The BTS helped create the NYC rave scene then killed it by setting a rhyming and stealing example for at least a hundred imitators. Here are all major articles written about the BTS, including the one that started it all, and knocked them out, the entire December ’98 Details article by Frank Owen, who has covered the techno scene as early at the early 90s, in old Village Voice articles on the techno pagan movement. He also wrote about the trancers here.
This article resulted in an investigation by the FBI and DEA and the subsequent arrests of an Israeli ecstasy ring with ties to Russian organized crime. Ilan Zager and Orgad were the kingpins, and were in dispute with Sammy the Bull Gravano until Gravano’s arrest. It was discovered that the BTS were generally not fit enough to be foot soldiers because so many were, quote, “junkies on downward spirals.” But for a while, they were the brownshirts to the two Israeli E-Hitlers.

Ecstasy Bandits

BY FRANK OWEN
December 1998
Details Magazine

Additional reporting by Ethan Brown.

Up until the moment the gang leader broke off our conversation in midsentence and dashed across the club to pull a knife on a bouncer, the interview was going swimmingly. For weeks, I’d been on the trail of the notorious gang known as B.T.S.-a.k.a. Born to Scheme, a.k.a. Brooklyn Terror Squad, a.k.a. Beat the System-the one-hundred strong crew that has wreaked mayhem at raves up and down the East Coast. “Violence has become a major problem on the scene because of B.T. S.,” reports one raver, a small-time Ecstasy dealer who says she has been robbed by the gang so many times that she knows some members by name. A lot of older ravers won’t go to parties anymore because B.T.S. has taken over. They’ve ruined it for everyone.”

I first saw B.T. S. in action at Back to the ‘Future, a midsize rave held in July at the Manhattan club Down Time. The event’s promoter had left a plea on the recording ravers had to call for the location of the party: “Please, everyone bring a positive vibe. Come to dance, come to listen to phat beats, come to meet some people. Don’t come to rob people and feud n’ fight and all that bullshit.”

Naturally, B.T.S. ignored it. They hid in the shadows, but the gang members were easy to spot. Unlike the dopey-looking ravers stumbling about in a daze, the B.T.S. crew were sharp-eyed, dressed like label-conscious street kids. A couple of hours past midnight, just outside the jungle room, they staged a fake brawl. As the larger members pretended to take swings at each other, the smaller ones crept up behind distracted partygoers and picked their pockets or snatched their gold chains and beepers before crouching low and disappearing down the back stairs. In one corner, a messed-up raver waved a hundred-dollar bill in the air trying to attract the attention of a drug dealer and make a buy. Two B.T.S. toughs jumped him from behind. Moments later, on the first floor, another callow night crawler clutched his head and cried out to his friends, “I got beat! I got beat! They robbed me!”

When the club finally emptied out in the wee hours of the morning, the signs of B.T.S.’s handiwork were obvious: The dance floor was littered with items from purses and backpacks the gang had stolen and dumped -driver’s licenses, photos, lipstick, and mascara.

A week later, I managed to hook up with a duo of fresh-faced B.T. S. foot soldiers from Gerritsen Beach– Skil One, Dope Star, and Seat- who promised to introduce me to the top dogs who run the gang. The one I wanted to meet most was a shadow figure called Chameleon, reputed to be the mastermind behind the entire operation. Skil One and company told me he’d probably be at a party B.T.S. was throwing that weekend at Planet 28, a cramped, low-key hole-in-the-wall on the edge of Manhattan’s garment district.

As I walk into the gloomy club, its walls covered with panels of the gang’s graffiti, my stomach is gripped with a mix of anticipation and fear. Everybody who is anybody in the B.T.S. ranks – at least those who aren’t in jail – is here, slapping each other on the back, showing off tattoos and knife wounds, and dancing furiously to thundering techno.

The unexpectedly upbeat vibe is greatly enhanced by the copious amounts of Ecstasy and strong green acid the gang members are popping, as well as the ketamine and crystal methamphetamine they’re snorting off the backs of their hands. The closest thing to a disturbance is a small, ferocious-looking “dust bunny” from New Jersey stumbling around, offering blow jobs in exchange for bumps of K.

In the corner, next to the bar, Era, a stocky B.T. S. old-timer with blond hair and blue eyes, tells me that at least a few of the stories I’ve heard about B.T.S. have been blown out of proportion. Yes, they sell hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of fake drugs. Yes, they beat up and rob “candy ravers,” naive, colorfully dressed partiers tripping on Ecstasy. But no, they don’t sell the bogus E that killed twenty-year-old college student Jason Williamson at a rave in April. “You’d think we were murderers,” another B.T.S. member scoffs, “but all we do is rob people.”

Around four in the morning, a compact, hard-muscled twenty-seven-year-old in a white fishing hat, an expensive-looking crewneck, and jeans with a hairbrush sticking out of the back pocket enters with his girlfriend, an exotic dancer who looks like a young Ellen Barkin. He’s immediately surrounded by fellow gang members rushing to greet him. A few moments later, he struts up to me with his entourage. “You’re the guy from Details, aren’t you?” he says. “I hear you want to talk to me.”

Chameleon doesn’t deny his gang’s exploits – he’s in a mood to brag. He tells me he earned his nickname by changing outfits as many as six times a night. “I’ll go to a club or a rave wearing something nice and flashy – like a loose-fitting Sergio Tacchini warm-up suit and a matching hat. I’ll sell a couple pills of E and K, until I spot some- ‘z body else selling, and I’ll jack them for their money and their drugs, y’know what I’m sayin. Then I’ll go into one of the back ‘o rooms and I’ll change.

“Underneath the sweat suit, I might be wearing a pair of jeans and a Polo shirt. I’ll take my hat off and let my hair down or tie it up in a ponytail. I’ll go back out on the dance floor and sell the drugs I just stole. After an hour or two, I’ll rob somebody else and go to the bathroom and change again. Under the jeans, I’ll be wearing a nice pair of shorts or something. Under the shirt, I’ll have a tank top. I’ll also put on a different hat. I store the spare clothes in a tote bag, then hand it to a member of my crew, who gives me my other tote bag with a new outfit in it.” Afterward, Chameleon and his boys rent a suite at a fancy hotel and party away some of the loot.

Lately, though, he says, he’s been trying to stay in the background. “I send out my younger kids with some money, and they buy drugs to find out who’s selling what,” he says. “Then they come back and my second string goes out-twenty, thirty, forty deep. The younger kids go around the room pointing out the drug dealers and we just go in-wham! wham! wham!- through the whole party. We’ll grab somebody, five guys hold him, one guy goes into his pockets and takes everything, and we disperse back into the crowd. It takes about two seconds. We occasionally get resistance-then twelve B.T.S. members dive in. Some kids try to run, but there’s really no escape.”

In the middle of our interview, out of the corner of his eye, Chameleon spots a Planet 28 bouncer trying to shake down Era. Chameleon’s face goes cold. And in a second he’s across the room, with his butterfly knife pressed against the bouncer’s throat. The bouncer backs off, reluctantly removing his hands from around Era’s neck.

Moments later the bouncer is back, with a half dozen other security guards. The insults fly back and forth–‘punk…… motherfucker,”‘pussy boy’!– and the confrontation escalates into death threats. Just when it seems an all-out brawl is about to break out, a shout goes up among B.T.S.: “Everybody out. We’re gone.” The standoff continues outside on the sidewalk, where the club’s manager holds back his bouncers and begs B.T.S. to leave.

Later that night, at a nearby after-hours party, Chameleon looks sick-not surprising, given his 24/7 hedonism. (In fact, a few hours from now, he’ll check himself into a hospital and be diagnosed with walking pneumonia.) “We’re not as bad as we used to be,” he says between hacking coughs, trying to downplay the incident at Planet 28. “We’re not grabbing everybody like we used to. We’re tired of the bad vibes.”

