Chemical Cowboys

by Lisa Sweetingham

  “They missed him,” Lacewell told Gagne a week later.

  “What?”

  “Everybody went home for the holidays.”

  Like Tuito, the Israeli police translators wanted to be with their families on Passover. They had been away from home for almost three months. Catching Oded Tuito, they decided, was not as important as being with their wives and children on one of the most important Jewish holidays.

  With the translators gone, the Spanish police had no idea what was being said on the wires. The Spanish cops were preparing for the Easter holidays, and the units were shorthanded. The operation was abandoned. Oded Tuito enjoyed a quiet Seder with his family and then returned to France, never knowing he had escaped American justice one more time.

  Gagne figured Tuito was the luckiest bastard alive. But he couldn't fault the foreign cops. He respected that they chose their families over Tuito. It never would have occurred to Gagne to let a bad guy go. He couldn't even turn his cell phone off, let alone allow a guy to walk.

  Every Sunday, when he and Kristen would bring their daughter to her parents’ home for dinner, Gagne prayed his cell phone wouldn't ring. But it always did. Kristen would give him the icy look that said: You are not going to take that. But he always did. He'd step out to the patio to give his time to an informant, an overseas agent, or whoever needed him in that moment. He'd rejoin the table but he'd be thinking about the call, mulling over the to-do list in his mind. In the car on the way home, he'd be back on the phone. Kristen could see him, sitting right next to her, but she didn't feel his presence.

  87 A SECRET MEETING

  WITH EL KAIAM

  IN THE SIX MONTHS since Tuito had been released from prison and resumed his place on the Ecstasy throne, it had been one problem after another for the Fat Man. Competition was stiffer. The police were better connected. He was losing money faster than he could make it.

  In late April, Los Angeles DEA agents overheard Tuito making plans to send seventy thousand pills from “the Towers” to “down below.” They passed the tip to New York and its neighbor “down below,” Florida. The information ultimately led Delaware state police to arrest a pair of drug runners who had 68,456 tablets in the trunk of their rental car. That arrest led to the discovery of Tuito's Miami cell head, a man named Nissim El-al, who was promptly picked up with fifty thousand pills on him.

  The succession of hits had the dealers burning up their phone lines: Who got popped? Did they talk? And what about my money?

  Every load lost was hundreds of thousands of dollars ripped from Tuito's and El Kaiam's pockets. Tuito desperately needed to have another secret meeting with El Kaiam. They had to sit down and root out all the “red yarmulkes,” the undercover drug cops, that Tuito suspected were infiltrating his business. Tuito knew he had to stay put in France or face potential arrest. But he had been feeling confident after his Passover vacation and was itching to get out of Paris.

  Los Angeles DEA was the first to hear about Tuito's travel plans on a wire intercept. This time, everybody was ready.

  In New York, Gagne was holding his breath and waiting for word of Tuito's arrest. Even with the best intelligence, Gagne knew that anything could go wrong. Tuito could slip out a side door while one of the surveilling officers was on a bathroom break. A translator could miss a key piece of information with just one word misunderstood.

  Gagne was at home, giving his infant daughter a bath, when he got the call from Chris Kabel of Special Ops: “They got him.”

  On May 18, 2001, Oded Tuito was apprehended by Spanish police in Castelldefels, a Mediterranean resort south of Barcelona. The official report is that he was captured as he was leaving a hotel. The unofficial report is that it was actually a brothel.

  By August, New York, Pittsburgh, and Los Angeles all had filed competing indictments for the thirty-nine-year-old Ecstasy trafficker. Tuito vowed to fight his extradition to the United States.

  In the months ensuing, Spanish police discovered that Tuito was still directing Ecstasy shipments from his cell in Madrid's Soto del Real prison by using smuggled cell phones and passing messages through visitors. Instead of confiscating the phones, they intercepted his conversations and let him talk as long as they needed to collect evidence and track down his co-conspirators.

  88 HIS OWN LITTLE

  MAFIA FAMILY

  IN THE MIDDLE OF handling the legal business of Oded Tuito's case, Linda Lacewell was also preparing for the upcoming drug conspiracy trial of Sammy Gravano.

