U.S. News Article published 2/5/2001 (underlines below have
been added by Radio Islam):
Cracking down on
ecstasy
Law enforcement
is treating the 'hug drug' as if it were the next cocaine. Is
it?By Chitra
Ragavan
In September 1999, two young case agents at the
Drug Enforcement Administration and Federal Bureau of Investigation
in Los Angeles asked federal prosecutor Jean Mohrbacher for a favor.
The agents had gotten a tip that a low-level street dealer was
selling ecstasy, the hot drug among America's teens, and they wanted
Mohrbacher to tap his phone. They got the bug. But instead of nailing
a small-time dealer, they stumbled upon a major international ecstasy
and cocaine distribution syndicate. And all of a sudden, ecstasyuntil
then considered small potatoes in the drug worldpopped on to the
government's radar screensbig time.
In this case, the suspected ringleader was
Tamer Adel Ibrahim, 26, a naturalized American who was born in Egypt
and moved to the States as a teenager. The feds say they discovered
in a 15-month investigation that Ibrahim, a jet-setting, high-rolling
playboy, was buying cocaine from the Mexicans and Colombians, selling
it for megabucks to Europeans, and then using those profits to buy
millions of ecstasy tablets from the Netherlands to hawk in the
United States. Last July, the U.S. Customs Service at Los Angeles
International Airport seized 16 Federal Express packages containing
2.1 million ecstasy tablets (1,096 pounds) with an estimated street
value of at least $41 million. Authorities say the Customs Service
was tipped off by the DEA and the FBI, which knew about the shipments
from wiretaps. Ibrahim, who knew the feds suspected him, fled first
to Mexico and later to Amsterdam, where he was allegedly in the midst
of arranging another big deal when Dutch authorities arrested him
last September. "This is a snapshot of what the new emerging
trafficking groups look like," says Michele Leonhart, head of the
DEA's Los Angeles division.
Red tide.
Law enforcement officials say that the
bust, dubbed Operation Red Tide, is the largest seizure of ecstasy in
the United States and that Ibrahim was probably the largest alleged
wholesaler of the drug to date. The case has raised the curtain on an
alarming new development in the drug wars: the rise of newly formed
international, mostly Israeli and Russian, organized crime syndicates
aggressively marketing ecstasy to Americans, mainly in their teens
and 20s.
Ecstasy was originally prescribed by marriage
counselors in the 1970s because of its supposed ability to bring out
the warm and fuzzy feelings that couples had for each other (hence
its nickname: "the hug drug"). The federal government banned it in
1985 after discovering that it was becoming popular as a recreational
drug and was potentially harmful if misused. But that didn't stop the
burgeoning illicit market. In fact, some say it may have encouraged
it. "The Europeans . . . tell us that we are the worst abusers of
it," says Joseph Keefe, DEA's chief of operations.
Young users.
What's most worrisome, say officials,
is that younger and younger Americans are trying it. Today, the use
of ecstasy is growing faster than any other illegal drug in the
United States, according to the White House drug czar's office. A
University of Michigan survey conducted last year indicates that 1.3
million of the nation's students in grades eight through 12 have
tried ecstasy at least once and that almost 450,000 students
currently use it.
Users like to say the drug is risk free. Not
so, say experts, who point to some serious side effects (box, Page
16). The problem is that researchers have yet to definitively
determine whether there are any long-term medical ills. Critics of
U.S. drug policy grumble that the recent crackdown is little more
than a PR stunt designed to make the feds look good to help them
wring more money out of Congress. "I don't want to make it sound like
ecstasy is innocuous, but I fear there is far too much alarmism
regarding it," says Michael Massing, a freelance journalist and
author who has been covering the drug wars for a
decade.
