E-COMMERCE

Once just for raves, ecstasy is now all the rage -- the favorite party
pill of wall streeters, prep-school kids, and mall rats alike.
Smugglers (JFK is their favorite route) may be the most ecstatic of
all -- but the government is definitely not amused.

At around 3 A.M. on a warm Friday night, Paul, a stockbroker in
his late twenties, is waiting for his ecstasy dealer in front of
the Gramercy Tavern, where he's just had a few drinks with
friends.

John, a club kid who delivers the drug to clients who beep him
or call on his cell phone, is running 45 minutes late, and Paul, who took
a hit of ecstasy half an hour ago, is furious. "My girl is already
rolling" -- tripping on ecstasy -- he says. "She's just waiting to get
fucked."

Paul starts dialing his dealer's cell phone and launches into a
tirade. "I don't need this shit," he says. "I've got another delivery
service that's way better -- a team of three hot girls who deliver
ecstasy to your apartment." Besides, he continues, "I've been telling
John that if he gets his shit together, he could make some real bucks.

The older guys on the Street are into coke, but there are traders on
the floor who would order hundreds of pills a day from him. They don't
know shit about ecstasy, either.

They'd probably pay $50 a pill -- money doesn't mean a thing to
them."

Moments later, John stops short by the curb and swings open the front
passenger door of his Jeep Cherokee. "Sorry, Paul," he says, wiping
sweat from a pale forehead partly covered with boyish brown bangs.
"I've been mad busy tonight." Paul snaps his cell phone shut and hops
in. "Here's 90 percent of your order," John says, handing Paul two
large Ziploc bags filled with 200 white pills between them. "I've
gotta run back downtown to get the rest." Paul glances at his purchase
- -- about $5,000 worth of ecstasy that should last him and his
stockbroker buddies through the weekend -- and says, "You'd better be
back fast. I'm not waiting on the street for drugs. This isn't 1974,
man."

Certainly not. A big guy with short hair, black jeans, and a frat-boy
swagger, Paul couldn't have less in common with the club kids who
popularized ecstasy in the early nineties.

After all, he has to keep track of trades in the morning.

But although he's been using the drug for just a year, he's doing so
with a similar abandon -- he says he goes through 20 or 30 pills a
weekend. "This," says Paul, holding up a bag, "is for my best buddy's
going-away party tomorrow night. We're gonna hire a bunch of strippers
and give them as much ecstasy as they want." A crooked smile crosses
his face, the first effect of the pill he just took. "This" -- he
holds up the other -- "is for tonight with my girl and the Hamptons
tomorrow."

Once found almost exclusively at raves or in college dorms, ecstasy is
nearing the cultural ubiquity marijuana reached at the beginning of
the seventies and cocaine achieved in the mid-eighties. "It's sweeping
through our society faster than crack," says Gary Murray, East Coast
representative of the U.S. Customs Ecstasy Task Force, a division
formed four months ago in response to the drug's growing popularity.
Except that "with crack you could say, 'These people over here are
doing it, and these people aren't.' You can't do that with ecstasy
now. Everyone's doing it."

Patented by the German pharmaceutical company E. Merck in 1914 (under
its chemical name MDMA, or 3,4 methylenedioxymethamphetamine), ecstasy
was first widely used during the seventies to help patients open up to
psychiatrists during therapy.

By the end of the decade, the drug had crossed over from the couch to
the dance floor at gay discos in New York, Chicago, and especially
Dallas. In 1985, then-Texas senator Lloyd Bentsen successfully lobbied
to have the DEA make MDMA a "Schedule 1" drug, subject to criminal
penalties similar to those for cocaine and heroin.

Now, like pot in the seventies and coke in the eighties, ecstasy --
also called X, E, or rolls -- is seen as fairly harmless,
hangover-free fun. Unlike cocaine, which leads to obvious trips to the
bathroom, accusations of being stuck in the Greed Decade, and often
addiction, ecstasy is inconspicuous and physically nonaddictive.
Usually taken as a pill that has a small, stamped logo "borrowed" from
pop or corporate culture -- Nike, Calvin Klein, Mitsubishi, Motorola,
and Tweety Bird are among the popular "brands" -- ecstasy induces
waves of euphoria and heightened physical sensations (especially
tactile ones). But it's not disorienting enough in moderate doses to
prevent users from remaining aware and outgoing.

