Chemical Cowboys

by Lisa Sweetingham

  When Tuito fled the country, Koppenheffer made two trips to Brussels. And then she got arrested by Miami Customs in April 1998 with forty thousand hits of X in her suitcase. She was left to fend for herself in jail, and eventually the veil of her misguided emotions lifted.

  When Koppenheffer decided to talk the floodgates opened. She identified Tuito's associates in Florida, Pittsburgh, California, and New York. She even identified the guy who had provided the crew with false driver's licenses. She knew how much Tuito paid for pills ($1 to $2) and how much he sold them for ($7 to $13). She knew his code words for Ecstasy (“bonbon” or “candy”) and cash (“paper” or “paperwork”). She described bringing Tuito $140,000 in drug money to Belgium and watching him pay his soldiers in $10,000 stacks of cash. She believed he dealt directly with a lab somewhere between Brussels and Amsterdam because it would only take him a few hours to leave and return with pills.

  Agents Mike Mancuso and Edward Alvey of Fort Lauderdale had regular jailhouse debriefings with Koppenheffer and were keeping tabs on Tuito's Florida lieutenants: Meir Ben-David and Yosef Levi. According to their sources, Ben-David was the brains behind the Florida post—a smart businessman who rarely partied, avoided socializing with the strippers, and wisely invested Tuito's money in safe houses and real estate. Surveilling the men was difficult, because they were always watching their backs, dropping phones, firing couriers. The men started using aliases as a rule: Ben-David was Benny or Michael Anton; Levi was Khubi; Tuito was Daniel or Simon.

  When the conference presentations wrapped up, discussion was opened to the floor and one by one the drug cops went around the table, sharing their case information and common links to Oded Tuito. The Ecstasy problem was larger and more entrenched than any of the American agents had realized before that day. And business wasn't just flourishing, it was evolving.

  The Dutch had formed a National Unit Synthetic Drugs (USD) in 1997 specifically to coordinate MDMA cases with domestic and foreign law enforcement. USD had discovered twenty-eight labs in 1998 and the traffickers were starting to separate responsibilities. The acquisition of precursor chemicals, powder production, tabletting, distribution, and disposal of chemical waste was all being handled by different groups, often in different locations, to reduce the risk of discovery and lost profits. And profits were staggering. One chalky white pill could be made for less than five cents. A good-sized lab could produce fifty thousand tablets a week. One five-cent pill fetched $25 to $50 in American nightclubs. That's as high as $2.5 million per week from as little as $2,500 worth of product—a 1,000 percent profit. Of course, everybody got a cut along the way. Since moving his base to Europe, Tuito had begun to send millions of pills to the States, pushing mules through Zaventem, Schiphol, and Charles de Gaulle airports like revolving doors.

  With so much product moving, Tuito took careful note of the tastes of his American buyers. He had already seen how pills stamped with Mercedes and Louis Vuitton logos were marketed to hip city kids, or peace signs and doves for disaffected suburbanites. Tuito wanted his brands to stand for quality. His Tweety and Star of David pills were known for delivering a strong and long MDMA high, which is why copycats were producing knockoffs with cheap fillers—making it impossible for law enforcement to know if all the Tweetys seized were from the Fat Man's organization. German and Dutch authorities were in the process of perfecting ballistics-style pill analysis that studied tool markings on the tablets to match them back to specific machines and pill labs, to help pin drug loads to specific trafficking groups.

  Belgian and Dutch drug cops had also become increasingly concerned about the dump sites associated with pill production, which were a serious environmental hazard. One kilo of Ecstasy could generate thirty kilos of toxic waste—chemicals, filters, powders. The waste runners in the South of Netherlands would drive two hours from the lab to the northern region of Belgium and dump jerry cans filled with toxic sludge out in the countryside. Eventually, the runners would get lazy and dump closer to base, so the Dutch USD started tracking dump patterns on a map. Like a game of hot-cold, over time the waste sites brought them closer to hidden labs.

  As the strategy conference began to wind down, Special Ops piped up: Well, we've heard from just about everyone. What does New York have to say?

