“Sit down, Bob,” O'Hara said. He was reading through stacks of memos and reports on his desk. “I got a call from SOD. They think that this Ecstasy case you're working out there would be better served if you worked it from Long Island.”
O'Hara put his papers down and looked at Gagne.
“All you agents are so full of shit. Don't bullshit me, Bob. Tell me the truth: can you work this case better here or in Long Island?”
“Sir, I will not bullshit you. I can work the case better in Long Island.” Gagne felt a tinge of guilt. Truth was, he knew he could work the case anywhere as long as he was a street agent again—he could run it from Pittsburgh if he had to. But he was thinking of his wife, and starting a family, and he needed to be closer to home.
“All right,” O'Hara said. “If that's what you're telling me.”
Two days later, Gagne got the official memo. He was being transferred to Long Island, effective in one week. He had a lot of work ahead of him. He wanted to prove himself again, show his bosses that putting him back on the streets hadn't been a mistake.
On the Friday morning of his last day at NYFD, instead of going to the gym, Gagne took a last long walk through the building. It was quiet and practically empty.
He passed through the locker room where he and Germanowski used to costume up. He walked down the main agent floor and glanced over at his old cubicle, where he used to break out his clubs and challenge Flaherty to miniature golf tournaments. He lingered for a while inside the Hall of Honor, where he studied the photos of fallen agents, and for the first time, he read through the tributes for his old Snowcap teammates. He let the memories sink in.
57 THE HIT MEN
ON APRIL 15, a Dutch judge approved the opening of a case project on Sean Erez in order to keep the wiretaps and surveillance of Erez ongoing. On April 26, Gagne flew to the Netherlands to meet the IRT agents and finalize protocol on the wiretap transfer.
Although the average Dutch citizen is under the impression that DEA spy helicopters are watching them like Big Brother and agents are manipulating Dutch drug cops in Situation Room-style meetings, in truth the cramped four-person DEA offices at the American embassy haven't been upgraded since the embassy was built in the 1960s, and the employees work more like information liaisons than street agents. They share intelligence and hope for reciprocal interest. They are an important part of the collective diplomatic pressure. But they have no authority. DEA agents can't carry guns in the Netherlands, they can't initiate investigations, and they can't arrest Dutch citizens. Which is why Gagne knew it was a gracious gesture when the Dutch cops invited him to tag along on an Ecstasy case surveillance operation.
Dutch wire intelligence suggested that Ecstasy trafficker Michel Denies was at war with a guy who refused to pay for thousands of dollars’ worth of pills.
Gagne and the Dutch officers were sitting in a car in a quiet suburb about fifty yards from the dealer's home. The police knew from listening to his phone that he was expecting visitors that evening: two pill buyers. It was almost quitting time, but the police figured they'd wait and see if the buyers showed up, take some notes, then head out for beers with Gagne. They hadn't counted on the excitement to come when the garage door opened and two unidentified men drove off in the dealer's car.
Gagne readied for what was certain to be his first Dutch car chase. But nobody moved. The officers spoke calmly to one another on their radios. Gagne watched the suspects drive away.
“Um, don't we want to follow that car?”
After much hand-wringing, the officers eventually agreed to split up—one team stayed at the house and a second team (Gagne's group) would follow the assailants. It was the most polite car chase Gagne had ever taken part in, replete with anxious glances at the clock (the officers’ shift was coming to an end), anxiety over the sudden change of plans, and trepidation over crossing into another police district's territory.
“Oh, we really should be going back.”
“Maybe, just follow them,” Gagne said, “and if they go anywhere we're not supposed to go, then we'll turn around.”
When they caught up to the two men at a gas-and-go shop, twenty minutes from the German border, Gagne had to convince his hosts to approach the men.
“What, are you crazy? We don't do that, we are just surveillance.”
“Okay, look—you need to write a report on this later, right?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Then, just ask the guy for ID so at least you can identify him in your report.”
That did seem logical to the officer.
After a haphazard ID check and halting conversation with the suspects, the police soon realized they had nabbed two hit men—guys who allegedly worked for Denies and Lijklema. In the trunk of the car were a hundred thousand pills they had just stolen from the dealer.
