The 1986 “Pizza Connection” convictions — the culmination of a sting that blew a huge hole the largest narcotics trafficking network in mob history, stretched across four continents — left an opening for non-Italian ethnic vice syndicates to occupy terrain exclusively controlled by the La Cosa Nostra in the past. The Albanians had already worked with or or for Italians, knew their trade secrets, and staked claims.
In Callifornia, Israeli drug gangs colluded with Italian mobsters as well. Drug money flowed from Southern California to the CIA’s proxies in Kosovo. The KKA filtered the proceeds through a complex of shell companies and bank accounts in Europe. In 1998, German bank locked down two accounts in the name of “United Kosova” org after auding discovered several hundred thousand dollars stashed away by a KLA drug trafficker.
But the American press didn’t find any of this particularly newsworthy. On May 17, 1999, Time magazine ran a graphic entitled, “How the KLA Gets Its Money.” The magazine reported vaguely that the Kosovars were sustained by “fund raisers, mailings and other sources,” London’s Times was more direct in a story concerning an intelligence study that found up to half of the guerrilla army’s funding derived from drug trafficking.
One of those “other sources” was thriving in Los Angeles. Bags of cocaine traded hands from from Beverly Hills to South Central and Long Beach. And Ecstasy was coming on strong.
“When X first appeared in the club circuit, the LA Times reported in 2009,”Israeli criminal networks were uniquely placed to take advantage. The drug flowed largely from underground labs in the Netherlands and Belgium, where Israeli mob families already had infrastructure in place for smuggling diamonds. As a hub for Israeli immigrants and a party town, Los Angeles instantly became one of the epicenters for the mid-’90s Israeli Ecstasy invasion.”
Orgrad emigrated from Israel in 1985, lived for a few years in Fort Lauderdale, and moved to Los Angeles in 1989. He opened a modest beeper store at the corner of Sunset and LaBrea, a few blocks south of downtown Hollywood, J&J’s Beepers. A year later, Heidi entered the store one day, they chatted, and Orgrad had a new line of work: enforcer and procurer of hookers.
Orgrad fattened his income with sales of cocaine and Ecstasy in the mid-90s. LA Times: “By the time of his arrest in New York in 2000, Orgad had allegedly created a global smuggling ring that brought an estimated 9 million ecstasy pills (worth around $270 million) from Europe to the United States. Customs agent Fred Walsh told the LA Times that Cookie ran one of the best organized operations we’ve encountered, and his people seemed to have a presence in every major city where Ecstasy is the rage.”
He muscled into a Las Vegas ring that moved cocaine from West Coast to the East Coast for Pablo Escobar’s Colombian cartel.
In 2001, he pleaded guilty to conspiracy to distribute ecstasy and operating an ongoing criminal enterprise and was sentenced to a minimum of 14 years in prison.
His supplier was busted the year before when the local U.S. attorney’s office filed charged his supplier: Itzhak “Big Friend” Abergil.
“Israeli police arrested Abergil and his brother Meir in August; the two await extradition to face charges that include assassinating a rival drug dealer in 2003 outside an Encino restaurant and allying with a San Fernando Valley Latino gang known as the Vineland Boyz to distribute Ecstasy.”
Cookic trained his sights on LA’s deep pockets. Reporter Julian Rubinstein writes that he “befriended Judah Hertz, a multimillionaire developer, who paid Cookie hundreds of thousands of dollars in the mid-nineties in what he says were real-estate-broker fees. And in New
York, Cookie was frequently seen at the fancy flesh pits with Sholam Weiss, a New York–based Israeli plumbing magnate who would
later be convicted, along with John Gotti Jr., in a $450 million life-insurance scam and sentenced to 845 years in prison, the longest federal sentence in U.S. history.”
The Nevada gaming control board determined that Hertz joined forces with Orgad in the drug dtrade. The Times-Picayune for August 07, 2005 described Hertz Hertz as “an Israeli immigrant and accused international drug smuggler. The board said Orgad allegedly distributed cocaine for the Gambino and Escobar crime families, supplied cocaine and recruited women for notorious Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss and has been linked to the illegal distribution of methylene dioxymethamphetamine, or MDMA, also called Ecstasy.”
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