Chemical Cowboys

by Lisa Sweetingham

  Around the same time, four DEA agents stationed in different parts of the world found themselves at similar junctures in their careers. Each was in a new city with a new assignment and looking for ways to distinguish himself. Gagne would soon come to know these men—Ecstasy would be their common denominator.

  In late 1997, special agent James Chris Kabel was sent to Special Operations Division in Virginia, a purse-controlling division of DEA. SOD was suits-and-ties territory, but Kabel was a rugged young agent who had spent six years in the jungles of Thailand, eluding armed insurgents and dismantling heroin labs as part of Operation Tiger Trap.

  When Kabel got to SOD, they dumped a pile of teletypes on his desk and said, “Here ya go, you've got Flashback.”

  Operation Flashback was a special enforcement program begun in July 1997 to target the domestic distribution of LSD and hallucinogens, and later MDMA. It was an umbrella program that supported field division investigations, so street agents interested in LSD or MDMA could raise the priority of their smaller cases amid the sea of heroin and cocaine cases that dominated most field divisions’ resources.

  As the keeper of Flashback, Kabel had access to GESCAN, DEA's automated message handling system. Every day he would type in “MDMA” and “Ecstasy” and the system would spit back hits from every international DEA teletype. Kabel was getting an unprecedented one hundred teletypes a day. It seemed that none of the field divisions were actively sharing Ecstasy intel.

  “At that time, nobody even knew where Ecstasy was coming from,” Kabel says. “From the DEA perspective it's a club drug, kiddie dope. But we were starting to see common names, Israelis importing Ecstasy from Europe. We were tracing phone tolls back to the same locations—Miami, Los Angeles, New York, Holland, Belgium, and Germany.”

  Officers from the Bundeskriminalamt, German federal police, or BKA, were visiting the office one day on a separate matter and happened to mention to Kabel that they were studying MDMA distribution as well, and would he like to see their data?

  “They break out this flowchart and it's the mirror image of our flowchart—it's the same guys. They had the exact same assessment that we had,” Kabel says. “It was an affirmation for us that we were on the right track.”

  Special agent Stephen Luzinski became DEA's country attaché in Brussels in October 1998. The Brussels office is significant today because of its proximity to the offices of the European Commission, the executive branch of the European Union. But when Luzinski came on in 1998, it was a struggle to justify the office's expensive existence—nestled among crumbling Old World buildings, chocolatiers, and antique shops—especially when foreign operations were focused on heroin-and cocaine-producing countries.

  Luzinski dug into the Brussels files looking for interesting cocaine cases—after all, Antwerp had one of the biggest ports in Europe. To his surprise, he found memo after memo from local drug cops calling about Ecstasy. The information had gone nowhere.

  “We were literally at ground zero in terms of Belgium being a major producer and major transshipment point,” Luzinski says. “I started finding that our Belgian counterparts had tremendous intelligence into Ecstasy operations but no one was bridging the gap and getting that information into our U.S. offices.”

  Next door, in the Netherlands, Special Agent Don Rospond arrived in November 1998 as an assistant country attaché to The Hague.

  “We estimated that 80 percent of the drug was produced in Holland and that America was the primary consumer,” Rospond says. “It really exploded around the time we got here.”

  By then the Dutch authorities were painfully aware of their Ecstasy problem.

  “They were starting to realize they were the source country for this stuff and they really didn't want that label,” Rospond says.

  And while Gagne was just starting to investigate Tuito's New York network, he had no idea that another agent had spent the last year digging up evidence on Tuito's Pittsburgh crew.

  When police arrested Tuito's partners in the warehouse raid of October 1997, DEA picked up the case for federal prosecution and rookie DEA Special Agent Gregg Drews took the lead. Drews figured he had a marijuana and cocaine ring on his hands, but after several months of debriefing the suspects, all anyone talked about was Oded Tuito and Ecstasy. Drews learned everything he could about both. He clipped newspaper articles, kept meticulous case notes, and studied intelligence flowcharts that depicted Western Union transfers to Tuito's networks in Israel and Los Angeles.