The hit men had snuck in through a back entrance of the dealer's home while Dutch surveillance sat outside waiting for the real pill buyers to show up. The hit men stole the guy's pills but didn't kill him. When police found the dealer inside, he was tied up with extension cords. Sharp kitchen knives were lying on the counter next to him. Police figured the hit men must have fled after hearing a message being left on the dealer's answering maching in the middle of their home invasion. It was a call from the real pill buyers. They apologized for being late and promised they were just minutes away.
Gagne later heard that one of the men was an Albanian grifter and ruthless contract killer who was eventually extradited to Germany, where he was wanted on murder charges. (Dutch police rejected several interview attempts and would not comment on this operation or any of the Ecstasy cases.) According to Gagne's sources, the guy would kill just for pocket cash and traveling expenses. It didn't matter if the target was a drug dealer or a businessman. He'd wake up, have a bowl of cereal, go out and kill someone, have lunch, read the paper. He never bought a gun or got caught holding a weapon. He was known to slip in, use whatever was handy to beat, stab, bludgeon, or strangle his target to death, and then slip out, whistling down the alleyway as he left. Gagne always remembered him as the MacGyver of hit men.
58 LINDA LACEWELL
MATT GERMANOWSKI AND Jay Flaherty were preparing for the trial of former nightclub director Steve Lewis. They wanted Gagne to work the case with them, together like old times. But Gagne didn't want to look back. He was older, a little gun-shy. Besides, he had a full plate working the Dutch angle on Tuito's former underling Sean Erez and collecting intel on Jackie Suarez. Gagne didn't want to lose this time and he would play everything by the book. But he needed a new partner—a strong assistant U.S. attorney. He wanted AUSA Linda Lacewell.
Lacewell was a whip-smart prosecutor who'd studied law on a full scholarship at the University of Miami and put time in at two boutique defense law firms in New York, handling tax and white-collar cases, both civil and criminal.
When she decided to play for the opposite side, she started out in the Eastern District of New York working in General Crimes, where her caseload was mostly drug traffickers stumbling through JFK airport. It was always cocaine, heroin, cocaine, heroin, cocaine, and then all of a sudden it was Ecstasy, Ecstasy, Ecstasy. Lacewell knew that JFK's Ecstasy problem represented a microcosm of what was happening in the rest of the country. When she moved next, to the Narcotics division of EDNY, she got her hands on broader investigations, prosecuting drug distribution rings.
As a federal prosecutor, Lacewell felt she had more discretion: she didn't have to prosecute every case, and the decision about whom not to prosecute was sometimes more important. She could be aggressive and dogged, but she deeply believed in the maxim that the government wins when justice is served, regardless of the verdict.
Lacewell's first assignment in Narcotics was the drug conspiracy cases of Steve Lewis and former club bouncer Ray Montgomery, who were tried together. She read the Gatien transcripts, learned from the mistakes of the past, and let Germanowski and Flaherty guide her through the blind
spots.
The trial ended in early May 1999. Ray Montgomery was acquitted; Lewis was convicted and later sentenced to a year in prison, with three hundred hours of community service and $15,200 in fines. Even with the mixed result, Germanowski couldn't say enough good things about Lacewell to Gagne. The thirty-five-year-old prosecutor had a no-nonsense, commanding presence in the courtroom. She did a clean, short trial. She didn't overplay her hand or suggest that Lewis and Montgomery were some kind of drug kingpins overseeing an empire. She told the jury that they had roles to play in the conspiracy, just like everyone else.
Gagne went looking for Lacewell the next day at her office.
“Congratulations,” he said. “Now we need to do the Sean Erez case.”
“Bob, I just did a trial. I'm exhausted. Leave me alone.”
“Linda, we have to do it now. Erez is in the Netherlands. There's a wiretap on him, and the Dutch are willing to cooperate. But if he leaves, we won't be able to track him. You're the only one I want on this. We can do this. I need your help.”
Lacewell felt like she was being smooth-talked, but she also knew from Gagne's partners that Gagne was a tireless, hardworking investigator. Plus the latest courier arrests at JFK revealed that Erez had stooped to new lows in the drug trade, exploiting a vulnerable coterie of mules who just hadn't seen it coming.
