But Tuito's success (and Judy's connections) attracted the attention of the big shots back home. Once they put their finances behind the Ecstasy business, they would come to import not only their drugs to America but their Mafia alliances as well. Eshed and his colleagues knew that the overseas mob hit of Allon Giladi in tony Brentwood signaled that a new breed of Ecstasy-peddling criminals had moved into Beauty's house. For guys like Tuito, it wouldn't pose a major problem. But it would for the loose-knit networks of smaller freelance dealers—they would have to pick sides and ask for protection or get out of the business fast.
By the end of 1999, Israeli police encountered a criminal convergence of events that marked the first signs of a shift in the balance of power. Clue number one was the pills.
The very first Israeli Ecstasy seizure was in a nightclub in Tel Aviv in 1992—just 11 pink pills. In 1999, INP seized 464,651 pills—a remarkable 300 percent increase from 1998 figures.
The 1999 release from prison of twenty-nine-year-old murder felon Itzhak Abergil was another catalyst for the shift in the Ecstasy trade. Because he was so young at the time of his crime, Abergil served just twelve years of an eighteen-year sentence and was sent into exile in Europe as one of the conditions of his release—a huge mistake, as it hastened his acquisition of international criminal status. Ecstasy trade was the favored commodity among Dutch and Israeli criminals when Abergil was let loose in Amsterdam in 1999. INP intelligence suggests that Abergil brought his mafioso money and contacts into the fold.
But the most glaring clue to Israeli police that the gangsters at home were dipping into the Ecstasy business came with the arrest of a man named Zvi Fogel.
In late 1999, while DEA was basking in the successful dismantling of Sean Erez's Ecstasy network in Holland, the INP was celebrating its own joint Dutch-Israeli case. The three-year undercover investigation, dubbed Operation Octopus, resulted in the seizure of 1.2 million pills, three Ecstasy labs, a chemical storage space, a field of marijuana, 1 million Dutch guilders, ten hand grenades, five kilos of TNT, and ten mini Uzis, as well as the October 11 arrest of twenty-five suspects including Maya restaurant owner Eddie Sas-son. An Israeli undercover officer had worked with the Dutch for nearly a year to slowly gain the trust of Sasson and infiltrate his Ecstasy network.
One of the suspects arrested in the Octopus case was forty-five-year-old Zvi Fogel, whose crime bio included forgery, conspiracy, receiving stolen property, trafficking in stolen auto parts, burglary, and assault.
Three months before the takedown, INP had received secret intelligence that Fogel was planning a trip to Paris for a drug transaction. The French police agreed to follow him on INP's behalf and Fogel was seen taking meetings in Paris with a former criminal associate named Baruch Dadush, who was wanted in New York for a 1992 charge of conspiring to export stolen vehicles.
Police followed Fogel and Dadush to the Gare du Nord, where the men purchased train tickets to Amsterdam. From there, Dutch police watched Fogel and Dadush meet with a suspected MDMA supplier and a man who made the specially designed false-bottom suitcases. It was not surprising to Israeli police that a lifelong freelance crook such as Fogel appeared to be trying his hand in Ecstasy trafficking. What concerned Gadi Eshed and his colleagues was that Dadush was with him. Baruch Dadush was the right-hand man of top Tel Aviv mob boss Ze'ev “the Wolf” Rosenstein.
When Fogel was later arrested in the Operation Octopus sting in October, he refused to talk and was eventually released for lack of evidence.
Of course, shortly after the Octopus sting, American and Israeli police received the most striking evidence of a shift in power over the Ecstasy trade: the dead man in the trunk of the Lexus in Brentwood. A source would later reveal to law enforcement that Giladi believed he was meeting his accused killers to take part in a $3 million Ecstasy deal.
72 ROUNDING UP TUITO'S SUSAS
ODED TUITO'S BIGGEST WEAKNESS as a businessman was the susas—his mares. Tuito always wanted to meet the women who were going to carry his pills.