  Gagne had ridden out a lot of criticism over the years for going after the “kiddie dope.” He hadn't come armed with a formal presentation or visual aids. He had a mint and a pad of hotel paper in front of him. It was clear that everybody in the room, Gagne included, wanted Oded Tuito. But the Gatien case had taught Gagne that MDMA wasn't solely the province of organized crime. They were dealing with the nascent stages of a free-market drug trade. It was unlike anything they had ever seen with cocaine and heroin, where competing drug lords viciously monopolized the raw product. With Ecstasy, even day traders and college students were cashing in.

  “Look, let's talk about Tuito, let's talk about the common links. But let's keep in mind it's not about Tuito, it's about Ecstasy,” Gagne said. “You can go to a club, sell three hundred pills, and make yourself ten grand a night. You can't make that kind of money on Wall Street.

  “Unlike heroin and cocaine, there are no barriers to the Ecstasy business. Ecstasy crosses all social and economic barriers, regardless of race, creed, color, or religion,” Gagne went on. “Anybody who goes to Bogotá, gets off a plane, and asks where they can buy some cocaine would be kidnapped, held for ransom, and eventually killed. With Ecstasy, the market's wide open. Hell, anyone in this room can fly to Amsterdam and in fifteen minutes and five thousand dollars in your pocket, you can score ten thousand pills. That's why Ecstasy is a serious, growing problem.”

  Gagne was on a roll, feeling confident. He went out on a limb: “And that's why Sean Erez is on his way to Europe right now looking to become the next Oded Tuito.”

  48 SEAN EREZ

  ABOUT A MONTH BEFORE the Ecstasy conference, Gagne had pulled together all the Dutch calls from Steve Hager's phone records and dialed up the American Embassy in The Hague to see if anyone at DEA could investigate the numbers, see what names might come up. Gagne knew the Netherlands was ground zero for MDMA production—maybe Tuito was in the Netherlands? Assistant country attaché Don Rospond said he'd ask the Dutch police to check it out. A few days before the Philly conference, Rospond had called Gagne back with a surprising lead—and it wasn't Tuito.

  One of the numbers was traced back to the Okura Hotel in Amsterdam, where Sean Erez had been checked into room 1703 with a female guest from November 21 to 28. He'd made several phone calls to the States, France, and Belgium while he was there. The hotel staff was under the distinct impression that Erez and his female companion were making plans to permanently relocate to Amsterdam in the near future.

  Sean Erez was a businessman. In his late teens, he owned an ice cream parlor in Tel Aviv. At twenty-one, he had a frozen yogurt company in Montreal. By twenty-five, he was co-owner of SoHo Jeans, running three 500-square-foot retail stores in Manhattan. At twenty-eight, Erez dumped the jeans business for the better profit margins of the Ecstasy business.

  Erez first met Steve Hager at his ice cream shop in Tel Aviv. They reconnected again in the 1990s at Scores strip club when Hager's Ecstasy business was booming from the infusion of Tuito's pills. Hager recruited Erez to do grunt work—counting pills, picking up couriers—for Tuito's network. Erez eventually met Tuito and Koki while partying with the crew in Miami.

  Erez was six foot one, with meaty arms and legs, thick brown shoulder-length hair, and sometimes a goatee. He had dual Canadian and Israeli citizenship and a raspy New York accent. Even when he was speaking in Hebrew, it was a slangy stream of “dude,” “bro,” and “how ya doin’, baby?”

  Everybody said Erez was ambitious. And greedy. All he had to do was look at Tuito's life—homes in Israel and Europe, respected and feared by his soldiers—to realize that selling pills retail was chump change. The closer he could get to the source of supply, the more money
in his pocket.

  While DEA was in Philly trading Ecstasy secrets, twenty-eight-year-old Erez was lining up Dutch pill brokers in the Netherlands. He was calling buyers in the States—like Steve Hager—who could receive and sell his pills. His twenty-year-old girlfriend, Diana Reich -erter, packed up the contents of her Franklin Square apartment and Erez's First Avenue pad, dropped it into a $160-a-month Moishe's Mini-Storage container, and then joined Erez in Amsterdam. Erez rented a spacious apartment at 528 Herengracht, a canal house on the ring, surrounded by seventeenth-and eighteenth-century ornate gabled mansions with tilted facades. They were close to the flower markets and antique shops, a stumble from the red-light district and casinos.

