Erez had a perfect in: an Orthodox Jewish associate, Shimon Levita, who was then 17 years old--and willing to sell the plan to his friends.
The two were confident they would find takers. After all, there were bound to be some rebels in the tight-knit Hasidic community, which insulates itself as much as possible from the modern-day world, prohibiting or strictly limiting television, radio and movies, and requiring very modest dress for both men and women.
Levita was promised $2,000 for every courier he brought in. He soon roped in Simcha Roth, then 18, who helped bring on board others at his yeshiva. Each of the yeshiva boys who joined the ring was offered a $200 commission for recruiting a friend.
"The brilliance of this conspiracy was the cover story," Lacewell said. While diamond smuggling is also illegal, it lacked the stigma that goes with the drug trade--and has a history in the community, where there are tales of Jews, forced to flee anti-Semitism in Europe, who hid diamonds and gold in their clothes to help them survive in new lands.
Court documents note that those who later cooperated with authorities acknowledged that "there were warning signs along the way that they were smuggling drugs, [but] they generally closed their eyes to the fact."
"Even though they knew it was drugs, they could tell themselves it was diamonds. I think if you told them 'you get $1,500 for bringing in a bag of drugs,' they probably wouldn't do it."
And Lacewell added, "I should say this--there were plenty of young people who refused" to run the "diamonds."
Those who did join up, most of them ages 18 to 20, helped turn Erez into a big-time operator. In the year before he set up shop, the period from October 1997 to October 1998, drug authorities at New York's John F. Kennedy Airport seized about 375,000 Ecstasy pills. From October 1998 to July 1999--at the height of Erez's operation--more than 1 million pills were found, which at retail could bring in as much as $25 million.
Erez's couriers typically smuggled 30,000 to 45,000 Ecstasy pills into the country in each trip, putting them in plastic bags and then in dozens of pairs of white athletic socks. At any one time, three couriers a week were traveling between the Netherlands and the United States with suitcases full of socks, each sock containing up to 1,000 of the aspirin-sized pills stamped with logos of elephants, Superman or the Chinese yin and yang symbol.
