It had been a crucial moment in Ze'ev Rosenstein's criminal career. He knew that Tuito and Koki and the networks of yordim had made small fortunes trafficking Ecstasy. But Rosenstein was a purported billionaire from his casinos and gambling package tours and presumably from his illegal rackets. He wasn't known as a drug trafficker and had no financial need to get involved. But informants had long ago revealed Rosenstein's greatest weakness to police—the Wolf was greedy to a fault.
Rosenstein accepted Fogel's offer that day in 1999, and he put Baruch Dadush in charge of their new business venture. They had agreed to share in Fogel's profits, taking up to 60 percent in some transactions. Dadush installed Roash and Ashkenazi in the Battery Park apartment to receive and distribute pills. The new organization had two successful test runs in 1999, moving nearly half a million pills overland from Holland to Germany—hiding the drugs in copper scrap, computer parts, and a vehicle—before sending them by freighter ship to the States.
Dadush confirmed to prosecutors that Rosenstein had financed the deals. Rosenstein didn't know who supplied the pills (that was Zvi Fogel's job), he didn't know who bought them (Dadush and the Battery Park dealers handled that part), and he didn't want to be bothered with the details. He should have kept it that way. But in the spring of 2001, the traffickers had suffered from a paucity of buyers, and Rosenstein made a call to his longtime friend Shemtov Michtavi to ask him to find buyers in the States. Michtavi called Flaco, and Flaco called his Colombian connection, who called the narc. That's when the trouble for Rosenstein began.
Authorities seized about 2.3 million pills total in the Lübeck and Battery Park busts, but when Eshed added up the statements of all the defendants, nearly 5 million pills had been distributed by the Ze'ev Rosenstein organization in a three-year period. For Eshed it was a huge relief. He had stood in front of three dozen foreign law enforcement officers at his conference in 2001, describing the mountain of drugs that INP believed Rosenstein was financing. If Dadush had said they had only smuggled a few hundred thousand pills, it would have been damaging not only to Eshed's reputation but also to the Israelis’ relationships with the Americans.
After a miserable year in solitary confinement, Rosenstein pleaded guilty.
Although suspected of numerous crimes in Israel, Rosenstein was brought to justice in America only on the Ecstasy charges. He was sentenced to twelve years, to be served in Israel under the laws of the extradition treaty.
Baruch Dadush's twenty-year sentence was eventually reduced to ten years in return for his extensive cooperation. His brother received forty-six months.
Rosenstein left Miami in March 2007 on a heavily guarded El Al commercial flight back to Israel. He was cuffed on both hands and feet and wore a bulletproof vest. An armored convoy took him from the airport to Ayalon Prison.
In a symbolic victory for the Israeli police, Rosenstein's plea agreement required that he make a public confession of his criminal acts. In June 2007, he stood in a Tel Aviv courtroom and admitted that he had hired the Colombian hit men in an attempt to assassinate the Alperon brothers. His innocent businessman charade was over.
The mob wars would continue without Rosenstein. The Alperons and Abergils—once thought to be close allies—soon became entangled in a fierce competition over bottle recycling, a $5 million a year industry, according to police and environmental groups.
The chain of trust between American and Israeli authorities would also continue. Just as Israeli police worked with Miami prosecutors to arrest and extradite Ze'ev Rosenstein, in August 2008, INP executed federal arrest warrants from Los Angeles for Itzhak Abergil, his brother Meir Abergil, and six alleged co-conspirators who are suspected of Ecstasy trafficking, money laundering, and murder. Abergil and his network are accused of forming an Ecstasy distribution alliance with the Vineland Boyz, a Latino gang in the San Fernando Valley, and hiring a member of the gang to carry out a 2003 revenge murder of a dealer who tried to steal a shipment of Ecstasy pills.
Like Rosenstein before him, Abergil has denied the charges. At last call, he was fighting extradition to America.
117 “YOU CAN'T DO
NOTHING BEHIND THE
GOVERNMENT'S BACK”
AS ODED TUITO SAT in jail awaiting trial, DEA began to tally up the results of the investigations into the Fat Man's syndicate. By 2004, the nationwide, multiagency investigations dubbed Operation Rave I and II had netted 247 arrests and the seizure of 7.5 million pills, $2.7 million in cash, and $1.9 million in other assets. During the course of the operations, seventy-one wire intercepts were utilized in Europe and the United States.