UNTIL RECENTLY, gang violence has been more closely associated with the braggadocio and street litanies of hip-hop than the smiles and utopian mood of the rave scene. But just as the Hell’s Angels went to love-ins to prey on ’60s hippies, just as Woodstock gave way to Altamont, today’s blissed-out teenagers make attractive targets for a pack of predators like B.T.S. Ecstasy’s empathy-inducing effects are great in theory-but only if the person you’re sharing your soul with isn’t looking to knock you upside the head and jack your backpack.

“The rave scene today is largely made up of young, middle-class kids from good families with money,” explains Chameleon, who told me he makes hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. “These kids are spending a hundred dollars a night on drugs. A pill costs twenty-five, bags of crystal twenty. You get a rave with six thousand people and there’s a lot of money to be made-a fucking ton of money

“And it’s my money,” he adds with an evil grin.

Though ravers like to portray B.T.S. as a group of parasitic latecomers, the New York rave scene first took root not among downtown trendies or suburban hedonists, but shirtless street kids from New York’s outer boroughs. Frankie Bones, the DJ who originally brought rave culture from the U.K to America with his early-’90s Brooklyn Storm Raves, traces the roots of B.T.S. back to rowdy Brooklyn street gangs like the Kings Highway Boys, the Avenue U Boys, and the Bay Boys. “The older neighborhood gangs used to come to my early parties looking for trouble,” he remembers. “B.T.S. comes from that same Brooklyn mold.”

“The New York rave scene has always been about hardcore Brooklyn,” concurs Fly, another B.T.S. member. “That’s how shit goes down in this city. These people come from New Jersey and Connecticut and think it’s all about peace and love. They don’t know what they’re stepping into in New York.”

In many ways, B.T.S. has less in common with traditional street gangs like the Bloods and the Crips than with British “love thugs,” the soccer hooligans who took over Ecstasy dealing at raves in the’U.K. in the early ’90s. B.T.S. has no rites of initiation- new members don’t get beaten in and can leave without fear of retaliation. They’re not tied to a specific ethnic group or neighborhood-the gang is a veritable Benetton ad of Asians, blacks, Latinos, Italians, and Irish, with members in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. And there’s no formal set of rules, other than one that forbids screwing over fellow members. At the end of the night, the crew don’t pool their loot; everyone keeps what he’s scammed for himself, though they all chip in to bail out members who get arrested.

Seemingly, the only requirement for joining B.T. S. is a talent for crime. “You have to have a skill to join,” explains Chameleon. “Like a good head for scheming. Or be a good runner-someone who doesn’t get nailed by security Or a good con artist like a young kid who buys the drugs and says to the dealer ‘Yo, can you hook me up? Can I get your phone number?’ Then when he gets the number, he calls him and goes to his apartment and kicks the fucking door in and takes everything.”

Recently, the gang has begun exporting its mayhem all over the East Coast– they’ve hit raves in Pennsylvania, Maryland, and all the way down to Florida. In September, fifty B.T.S. members flew down to the 16,000 person Zen Festival rave near Tampa, where they sold enough bogus drugs to walk away with about $4,000 each.

In April of 1997, they invaded a rave at the Washington, D.C., Armory. “Will you Brooklyn kids please stop fighting?” the promoter pleaded on the microphone. “Will B.T. S. please stop robbing people?” The answer was no. “We wrecked shop,” boasts the aptly named Kaos, a beefy B.T.S. enforcer with close-cropped dark hair. “I even had cops robbing kids for me! I swore I was a promoter and pointed out all the drug dealers [and said they’d stolen my money]. The cops were taking their money and giving it to me.”

In June, they turned the Funky Monkey party at Manhattan’s Roseland Ballroom into “B.T.S. central,” as one raver put it. The scene was more like a British soccer match than a rave. Sporadic fights finally culminated in a massive free-for-all on the dance floor. The B.T.S. dealers were so brazen, they peddled their wares in full view of security guards, who were apparently too scared to intervene. “B.T.S. basically acted as house dealers,” recalls one of the featured DJs, Odi of Digital Konfusion. “They totally controlled the party.” Their greed was so boundless that they sold drugs to the same people they later robbed. Even little, barrette-wearing raver girls were battered mercilessly

But assaulting and robbing ravers may not be the worst crime B.T.S. has committed: Friends of Virginia Tech student Jason Williamson think the crew is also guilty of murder. Williamson attended the April Foolz II rave at Mount Airy Lodge, a holiday resort in the Poconos, earlier this year. It was a suffocating crush of nearly nine thousand bodies packed together like psychedelic sardines-a perfect setting for B.T.S. to conduct business.

In the hardcore room, Williamson befriended a group of kids from Brooklyn. One of them gave him a free Ecstasy pill, according to Sean Choudry and his girlfriend Caxla Ringquist, Virginia Tech friends of Williamson’s who were with him that night. After swallowing the bogus E ecstasy- which a nurse later told Ringquist was actually a mix of drugs that included a horse tranquilizer- Williamson ran outside, where he collapsed on the ground and had a seizure. At four in the morning, after medics tried to stabilize his condition, he was rushed to the Pocono Medical Center, where he lapsed into a coma. “All of his organs exploded in-side of his body,” says Ringquist, who described the doctors’ bandaging her friend from head to toe like a mummy Early Monday, Williamson’s parents, who had rushed to their son’s bedside from Virginia Beach, gave doctors permission to pull the plug on his life-support system.

Choudry and Ringquist say they saw half a dozen other ravers in the medical center’s intensive care unit. “There was some indication that at least a couple of those ravers took the same drug,” says Sgt. Donald Fernbach of the Pennsylvania State Police. “But I did not find any evidence of an individual specifically intending to poison another person to death. If we had, we would have conducted a homicide investigation.”

“Jason was a newcomer to the scene who thought everybody could be trusted,” Choudry says. “B.T.S. are murderers. They knew the pill was bad.”

“That’s an absolute lie,” replies Chameleon. “We’re not looking to kill anybody we’re just after the money and the drugs.”

As of now, the New York City Police Department isn’t even keeping tabs on B.T. S. “At this point,” says a public information officer,” we don’t have anything on them.” [As a result of this article most of the leaders were jailed]

“USING THE TERM ‘GANG’ about B.T.S. is a bit misleading,” says Frankie Bones. “It’s much more loose-knit.” The group started out in the early ’90s as a neighborhood graffiti crew, a bunch of friends who hung around a homemade recording studio in the basement of a travel agency in Brighton Beach, a shabby seaside resort that’s the Russian mob’s home-away-from-home. The original members were a Vietnamese immigrant named Soak; his right-hand boy, E.S.; the owner of the studio, Kaos; E.S.’s little brother Era; and Miss Melody, the only female founder. Originally, B.T.S. stood for Bomb the Subway, and initiates are still expected to tag walls and compile black books of their illustrations. Later, B.T.S. stood for Born to Survive, when several of the members were homeless.

The godfather of the gang was Soak. B.T.S. members told me he’s now finishing up a two-year jail term for robbing $20,000 from the safe of a Chinese restaurant in Brooklyn; when he completes his sentence, the government will try to deport him back to his homeland. “Soak always held everything together,” remembers Mr. Lover, a B.T.S. veteran who looks tougher than his small stature might suggest, thanks to a broken nose. “Things are falling apart a little bit, now that he’s not around. It was easier two or three years ago, when the younger kids were younger. Now they’re getting older and they have their own minds.”

In 1992, Miss Melody, an exotic-looking Italian-Irish-black-Cherokee woman from Sheepshead Bay, took the crew to check out one of Frankie Bones Storm Raves. “There were no kids robbing each other back then,” recalls E.S. without a trace of irony. “It was all about dancing and having a good time.” Miss Melody agrees: “There were no ulterior motives. Now every raver wants to be a drug dealer.”

As the rave scene grew, the crew hit on the idea of selling fake drugs to gullible suburban kids. One weekend, Mr. Lover remembers, he and Soak hit a rave in Connecticut with hundreds of packs of breath mints that looked exactly like some green-speckled Ecstasy that was going around at the time. They sold out-at twenty dollars a mint.

“Before I found the mints,” says Mr. Lover, “me and Soak used to sit in his basement and spray-paint hundreds of white tablets.”

