Chemical Cowboys

by Lisa Sweetingham

  94 JULY 18, 2001:

  ONE POLICE PLAZA

  NEW YORK MAYOR Rudy Giuliani gestured to the small Lucky Charms-colored tablets laid across a table as he spoke to reporters.

  “When you look at these pills,” he said, “they look harmless. They are pink and light blue and white, but these are very dangerous substances that can in fact be fatal under some circumstances and do tremendous damage to young people.”

  Two dealers, David Roash and Israel Ashkenazi, had been arrested the night before when NYPD detectives raided their financial district studio apartment overlooking Battery Park. The place was stash-house Spartan—two futons and a TV set. The cops seized $187,000 in cash and seven hundred thousand pills stuffed inside eight duffel bags and one suitcase. It was the largest MDMA seizure in New York history—450 pounds of mind-altering chemicals, brewed up in a dirty clandestine lab in Holland.

  As news of the bust spread, a twenty-six-year-old Israeli drug dealer in Madrid named Mordechai “Flaco” Cohen was desperately retracing his steps, trying to figure out who was the narc and how he got into the chain. Flaco's life was on the line.

  “Find out everything,” Ze'ev Rosenstein ordered Flaco over the phone. “Why it happened, when it happened.”

  When was easy, but why was a little more complicated.

  95 “A VERY POWERFUL MAN”

  FLACO'S TROUBLES BEGAN in early 2001, when he got a call from forty-nine-year-old Shemtov Michtavi, an old friend of Flaco's father, Elias Cohen.

  The elder Cohen was an infamous cocaine trafficker who had married into the Medellín cartel family and used his bride's connections to arrange several tons of cocaine shipments from Colombia to the United States and Europe in the early 1990s. Shemtov Michtavi—a squat, hard-edged, and sharp-minded dealer—was one of Elias Cohen's trusted contacts who used to smuggle coke into Russia, hiding it in cans and plastic wrap, disguised as food.

  Cohen's son Flaco, the new young drug prince, was fluent in English, Spanish, and Hebrew and his family name gave him credibility and preapproved links to high-ranking drug traffickers. Which is why Michtavi called him. Michtavi had a business proposition, but they would discuss it when he arrived in Spain, not over the phone.

  In April 2001, Michtavi flew to Madrid to propose a partnership. He had access to cheap Ecstasy pills; Flaco had connections to buyers in the States. If Flaco provided introductions to his buyers, then Michtavi's associates in New York would take care of the rest.

  Michtavi boasted that he was working with Ze'ev Rosenstein, “a very powerful man.” Flaco knew who Rosenstein was. His father had also been friendly with the Wolf. A couple of days later, Flaco got a personal call from the very powerful man.

  “Don't worry,” Rosenstein told Flaco. “Nothing will happen to you.” The mob boss promised Flaco that if he got in trouble with competitors, he would have Ze'ev Rosenstein's name as backing.

  Flaco started hooking up Michtavi with buyers, they did a couple of deals, and everything was going smoothly—until a narc stumbled into the chain. In July 2001, one of Flaco's Colombian connections passed along the phone number of a man in Florida named “Juan Carlos” who was looking to purchase “CDs”—code for Ecstasy. That man turned out to be a confidential informant for Miami police and DEA.

  The sting went down like this: Flaco called Juan Carlos (the Miami narc) and they made a deal for 65,000 pills for $393,000, at Shemtov Michtavi's direction. Juan Carlos said he would send his runner to pick up samples from the organization's New York-based associates and if the pills were good, he would have his runner pay for and collect the rest. Behind the scenes, Miami police had called New York police to arrange for an NYPD undercover officer to play the role of Juan Carlos's drug runner. When the undercover arrived at the prearranged midtown meeting place, it was New York dealers David Roash and Israel Ashkenazi who showed up with the sample pills. NYPD officers followed Roash and Ashkenazi back to their Battery Park apartment and made the arrests. The next day, Rudy Giuliani was calling a press conference to parade the confiscated product—$40 million worth—to the media.

  Roash and Ashkenazi pleaded guilty to drug charges but refused to cooperate or say whom they were working for.