“Okay,” Lacewell said. “Let's do it.”
59 PILGRIMS WITH PILLS
THERE IS A PICTURE wall along a corridor of the New York Field Division laboratory—a kind of smugglers’ hall of fame. The photos depict case exhibits: heroin smuggled inside food tray carts on airplanes; lollipops with drug-filled centers; a funeral urn made of cocaine; a Christmas-tree skirt—decorated in green wreaths and gold ribbons—with drugs sewn into a hidden layer; plastic green bananas mixed with real green bananas, but pull one of the fakes by the stem and the banana opens like a change purse to reveal the cocaine inside.
The most famous New York DEA press release was about the arrest of Medellín-based heroin traffickers who had crudely implanted packets of liquid heroin into the stomach linings of Labrador retriever puppies destined for the United States. The story broke all records for Web site hits, press interviews, and personal calls from concerned animal lovers wanting to know the fates of the puppies. A few of the dogs had died from the crude surgeries, but Colombian police found homes for the surviving animals. One of the puppies, Heroina, is now a drug-sniffing dog for the Colombian national police.
Ecstasy traffickers sometimes hid pills on slow-go freighter shipments of Dutch tulips, antique furniture, bread machines, auto parts, and once in the hollowed-out frame of a poster of Rembrandt's “Night Watch.” But when millions of dollars are tied up in each load, time is of the essence, and the fastest way to get pills in the hands of buyers abroad is to send them with human couriers.
American strippers and Israeli citizens were the Ecstasy standard. Agents at JFK airport's Narcotics Smuggling Unit caught on quick to the stripper mules—attractive, flirty women just back from “shopping trips” in Paris and Brussels. But nobody would have guessed that ultra-Orthodox youth, with dark clothes and curled side locks, returning from “a youth tour” in Europe, were smuggling thousands of Ecstasy pills in their suitcases.
After Gagne ID'd Sean Erez back in March, the Dutch police started watching him more closely, and noted several meetings with young men in religious dress at the airport. It seemed unlikely that Erez was seeking spiritual guidance. Gagne and his partners passed along word to Customs agents out of JFK to be watchful.
On March 11, a twenty-year-old Erez courier named Brenda Mendelovits was arrested at JFK with forty thousand clover-shaped pills.
Joel Gluck, eighteen, of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, was arrested on March 24 with thirty thousand “Yin-Yang” pills concealed inside rolled-up socks.
Like the others, twenty-four-year-old Benjamin Gratt's trip began in Brussels. He stayed at the Hotel Le Plaza, not far from the temptations of the Grand'Place central market's breweries and alfresco cafes. On a notepad in his hotel room, Gratt scribbled a 917 area code phone number, the same number that Mendelovits had written on the inside of her airline ticket sleeve. On March 23, Gratt took a Delta flight to New York (confirmed kosher meals), picked up his bags off the carousel, and was arrested by the Narcotics Unit with thirty thousand Yin-Yangs inside thirty socks. He had been given an airline ticket, $400 for expenses, and the promise of an additional $1,000 at the completion of the trip.
While Tuito paid his couriers $10,000, Erez promised little more than $1,500 and an economy-class ticket to Europe. His couriers were naive and unaware of the dangers. And Erez had devised an inspired scheme to prey on their faith: the young pilgrims were told they were smuggling diamonds for the Holy Land.
60 SEAN EREZ'S CREW
GAGNE WORKED BEHIND THE scenes to convince his Dutch counterparts to turn over their evidence on Sean Erez. AUSA Linda Lacewell worked the legal channels, with help from the Netherlands liaison at the Department of Justice's Office of International Affairs. By late May 1999, the Dutch sent everything they had on Erez: audio recordings, written reports, logs of wires on six different cell phones and one landline. The wire packages arrived almost daily on zip disks and CDs containing countless hours of phone calls. Gagne sat in Lacewell's office for weeks, listening to the tapes, trying to piece the conversations together.