  Just as Tuito had feared, one of his former lieutenants in Pittsburgh eventually became a snitch in order to save his own skin. In November 1998, the guy was back in touch with Tuito and secretly taping their phone calls to hand over to Drews and his partners.

  “I want you to find someone to buy Vertigo,” Tuito was overheard ordering the informant.

  “How much do you want to sell it for? A million?” the CI asked.

  “Too much. A half million is good.”

  Before they hung up, Tuito told the CI to go and “put a mark” on the face of a dealer in Pittsburgh who owed Tuito money, and to please pass along his new pager number to a stripper in Pittsburgh named Angel. And while he was at it, could he also “find a bitch” to send to him in Belgium—”not for work, for vacation.”

  Agent Drews had big plans. He wanted to bring an undercover into the relationship and he imagined his undercover making buys in Pittsburgh, wending his way into Tuito's network, flying to Belgium to meet the top soldiers, and eventually bringing down the entire ring. Even if Drews could pull it off, it would be a time-consuming and expensive operation: travel to Europe, $40,000 drug buys, wiretaps. He wasn't going to get that kind of support from his bosses just to go after kiddie dope. But if he could bring agents from around the country together to share intel, maybe it would drum up more resources and support for the Tuito case.

  Drews called Chris Kabel at Special Ops, who was still reviewing international teletypes on Ecstasy intel. Kabel agreed: Ecstasy was big, and they needed to host a strategy conference and coordinate their efforts on this thing.

  Drews was excited, but to get more money for his case, he had to share, and sharing meant he might lose his case. Drugs enter the United States primarily through El Paso, Miami, L.A., New York—which is why those DEA field divisions get the most press coverage and target the biggest drug lords. Drews didn't want to see one of the big cities—where the majority of Tuito's pills were landing—steal the Fat Man out from under him.

  The Fat Man was like a romantic mystery to Drews. When he first got ahold of Tuito's local cell phone number, he dialed it a few times and it always went straight to voice mail. After that, he must have called a hundred times just to listen to Tuito's muddy hard-bitten English on the outgoing message. It was just seven words: “I'm the boss. Don't fuck with me.” Beep.

  46 TWEETY

  IN NEW YORK, Gagne was punching up names and numbers from Hager's phone records and address book looking for connections. He ran an AutoTrack check on Hager's home address and an interesting lead came up: a guy named Sean Erez had once used Hager's address to apply for a New York driver's license. Clare remembered Erez. Said he used to sell pills in the clubs, but last she heard he had been arrested by NYPD and she hadn't seen him since. Police confirmed that Erez and his girlfriend, Diana Reicherter, were picked up in July with a hundred tabs of X. Charges against his girlfriend were dismissed. Erez was charged with intent to sell, reckless endangerment, and resisting arrest, but he copped a plea deal, got time served, and had been released from jail on October 8.

  Another lead: Hager's phone records showed that he had been constantly dialing the number listed to a Jackie Suarez at 814 Tenth Avenue for months, and then nothing since August. Clare said she didn't know any strippers named Jackie. Gagne did a DMV lookup and found a Jacqueline Suarez in New York. She was pretty, with dark eyes and hardly any makeup.

  As Gagne sought out the New York links, he noticed an increase in Ecstasy teletypes from Eu
rope. The French police seemed to be knocking off couriers left and right.

  On November 17, 1998, a fax came from the DC Interpol office: France was reporting the October seizure of 36,330 Ecstasy tablets at the Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris from a thirty-year-old Israeli from Haifa who was on his way to JFK. The Tweety pills—hidden in two false-bottom duffel bags—matched the type of pills seized from a female courier in September out of Zaventem airport in Brussels. A third courier, a New Yorker named Christina Ridgeway, would be arrested in November attempting to board an American Airlines flight from Paris to Miami.

  Ridgeway was interrogated in a French prison for three days. The twenty-seven-year-old singer/model said she danced for extra cash at private parties when she was broke, which was often. At the time of her arrest she had just $60 to her name. A stripper named Jennifer had recruited her to mule pills for Israeli dealers, saying it was an easy $10,000. Ridgeway flew to Brussels, checked into room 336 of the Ibis Hotel, and was met by three Israelis who called themselves “Terry,” “Gingi,” and “Sam.” They partied that night with other women she had never met but suspected were also mules. Some of them took Ecstasy with the dealers.

