waiting on the other side. He took her straight to Tuito's apartment, where she was greeted by the Fat Man with kisses and bottles of wine. He cooked her dinner and then took her to Carré, a nightclub just outside the city, to meet his friends. Everyone took Ecstasy that night and Suarez got lost in the cacophony of techno music, streaming lights, and the swirl of different languages being spoken around her. When Suarez was with Tuito, people looked after her comfort and listened when she spoke. Tuito took her back home and they had sex for the first time. He was a giant, hairy teddy bear of a man, and not the most sensitive or skilled lover. But it wasn't his prowess in bed or looks that kept her around. He made her feel special.

  The next day they flew to Nice and took a room at the four-star Le Meridien, where they spent wine-drenched nights making love with a moonlit view of the Mediterranean Sea. They wandered up the coast, eating shrimp, drinking more wine, listening to jazz. They walked along a marina where Tuito shared his dream of buying a fishing boat one day, so he could spend more time on the tranquil sea. He also talked of having killed men—in self-defense, he said. He spoke of his love for his mother, his children, and his wife. He made jokes at his own expense about not being the best Jew. Tuito had a rapacious appetite for food, booze, drugs, and sex. He had trouble staying kosher and was regretful that at his son's bar mitzvah, he'd struggled through prayers he should have known. As far as Suarez could tell, he took care of his employees and he sent money home to his family in Israel. Suarez never suspected Tuito was the world's biggest Ecstasy trafficker. They spent twelve days together on the French Riviera, some of her best days.

  Before Suarez returned to the States, Tuito sat her down to talk business. He told her that all he knew was being a criminal. This was all he had to offer her. And then he asked her what she wanted—what part of his business she would like to stake her claim in. His trust in her cemented her loyalty. From then on, Suarez would handle New York with Tuff Tuff.

  44 “CLARE”

  BY AUGUST 1998, Gagne had been so instrumental in providing intelligence support for a crystal meth and Ecstasy case out of Long Island that he had convinced the enforcement group to let him do the undercover buy/bust of one of the targets—an Ecstasy dealer named “Clare.”

  Clare could have been any number of troubled defendants who stumbled into the drug trade and got lost. She was a stripper who got caught selling a handful of pills in a nightclub; she was addicted to coke, X, and gin; she had an absentee father and a mother whom she drove to chemotherapy appoint
ments each week.

  “Yeah, you guys got me. Go fuck yourself,” Clare greeted Gagne the first time he visited her in her holding cell.

  Gagne took his time with Clare.

  “Look, I know you're dealing with the Israelis and you're probably afraid of them,” he said. “But I also know that your mother's very sick.”

  She gave Gagne a cold stare and said nothing.

  “This is your second offense. I'm not going to ask you to cooperate. I'm not going to tell you what to do. Because I think you need time to think about it for yourself.”

  Five minutes after Gagne left, he got a phone call to come back. Clare was asking for him.

  “All right,” she said. “I'll talk to you.”

  Gagne had been burned by confidential informants enough times to know whom to trust and whom to walk away from. Dealing with sources was a constant dance of control: be light; casually nod in agreement and pretend to know more than you do, because it keeps the source talking; don't lie, because if they catch you in a lie, everything else that comes out of your mouth will be met with suspicion.

  Gagne built trust with sources by never making promises he couldn't keep. And for some, keeping a promise of confidentiality was a matter of life and death.

  It took months for Clare to begin to divulge small crumbs about the Ecstasy networks in New York and Holland. The first piece she gave Gagne was a Manhattan dealer named Steve Hager—it was the first time Gagne had heard his full name.

  Hager recruited dancers from Scores, Ten, and VIP to mule pills, Clare said. The money was good: $10,000 per trip plus travel expenses.