  96 “PLEASE DON'T LET

  THIS CASE DIE”

  FLACO HAD UNWITTINGLY INTRODUCED an informant—Juan Carlos—into the chain of trust, and Rosenstein was furious. Flaco was now on the hook for Rosenstein's $40 million worth of seized pills and the Wolf warned him that one way or another “someone would be responsible” for recouping his money. Flaco knew that someone would be him. But where was he going to get that amount of money? He started looking over his shoulder, terrified he was going to be killed.

  But then Rosenstein made a foolish misstep that gave Flaco leverage: he inveigled Flaco into a murder conspiracy.

  Shortly after the debacle over the lost pills, Michtavi called Flaco to ask if he knew any killers who could do a job in Israel. Michtavi didn't say he was calling at Rosenstein's behest, but Flaco knew that the Wolf never made that kind of call himself; he always asked close associates to facilitate hits.

  Flaco told Michtavi he happened to know two guys—Colombian hit men—who could do the job. They agreed to speak again soon about money and logistics. Flaco's next call was to Israeli police.

  Flaco's defensive strategy was to procure hit men to appease Rosenstein but at the same time secretly feed the valuable information to Israeli police. He knew INP wanted Rosenstein, and in return, Flaco wanted protection from prosecution. He would be a secret informant and play both sides.

  Flaco's defection took Gadi Eshed and his colleagues completely by surprise. He gave them the first real piece of evidence that Rosen-stein was involved in Ecstasy trafficking—and the murder conspiracy was the cherry on top. Israeli police officers began to work with Flaco out of the Spanish embassy, getting Flaco to tape his phone calls with Michtavi. He collected incriminating conversations with Michtavi about “the brothers” (hit men) and the $40,000 Michtavi was sending to take care of their fees. Rosenstein, however, never called Flaco again nor was his name mentioned.

  In late August 2001, two Colombian hit men arrived in Israel and were spotted stepping off the tarmac at the Tel Aviv airport. They had youthful faces, tan smooth skin, and thick dark hair. They wore T-shirts and dark sunglasses, like students on summer break. Their assignment: liquidate brothers Jacob and Nissim Alperon—Rosenstein's rivals. They would pretend to be tourists until the order came down to carry out the hit. Tel Aviv police officers watched the killers’ every move for nearly a month.

  While the assassins waited for the green light, they partied like freshmen, migrating from one hotel and bar to the next. Rosenstein's aides had to give the killers 40,000 shekels—roughly $11,000—on top of their fee just to cover their extra expenses. After several weeks, Michtavi unexpectedly rang Flaco and told him to call off the dogs. The liquidation order was rescinded; no reason was given.

  Eshed could never say for sure, but it seemed as if the men suspected they were being watched. At the same time the hit was called off, Michtavi also started acting strangely. He made friendly overtures to young Flaco to visit him in Bucharest, where Rosenstein had a hotel and casino.

  Come take a nice vacation, Michtavi cooed. It reeked of ambush.

  Flaco's plan had backfired and now he was in a serious bind. On one side, Rosenstein wanted him dead; on the other, Israeli police were pressuring him to become a full cooperator—to testify against the Wolf. Flaco refused. Nobody had ever dared to face off with the Wolf in court. But what Flaco didn't know was that he was about to be fed to American prosecutors.

  The Florida narc, Juan Carlos, had secretly taped his phone calls with Flaco and Miami federal prosecutors were using the evidence to build a drug case against Flaco, Michtavi, Roash, and Ashkenazi. In fact, Miami's case against the Israeli drug traffickers had begun when Gadi Eshed used his own brand of the chain of trust and called in a favor to his old pal, DEA specia
l agent John McKenna.

  John McKenna was the twenty-three-year-old kid in a candy store who used to lock up drug dealers in New York's Washington Heights in the 1980s. Eshed had met McKenna in 1991 when they worked together in Eshed's first joint investigation with American law enforcement. It was a DEA heroin case in New York that led to the arrest of Ran Efarin, Eitan Hiya, Johnny Atias, and Yisrael “Alice” Mizrahi, members of an infamous Mafia gang involved in heroin, cocaine, murder, and extortion. (All but Hiya would eventually be killed in mob warfare.) Eshed spent five weeks on Long Island with McKenna working tirelessly day after day, listening to wiretaps and breaking down the network.