  On Sunday morning, Gingi called Ridgeway's room and told her to step into the lobby. At the elevator, he handed her two soft travel bags and then left. Alone in her room, she peeked into the bags but saw nothing. Terry called next and instructed her to go outside, where he was waiting in a small black European car. He handed her a train ticket to France and told her to check in at the Select Hotel in Paris. When she arrived, another Israeli man took her to the airport and left. Suspicious Customs agents took it from there. Ridgeway never made her flight.

  “I regret having been so naive as to allow myself to be drawn into that business,” Ridgeway told her questioners through tears.

  The police showed her a photo spread.

  “That's the one I call Sam,” she said, pointing out Oded Tuito. “I recognize his smirk.”

  Gagne studied the arrest details. Ridgeway was carrying almost thirty-four thousand Ecstasy pills in her bags, all of them stamped with the Tweety Bird logo.

  It clicked. Tweety—Tuito.

  He was building his signature brand.

  Operation Snowcap made close friends of DEA agents Frank Fernandez, Jr., Jay Seale, Robert Gagne, Linda Miller, and Meredith Thompson. A plane crash in Peru shortly after this photo was taken would devastate the team and forever alter Gagne's personal mission in the drug war.

  Robert Gagne with his D-35 brothers Jay Flaherty and Matthew Germanowski

  Michel Elbaz

  (Courtesy DEA)

  Israel “Ghel” Hazut

  (Courtesy DEA)

  Michael Alig, left, at an East Village club in 1989, the same year Peter Gatien hired the party promoter to revitalize his club empire (© Catherine McGann I www.catberinemcgann.com)

  Alig, center, with his mother, Elke, at his twenty-third birthday party in 1989 (© Catherine McGann /www.catherinemcgann.com)

  Peter Gatien at Club USA in 1993, with DJ Merritt and Marc Berkley (© Catherine McGann /www.catherine mcgann.com)

  After being rejected at the velvet ropes, Germanowski and Gagne went undercover in make-up and thrift store finds, hoping to pass as gay ravers.

  Gagne and his partners arrested Alig in November 1996. The Club Kid gave the agents insider information about drugs in the nightclubs—and a chilling murder confession. (Courtesy DEA)

  Former party promoter Michael Caruso told jurors how he'd lured thousands of patrons to Limelight by giving out free cups of Ecstasy-laced punch. (Courtesy DEA)

  Oded Tuito and his wife, Aliza, in an undated photo from DEA case files. (Courtesy DEA)

  By late 1998, Oded Tuito was believed to be responsible for 80 percent of the Ecstasy supply in the United States. His signature “Tweety” pills were known for their high MDMA content. (Courtesy DEA)

  Seizures of MDMA in Belgium and Netherlands increased 925 percent from 1998 to 1999. The pills were often produced in secret makeshift labs like this one discovered by Dutch police.

  Sean Erez broke ranks with Tuito and started his own Ecstasy ring in Amsterdam, charming young ultra-Orthodox Jews into being his mules. Erez and girlfriend Diana Reicherter enjoyed a lavish lifestyle until Dutch police started tapping their phones. (Courtesy DEA)

  Agents expected to find pills or cash in an SUV abandoned in Bel Air in December 1999. Instead, they discovered the battered body of an alleged Ecstasy dealer and hitman. (Courtesy LAPD Robbery-Homicide Division)

  In July 2000, Customs agents at LAX inspected sixteen boxes marked “clothing” off a commercial airliner. They found 2.1 million tablets worth $41 million—the largest seizure to date. (AP Photo/ Nick Ut)

  Mob turncoat and Witness Protection dropout Salvatore “Sammy the Bull” Gravano was busted in February 2000 for heading a family-run Ecstasy ring in Arizona. Gravano got his pills from the Israeli distributors. (AP Photo/Michael Ging, POOL)

  By 2000, Ecstasy use had skyrocketed in New York, Los Angeles, and South Florida—aka “The Party Triangle.” U.S. Customs Commissioner Raymond Kelly addressed the MDMA problem at a Capitol Hill hearing in July before the Senate Caucus on International Narcotics Control. (Courtesy U.S. Customs and Border Protection)

  By 2001, some eighteen members of Sean Erez's ring had pleaded guilty to drug conspiracy charges. It was the largest takedown in New York State to date. (Courtesy DEA)

  AUSA Linda Lacewell made a name for herself prosecuting the Ecstasy dealers and was later tapped to join the executive staff of New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo as counsel for economic and social justice.