  Gagne knew from Clare's travel records that she had flown to Belgium at least once, likely to mule pills for Hager, but Clare denied it. She claimed she could never mule pills because she had white-knuckle panic attacks on airplanes and that didn't bode well for someone aiming to deflect attention. Clare said she preferred to sell pills for extra cash and had purchased several thousand hits of X from Hager in the past year.

  Gagne had a problem. Clare gave him the first real link he had ever encountered to the Israeli networks, and she was willing to set up undercover buys—but Gagne was S-11 and Intel agents couldn't open cases. He'd have to convince a street agent to do it, and then insinuate himself into the operations.

  Since Clare's arrest was out of Long Island, Gagne asked special agent Roger Bach of the Long Island Division Office, or LIDO, to start a file on Steve Hager. Bach would be the official case agent, but Gagne would do as much legwork as he could get away with.

  For Clare's first undercover buy with Hager, she wore a recorder on her body. Gagne later listened to his voice on the tape: Hager had a deep, hurried accent, a slight lisp. His pills tested positive for MDMA. Clare arranged for a second buy/walk of a thousand pills for $8,000. It was a low-ball purchase in Hager's world, but just squeezing that kind of cash out of DEA was a challenge for Gagne. His solution was to share the case with the Office of the Special Narcotics Prosecutors, an agency exclusively dedicated to the investigation and prosecution of narcotics felonies in the five boroughs. For Gagne, it meant Hager's case would be handled in state, not federal, courts—and he would lose some control. In return, OSNP would chip in a major portion of the buy money.

  On October 22, Clare geared up for the final buy/bust. The agents searched Clare's black Mitsubishi 3000 GT for drugs, issued her a KEL transmitter, and sent her to 33rd and Third Avenue, where Hager had asked her to meet him. Special agent Robert Yoos watched across the street from a black undercover Nissan 300ZX. A few minutes after five, the surveillance team saw Hager exiting his building on East 34th Street carrying a small shopping bag.

  “He's on the corner,” Yoos called on the radio once Hager was in sight of the staging area. “Okay, he's walking across the street.”

  But something wasn't right. Hager passed Clare's car.

  “Where is he going?” Gagne said. The agents were burning up the radio: “Did he see us?”

  “He's walking right toward me!” Yoos said. “I'm going off air!”

  Yoos dropped his handheld radio just as Hager opened the passenger-side door of the Nissan and got into the car. The other agents held their breath, waiting for a signal to move.

  “You're not Clare!” Hager said.

  “Uh, no.”

  “Sorry, sorry.” Hager dialed Clare's cell phone as he scrambled out of the car. “Where are you? Oh, I see you. Okay, I'm coming.”

  When Hager was out of earshot Yoos picked up the radio.

  “You're not going to believe this,” he told his team. “He got in the wrong car.”

  Clare kissed Hager hello, they laughed about his absentminded mix-up with her car, and then she looked in the shopping bag: large zip-top bags swollen full of small white pills.

  “Okay,” she said. “I just need to get the money from the trunk.”

  She stepped out and popped open the trunk—the prearranged arrest signal—and the agents circled.

  Hager stayed calm as he was read his rights and Agent Bach took custody of his shopping bag. Inside were three thousand pills stamped with a “Tweety Bird” logo. In Hager's front-right pants pocket was $8,238. Two of the $100 bills matched the serial numbers of the buy money Clare had paid him a week earlier, further implicating Hager. The agents asked him to sign a release to search his apartment and Hager began to sweat and shake. He seemed to be stalling. He claimed to be diabetic, which was true. Hager was eight days shy of his thirty-eighth birthday and in the worst shape of his life, a bloated 240 pounds from excessive indulgence in cocaine, Ecstasy, alcohol, rich foods, and a lifestyle that was slowly killing him. He eventually handed over the keys to apartment 19G. Inside, Gagne and Yoos found another four thousand pills in a safe. On the living room coffee table was a cocaine grinder and a suitcase filled with $14,700 in $100 bills. Gagne seized Hager's address books, papers with scribbled numbers, his passport, and several photographs. But what he had missed was a quarter of a million Ecstasy pills that had been whisked away minutes earlier by Oded Tuito's New York soldier Ronen “Tuff Tuff” Dayan. Hager had wasted just enough time for Tuff Tuff to notice he had been gone too long. Sensing something was amiss, Tuff Tuff grabbed the pills and took off.