Men under the influence of sex and alcohol often spill secrets to the women in their company. Days before he conspired in the deadliest terror attack yet on U.S. soil, Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh told a dancer in a Tulsa strip club, “On April 19, 1995, you'll remember me for the rest of your life.” Years later, several of the 9/11 terrorists spent their last weeks getting lap dances at the Pink Pony in Daytona Beach, Florida, and the Olympic Garden Topless Cabaret in Las Vegas. Strippers are the consummate interlopers between good guys and bad guys—which is why Gagne and his DEA peers know that strippers can be crucial intelligence sources.
Gagne ushered in the millennium by rounding up susas—more than seven arrests in the first few months based on intel from cooperating sources in New York, Miami, Pittsburgh, and Los Angeles and the continued cooperation of “Clare.”
Most of the girls were surprised to see DEA at the door because it had been months, for some more than a year, since they'd been to Europe to carry pills for the Fat Man. But every one of them talked. And the more the women revealed, the more Gagne and Lacewell had to enhance Tuito's indictment.
Nikki was a pretty Hispanic dancer at Club VIP in Manhattan who was first approached by Steve Hager in 1998 to mule pills and recruit girls. She made seven trips and recruited a dancer named Jenn.
Jenn took four trips and became a recruiter herself, inviting her roommates Sara and Annie into the mix and pocketing an extra $1,000 for every susa she handed over to Tuito's crew. Jenn identified Tuito in a six-pack photo spread as “Simon,” the one with curly black hair, a “big Buddha belly,” and scars.
Carlie wasn't a dancer but a photography student who met Steve Hager in 1995 through her sister. One day the budding photographer innocently snapped a still life of Hager's coffee table: a stack of $50 and $100 bills piled ten inches high next to several thin white lines of powder and a bowl filled with cocaine, presumably so abundant as to be left out like candy for the taking. It never occurred to Carlie that Hager was part of an international Ecstasy network.
Carlie took one trip in 1998 and hated it. Gingi put her up in a “rathole hotel” in Brussels. A blond “stripper type” who joined them warned Carlie to stay away from her Israeli boyfriend and then later hit on her in the bathroom. Carlie never took another trip.
Like most susas, Carlie didn't know how much she was carrying. She was surprised when Gagne told her she had smuggled roughly thirty-five thousand pills through JFK. She was later sentenced to three years’ probation and a hundred hours of community service.
There were dozens more girls just like Jenn, Nikki, and Carlie, getting picked up and questioned by agents in Miami, Los Angeles, Houston, Boston, and Las Vegas about their Ecstasy courier trips not only for Tuito's network but also for the splinter groups that had arisen in his absence. They had been told by their Israeli handlers to dress like prim angels and to stay calm if they got caught.
Tuito's girlfriend Jackie Suarez wasn't a dancer and she wasn't prim and proper. She was a major player, and she would be stone-cold quiet when they came for her.
73 THE KINGPIN'S GIRLFRIEND
IT HAD BEEN ALMOST a year since Suarez spoke to Tuito; their last conversation had been on her twenty-ninth birthday. At the time, he was hiding out in France, the Germans had arrested Gingi, and couriers were getting knocked off left and right. He told her he wanted to die. She told him she loved him and asked him to call her every day until things calmed down. It was the last time she heard his voice.
In the last twelve months Suarez had gone through devastating lows. Her panic attacks came on so strong she made several visits to the emergency room. Doctors told her that nothing was physically wrong and she began to suspect she was going crazy. A deep foreboding and dread paralyzed her. All the men who used to watch out for her—Tuff Tuff, Gingi, Tuito—had vanished or been arrested. She had no more Israeli connections to reach out to and none of Tuito's phone numbers worked anymore. When Tuito stopped c
alling she had assumed (correctly) that he was sitting in prison somewhere. She didn't understand why the police hadn't come for her as well. She was alone. She fell into a deep depression and spent a period in complete seclusion sleeping, drinking, and watching soap operas. Her meals, clean clothes, liquor, and drugs were delivered to her door. She was running out of money.
At some point, Suarez began to take inventory of her life. She was almost thirty, well traveled and intelligent, with a bachelor's degree in communications and a head for business. She felt torn, caught between two disparate worlds. She had enjoyed the company of her criminal friends. The men were attentive and funny and dropped cash like bread crumbs. But they had no real skills or formal education. Suarez had a tremendous work ethic. It was her moment to choose which side of the law she wanted to live on. She had never fully committed to a life of crime or to professional ambition. She could excel at either, but her duality pulled her in two directions at once, which left her with nothing. Instead of choosing, she tried to juggle both.