If seizure and arrest data are any measure, MDMA availability hit its peak in 2001 and then decreased significantly—hitting a high of 5.47 million dosage units submitted to DEA labs in 2001 and dropping to 1.47 million by 2003. In 2001, DEA made 2,015 Ecstasy-related arrests. By 2006, the number had dropped to 690.
Ecstasy also lost some of its candy-coated glamour with American youth. At MDMA's peak in 2001, some 9.2 percent of twelfth graders, 6.2 percent of tenth graders, and 3.5 percent of eighth graders reported having used Ecstasy in the previous twelve months, according to the University of Michigan's annual Monitoring the Future study. By 2005, the numbers had fallen by more than half to 3.0, 2.6, and 1.7 percent, respectively. Reported first-time MDMA use by Americans age twelve and older declined from 1.2 million in 2001 to about 600,000 in 2005. Perception of the hug drug also changed. In 2006, 59.3 percent of high school seniors perceived “great risk” in taking Ecstasy just once or twice, up from 33.8 percent in 1997.
But researchers also noticed a trend of “generational forgetting,” causing the numbers to increase slightly by 2007. It seems that while 58 percent of high school seniors viewed MDMA as harmful, just 30 percent of eighth graders shared that view—a sign that communication about the dangers of MDMA use needs to be consistent and continuing.
The prevalence of Ecstasy in America appears to wax and wane as new distribution routes are forged. Now, instead of the Israelis dominating the trade from the Netherlands and Belgium, it's Canadian-based Asian traffickers who smuggle the pills by car into the U.S. northern border states. But Ecstasy has never regained the level of production or purity it once held. And the Israeli traffickers appear to have mostly abandoned the trade.
Former Ecstasy trafficker Steve Hager believes that the high-profile arrests of Israeli dealers had a direct impact: “The Colombians didn't know nothing about Ecstasy, the blacks never knew about it, the Dominicans never knew about it. But the Israelis had the connections to get it from Europe and bring it to the United States. And Israelis knew from the beginning—this would bring very big profits. But now? Not worth it no more. You can't do nothing behind the government's back. Always—the government will get you.”
118 TUITO'S LAST MOVE
AFTER FOURTEEN YEARS of chasing bad guys in the streets of New York, Bob Gagne was ready for a new challenge. He reached back to his early military training and remembered how much he enjoyed flying planes, before his time in Snowcap. As the Oded Tuito investigation wound down, Gagne renewed his pilot's license and joined a police flying club out of Long Island. In 2004, DEA's pilot out of Long Island retired and Gagne successfully lobbied for the job. Being a DEA pilot let Gagne take his street work to the skies, conducting air surveillance, posing as a drug-smuggling pilot, and sometimes just transporting warm bodies.
Meanwhile, his partner Linda Lacewell had been tapped by the Department of Justice to work on loan with the high-profile Enron Task Force in Houston. Lacewell helped secure guilty pleas from Enron CFO Andrew Fastow and his wife, Lea Fastow. However, her other defendant, Oded Tuito, wasn't so quick to plead out. Preparations for a 2005 drug conspiracy trial were well under way when the Ecstasy kingpin played his last move.
Linda Lacewell was sitting in a Houston courtroom checking her BlackBerry one morning in June 2004 when she received an e-mail from a duty assistant at the U.S. attorney's office in New York: I g
ot a call from the marshal's office. A defendant of yours, Oded Tuito, has died.
Lacewell typed back: Says who, and where is he?
She stepped outside the courtroom to call Gagne. She was sure Tuito had scammed the guards and was laughing at everyone as he jetted off to his next foreign destination.
“What?” Gagne said. “Let me call you back.”
For the next two hours, Gagne was on the phone with the U.S. marshals, the warden at the Metropolitan Detention Center, and the FBI—who had already begun an investigation.
“Linda, it's not a scam this time,” Gagne said when he got back to her. “Tuito's dead.”
“Are you sure?”
“I just talked to the FBI. I read the report.”
“Okay, but are you sure?”
“Yeah. I didn't check his pulse. But I'm sure.”
Around 7:30 a.m. on June 20, Oded Tuito went to work out in the prison yard. His new prison routine of running and lifting weights had helped him shed his portly Fat Man physique. He was in the best shape of his life.