Another time, he recalls fondly, he and Soak went to Boston with eighty bags of Epsom salt which they sold as crystal meth, and two hundred niacin tablets which they passed off as Ecstasy Not one of the customers complained. Instead, says Mr. Lover, they kept coming back for more, pestering him for his beeper number. At the end of the night, he found himself in the bathroom surrounded by a bunch of pretty girls as he cut up huge rails of Epsom salt. “I was telling girls ‘Bring your friends over.’ I was sniffing with them – I didn’t give a fuck.”

Another favorite scam is selling incense as “Red Rock opium” -a con that has worked so well that kids come in from out of state to buy a “drug” that B.T S. made up. Mr. Lover sometimes travels to parties in Connecticut, where he charges $1,200 for a pound, $400 for a quarter, and $150 for an ounce. “When they find out I have ‘Red Rock, ‘the stupid motherfuckers fight with each other over whose house I should go back to. ‘Come to my house, “No, come back to my place.’ Even the people who figure out it’s fake still buy from me because they know they can double their money by selling it to some other stupid raver.”

“I USED TO BE CRAZY,” Chameleon tells me. We’re in the basement of a downtown club, where the gang leader is dealing hits of genuine Ecstasy to baggy-trousered beat fanatics. “I got shot twice and stabbed twice. I had my index finger sliced off by a big black guy with a machete who was trying to rob me buying pot.” But the charismatic gang leader wasn’t always a criminal.

At the age of eleven, he ran away from his comfortable home in Queens to Florida, where he learned to ride horses from his grandfather, a professional jockey, but his racing career came to an abrupt end at the age of nineteen when a horse fell on his upper back during a race at Belmont Racetrack. Temporarily paralyzed from the neck down, he had to wear a steel cage on his head for six months, with four bolts screwed into his skull.

A few years later he befriended Lord Michael Caruso (no relation to the editor of this magazine). At the time, the scene at the Limelight was controlled by techno promoter Lord Michael. In order to ensure that Chameleon and his boys didn’t disrupt business, Caruso struck a deal to buy up Chameleon’s complete supply of Ecstasy-usually the popular brand known as “half moons” -at fifteen dollars per hit. He then gave the pills to his runners, who broke them in two and sold “half moons” for thirty dollars apiece.

Chameleon observed Lord Michael’s operation closely and soon began to imitate his most lucrative crimes. Just as Caruso ripped off drug dealers he became friendly with, Chameleon would screw over rave kids who trusted him. “I’d befriend them to get into their apartments,” he recalls, ” and I’d tie them up with their phone cord, take all their shit, and leave them sitting there.” Dealers also made perfect targets because they have large amounts of cash on hand and are afraid of the police: “I’m one of the ones that climbs through their windows at six in the morning, ties them up, and takes their safes. The most I earned for one job was $125,000, when I climbed up a drug dealer’s fire escape.

His new line of work was so profitable that soon he was able to move into real drugs.

Chameleon was an avid club-crawler both before and after his accident, and one night at the Limelight, revved up on cocaine, he came up with a novel idea for a new career. “I realized the amount of money I could make selling drugs at raves. So I got a group of kids together and I showed them how to create fake drugs. Why should I spend money on E’s when I can go to Duane Reade, stick fifty Chlor-Trimeton tablets in my pocket, and go sell them?”

Chameleon first met members of B.T.S. through mutual friends two years ago at a dance club called Vinyl. He sweet-talked himself into the gang’s good graces, throwing sex-and-drug parties for the members at fancy Manhattan hotels. “Chameleon spent a lot of money on those parties,” says Miss Melody “We were all ordering filet mignon and champagne on room service.”

CHAMELEON IS SOMETHING of a controversial figure within B.T.S. He didn’t grow up in the gang like most of the other key members, and he’s from middle-class Queens rather than blue-collar Brooklyn. He claims he is the leader of B.T S. now that Soak is in prison, but other members say Era, a six-two Irish-Italian member whom I see wearing khakis and a white shirt after coming from his day job on Wall Street- is the acting don and that Chameleon is only the boss of the Long Island branch. “Chameleon is a crazy cowboy who thinks he controls everything,” says Miss Melody “Sure, he represents B.T.S., and he’s always there to help us up when there’s trouble. But he’s only been down with us for two years. He’s older than the rest of us.”

Melody’s roommate Griz, who calls Chameleon “B.T Wannabe Prez,” says that the usurper “wants to dominate us. But B.T.S. is like a tight friendship or a family. Everyone is equal.”

“Chameleon is dogging my shadow,” complains E.S., angry to hear that Chameleon told me he’s in charge. “Chameleon is like a brother – but B.T.S. is my crew.”

The gang faces another problem that’s even larger than their leadership struggle: They may have cooked the golden goose. “The rave scene has diminished alarmingly in the last two years because of us,” admits Chameleon. “Kids are afraid to come out. That’s why we’re trying to boost the scene back up again by selling real drugs.”

Other B.T.S. members are even trying to go legit. By day, E.S. and Geo sell stocks, cold-calling potential customers from a Wall Street office. They may be switching careers just in time: The DEA is currently widening its investigation into New York nightlife, and agents have already picked up Chameleon for questioning. But he says he isn’t scared. “What happened to Lord Michael is not going to happen to me, because I’m mobile while he was in one club controlling dealers who kickback to me,” he says. “Every night of the week I’m in a different place. That’s the trick-to stay mobile and never carry large amounts of drugs personally.”

Digital Konfusion’s DJ Odi, who frequently plays B.TS. parties, says he can’t believe it but he’s nostalgic for the reign of Lord Michael – who conned and later ratted on both his enemies and his friends. (He became the star witness in the government’s unsuccessful attempt to jail the owner of the Limelight, Peter Gatien, on racketeering and conspiracy charges.) At least then, Odi says, blood wasn’t all over the dance floor. “Back in the days of the Limelight, dealers didn’t step on each other’s toes,” he remembers. “There was a hierarchy and a structure. With the disintegration of the club scene and the disintegration of the rave scene, there hasn’t been anyone with the authority to police the situation.

“That’s how a group of wild-ass kids like B.T. S. can take over.”

E-Commerce

BY ETHAN BROWN
Jul 24, 2000
New York Magazine

Once just for raves, ecstasy is now all the rage — the favorite party pill of Wall Streeters, prep-school kids, and mall rats alike. Smugglers (JFK is their favorite route) may be the most ecstatic of all — but the government is definitely not amused.

At around 3 A.M. on a warm Friday night, Paul, a stockbroker in his late twenties, is waiting for his ecstasy dealer in front of the Gramercy Tavern, where he’s just had a few drinks with friends. John, a club kid who delivers the drug to clients who beep him or call on his cell phone, is running 45 minutes late, and Paul, who took a hit of ecstasy half an hour ago, is furious. “My girl is already rolling” — tripping on ecstasy — he says. “She’s just waiting to get fucked.”

Paul starts dialing his dealer’s cell phone and launches into a tirade. “I don’t need this shit,” he says. “I’ve got another delivery service that’s way better — a team of three hot girls who deliver ecstasy to your apartment.” Besides, he continues, “I’ve been telling John that if he gets his shit together, he could make some real bucks. The older guys on the Street are into coke, but there are traders on the floor who would order hundreds of pills a day from him. They don’t know shit about ecstasy, either. They’d probably pay $50 a pill — money doesn’t mean a thing to them.”

Moments later, John stops short by the curb and swings open the front passenger door of his Jeep Cherokee. “Sorry, Paul,” he says, wiping sweat from a pale forehead partly covered with boyish brown bangs. “I’ve been mad busy tonight.” Paul snaps his cell phone shut and hops in. “Here’s 90 percent of your order,” John says, handing Paul two large Ziploc bags filled with 200 white pills between them. “I’ve gotta run back downtown to get the rest.” Paul glances at his purchase — about $5,000 worth of ecstasy that should last him and his stockbroker buddies through the weekend — and says, “You’d better be back fast. I’m not waiting on the street for drugs. This isn’t 1974, man.”

