Chemical Cowboys

by Lisa Sweetingham

  “What do you think?” Lacewell said.

  “I think she's fucking scared,” Gagne said.

  “No,” Lacewell said. “I think she's still in love with him.”

  “What? No.”

  “I'm not sure.”

  “I'm telling you she's scared.”

  “It's really important that we get her.”

  “Linda, her attorney would have to be a complete moron to let her walk out of that room right now.”

  “I don't know, I think she's still in love with him.”

  “Scared.”

  “She's probably vacillating,” Lacewell said. “You know, going back and forth.”

  Gagne rolled his eyes. “Yeah, thanks, I figured that out.”

  Inside the debriefing room, Suarez's attorney was giving her the pep talk: You're almost done, Jackie. All you have to do is identify Tuito and you're finished for the day. They already have enough evidence to put him away for a long time. If you back out of this deal, someone else will take it. The choice of whether or not to go to prison is in your hands.

  But his words floated past her. Suarez felt nothing.

  Gagne and Lacewell came back in. The moment of truth.

  “Yeah, I know somebody here,” Suarez said.

  “You think you want to take a little more time?” Gagne was doing it by the book.

  “No.”

  “Why don't you take a little more time?”

  “I don't need time.”

  “Okay. Do you know anybody in there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who?”

  “Daniel.” Suarez had always known Tuito by the name he'd given her when they met, the same name he'd used to escape Israel.

  “Why don't you point to him,” Gagne said.

  She pointed to photo number five.

  “Okay,” he said. “Anybody else?”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes,” she said with contempt.

  Lacewell started to offer kind words. “I know that must have been hard for—”

  “Can I leave now?” Suarez cut her off.

  As she waited at the Brooklyn Borough Hall subway platform, she fantasized about stepping in front of the approaching train. She decided she didn't have the guts.

  Gagne and Lacewell decided Suarez needed help. Lacewell saw pain behind Suarez's vitriol. She tried to be sensitive to her feelings of loss and frustration. Gagne was less sympathetic. Suarez, to him, had taken the tough hand she was dealt as a child—a broken family and absent father—and, instead of learning from it and soldiering on, numbed the pain with drugs. He suspected that as tough as she was in her demeanor, she was that much weaker in her own personal conviction to heal herself.

  Gagne had seen the same toughness in his sister so many years ago when she was battling addiction. Gagne had watched Sherrie beat down the pain and emerge stronger than before, comfortable in her own skin. He knew that she'd had to go to hell and back to get there. Suarez hadn't committed to taking that first step to the abyss yet. She needed some pushing.

  Under the conditions of Suarez's probation, she was sent to dual therapy for drug abuse and mental counseling. She was ordered to wear a patch that would monitor any drugs she was putting in her system. Suarez kept her troubles to herself. She gave doctors’ excuses to her bosses to explain her absences on days she had to be at court hearings and meetings at Lacewell's office.

  Her case was eventually assigned to Judge Reena Raggi, who had become the first woman to serve in the roughneck Eastern District of New York after a standout career as a federal prosecutor specializing in narcotics and organized crime.

  At Suarez's first appearance, Raggi told her she'd seen a lot of Ecstasy dealers come through her courtroom and act like their predicament was an irritating annoyance. Just because they tended to be more educated and sophisticated than the average crack dealer, they seemed to think they were special. Raggi told Suarez she wasn't special. She challenged her to pull herself together. Sentencing would be in five months. Stay clean and maybe you'll stay out of jail, Raggi said.

  But Suarez was in too much pain to give up her painkillers—coke, Ecstasy, and alcohol. Her skin patches kept coming up dirty for drugs and she kept denying that she was using. Raggi ordered her to a thirty-day detox at Gracie Square Hospital. Suarez prayed that when it was over her job and her roommate would still welcome her back.

  On March 29, 2000, Linda Lacewell filed a superceding indictment on Oded Tuito in the Eastern District of New York, charging the Fat Man with fourteen counts, including Ecstasy importation and distribution, conspiracy, money laundering, and being the head of a CCE, a continuing criminal enterprise.

  The new evidence Gagne and Lacewell received from Suarez was the key to the CCE charge. An extradition request had been filed with the French government and Gagne and Lacewell would wait for the French courts to approve it and officially release Tuito to the United States.