  That was a long time ago, but Eshed and McKenna had stayed in touch all those years. McKenna was in his late thirties now and recently had been assigned to the Miami office. It was a lucky coincidence for Eshed that one of his closest American colleagues was overseeing the same agents who worked behind the scenes to alert New York police to the deal that led to the Battery Park bust. When Flaco first came to Israeli police with the information that Rosenstein was involved, Gadi got on the phone to Miami to beg his old friend to keep the American case alive.

  “John, please don't let this case die at the state level in New York,” Eshed had asked McKenna. “Please renew this as a DEA case, a federal case in Florida.”

  McKenna knew how dangerous Ze'ev Rosenstein was and how important it was to the INP to prosecute him. More important, Rosenstein was a joint Israeli-American target, an A-list suspect.

  The Israeli police met with Flaco at the Spanish embassy to give him one last chance. The Americans are planning to indict you, they warned him. Cooperate now and we will try to help you. Flaco wasn't aware that the two countries had been working together behind the scenes, and he didn't believe the American prosecutors had enough to convict him of drug charges. He also didn't know that two American agents were waiting outside, sent to Spain by McKenna at Eshed's request.

  “I will never be a witness against Rosenstein,” Flaco told the Israeli officers defiantly. “Only an informant.”

  Flaco said adios and headed for the door, ready to vanish. An Israeli officer gave the sign for the American agents to move. Flaco was apprehended outside the embassy. He just couldn't win—Rosenstein wanted him dead whether he talked or not and he was facing up to twenty years in prison for conspiracy to import and distribute Ecstasy to the States. After a few days, he finally agreed to cooperate. He was extradited to Florida, where Gadi Eshed interviewed him in depth with DEA and federal prosecutors.

  Flaco had a trove of damaging information about the pill deals, but the problem was that Flaco had never met Rosenstein, Michtavi had never mentioned Rosenstein's name in any of their taped calls, and Flaco's word alone wasn't enough to indict the mob boss. They needed more—another witness who could speak to Rosenstein's crimes.

  Shortly after Flaco's arrest and interrogations, John McKenna flew to Colombia and secured a meeting with Flaco's infamous father, Elias Cohen, a known associate of Rosenstein. It ended up being a very short meeting in a hotel room in Bogotá. As McKenna put it: “We were trying to give him a chance to save his son. If he wanted to come on board with us, and whatever he would help us with, we would give credit to his son. But he wanted nothing to do with it. He denied knowing Rosenstein. He lied right to my face and just left his son out there.” McKenna walked out shaking his head, thinking, The kid never had a chance to grow up straight.

  They tried to bend Shemtov Michtavi next.

  After U.S. marshals arrested Michtavi in Bulgaria, he was extradited to Florida and Eshed flew out to meet with Michtavi's defense attorney at the federal prosecutor's office. Another short meeting. The attorney opened by telling Eshed that Michtavi “would never say one word against the honest businessman Ze'ev Rosenstein” and that they should just forget about a deal. Eshed started laughing and the attorney wanted to know what was so funny.

  “I didn't say a word about Ze'ev Rosenstein,” Eshed said. “Maybe I wanted to talk with you about someone else?”

  Meanwhile, the Battery Park boys, Roash and Ashkenazi, figured they had gotten off pretty easy in New York—sentenced to just seven years. They were overheard on jail phone lines telling their contacts in Israel that they'd be out of prison in no time—five or six years—and right back home. But the dealers didn't understand that in America, you can be tried by both state and federal courts. They were shocked to learn that their next stop was Florida, where they faced another twenty years of federal time if convicted on drug conspiracy charges. The pressure was on. Both men pleaded guilty and admitted that their boss was none other than Baruch Dadush—the right-hand man to Ze'ev Rosenstein.

  It was a huge break for Israeli police. But it still wasn't enough. Roash and Ashkenazi had never met Rosenstein. They insisted they had no knowledge of the Wolf's role in the Ecstasy ring. And Eshed knew they weren't lying. Rosenstein would never touch pills or money. He had people do it for him. Roash and Ashkenazi had only ever dealt with Baruch Dadush and his brother, Ilan.