Aside from occasional cautionary tales about dehydration and
overdoses, the word-of-mouth on ecstasy is overwhelmingly positive.
"There's this perception of harmlessness surrounding ecstasy that
other drugs simply don't have," says Bridget Brennan, the DEA's
special narcotics prosecutor for New York City. At $20 to $30 for a
pill that lasts four to six hours, it's also a bargain in the age of
the $9 Cosmopolitan. "You could spend that kind of money in fifteen
minutes at any bar in the city," notes a thirtysomething A&R executive
who often takes the drug with friends at his country house in Sag Harbor.

Though ecstasy is still nowhere near as mainstream in the U.S. as it
is in England, much of its jump in popularity can be explained by
older ecstasy users whose clubgoing days are long behind them -- if
they ever happened at all. "It's such a cool drug because you can mold
it into whatever you want to do," says Steve, an artist in his late
twenties who sheepishly admits, "I missed the whole rave thing."
Instead of hitting nightspots like Twilo, Steve takes ecstasy when he
hangs out with friends at bars. "When you do ecstasy, you realize how
paranoid you've been around people," he says. "Ecstasy breaks down
those barriers."

Plenty of other users began taking the drug in college and simply
never stopped. A thirtysomething architect named Mark remembers using
it with his fraternity brothers and their "groupies" at a California
college in the late eighties. "We'd have this little lovefest where
everybody was making out with everybody -- not crazy sex games or
anything but just the whole ecstasy thing of wanting to wrap your
tongue around somebody," he says. He's grown up now, with a
high-paying job and a nice loft downtown, but he still uses ecstasy as
a social lubricant.

His architect girlfriend "was one of those people who wanted to rebel
but came from a very conservative household," he says. "It made her
relax and cut loose and not be so self-conscious. She absolutely loved
it."

Nor is ecstasy confined to party-prone young people.

Tom, a 44-year-old movie executive, takes ecstasy with the intensity of
a club kid ("If it's good, I'll take like six in one evening"), but only in
his downtown loft. "Usually when we do ecstasy, it's a very quiet,
intimate thing," he says. "I've never understood the whole concept of
doing ecstasy out in public. One time we did E and went to Vinyl.
I just ended up sitting there for about ten minutes and leaving."

Just how widespread is ecstasy in New York? "It's everywhere," a
suburban Long Island teenager now enrolled at Daytop Village's
Huntington, Long Island, adolescent drug-rehab facility told New York.
"It's easier to get an E pill than a pack of cigarettes. You need I.D.
for that, you know." Another teenage patient there agreed. "We'd talk
about it during social studies: 'You gonna do E this weekend?' " One
dealer even said his aunt asked him about it: "A friend of hers read
about it and was interested in trying it."

"Everybody is into ecstasy," says Suave, another dealer, "straight,
gay, black, yellow, red, white, brown, whatever."

Well past 2 a.m. on a Wednesday night, Suave is kicking back on a tan
leather couch in the VIP room of Float, a multilevel midtown nightspot
known for hosting dot-com launch parties and boasting Prince as a regular.

Discreetly holding a cigarette-size joint by his side, he's regaling a
dozen or so fellow partyers -- editors, stylists, Web designers --
with stories about his week of club-hopping. "Yo, the VIP room at NV
is the illest," he says, pausing to look down at the cell phone on his
hip that vibrates with an incoming call every few minutes. "There were
so many models up in there I thought I was in a fashion shoot." The
Gucci-and-Fendi-clad group, here for promoter Derek Corley's weekly
upscale hip-hop party, laughs in unison. "Have y'all been to Joe's Pub
on Tuesday nights?" Suave asks. "The girls are so fine."

But Suave isn't there for the women.

Like so many of the beautiful people around him, he goes clubbing to
network.

He's a new kind of ecstasy dealer, one who sells from a cell phone
instead of a crinkled plastic Baggie full of pills. "I would never
sell in a club," he says. "The security sweats you like mad. Plus, you
have no idea who you're selling to. It could easily be an undercover
cop."

