PaliHi Grad Signs Her DEA Thriller April 14

Author Lisa Sweetingham is excited about her Village Books appearance on Tuesday, April 14 at 7:30 p.m., when she will sign copies of her first book, ‘Chemical Cowboys: The DEA’s Secret Mission to Hunt Down a Notorious Ecstasy Kingpin’ (Ballantine Books), at 1049 Swarthmore.   ’A lot of close friends from Palisades High live here,’ Sweetingham, a TruTV (formerly CourtTV) correspondent and a freelancer for the New York Times, Spin and Venice, told the Palisadian-Post. ‘It’s like going home.’ The articulate PaliHi graduate (class of ’88), who started out at Gerry Blanck’s Martial Arts Studio in 1992, once competed on the karate circuit. Perhaps the amiable writer, who holds a blackbelt, kept her self-defense chops ready as she traveled nationwide and overseas to interview underworld figures associated with a multi-million dollar Ecstasy ring. In the process, she gained the trust of hardboiled Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) officials and no-nonsense Israeli law enforcement agents. What she unearthed informs the nonfiction ‘Chemical Cowboys,’ a penetrating page-turner about how a pair of DEA agents took down the elusive Oded ‘Fat Man’ Tuito, master of the once-thriving, Israeli mafia-controlled Ecstasy drug trade, which flourished from 1995 to 2001. Sweetingham, 38, all but grew up in Pacific Palisades. While raised in Venice and Topanga Canyon, she attended Paul Revere Middle School and Palisades High. ‘I enjoyed my school years,’ said the erstwhile Lisa Strum, single and now living in West Los Angeles. ‘I loved it because the teachers were really good, there was a diverse student body, and you had the beach nearby.’ In fact, Sweetingham’s first brush with reporting happened at PaliHi. She admitted she didn’t care much for the journalism class run by the late Barry Tunick, who co-created the Los Angeles Times’ crossword puzzles. However, Mary RedClay’s class fired up her writing passion. ‘She was a very outspoken, intelligent hippie,’ Sweetingham said, describing PaliHi English teacher RedClay, ‘and she didn’t let anyone get away with clich’s or stereotypes in their writing.’ By Sweetingham’s recollection, ‘Drugs and alcohol were rampant at PaliHi. Ecstasy hit the campus really big in 1986. I reconnected recently with an old boyfriend who was the sole Ecstasy dealer at PaliHi. I knew because he was dealing Ecstasy to all of our friends. No one knew where Ecstasy came from. It seemed like a fun, safe thing to do.’ Not that Ecstasy was exclusively PaliHi’s problem, but ‘in the Palisades, you probably had better quality drugs.’ First synthesized by the German pharmaceutical company Merck in 1912, Ecstasy did not surface until 1976, when Alexander Shulgin, a UC Berkeley professor with a Timothy Leary-esque bent, began to take and distribute the semisynthetic psychoactive drug. ‘Shulgin was a chemist for Dow Chemical,’ Sweetingham said. ‘He called it Empathy, and he was a real pioneer in the psychedelic drug world. The thing about Shulgin that was so interesting is that he liked to try all the drugs on himself. If he liked it, he would then introduce it to his wife and his circle of friends, other professors.’ Ecstasy quickly leapt from a judiciously prescribed drug to the streets. It cost 25 cents per tablet to manufacture and sold in the clubs at $20 to $50 a pop. ‘The drug escaped the therapist’s couch and went to clubs, even grade schools. There was no more control in the taking of it,’ Sweetingham said. At first, Ecstasy was produced in Holland, ‘but the mafia in Israel started to see the millions being made,’ Sweetingham continued. ‘That’s when they began financing the pills and you started seeing a lot more warfare and a dead body showing up in the back of a Lexus SUV in Brentwood,’ alluding to an excerpt from ‘Cowboys.’ So how did ‘Cowboys’ become Sweetingham’s maiden book project? ‘When I was at journalism school at Columbia University,’ she recalled, ‘I thought this was a fascinating story, but I couldn’t penetrate that community, so I let that story go. Years later, while working for CourtTV, a source came to me and said I should take a look at it.’ Sweetingham gained the trust of the DEA and the Israel National Police to compose her remarkable account of two young undercover DEA agents”Robert Gagne and Matthew Germanowski”on the warpath to take down Tuito’s operation. ‘This wasn’t just a magazine story,’ she said. ‘It was the story of an era.’ In late 2007, Sweetingham met Israel National Police’s top official: ‘He opened up my eyes to the challenges that they faced battling the mafia there. No one in America writes about the Israeli mafia, the warfare going on between them, blowing each other up in the streets. In Israel, it’s a major part of what the police do battle with.’ Soon, Sweetingham found herself in Romania meeting a former Ecstasy dealer: ‘He knew all of the players. A lot of money had been laundered through Bucharest.’ Despite some vague threats, the young writer never felt in harm’s way: ‘Those sources who may have threatened me in the beginning ended up becoming very good sources. A lot of them were just posturing. But once people got to know me and trusted that I was writing an honest portrayal, they agreed to tell me more of the story.’ So why did criminals from Israel seize the Ecstasy market? ‘They knew that they couldn’t penetrate the cocaine, heroin and marijuana markets, controlled by brutal Mexican, Colombian organized crime,’ Sweetingham said. ‘But they saw that law enforcement was not paying attention to Ecstasy. They called it ‘kiddie dope’ and the demand was so high.’ Some ultra-Orthodox Jewish youth were manipulated into becoming ‘mules,’ obviously a conflict with their religious beliefs. ‘They didn’t know what they were carrying,’ Sweetingham said. ‘They grew up very sheltered, without television. They were told that they were smuggling ‘diamonds for the Holy Land’ [jewels sold to support Israel]. It was actually one rogue dealer, Sean Arez, a Canadian-Israeli, who roped them in. He greatly upset the Jewish community by involving ultra-Orthodox teenagers.’ By the 2000s, the Ecstasy trade evaporated ‘because law enforcement from Israel, Western Europe and DEA worked together in secretive cooperative busts’ to break the back of Tuito’s ring, Sweetingham said. ‘The way the DEA and the Israel National Police took down the Ecstasy dealers has become a model. Israel changed its laws to extradite criminals to America to be prosecuted. There’s a new kind of cooperation between law enforcement in both countries.’ Visit www.LisaSweetingham.com.