IT WASN'T EASY BEING the boss. Tuito was supplying New York, Miami, and Los Angeles and every day he had to ride his lieutenants and soldiers, make sure they were keeping the money flowing and the pills moving. With the recent spate of courier arrests, Tuito needed to keep a stone's skip ahead of the law. So he left Brussels for Nice, and put his right-hand man, David Ben-Amara, aka “Gingi,” in Frankfurt. When his New York lieutenant Tuff Tuff moved back home to Israel to be with his family, Tuito promoted Jackie Suarez to keeper of pills and cash.
Suarez had been selling Tuito's pills for $7 to $8 and, with his permission, tacking on an extra 25 to 50 cents kickback for herself. She had a safe in her Tenth Avenue studio apartment invariably filled with as much as $100,000 of Tuito's money. She started suffering from paralyzing panic attacks, making it difficult to breathe, impossible to sleep. She kept it a secret from Tuito. She was handling too much money and too many drugs to lose it in front of the boss.
In February 1999, Tuito sent for her. She would stop over in Miami, meet with Yosef Levi to pick up cash, and deliver it to Tuito in Frankfurt. It had been months since she'd seen him. He came to her room at the Omni hotel, woke her from a deep sleep, and spent the next ten days romancing her as best he could in a city that Suarez found to be cold and antagonistic.
The night before Suarez was to return to New York, she lay in bed next to Tuito. Something was dark in his manner. He seemed tense and unhappy. In the eight months she had known him, he was constantly on the move. He seemed tired. She never knew when he might disappear for good. Tuito had promised Suarez that if she ran off one day, married someone, and started a family, he would always be a friend to her and look out for her. But she wanted to be his protector in that moment as he fell asleep next to her.
When she awoke, she quietly dressed, not wanting to wake him, and took a taxi to the airport.
52 HEARTS
POLICE AROUND THE WORLD were waiting for Oded Tuito to make a wrong step. Israeli police were tapping phones of his Israeli associates; the German BKA police were tapping Gingi's phones in Germany; the Dutch were on the lines of suspected pill brokers in Amsterdam. Tuito was living in Nice with Aliza and their children, where the French essentially left him alone.
The BKA investigation, dubbed Operation Twingo, revolved around surveillance and scrupulous attention to Gingi and Tuito's calls. The dealers spoke daily, in barely coded conversations about money and women and flaky male couriers whose messy hair and frumpy clothes made them unfit for scrutiny by Customs agents. Tuito nagged Gingi over every detail—did he check and double-check flight arrangements, did he confirm everything with the travelers, was he out so late that he missed an important phone call or pickup?
Tuito's moods were never hidden. Sometimes he would lash out in anger and promise retribution for dealers who were slow to pay for loads they had already received. Other times he could be heard bemoaning his pet dog, who unfailingly ignored his commands: “Sit! Lie down! Sit, I say!”
When Tuito had reached the end of his rope with someone, he would order Gingi, “Tell him the Fat Man said so … tell him that's it.”
The BKA knew that Tuito had a half dozen couriers in the Frankfurt area awaiting orders to smuggle pills into the States, but to find them, the police needed names, flight times, airlines. They got a break late one Saturday night in February.
“When is Yakov traveling?” Tuito asked.
“Tomorrow,” Gingi said.
“What is he taking?”
“He's taking the hearts. Sixty.” Gingi had sampled the hearts himself.
“I ate from it yesterday, their work is much better. Like the butterfly.”
Gagne got a call at 4:30 a.m. from Gregg Drews. He grabbed his cell phone from the nightstand and snuck out of the bedroom so as not to wake Kristen. Drews told him a Tuito courier was headed to New York.
Gagne called the DEA attaché in Berlin and learned that two men from Israel had checked into the Ibis Hotel in Frankfurt and were seen receiving luggage from Gingi. One of them got on a Lufthansa flight Sunday morning, February 7, en route to JFK. Gagne looked at his watch; the plane was scheduled to arrive in about eight hours. He'd have to get the case agent up if he wanted to meet that flight.
“What are you doing?” Kristen was sleepy-eyed and wondering what her husband was up to.