At first glance, Suave seems like just another sociable single guy on
the make -- albeit one who hits several high-end hot spots like Ohm,
Cheetah, and Justin's in a single night. "I'll see a pretty girl or
maybe a guy that looks cool and strike up a conversation," he
explains, adjusting the brim of the Ralph Lauren baseball cap that
hides a shock of kinky hair. "I'll ask, 'Do you smoke weed?' or 'Do
you do ecstasy?' If they seem cool, they get my number, and we'll get
a relationship going from there."

Suave's casual networking style suits his clientele perfectly: His
regular customers include editors from at least one national magazine,
brokers at major investment banks, and Website designers at dot-com
start-ups. In fact, he only deals to professionals, because "they
treat me right," he says. "These aren't the kind of people who'll be
begging me for free pills." He won't sell to ravers, because they
always ask to meet him in nightclubs and "they're terrible with
money," he says. "They can't hang on to it for a minute."

Like Suave, Greg, who has dealt ketamine, cocaine, marijuana, and
mushrooms at one time or another, conducts business far from the limelight.

He sells only out of his Chelsea apartment and only to friends of
friends who have one of the yellow business cards with his pager
number. "You don't have to go to a club to get E anyway," he says.
"You can just make a few calls and have it before you go out for the
night." To keep his neighbors from getting suspicious, he maintains
well-known "office hours" -- by 10 p.m. most nights, he's in bed or
watching a movie on his DVD player.

Some of his customers keep similar hours. "I've sold to couples in
their sixties and people in their forties who have families," he says.
"Just last month, a friend of mine who's in his mid-thirties finally
tried ecstasy for the first time," he continues. "He bought a couple
of pills from me and took his girlfriend out on a rowboat in Central
Park."

Because of increasing demand and his high profit margin, he says,
"selling ecstasy is a ridiculously easy way to make money." Greg sells
pills for $30 that most dealers buy for $8 to $11. Suave buys pills
for $11 from a distributor in Brooklyn, then sells them for $20 to $30
to customers who beep or call him. "If they're buying a bunch of
pills," Suave says, "I'll throw in two or three to make them feel good
about working with me." For purchases of 100 or more, he charges $20
per pill. "Quantity calls are what keep me in business," he says.
"Keep those orders for 100 and more coming, and I'm a very happy man."

A typical day for Suave begins in the late afternoon, when he's
awakened by a phone call or beeper message from a customer at a law
firm, publishing house, or Internet start-up. "My music-industry
customers are my favorites," he says, "because they hook me up with
concert tickets and free CDs." (Another regular client is helping him
put together a portfolio so he can pursue a career as a model.) He
delivers ecstasy on foot or by taxi until around midnight, then heads
out to clubs to meet more potential customers. "On a bad week, when
I'm not getting many calls or I'm too lazy to really work it, I'll
make $1,000," he says. "On an average week, where things are business
as usual, I'll make about $3,000 to $4,000. A great week, where
there's a holiday or a big party, I'll make $5,000."

Though the frenzy for ecstasy is national -- legislators in both the
House and the Senate are working on bills to increase penalties -- the
two most popular U.S. points of entry for the drug are JFK and Newark
airports, according to law-enforcement sources.

So far this year, New York accounts for more than 2 million of the
nearly 7 million hits of ecstasy seized by Customs. "Because of our
airports and the presence of organized crime, New York is a critical
port for the importation of ecstasy," says Brennan. Even given these
conditions, Brennan struggles to account for the ecstasy explosion.
"The numbers are staggering," she says.

According to information compiled by U.S. Customs, many
distributors pay Dutch or Israeli smuggling rings $100,000
for bringing them 200,000 pills from the Netherlands or Belgium.
They then sell those pills to dealers for $8 to $11 apiece, earning a
profit of $1.5 million.

That might seem like an awful lot of ecstasy to unload, but demand is
so high, most dealers purchase by the thousand. "Ecstasy is a much
neater business [than cocaine or heroin]," says Customs commissioner
Raymond W. Kelly. "You can invest $100,000 as a distributor and get $5
million back."

