Pubdate: Fri, 24 Nov 2000
Source: Washington Post (DC)
Copyright: 2000 The Washington Post Company
Contact:  1150 15th Street Northwest, Washington, DC 20071
Feedback: http://washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/edit/letters/letterform.htm
Website: http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Author: Josh Meyer, Los Angeles Times

ALLEGED ECSTASY KINGPIN ARRESTED

LOS ANGELES - Before it ended in a series of raids Wednesday, the hunt for 
the world's biggest cartel trafficking in the designer drug Ecstasy took an 
international consortium of law enforcement agents from the rave clubs of 
Hollywood through a host of European cities.

For 15 months, the authorities--led by a Los Angeles-based team of FBI, 
Drug Enforcement Administration and Customs Service agents--played an 
elaborate cat-and-mouse game with Tamer Adel Ibrahim and his alleged 
associates. They watched as the young cadre of suspected traffickers 
traveled to Milan; Paris; Frankfurt, Germany; Amsterdam; and elsewhere 
around the globe--even to Mexico, Israel and South Korea--to arrange their 
deals.

Authorities believed the group to be perhaps the No. 1 wholesaler of a drug 
whose explosive growth among young people has alarmed those at the highest 
reaches of the Justice Department--especially because of new indications 
that Ecstasy may cause depression and significant brain damage among 
chronic users.

They said their concerns were confirmed, that wiretaps and surveillance 
showed that the cartel was engaged in a global enterprise, shipping 
literally millions of the tablets from various drops in Europe to Los Angeles.

Ibrahim, 26, allegedly ran the operation from a swank high-rise ocean-view 
apartment in Santa Monica and while driving around town in a sleek black 
Range Rover, authorities say.

Capping that investigation, the Dutch National Police early Wednesday 
raided 17 locations in Amsterdam, arresting seven alleged co-conspirators 
and seizing hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash, as well as guns and 
other weapons.

And authorities in Washington and Los Angeles disclosed that Ibrahim was 
quietly taken into custody two months ago in connection with a shipment of 
more than 1.2 million Ecstasy tablets headed for Los Angeles.

All told, the multinational dragnet, dubbed Operation Red Tide, has seized 
more than 4 million tablets of the so-called designer drug and arrested at 
least 22 suspects in six U.S. cities and four European countries. And an 
additional 18 people linked to Ibrahim's operation have been arrested in 
law enforcement operations around the world within the past year, 
authorities said.

"It's the largest Ecstasy ring in the world that we know of, and we took 
them down," said FBI spokesman Matthew McLaughlin in Los Angeles. "That's 
significant."

So significant, in fact, that top Justice Department officials said 
Wednesday that Ibrahim's arrest and the dismantling of his alleged network 
will go a long way toward staunching the flow of the drug from 
manufacturing bases in Europe to users here in Los Angeles and elsewhere in 
the United States.
- ---
MAP posted-by: Jo-D