61 GADI ESHED
ECSTASY TRAFFICKING FROM EUROPE was exploding. In 1997, Customs had seized about 350,000 Ecstasy tablets. That number increased to 750,000 a year later. In 1999, Customs would seize a record 3.5 million pills. International trafficking had become so intense that Interpol established an Ecstasy desk just to take calls and collect data.
The only way drug cops around the world could hope to keep up was to use the same kind of chain of trust that the criminals used. Gagne checked in with his foreign counterparts daily. They shared tips on new phone numbers, suspected couriers, developments on wiretaps, and busts at airports. And somewhere along the chain, Gagne was put in touch with the head of intelligence at Israeli National Police's Central Unit in Tel Aviv, Gadi Eshed. A number may have been passed along, a suggestion they share information—neither man could be certain when they first spoke, because their connection became seamless. They talked several times a week.
Sean Erez was a name Eshed had not heard before. The new mules were also a surprise. In Eshed's experience, it was rare to find criminal activity among the haredim (ultra Orthodox) communities in Israel.
“He recruits them from two places,” Gagne told Eshed. “Borough Park and Monsey—two very large Hasidic communities.”
“There is a reason why they use Hasidic couriers,” Eshed said. “To the Customs agent, it looks like here is a friend of God, very innocent and very naive, and no way in the world those people would dare to do something wrong.”
Eshed and Gagne didn't believe that all of Erez's couriers really thought they were smuggling diamonds. Some seemed to have been swayed by the excitement of the easy money and free travel.
“The average Hasidic young Orthodox prefers to spend his day at the yeshiva, to pray and to study,” Eshed explained to Gagne. “So the ones that are not the best students and the ones that maybe feel stuck in an extremely religious community—they are the ones that may stray, choose to take the wrong way from their normal way of life.”
Gagne liked Eshed. They had both served in the military, were passionate about their countries and their callings, and yet quietly suspicious of dogma in all forms. Eshed was sharp and disciplined (he arose at 4:45 every morning to swim laps), but he also had a warm sense of humor. He was a family man with two preteen daughters that he doted on and a beautiful wife he called “boss.” And Eshed understood just as well as Gagne that Ecstasy was a wide-open market.
The magic of the Israeli Ecstasy networks was that if someone dropped out, the drugs still flowed because there was always a new link to slip into the chain, someone to take receipt of pill loads or fulfill lost orders. There was so much supply, and even more demand, that the Ecstasy traffickers existed in relative peace and prosperity, forming loose coalitions of joint ventures.
Case in point: Earlier that year, on January 22, 1999, the day before teenager Jimmy Lyons overdosed at Tunnel, Dutch police confiscated two hundred thousand pills at Schiphol airport that were secreted inside the false-bottom drawers of antique desks. The pills were destined for a buyer in New York who was taking his orders from Judy Ben Atar. The Dutch cops determined the pills were being supplied by Maya owner Eddie Sasson in Holland. German police overheard Tuito's right-hand man, Gingi, discussing the shipment over wiretaps with Sasson's associates in Amsterdam. Sasson was a known associate of Ecstasy dealer Yosef Buskila. Gagne had phone and travel records indicating that Buskila had recently returned to New York and was in contact with Tuito underling Steve Hager. However, no evidence surfaced that Tuito had anything to do with the pills hidden in the antique desks. It's possible he got a cut somewhere along the chain, but he certainly wasn't directing this deal.
62 YORDIM
IN HEBREW, when someone leaves Israel and moves abroad, he is called yored—the one that goes down. If it's a group of expatriates, they're called yordim. It's a negative connotation and even among Israelis who have lived in the States for decades, many still insist “I will soon be ole”—I will ascend, like the others who have returned and are olim.
Eshed knew that the Israeli Ecstasy dealers—guys like Tuito, Erez, Koki, Jacob “the Dog” Elchik, and Eddie Sasson—were all yordim. Some of them may have paid tribute at some point to mob bosses and crime groups in Israel, but for the most part they were independent drug dealers who had been gone so long from the motherland that they were virtually untouched by Israeli Mafia warfare.
But Eshed had grave concerns about what would happen once the top mafiosos in Israel caught sight of the riches that the yordim were making in the Ecstasy trade abroad. Eshed and his colleagues had been cleaning up after the bitter mob rivalries in Israel for years.