Suarez got a job as a production assistant at an AM talk radio station in New York and found that just giving it a 50 percent effort seemed to please her bosses. On the side, she started reaching out to her old buyers in the club scene to find out if anyone needed help moving Ecstasy. Suarez's Israeli connections were gone, but she found new sources for coke, Ecstasy, and crystal meth. New clients and old lovers rolled into her life. She left her Tenth Avenue studio and moved into a railroad apartment in Hell's Kitchen with a roommate. There were drug-fueled interludes when she stayed up for days with friends, laughing, talking, bullshitting, and playing Scrabble. But she missed Tuito still. And she knew that being a dealer on her own, without her Israeli family, held no meaning for her.
Two days before her thirtieth birthday, Suarez learned that one of her closest friends had died of a heroin overdose in San Francisco. It sent her into black days. She kept it together at work, but at home she was falling deeper into depression and mixing coke, booze, and prescription pills.
74 “YOU KNEW THIS DAY
WOULD COME”
“JACKIE, OPEN THE DOOR.”
On March 20, 2000, a little before 11:00 p.m., Suarez was in her pajamas brushing her teeth when she heard a knock.
“It's the police,” the voice said on the other side. She froze. Her roommate was asleep in the next room.
Another loud knock.
“Jackie, you knew this day would come.”
A team of DEA agents stood in her hallway, guns drawn. She was under arrest. They walked right past her and began to secure the apartment.
“What are the charges?” Suarez asked.
“Money laundering and drug trafficking.”
She went to her room to change her clothes and swallowed two tranquilizers. She kept her cool, even when her roommate woke up screaming, “What are you doing? Jackie, don't go with them!”
“Call my mom,” Suarez mouthed to her as she was escorted away.
In the hallway, the agents cuffed her hands in the front. She plucked a Parliament Light from her jacket pocket and lit it as she was escorted outside. She counted nearly a dozen agents on the street and a line of black SUVs with tinted windows. She was put in the backseat of a small car. The agent in the passenger seat turned and introduced himself.
“Jackie, I'm Special Agent Bob Gagne.”
Gagne had been following Suarez's movements for more than a year. He was ready for her. He knew she had played multiple roles in Tuito's organization and had held her own with the men. Ecstasy trafficking—and drug trafficking in general—is a male-dominated business. Someone like Suarez, who was recruiting girls, moving money, and sleeping with the top boss, wasn't the average courier skipping through Brussels with candy pills thinking it's all fun and games. None of the women Gagne flipped had ever touched the money. For the organization to even trust her to carry cash meant she was perceived as credible, tough, and unbreakable.
Girls got used and abused in this business, but as far as Gagne could tell, Suarez was no victim. To break her down, to get her to cooperate, it was going to take a lot more than the condescending “You're in a lot of trouble, missy” speech that some agents leaned on when confronting sweet little couriers, who melted in a puddle of tears once they realized they were pawns for the dealers and now they'd have to be pawns for the feds.
As they rolled through Times Square the tranquilizers began to kick in and Suarez fell into a soporific state, uninterested in Gagne's mundane paperwork questions: Date of birth? Social? She said she wasn't answering shit until she talked to her attorney.
“All right,” Gagne said. That was fine with him. Gagne needed to accomplish two things before Suarez sat down with her attorney in the morning: he had to earn some credibility with her and he had to show her that prison was a miserable road. Suarez was on her way to Nassau County Jail in Mineola, New York. It was a hellhole, freezing cold even in the middle of summer, fifty-five degrees and no blankets, always packed with drunks whose belligerent, slurred voices echoed through the hall all night long.
A processing agent took Suarez's belongings: leather jacket, boots, socks, and belt. Gagne asked her what she wanted for breakfast and told her he'd bring her cigarettes back when he came for her in the morning. She told him to bring coffee too.
Her cell was dark and smelled like urine.
