Chemical Cowboys

by Lisa Sweetingham

  At a hearing before the French magistrate on October 11, 2000, the judge announced that he had two extradition requests in front of him from the United States and Israel. That's when Tuito's lawyer dropped the bomb, presenting the court with a French certificate of nationality, certifying that Tuito had become a citizen.

  “Quick work,” the judge remarked. He asked for a response from the government.

  “Mr. Judge, the government of France does not extradite its citizens,” the prosecutor said.

  The judge took a recess to think about what he would do next.

  DEA Special Agent Gerald Graves and Israeli police officer Etty Yevnin, who were present at the hearing, told the French prosecutor during the break that Israel and America were jointly requesting that Tuito be prosecuted by the French, based on the charges filed in both their extradition requests. Essentially, it meant that both countries were willing to give up their cases and hand all their evidence over in the hope that the French government would try Tuito for them.

  Graves and Yevnin knew Tuito was a flight risk and they begged the French prosecutor to ask that he be held in custody pending a French trial. But when the judge returned, he denied the American and Israeli extradition requests and ordered Tuito released.

  “You mean, now?” Tuito asked, seemingly confused.

  “Yes,” his attorney said. “Now.”

  Tuito was a free man after spending nineteen months in a French prison.

  Gadi Eshed called Gagne when he heard. “So, our friend Tuito. I admit that this was a very beautiful and clever trick.”

  “We can't touch him as long as he stays in France,” Gagne said. “But there are no border checks with the new EU, so how are we going to catch him?”

  Their best chance at bringing Tuito to American justice was catching him in another country and trying to extradite him again. But if one is going to be trapped within the borders of a nation, Tuito picked well. He put his family up in a white two-story gated home in the suburbs of Créteil, outside of Paris. Then he retook his seat on the throne and set out to reassemble his chain of trust.

  Sean Erez was in a Dutch prison; Koki was in jail but the charges might not stick; Meir Ben-David, Yosef Levi, Judy Ben Atar, and Steve Hager were all easily reachable.

  Tuito had some calls to make.

  83 THE A-LIST

  IN THE PAST YEAR, Gadi Eshed had been besieged with phone calls from agents and prosecutors in Houston, Los Angeles, New York, Phoenix—American voices constantly on the line, names he'd never heard, people who introduced themselves by saying: “I've got an Ecstasy case. I've been told you're the expert on the ground in Israel.”

  If there was one thing Eshed had learned from his four years in the Netherlands, it was the importance of intelligence sharing. When different units were targeting the same suspects yet failing to share information, it only led to folly and missed opportunities. Eshed decided it was time to have INP officers meet their American counterparts face-to-face, to share intelligence and work together to take down the Ecstasy traffickers. He convinced his colleagues at INP to open their files and then he made hundreds of phone calls to his contacts in the States and the American embassy in Tel Aviv.

  A date in January 2001 was set. INP officers prepared for months, pulling together every bit of case information they could muster: intelligence reports, photographs, and background information on the suspected MDMA traffickers.

  In September 2000, just as the conference schedule and expected attendees was firming up, war broke out in Israel, the Second Intifada. In the ensuing months and years, Israelis’ daily lives were marked by a constant threat of terror. Palestinian suicide bombers killed hundreds of innocent Israeli citizens at cafés, shopping malls, and nightclubs and on buses. Israel retaliated with aggressive air strikes and military operations that killed thousands of Palestinian militants and civilians in the cross fire.

  When the U.S. Department of State issued warnings that Americans avoid travel to Israel, Gadi Eshed was put in the awkward position of trying to convince dozens of high-ranking American officers to come to Tel Aviv to share investigative intelligence about Ecstasy in the middle of a war. Many agents were told point-blank by their supervisors: No way, not now, too hot.

  Eshed's boss at the time, Tel Aviv district commander Yosef Sed-bon, was welcomed on his first day on the job in 2000 with a terrorist bomb attack on a Dan bus in Tel Aviv. In three years there were thirty terror attacks during his watch. The forty-seven-year-old police commander was in almost daily contact with the Shabak, Israel's internal anti-terror unit. Despite the obvious dangers, Sedbon encouraged Eshed to move forward with his conference. He understood that this was an important moment for the Israeli cops to show their cards to the American drug cops for the first time and prove that they were serious about mutual cooperation.