63 TRACKING THE WOLF
WHEN GADI ESHED RETURNED to Israel from his assignment in Holland in 1995, he had been promoted to head of the Intelligence section at Tel Aviv's Central Unit, the largest investigations and intelligence unit in Israel. He oversaw about 120 officers in the Serious Crimes division, which handled vice, drug trafficking, murder, and organized crime. A lot had changed while Eshed was away. As Israel was entrenched in defending herself in a seemingly endless border war, internecine warfare was being waged among crime families within her borders.
The American notion of the Mafia, informed by The Godfather and The Sopranos, conjures warring factions drawn up by generations of family bloodlines. However, organized crime in Israel in the early 1970s was actually drawn up by neighborhoods, so that if a drug dealer grew up in Jerusalem, he would pay tribute to the Jerusalem group. In return, he brought the name of the group's leader, the de facto godfather, to the table as his backing in deals. It was a provincial structure that died out in the 1980s as the gangsters spent more time in jail, meeting their future partners, and then expanding business beyond their villages and cities to national and international venues.
Israeli gangsters fight over control of the typical rackets—extortion, prostitution, drugs, weapons, and gambling—and solutions to Mafia disputes come in several forms. There are arbitrators, often retired bosses, who hold meetings, let both sides air their grievances, and then render a binding decision. (Arbitrators commonly rule in favor of the guy who pays the bigger bribe.) There are leg breakers from the collection-and-protection rackets who exert pressure on one party to pay up. And when it's time to cut to the chase, there are plenty of freelance hit men available to carry out liquidations. Problem solved.
Until 1993, the Israeli mob boss who killed his way to the top and ruled for more than a decade was Yehezkel Aslan. Aslan grew up a poor Iraqi immigrant in the slums of Ha-Tiqwa, a south Tel Aviv neighborhood. He pulled himself up from poverty, first by selling soap at the Central Bus Station, then by injecting heroin into the streets, and finally by controlling the lucrative underground gambling rings in Tel Aviv.
By the late 1980s, globalization and the fall of the Soviet Union had created new opportunities for Aslan and his rivals to combine their loan sharking, extortion, and illegal gambling businesses in Israel with the ownership of legitimate casinos in Turkey and Eastern Europe. They ran package tours, chartering planes to fly Israelis for gambling weekends and vacations. Some six hundred thousand gamblers spent an estimated $4 billion in the Mafia-owned casinos every year. Aslan moved his family to a large gated home in the upscale coastal suburb of Herzliya Pituach—Miami Beach on the Mediterranean.
Aslan was king, and his main business rival, Ze'ev “the Wolf” Rosenstein, was just at his heels. There was plenty of business for the top families below them—the Abutbuls of Netanya, the Alperons of Givat Shmuel, the Abergils of Lod, and the Ohanas of Kfar Saba. But soon it appeared that Ze'ev Rosenstein had decided he preferred a monopoly over a power share.
On February 24, 1993, Yehezkel Aslan was sitting in his black BMW with a twenty-three-year-old woman outside the Pisces restaurant in Tel Aviv. A car pulled up and a masked gunman fired five times, killing the mob boss and injuring the girl. Aslan was forty-three. More than a thousand mourners attended his funeral. Even Ha-Tiqwa
heroin junkies praised the crime boss, pointing out to reporters that he was a donor to the local rehab center.
Police lacked the evidence to charge Rosenstein for murder, but it was clear that the Wolf had benefited from the killing. Aslan's death vaulted Rosenstein to the position of number one Israeli mafioso and ignited a fierce war. The Aslan clan wanted revenge. In 1995, Eshed had returned to Tel Aviv from his Hague post in time to wade through the blood feud.
In the summer of 1996, Rosenstein was sitting at a traffic light in the center of Tel Aviv when he was hit twice by gunmen from a passing car. He stepped on the gas, drove himself to a hospital, and survived. Eshed was at the scene when police arrested three suspects, one of whom was Ilan Aslan, the brother of slain godfather Yehezkel. Still, Rosenstein told police he had no idea who would want to kill him.