75 WE FUCKING GOT HIM
OVER THE NEXT TWENTY-FOUR HOURS Suarez was arraigned, handcuffed to a bar, told when she could go to the bathroom and when she had to wait. This was the price: the French Riviera, easy money, good wine—and sleeping on a cold, concrete bench next to a filthy toilet and an itchy crack addict.
Suarez was assigned a public defender and had a chance to meet with her brother at the courthouse. He read through the indictment Gagne had written about his sister: “identified as a drug courier, money courier, and recruiter” for the Oded Tuito network; “responsible for the importation of between 150,000 to 200,000 Ecstasy pills;” “made approximately ten trips” from the United States to Europe and brought Tuito “at least $200,000 in drug proceeds on each occasion, for a total of at least $2 million.” Gagne had been tempted to add “major fucking attitude” to the list but thought better of it.
“Is this all true?” Suarez's brother asked.
“Basically,” she said.
Gagne had corroborating evidence in Suarez's phone records, travel records, incriminating conversations with sources, and witness statements from couriers. He even had video surveillance of the front of her Tenth Avenue studio, recording the comings and goings of suspected co-conspirators.
She was angry and confused. She hated Gagne and Lacewell and her court-appointed attorney, who agreed that cooperation was her best option. If she went to trial and lost, she was looking at up to fifteen years. But if she pleaded guilty, answered questions about her role in Tuito's network, and agreed to testify, then she could earn a coveted 5K letter, and if the judge was impressed, maybe she'd receive as little as probation. (Named after Section 5K1.1 of the United States Sentencing Commission's guidelines, a 5K motion is a veritable love letter from the prosecutors informing the court of a defendant's substantial assistance. It allows the judge to grant lighter sentences.)
Suarez began to tune out the voices around her, but certain words slipped into her consciousness: Tuito. French prison. Extradition. It dawned on her that none of this had anything to do with her. The government needed her to nail Tuito. If she refused to cooperate, she'd be throwing herself on the sword to save him. But if she signed a cooperation agreement, she could go home today and maybe never spend a day behind bars. She felt like a dog backed into a corner. Everything was happening too fast. She had secretly held on to the slight hope that Tuito would magically appear and rescue her, but now she knew that wasn't going to happen. She felt as if all her life people had let her down.
Suarez signed the agreement. She was released on bond and would be sentenced at a later date. She wanted to get home
and get numb as quickly as possible. But first she had to explain all this to her worried mother.
Back at her apartment, Suarez pulled the last cold beer from the refrigerator as she told her mother that yes, it was true, she had brought millions of dollars to Europe for her boyfriend, who unbeknownst to her was the biggest Ecstasy trafficker in the world. She left out the graphic details of her drug use. Her mother cried. It only made Suarez want to drink more.
On March 23, Suarez took a train to Brooklyn after work and met with Gagne and Lacewell for her first proffer session. Gagne needed Suarez to talk about the money. Money was the key to a continuing criminal enterprise (CCE) charge. A CCE charge would bring Tuito's potential sentence up to twenty years and help secure New York's position to be the first to try him—before Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, Miami, or any other city where his pills might have landed.
Gagne asked Suarez to go over her entire story: meeting Hager, the first trip to Belgium when she met Tuito, carrying back pills, recruiting girls, working directly for Tuito. And then he got to the money.
Suarez confirmed that she had traveled to Europe on several occasions. Yes, she had brought Tuito cash in false-bottom suitcases. Yes, she had handed the money over to Tuito, and yes, she had seen him hand it directly to members of his organization.
Gagne tried to act casual but felt relief washing over him as she spoke. He looked over at Lacewell briefly. She looked back, also expressionless—but her eyes lit up. They both were thinking the same thing: We fucking got him.
“Okay, I'm going to show you some pictures,” Gagne said. He gave her his standard legal spiel—a long, cautiously worded instruction meant to avoid any semblance of leading the defendant to a specific photo: “Some of these people you may know, some of these people you may not know. There may be just one person you know in there; there may be a couple people …” Suarez hated the cold formality of it, because when he finally laid the six-pack photo spread on the table, she instantly saw Tuito's face. It was overwhelming. She asked for a minute alone with her attorney. Gagne and Lacewell stepped into the hallway.
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