Israeli Russian Mafia Corners Ecstasy Market - Supplies Gravano - Uses Hasidic Mules - 18Jul01
Stefan Lemieszewski
Gravano - Uses Hasidic Mules - 18Jul01
http://www.forward.com/issues/2001/01.01.19/news3.html
Forward
'Sammy Bull' Trial Lifts Veil
On Israelis in Ecstasy Trade
By BENNY AVNI
FORWARD CORRESPONDENT
A celebrated mob informant's trial on drug-distribution
charges is opening a window on an aspect of the drug
trade that many New Yorkers would rather ignore.
According to federal and local law enforcement
officials, Israeli criminals have cornered the market on
the drug ecstasy, controlling by some accounts as much
as 75% of the American market.
[ . . . ]
But Zarger is hardly unique. According to the Drug
Enforcement Agency's web page, "In recent years,
Israeli organized crime syndicates, some composed of
Russian émigrés associated with Russian organized
crime syndicates, have forged relationships with
Western European traffickers, and gained control over
a significant share of the European market. The Israeli
syndicates are currently the primary sources to U.S.
distribution groups."
[ . . . ]
Soon after, Israelis started manufacturing and
distributing the drug, first in Israel and then abroad, Mr.
Hefetz said.
Most manufacturing of MDMA is done in Belgium and
Holland, where Israeli émigrés have been a visible
presence in the local crime scene for a long time. "The
heroin import to Israel is done from Thailand via
Holland," said Abraham Abramovsky, a Fordham law
professor and the director of the university's
International Criminal Law Center, who has followed
Israeli crime figures abroad for years.
[ . . . ]
"There are a lot of Israeli criminals in the three major
hubs, New York, Miami and Los Angeles, so they
didn't have to reinvent the wheel," Mr. Abramovsky
said. The Israelis also had good connections to Russian
criminal gangs, which often serve as the Israelis'
partners in the ecstasy business.
[ . . . ]
==========================================
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/ap/20010711/us/ecstasy_guilty_plea_2.html
AP
11July01
Ecstasy Ring Kingpin Pleads Guilty
By DONNA DE LA CRUZ, Associated Press Writer
NEW YORK (AP) - The kingpin of a drug ring that used
Hasidic Jews to smuggle more than a million Ecstasy pills
from the Netherlands to the United States pleaded guilty
Wednesday.
Sean Erez, 31, faces up to 20 years in prison and $1 million
in fines when he is sentenced on Oct. 11 for conspiring to
import Ecstasy. Erez, the last of more than a dozen defendants
to plead guilty, also agreed to forfeit $750,000.
[ . . .]
=================================================
http://www.naplesnews.com/01/01/florida/d577720a.htm
Alleged European ecstasy
supplier to face charges in
Brooklyn
Thursday, January 25, 2001
By TOM HAYS, Associated Press
[ . . . ]
Sean Erez, 30, is accused in a U.S. indictment of heading
a ring that flooded the East Coast market from New York
on down to trendy Miami Beach with more than 1 million
pills. Erez has now exhausted all extradition appeals in the
Netherlands, authorities said Wednesday.
[ . . . ]
================================================
http://www.nypost.com/news/regionalnews/35294.htm
New York Post
18Jul01
COPS BUST UP $40M ECSTASY RING
By PHILIP MESSING
July 19, 2001 -- A cache of more than a million tablets
of ecstasy - the largest seizure in the city's history - was
confiscated from a luxury lower Manhattan apartment in
a raid that netted two Israeli suspects, authorities said
yesterday.
The drug, widely used at nightclubs and "raves," could
have earned the traffickers more than $40 million in
profits, said Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik.
The seizure was made inside a studio apartment at
17 Battery Place, where police arrested two men on
felony drug-possession charges - David Roash, 28,
and Israel Azhkenazi, 27, both of Tel Aviv - who
arrived here from Israel on May 22.
[ . . . ]
========================================
Newsday
15Jan01
ECSTASY FROM OVERSEAS TO OUR STREETS
The Israeli Connection
Smuggling ecstasy the hot new industry
This story was reported by Matthew McAllester in Jerusalem
and Dan Morrison in New York.
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."
=========================================================
Newsday
16Jan01
ECSTASY From Overseas To Our Streets / Fast Lane to Dead End /
Ecstasy trade lures young Hasidim into a world of crime
By Dan Morrison. STAFF WRITER
Third in a series.