Certainly not. A big guy with short hair, black jeans, and a frat-boy swagger, Paul couldn’t have less in common with the club kids who popularized ecstasy in the early nineties. After all, he has to keep track of trades in the morning. But although he’s been using the drug for just a year, he’s doing so with a similar abandon — he says he goes through 20 or 30 pills a weekend. “This,” says Paul, holding up a bag, “is for my best buddy’s going-away party tomorrow night. We’re gonna hire a bunch of strippers and give them as much ecstasy as they want.” A crooked smile crosses his face, the first effect of the pill he just took. “This” — he holds up the other — “is for tonight with my girl and the Hamptons tomorrow.”

Once found almost exclusively at raves or in college dorms, ecstasy is nearing the cultural ubiquity marijuana reached at the beginning of the seventies and cocaine achieved in the mid-eighties. “It’s sweeping through our society faster than crack,” says Gary Murray, East Coast representative of the U.S. Customs Ecstasy Task Force, a division formed four months ago in response to the drug’s growing popularity. Except that “with crack you could say, ‘These people over here are doing it, and these people aren’t.’ You can’t do that with ecstasy now. Everyone’s doing it.”

Patented by the German pharmaceutical company E. Merck in 1914 (under its chemical name MDMA, or 3,4 methylenedioxymethamphetamine), ecstasy was first widely used during the seventies to help patients open up to psychiatrists during therapy. By the end of the decade, the drug had crossed over from the couch to the dance floor at gay discos in New York, Chicago, and especially Dallas. In 1985, then-Texas senator Lloyd Bentsen successfully lobbied to have the DEA make MDMA a “Schedule 1” drug, subject to criminal penalties similar to those for cocaine and heroin.

Now, like pot in the seventies and coke in the eighties, ecstasy — also called X, E, or rolls — is seen as fairly harmless, hangover-free fun. Unlike cocaine, which leads to obvious trips to the bathroom, accusations of being stuck in the Greed Decade, and often addiction, ecstasy is inconspicuous and physically nonaddictive. Usually taken as a pill that has a small, stamped logo “borrowed” from pop or corporate culture — Nike, Calvin Klein, Mitsubishi, Motorola, and Tweety Bird are among the popular “brands” — ecstasy induces waves of euphoria and heightened physical sensations (especially tactile ones). But it’s not disorienting enough in moderate doses to prevent users from remaining aware and outgoing. Aside from occasional cautionary tales about dehydration and overdoses, the word-of-mouth on ecstasy is overwhelmingly positive. “There’s this perception of harmlessness surrounding ecstasy that other drugs simply don’t have,” says Bridget Brennan, the DEA’s special narcotics prosecutor for New York City. At $20 to $30 for a pill that lasts four to six hours, it’s also a bargain in the age of the $9 Cosmopolitan. “You could spend that kind of money in fifteen minutes at any bar in the city,” notes a thirtysomething A&R executive who often takes the drug with friends at his country house in Sag Harbor.

Though ecstasy is still nowhere near as mainstream in the U.S. as it is in England, much of its jump in popularity can be explained by older ecstasy users whose clubgoing days are long behind them — if they ever happened at all. “It’s such a cool drug because you can mold it into whatever you want to do,” says Steve, an artist in his late twenties who sheepishly admits, “I missed the whole rave thing.” Instead of hitting nightspots like Twilo, Steve takes ecstasy when he hangs out with friends at bars. “When you do ecstasy, you realize how paranoid you’ve been around people,” he says. “Ecstasy breaks down those barriers.”

Plenty of other users began taking the drug in college and simply never stopped. A thirtysomething architect named Mark remembers using it with his fraternity brothers and their “groupies” at a California college in the late eighties. “We’d have this little lovefest where everybody was making out with everybody — not crazy sex games or anything but just the whole ecstasy thing of wanting to wrap your tongue around somebody,” he says. He’s grown up now, with a high-paying job and a nice loft downtown, but he still uses ecstasy as a social lubricant. His architect girlfriend “was one of those people who wanted to rebel but came from a very conservative household,” he says. “It made her relax and cut loose and not be so self-conscious. She absolutely loved it.”

Nor is ecstasy confined to party-prone young people. Tom, a 44-year-old movie executive, takes ecstasy with the intensity of a club kid (“If it’s good, I’ll take like six in one evening”), but only in his downtown loft. “Usually when we do ecstasy, it’s a very quiet, intimate thing,” he says. “I’ve never understood the whole concept of doing ecstasy out in public. One time we did E and went to Vinyl. I just ended up sitting there for about ten minutes and leaving.”

Just how widespread is ecstasy in New York? “It’s everywhere,” a suburban Long Island teenager now enrolled at Daytop Village’s Huntington, Long Island, adolescent drug-rehab facility told New York. “It’s easier to get an E pill than a pack of cigarettes. You need I.D. for that, you know.” Another teenage patient there agreed. “We’d talk about it during social studies: ‘You gonna do E this weekend?’ ” One dealer even said his aunt asked him about it: “A friend of hers read about it and was interested in trying it.”

“Everybody is into ecstasy,” says Suave, another dealer, “straight, gay, black, yellow, red, white, brown, whatever.”

Well past 2 a.m. on a Wednesday night, Suave is kicking back on a tan leather couch in the VIP room of Float, a multilevel midtown nightspot known for hosting dot-com launch parties and boasting Prince as a regular. Discreetly holding a cigarette-size joint by his side, he’s regaling a dozen or so fellow partyers — editors, stylists, Web designers — with stories about his week of club-hopping. “Yo, the VIP room at NV is the illest,” he says, pausing to look down at the cell phone on his hip that vibrates with an incoming call every few minutes. “There were so many models up in there I thought I was in a fashion shoot.” The Gucci-and-Fendi-clad group, here for promoter Derek Corley’s weekly upscale hip-hop party, laughs in unison. “Have y’all been to Joe’s Pub on Tuesday nights?” Suave asks. “The girls are so fine.”

But Suave isn’t there for the women. Like so many of the beautiful people around him, he goes clubbing to network. He’s a new kind of ecstasy dealer, one who sells from a cell phone instead of a crinkled plastic Baggie full of pills. “I would never sell in a club,” he says. “The security sweats you like mad. Plus, you have no idea who you’re selling to. It could easily be an undercover cop.”

At first glance, Suave seems like just another sociable single guy on the make — albeit one who hits several high-end hot spots like Ohm, Cheetah, and Justin’s in a single night. “I’ll see a pretty girl or maybe a guy that looks cool and strike up a conversation,” he explains, adjusting the brim of the Ralph Lauren baseball cap that hides a shock of kinky hair. “I’ll ask, ‘Do you smoke weed?’ or ‘Do you do ecstasy?’ If they seem cool, they get my number, and we’ll get a relationship going from there.”

Suave’s casual networking style suits his clientele perfectly: His regular customers include editors from at least one national magazine, brokers at major investment banks, and Website designers at dot-com start-ups. In fact, he only deals to professionals, because “they treat me right,” he says. “These aren’t the kind of people who’ll be begging me for free pills.” He won’t sell to ravers, because they always ask to meet him in nightclubs and “they’re terrible with money,” he says. “They can’t hang on to it for a minute.”

Like Suave, Greg, who has dealt ketamine, cocaine, marijuana, and mushrooms at one time or another, conducts business far from the limelight. He sells only out of his Chelsea apartment and only to friends of friends who have one of the yellow business cards with his pager number. “You don’t have to go to a club to get E anyway,” he says. “You can just make a few calls and have it before you go out for the night.” To keep his neighbors from getting suspicious, he maintains well-known “office hours” — by 10 p.m. most nights, he’s in bed or watching a movie on his DVD player. Some of his customers keep similar hours. “I’ve sold to couples in their sixties and people in their forties who have families,” he says. “Just last month, a friend of mine who’s in his mid-thirties finally tried ecstasy for the first time,” he continues. “He bought a couple of pills from me and took his girlfriend out on a rowboat in Central Park.”

