DRUG WAR'S NEW FRONT

It was midafternoon, and six U.S. Customs inspectors and a dog named Bird
were standing next to a clanking baggage conveyor belt that runs beneath
Newark International Airport's Terminal B, waiting for the "blitz" to begin.

"The aircraft is pulling into the gate," Maryam Assad, a supervisory
Customs inspector, yelled to her colleagues over the noisy conveyor, after
hearing the message on her walkie-talkie.

Within minutes, the "blitz" was in full swing -- every piece of luggage
taken from the hold of Continental's Flight 71 from Amsterdam was being fed
through a portable X-ray machine in a Customs van, and Bird, an
enthusiastic black Labrador, was loping along the baggage conveyor belt,
sniffing suitcases and backpacks for the telltale chemical odor of Ecstasy.

Not long ago, affluent "culture tourists," business travelers, and college
backpackers arriving at Newark on flights from Western Europe received far
less scrutiny from Customs inspectors. Instead, the bags of travelers
coming from South American countries where cocaine and heroin are produced
were the most likely to be "blitzed" -- subjected to a complete luggage search.

But the growing popularity of Ecstasy has prompted Customs officials at
Newark Airport to make a dramatic shift in the way they do business. The
agency's newly aggressive posture was formulated after an incident last
fall that deeply alarmed ranking Customs officials in New Jersey.

That was when inspectors discovered that three Dutch tourists in their 50s
had arrived at Terminal B with 106 pounds of the hallucinogenic drug in a
suitcase. It still ranks today as the nation's largest seizure of Ecstasy
from air passengers.

But what really disturbed Customs officials was the realization that they
may have been missing many other Ecstasy smugglers coming across the
Atlantic, people who would never have received a second glance from an
inspector.

"That was a wake-up call for the Customs Service," said Thomas E. Manifase,
assistant special agent in charge of the agency investigative office in
Newark. "When you have that kind of [drug] weight on three middle-aged
tourists -- we changed the way we looked at some of these European flights
because of that large seizure."

So, inspectors at Newark have begun to closely scrutinize travelers coming
from the Netherlands and Belgium, where experts believe nearly 90 percent
of the worldwide supply of Ecstasy is produced in illicit laboratories. And
because Newark has more than a half-dozen non-stop flights arriving from
Amsterdam and Brussels, it enjoys the dubious distinction of being the
second busiest airport in the nation for Ecstasy seizures -- only slightly
behind Kennedy International Airport, which holds the lead.

"We saw this explosion of Ecstasy, a really alarming increase," Manifase
said of the past year. "Ecstasy has become the most popular drug. Our
seizures of Ecstasy are far above seizures for cocaine and heroin. This is
a top priority."

In 1998, inspectors made only a single seizure of Ecstasy -- just over 13
pounds -- at Newark Airport. Then in 1999, Ecstasy seizures at the airport
sky rocketed to a total of 319 pounds. So far this year, inspectors have
made 18 seizures, totaling 240 pounds.

Responding to the Ecstasy trend, inspectors at Newark stop and question
more travelers arriving on European flights, and direct more to tables
where their luggage is sometimes searched. They are also conducting more
"blitzes" of European flights, and additional resources have been assigned
to the Ecstasy enforcement effort.

Federal authorities say the drug, which has both hallucinogenic and
stimulant properties, has attracted an enthusiastic following among some
young people who live in North Jersey suburban towns. Often it is used in
nightclubs in Hoboken, the Jersey Shore and in Manhattan, as well as at
all-night "rave" parties sometimes held in warehouses or other industrial
neighborhoods.

Top officials of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration say the pills are
manufactured by Dutch chemists and largely trafficked by factions of
Israeli organized-crime groups. The profit margins in the illicit business
are astronomical; Ecstasy pills cost as little as 5 cents apiece to
manufacture, but sell for $30 in the clubs, Manifase said.

The laboratory synthesis of the drug is complex, requiring scientific
expertise, and the chemicals used to make it are heavily regulated in the
U.S. But the outlaw trafficking groups purchase these chemicals in Eastern
Europe, where law enforcement is less stringent. Then they transport these
materials across the continent, where today few frontier controls exist, to
clandestine labs in the Low Countries.

The traffickers employ American, Israeli, and Western European couriers,
who travel as tourists with some 10,000 to 20,000 pills concealed on their
person. Sometimes suitcases are rigged with secret compartments that can
carry up to 50,000 pills, which is equivalent to 10 kilograms of Ecstasy.