  In May 2001, Lacewell had filed a thirty-four-page motion detailing Gravano's “other crimes”—evidence she had hoped to introduce to a jury to show how Gravano had used his name and reputation to threaten Ecstasy competitors and maximize his profits. The motion also revealed Gravano's alleged plot to whack his son Gerard's girlfriend. Prosecutors said Gravano was so angry to hear that the girl was bragging to friends about dating “Sammy the Bull's son,” that he put a gun to Gerard's head and threatened to pull the trigger—a lesson about disrespecting the family name.

  The judge granted Lacewell's motion—all the evidence would be allowed at trial. She also agreed to allow the government to introduce some of its forty thousand hours of secretly taped phone conversations—a collection so broad, it included moments in which Sammy could be heard singing to his dog.

  The cards were stacked against Sammy. And days before the trial was to begin, Michael Papa decided to cooperate. Once Papa flipped, Gravano was cooked. He folded and took a plea deal.

  On May 25, 2001, Gravano and his son, Gerard, both pleaded guilty to drug charges in New York. The gallery was packed with gavel groupies, reporters, federal prosecutors, and angry women related to men Sammy had killed.

  When asked by the judge to state his crime, Sammy said in a mono tone: “I lent money to people. They distributed Ecstasy.”

  Gerard Gravano was later sentenced to nine years and three months and ordered to enter a substance abuse treatment program. The judge had cut his sentence by two years out of pity, noting that he would likely have to spend his entire time in solitary to protect him from those looking to exact vengeance on his father.

  Sammy was cocky to the end. He challenged the sentencing enhancements the prosecutors were proposing and demanded an evidentiary hearing. It was a blustering miscalculation on his part, because it gave the prosecutors an opportunity to put on a mini-trial to defend their position. Witnesses were called, and the judge was given a detailed, blow-by-blow account of every crime Sammy was accused of—from threatening to kill his young rivals DePalma and Steinberg to running his own little Mafia family in Arizona.

  Judge Allyne Ross sentenced the fifty-seven-year-old Ecstasy trafficker to twenty years—four years above what the sentencing guidelines called for. She told Gravano she wished she could have given him more.

  As for Mike Papa, according to at least one DEA report, he followed in the footsteps of his former mentor and entered Witness Protection. Prosecutors would not confirm or deny it.

  89 BREAKING TUITO'S

  CHAIN OF TRUST

  BY THE SUMMER OF 2001, Oded Tuito's entire network was under siege. On July 29, Tuito's partner El Kaiam was arrested in Spain and his pill supplier was rooted out in Holland. Two days later, DEA and Customs arrested seven of Tuito's Los Angeles distributors. In August, Israeli police arrested Meir Ben-David and Yosef Levi. Ten months later, after exhausting all appeals, the men were brought back by U.S. marshals to the Southern District of Florida for prosecution.

  Israel's legislature, the Knesset, had amended its laws in 1999 to permit the extradition of Israeli citizens to stand trial for crimes committed overseas, as long as they would be allowed to serve out sentences in an Israeli prison. Tuito's Ecstasy traffickers became the road test of the new extradition laws and Ben-David and Levi were the first Israeli citizens to be extradited to America for drug crimes. It was an explicit symbol of the developing cooperation between Israeli and American law enforcement.

  Jacob “K
oki” Orgad had been in prison for a little over a year when Tuito was arrested. Since then, word had spread among Koki's friends on the outside that Judy Ben Atar was grousing about a $250,000 loan he had given Koki and was still owed.

  When it came to money, Judy didn't care if you were friend or foe; he dealt with you the same. But what happened next, according to sources close to both men, went one of two ways. Some say that Judy tracked Koki's daughter down, shoved a gun in her face, and told her that if her father didn't pay, he'd kill her. Others claimed Koki fabricated the entire incident to garner sympathy with prosecutors.

  Either way, Koki was said to be so frustrated and helpless behind bars that he pleaded guilty in New York to drug conspiracy charges, told the feds he was fearful that Judy would come after him and his family, and then ratted Judy out.