  Hager was charged with sale and possession of MDMA. He spent a few days in jail and was released on bond. He turned to his younger brother, Isaac, for help, while begging Isaac not to tell their parents. Their father had been a rabbi in Israel, their mother a lawyer—it would be too shameful. He had managed to keep his drug business a secret from them for this long; his arrest was just one more little secret to add to the charade.

  Hager hired a top attorney and let his case drag through the state court system for as long as possible. Gagne kept close tabs on him, studying his address book, his phone records, and his movements. Hager knew he was being watched and it put a crimp in his business. But he continued to spend his money on copious amounts of cocaine and girls. He couldn't resist the girls.

  Clare moved back home to be closer to her sick mother. She thought about going back to school. She quit the strip club, but her girlfriends still called. She hated it when they bragged about being wined and dined in Europe: champagne, drugs, and luxury hotels. She knew that wasn't always the case. Sometimes a girl was left to wait in a cheap, dirty room for two days without a word. Sometimes the dealers took her bags, dumped her clothes, and made her change hotel rooms in the middle of the night. Sometimes she was treated like an actual mule instead of a woman.

  Clare gave Gagne the next piece of information, and it was more than a crumb: the big guy, his name was Tuito. She said his lieutenants used a travel agent in midtown to buy the girls’ tickets and that the suitcases all the mules carried had Velcro strips along the inside seams at the bottom of the bag. Just lift the strip and there was a hidden compartment underneath for the pills.

  In fact, the false-bottom design had been around for years, originally created for Antwerp's diamond dealers. The Ecstasy traffic
kers simply adapted its use from diamonds to pills.

  45 “NOBODY EVEN KNEW WHERE

  ECSTASY WAS COMING FROM”

  DEA TURNED TWENTY-FIVE in 1998, and like any entity reaching the quarter-century mark, it was taking stock. Up until then, the majority of DEA's time and cash had been earmarked for cocaine and heroin interdiction. But Ecstasy trafficking had reached unprecedented levels. Fewer than 200 tablets were mixed in among the drugs DEA seized nationwide in 1993. By 1997, more than 68,000 pills had been confiscated by DEA agents; U.S. customs agents reported an additional 370,000 pills seized at borders, seaports, and airports.

  Drug trafficking was also changing, thanks to the streamlined efficiency of globalization. The same developing technologies that had fomented legitimate international commerce were also creating paths to wealth for illicit commerce. Traffickers could be in four corners of the globe, in constant contact through cell phones and e-mail, utilizing legitimate shipping and transport companies, and coordinating millions of dollars in drug loads around the world. In Europe, cooperation among EU countries was a boon for traffickers. The Schen-gen Agreement—a plan that allowed free movement between EU countries—meant that drugs could be driven from the Netherlands to Belgium and Paris without a single border stop. DEA headquarters had decided it was time to take a closer look at Europe.

  A DEA intelligence bulletin on Ecstasy trafficking in Western Europe had noted a sharp rise in MDMA demand in 1997 among fifteen-to twenty-five-year-olds. Bad pills were flooding the market to fill the gap between supply and demand. In Scotland, police had seized half a million tablets that were really dog-worming pills. British police found purported Ecstasy made of heroin and horse steroids. Germany reported fifteen deaths attributed to Ecstasy use.

  Seizures and arrests were on the rise in Belgium, France, Ireland, Italy, Spain, Austria, and Croatia. Interpol estimated that 396 million Ecstasy tablets had been seized in Europe in 1995, with the Netherlands as the top source country. By the end of 1998, the United States was the top importer of Dutch pills.