History Forum / General / General Topics / November 2007

http://www.fpp.co.uk/online/02/05/Israel/student_spyring2.html

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. 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.
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