ALLEGED ECSTASY KINGPIN ARRESTED

LOS ANGELES - Before it ended in a series of raids Wednesday, the hunt for
the world's biggest cartel trafficking in the designer drug Ecstasy took an
international consortium of law enforcement agents from the rave clubs of
Hollywood through a host of European cities.

For 15 months, the authorities--led by a Los Angeles-based team of FBI,
Drug Enforcement Administration and Customs Service agents--played an
elaborate cat-and-mouse game with Tamer Adel Ibrahim and his alleged
associates. They watched as the young cadre of suspected traffickers
traveled to Milan; Paris; Frankfurt, Germany; Amsterdam; and elsewhere
around the globe--even to Mexico, Israel and South Korea--to arrange their
deals.

Authorities believed the group to be perhaps the No. 1 wholesaler of a drug
whose explosive growth among young people has alarmed those at the highest
reaches of the Justice Department--especially because of new indications
that Ecstasy may cause depression and significant brain damage among
chronic users.

They said their concerns were confirmed, that wiretaps and surveillance
showed that the cartel was engaged in a global enterprise, shipping
literally millions of the tablets from various drops in Europe to Los Angeles.

Ibrahim, 26, allegedly ran the operation from a swank high-rise ocean-view
apartment in Santa Monica and while driving around town in a sleek black
Range Rover, authorities say.

Capping that investigation, the Dutch National Police early Wednesday
raided 17 locations in Amsterdam, arresting seven alleged co-conspirators
and seizing hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash, as well as guns and
other weapons.

And authorities in Washington and Los Angeles disclosed that Ibrahim was
quietly taken into custody two months ago in connection with a shipment of
more than 1.2 million Ecstasy tablets headed for Los Angeles.

All told, the multinational dragnet, dubbed Operation Red Tide, has seized
more than 4 million tablets of the so-called designer drug and arrested at
least 22 suspects in six U.S. cities and four European countries. And an
additional 18 people linked to Ibrahim's operation have been arrested in
law enforcement operations around the world within the past year,
authorities said.

"It's the largest Ecstasy ring in the world that we know of, and we took
them down," said FBI spokesman Matthew McLaughlin in Los Angeles. "That's
significant."

So significant, in fact, that top Justice Department officials said
Wednesday that Ibrahim's arrest and the dismantling of his alleged network
will go a long way toward staunching the flow of the drug from
manufacturing bases in Europe to users here in Los Angeles and elsewhere in
the United States.