A few weeks later, a judge granted the three attackers release from custody while the investigation continued. Ilan Aslan vanished without a trace. (The rumor goes that one would have to dig very deep to find Aslan under the giant mall that was being built in the center of Tel Aviv.) A year later, police received an anonymous phone call telling them where to find the body of the second attacker. The third gunman was later tried for murder, acquitted, and then shot to death while leaving a restaurant.
Police had no proof, but they believed the killings to be Rosen-stein's work.
In frustration, Yehezkel Aslan's widow, Shoshana, sent a message that spread among underworld hit men that she was willing to pay any sum of money to have Rosenstein killed. On June 27, 1996, a little before 7:00 p.m., Shoshana was getting home from grocery shopping, bags in her hands, when her eleven-year-old son ran out to greet her and saw a hit man walk up behind his mother and shoot her in the head. Shoshana Aslan became another unsolved murder.
A year later, Eshed and his colleagues received a tip that Meny Aslan, an adult son of Yehezkel and Shoshana, was determined to kill Rosenstein himself in revenge for the death of his parents and his vanished uncle, Ilan. The police made a strategic decision to cover Meny Aslan—they were betting that Rosenstein had already learned about Meny's murderous intent and would move first.
Nearly a hundred officers took part in top-secret 24/7 surveillance. It was a tremendous undertaking, with cops stationed in ambush and surveillance positions covering Meny's daily movements for several weeks. The Aslan house in Herzliya Pituach was on a quiet cul-de-sac and police had to install secret cameras on the block in order to watch the house from vans nearby without being seen by Meny or his neighbors.
Even an old man in a hat and sunglasses who was seen walking his dog past the Aslan residence piqued the officers’ suspicions. One astute detective noticed that the man had driven into the neighborhood to walk his dog. On a hunch, police followed him back to Jaffa and discovered he was really an old-school criminal named Jacob Cohen. Eshed knew then that their assumption was correct—preparations for a hit were under way. After all, you can't kill someone without collecting information first: What does the intended victim look like? When does he leave his house? Where are the main entrances and exits? Does he have bodyguards?
On September 10, 1997, the police ambushed two hit men, brothers, outside Meny's office. The fraternal assassins eventually cooperated, giving up the name of the person who sent them; that person cooperated and it went all the way up the chain to a man named Nahman Cohen. And this is where it would end.
Nahman Cohen was a well-known hit man and boss who had previously served seventeen years for murder and was known to run with both Israeli Mafia and criminals abroad—including the yordim Ecstasy traffickers. Sources close to Oded Tuito once told Pittsburgh agent Gregg Drews that the Fat Man kept Nahman Cohen on his own payroll as an enforcer.
The Israeli police learned through secret intelligence that Cohen had facilitated the murder contract with a promise of $50,000 for Meny Aslan's head. Cohen's order surely came straight from Ze'ev Rosenstein, but police had no proof. Cohen got fifteen years for the attempt on Aslan's life—and he never gave up the Wolf.
Ze'ev Rosenstein was a master at putting so many layers between himself and crime that police could never charge him for murder, extortion, fraud, or any of the activities that allegedly secured his wealth and position at the top. In fact, he had just one conviction to his name, in 1978, when he was twenty-two, for armed robbery. He liked to tell the press that he was a serious businessman—and that his jealous competitors were trying to dirty up his name with talk of murder and the Mafia.
Intelligence indicated to Eshed that, for now, the criminal networks that ran the Ecstasy trade in America were primarily yordim. But while Bob Gagne was focused on Oded Tuito and Sean Erez, Eshed had his eye on the Wolf. Ze'ev Rosenstein was a vicious competitor and Israeli police were already stretched too thin to bridle the power struggles that would arise if the Wolf decided to stake his claim in America's Ecstasy market.
64 NOT A SERIOUS CRIME
GREGG DREWS HAD PUT his Tuito case on the back burner since the French arrest, but on June 17, 1999, a short news item in USA Today caught his attention.
Switzerland's Supreme Court had overturned the one-year prison sentence of a man who had been convicted of selling a thousand pills. The tribunal ruled that Ecstasy dealing was “not a serious crime,” and that there was no evidence that it posed serious health risks. The tribunal further categorized Ecstasy as a “soft drug” that didn't lend itself to criminal behavior since it was used by “socially integrated people.”