Before it was busted in February, the Israeli ecstasy ring that
supplied Greg out of an apartment in Forest Hills sold dealers as many
as 100,000 pills a week, according to the Queens district attorney's
office. One member was observed by the DEA saying he needed 10,000
ecstasy tablets immediately and 25,000 more within the hour.

Both the reach and the organization of the Forest Hills ring were
impressive. "They were very, very smart -- even if you were buying a
few thousand pills, you'd always deal with the guy lowest on the totem
pole," says Greg. "And their reach was amazing. I would buy pills from
them, and the next week I'd talk to friends out in San Francisco and
Dallas who had the exact same pills."

An even bigger Israeli ring, allegedly run by 29-year-old Amsterdam
resident Sean Erez, recruited Hasidic Jews from Williamsburg,
Brooklyn, and Monsey, New York, to smuggle ecstasy from Amsterdam
through Paris. Although Erez and his girlfriend remain in Dutch
custody fighting extradition, the other people named in the indictment
all pleaded guilty, including Shimon Levita, an Orthodox Jew from
Brooklyn who helped Erez recruit Hasidim, who were given $1,500 for
each trip. When the ring was busted, Erez had almost $475,000 in a
Luxembourg bank account, and law-enforcement officials estimated it
had smuggled more than a million tablets of ecstasy into the U.S.

Even those operations pale in comparison with the Los Angeles-based
ecstasy ring allegedly run by a 44-year-old Israeli national named
Jacob "Koki" (pronounced "Cookie") Orgad that was busted by Customs in
June. During the past two years, the group allegedly brought at least
9 million pills into the U.S. "We've only identified 30 couriers so
far, and there could have been many more," says a source at Customs.
"So 9 million pills is actually our low estimate, because we know that
each courier brought in at least 30,000 pills."

Beyond sheer numbers, the group was run with a "level of
sophistication that until now has only been associated with heroin and
cocaine smugglers," according to the Customs source.

Orgad's group recruited poor families from Texas and Arkansas who
would then be taken by lower-level associates to "local malls where
they would be outfitted in conservative clothing like plaid shirts and
penny loafers.

They would then be coached on how to act when going through Customs at
the airport."

The group also employed decoys. "They would send a pair of girls in
their twenties who wore tie-dyed shirts and looked as though they had
just taken a vacation in Amsterdam," according to the Customs source.
A Texas couple working for Orgad brought a mentally handicapped
teenager with them, but the ruse didn't work -- the pair were caught
with more than 200,000 ecstasy pills in their luggage.

Sometimes the decoys also served as monitors to make sure the
smugglers didn't make off with the drugs.

To give their couriers a better chance, Orgad's organization even
booked them on flights scheduled to land during an airport's busiest
hours, says the source. "They wanted to send their guys through when
our inspectors were overwhelmed. That proves their level of
sophistication."

Orgad allegedly maintained the kind of high life usually associated
with cocaine and heroin kingpins.

He had a fleet of luxury cars and, according to the Customs source,
"was often accompanied by two women, usually exotic dancers." It has
also been reported that in the early nineties, he was an associate of
Heidi Fleiss who helped her recruit prostitutes.

As Orgad awaits trial, Customs continues to bust his associates. On
Thursday, four of his Texas-based smugglers were arrested, one for
allegedly facilitating the transport of pills from Europe to Houston.
A week before, a more important Orgad associate, Ilan Zarger, was
busted for running what Customs officials allege was the largest
ecstasy-distribution network in New York City. Customs estimates that
Zarger's organization distributed more than 700,000 ecstasy pills in
the New York area over the past six months alone. The organization,
which also included another alleged Orgad associate named Assaf "Assi"
Shetrit, supplied ecstasy to a violent Brooklyn-based street gang
called BTS ("Born to Scheme" or "Brooklyn Terror Squad"), who sold the
drug at raves in New York, Connecticut, New Jersey, and Washington,
D.C. Zarger also arranged for 40,000 ecstasy pills to be delivered to
the Hamptons in April, according to Customs. Zarger allegedly charged
his associates an extra 2 percent if they brought him anything smaller
than a $100 bill, thought nothing of lending $100,000 to friends (as
long as they paid him back in hundreds), and socked away $1.5 million
of drug profits in a safe.