  He was settled in and his new business venture was ready to roll. All that was left was recruiting the couriers. And for this, Erez had a special plan.

  49 “WHO'S IN CHARGE?”

  SPECIAL OPS WAS INUNDATED with Ecstasy intel after the Philly strategy meeting. In New York alone, thirty new cases involving Ecstasy were being tracked. Operation Flashback spun off into Op Rave, focused solely on MDMA trafficking.

  DEA soon determined that about 90 percent of the Ecstasy smuggled into the United States was being commanded by a loose-knit network of Israeli criminals, and their distribution chain defied the traditional hierarchy. It was a system that mystified the top brass.

  In every major drug trafficking organization until then, agents could rely on a predictable power structure: there was the top guy, and below him were his lieutenants and soldiers. Everybody had a position, everybody had a role, and everyone knew his place in the organization. But Ecstasy wasn't like that. There was so much demand for Ecstasy that the Israeli dealers could buy, sell, and partner up with one another and their competitors without having to battle over territories.

  The old-school DEA agents had gotten so used to looking at pyramid charts that when Gagne would pull out something that was circular, they didn't get it. “Wait—who's in charge?” they'd always ask. Oded Tuito used fear and threats to enforce a pyramid style in his own organization. Loyalty was important to him. But there was so much Ecstasy to go around that he didn't need to kill a guy to make his point: he'd just rip him off, steal his drugs, and have him beaten good.

  By January 1999, Tuito was living in France and building a formidable presence in the United States. Gagne's best lead on Tuito so far was Jackie Suarez. Her international travel records revealed at least nine trips since July 1998, entering the States from Brussels, Nice, and Paris. Gagne subpoenaed her phone records, which provided the probable cause to obtain a pen register. Pen registers, like wiretaps, are secured through court orders but the legal standard is much lower because it reveals only a list of numbers dialed from the target's phone. It's a way to study links. For instance, Suarez had a high volume of calls to Miami, so Gagne put in an official request for Miami DEA to cross-reference those numbers with their cases to find potential criminal associates.

  Gagne discovered Suarez was using three different calling cards on her landline and cell phone connecting her with Tuito in France and Germany and with Ben-David in Florida. He wanted to do a wire on Suarez, but he kept tripping over Pittsburgh agent Gregg Drews.

  Drews had brought in an undercover narcotics agent from the Pittsburgh Bureau of Narcotics Investigation to try to infiltrate Tuito's network. When the BNI agent left messages on Tuito's cell phone, hoping to start a buying relationship, Tuito had Suarez return the calls.

  Suarez spoke warmly to the new potential Pittsburgh client the first time she dialed him. She explained that “the big guy” asked her to call. She gave the narc her cell phone number and told him to call her if he was traveling to Manhattan.

  Pittsburgh DEA was hot to get Suarez to travel to Philly to sell them Tuito's pills, but Tuito told Suarez not to go—the new client should come to her. That was no good for Drews. It was a venue problem: they couldn't press charges in Pittsburgh if she sold them pills in New York.

  Gagne knew that Pittsburgh was trying to lure Suarez and it pissed him off. Suarez was a New York dealer, handling Tuito's New York business, and Gagne was already investigating her. His bosses proposed a compromise to Pittsburgh: New York would apply for a T-III wiretap on Suarez's phone and Drews could come to Manhattan to be the affiant on the wire.

  But Drews wasn't interested in sitting in a wire room for thirty days and sharing the evidence, only to let New York run with his case.

  Pretty soon, Suarez stopped returning the narc's calls. Drews took a gamble and got an intermediary to ask for her home number from Gagne.

  When Suarez picked up her phone that day and heard the pushy Pittsburgh “client” on the line she panicked: how had he gotten her home number? She quickly hung up. She was on to them. And that meant she was going to start watching herself, talking less on the phone, taking more care in how she conducted business. Gagne was furious, but he had no game. DEA was made up of quarterbacks who all wanted the ball, and not so they could go three and out—they wanted to go all the way, to win. Gagne felt like the guy on the sidelines who kept the stats—nobody cared about stats unless they needed to prove a point or support a theory.

  Gagne tried to come up with another play, another way to get to Jackie Suarez. But he was feeling ineffective and increasingly distracted by reminders of his past failures: Peter Gatien was in the news again.