  In 2001, Gadi Eshed and his INP colleagues shared secret information with DEA at an Ecstasy conference in Tel Aviv, which would set an aggressive new course of cooperative investigations into the dealers.

  INP Commander Yosef Sedbon and Eshed were privately troubled by the rising tide of public sympathy and fascination for their number one target and suspected mob boss Ze'ev Rosenstein.

  Oded “the Fat Man” Tuito was placed on the U.S. President's Drug Kingpin List in 2002. Prosecutors never found the millions in drug money he was suspected to have hid away for his family. (Courtesy DEA)

  Israeli police believed Ze'ev “the Wolf” Rosenstein was involved in murder, extortion, gambling, and prostitution rackets. In the end, it was the Ecstasy charges brought by the Americans that led to his arrest in November 2004. (AP Photo/Brennan Linsley)

  In 2006, INP handed Rosenstein over to U.S. marshals at the tarmac of Ben-Gurion airport. He was the first Israeli crime boss to be extradited to the U.S. (Courtesy DEA)

  Gadi Eshed, John McKenna, and Avi Noy-man were among the recipients honored by the Department of Justice in August 2007 with a Best International Coordination Award for their work on the Rosenstein case. (Courtesy DEA)

  47 “YOU CAN'T MAKE THAT KIND

  OF MONEY ON WALL STREET”

  DEA'S FIRST INTERNATIONAL ECSTASY strategy conference was held in secret in an austere hotel conference room in Philadelphia on a cold December morning in 1998. Chris Kabel, section chief of Special Operations Division and his boss, Ken Dinino, section chief of Domestic Operations West, co-hosted the conference with the Philadelphia SAC and case agents Drews and his partner, Andrew Petyak.

  After a round of introductions of top brass, Gregg Drews took the podium with a PowerPoint presentation describing MDMA, its effects, street names, and prices.

  Bob Gagne looked around the room. The tables were arranged in a giant square and he counted about forty people—DEA agents, Customs officials, and law enforcement from Boston, Los Angeles, Miami, and Pittsburgh, and foreign drug officers and attachés from Belgium, France, Germany, and Israel. Everyone wore sports jackets and ties. Gagne looked down at his Top-Siders, khakis, and button-down shirt. A teletype had been sent out a month in advance inviting any case agents with Ecstasy investigations to participate—but Gagne, being an Intel agent, was the last to hear a
bout it. He had thrown a duffel bag in his car and driven to Philly the night before. He may have been the driving force behind New York's nascent MDMA investigations, with more Ecstasy experience than any DEA agent in that room. But on paper, he wasn't really anybody anymore.

  Drews began to outline Oded Tuito's cocaine, marijuana, and Ecstasy activity. He described their attempts—so far unsuccessful—to make direct contact with Tuito through a former lieutenant, their CI snitch.

  But the best intelligence anyone had on Tuito at that time wasn't from Drews's CI, it was from a girl named Ursula Koppenheffer. She was intelligent and had a keen recollection of details. The petite, twenty-five-year-old brunette met Tuito on July 4, 1997, during a boat ride with her Israeli boyfriend, one of Tuito's main buyers. She dumped the boyfriend and started moving Ecstasy, marijuana, and cash for the Oded Tuito organization. Tuito paid her bills, bought her clothes, and furnished her apartment. She believed she was his number one girlfriend. She agreed to marry him to help secure a green card and was even converting to Judaism to be closer to the Fat Man.

  Among the Israeli dealers it was known that there were mules one might take a special interest in and maybe even take care of. But a woman you loved—a girlfriend, a wife—you just didn't bring them into the business. That would be putting them in potential danger.