  The feds’ case in Florida now amounted to Flaco's phone calls and statements implicating Shemtov Michtavi and Roash's statement implicating Baruch and Ilan Dadush. Nothing on Rosenstein. But Gadi Eshed, whose first name in Hebrew means “luck,” had another lucky break four months after the New York seizure.

  A secret international investigation had been simultaneously conducted against a ring of Ecstasy traffickers who were taking Dutch-made pills, concealing them in boxes of dried flowers, and driving them to a warehouse in Germany where they were loaded onto freighter ships destined for America and Australia. The smugglers made one tiny mistake: a wire suspect was overheard saying in Hebrew that he would leave an envelope at the reception desk of the Victoria hotel in Germany. German and Israeli police rushed to the hotel. Inside the envelope was a single piece of paper with an address: Geniner Strasse 82.

  Police returned the envelope to the reception desk and watched from the shadows as a Dutch trucker later picked up the message. They followed him as he drove to a warehouse at Geniner Strasse 82 in Lübeck, a major port city on the Baltic. The driver was met by two Israelis who loaded the pills into containers, ready to be shipped abroad. Unbeknownst to the smugglers, the warehouse was crawling with surveillance teams and video cameras.

  The investigation netted more than 1.6 million Ecstasy pills and the arrest of twenty-nine suspects in Australia, Germany, Holland, and Israel—where Eshed and his colleagues nabbed Zvi Fogel and Baruch and Ilan Dadush. Zvi Fogel was the same man they had arrested in the 1999 Operation Octopus sting and then released for lack of evidence. He was the same man police had spied on taking meetings with Baruch Dadush in Paris and Amsterdam, where they met with the bagmakers. And the pills that New York police seized in the Battery Park bust had originated with Fogel's ring of suppliers, who were arrested in the Geniner Strasse warehouse raid.

  Eshed and his colleagues finally had clear evidence that Zvi Fogel was handling the suppliers in Holland and that Baruch Dadush was overseeing the distribution of pills in New York. INP suspected that Ze'ev Rosenstein was the financier—but neither Fogel nor Dadush would say one word. They preferred to sit in jail and wait for a judge to decide their fate.

  The Israeli police were stymied again. They had no direct evidence to link Rosenstein to drugs—no taped conversations, and no one who took orders from him who would talk. They had nothing to link Rosenstein to the murder plot because Michtavi had handled the logistics and the Colombian hit men were ultimately called off.

  Eshed and his colleagues leaned on Zvi Fogel. But Fogel was a forty-seven-year-old practiced con who'd take prison time without a shrug. (“I'm an old man,” Fogel told Eshed. “What do you want from me?”) Baruch Dadush, on the other hand, was thirty-four with a wife and children.

  The police would wait to see how Dadush's drug case in Israel played out while simultaneously assisting the American case against Shemtov Michtavi. And when the time was right, Gadi Eshed w
ould ask his American counterparts to help them put pressure on Dadush. Eshed would wait as long as it took to play it right. It would take years.

  97 “A PLANE JUST CRASHED”

  IN THE SUMMER OF 2001, Bob Gagne was plucked from the Long Island Division Office and sent back to New York, where he was appointed demand reduction coordinator. He wasn't happy about going back to the city. He was getting used to being home in time to play with his cherub-faced one-year-old. He called her his little peanut. Clearly, he was no longer a D-35 meat eater.

  As the new head of the Demand Reduction unit, Gagne was the DEA representative in charge of drug prevention programs for the state of New York, which meant public speaking engagements and visits to schools and companies to educate them on drug prevention policies.

  Gagne got to know the designated substance abuse prevention and intervention specialists in the city's public schools—often they were teachers who got tagged with the extra job and the title. Gagne found many to be blasé about drug use and poorly informed. For instance, they didn't know marijuana now contained three times more THC than it had when they were toking in high school, they knew much less about Ecstasy, and some still had outdated notions of heroin as a drug that could only be injected, usually with dirty syringes in back alleys. Gagne decided his job was to prepare them to be at least 10 percent smarter than the kids.

  “Listen, if I can bring you up to speed, to the point where you know just that much more than they do, then they will believe you when you talk to them about drugs,” he would say. “And if they believe you, then you have a chance to help them.”