  “Gadi, talk with the Americans,” Sedbon said. “Take your time.”

  After several days of relative peace and quiet, Eshed was on the phone with a New York prosecutor, assuring him that it was a safe time to visit. In the middle of their conversation, a bomb exploded at a nearby bus station.

  “I think that something just happened,” Eshed said. “Let me check it and I'll get back to you.”

  This is it, Eshed thought. This conference will never happen.

  But the Americans needed a sit-down with their Israeli counterparts more than ever. The DEA-initiated cases against MDMA violators had more than doubled from 278 in 1999 to 670 in 2000. And it was difficult for the Americans to make sense of the tenuous links between the cases. The agents who knew Eshed went to bat for him, convincing their supervisors that the Israelis were serious about getting together, cop to cop, to unravel the unwieldy trafficking networks.

  Finally, a compromise was reached—the Americans could go, but with restrictions. Travel was permitted between the hotel, police station, and American embassy. They were ordered to stay out of shopping malls and cafés, and absolutely no riding on buses.

  The conference was held at the Tel Aviv district police station in January 2001. Some three dozen Israeli National Police officers took part in meetings with more than thirty DEA and Customs agents and prosecutors from Miami, L.A., New York, and Houston and a small delegation from DEA Special Ops Division, as well as representatives from Cyprus, Holland, France, and Germany. DEA agent Deanne Reuter, who was helming the Los Angeles investigations, attended, as did Don Rospond, the DEA assistant country attaché in The Hague who'd worked on the Erez investigation in 1999.

  Conspicuously missing from the meeting was Bob Gagne. As much as Gagne wanted to put Tuito away, he took one look at his newborn daughter, fragile and perfect, and couldn't leave her behind to spend a week in a war zone. The day he became a father, his brain had reordered the world.

  District Commander Yosef Sedbon sat at the head of the table in the conference room at INP. He said a few words, in English, in his gravelly baritone. In the middle of this war, he told them, he was thankful that they had found the time to come and work together, to continue the normal life of fighting crime, to not be terrorized.

  Eshed spoke next. It was the first time most of the agents had ever met him, although they had heard his voice many times. He was tall and slender, with light brown hair, blue-green eyes, and a tricky smile. Like them, he was slightly out of place in a suit and tie. In his years working cases around the world, Eshed noticed that Israeli police and American DEA agents dressed exactly alike—jeans, collared shirts, tennis shoes, short hair. But there was something else in their body language, the way they carried themselves—they could always find one another at an airport without ever having met.

  Eshed told the agents that he “saluted their bravery.”

  “I feared it would be just me and Yossi this morning,” he joked. “But here in this room are the people with a combination of knowledge and experience—exactly the people who are able to solve the big part of the problems that every individual and every officer is not able to
do by himself.”

  After a round of presentations, the participants would spend the rest of the week in meetings—sometimes fourteen, fifteen hours a day in small working groups, going through hundreds of case files, reviewing suspects’ photos, crime records, historical information, and known associates. Dozens of INP analysts and investigators sat in to answer questions, draw out the bigger picture, and refine the agents’ understanding of the nuances of the circular chain of trust organized-crime model. A face-to-face meeting with a top-secret informant was arranged.

  As the meeting wound down, Eshed and his colleagues stressed to their American counterparts that what they were looking for was full, honest, and professional cooperation in order to bring the Ecstasy targets to justice—whether it be in Israel, the States, or abroad.

  They had shared information on more than a hundred suspects. But for Israeli police, it was important that by the end of the conference, they devise together a short list of joint targets: the A-list.

  The A-list included all the headliners: Tuito, Koki, Judy. But for the Israeli officers, the number one target on their wish list was Ze'ev Rosenstein. Many of the Americans had never heard his name. What evidence did they have that this supposed Mafia boss was even smuggling Ecstasy?

