Not exactly what you'd call "evidence" --only good "background doc":
[...]
The Ecstasy profits are enormous. It costs 15 to 25 cents to produce one Ecstasy tablet, which wholesalers will sell for $2 a pill. Distributors sell it for $10 to $15 a pill, and by the time a drug dealer sells it at a disco or on a college campus, it can fetch between $25 and $40. Thus, a $100,000 investment by an organized crime group can, in a matter of weeks, earn more than $5 million. Labs can manufacture some 100,000 tablets in a few days. Ecstasy is produced primarily in Dutch and Belgian labs-ranging from industrial-sized plants and mobile labs hidden inside trucks or on floating barges, to basements underneath farms and factories. In the past year, about 50 labs were dismantled by police in Holland and Belgium, but they keep springing up in new locations, DEA agents in Belgium say.
Packaged pills are sent overseas through a variety of methods. Air parcel companies, such as FedEx and UPS, are among the most popular. Israeli dispatchers will drive through Holland, Belgium, and Luxembourg, stopping off to ship their packages, according to drug task force detectives in New York. "The Israelis are veterans. Some served in elite units and intelligence units," said a New York narcotics agent. "They know all the tricks of surveillance and counter-surveillance. They are very hard to catch." Law enforcement, however, is slowly denting this pipeline. On April 5, 2000, U.S. federal agents intercepted two 40-pound FedEx packages of Ecstasy, that, according to the Boston Globe, had been shipped to hotel rooms in Boston and Brookline, Mass. The recipients, Yaniv Yona and Ereza Abutbul, were Israelis.
A few months later, U.S. Customs officials in Los Angeles seized Ecstasy shipments of 650,000 and 2.1 million tablets, respectively, on flights from Paris; agents in upstate New York seized 100,000 pills that had been transported across the St. Lawrence River from Canada. In 2000, DEA and Customs agents seized 11.1 million doses of the drug (up from a few hundred thousand in 1995). The United States also beefed up penalties a few months ago, tripling the potential jail terms for dealers caught with 800 or more pills to at least five years and three months; those caught with 8,000 or more would serve at least 10 years if convicted. DEA agents and detectives say Israelis have been involved in almost all the major busts. They have included Sean Erez, currently awaiting extradition from the Netherlands; Shimon Levita, a New York yeshiva student who was sentenced to 30 months in a federal boot camp for participating in the ring allegedly run by Erez; and Jacob Orgad, identified as an Israeli national with operations in Texas, New York, Florida, California, and Paris. A man identified by Customs as head of one of the biggest "drug importation rings," Israeli Tamer Adel Ibrahim, remains at large.
New York and Miami (with considerable Israeli populations) are major transit points for the drug. The Tel Aviv-to-Antwerp-to-Amsterdam-to-New York City route is a classic smuggler's path, says a Belgian police officer. But with law enforcement lately scrutinizing arrivals at JFK and Newark airport more closely, Ecstasy distributors are now focusing on Los Angeles and the West Coast, where indigenous Israeli communities also exist and demand is high.
The Israeli Ecstasy rings have mainly used Israelis (sometimes unwittingly) as "mules," or couriers, to bring the drug into the United States. Israeli nationals living in Europe and the United States, typically young and seeking some easy cash, make ideal couriers. They don't fit the image of a Colombian cocaine smuggler and they don't usually arrive en masse. Still, according to Dan Rospond, a DEA agent working in the Netherlands, "smuggling rings will often 'shotgun' couriers on flights from Europe-either sending a bunch on the same flight or splitting them among several flights and airlines [to] the same destinations. If two or three are caught, half a dozen still get through."
"Nobody suspects nice Jewish kids [of] being dope smugglers," says a former NYPD detective in the Manhattan District Attorney's office, "especially Orthodox Jews."
Perhaps that's why Erez used Orthodox and Hasidic Jews from the New York area to smuggle Ecstasy into New York's major airports in 1999 and 2000. Young Hasidic couriers typically took 30,000 to 45,000 Ecstasy pills into the United States on each trip, according to a report by David Lefer in the New York Daily News, sometimes carrying as much as $500,000 in drug proceeds back to Erez, in Amsterdam. Offering $200 finder's fees, the drug rings were able to infiltrate yeshivas and rabbinical seminaries, and recruit individuals who looked innocent enough to pass through customs without suspicion. In the insular Orthodox communities of Williamsburg, Brooklyn and Monsey, north of New York City, recruiters found gullible youngsters who thought they would be smuggling diamonds, not narcotics [much less bombs!!]. The reach of the Israeli syndicate is truly global. In September 2000, Japanese police arrested Israeli David Biton on a charge of smuggling 25,000 Ecstasy tablets into Japan. "Ecstasy is to the new century what crack was to the 1980s," said the DEA's Rospond, and Israel has its finger on the trigger.
Although Israeli groups have dominated the Ecstasy trade for about a decade, profit margins are so enormous that organized crime groups from other countries are now attempting to muscle in on the market, an officer explains. "The Israelis are not about to allow the Albanians, the Serbs, the Poles, the Chechens, the Nigerians, the Dominicans, or even the Colombians to take away their profits," says an undercover narcotics detective. "There will be violence. There will be bloodshed and we have to be ready."
In Israel, and indeed around the world, a new day is dawning in the consumption and trafficking of a narcotic that resists control. And at New York's JFK International Airport, a new day dawns for a small army of Immigration and Naturalization Service and Customs officers awaiting the arrival of El Al Flight 001-the first of many daily El Al flights from Israel. For years, customs agents paid little attention to El Al flights, but now, moments before 6 a.m., they are ready, waiting. They've got their work cut out for them.
"Pick the nice Jewish boy out of a crowd of nice Jewish boys," says a veteran Customs inspector as he watches the 400-plus passengers search for their luggage. "It is the needle in the proverbial haystack."
© MOMENT 2001
fpp.co.uk
"...the needle in the proverbial haystack", indeed. On July 7, 2005, there were four "needles" making their way into London's subway, unaware that their XTC deliveries had been replaced/supplemented with cemtex charges.... |