  Judy Ben Atar was arrested shortly thereafter. Like Koki and the others before him, Judy cooperated. He provided important information to Los Angeles DEA in its case against the so-called Jerusalem Group, which oversaw the Las Vegas Ecstasy market and was headed by Israeli expatriate Gabi Ben-Harosh, who was connected to the Abergil crime family in Israel.

  For his cooperation, Judy was given a reduced sentence, a little more than five years, and was released in October 2008. Sources say his old Jerusalem associates are waiting for him to dare to return home.

  Judy's partner Itzhak “Jackie” Cohen was arrested based on the information provided to law enforcement by his former partners. But Jackie hewed to the code of honor—say nothing. He was sentenced to seventeen and a half years.

  Koki, who had started wearing a yarmulke in prison and claimed that he had become a rabbi, was sentenced to six years. As part of his plea agreement he waived his right to fight extradition to France, where he faced additional charges. A French court would later try Koki and twelve members of his ring. Koki served his time, was released early, and last heard was living a quiet life somewhere in Israel.

  Koki's former partner, Melissa Schwartz, who helped run his Paris office, was found guilty of drug charges and sentenced to six years. Schwartz languished alone in a French prison. Unable to speak the language and isolated from friends and family, she hanged herself.

  90 “SEAN EREZ MADE

  EVERYTHING SEEM SO EASY”

  WHILE AUTHORITIES ACROSS THE country were breaking down Tuito's chain, Bob Gagne was busy in Brooklyn breaking Diana Reich erter. Erez and Reicherter had fought extradition from the Netherlands for almost three years on the grounds that they were suicidal. They finally landed in Brooklyn in early 2001. The evidence Gagne had gathered from cooperators in the last three years was overwhelming and Reich erter knew it. Once she agreed to cooperate, it was all over for Sean.

  Sean Erez's Ecstasy network had fallen hard: some eighteen members of his ring pleaded guilty to importing and conspiracy to import Ecstasy and agreed to cooperate in the case against Erez. It was the largest Ecstasy organization takedown in New York thus far.

  Many of Erez's young courier-defendants had stood before U.S. district judge Leo Glasser in a Brooklyn courthouse in the last two years asking for leniency in their sentences. Some seventy members of the Bobover Hasidic community—rabbis and parents in dark garb and somber expressions—had squeezed into the courtroom in March 2000 to support eighteen-year-old Shimon “Shimi” Levita, Erez's Amsterdam assistant.

  “Where was the community when all of this was going on?” Glasser asked the gallery. “Where was the family when eighteen-year-old boys were traveling from Paris to Amsterdam, Montreal, New York, and Atlanta … Where were the teachers? Who was keeping tabs on these boys who were bringing drugs back and taking money there?”

  Shimi was sentenced to thirty months in a federal youth boot camp but got out in eight months for good behavior.

  Another Erez recruit, Simcha Roth, had tried to shed light on his actions during his sentencing hearing.

  “I'm still searching for answers, wondering how I did what I did,” Roth said in court. “I grew up in a very protective environment, and the chance of going to Europe and all that money was like telling a child, ‘Don't touch a hot stove.’ I just did it without thinking. … Sean Erez made everything seem so easy. I was living in a fantasy world.”

  After dealing for so long with the Sean Erez case and having to sentence so many young yeshiva boys who stood before him, guilty of drug smuggling, Glasser had grown weary of the obligation.

  “I've had the misfortune of dealing with this case for the past two years,” Glasser said. “This has without any doubt—and I've been sitting in this courtroom for twenty years—been the most painful case I've had to deal with.”

  On July 11, 2001, Sean Erez pleaded guilty to conspiracy to distribute MDMA. Reicherter, who had also pleaded guilty, was released seven months later.

  Erez was sentenced to fifteen years in federal prison, but after five years he was granted his request to serve his time in a Canadian prison. Two months after he arrived, Canada's National Parole Board determined he was unlikely to commit an offense involving violence before the expiration of his sentence and immediately released him.

  In 2006, Gagne got a call from Canadian cops. They had just arrested a thirty-six-year-old drug dealer who'd been ripped off and gunned down at an upscale waterfront hotel in Toronto. It was Erez. He was found crumpled and bleeding in an elevator after getting shot three times in the stomach and legs during a botched cocaine transaction. Police told Gagne that Erez had a new girlfriend at his side at the time of the crime.