“I gotta go into the city later,” Gagne said. “We gotta arrest a guy. I should be back in time.” She sighed and went back to bed. They were supposed to spend the day together, maybe go to the mall. She knew he wouldn't be back in time.
A little before 1:00 p.m., Gagne and case agent Roger Bach watched as Yakov Ariel picked up two Samsonite bags off the carousel and timidly shuffled toward the Customs line. An inspector asked him to open his bags. The inspector would later report that hidden under Ariel's “21 shirts, 9 pairs of pants, 8 pairs of underwear, 1 book, and 2 religious items” were secret flaps, and under the flaps were 59,298 round, grayish pills bearing a raised logo: heart-stamped pills, just in time for Valentine's Day. Ariel's belongings were inventoried and sent to the Customs warehouse at the World Trade Center.
Gagne attempted to read Ariel his Miranda rights, but the courier pretended not to understand. Only Hebrew, he said. He refused to sign anything and asked to speak to an attorney. He told the agents in broken English that the bags were not his. A girl he met in Brussels had had so many bags that she'd asked him to take these for her, he said. But in time, like the others, Ariel would reveal his story.
53 THE ACCIDENTAL COURIER
YAKOV ARIEL WAS A twenty-eight-year-old from Haifa who worked for a moving van company and owed $7,500 in gambling debts to the Russian Mafia. The man he owed the debt to made him an offer: Do a job for me for some friends abroad and we'll call it even.
A few days later, Gingi knocked on Ariel's door, gave him an envelope of cash, and told him to buy a ticket to Frankfurt. When Ariel arrived in Germany, Gingi put $150,000 in his luggage and sent him on a plane to Nice.
When you get there, Gingi told him, walk across the street to a rental car agency, where you will meet a fat man.
The Fat Man drove Ariel to a hotel, where he stuffed the cash in a room safe and shoved the key to the safe in his pocket. The Fat Man told Ariel he'd done good, and he had another job for him: Now you will bring pills back with you to the States. Ariel started to sweat.
Later that night at a club, Ariel slipped into the restroom, tossed his passport into the trash can, and told Tuito he couldn't make the return trip because it seemed he had lost his passport. Tuito was livid. He sent Ariel to the police station to file a lost passport claim, and waited for him outside the station.
Ariel returned to Israel in deeper trouble with his Russian loan shark. For his nonsense in Europe, he was being fined an extra $200 and would have to get a new passport and do the whole trip again. A month later, Ariel was back in Frankfurt. Another courier, thirty-six-year-old Yalon Scheps, bunked with him at the Ibis Hotel. Scheps told Ariel not to worry so much—he had done the trip many times, with twice as many pills, with no trouble.
Gingi gave Ariel two Samsonite bags with secret compartments and Scheps gave him two sedatives: one to take before he checked in at Lufthansa, and one to get him through U.S. Customs.
“If the police arrest you,” Scheps said, “just tell them that a girl gave you the bag because she had too much luggage.”
Gingi picked Ariel up on Sunday morning and drove him to the airport. He instructed Ariel to look for a young dark-haired woman named Jacqueline, who would meet him at JFK.
“If you don't see her,” Gingi said, “go to the nearest Holiday Inn and check in and she will find you.”
Ariel told Gagne that he assumed Jacqueline had been waiting for him on the other side of Customs. Sure enough, records indicated that Suarez's cell phone had pinged at the JFK cell tower. In fact, Suarez may even have seen Gagne that day. She was waiting in a car out front when she saw her courier pickup being escorted by federal
officers.
Jackie Suarez stepped on the gas, speeding as far away from the airport as she could get. Her heart was pounding. She tried to concentrate.
She would call Tuito. Then she would get out of town as quickly as possible. She had about a thousand pills and $7,000 in her safe at home.
Suarez thought about all the weed and Ecstasy she had sold since meeting Tuito. A nice sum of cash, but she had little to show for it. She had to get her life straight. But first, she thought, she would go to Miami and party like the feds were about to bust down her door.
54 FRANCE PRESSES CHARGES
BKA POLICE ARRESTED GINGI and Scheps as they were on their way to the Frankfurt airport. Scheps had 65,000 pills—”Butterfly” and “e” brands—hidden in his two bags. Another 20,000 pills were seized off Gingi.