As Customs inspectors at Newark and other airports across the country have
become more successful finding Ecstasy shipments, the traffickers have
introduced new techniques to hoodwink the authorities. The organizations
have recruited middle-class travelers -- sometimes in bars -- and pay them
up to $10,000 and throw in a free vacation in exchange for transporting the
pills.

Often, these couriers are told that Ecstasy is a harmless substance that is
not illegal in the United States, authorities said. But federal authorities
say the drug is both dangerous and against the law.

Concerns about potential health risks -- including memory loss and heart
problems -- and the growing popularity of the drug have prompted lawmakers
to increase the criminal penalties for Ecstasy trafficking.

Under New Jersey law, people convicted of possessing small quantities of
Ecstasy for personal use face up to five years in state prison. Those
convicted of having more than five ounces of the drug -- roughly 500 pills
- -- can be sentenced to up to 20 years behind bars, the same penalty facing
major traffickers under federal law.

The wide variety of travelers now carrying the drug has made the Customs
Service's job more challenging.

"We're getting all types of people, as young as 19 and as old as 63," said
Edward J. Morera, a supervisory customs inspector at Newark's Terminal B,
as he watched luggage from the Amsterdam flight pass on the conveyor belt.

Recently, one man discovered carrying Ecstasy made Morera do a double-take,
when he saw the Dutch passenger sitting in the agency's airport detention area.

"He looked like a college professor," Morera said. "He had almost 18 pounds
of the stuff."

To confound the Customs inspectors, traffickers have begun to ship the
pills from the Netherlands and Belgium into neighboring countries. There,
the smugglers depart from airports in Paris, Frankfurt, and London, in
hopes that less official attention will be paid to these flights, Morera
said over the din of the conveyor area.

Ecstasy traffickers use other sophisticated tactics, such as sending
couriers through airports on "dry runs." The purpose of these no-drugs
trips are for the criminal organizations to take note what kind of
travelers, and what kind of attire, attracts greater attention from
Customs. Then they formulate new smuggling techniques.

"They see how the inspections go," Manifase, the investigator, said. "They
have a whole list of 'do's and don'ts: how you should act and what you
should wear.' They're light-years ahead of where we think they are."

So, Ecstasy couriers now don suits when they travel on European flights
frequented by business executives, and put on shorts and sneakers when
taking a route popular with summer tourists, officials said.

The latest Ecstasy smuggling twist is to fly from Europe to the Caribbean,
particulary Curacao in the Dutch West Indies, the Dominican Republic, and
Suriname, the former Dutch colony in northeastern South America. The
smugglers hope that inspectors will not be looking for Ecstasy on flights
from these regions, officials said.

Some smugglers have even started body-carrying, which entails the
potentially deadly practice of swallowing condoms filled with Ecstasy
pills. The organizations are also now giving their couriers smaller
quantities of the drug to carry, hoping to reduce their losses if they are
caught by inspectors.

Underneath the Customs arrival hall, Morera and his fellow inspectors
closely eyed the bags as they passed on the conveyor belt. Bird, the black
Lab, had pawed at several, and inspectors took them off the belt for a
second sniff. There are now two Customs dogs at Newark Airport trained to
alert to the smell of MDMA, the name for the synthetic chemical compound
that is the active ingredient of Ecstasy.

Other inspectors stare at the screen on the X-ray van and look for the
tablets inside luggage.

"Lots of dots," is the way Morera says the drug looks like on the monitor
screen.

More airline baggage trucks arrive with bags in a line of trailers. The
inspectors looked at hundreds of bags, scanning labels, and baggage tags,
lifting some to feel their weight. Several suitcases that the dog alerted
to were sent upstairs, where other inspectors in the arrival hall opened
them in the presence of their owners.

But no Ecstasy was found on the Amsterdam flight.

Federal authorities, however, know the drug is somehow making its way into
the country. Testifying before a congressional caucus hearing on Ecstasy
last month, a high-ranking official of the U.S. Drug Enforcement
Administration said German police authorities believe that more than 2
million pills are being smuggled into the United States each week from
various cities throughout Europe.

Morera concedes that stopping the increasingly popular drug is no easy task.

"You figure 15,000 passengers come though here a day," he said of the
aiport's Customs arrival hall one floor above. "It's just not humanly
possible to examine them all. You'd need an army."