Lisa Sweetingham - Chemical Cowboys: The DEA’s Secret Mission to Hunt Down a Notorious Ecstasy Kingpin

TOWER AIR FLIGHT 31 from Tel Aviv touched down at the Los Angeles airport a little before noon on a Tuesday. Israeli nationals Ben Cohen and Nathan Hanan deplaned at gate 120, where a team of undercover agents dressed in jeans, T-shirts, and ball caps had been waiting. The agents slowly trailed the two Israeli targets as they walked through the terminal, brushing past hurried travelers and families getting an early start on the holidays.

Cohen and Hanan were met outside by a handsome, dark-haired thirty-three-year-old Israeli named Itzhak Jackie Cohen, who placed their bags in his Range Rover and took them to a Budget lot, where they rented a white Lincoln Town Car. The men drove in tandem toward the San Fernando Valley as DEA and U.S. Customs agents followed from a careful distance in unmarked vehicles.

It was a cool, clear fall day. Rows of top-heavy palm trees swayed in the Pacific breeze. The L.A. desert clime, whitewashed stucco homes, and gleaming high-rise towers had the familiar Mediterranean radiance of Cohen and Hanan's native Tel Aviv. Jackie led the men to a vacant single-family home at 6606 Whitaker Avenue, in a well-manicured neighborhood carved alongside the concrete L.A. River. For the next ten days, this was where Cohen and Hanan would carry out their work, unaware that agents were watching their every move.

In the last twenty-four hours, an Israeli National Police (INP) investigation team had received secret intelligence that Cohen and Hanan were traveling to Los Angeles to take part in a major narcotics transaction with Jackie's partner, Yehuda Judy Ben Atar. INP passed the tip to the L.A. drug cops who were investigating Judy's role in an Ecstasy distribution ring.

Judy Ben Atar was a thirty-four-year-old Israeli expat who lived in Sherman Oaks with his wife and children and kept close ties to leg breakers and mob bosses back home in Jerusalem. Judy had first caught the attention of LAX Customs agents four months earlier, when three women arriving from Paris were caught smuggling 140,000 Ecstasy pills hidden in false-bottom luggage and boxes of toys. Intelligence suggested Judy and his partners were behind the load.

The tip from INP was a good break for the Los Angeles drug cops, but only if they could catch someone holding the bagpicking up or dropping off cash or pills. A half-dozen undercovers were assigned to follow the suspects and report back any unusual activity or signs that the deal was about to go down.

Over the next five days, the surveillance team filled spiral notebooks with minute-to-minute observations about the dealers meetings at a sandwich shop on Ventura Boulevard, late-night trips to public pay phones, and heated arguments in Hebrew, which none of the agents understood.

On November 29 at 1:35 p.m., a DEA agent was sitting in an unmarked vehicle a half block from the Whitaker Avenue house, when he saw an unknown suspect in a shiny black Lexus SUV pull into the driveway and go inside. Forty-five minutes later, someonethe agent couldn't see whobacked the suspect's SUV into the attached garage and shut the garage door.

Minutes passed. Nothing. At 2:35 p.m., the agent quickly slumped down into his seat to avoid being seen as the garage door opened and Hanan sped off in the Lexus SUV, with Cohen right behind him at the wheel of the rented Lincoln. The third suspect was nowhere in sight.

The agent called his teammates over the radio. It was time.

All units maintained constant radio contact as they followed the two Israeli targets onto the 101 freeway and then the 405 freeway heading toward West Los Angeles. A Customs Air Support helicopter hovered overhead, calling out the targets positions. At 3:00 p.m. the chopper unit confirmed that Hanan had exited at Sunset Boulevard and was parking the SUV on Church Lane near the Holiday Inn tower, an iconic circular landmark that divided tony Brentwood from the smog-choked 405 freeway. Cohen pulled up beside him.

The car keys dangled from Hanan's hands as he got out of the SUV and slipped into Cohen's car. Two undercover agents followed the Israeli targets as they drove up the winding Sepulveda Pass through the Santa Monica Mountains back to the valley. The agents followed Cohen and Hanan into a supermarket in Encino and watched them purchase cleaning supplies, Gatorade, toilet paper, bleach, Coke, and eggs. Nothing special. All units were redeployed back to the abandoned SUV.

Cash or drugs. This was it. The vehicle had to be loaded with bundles of $20 bills or plastic bags filled with small white Ecstasy pills.

Shifts of two officers from DEA, Customs, and Torrance police maintained tweny-four-hour fixed and unobstructed surveillance of the SUV from unmarked vehicles on Church Lane and from an observation post inside room 906 of the Holiday Inn. The plan was to wait for the drug runner to come collect. They'd follow him, do a routine traffic stop, check his ID, find the load, and make an arrest. Or maybe they'd let the runner lead them straight to whoever was buying the pills or collecting the money.

Two days passed and the SUV sat undisturbed under the shade of the towering hotel. A thin layer of dust had settled on its cool black skin. Lead DEA Special Agent Michele Figura sensed that something was wrong. Brentwood was an unusual location for a drug drop. The ultra-wealthy neighborhood was known more for its palatial mountainside homes and elite private schools than covert drug deals. She started to worry that they'd taken a burnthat the dealers had spotted them and decided to abandon the load. Figura called DEA Special Agent Robert Gagne in New York for advice.

Gagne was the go-to guy of Ecstasy. Back in 1995, Gagne and his partners had led DEA's first major investigation into the so-called Love Drug when they infiltrated Manhattan's top nightclubs. While the agents in L.A. were babysitting the SUV, Gagne was deep into his own investigation of Judy's associate Oded Tuito, aka the Fat Man, who'd made a fortune buying millions of the little, bright-colored pillsstamped with stars, hearts, and happy facesfor about $1 each from Dutch suppliers and reselling them to his network of distributors in the States for $6.

Gagne agreed with Agent Figura that something was amiss with the abandoned SUV. After years of watching Ecstasy dealers operate, Gagne knew they could get sloppy. Sometimes they'd be out all night partying at strip clubs and would wake up too late to pick up couriers. Other times the dealers would purposely switch their plans to throw off law enforcement. But nobody leaves drugs or money on the street for that long. Gagne checked in with his confidential sourceshe had snitches from Boston to Bucharestbut no one had any further intel on Cohen and Hanan. Gagne knew it wasn't his place to tell them what to do, but if it had been on his turf, he'd have found a way to look inside that car and figure out if they were wasting their time.