Because of increasing demand and his high profit margin, he says, “selling ecstasy is a ridiculously easy way to make money.” Greg sells pills for $30 that most dealers buy for $8 to $11. Suave buys pills for $11 from a distributor in Brooklyn, then sells them for $20 to $30 to customers who beep or call him. “If they’re buying a bunch of pills,” Suave says, “I’ll throw in two or three to make them feel good about working with me.” For purchases of 100 or more, he charges $20 per pill. “Quantity calls are what keep me in business,” he says. “Keep those orders for 100 and more coming, and I’m a very happy man.”

A typical day for Suave begins in the late afternoon, when he’s awakened by a phone call or beeper message from a customer at a law firm, publishing house, or Internet start-up. “My music-industry customers are my favorites,” he says, “because they hook me up with concert tickets and free CDs.” (Another regular client is helping him put together a portfolio so he can pursue a career as a model.) He delivers ecstasy on foot or by taxi until around midnight, then heads out to clubs to meet more potential customers. “On a bad week, when I’m not getting many calls or I’m too lazy to really work it, I’ll make $1,000,” he says. “On an average week, where things are business as usual, I’ll make about $3,000 to $4,000. A great week, where there’s a holiday or a big party, I’ll make $5,000.”

Though the frenzy for ecstasy is national — legislators in both the House and the Senate are working on bills to increase penalties — the two most popular U.S. points of entry for the drug are JFK and Newark airports, according to law-enforcement sources. So far this year, New York accounts for more than 2 million of the nearly 7 million hits of ecstasy seized by Customs. “Because of our airports and the presence of organized crime, New York is a critical port for the importation of ecstasy,” says Brennan. Even given these conditions, Brennan struggles to account for the ecstasy explosion. “The numbers are staggering,” she says.

According to information compiled by U.S. Customs, many distributors pay Dutch or Israeli smuggling rings $100,000 for bringing them 200,000 pills from the Netherlands or Belgium. They then sell those pills to dealers for $8 to $11 apiece, earning a profit of $1.5 million. That might seem like an awful lot of ecstasy to unload, but demand is so high, most dealers purchase by the thousand. “Ecstasy is a much neater business [than cocaine or heroin],” says Customs commissioner Raymond W. Kelly. “You can invest $100,000 as a distributor and get $5 million back.”

Before it was busted in February, the Israeli ecstasy ring that supplied Greg out of an apartment in Forest Hills sold dealers as many as 100,000 pills a week, according to the Queens district attorney’s office. One member was observed by the DEA saying he needed 10,000 ecstasy tablets immediately and 25,000 more within the hour.

Both the reach and the organization of the Forest Hills ring were impressive. “They were very, very smart — even if you were buying a few thousand pills, you’d always deal with the guy lowest on the totem pole,” says Greg. “And their reach was amazing. I would buy pills from them, and the next week I’d talk to friends out in San Francisco and Dallas who had the exact same pills.”

An even bigger Israeli ring, allegedly run by 29-year-old Amsterdam resident Sean Erez, recruited Hasidic Jews from Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and Monsey, New York, to smuggle ecstasy from Amsterdam through Paris. Although Erez and his girlfriend remain in Dutch custody fighting extradition, the other people named in the indictment all pleaded guilty, including Shimon Levita, an Orthodox Jew from Brooklyn who helped Erez recruit Hasidim, who were given $1,500 for each trip. When the ring was busted, Erez had almost $475,000 in a Luxembourg bank account, and law-enforcement officials estimated it had smuggled more than a million tablets of ecstasy into the U.S.

Even those operations pale in comparison with the Los Angeles-based ecstasy ring allegedly run by a 44-year-old Israeli national named Jacob “Koki” (pronounced “Cookie”) Orgad that was busted by Customs in June. During the past two years, the group allegedly brought at least 9 million pills into the U.S. “We’ve only identified 30 couriers so far, and there could have been many more,” says a source at Customs. “So 9 million pills is actually our low estimate, because we know that each courier brought in at least 30,000 pills.”

Beyond sheer numbers, the group was run with a “level of sophistication that until now has only been associated with heroin and cocaine smugglers,” according to the Customs source. Orgad’s group recruited poor families from Texas and Arkansas who would then be taken by lower-level associates to “local malls where they would be outfitted in conservative clothing like plaid shirts and penny loafers. They would then be coached on how to act when going through Customs at the airport.”

The group also employed decoys. “They would send a pair of girls in their twenties who wore tie-dyed shirts and looked as though they had just taken a vacation in Amsterdam,” according to the Customs source. A Texas couple working for Orgad brought a mentally handicapped teenager with them, but the ruse didn’t work — the pair were caught with more than 200,000 ecstasy pills in their luggage. Sometimes the decoys also served as monitors to make sure the smugglers didn’t make off with the drugs. To give their couriers a better chance, Orgad’s organization even booked them on flights scheduled to land during an airport’s busiest hours, says the source. “They wanted to send their guys through when our inspectors were overwhelmed. That proves their level of sophistication.”

Orgad allegedly maintained the kind of high life usually associated with cocaine and heroin kingpins. He had a fleet of luxury cars and, according to the Customs source, “was often accompanied by two women, usually exotic dancers.” It has also been reported that in the early nineties, he was an associate of Heidi Fleiss who helped her recruit prostitutes.

As Orgad awaits trial, Customs continues to bust his associates. On Thursday, four of his Texas-based smugglers were arrested, one for allegedly facilitating the transport of pills from Europe to Houston. A week before, a more important Orgad associate, Ilan Zarger, was busted for running what Customs officials allege was the largest ecstasy-distribution network in New York City. Customs estimates that Zarger’s organization distributed more than 700,000 ecstasy pills in the New York area over the past six months alone. The organization, which also included another alleged Orgad associate named Assaf “Assi” Shetrit, supplied ecstasy to a violent Brooklyn-based street gang called BTS (“Born to Scheme” or “Brooklyn Terror Squad”), who sold the drug at raves in New York, Connecticut, New Jersey, and Washington, D.C. Zarger also arranged for 40,000 ecstasy pills to be delivered to the Hamptons in April, according to Customs. Zarger allegedly charged his associates an extra 2 percent if they brought him anything smaller than a $100 bill, thought nothing of lending $100,000 to friends (as long as they paid him back in hundreds), and socked away $1.5 million of drug profits in a safe.

The organization, which Zarger himself claimed on wiretap was protected by the Russian Mafia, was unusually well run, according to Customs. “It would appear that he controlled all ends of the ecstasy business, from importation to retail,” says Customs special agent Joe Webber. The group’s reach extended beyond the New York area, too: Zarger allegedly threatened to have Sammy “the Bull” Gravano “whacked” during a price dispute.

As demand rises, ecstasy smugglers are becoming as diverse as those who use the drug.”We used to be able to break down the trade fairly easily,” says Murray. “We could put the Israelis at about 50 percent, the Netherlands at 15 percent, and the rest everybody else. But that ‘everybody else’ is getting larger every day. Our math no longer works.” Kelly agrees. “We’re seeing smugglers from incredibly diverse backgrounds,” he says. “Older people, younger people, black, white — it’s an across-the-board demographic.”

Thanks to sky-high profits, fairly light federal penalties, and the relative ease of smuggling ecstasy as opposed to cocaine or heroin (U.S. Customs finished training the first group of dogs to sniff out the drug only this March), many of those would-be smugglers aren’t exactly practiced criminals. In March, Joseph Colgan, the 33-year-old owner of the Minetta Tavern, was charged with masterminding a ring to import more than 80,000 pills to the U.S. from Amsterdam via Paris over five months. (He pleaded guilty last week.) His courier? Scott E. Rusczyk, a lawyer with the New York firm Kronish, Lieb, Weiner & Hellman.