When Tuito returned from the yard, he told his cellmate he was having chest pains. Thinking it was muscular, he rubbed Ben-Gay on his chest and lay down on the bunk. His cellmate left for breakfast and by the time he had come back, Tuito was still in bed, unresponsive and not breathing. The prisoner yelled for the block manager's help. They gave him CPR while waiting for emergency services.
Tuito was transported to Lutheran Medical Center in Brooklyn and pronounced dead at 11:50 a.m. from a heart attack. No autopsy was required, because no foul play was suspected. His body was immediately returned to his family in Israel for a proper Jewish service. He was forty-two years old. He was buried under a black marble headstone in one of the largest plots in the modest cemetery in Ze -rufa, the village where he grew up.
Whispered rumors and innuendo followed Tuito's death. Some said he'd gotten so used to living the good life that he'd killed himself rather than face the prospect of spending the next twenty years in prison. But there was no evidence of suicide. In fact, in one of Tuito's last appearances in court, his attorney had told the judge they were looking forward to bringing the case to trial.
—————
“I just wanted to tell you that you're not going to have to testify against your friend,” Gagne informed Jackie Suarez over the phone.
“Oh … ?” Suarez said. It had been more than a year since she'd heard Gagne's voice and it was never good when he called.
“He had a heart attack, Jackie. He's dead.”
Suarez was speechless. She wanted to tell Gagne that she'd never had any intention of testifying against Tuito. Instead she thanked him and hung up.
Suarez thought back on her time with Tuito, his sweetness to her, and how he had changed her life. She didn't want to believe she'd never see him again. She preferred to entertain an alternative ending—that this was his crafty escape, a faked death. Suarez imagined Tuito back on the French Riviera, salty and free, out on that fishing boat he had always wanted.
Gadi Eshed called Gagne when he heard the news.
“It's a strange way to win this game,” Eshed said. “Now he will say in heaven—or for him maybe hell: ‘You see, I was never found guilty in this case. I am innocent. I win.’ “
“ ‘Innocent’ is a relative term,” Gagne said.
For all legal intents and purposes, Oded Tuito died an innocent man. Linda Lacewell decided she was fine with that. Tuito had been a star among his peers, the original Ecstasy kingpin, who smuggled millions of pills to America with seeming impunity. But his arrest and extradition to the States had been a sign to Ecstasy traffickers worldwide that the American justice system would make them accountable for their crimes.
For Gagne, it was a bittersweet end. He had been chasing Ecstasy dealers for nearly a decade. He had wanted to see Oded Tuito brought to justice. But at the same time, Gagne knew Tuito had died alone in his prison cell, without his family and his children by his side, and perhaps that was a far worse price to pay.
A NOTE ON SOURCES
All of the names in Chemical Cowboys are real with a few exceptions. DEA neither confirms nor denies the identities of its confidential informants, who are identified in case files only by a CI or CS number. I have used pseudonyms for informants (in quotation marks on first reference) instead of numbers. I have used real names if an informant has previously been identified in the press or I have been able to identify the person through other means.
In one case, a DEA informant I've referred to as “Clare” is actually a composite of three different individuals who shared sensitive information with DEA at the risk of grave danger. I have taken some creative liberty in combining the identifying details of these sources in order to further protect their identities.
The events depicted in Chemical Cowboys are based on reporting and research conducted between 2004 and 2008. At the approval of DEA headquarters, I was given unprecedented access to review and take notes from the materials in DEA's New York and Pittsburgh Ecstasy case files, which provided me with vivid case reports, facts and figures on evidence and seizures, confidential DEA memos, interviews with informants, audiotapes of phone conversations, lab reports, operational plans, agents’ handwritten notes, and other invaluable materials. What I could not find in case files, I culled from police records, court documents, trial transcripts, and congressional testimony. I also conducted hundreds of hours of interviews with DEA agents and employees, Israeli police and intelligence analysts, attorneys, defendants, informants, and others involved in Ecstasy casework—all of whom are mentioned in the Acknowledgments, with the exception of those sources who have requested anonymity.