  If convicted on the enhanced charges, he now faced a mandatory minimum of twenty years in prison.

  76 KOKI TAKES THE HELM

  ODED TUITO HAD BEEN sitting in a French jail for more than a year, so it was no surprise that authorities noticed a dramatic drop in the number of Tweety pills seized. But total MDMA seizures continued to rise. Tuito's former underling Sean Erez had filled the vacuum of Tuito's absence, and now that Erez was sitting in a Dutch jail, Los Angeles dealer Jacob “Koki” Orgad's business was flourishing.

  Koki had visited Erez in Amsterdam in February or early March 1999, back when Erez was just starting out. Erez was making a killing and had no intention of paying kickbacks to his old bosses. Instead of killing Erez, Koki just pilfered Erez's suppliers, stole $30,000 worth of Erez's pills, and then installed his own trusted associates in a $2,300-a-month apartment in Paris. Voilà—Koki was in business.

  As always, Ecstasy was devoured by New York, L.A., and south Florida—dubbed “the Party Triangle” by Customs for their tourism and spring break venues—and Koki had plenty of links in the chain to distribute his pills there. He developed a bevy of new distributors, couriers, and partners, as well as some of the old regulars: Judy Ben Atar in Los Angeles, Steve Hager in New York, Meir “Benny” Ben-David, and Yosef Levi in Miami.

  The forty-four-year-old dealer split his time among homes in Los Angeles and New York and his Paris apartment on Avenue de Villiers, in a quiet residential neighborhood in the Seventeenth Arrondisse-ment. Koki's close cohort, forty-four-year-old Melissa Schwartz, was one of several partners who worked out of the Paris apartment handling couriers and loads. In return she got about $10,000 a month and all expenses paid.

  Schwartz had first met Koki in 1998 in Los Angeles through a mutual friend. She thought Koki was generous and kind. He told her to call if she ever needed a favor. In January 1999, when her Svengali boyfriend, Victor, made her carry ten thousand pills to New York, Schwartz was too scared to say no, so she called Koki.

  Don't worry about it, a paternal Koki assured her, I'll take care of it.

  What happened next depends on who's telling it. Schwartz claimed years later that Koki took the pills off her hands and she was indebted to him. Koki said he persuaded Schwartz to steal the pills and divert them to Steve Hager in New York, who paid her $65,000, and then Koki and Schwartz split the cash. Their stories converged however, when it came to Victor.

  When Schwartz got to New York, she called Victor and said her luggage had been cut and the pills were gone—damn baggage handlers! Victor wasn't buying it. He kidnapped Schwartz and brought her to a hotel in midtown where a busty blonde was waiting for them. They held Schwartz against her will and threatened to mutilate her and kill her family if she didn't tell them where the Ecstasy was. They eventually took off with Schwartz's jewelry. Terrified, she called Koki in Paris. From then on Koki was her protector and boss. She never heard from Victor again. And Koki never let her forget it. He could be generous and nasty at once.

  Agents who surv
eilled Koki say he was short of stature with big-shot tastes and a hot tub in his bedroom. He drove through Hollywood in his black Mercedes, flashing gold jewelry and designer clothes and enjoying VIP treatment at the nightclubs, where he doled out wads of cash to ensure a constant flow of champagne and girls. He was always talking with his hands and yelling at people. He called his female couriers “toys” and kept company with an entourage of women. Koki had two daughters—an eighteen-year-old and a two-year-old—by different women. According to DEA reports, the mother of his toddler was a woman named Camilla, whom he put up in an apartment near Westwood, California, and bought a brand-new black Range Rover. Sources say he asked Camilla to convert to Judaism for their daughter's sake. He hosted Passover meals. He insisted on eating in kosher restaurants. But Koki's attempts to live a life that pleased God were at odds with his life of crime. He would soon be forced to pick between the two.

  Koki sensed in the months before his arrest that importing pills to the States was getting too risky. Instead of getting out of the business, he adapted his stable of mules. Customs began to see an influx of nicely dressed midwesterners and conservative-looking little old ladies who were smuggling Ecstasy. In one case, two couriers posing as a couple brought a mentally handicapped teenager on a smuggling trip. Customs arrested the couple in Houston a week before Christmas in 1999 on a flight from Paris and found two hundred thousand pills concealed in socks in their luggage.