  INP believed that Rosenstein was involved in trafficking pills, but they had no arrests or seizures to back up their assumption. They had only surveillance and intelligence reports: Rosenstein's lieutenant Baruch Dadush had been seen meeting with suspected Ecstasy trafficker Zvi Fogel; Rosenstein's ally Nahman Cohen was said to have been involved in deals with Judy Ben Atar and Oded Tuito. But what was any of that? A wisp of proof that Ecstasy traffickers were linked to men who were linked to Rosenstein.

  But Eshed stood in front of nearly three dozen foreign agents and said they believed that Ze'ev Rosenstein was financing the importation of millions of pills to the States.

  “The intelligence is good,” he said. They just needed help building the evidence.

  It was done. Rosenstein's name was on the A-list.

  84 ZE'EV “THE WOLF”

  ROSENSTEIN

  ZE'EV ROSENSTEIN WAS A stout man, with graying black hair, slack jowls, and meaty legs. He grew up across the street from a police station in middle-class Tel Aviv-Jaffa in a white stucco tenement building, the kind where laundry always hung from the windows. His father had worked forty years for the Dan bus line, sitting at the back of the bus selling tickets. He was said to be partial to his mother, a Bukharian Jew, who had filled their tiny apartment with the exotic aroma of Persian dishes, lamb, and saffron.

  Like his former business rival Yehezkel Aslan, Rosenstein had amassed great wealth in the early 1990s by opening casinos in Turkey and sending droves of Israelis on gambling trips abroad. Aslan's 1993 unsolved murder gave Rosenstein even greater riches and power. But in 1998, Turkey's Islamic government banned gambling and ordered the casinos closed. The money flow tightened and many gangsters scrambled, turning their focus toward other parts of Eastern Europe. Netanya mob boss Felix Abutbul opened Casino Royal in Prague. Rosenstein bought a hotel and casino in Bucharest. Some went the way of Internet gambling.

  By 2000, the crime families had scrambled to form alliances in order to protect their empires. Ze'ev Rosenstein allied himself with Haniana Ohana and Felix Abutbul. (Abutbul had cemented his underworld reputation in the 1980s after he was caught in a London airport traveling with a box containing a drugged Nigerian diplomat whom he had kidnapped.) On the other side of the war line, the Abergil brothers—Itzhak, Meir, and Jacob—had allied themselves with the Alperon brothers—Jacob and Nissim.

  Rosenstein wasn't just an A-list arrest target for the Israeli police, he was also an A-list underworld murder target—the man to dethrone. The Wolf's reputed strategy was kill first. The blood feuds among the warring families would only intensify in the years following Gadi Eshed's 2001 Ecstasy conference.

  85 “I'M SORRY”

  LEARNING THAT ODED TUITO was free evoked conflicting emotions in Jackie Suarez. She secretly cheered his eleventh-hour escape plan—citizenship. She wondered if he had heard that she sang to the feds. She never feared Tuito would come after her for talking.

  In January 2001, her attorney told her they needed to postpone her sentencing again and schedule a psychiatric evaluation. The plan was to play up her tough-luck childhood to engender sympathy with the judge. Suarez didn't like the idea of having her life dissected and her dead father held up as the culprit of her misfortunes. But she was going on eight months behind bars and she didn't have much fight left. Shortly afterward, her mother sheepishly admitted that she had collected Jackie's belongings from her apartment. She would have to live at home with her mother whenever she was released. It was devastating news. In the space of a year, she had lost her best friend to an overdose, her freedom, her job, and now her apartment.

  On February 23, the day of her sentencing hearing, Suarez prayed for a favorable outcome. She could get time served and be released right away, or Judge Raggi could make an example of her and give her seven years. Her heart raced as U.S. marshals escorted her to the courtroom.

  Linda Lacewell praised Suarez to the judge and said her cooperation had helped secure a more severe indictment against Tuito, including the continuing criminal-enterprise charge. Lacewell's words stung.

  Raggi ran down Suarez's list of crimes. She told her that she was an intelligent woman, but if she continued using drugs, it would only lead to more problems. Then she asked Suarez, “Do you have anything to say?”