Most couriers are less upscale. The Amsterdam-based writer Hendrikus Van-Zyp, 54, and his wife, Maria Van-Zyp Landa, 47, agreed to bring a package they were told contained a few thousand ecstasy pills to the U.S. in exchange for a trip to Aruba and $10,000 that Hendrikus told New York he needed for his wife’s bone-cancer treatments. “They had a good feeling about us,” Van-Zyp says now, speaking from the visitors’ room at the Otisville Federal Correctional Penitentiary, where he’s serving a five-year sentence for ecstasy smuggling, “because we were an older couple.” But when he and his wife were bumped from their original Amsterdam-Newark flight on October 22, their luggage remained aboard the plane. During a routine check of unclaimed baggage, ecstasy was found in their suitcases, and the couple were arrested by Customs officials posing as airline workers.

The Van-Zyps were carrying what was then a record seizure of ecstasy at a U.S. airport, but their loss probably put barely a dent in the organization that recruited them. “I think they put ten people on the airplane, so when they catch two, then they’re not out much money,” Van-Zyp says.

“I knew we were in trouble,” he says with a throaty, nicotine-scarred laugh, “when they brought the suitcase and I tried to tip the guy and he said, ‘Keep it.’ “

“Ecstasy has enormous appeal, but people crash afterward,” says Dr. Robert Klitzman. “If they’re doing ecstasy on a Saturday night, there’s ‘Suicide Tuesday.'”

A good portion of all the ecstasy coming into New York ends up in the hands of high-school students, and not just young ravers, according to Caroline Sullivan, director of Daytop Village’s Huntington, Long Island, adolescent drug-rehab facility. “We’re not talking about kids in the club or bar scene — we’re talking about kids with ten o’clock curfews,” Sullivan says. “Their first experience is usually at a party or friend’s house. The feeling they get from the pill is incredible, and they want to replicate that experience over and over again, until they build up a tolerance for the drug. Then they start to take several doses at a time.” Sullivan says 85 percent of the teenagers admitted to Daytop have used ecstasy, an increase from just 20 to 30 percent one year ago (though none have been admitted solely because of ecstasy).

At one elite private school on the Upper West Side, the drug “has become more popular than weed,” according to Laura, a 17-year-old who has done ecstasy several times and has a regular dealer. “Most of the kids at school do it. They do it at house parties or when they’re just hanging out, not really at clubs.”

The ecstasy scene at Bronx High School of Science “ranged from preppy kids to this kid who was in my Hebrew-school class,” according to Shari, a recent graduate. A few of her fellow students sometimes sold pills, she says, and when they were out, “we all knew this guy on 46th Street in the theater district who literally had boxes full.” Often, they took ecstasy at home: “I hosted my share of ecstasy parties where someone would walk in the room with 100 pills and they’d be gone within twenty minutes.”

Neither Manhattan teens nor several young Daytop Village patients from suburban Long Island interviewed by New York say they had much trouble finding the drug. “E was around every weekend — my brother played on a soccer team with my dealer, so I knew him well,” says Charlie, 16. “I’ve never been to a club. I was like, ‘Why waste money on the club when I could just save it for drugs?’ “

Leah, a 16-year-old who lives on the Upper East Side, says most of her friends do ecstasy and doesn’t think her occasional use of the drug will do her any harm. “I’ve had some of the best times of my life on ecstasy, and I’m not an addict, so what’s the problem?” she says. “For the Fourth, me and my friends took some pills really early in the night and then we went to Exit,” she explains. “When we got out of the club in the morning, the weather was so nice we decided to take a few more rolls. It was just amazing.” The club might have enhanced her high, but she’s not interested in becoming part of that scene. “It’s way too druggy,” she says, without irony.

“Kids who are going to birthday parties or hanging out at friends’ houses are doing it,” says Carrie, a Trinity graduate who says she was one of the few students at her high school who didn’t try ecstasy. “It’s the drug of our generation,” she says. “I know friends who are scared to do coke, but they’ve done E more than a few times.”

That attitude persists because “the jury is still out” about ecstasy’s addictiveness, according to A. Jonathan Porteus, a doctor of psychology at Daytop Village. “It’s definitely habit-forming, though. It becomes associated with certain things, like sex or dancing, and becomes a habit. You’ll hear people say, ‘To have sex, you need X.’ ” He pauses and laughs. “And some people can’t listen to Orbital without it.”

Whether or not the drug is addictive, says Porteus, “ecstasy is going to affect your ability to concentrate, you’re going to have more trouble feeling happy, there’s going to be a bit of spaciness there.” Because MDMA alters the brain’s serotonin levels, which control mood, Porteus also believes the comedown ecstasy users experience after a weekend of partying could last longer than they think. “There’s going to be a lot of people taking anti-depressants in the future.”

“Ecstasy has enormous appeal, but people crash afterward,” says Dr. Robert Klitzman, a clinical psychiatrist at Columbia University. “If they’re doing ecstasy on a Saturday night, there’s ‘Suicide Tuesday,’ a brief but deep depression. Still, teenagers are particularly vulnerable, Klitzman says, because “high school is an awkward time for everyone, and this is sort of the anti-rejection drug.”

Kristin, a shy, blonde 14-year-old with braces who hugs herself nervously while talking, began drinking and smoking marijuana at age 12, but neither drug had the pull of ecstasy, which she first tried in the spring of 1999. “I didn’t think it was gonna be that good, but once I tried it, it was like my life,” she says. “I couldn’t wait until the next time I did it, so I did it the next day.”

Like the club kids who proselytized about ecstasy (“Everything begins with an E” was a raver mantra), Kristin found herself E-vangelizing about the drug the way Timothy Leary’s followers extolled the virtues of LSD. “Once you do the first pill, your whole perspective on life changes,” she says. “Your whole view on the world around you, the way you look at people. I would look at clean people and be like, ‘What is wrong with them? They don’t even know what they’re missing.’ And I wanted to show people ecstasy.”

Though ecstasy is relatively expensive for cash-poor teenagers, Kristin says she rarely had to pay for it. “Most girls I know who don’t pay for their drugs had sex with the dealer and he’d give it to them for free, but it wasn’t like that for me,” she says. She got the drug by hosting afternoon ecstasy parties at her parents’ home.

On the drug, “if someone says something just a little nice, like ‘Hi, how are you?,’ you’ll be like, ‘Oh, my God, that’s so nice of you,’ and you’ll fall in love with them on the spot,” she says. But the bonds created by the drug vanish just as quickly. “I remember this kid who I was so in love with when I was on ecstasy,” she continues. “Then the next day I called him and told him to come over and he said no, and I was like, ‘Whatever, I don’t really care about you anyway.’ He wasn’t important to me at all — we just had that connection when we did E together. I call it ‘E love,’ ’cause that’s what it is, really.”

“E was around every weekend,” says Charlie, 16. “My brother played on a soccer team with my dealer, so I knew him well.”

After she began to miss more school, her mother read her diary and “saw a completely different person ’cause every page was filled with ‘Oh, my God, I can’t wait till the next time I can do E,’ ” she says. She’s been enrolled with Daytop since the fall, but it’s still difficult for her to imagine life without ecstasy. “I give myself pats on the shoulder every day, like, ‘Today I’m clean another day,’ ” she says, “but it’s still constantly in the back of my head, because nothing can make me feel like that.”

In the early nineties, when ecstasy was prevalent only in European rave culture and the few underground American clubs that identified with it, two outer-borough teens named Frankie Bones and Michael Caruso went to England to check out London nightlife. They were fateful trips: Bones was inspired to begin throwing raves in Brooklyn, and Caruso started Manhattan’s first techno party at the Limelight. Eventually, Bones’s “Storm Raves” planted the seed for the U.S. rave scene; the drug-distribution network Caruso allegedly ran at the Limelight gave the city its first bona fide ecstasy bust.

“We weren’t really even aware of ecstasy until the Limelight case in 1995,” says Brennan. Indeed, the DEA-NYPD joint investigation into the Limelight began only after police were contacted by the parents of an 18-year-old New Jersey man who had died from an overdose of ecstasy he had allegedly bought there. Until 1997, ecstasy wasn’t even a controlled substance in New York State.