When possible, I met with sources in person and also traveled to the sites of enforcement operations, drug-dealing activity, and Mafia warfare detailed in the book. This led me to such far-flung places as Amsterdam, Amstelveen, and The Hague in the Netherlands; Brussels, Belgium; Créteil and Paris, France; Bucharest, Romania; Jaffa, Herzliya Pituach, Jerusalem, Netanya, Tel Aviv, and Zerufa in Israel; the former San Fernando Valley neighborhoods and haunts of Tuito's Los Angeles crew; DEA headquarters in Virginia and offices in Brussels, The Hague, Los Angeles, Long Island, and New York City; the former nightclubs and residential sites associated with the New York Ecstasy operations; and a visit to the Gagne clan in Pawtucket, Rhode Island.
There are many informative Web sites for those seeking more information on Ecstasy and club drugs. I frequently relied on information provided by the Drug Enforcement Administration (http://www.usdoj.gov/dea/concern/mdma.html), the National Institute on Drug Abuse (http://www.drugabuse.gov/NIDA_Notes/NN0060.html), and the Office of National Drug Control Policy (http://www.whitehousedrugpolicy.gov/drugfact/club/club_drug_ff.html). I also turned to an Ecstasy advocate organization, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (http://www.maps.org/mdma), for its comprehensive information about ongoing research, as well as copies of the original legal briefings, letters, testimony, and documents from the 1984-1988 government hearings on the scheduling of MDMA.
Clubland, by Frank Owen; Party Monster: The Shockumentary, produced and directed by Randy Barbato and Fenton Bailey; and the Michael Alig Club Kids’ fan site (http://www.michaelaligclubkids.com/) provided rich detail on Club Kid life and lore.
I relied on countless articles, books, government materials, and reports to confirm and supplement my own reporting. Many of these are listed in the bibliography.
While there is no seminal book specific to Israeli organized crime, Naím Moisés's Illicit and Misha Glenny's McMafia provide compelling illustrations of the ominous political and social implications when nations are unable to fight or contain the burgeoning transnational organized crime networks that have flourished under increasing globalization.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
“A novelist's son pleads in stolen property case.” New York Times, Jan. 21, 1998.
“Brooklyn haredi sentenced for recruiting Ecstasy smugglers
.” Jerusalem Post, Mar. 30, 2000.
Barnes, E. “Ecstasy in Arizona: A cop and bull story.” Time, Jun. 5, 2000.
Bastone, W. “Gatien's last dance?” Village Voice, Jan. 12, 1999.
———. “Peter's pad? Pal: Gatien bribed an NYPD detective.” Village Voice, July 29, 1997.
Beck, J., and M. Rosenbaum. Pursuit of Ecstasy: The MDMA Experience. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994.
Bennett, D. “Dr. Ecstasy.” New York Times, Jan. 30, 2005.
Ben-Tal, D. “Mafia explosion.” Jerusalem Post, Dec. 19, 2003.
Blickman, T., D. Korf, D. Siegel, and D. Zaitch. “Synthetic Drug Trafficking in Amsterdam.” In Synthetic Drugs Trafficking in Three European Cities: Major Trends and the Involvement of Organised Crime. Amsterdam: Transnational Institute/Gruppo Abele/The Institute for Studies on Conflicts and Humanitarian Actions, 2003. http://www.tni.org/detail_page.phtml?page=books_synthetic.
Bumiller, E. “Sparse crowds and hard times for Peter Gatien, club owner, who maintains his innocence.” New York Times, June 21, 1996.
Butterfield, F. “Violence rises as club drug spreads out into the streets.” New York Times, Jun. 24, 2001.
Califano, J. “It's drugs, stupid.” New York Times, Jan. 29, 1995.
Continetti, M. “Money, mobsters, murder: The sordid tale of a GOP lobbyist's casino deal gone bad.” Weekly Standard, Nov. 28, 2005.
Council on Foreign Relations. “Backgrounder: Shining Path, Tupac Amaru (Peru, leftists).” Nov. 2005. http://www.cfr.org/publication/9276/ shining_path_tupac_amaru_peru_leftists.html.
De Kort, M. “The Dutch cannabis debate, 1968-1976.” Journal of Drug Issues, 1994; 24 (3). http://www.drugpolicy.org/library/dekort2.cfm.
Derfner, L. “A scary place called Pardess Katz.” Jerusalem Post, Jan. 30, 1998.
———. “The outlaw allure.” Jerusalem Post, Oct. 9, 1998.
Chemical Cowboys Page 38