  50 CHEMICAL COWBOYS

  IN A SURPRISING TURN, Peter Gatien had pleaded guilty on January 8, 1999, to tax evasion charges. Adding to his troubles, the State Liquor Authority was threatening to take away his liquor license. On January 12, Village Voice reporter Bill Bastone wrote a scathing article about Gatien's continuing claims that he knew nothing of the drug dealing in his clubs, that he was the victim of a government vendetta, persecuted by dishonest prosecutors and DEA agents. The reporter suggested liquor officials take a peek at Steve Lewis's suppressed statements to the feds about document shredding, hush money, house dealers, and a crooked cop on Gatien's payroll.

  “Three years and one acquittal later,” Bastone wrote, “and Gatien still desperately needs everyone to believe that he was, in fact, operating in the dark.”

  A smile had crossed Gagne's face when he read that article. But then there was only bleak news from clubland.

  On January 23, a waifish teen named Jimmy Lyons celebrated his eighteenth birthday at Tunnel by taking Ecstasy with ketamine, a common club-drug cocktail. A little after 3:15 a.m., someone pulled Lyons into the bathroom, or maybe he stumbled in on his own—dizzy, hallucinating, dehydrated, foaming at the mouth. Word was he tried to get a drink from the faucet, but all that came out was hot water.

  Jimmy Lyons suffered the symptoms typical of Ecstasy-related overdose: chills, sweats, fever, teeth-rattling seizures. Around 5:00 a.m., emergency medical technicians found Jimmy on the street near a loading dock outside the club's back door. His body was bruised from flopping on the pavement like a landed fish, seized by uncontrollable convulsions. He was pronounced dead on the scene. Three hours after his death, he should have been cold to the touch, but his body temperature was 104 degrees, still baking from the inside out. Regret and anger ate away at Gagne. Even if Gatien's claim that he was unaware of drug dealing in his clubs were true, did it make him innocent? Gagne didn't think so. A fool on the throne isn't absolved from responsibility simply because he is a fool. Jimmy's death was the second drug overdose at Tunnel in January alone and Gatien's reps had countered with a specious claim that Jimmy really died from steroids he had taken earlier that day. A medical examiner told the New York Post that Jimmy's toxicology results were negative for steroids, that his death was a result of “acute intoxication by the combined effects of MDMA and ketamine.” Jimmy's friends said they'd seen him buy two hits of E inside Tunnel.

  In 1993, there were just 68 mentions of Ecstasy in emergency room visits nationwide, but by 2000, Ecstasy would land 4,511 people in the ER. High school students would soon cite Ecstasy as one of the easiest drugs to obta
in next to marijuana.

  Gagne knew there were more dangerous drugs, but Ecstasy was like a wolf in sheep's clothing. It was called the “love drug” because that was how dealers marketed it to suburban youth. While heroin traffickers branded their product with names like “Instant Death,” “Red Devil,” or “Lightning Bolt,” Ecstasy traffickers made aspirin-sized tablets in Froot Loops colors, stamped with happy faces, peace signs, dolphins, the initials HP (Harry Potter), Pokémon, and Scooby-Doo. If Flintstone's chewable vitamins were good for you as a kid, Ecstasy looked like the sexy upgrade.

  Sometimes Gagne felt like he was swimming upstream, fighting the Ecstasy machine in a society that embraced hyperconsumption of the new and improved. Wait a couple of minutes, and a better TV, computer, or cell phone would be ready for purchase. He worried about the wholesale embrace of drugs that promised a new and improved life. It was as if no one had the fortitude to endure the mental challenge of self-doubt or human imperfection anymore. To make varsity, there's steroids. To make kids behave, there's Ritalin. To feel special and connected to other human beings—just take a pill. There's plenty of Ecstasy to go around.

  People would talk about Generation X or Generation Y, but Gagne didn't know what to call this new generation. They could be vegan yoga fanatics, totally passionate about the environment, and yet they treated their bodies like toxic dump sites.

  “They'll do two hits of X, a couple bumps of K, a capful of GHB,” Gagne says, “but they're very concerned about air pollution, water pollution, and won't go into a Burger King or McDonald's. But come fuckin’ Saturday night they're like the chemical cowboys.”

  51 SECRETS AND LIES