By then, the drug was already old news in clubland — it had started spreading to the mainstream. “Law enforcement is always playing catch-up,” Brennan admits. Because it got such a late start monitoring the ecstasy trade, Brennan says, the NYPD’s lab doesn’t “have a baseline to start with in terms of assessing the purity of ecstasy pills” the way it does with cocaine or heroin. Lately, however, Brennan has been surprised to find supposed ecstasy pills that actually contain antihistamine laced with insecticide. “We’re seeing all kinds of adulterated substances,” she says. “You honestly don’t know what you’re putting in your mouth when you’re taking ecstasy.”

The current ecstasy explosion has made the market for fakes even hotter. “People don’t have qualms about what they sell as ecstasy,” according to Murray, “as long as people pay for it.” Indeed, when the NYPD used the nuisance-abatement law to shut down the Tunnel last year after a raid targeting ecstasy dealers there, only four of the pills that were seized tested positive for MDMA. (Tunnel has since reopened.) And as user demand builds for “brands” like Mitsubishi — a particularly potent pill illicitly stamped with the car manufacturer’s three-diamond logo — drugmakers are putting the same insignia on impure pills, much the way knockoff-makers sew Prada labels onto cheap backpacks.

But adulterated or weakened pills are the least of law enforcement’s problems: Smugglers are getting more sophisticated, and other organized-crime rings are competing with the Israelis. Several men have been nabbed at JFK wearing skintight bodysuits that held more than 7,000 ecstasy pills each; Customs officials have also found pills hidden in software packaging, stuffed animals, and secret compartments in carry-on luggage. In March, Customs scored its first internal seizure when it arrested a passenger flying into JFK from Amsterdam who had swallowed 2,800 pills in 70 condoms.

At the same time, “organized-crime groups are putting their feelers out” to the ecstasy trade, according to Murray. “There’s so much money to be made that these groups are saying, ‘Let’s get this going on,’ ” Murray says. “We’re going to see a stronger Mexican connection, a much stronger Dominican connection. We’re going to see bikers who were running methamphetamine labs in the Midwest convert those labs into ecstasy labs. We’ve already seen it in Vancouver. The only difference is you start with a different chemical.”

To combat the spread of the drug locally, New York state senator Roy Goodman issued a recommendation that a defendant be charged with ecstasy possession based on the weight of his or her stash rather than its purity. On July 3, New Jersey governor Christine Whitman signed into law a bill that would put ecstasy in the same legal class as heroin and cocaine.

“It’s worse in the cities,” says Dr. Mike Nelson, a physician at the St. Vincents emergency room. “But it’s also in middle America, because they don’t have anything else to do.” Congresswoman Judy Biggert, who represents the suburban Thirteenth District of Illinois, is sponsoring a bill to double the minimum jail time for ecstasy traffickers. “Ecstasy has been around for 20 or 30 years now, but we’re finally seeing it in the suburbs,” she says. “So we’re trying to send a message to dealers and traffickers — right now, the penalties they receive are a joke.” Similar legislation, the Ecstasy Anti-Proliferation Act, has been introduced by Senator Bob Graham of Florida.

Harm-reduction advocates argue that under such laws, the least powerful people in the ecstasy-distribution business, the “mules” who carry the drugs, would receive some of the harshest penalties. “They’ll always arrest people like me — poor people and idiot people,” argues Van-Zyp. “The people higher up will make a lot of money but they won’t get arrested.” Indeed, ecstasy couriers are hardly an upscale bunch. The Customs source notes with some amusement that many of the mules recruited by the Orgad network used their $10,000 fee as a down payment on a trailer home.

“We’re at the point right now with ecstasy that we were with cocaine in the seventies,” says New York State Senator Roy Goodman. “It’s being passed out like mints by people who have no idea of its negative effects.”

Customs and the DEA have labeled ecstasy “agony” in order to raise awareness about the dangers of the drug, but unlike crack or cocaine before it, ecstasy seems to have negligible social effects. “Crack is categorically an addictive substance, so the crack epidemic was much easier for people to understand,” says Daytop Village’s Porteus. “Unlike crack or cocaine, ecstasy is the sort of drug people use to compensate for something rather than to fulfill a craving.”

While nearly every week brings the arrest of a newer, more powerful ecstasy baron who seems to have been plucked right out of the cocaine era, there hasn’t been the kind of gang violence seen in the late eighties and early nineties. “Ecstasy itself might not cause violent crime,” acknowledges Brennan of the DEA. But she predicts that “there will be a rise in violence associated with organized crime as a result of the ecstasy trade.” Some cities, like Chicago, aren’t taking any chances. In response to a series of ecstasy-related overdoses in the city (most of which were due to pills laced with a deadly drug called PMA, or paramethoxyamphetamine), the City Council there passed an “anti-rave” ordinance, which makes holding such a party punishable by a $10,000 fine. One Chicago police officer even vowed to the Chicago Tribune that “if D.J.’s know it’s dangerous to come to Chicago . . . they may think twice about coming here.”

But to those who use the drug, such moral panic is hard to understand, much less agree with. “I really don’t understand what the big deal is. Yeah, you might get a little too happy, a little too emotional; you might even say some really stupid, cheesy things you regret later. And yeah, there can be a pretty harsh comedown if you overdo it,” argues one user. “But compared to crack or coke? Please! When was the last time you saw two crackheads hugging?”

Mixmag: How NYC’s legendary illegal storm rave was revived for one night only

Daniel Rodriguez went to RBMA’s rave revival and tracked the impact the parties had on New York techno

Words by Daniel Rodriguez
May 21, 2015

It’s an appropriately dark and stormy night, and dozens of aging and young ravers are congregated outside a Brooklyn warehouse in anticipation of the 25-year reunion of the original Storm Rave DJs: Frankie Bones, Adam X, Lenny Dee and Heather Heart. From inside the warehouse classic hardcore tracks boom, causing the people outside to grin at each other and nod their heads in approval and anticipation.

The Storm Rave parties are legendary in the New York rave community. The parties were revolutionary at the time and threatened the reigning order of the nightclub. Though for some, the fact that Red Bull was throwing a sanctioned event as part of the Music Academy festival, with pre-sales, alcohol and security, was less a tribute and more a slap in the face of the rave community.

It’s nothing the original Storm Rave crew hasn’t heard before.

“It’s not going to be a totally authentic 1992 experience. I mean, 25 years has changed a lot in New York,” notes Adam X, one of the New York techno scene’s earliest pioneers.

New York City in the late 1980s and early 1990s was a very different place.

Before the unbridled gentrification marshaled by former mayor Giuliani, graffiti covered the city, crack was king, and the Manhattan clubs dictated what people danced to and how they would do it.

“You had your one DJ,” recalls Lenny Dee. “You had your freestyle music. Little Louie Vega. David Morales. You weren’t getting much variation at the clubs at the time. It was not a bad thing for them but it was a bad thing for us.”

Much has been written about Frankie Bones 1989 trip to England being the beginning of rave culture in the US, but New York City has a long history of dance culture all its own.

The art of DJing was arguably created, or at least perfected, in the city’s discos in the 1970s. When the rest of the country had smashed their disco records, the music was kept alive on the radio and in roller rinks across the five boroughs. Sheepshead Bay, the neighborhood that Lenny, Frankie, Heather and Adam hail from was famous for the Roll-A-Palace, a huge roller rink where south Brooklyn youth skated to the nascent sounds of electronic music in the form of early electro and Italo disco.

It was here that aspiring DJs Lenny Dee and Frankie Bones first learned from one other as they vied for coveted spots behind the decks. The pair initially viewed each other as rivals until veteran selector Tommy Musto squashed their beef. Musto, who also hailed from Brooklyn, served as a role model for Lenny and Frankie and drew them deeper into dance music industry, getting them jobs at his record labels Fourth Floor Records as in-house producers and engineers. Lenny, along with Musto, is often credited with writing one of the earliest deep house tracks “The Morning After” on Fourth Floor Records.

But it was Frankie and Lenny’s production work at Nu Groove as Looney Tunes that eventually brought the duo to Europe to experience “the second summer of love” and the rise of rave culture in England. Hooked, the two brought back as many records as they could and began actively trying to recreate the scene back in Brooklyn.

