THE ISRAELI CONNECTION

Smuggling Ecstasy The Hot New Industry

Jerusalem-Taking advantage of age-old diamond-smuggling routes,
groups of Israeli criminals have become dominant in the illegal
international trade of a newer commodity: the drug ecstasy.

From Tel Aviv to Antwerp and Amsterdam, to New York and Miami,
Israeli smugglers have gained particular prominence within the
growing ecstasy trade thanks to their familiarity with the route, the
techniques for smuggling small objects and the tight communities that
Israeli criminals tend to form in Israel and overseas, according to
Israeli, Dutch and American law-enforcement officials and convicted
Israeli ecstasy smugglers.

"Israelis form a very close-knit group in Belgium. People have
connections," said Amos, 23, a smuggler who was caught at Ben-Gurion
Airport near Tel Aviv in April last year with 10,000 ecstasy pills in
a false-bottomed suitcase that he had brought from Antwerp. Speaking
on condition that his real name would not be published because he
fears reprisals for telling his story, he is serving a 5-year
sentence in Israel's medium-security Ashmoret prison.

Although many Americans, Belgians, Dutch and others are also involved
in the ecstasy trade, which is growing exponentially every year,
Israeli organized criminals have been especially quick to take the
opportunities for generating vast profits.

Law-enforcement officials say these suppliers and smugglers do not
tend to be killers or mafia-types; rather, they are less prominent
criminals who appear apparently out of nowhere to become significant
players in supplying America's and Israel's growing ecstasy habit.
Nearly all of them operate out of the Netherlands and Belgium, where
most of the world's ecstasy is produced, using connections in New
York and Israel to distribute millions of pills.

Contributing to the prevalence of Israeli involvement in the trade is
demography: Amsterdam, Antwerp and New York all have large Israeli
communities, noted U.S. Customs Commissioner Raymond Kelly, former
New York Police commissioner.

"Israeli guys always prefer to work together with other Israelis,"
said Yaffa Mizrahi, a senior officer in the drugs and serious-crime
section of the Israeli police. "They all know each other from the
scouts or the army or the neighborhoods. It's a small country. Every
time two Israelis meet overseas, they can always find a connection."
Internet programer Yaish Malka, 48, made his connection when he moved
to the United States five years ago and met up with an old friend,
Oshri Amar, from the Israeli town of Bet Shemesh. Malka was living
with his pregnant wife and child in the Oakland Gardens section of
Queens, apparently a normal and quiet couple.

But Malka had become an ecstasy smuggler.

Malka, investigators say, had met up with Amar in New York, and Amar
had tempted Malka into joining his smuggling business. Like many
Israel-run smuggling rings, it dealt with hundreds of thousands of
pills but was not connected to recognized organized-crime gangs.

Police came to his house one evening in February while Malka was
feeding his baby and charged him with ecstasy smuggling, said his
wife, Yara.

"They were independent entrepreneurs," said one New York investigator
involved in the case. "They were looking to make an easy buck." Quick
money is the driving force behind the trade, Israeli police say. In
Israel, as in the United States, the appetite for ecstasy has grown
enormously.

At a recent rave in the Judean desert overlooking the Dead Sea, young
Israelis danced to pounding electronic music until the pale sun came
up over the mountains of Jordan, across the saline waters of the
lowest place on Earth.

Many ravers acknowledged that ecstasy, which stimulates feelings of
happiness, affection and energy, was fueling their dancing.

Israeli police were out in force at the rave, however, and this was
part of a conscious effort to clamp down on ecstasy's distribution
and use.

"We planted agents in the schools," said Susie Ben Baruch, head of
the youth department of the Israeli police force. "They look like the
maintenance guy, or students. We've used two girls who have finished
military service and have baby faces." Within the past two years, Ben
Baruch also has been given many more police officers to help in her
department's struggle against drugs. While they do prosecute users
and lower-level dealers, they ultimately want to use information they
gather from the ground up to "catch the whales, not the little fish."
They caught a few whales last year in a huge international operation
between Israeli, Dutch and Belgian police, with a final assist from
the New York Police Department.

Amos, the young courier now in Ashmoret prison to the north of Tel
Aviv, worked close to the heart of this ring, said by police to be
one of the largest ever exposed.

Wearing a dark-brown prison uniform that drooped off his lean frame,
Amos explained how he had spent many of his teenage years living with
his father, Gabriel Elimelech, in Antwerp, where there is a large
Israeli population.

Estranged from his wife, Gabriel Elimelech is a career criminal,
according to Israeli police, but he still claims to be a businessman
who owns restaurants, a construction business and other legitimate
concerns in Belgium.

One day about three years ago, Elimelech and his son Amos were
working on renovating a clothing store in Antwerp with other Israelis
when a new face appeared looking for work. This was Meir Maloul, who
would soon become a senior figure in the ecstasy ring with yet
another Israeli, the Amsterdam-based Eddy Sasson.

Elimelech gave Maloul a job, and Amos helped him find a place to live.

"We stayed friends, and we were doing other things on the
side-smuggling cigarettes, black-market stuff," Amos said. "From that
money, he got more money." With some of that money, Maloul got into
the ecstasy business. The Elimelech family joined Maloul in the new
and highly lucrative trade.

With his father's encouragement, Amos agreed to smuggle 100,000 pills
into Israel in a false-bottomed suitcase that was manufactured by a
connection at a luggage shop in Antwerp. This time, Amos sailed
through customs and delivered his shipment to a woman he didn't know
in the Israeli town of Ra'anana.

"My father said it was completely risk-free and the worst that could
happen to me would be they might arrest me for a few days," said
Amos, whose intelligent eyes and own criminal history do not aid his
claims of naivete. He casually tells stories of drug deals and
sheltering guns for Maloul, crimes for which he has not been charged.

On April 13, 1999, Amos, at the behest of his father, made a second
trip to Israel with a false-bottomed suitcase.

Amos is convinced that his father, whom he now hates, tipped off the
authorities to Amos' arrival at Ben-Gurion Airport. But Nissim Cohen,
the police inspector in charge of Amos' father's case, said Amos was
caught by chance alone.

"He was almost released, but one guy at customs really knew something
was not kosher in that suitcase, and it was only because he was very
stubborn that we caught him," said Cohen, who can't help liking the
intelligent and charming Amos. "His colleague said Amos had been
checked, but this guy noticed little round things at the bottom of
the suitcase in the X-ray." Amos was arrested and soon began to tell
investigators about his father, who fled to New York shortly after
Amos' arrest. Outraged that Elimelech would send his own son on a
smuggling trip, the Israeli police decided to seek his extradition.

"We think he is important," Cohen said. "He did something we did not
agree with-to ask his son to import pills to Israel." The New York
Police Department caught Elimelech, 49, on Oct. 31. He is serving a
2-year, 3-month prison sentence in Israel for drug smuggling. Maloul
and Sasson are in prison in Europe, as are many other couriers and
connections involved in the ring. Neither Elimelech, Maloul, Sasson
or their lawyers could be reached for comment.

Cohen, who is now working on another big Israeli smuggling case, is
not surprised at Israeli criminal involvement in the trade. He
expects to see many more cases in the coming months and years.

"Diamonds have been replaced by pills," he said. "Criminals know it.
Twenty years ago, they would go to Antwerp for diamonds. Now they go
for pills."