  Decoys were paid as much as $2,500 to dress like tie-dye-loving hippie clichés just getting back from a narcotour of Amsterdam. They traveled on the same flight as Koki's mules in a bid to distract Customs agents from the real pill carriers. Koki's lieutenants went to great lengths to prep the mules, taking them clothes shopping for plaid shirts and penny loafers. They would photograph them in their traveling outfits and send the pictures ahead so the airport runner would recognize the pill carrier coming through Customs. Koki's mules got a free vacation to France and $10,000 to $15,000 cash.

  77 THE TIPPING POINT

  IT HAD BEEN A little over a year since Gagne gave his speech at the Ecstasy summit about the future of MDMA—about the ease of trafficking and the promise of fast, big money that was sure to make it a gangbuster with bad guys and civilians alike. In 2000, that future had arrived. The Israelis still dominated the trade, but demand was so high, everybody tried to break off his own little piece.

  In March 2000, Customs agents at JFK were just starting to employ MDMA-sniffing canines when they encountered a disturbing new trend: Ecstasy “internal carriers,” aka “swallowers.” Swallow-ers would fill the fingers of latex gloves with dozens of pills, tie the tips to create small pellets, and then choke them down. (Suspected swallowers usually are given a choice: submit to an X-ray or be detained until nature takes its course.) The first Ecstasy swallowers caught at Kennedy Airport in March were two men who had ingested a total of 2,800 pills. Fifteen more swallowers would be caught at JFK by year's end, including a fifteen-year-old boy arriving on a flight from Amsterdam. He had ingested sixty-three pellets containing 2,079 Ecstasy tablets.

  In July, Customs agents at LAX seized sixteen boxes marked “clothing” off a commercial airliner. Instead of clothes, they found 2.1 million tablets worth about $41 million. It was the largest single seizure of Ecstasy in history. The complex investigation involved DEA, FBI, IRS, Customs, and law enforcement in Holland, Israel, Mexico, Germany, Italy, and France. The mastermind behind the network was an Egyptian-born naturalized American citizen named Tamer Ibrahim—a Muslim drug trafficker who partnered with Israeli Jews.

  Ecstasy profits had even tempted three cadets from the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy in Kings Point, New York, who had been arrested a year earlier on board the OOCL Innovation shortly before its departure from the Netherlands port of Rotterdam on its journey to New York. The men had secreted 50,000 pills onto the ship. Two of them would later plead guilty in New York to smuggling 380,000 pills total into the States.

  As demand for pills continued unabated, freelance dealers looking to make a quick buck were starting to ratchet out even greater numbers of fake pills, containing a wide variety of adulterants: metham-phetamine, ephedrine, cocaine, mescaline, codeine, and the cough suppressant dextromethorphan, which has PCP-like effects at high doses.

  In September 2000, seven Floridian ravers died after unknowingly ingesting paramethoxyamphetamine, or PMA, a hallucinogen that mimics Ecstasy's effects but takes longer to work. They popped what they must have thought were weak E tabs and ingested more, leading to a fatal overdose. The temperature of one victim, an eighteen-year-old girl, shot up to 108 degrees before she succumbed to massive internal bleeding. That made ten total deaths since May 2000 from PMA sold as Ecstasy.

  Congress responded to the rising epidemic with the Ecstasy Anti-Proliferation Act. When co-sponsor Senator Bob Graham of Florida introduced the bill, he told of New York Post reporter Jack New-field's chilling articles about Jimmy Lyons's death at Tunnel. “New-field speaks of how the boy tried to suck water from the club's bathroom tap that had been turned off so that those with drug-induced thirst would be forced to buy the bottled water,” Graham said in an emotional speech on the Senate floor.

  Modified and rolled into the Children's Health Act of 2000, the law enacted stiffer federal sentencing guidelines: trafficking eight hundred pills meant a potential sentence of up to five years (previously up to fifteen months) and eight thousand pills could garner a sentence of up to ten years (previously forty-one months). Also included in the bill was increased funding for scientific research and education programs.

