ECSTASY CHANGES THE FIGHT AGAINST DRUGS

Oct. 2, 2000 - AMSTERDAM, Netherlands - When the Denver office of the
Drug Enforcement Administration received a call from Frankfurt,
Germany, the federal agents learned that their world had changed.

German customs officers had discovered a package, one of seven
containing a total of nearly 1 million ecstasy pills with a street
value of $25 million, being shipped from Holland to Spain, up to
Frankfurt, and then to a startling location in the United States:

Provo, Utah, population about 100,000.

A smallish Western city had become enmeshed in the multinational and
complex supply lines for the wildly popular party drug, which is
manufactured primarily in Holland and has involved Israeli organized
crime members, drug couriers recruited from the ranks of strippers and
Hasidic Jews, American mobsters, Chinese chemical companies and dozens
of transfer points around the globe.

As the Provo connection and other de velopments show, the West is
entering a new world based on a new drug.

"It (Provo) really raised our awareness level," said Tom Ward,
assistant agent in charge of the DEA office in Denver, which oversees
Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and Montana.

"Ecstasy and the related club drugs have become the DEA's top
priority," said Jim Craig, another assistant special agent in charge
of the Denver office.

Narcotics agents, familiar with kilos of cocaine and heroin in rough
parts of town, now are entering a new world of warehouse rave parties
and afterhours techno nightclubs. Many of the biggest busts in the
past have been on the East and West coasts, including just this year
101,000 pills seized in Boston, 800,000 on Long Island, N.Y., and 2.1
million in Los Angeles.

Not much has been seized yet in Colorado, Ward said. The Metro Drug
Task Force in April scored its first sizable ecstasy bust in the
Denver area, arresting James Shirley, Joseph Rae and Cassie Porter at
the Sheraton Hotel in Lakewood for selling 3,000 tablets to an
undercover agent for $16 each. Officials said the pills came from
Holland, through New York, Houston, Phoenix, then Denver, but refused
to provide more details.

In a resurrection of lurid Mafia lore, Sammy "The Bull" Gravano, the
former hit man who testified against mob boss John Gotti, was arrested
in Phoenix in February in connection with a drug ring selling up to
30,000 hits of ecstasy a week.

And in Boulder, police dismantled a small ecstasy lab in April before
it could begin operation.

Ecstasy, which in four years has become the drug of choice for the 20s
and 30s nightclub set around the world, has changed the rules of
smuggling because of its source, its market and the enormous profits
that can be made.

During the Provo incident in February, agents realized they were up
against clever, sophisticated smugglers who were moving the drug from
city to city by shipping it through Federal Express.

"We knew we had to act quickly," said Ward of the DEA. "These
smugglers are savvy enough to know that if a Fedex or UPS package is
delayed, even one day, there's a reason for it. They will refuse
delivery." In Utah, DEA agents put electronic tracking devices on
three of the packages and followed them as the Provo recipient
forwarded them to a man in Los Angeles. He was arrested with more than
100 pounds of ecstasy, one of the largest busts to date in the United
States, said Ward.

Ecstasy, whether in Provo, Denver or Amsterdam, has posed an enormous
challenge to law enforcement.

"All the players are different than what we're used to," U.S. Customs
Commissioner Raymond Kelly told a symposium of law enforcement
officials from 22 countries last month in Virginia. "It's changed our
institutional mindset." Ecstasy, which is taken in a pill about the
size of aspirin, is virtually impossible for law enforcement officers
to find except in large quantities. "The problem with club drugs is
that they are so easy to hide," said Ward. "If it's a private party,
like a rave, the police can't search without probable cause. One thing
they do is to mix ecstasy pills into a grab bag of M&Ms. For $20, you
can reach in a grab a handful and hope for the best." The profits are
enormous, with pills being manufactured for about 20 cents a piece and
sold to users for $25 to $30 each. The drug is common at dance parties
known as raves. It's been used recently at late-night clubs in Lower
Downtown Denver and a party in a remote equipment shed on the Eastern
Plains.

The drug gives a sense of euphoria, but authorities say it can cause
brain damage.

"Raves are really a dilemma for us," said Lt. Curt Williams of the
Metro Denver Drug Task Force. "We don't want to give the impression
we're out to stop dance parties. But we're not soft on drugs. Those
kids are so young it's hard for narcs to get inside. It's pretty new
ground for us.

Smugglers try hard to blur their trail.

