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http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1143896/
http://www.nydailynews.com/archives/news/ecstasy-hasidim-drug-ring-youths-mules-pill-trade-article-1.851116
To the young Hasidic men, $1,500 and a free trip to Europe seemed too good to pass up. All they had to do, they were told, was sneak suitcases full of diamonds into the U.
S. But when inspectors at Kennedy Airport stopped some of the young men with long black coats, yarmulkes and sidelocks, the contents of their bags surprised both the couriers and the customs agents.
Federal officials soon realized they had stumbled across an international conspiracy to smuggle the drug MDMA, popularly known as Ecstasy, into New York.
Officials believe this ring, accused of bringing more than a million pills into New York and laundering millions of dollars in drug profits, has been responsible for much of the Ecstasy that has been flooding the city's nightclubs and rave dances during the past few months. Federal officials announced the indictments of seven people accused of organizing the ring in July. They said the young Hasidic couriers typically took between 30,000 and 45,000 Ecstasy pills into the United States on each trip. Sometimes they would carry as much as $500,000 in drug proceeds back to the ring's alleged leader, Sean Erez, in Amsterdam.
Erez, 29, and his girlfriend are being held by Dutch authorities while awaiting extradition to the U.S. Officials said more arrests are expected.
Several couriers who were caught have already pleaded guilty and become confidential informants in exchange for reduced charges. Officials said the informers proved crucial to cracking the conspiracy. They also revealed the extent to which the ring's organizers, several of whom are Orthodox Jews, allegedly took advantage of their connections in the insular Orthodox Jewish communities of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and Monsey, N.Y. Offering $200 finder's fees, the drug ring managed to infiltrate yeshivas and Jewish rabbinical schools, and recruit students they hoped would pass unsuspected through customs. Most of the couriers were between 18 and 20 years old. "The older guys took in a very ripe bunch of gullible youngsters," said Chris Franzblau, a New Jersey lawyer representing 18-year-old Simcha Roth, one of those recently indicted.
"They have complete trust in each other, so no one ever dreamed they were dealing with narcotics.
"On Erez's advice, Roth fled to Amsterdam and then Israel after several couriers he knew and helped recruit were arrested. According to federal wiretaps, Erez then encouraged him to start using Ecstasy himself.
After his indictment, Roth returned to New York at his family's insistence. He comes from a large Orthodox family and is free on $200,000 bail.
One courier, referred to only as CI-5 by federal investigators, became an informant after his arrest at Kennedy Airport.
His experience as a smuggler was typical. This past March, he says, a friend gave him money for an airplane ticket to Brussels and promised him $1,500 for smuggling diamonds. Shortly after CI-5 arrived in Brussels, he called a pager number he had been given. He soon received a return call from someone called Mutty, who authorities believe was Simcha Roth. Later he got a call from a Shmuel, one of Sean Erez's aliases, and was told someone would meet him in his hotel lobby.
The next day, CI-5 was met by an unidentified man and driven to the airport. He was given a suitcase and the password "Adidas," but he never made it past customs in New York. Inspectors discovered 30 socks in CI-5's luggage, each containing 1,000 pills of Ecstasy. The drugs weighed about 20 pounds and bore the Chinese yin and yang symbol.
Prosecutors said most of the operation's pills bore one of three labels yin-yangs, the Superman "S" logo or the imprint of an elephant. Each is supposed to have a slightly different potency and contains different levels of the various narcotics that make up MDMA tablets. The pills smuggled into New York were produced in Amsterdam for as little as 50 cents apiece and sold here for as much as $35 a pill. Ecstasy smuggling has boomed in the last two years. Last year roughly 375,000 pills were found at JFK. In the past nine months, the number has surged to more than a million.
Customs agents rejected the notion that they would start scrutinizing Hasidic Jews returning from Europe more closely.
"These people aren't your hard-core drug traffickers," said Associate Special Agent Marvin Walker. "The Hasidic community is not responsible for this drug ring.
" Sidebar: ADDICTION THEIR SILENT SHAME Every community wrestles with problems of addiction, but many among New York's Hasidic Jews prefer to grapple in silence. "This brings shame upon the community," said one Hasid in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. "If I could pay money not to have this story written, I would.
"The reasons behind the ultra-Orthodox community's reticence are more complicated than mere denial. One major difficulty is that many treatment programs use Christian spirituality to help addicts fight their demons.
"The treatment is often felt to be as bad as the disease," said Maxine Uttal, director of JACS Jewish Alcoholic and Chemically dependent persons and Significant others.
The Hasidic assumption that drug addiction is a moral failing, Uttal said, reinforces the community's desire to keep quiet about it. Instead, she said, drug addiction must be treated as a disease, and a crucial part of the treatment is the support of others addicts. In other words, talk helps. Drug addiction and the drug business are no strangers to Orthodox Jewish communities. According to Uttal, one-third of the people who attend meetings at JACS are Orthodox and roughly 10% are Hasidic, or ultra-Orthodox. "This is a bad thing that happens to good people," Uttal said. "Unfortunately, it's a disease that leads people to do bad things.
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