The organization, which Zarger himself claimed on wiretap was
protected by the Russian Mafia, was unusually well run, according to
Customs. "It would appear that he controlled all ends of the ecstasy
business, from importation to retail," says Customs special agent Joe
Webber. The group's reach extended beyond the New York area, too:
Zarger allegedly threatened to have Sammy "the Bull" Gravano "whacked"
during a price dispute.

As demand rises, ecstasy smugglers are becoming as diverse as those
who use the drug."We used to be able to break down the trade fairly
easily," says Murray. "We could put the Israelis at about 50 percent,
the Netherlands at 15 percent, and the rest everybody else. But that
'everybody else' is getting larger every day. Our math no longer
works." Kelly agrees. "We're seeing smugglers from incredibly diverse
backgrounds," he says. "Older people, younger people, black, white --
it's an across-the-board demographic."

Thanks to sky-high profits, fairly light federal penalties, and the
relative ease of smuggling ecstasy as opposed to cocaine or
heroin (U.S. Customs finished training the first group of dogs
to sniff out the drug only this March), many of those would-be
smugglers aren't exactly practiced criminals. In March, Joseph Colgan,
the 33-year-old owner of the Minetta Tavern, was charged with
masterminding a ring to import more than 80,000 pills to the U.S. from
Amsterdam via Paris over five months. (He pleaded guilty last week.)
His courier? Scott E. Rusczyk, a lawyer with the New York firm
Kronish, Lieb, Weiner & Hellman.

Most couriers are less upscale.

The Amsterdam-based writer Hendrikus Van-Zyp, 54, and his wife, Maria
Van-Zyp Landa, 47, agreed to bring a package they were told contained
a few thousand ecstasy pills to the U.S. in exchange for a trip to
Aruba and $10,000 that Hendrikus told New York he needed for his
wife's bone-cancer treatments. "They had a good feeling about us,"
Van-Zyp says now, speaking from the visitors' room at the Otisville
Federal Correctional Penitentiary, where he's serving a five-year
sentence for ecstasy smuggling, "because we were an older couple." But
when he and his wife were bumped from their original Amsterdam-Newark
flight on October 22, their luggage remained aboard the plane.

During a routine check of unclaimed baggage, ecstasy was found in
their suitcases, and the couple were arrested by Customs officials
posing as airline workers.

The Van-Zyps were carrying what was then a record seizure of ecstasy
at a U.S. airport, but their loss probably put barely a dent in the
organization that recruited them. "I think they put ten people on the
airplane, so when they catch two, then they're not out much money,"
Van-Zyp says.

"I knew we were in trouble," he says with a throaty, nicotine-scarred
laugh, "when they brought the suitcase and I tried to tip the guy and
he said, 'Keep it.'

A good portion of all the ecstasy coming into New York ends up in the
hands of high-school students, and not just young ravers, according to
Caroline Sullivan, director of Daytop Village's Huntington, Long
Island, adolescent drug-rehab facility. "We're not talking about kids
in the club or bar scene -- we're talking about kids with ten o'clock
curfews," Sullivan says. "Their first experience is usually at a party
or friend's house.

The feeling they get from the pill is incredible, and they want to
replicate that experience over and over again, until they build up a
tolerance for the drug. Then they start to take several doses at a
time." Sullivan says 85 percent of the teenagers admitted to Daytop
have used ecstasy, an increase from just 20 to 30 percent one year ago
(though none have been admitted solely because of ecstasy).

At one elite private school on the Upper West Side, the drug "has
become more popular than weed," according to Laura, a 17-year-old who
has done ecstasy several times and has a regular dealer. "Most of the
kids at school do it. They do it at house parties or when they're just
hanging out, not really at clubs."

The ecstasy scene at Bronx High School of Science "ranged from preppy
kids to this kid who was in my Hebrew-school class," according to
Shari, a recent graduate. A few of her fellow students sometimes sold
pills, she says, and when they were out, "we all knew this guy on 46th
Street in the theater district who literally had boxes full." Often,
they took ecstasy at home: "I hosted my share of ecstasy parties where
someone would walk in the room with 100 pills and they'd be gone
within twenty minutes."

[Continued in Part II at
http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00.n1028.a09.html]