A week later, a twenty-five-year-old Brooklyn Israeli was arrested at JFK with about 54,000 Hearts and e's in his bags. Next came a twenty-year-old Israeli girl from Miami, with 63,000 hits of a new brand—”Clovers,” for St. Patrick's Day.
Tuito was losing millions of dollars’ worth of pills and Gingi, his top lieutenant, was in a German jail. Israeli police were tapping the phone of one of Tuito's cohorts when they overheard Tuito confide to the man that he was considering leaving France, another move to seek “safe haven.” They couldn't let him escape again. The Israelis passed the tip to the French Office Central pour la Répression du Trafic Illicite des Stupéfiants or OCRTIS.
On February 24, at 5:30 a.m., OCRTIS officers arrested Tuito at his home in Nice and charged him with conspiracy to smuggle Ecstasy from France to the United States. They seized $10,000 and 50,000 francs in cash, cell phones, an address book, and personal documents. They froze two bank accounts holding $250,000. But it took police a couple of days to confirm Tuito's true identity, because he gave the name and fake passport of an Eliyahu Mamo.
Pittsburgh agent Gregg Drews was disappointed in the turn of events. He had twenty-five recorded undercover phone calls between Tuito and his associates. He had hoped to work the case longer and eventually see Tuito extradited and brought to prosecution in Pennsylvania. Now he'd have to wait to see what the French were going to do.
As far as Gagne could tell, the French did whatever the French wanted. But, like Drews, he didn't think they had enough: two couriers had been arrested at Charles de Gaulle with a collective seventy-two thousand pills, all of it destined for New York City.
Whether or not the French charges stuck, Gagne knew that Tuito's partners would reorganize to keep the pills and cash flowing. Nobody was going to throw in the towel. The American cases would continue while the French figured out their game plan.
Tuito had escaped charges in Tel Aviv, Los Angeles, and Pittsburgh. He had moved four times in the last year. Now he was on ice in a Fresnes prison while French officers studied the documents seized from his home. Everything was in Hebrew and had to be translated. Slips of paper inside Tuito's phone book revealed visits to the Savoy Hotel in Munich. There was a phone number for Suarez in New York, one for Koki in Los Angeles, and a recipe for lentil pea soup. His list of to-do items included “Give money to the snake.”
Next to some phone numbers, Tuito had written code names—”the pious one,” “the butcher,” and “susa.” A Hebrew translator noted that while “Sosa” or “Sus” may be a legitimate last name, when the word “susa” has an accent on the second syllable it means “mare.” It appeared that Tuito used the word as code: mare = horse = mule.
All of the susas in Tuito's phone book were women.
Civilians and strippers. Those were the couriers. That's how it was always done.
55 THE DUTCH WIRE
“BOB, YOU SHOULD HEAR this.” Don Rospond was calling from The Hague. “They've got an American on the line.”
In March 1999, the Dutch police were investigating a drugs trafficker named Wyste Lijklema when they heard an unexpected English-speaker on a wiretap. He had an accent that the Dutch guessed to be “strong New York/New Jersey.”
Dutch police are forbidden from soliciting drugs from dealers, using informants, or tape-recording meetings with a suspect. Such methods are considered an affront to civil liberties. However, police can get judicial approval to tap a phone line based on mere suspicion. And when the Dutch police started listening to Wyste Lijklema's phones, they spun off dozens of new wiretaps on his suspected criminal associates and their associates, including the mysterious American. Gagne had a hunch it was Sean Erez.
From what the police could tell, the American had started an independent Ecstasy network in Amsterdam and was sending couriers to the States through airports in the Netherlands, France, and Belgium. He was overheard checking his balance—nearly a million dollars—in a bank account in Luxembourg. His source of supply was a man named Michel Denies, who was an associate of Wyste Lijklema.
Gagne faxed a copy of Erez's DMV picture to Don Rospond to give to the police. A Dutch surveillance unit in Amsterdam bicycled past the home of the wire suspect, snapped shots of him leaving his Herengracht apartment, and verified his identity—it was Erez.
Gagne knew that the Dutch police couldn't care less about Sean Erez. The Dutch work on projects, with targets of interest, and that's it. Sean Erez was not a project target. But Wyste Lijklema and Michel Denies were.