  Erez survived the shooting and would later fight the charges. In October 2008, a jury found him guilty of possession for the purpose of trafficking cocaine, a verdict that could send him back to prison for up to fourteen years. Erez's newly estranged girlfriend was the prosecution's star witness at trial.

  91 THE RABBI'S SON

  STEVE HAGER'S ECSTASY DEALING had mostly dried up by the time DEA started picking off Tuito's entire crew. He had spent all his money and had to move in with his parents. He never revealed his past or his drug use, and his family didn't ask. The day in 2002 when DEA arrested Hager on the street in Brooklyn, he called his father shortly afterward from a holding cell and finally admitted that he was a drug dealer. His father had little to say. He knew his son was in trouble because DEA agents had just knocked on the door, asking for Hager's diabetes medications. Hager's father was the kind who showed love and disappointment in his face but rarely in his words.

  Steve Hager was sentenced to fifty-five months. He quit drugs cold turkey in prison, and once the fog of substance abuse lifted, Hager decided he preferred lucidity. His mother visited every week, bringing money and books and reminders of the pain he'd inflicted on his family.

  “If I knew what you were doing,” she cried, “I would have gone to the police myself.”

  Hager's brother Isaac handled so much—making phone calls, lining up attorneys, seeing that he had enough Hebrew books and newspapers to read—that it softened Hager. He felt indebted to his family. They were all he had left to lose.

  Hager had heard once that jail was like a revolving door—85 percent go right back to crime.

  “I'm going to be from the fifteen,” Hager declared. “I won't touch it. I'm not going to sell dope for the rest of my life.”

  When he got out in 2006, he moved back home again, took small jobs, and took regular drug tests as part of his probation requirements. He had enjoyed cooking meals for Shabbat while he was incarcerated and offered to do the same at the New York synagogue. In the beginning it was ten, fifteen people on Friday nights, but soon he was cooking for up to 120 people. He struck a deal with a caterer to buy up fresh, unused food and spent hours preparing salads, pasta, and fish.

  Sometimes, when he thought about his pedestrian existence and living with his parents at the age of forty-six, he would recall his glamorous past—the spacious city apartments, girls who dropped their panties at the sight of an eight ball, piles of money and drugs on his coffee table. But that was ov
er. He was “from the fifteen” now. Mostly, he wanted to be remembered as a nice guy.

  92 JACKIE GOES HOME

  JACKIE SUAREZ WAS RELEASED from prison on her mother's birthday in May 2001. She stood in the rain just outside the prison gates, holding a box of her belongings, smoking a cigarette, and waiting for her mom to arrive to take her home, whatever that meant. She would have to return to her original family now, and as uncomfortable as it made her feel, she would have to start over and create a new life. (She would also have to go to weekly drug counseling and complete a hundred hours of community service. Judge's orders.)

  Shortly before her release, Suarez learned from her attorney that Tuito had been captured in Spain, and it appeared that all his old associates were cooperating against him. It angered her to hear that the tough guys she'd once drawn so much courage from had folded, just like that. She recalled Yosef Levi telling her that cooperation with the authorities was not a viable option. We live together, we die together, he had said. Just words.

  93 NOT OVER YET

  IN JULY 2001, DEA Chief of Operations Joseph Keefe testified before the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee about the “unprecedented level of coordination” among local, state, federal, and foreign law enforcement in combating the nation's Ecstasy epidemic. Keefe stressed the increasing “transnational nature” of MDMA trafficking and recognized Gadi Eshed's Tel Aviv conference as a major step in information sharing and coordinating international efforts to target and capture traffickers like Oded Tuito.

  It was a proud moment for Eshed and his colleagues. The Israelis had been instrumental in helping the Americans bring down the Fat Man's Ecstasy empire. But Eshed knew that their work was far from over. Ecstasy dealing had spilled beyond the purview of the yordim criminals abroad. The lucrative trade would continue to be dominated by Israeli organized crime until the Israeli police finished the job. Now that Tuito was behind bars, Eshed and his officers were focused more than ever on chasing after their own A-list target, the Israeli Capone, Ze'ev Rosenstein.