  But no story in 2000 did more to put Ecstasy in the spotlight—and emphasize the love drug's links to organized crime—than the headlines from Arizona revealing that former mob enforcer Salvatore “Sammy the Bull” Gravano was heading a major Ecstasy distribution ring in Phoenix. Let the territorial battles begin.

  78 “I WANTED MY SON

  TO BE LEGITIMATE”

  IN 1991, SAMMY GRAVANO, underboss of the Gambino crime family and a hit man responsible for nineteen murders, became a federal witness and helped New York prosecutors put thirty-nine top mobsters behind bars, including his former boss John Gotti. For his troubles, Gravano did five years in prison and then he and his family were placed in the Federal Witness Protection Program and quietly moved to Tempe, Arizona, where he took the name Jimmy Moran.

  Gravano eventually left the program, sold his memoirs (1999's Underboss), bought an eight-bedroom home with a three-car garage and a pool, opened an Italian restaurant called Uncle Sal's, run by his wife, Debra (its motto: “The best-kept secret in Scottsdale”), and started a pool-construction company.

  Michael Papa, a close friend of Sammy's twenty-four-year-old son Gerard, was an employee in the pool company. Papa was twenty-three, handsome, physically fit, and a premed student on the dean's list at Arizona State University before he swooned to the Gravano family charm.

  By late 1998, Mike Papa and Gerard Gravano were selling pills to ravers in Phoenix nightclubs—a few hundred here, a couple of thousand there. When Sammy caught on, it was a perfect opportunity for the reformed mob soldier to teach the boys a lesson. After all, his former boss, John Gotti, had always pushed the family line: no drugs. Sammy once even criticized Gotti's pride when his son John junior became a made man.

  “I myself would be dead set against it,” Gravano said in Under-boss. “I wanted my son to be legitimate, to have nothing to do with what I did.”

  But that wasn't Sammy. Instead of discouraging the boys, he men-tored them. Soon, Gerard and Papa were carrying guns and using Sammy's name to intimidate other dealers. Sammy even brought his wife and twenty-seven-year-old daughter, Karen, into the business. Gravano's crew became the top Ecstasy suppliers in Arizona. At its height the ring was making almost $1 million a month.

  On February 24, 2000, Phoenix state police and DEA arrested Sammy, Debra, Gerard, Papa, Karen, and forty-one others who were named in a 201-count indictment. Pills, guns, and n
early $100,000 in cash were seized. Authorities had been monitoring the business on some eleven wiretaps and bugging devices as part of Operation XTC.

  The FBI later learned that Sammy's arrest had saved him from an elaborate revenge-murder plot by two Gambino family soldiers who planned to blast him to pieces with an improvised explosive device. They were apparently furious with the fifty-four-year-old turncoat after he gave an interview to the Arizona Republic in July 1999 describing his big, conspicuous life in Tempe, as if he was rubbing it in their faces.

  While state prosecutors in Arizona were busy building their case against Gravano, and Gagne had his hands full with Tuito and Erez, Linda Lacewell and DEA agents from the New York Field Division had been busy working a case that would deliver stunning links between Italian and Israeli organized crime.

  79 THE BASEMENT TAPES

  DEA AGENT SCOTT SEELEY-HACKER, who was tearing up Ecstasy cases out of Gagne's old group D-35 in New York, first became interested in a gang called BTS after reading a December 1998 Details article by Clubland author Frank Owen. BTS was a Clockwork Orange–like crew that operated out of south-central New Jersey, Brooklyn, Staten Island, and Manhattan. BTS was short for “Brooklyn Terror Squad,” “Born to Steal,” and “Beat, Trash, and Steal”—and they got their kicks by beating and robbing ravers at nightclubs and then selling their own Ecstasy and crystal meth back to them.

  Reporter Owen trailed the top members of BTS and witnessed their mayhem at a Manhattan nightclub, where the crew staged a brawl to distract ravers before they robbed them blind.

  “When the club finally emptied out in the wee hours of the morning, the signs of BTS's handiwork were obvious,” Owen wrote. “The dance floor was littered with items from purses and backpacks the gang had stolen and dumped—driver's licenses, photos, lipstick and mascara.”