  Her family had been begging her to apologize and act remorseful in front of the judge, but Suarez was still bitter. She was angry about being ratted out, locked up, and losing everything that mattered to her. What was there to say?

  “I'm sorry.”

  Suarez choked up, surprised to hear the words slip out of her mouth.

  Raggi sentenced her to a year and a day, with credit for time served. She would be free in about eight weeks. Tears ran down Suarez's cheeks.

  86 SEDER IN SPAIN

  TUITO WAS A FREE man in Paris. Israel couldn't touch him, he had evaded the Americans, and now the French were calling him one of their own. He rebuilt his Ecstasy network with a new partner in Spain named Michel El Kaiam, a man he'd met in prison in Israel more than a decade ago. He abandoned the old Tweety-stamped pills for testosterone-laden logos: Rolls-Royce, Ferrari, and Armani.

  Tuito had long depended on the chain of trust to swiftly move pills and cash without detection. But a lot had changed while Tuito was in prison. The drug cops had finally adapted.

  Gadi Eshed's January 2001 conference in Israel heralded a new order for dealing with the Ecstasy traffickers, and Israeli National Police became increasingly active in foreign posts, assisting with international investigations. The quest to capture Tuito took on a new sense of urgency. If the individual countries couldn't catch the dealers on their own, they would do whatever it took to bring them to justice in American courts, where they would face stiffer sentencing. Tuito's partners were being wiretapped and surveilled by law enforcement in California, Florida, and New York and in Israel, Spain, Germany, Holland, Canada, and Australia.

  In Spain, a delegation of Israeli officers rotated through posts working alongside Spanish National Police (SNP) who were tapping the phone of Tuito's partner Michel El Kaiam. The Israeli detectives translated the wires and helped coordinate SNP's casework.

  In Tel Aviv, Eshed and his colleagues gained a crucial piece of information—a single landline number—from American DEA agents. That number led them to an apartment in Giv'atayim, in East Tel Aviv, where Meir Ben-David and Yosef Levi were hiding out after fleeing the DEA in Florida the previous fall.

  Ben-David and Levi were too savvy to talk business on the land-line, but it didn't matter. Surveillance officers caught the men returning again and again to a single pay phone that they were using to make dozens of incriminating calls to Tuito's cell heads in the States and Europe. They spoke in part
ial code about selling “a half building” (half a million pills) to the “Towers” (New York), while arguing over price schemes and concocting plans to use elderly couriers with fake passports.

  In Los Angeles, DEA and Customs were surveilling several suspects who used to get their drugs from Koki and were now buying directly from Tuito. Tuito was sending by UPS shipments of 50,000-pill loads concealed in picture frames to his new L.A. cell heads. DEA started tapping their phones. Soon the agents were listening to the Fat Man bitching about money owed, favors he needed, and the headaches of being the boss. In March 2001, Tuito lost couriers and thousands of pills at increased vehicle border checks when a foot-and-mouth disease outbreak coupled with the resurgence of mad cow disease spread panic through Europe.

  “There is a mess over the cows, a serious one, not a joke. It's impossible to get out,” Tuito was overheard telling a Los Angeles distributor. “Two friends were caught because of these things.”

  In New York, Gagne was waiting for Tuito's wanderlust to take hold again—he knew it would only be a matter of time before the Fat Man crossed the French border.

  On April 4, 2001, Gagne got the call. The Paris DEA office had just been tipped off by Spanish police: Tuito had snuck out of France and was somewhere in Barcelona. The Spanish police figured it out when they heard Tuito using his Spanish partner El Kaiam's cell phone to call his wife in France.

  “Pack up the family and come to Barcelona,” Tuito was overheard telling Aliza. “I have a safe place for us to stay.”

  Tuito advised Aliza to arrive by April 6 so that the family could have Seder together in Spain. Gagne faxed a photograph of Tuito to the Spanish police to help them identify the Fat Man and investigators from Madrid and Barcelona were standing by to arrest Tuito based on the Interpol red notice previously filed by Linda Lacewell. It seemed like an easy enough operation, but there was one problem.