But law enforcement officials aren't taking any
chances. "It could be worse than cocaine. We just don't know," says
Christopher Giovino, head of the DEA's Long Island, N.Y., district
office. Giovino worries that the DEA, until now consumed by cracking
down on methamphetamine, cocaine, and heroin traffic, may have missed
crucial early signs. So far, unlike heroin and crack cocaine, there's
no evidence that ecstasy is addictive or so expensive that it prompts
violent crimes by users desperate for money to buy more. Ecstasy also
seems to have a pacifying, happy-time effect, so users don't
generally stand out like hyped-up crack users or nodding heroin
addicts. Consequently, Giovino says, ecstasywhich costs as little as
$7 a pill but can run as high as $50 a pop at big-city raveshad
already become the drug of choice among young partygoers, especially
in raves or dance clubs, by the time the feds caught
on.
In the past two years, DEA agents in New York
nabbed some big ecstasy dealersbut none as allegedly big-time as
Ibrahim. "We've had to learn quick lessons of Israeli and Russian
crime groups 101," says Los Angeles DEA agent Michael Braun. Ibrahim
and his cohorts, mostly young Egyptian, Syrian, Russian, Israeli, and
Korean men, allegedly ran a state-of-the-art global operation.
Authorities say they would ship loads of ecstasy from Amsterdam to
Los Angeles by way of France, Korea, and Mexico, usually via Federal
Express. Ibrahim would then allegedly monitor the drug shipments on
the Internet using FedEx's package tracking system.
Floating
labs. According to DEA sources,
more than 90 percent of the ecstasy on the U.S. market comes from the
Netherlands and Belgium, where the drug is also illegal, although
Romania and Poland now are becoming players. The tablets are
manufactured in makeshift mobile labs set up inside 18-wheeler trucks
or on floating barges; they're transported by criminal syndicates,
many run by Israeli nationals, based in Europe, Israel, and America.
"That is the ecstasy triangle," says Robert Gagne, a DEA agent on
Long Island. Many of these Israeli nationals are Russian
émigrés; many have prior convictions for cocaine and
heroin smuggling. Gagne says many are also involved in diamond
smuggling from Antwerp, Belgium, which for centuries has been the
world's diamond-polishing capital. "The unification of Europe has
helped ecstasy dealers as much as NAFTA has helped the Mexicans with
free trade," says Gagne.
Recent DEA investigations show how these
reputed syndicate heads frequently use couriers or "mules" to carry
the drugs. An Israeli who came to the attention of authorities,
Oded Tuito, allegedly recruited female American strippers from dance
clubs. Authorities say one of his flunkies was Sean Erez, who moved
to Amsterdam after Tuito's arrest on drug charges in 1999. (Tuito was
released last October, never convicted, after being held in a French
prison for nearly two years.) In Amsterdam, Erez allegedly built a
giant ecstasy smuggling ring using more than a dozen young Hasidic
Jews as his couriers because their innocent demeanor and conservative
appearance got them past airport security. Erez, who now is in a
Dutch prison, has lost all his extradition appeals and could be
returned to the United States as early as this week. Law enforcers
say he will be the first ecstasy dealer to be prosecuted as head of a
continuing criminal enterprise under a drug statute mimicking the
famous RICO statutes used to take down organized crime families. If
convicted, he faces a likely sentence of 20 years in prison.
"We're hoping this sends a shock wave through the smuggling
community," says Giovino.
Nouveau
riches. But DEA officials aren't
confident that it will. There's so much money in ecstasy that agents
say smugglers don't seem to care about the risks, often even
flaunting their wealth. Take the case of Michel Devalck, a Belgian
who, according to authorities, believed he was delivering 150,000
ecstasy tablets to a distributor waiting for him at Miami Beach on
December 13. Devalck arrived in a 2001 Mercedes SUV that he leased
for a whopping $70,000. Even the feds waiting to nab him were
impressed.
As the government cracks down, ecstasy cases
are beginning to clog some courts. In New York, so many Hasidic Jews
are being arrested as couriers that a federal judge in Brooklyn blew
a gasket during a March sentencing hearing for one Hasidic teenager
who was involved in the giant smuggling ring allegedly run by Erez.
The judge upbraided dozens of Hasidic men and women who had come to
court to offer testimony on behalf of the teen. "I don't know where
this community was while all of this was going on," Judge I. Leo
Glasser admonished from the bench. Law enforcers want to make sure
they won't be asked the same question down the
road.