Right. Kiddie dope, Drews thought as he read the article. These people have no clue. He clipped the item and placed it in Tuito's case file.
65 “YOU'RE UNDER ARREST
BY THE DEA”
DEA'S HAGUE REP DON ROSPOND called Gagne at home on a Sunday morning in June.
“How fast can you get to Amsterdam?”
Erez and Reicherter had been discussing vacationing for several months and were leaving Monday for the French Riviera. It was time.
Gagne needed to get emergency clearance to travel from headquarters, country clearance from the Netherlands, and provisional arrest warrants translated and approved by the Dutch judiciary. With Linda Lacewell's help, they pulled it together at breakneck speed. By 5:30 p.m., he got the green light and rushed to JFK for the next available flight.
Rospond and the Dutch IRT officers met Gagne's plane at Schiphol the next morning, June 21. They ate sandwiches at an airport pub and debriefed Gagne on the arrest plan while they waited for a signal from the surveillance team. The Dutch police could have commandeered the entire takedown and sent a memo about it later, but they trusted Gagne and Rospond and had decided to let DEA take the lead on the American targets. Rospond's boss at The Hague was impressed. This kind of cooperation was unheard of.
By late afternoon, the surveillance unit called: Erez and Reicherter had just left their apartment and would be followed en route to the airport.
Gagne and the arrest team watched the couple check their bags at the Air France ticket counter and pass through airport security. They were early for their 6:10 p.m. flight to Nice, so they shopped the duty-free stores as they slowly worked their way toward the gate.
Once police were certain Erez and Reicherter were alone—and not meeting anyone inside the terminal to do business—Gagne moved in for the arrest. He approached Erez with the casual tone of an acquaintance.
“Sean Erez?”
“Yeah …” Erez seemed to be trying to place Gagne's face.
“You're under arrest by the DEA.”
“Uh-huh.” Erez looked around: a team of plainclothes officers and a pair of uniformed Dutch policemen had encircled them.
“You're under arrest for the distribution and importation of Ecstasy to the United States,” Gagne said as the police cuffed Erez and his girlfriend. “These people are executing an arrest warrant on my behalf for the United States.”
The couple was transported to a holding location for questioning and their luggage was seized and inventorie
d. The contents of Reich -erter's black suede purse screamed In Style summer photo shoot: one Canon Elph camera, one gold Sony cell phone, eight pieces of silver jewelry, Elizabeth Arden makeup, a Cartier wallet with silver and copper foreign coins, Gucci sunglasses, and a brown vial tinged with a white powdery residue. At the Herengracht apartment Dutch police found false-bottom luggage, $10,000 cash, a handful of Ecstasy pills inside a Tic Tac canister, and address books listing numbers for Erez's couriers, for Koki and Hager, and the direct lines for Tunnel and Limelight nightclubs.
Erez's assistant Shimi was arrested on a tram on his way home. The officers escorted him to his apartment for questioning. Gagne had heard Shimi's voice on the wire and knew he was young. But he wasn't prepared to meet a short, scrawny eighteen-year-old.
Shimi came from a good home and a deeply religious family. He still said his morning and evening prayers. So how had he ended up living in Holland, taking orders from a drug dealer, and playing junior Mafia with his girlfriend in tow?
While Erez and Reicherter lived in a luxury apartment in Amsterdam, Shimi and eighteen-year-old Jessica Cusumano were put up in a dull bedroom community in nearby Amstelveen. By day, Shimi ran errands and handled couriers while Jessica stayed home and played with her pet chihuahua, Precious. At night they joined Erez and Reicherter at the casinos. They traveled with the couple to Miami, slept in luxury hotels, got escorted past the velvet ropes into chic nightclubs. Everything seemed exotic to the young couple.
Jessica told Gagne that she knew Shimi was recruiting ultra-Orthodox couriers and delivering money for Erez, and she worried he would get arrested. Shimi told her he was safe because he “ doesn't touch anything.” He was wrong.
At first, Jessica had looked up to Erez as a Mafia mentor to her boyfriend. But when Reicherter and Erez tried to get her to carry $250,000 in her bag from Miami to Amsterdam, she begged Shimi to help her get out of it. Shimi reminded her that Erez was the boss—he controlled their livelihood. Jessica felt helpless to object.
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