It was just after 3 a.m. and Jessica Cusumano was alone in her flat on the
outskirts of Amsterdam, trembling with worry, when she heard someone at the
door.
It had been hours since Cusumano had heard from Shimon Levita, her goateed
drug-runner sweetheart, and what she'd heard did not sound good. Levita's
voice
had sounded strained as he spoke by phone from a tramway platform several
miles away, where he was returning from a meeting with his boss and
father-figure, a burly Israeli named Sean Erez.
"He was talking funny, like people were watching him," Cusumano said.
A lieutenant in one of the largest ecstasy-smuggling rings prosecuted in
the United States, Cusumano said "Shimmy" had been growing more nervous by
the
day.
Recently, the couriers he recruited from Hasidic Jewish enclaves in New
York City to secret the popular drug into the United States from Amsterdam
had
been disappearing before they reached their destinations.
Among them were Eli Freedman and Mikhal Ruth Stern, a young Orthodox couple
from Far Rockaway, arrested April 14, 1999, at France's Orly Airport
carrying
80,000 ecstasy pills stamped with the shape of a Superman insignia.
Two days later, Fruma Goldman, of upstate Monsey, had been nabbed at Dorval
airport in Montreal after stepping off a SwissAir flight from Brussels with
45,000 Superman pills tucked into her luggage.
Levita and his partners worried that the arrested couriers, more than a
dozen in all, were aiding prosecutors and drug agents alarmed by a recent
upsurge in ecstasy use by teenagers and young adults in the United States.
The drug operation allegedly run by Erez was unremarkable, except for the
Hasidim. Where other ecstasy smugglers have used strippers, college students
and musicians as "mules," officials say it was Erez' idea to use naiveand
some
not-so-naiveteenagers from New York's Hasidic commu- nities to move the
party
drug safely into the United States.
Erez' main recruiter was Levita, the son of a prominent member of the
Bobover Hasidic community who fell in with Erez while still living with his
parents in their Borough Park home.
With the Hasidim's dark hats, side curls and 19th-Century garb, Erez and
Levita believed that officials would never look at the cloistered youths as
potential drug runners. For a while, they were right.
Through its use of young Hasidic and Orthodox Jews as couriers, prosecutors
say, the Erez organization made a killing in a wide-open drug market where
$10,000, a plane ticket and a conversation with a stranger can earn an
enterprising twentysomething millions of dollars in the manufacture and
wholesale of little colored pills.
"You can be an 18, 19, 20-year-old kid and go to Amsterdam, go into a
coffee shop and, cash in hand, be making your own ecstasy," one investigator
said.
More than a year after the arrests began, Erez, the alleged head of the
conspiracy, sits in an Amsterdam jail, where he and his girlfriend, Diana
Reicherter, of Franklin Square, are fighting extradition to the United
States.
With the exception of Reicherter, Erez' former associates and couriers have
all
pleaded guilty.
According to prosecutors and defense attorneys, Jessica Cusumano was a
naive bystander lounging in the middle of a criminal enterprise that
produced
and exported more than 800,000 ecstasy tablets into the United States,
illegal
drugs that powered all-night dance parties in New York City, Long Island and
Miami at a street value exceeding $12 million.
Nationwide, ecstasy seizures by the U.S. Customs Service have soared from
350,000 tablets a year three years ago to 9.3 million pills a year.
It is this flood of contraband, Customs Commissioner Raymond Kelly says,
that has pushed abuse of the drug, which has been used by college and
high-school-age revelers since the mid-1980s, to new heights.
"In a strange kind of way, the supply, the fact that it is there, has
increased demand and lowered the price," Kelly said in an interview. "Pills
were going for $40 in some places, and now they are going for $10."
Mass marketing of MDMA, the chemical compound that was dubbed ecstasy by
market-savvy dealers in the early 1980s, and counterfeit pills that contain
far
more dangerous compounds, has "resulted in mass use," said Kelly, the former
New York City police commissioner.
Authorities are left to contend with a significant drug boom that is common
among middle-class youth, extolled in club and hip-hop music, but devoid of
any established monopolies, organizations and kingpins for police to target.
As Kelly said recently, "There is no Mr. Big that we know of."
While the profits are high, the risk of imprisonment for smugglers is great
as well. Smugglers caught by the feds face decades in prison. Those
prosecuted
in state courts could go away for life under New York's tough drug laws.