"We're finding now that ecstasy made in Holland are shipped anywhere,
to Spain, to Eastern Europe, before they come to America," Dean Boyd,
U.S. Customs spokesman in Washington, D.C., said in an interview.
"We've even found shipments going to Suriname, a former Dutch colony
in South America. Anything to throw us off.

"Australia has had enormous problems with ecstasy. And now it is
showing up in Indonesia ... and the Philippines." In the United
States, law enforcement is just getting wise to the drug. Only
recently were the first batch of ecstasy-sniffing dogs trained for
customs agents.

"We're definitely playing catchup," said Ward.

Not only are the routes different, the smugglers are different too.

For reasons no one has defined, the Israeli underground has become the
dominant player in smuggling ecstasy internationally.

They are the aristocrats of smugglers, rarely resorting to violence,
operating quickly and efficiently as commodity brokers who never take
possession of the drug. Agents say cocaine and heroin smugglers
typically use couriers within their organizations to transport the
drugs.

International authorities, led by Dutch National Police, dismantled a
large ecstasy ring this year led by Sean Erez, a 29-year-old Israeli
with Canadian citizenship living in Amsterdam who used Hasidic Jews
from the Williamsburg district of Brooklyn and from other New York
towns to smuggle the pills in from Paris.

Shimon Levita, an Orthodox Jew from Brooklyn, testified that he
recruited for Erez. He received $2,000 from Erez for each courier,
then paid them $1,500 each for bringing in between 30,000 and 45,000
pills, according to published reports. Levita pleaded guilty and
received a 30-month sentence in a federal boot camp. Erez is in
Holland fighting extradition.

Another Israeli, Jacob "Cookie" Orgad, 44, who ran a large ecstasy
smuggling ring in Los Angeles for two years, was busted by DEA agents
in June and charged with masterminding the smuggling of 9 million
pills into the United States, using at least 30 couriers.

Some of them were strippers. Others were poor families from Texas and
Arkansas who would be given conservative clothes and taught how to act
while clearing customs in U.S. airports.

In July, DEA agents busted an associate of Orgad, Ilan Zarger, and
charged him with running one of the largest ecstasy distribution
centers in Manhattan, allegedly moving 700,000 pills in the New York
area just this year. Zarger, overheard in a wiretap, claimed his
organization was being protected by the Russian Mafia.

"The Israelis have a very good intelligence network around the world,"
said Dutch National Prosecutor Jans Pieters in an interview with The
Denver Post. Pieters heads a 60-person staff focused on synthetic drug
manufacturing and smuggling.

"They also know you can make a lot of money with ecstasy. The Russians
have become involved, more with providing protection. They also are
involved with providing the (drug) precursors, which are manufactured
in Eastern Europe, Russia and China.

"The former Soviet Union has a very strong chemical industry and is
politically unstable, which makes it easy for criminals. There is a
big new market in Eastern Europe now for manufacturing ecsta sy. And
the Russian Mafia is very strong." The market for ecstasy is growing
exponentially, based on smuggling activity and seizures. In 1998, U.S.
Customs seized 750,000 pills coming into the United States. In 1999,
that figure shot up to 3.5 million. So far this year, some 8 million
pills have been seized by U.S. authorities.

Along with the big smuggling operations, authorities are beginning to
see the sprouting of "bathtub" labs, small manufacturing operations in
bathrooms and basements. The Boulder Drug Task Force recently
dismantled a small lab two blocks from the University of Colorado
campus. Sgt. Jim Smith said the lab was ready to go but that no
finished ecstasy was found.

The large labs in Holland are capable of producing 300,000 to 500,000
pills per week, with large stamping machines that mold the powder into
pills with little logos on top, such as cars, cartoon characters and
letters.

The DEA tries to identify the pills based on the grooves left on the
sides by each stamping machine, similar to ballistics tests used to
identify firearms.

"We call it "pillistics'," said Larry Hedberg of the Denver DEA.

Authorities say the appearance of small labs is a troubling
development because of the lack of predictability and quality of
ecstasy and for the risks of small-time users getting involved in the
dangerous business of drug dealing.

Another concern is the generation of drugs coming after ecstasy. Dutch
police say they have begun spotting a variety of "club" or "party"
drugs. "People are always experimenting," said Pieters. "A lot of them
are trying to make the "ultimate' drug." Examples of those include
2C-B, also known as nexus or venus; and 4-MTA, also known as flatliner
or goldeneagle. DEA reports that a quantity of nexus was seized this
summer in Richmond, Va., the first in the country.