- Oded Tuito was alleged to be a global pill-pusher, whose
Israeli mafia group was the biggest operator in a booming international
trade in the lucrative "hug drug".
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- Now Mr Tuito, who allegedly stamped his ecstasy pills
with the Star of David and the Tweety Bird cartoon character that reminded
him of his own name, is sitting in a Spanish prison.
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- Picked up in the eastern coastal town of Castelldefels,
just outside Barcelona, his arrest has provoked a deluge of extradition
requests and police inquiries from four continents.
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- Mr Tuito, 40, had half a dozen homes and as many aliases.
In Spain he called himself Adel Tonitou and lived in a luxury Barcelona
hotel. He kept his wife and family in France but travelled the world, allegedly
directing his operations while on the move.
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- "The fact that he could be based in Spain, away
from his main production and distribution bases, allowed him greater security,"
a Spanish police spokesman asserted yesterday.
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- Mr Tuito was arrested in May, but allegedly continued
directing shipments from his cell in Madrid's Soto del Real prison until
a global police operation against the rest of his gang began two weeks
ago.
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- Three dozen of his alleged associates, part of an organisation
that shipped several million pills a year, have been arrested since then
in Spain and as far away as Los Angeles and Melbourne, Australia. The men
police believe were his principal lieutenants, Michael Elkaiam and Simon
Itach, were picked up in Barcelona.
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- The gang was also alleged to have trafficked in cannabis
and cocaine and been linked to a group of Israeli armed robbers who targeted
jewellers' shops in Barcelona, according to Spanish police.
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- "The profits were ploughed into Israeli real estate,
being sent there from the US or Barcelona," a police spokesman said.
Police forces in various parts of the world said Mr Tuito's arrest confirmed
the alleged growing global influence of Israel's loose-knit, but expanding,
crime organisations.
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- America's drug enforcement agency had been about to put
his name on its public list of the world's eight most wanted drug trafficking
suspects.
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- "Historically, Tuito is the most notorious ecstasy
trafficker known to law enforcement authorities in Europe, Israel and the
US, and was the most prolific ecstasy smuggler based in Europe," a
DEA spokesman claimed.
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- Mr Tuito has been charged in New York, Los Angeles and
Pittsburgh and is connected to investigations in Florida, Kentucky and
Delaware. He is also wanted by the Israeli courts. Spanish police, meanwhile,
are investigating allegations that he also trafficked in ecstasy to the
island of Ibiza.
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- The Israeli allegedly made a fortune out of exploiting
the mark- up on a pill that costs only 30p to make. "He was buying
pills for 50 cents a piece in Holland and selling here for $28 [£19].
That is quite a mark-up," a DEA agent in New York said.
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- Mr Tuito allegedly bought up the entire production of
pills from several clandestine laboratories in the Netherlands, which were
driven overland to Spain, Belgium, France and Germany. A variety of courier
services is alleged to have been used to sneak the drugs out of the EU.
Strippers from New York and Spanish teenagers or pensioners took the drugs
to the US, Canada, Israel and Australia. Sometimes pills were packed into
picture frames and sent via ordinary international messenger services.
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- "There was a constant flow of ecstasy," claimed
Jose Martinez, a special agent with the DEA. "He was sending young,
attractive women on European vacations. They'd go to Paris for a few days,
hang out, he'd give them money for expenses, and on the way back they would
have to bring a package." An estimated 100,000 tablets reached Los
Angeles alone each month, Mr Martinez said.
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- A series of police raids in the past two months have
netted 340,000 pills in Spain, Israel, the Netherlands, the US and Australia,
Spanish police said. Mr Tuito's gang is alleged to have also exported to
Latin America via Panama and Asia via Thailand.
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- The emergence of alleged Israeli mafias as major drug
traffickers comes after they spotted the potential of what some Interpol
officials now consider the world's most popular illicit drug, with an estimated
annual global consumption of more than 500m ecstasy pills.
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- "The Israelis moved into an empty niche. They were
among the first to identify the enormous profit potential in ecstasy,"
a senior Israeli police official, Yifat Steinberger, told the Jerusalem
Report magazine this week. He alleged that loose-knit and flexible global
crime groups headed by Israelis had grown on the back of contacts made
in Israel's own crime underworld and during military service in the army.
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- A shipment of 2.1m pills that arrived in Los Angeles
from Paris earlier this year, and the corpse of an Israeli dealer found
in a car boot at Los Angeles airport, were both put down to the Israeli
mafias.
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- Even New York's strict Hassidic community has been affected
by the ecstasy trade. A 31-year-old alleged protege of Mr Tuito, Israeli
citizen Sean Erez, reportedly hired a small group of ultra-Orthodox teenagers
and 20-year-olds to work as international couriers.
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- These traditionally dressed "Hassidim" were
recruited on the basis that their clothes and religious aura would make
them immune to customs searches. "He changed the courier profile 180
degrees," claimed one DEA agent who worked on Erez's case.
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- Police in the US believe that the new Israeli groups
were beginning to forge contacts with major Italian crime families, such
as the Gambino and Giotti groups.
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