Sometimes it was all too surreal for him. With a normal wire, everything happened in real time, with case agents on the street, ready to move with the bad guys. But with Erez, the deals and the meetings and the money handoffs—everything was happening overseas and a week ago, and there was nothing he could do about it. Gagne and Lacewell would get punchy from the tedium but remained unceasing in focus. They grew close over the ensuing weeks. She was his new Germanowski.
Most AUSAs had a way of talking about the agents—it was always “Let me call you back, my agent is here,” or “I'll have my agent do it,” or “I'll ask my agent to pick it up.” It was hard enough to run a case for months knowing that the prosecutor was eventually going to take it over—let alone to be treated like the prosecutor's assistant. But Lacewell never once called Gagne “my agent.” They were partners. Sometimes they worked fourteen-hour days, six days a week.
Kristen didn't like that.
“You could be having an affair and I wouldn't even know,” she said one Saturday morning as Gagne was on his way to the city.
“What?”
“You spend a lot of time with her. I wouldn't even know about it.”
“Trust me, you have nothing to worry about,” Gagne said dismis-sively. He didn't have time to talk about it, and besides, having an affair was the last thing on his mind. Securing the Dutch wire was a major coup, but only if it led to real evidence. Each call was like a small piece of the big picture, and every day he and Lacewell were getting closer to locking those pieces in place. He was finally starting to see Erez's network.
In the States, Erez depended on three key distributors: Goombah, Tiny, and GQ. Twenty-three-year-old Giacomo Pampinella, aka “Goombah,” handled New York. Richard Berman—nicknamed “Tiny” for his six-two, 215-pound frame—was a twenty-nine-year-old stock trader who took care of Miami with cohort Yves Cesar Vandenbranden III, a confident twenty-four-year-old green-eyed model whom Erez called “GQ.”
In the Netherlands, Erez had a seventeen-year-old gopher named Shimon Levita, aka “Shimi,” who was raised in a Bobover Hasidic community in Borough Park.
Erez's crew was an eccentric group and their antics on the wire were like a study in Keystone criminalia for Gagne and Lacewell. Erez's plans were continually stymied by Goombah's lazy indifference, Shimi's naïveté, and his own inability to control every step.
Just coordinating a load of twenty thousand pills into New York through Canada almost put Erez in a padded room: Shimi couldn't find his cell phone, Goombah didn't bring the right ID to get across the border, GQ waited at the Ritz Hotel for two hour
s because Tiny took down the wrong room number.
“You guys are stupid! You guys are really fuckin’ stupid!” Erez was overheard on the wire. “It's room six-two-one, is that so fuckin’ hard? It's three numbers!”
Tiny suggested they give up the suicide mission and liquidate at fire sale prices, $4 a pill, to the Hell's Angels who controlled the market in Montreal.
As Gagne and Lacewell got to know Erez's voice on the wire, they could hear the dealer's increasing paranoia after Customs agents started picking off his Hasidic couriers in the States. Tiny once had the nerve to suggest to Erez that his phone might be hot.
“I never call you, ever, from a fucked-up phone!”
“Okay, okay,” Tiny said.
Erez was under the mistaken assumption that he was safe in the Netherlands from federal wiretaps and American justice, but he still kept a half-dozen cell phones, using a different number for every supplier. His sources of supply were many, but Michel Denies seemed to be the constant. Erez called Denies “Papa.”
Michel Denies cut a smart figure in the Dutch underworld. He was thirty-two, six feet, and thin, with a thick scrub of dark brown hair. He wore stylish dark-rimmed eyeglasses that gave him an intellectual flair, the look of someone who might spend his days at a café on the Leidseplein reading Spinoza in the sun. He owned such a place in Marbella, Spain, called Café Saxo, which Erez and his girlfriend, Diana Reicherter, had visited.
In the six months since they had moved to Amsterdam, Erez and Reicherter had taken first-class trips to Israel and Spain, rented luxury vehicles and homes, bought white gold rings with diamonds and Rolex watches. Reicherter was overheard on the wire making an appointment for Erez for a liposuction and tummy tuck consultation. Erez was overheard planning a whirlwind summer vacation on the French Riviera. They lived well on drug money.
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