By the summer of 1999, Shimon Levita could feel the law closing in.
According to prosecutors, the arrests of the couriers had soured the
tempers of Erez and his band of smugglers. By that June, it seemed the
Atlantic
Ocean that had put so much distance between Levita and troubles back home
had
become little more than a shallow moat.
Levita had feared he was being watched by the police in New York and Miami,
Cusumano said in an interview. What the pair did not know that summer night
in
1999 was that a federal grand jury in Brooklyn had indicted Levita, Erez and
several others on drug-conspiracy charges.
It had been an incredible year for Levita and his girlfriend, one that had
taken the star-crossed teenage couple from working-class homes in Brooklyn
and
Staten Island to the plush party life on Miami's South Beach and then to
Amsterdam's unflappable culture of legalized drugs, gambling and
prostitution.
By 3 a.m. on June 21, 1999, Jessica Cusumano, an 18-year-old high school
dropout, and Shimon Levita, her barely-18 Yeshiva-educated Romeo, were
coming
to the end of a memorable adventure.
"I will never forget it," she said. "It is very hard to forget."
During their months in Miami, they had stayed at fancy hotels like the
Loewes and the Tiffany, Cusumano said. At night, Shimmy's friend Tiny,
identified by authorities as drug dealer Richard Harris Berman, would escort
them past the lines of revelers and into the hottest clubs in Miami Beach.
They
never paid a cover charge.
In April, 1999, prosecutors say, Levita stuffed a duffel bag with $100,000
cash and the couple moved to Amsterdam.
It was a whole new world.
"Amsterdam, everything's different," Jessica said, the wonder of it all
still in her voice. "Different language, different environment, weird
people.
Weird like they don't care, they don't give a crap. They have riots out
there.
Like, me and Shimmy walked past the police out there and they were smoking
weed, 'cause it's legal out there."
The couple lived a life of shopping, gambling and fancy dinners that most
would envy.
The tough-talking Erez was their mentor. "He was like a Gambino," Cusumano
said. "He thought that he was a Donnie Brasco type, like a Mafia type, like
that. He was nice, but he was sometimes mean.
"Sean was like Shimmy's father," she said. "He looked out for Shimmy."
After all, she said, "We're both teen- agers."
With a knock at the door, it was over.
Jessica, a bloodshot bundle of hope and nerves, bounded past her pet
chihuahua, Precious, to see if Shimmy was finally home.
She threw open the front door to find not her hazel-eyed boyfriend, but a
gaggle of officials from the Dutch national police, the U.S. Drug
Enforcement
Administration and the U.S. Embassy.
The officials had grabbed and handcuffed Levita on the tram soon after he
got off the cell phone with Jessica, she later learned. The Hasidic Jewish
dropout who, according to Cusumano, regularly prayed mornings and evenings
even
as he exported drugs to the United States, was shipped to the Metropolitan
Detention Center in Brooklyn to await trial.
The lawmen left Jessica alone.
Speaking at her home in Staten Island where she lives with her mother,
Cusumano, now 19, said the officials did what they could for her. "They were
very, very nice," she said. "One of the guys even gave me money so I can,
like,
eat something."
The event that led law enforcement to Cusumano and Levita was the arrest,
on March 24, 1999, of one of Levita's couriers, Joel Gluck, 18, of
Williamsburg. Gluck was stopped by U.S. Customs officers at Kennedy Airport
with 30,000 ecstasy pills concealed in rolled-up socks in his suitcase.
This, Customs Commissioner Kelly said, was a surprise. "We'd seen them in
the past be involved in diamond smuggling," Kelly said of his agency's
previous
interactions with Orthodox Jewish suspects. "The fact that it was drugs was
new."
Gluck was humiliated over his arrest and frightened by the prospect of
prison. Within a week, his lawyer later said, he began cooperating with
prosecutors from the office of U.S. Attorney Loretta Lynch, setting the
stage
for Levita's flight a month later from Miami to Amsterdam to try to avoid
prosecution.
On Nov. 5, 1999, Gluck was sentenced to 6 months of home detention. "I
shamed my family and my community for what I did," he told U.S. District
Court
Judge Edward R. Korman. "And the bad name will never be removed from that."
He
did not return calls for comment.