Lijklema allegedly sold plastic explosives and fully automatic weapons in addition to drugs. Denies was thought to be one of Oded Tuito's backup Ecstasy suppliers. The Dutch believed Denies and Lijklema took part in the exportation of millions of pills a year, but they were having trouble getting evidence.
Sean Erez's phone tap was under the Dutch unit that investigated organized crime—the Interregionaal Rechercheteam Noord en Oost Nederland, unit Noord, or IRT for short. Gagne needed to convince IRT to stay up on Erez's phones and then share that wire with him in New York, to be used in Erez's prosecution. If Gagne could catch Sean Erez, maybe he could flip him and use him to help the Dutch catch Denies and Lijklema. That was what he would offer the Dutch in return for their help.
It was a tall order and as far as Gagne could tell it had never been done before with the Dutch—a cooperative international wiretap, conducted contemporaneously on an American. Erez wasn't even an American; he had dual Canadian and Israeli citizenship. But his drugs were hitting American soil and that was crime enough in a court of law. The 1983 treaty between the United States and the Netherlands on mutual assistance in criminal matters made it completely permissible for the Dutch to share the wire evidence. But a treaty meant nothing if the Dutch police decided they had better things to do. In America, if an informant walks in off the street and says, “Hey, I know someone who's selling drugs,” the DEA agents are out the door chasing that lead, that potential target of opportunity. But in the Netherlands, if an informant calls the police station and says, “There's a truckload of cocaine parked in front of the police station,” they are likely to reply: “Thank you very much, that's nice. Have a nice day.” The Dutch are dogged investigators who do tremendous casework. But their work is project-specific.
Gagne would have to gain their trust and respect. He needed to fly to the Netherlands to meet the Dutch officers—get to know them, have a beer, discover their commonalities—so that any time of the day he could pick up the phone and call in a tip, ask a favor, or share intelligence and they would be happy to hear from him. Gagne knew their policing styles were different, their drug policies were at odds, their whole way of life was different—but bottom line, they were united in their desire to take down Ecstasy dealers. And what Gagne needed most to take down Sean Erez was the Dutch wiretap.
But he was getting ahead of himself. He couldn't even open a case on Erez without handing it over to another agent—a street agent. He could barely get time on the streets of New York, let alone Amsterdam. He desperately needed to catch a break.
56 “DON'T BULLSHIT ME, BOB”
“JACKIE SUAREZ-WHAT DO you got?” Chris Kabel of Special Operations Division was
on the line. It was April 1999, and the Oded Tuito case had essentially come to a standstill since his February arrest by French authorities. SOD was still interested in breaking down Tuito's network and Kabel knew that Suarez was a critical piece of Tuito's entire operation.
“Gagne, you going up on her phone or what?” Kabel asked.
“Listen, I can't do this from Intel,” Gagne said. “No one's interested in the case out on Long Island except Roger Bach, but he's been promoted, so he's gone.”
Gagne wanted Bach's now-vacant spot. It would put him back on the streets—and closer to home—and give him the authority he needed to really go after Suarez and Sean Erez.
“Look, I'm doing this half-assed because I'm doing it from here. You get me out there and I'm telling you it will get done and it will get done right.”
“Well, I don't know,” Kabel said. “I don't know if we can do anything.”
Gagne worried he had pushed too much. The last thing he needed was to alienate his bosses.
“Chris, if somebody takes the case over in Long Island, that's all well and good, and I'll walk them through it, tell them everything I know, help them out to the best of my ability. But you know as well as I do, I can never sit down with someone and explain everything so that they'll get it and get behind it the way I would.”
“Okay,” Kabel said. “Let me see what I can do.”
The next day, Gagne got called into the office of one of his supervisors, Assistant Special Agent in Charge Gary O'Hara.
That was quick, Gagne thought.
As he walked toward O'Hara's office, he figured this was headed one of two ways: Who the fuck do you think you are, getting SOD to take you out of here? or Pack your desk, you're going to Long Island.
Gagne liked O'Hara. He got what Bob was trying to do. He'd even started running monthly meetings on club drugs after Gagne got back from the Philly strategy conference in December. O'Hara was the last person Gagne wanted to piss off.
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