Frankie recruited his younger brother, Adam X, along with other kids from the neighborhood like Jimmy Crash, Ray Love and Heather Heart. Adam, under the alias ‘Ven’, was one of New York’s biggest graffiti writers as well as one of the main targets for the NYPD’s vandal squad, and used his consummate knowledge of the transit system to scout locations for the parties. Heart, inspired by her time in the New York punk scene, created a DIY zine “Under One Sky” to document the time period.

The first Storm Raves were revolutionary. Thrown mostly for friends, they were held throughout the outer boroughs in spots as diverse as empty apartments and in the coves under the Belt Parkway. Frankie and Adam worked hard to distinguish their parties from club nights, which had a reputation for gang violence. Frankie is credited with coining the concept of “peace, love, unity and respect” as a way to bring together different neighborhood gangs attending the parties.

“It’s just how clubs were at the time. There was no real outlet. The youth wanted something,” says Adam X. “More and more kids came out when they realized they could have fun on a Saturday night and not have to fight the kids in another neighborhood.”

A new drug called ecstasy also had much to do with it.

The parties themselves were also decidedly anti-club in aesthetic. No longer forced to adhere to a club’s dress policy, baggier clothes began to become the fashion. Sound systems became larger with a “wall of sound” becoming the ideal. Drug use was open and alcohol was frowned upon.

The music was also revolutionary. Instead of the pop freestyle and house played in clubs, ravers embraced the darker and harder four-to-the-floor records emerging from Belgium and Frankfurt, and tracks like ‘Magic Bells’ by Two Pieces, ‘Mentasm’ by Second Phase and ‘We Have Arrived’ by Mescalinum United seemed to ring in a new era in dance music with an emphasis on bass and aggressive distortion.

Visiting ravers from out-of-state would return home to spread the gospel of rave with their own crews like Drop Bass Network, and they’d champion the records that they’d purchased from Frankie and Adam’s shop Groove Records in Bensonhurst.

Around this time Lenny found himself uninspired with the label work he was doing at the time with Musto and Arthur Baker and started his own imprint, Industrial Strength Records, to promote the aggressive sounds that were being played at the raves.

“For me, the focus is always going to be the new, the new, the new,” notes Lenny, who ditched the fame and notoriety he’d found early on and developed the sound that came to be hardcore techno. “At that point I was one of the biggest DJs in the world, one of the biggest producers in the world. I had hits and a string of successes and I discovered what I thought was the end of the road was for electronic music. [Industrial Strength] was a conduit for me to say ‘enough is enough’.”

By the final Storm Rave in 1993, the music had started to fracture, creating fissures in the scene that would widen as time went on. Instead of just one incarnation of “rave”, different characteristics of tracks began to be emphasized. Hardcore, trance and jungle all began to metastasize during this period, taking their own followers and further splitting the scene. Clubs took advantage of the split and began to have their own parties featuring specific genre.

Violence too became more of a factor at parties. Before kids had gone to escape fights, now crews like Brooklyn Terror Squad began going to parties to rob drug dealers and ravers. Increased media coverage, including a disastrous Dateline special, elevated “the problem” of raves to politicians looking for easy targets.

By the time the Reducing American’s Vulnerability to Ecstasy (RAVE) Act was proposed in 2001 by then Sen. Joe Biden, the writing was on the wall for raves in New York. Clubs, once the enemy of raves, became the only place you could hear the music in all its over-the-top glory.

As it gets closer to 4am the mood of the crowd remains euphoric. Frankie Bones gets behind the decks, he holds up a flier from the original Storm Rave and the crowd roars. Looking around we truly feel that we’re being given a look back to the true origin of peace, love, unity and respect, and for one night, thanks to the crowd, the music and the DJs, a vibe has returned to Brooklyn that’s been missing for years.

The Final Solution

by Neal Stephenson & Machinelf

The Mental Response AKA The Only Sane Response to Those who Prey on those they mistakenly assume are Weak

The Deliverator belongs to an elite order, a hallowed subcategory. He’s got esprit up to here. Right now he is preparing to carry out his third mission of the night. His uniform is black as activated charcoal, filtering the very light out of the air. A bullet will bounce off its arachno-fiber weave like a wren hitting a patio door, but excess perspiration wafts through it like a breeze through a freshly napalmed forest. Where his body has bony extremities, the suit has sintered armorgel: feels like gritty jello, protects like a stack of telephone books.

When they gave him the job, they gave him a gun. The Deliverator never deals in cash, but someone might come after him anyway – might want his car, or his cargo. The gun is tiny, aero-styled, lightweight, the kind of a gun a fashion designer would carry; it fires teensy darts that fly at five times the velocity of an SR71 spy plane, and when you get done using it, you have to plug it into the cigarette lighter, because it runs on electricity.

The Deliverator never pulled a gun in anger, or in fear. He pulled it once in Nu Brooklyn. Some BTS wanted a delivery, and they didn’t want to pay for it. Thought they would impress the Deliverator with a baseball bat. The Deliverator took out is gun, centered its laser doo-hickey on that poised Louisville Slugger, fired it. The recoil was immense, as though the weapon had blown up in his hand. The middle third of the baseball bat turned into a column of burning sawdust accelerating in all directions like a bursting star. BTS Punk

(No not 666 Punk he’s evil, would eat Luke Skywalker for breakfast and cut the extra brains in little pieces and feed them to his minions, but not stoopid.)

Anyway, this chubby BTS punk named Alex Muff Munschkin AKA Muff or Munschnik who claimed to be the President of the BTS since he had inherited $2 million ended up holding this bat Babe Ruth Style handle with milky smoke pouring out the end.

Stupid look on his face. Didn’t get nothing but trouble from the Deliverator nor the real BTS that he sold out.

Since then the Deliverator has kept the gun in the glove compartment and relied, instead, on a matched collection of old skool 10 gauge Ketamine needles emblazoned with Tokkyo sponsorship logo plus an emergency bottle of Whale Tranquilizer, complete with extra straitjackets. The punks in the BTS weren’t afraid of the gun, so the Deliverator was forced to break the glass on his emergency kit. But needles need no demonstrations, especially when used as weapons.

The Deliverator’s car has enough potential energy packed into its batteries to fire a pound of bacon into the Asteroid Belt, or even Muffy Munsckin to escape velocity. Unlike a bimbo box or a Burb beater, the Deliverator’s car unloads that power through gaping, gleaming, polished sphincters. When the Deliverator puts the hammer down, shit happens. You want to talk contact patches? Your car’s tires have tiny contact patches, talk to the asphalt in four places the size of your tongue. The Deliverator’s car has big sticky tires with contact patches the size of a Jennifer Lopez’s thighs. The Deliverator is in touch with the road, starts like a bad day, stops on a peseta.

Why is the Deliverator so equipped? Because people rely on him. He is a roll model. This is America. People do whatever the fuck they feel like doing you got a problem with that? Because they have a right to. And because they have guns and no one can fucking stop them. As a result, this country has one of the worst economies in the world of 2150. When it gets down to it – talking trade balances here – once we’ve brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they’re making K in Mexico and cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here – once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel – once the Invisible Hand has taken all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity – y’know what? There’s only five things we do better than anyone else:

► music
► movies
► microcode (software)
► brainmachines
► High-speed pizza delivery

The Deliverator used to make software. Still does, sometimes. But if life were a mellow elementary school run by well-meaning education Ph.D.s, the Deliverator’s report card would say: “Machinelf is so bright but needs to work harder on his cooperation skills.”

So now he has this other job. No brightness or creativity involved – but no cooperation either. Just a single principle: Your pizza pie in thirty minutes or you can have it free, shoot the driver, take his car, file a class-action suit. The Deliverator has been working this job for six months, a rich and lengthy tenure by his standards, and has never delivered a pizza in more than twenty-one minutes.

Call me anytime at (212)479-7990

Update: BTS Leaders leave federal prison. Christopher Jones has come clean, is good, and is now welcome in the family. Teardrop, who had mercilessly assaulted Jacob and Eddy at an outlaw under the bridge, came clean as well.