Gluck's arrest was followed by those of a dozen other couriers, and, later,
Shimmy and Jessica's friends from Miami and New York. There was Giacomo
(Jimmy) Pampinella of Franklin Square, the conspiracy's Long Island
connection.
He was sentenced to 70 months in federal prison and 3 years' probation. "I
thought that he was a really, really nice guy," Jessica said of the drug
dealer
Richard Harris Berman, the Miami drug dealer known as Tiny, pleaded guilty
and awaits sentencing in a Brooklyn jail. Yves Cesar Vandenbranden II, a
Jesuit-educated dealer known as "GQ," is awaiting sentencing in Miami.
Simcha
Roth, an Orthodox youth who worked with Levita as a recruiter, pleaded
guilty
and is out on bail while awaiting sentencing.
But the alleged kingpin, Sean Erez, has not admitted guilt. Erez and his
girlfriend, Dana Reicherter, stew in a Dutch jail, where the justice
minister
recently rejected their claims that psychiatric problems should prevent
their
extradition to the United States. Federal prosecutors expect to have Erez
and
Reicherter in custody early this year.
Shimon Levita no longer wears the garb of a Hasidic student. Nor is he seen
in the slick clothes of a nascent nightlife prince. Levita is in a halfway
house in Brooklyn after his release earlier this month from the federal
Bureau
of Prisons' Intensive Confinement Center in Lewisburg, Pa., a boot camp
where
he was sent after pleading guilty to federal drug conspiracy. He received a
light sentence because he was a minor for most of the time he was involved.
But
Eli Freedman and Mikal Ruth Stern, the Far Rockaway couple recruited by
Levita, were convicted in France of drug smuggling and sentenced to 3 years.
Stern gave birth to a daughter in prison.
At Levita's March 28 sentencing, Judge I. Leo Glasser lambasted the
Orthodox community for letting its children go so far astray. "They were
traveling around Europe," Glasser said. "They applied for passports. Where
were
the teachers? Who was keeping tabs on these boys who were bringing drugs
back
and taking money there?"
Levita blamed his sheltered background for his fall. "We didn't have no
television and no radio," he told the judge. "I didn't know what drugs were.
But in nine months in jail, I learned what they can do."
===========================================================
.
Gush666Emunim
bust of jewish child snuff movie ring)
as well...the russian/jewish mafia alliance has connected up to jewish
criminal elements around the world..no crime
is off limits to them..
If international jewish criminal are in danger of arrest they seek
sanctuary in Israel where its is not an offence to kill or exploit a
Gentile(halach law) only the severist political pressure brings them to
justice and even then
they are only allowed to stand trail if they can serve their sentence in
Israel...crimes committed inside Isreal against gentiles is quirky law as
well..arrest is only made if domestic politics demand it otherwise the have
a religious get out of jail free law...
fd
Stefan Lemieszewski wrote in message ...
>Israeli Russian Mafia Corners Ecstasy Market - Supplies
> Gravano - Uses Hasidic Mules - 18Jul01
It should be Israeli-Finno-Ugro-Mongolian Mafia and
Russian-Orthodox-Hasidic-Mullahs! Although after invention of
African-Americans nothing can surprise me.
>
>
>
>http://www.forward.com/issues/2001/01.01.19/news3.html
>Forward
>'Sammy Bull' Trial Lifts Veil
>On Israelis in Ecstasy Trade
>By BENNY AVNI
>FORWARD CORRESPONDENT
>
>
>A celebrated mob informant's trial on drug-distribution
>charges is opening a window on an aspect of the drug
>trade that many New Yorkers would rather ignore.
>According to federal and local law enforcement
>officials, Israeli criminals have cornered the market on
>the drug ecstasy, controlling by some accounts as much
>as 75% of the American market.
>[ . . . ]
>But Zarger is hardly unique. According to the Drug
>Enforcement Agency's web page, "In recent years,
>Israeli organized crime syndicates, some composed of
>Russian ÊmigrÊs associated with Russian organized
>crime syndicates, have forged relationships with
>Western European traffickers, and gained control over
>a significant share of the European market. The Israeli
>syndicates are currently the primary sources to U.S.
>distribution groups."
>[ . . . ]
>Soon after, Israelis started manufacturing and
>distributing the drug, first in Israel and then abroad, Mr.
>Hefetz said.
>
>Most manufacturing of MDMA is done in Belgium and
>Holland, where Israeli ÊmigrÊs have been a visible