The feds yesterday said they busted a major wholesale “Ecstasy” ring that flooded the city with the hallucinogenic drug.
Federal Drug Enforcement Administration agents arrested Raoul Goldberger at his mother’s Upper West Side coop on narcotics conspiracy charges.
Goldberger, 27, a law-school graduate, and two alleged accomplices, Michel Hemli and Marc Freund, were charged with importing at least 265,000 Ecstasy, or MDMA, tablets into the United States from Belgium since last August.
When Goldberger was arrested, he directed agents to $100,000 in tightly wrapped $100 bills and a small quantity of Ecstasy pills, which were recovered at a Greenwich Village location, the feds charged.
The yearlong probe began with a phone call last April from an informant who said Goldberger’s ring paid $2 to $3 per tablet and sold them to dealers here and in Florida for up to $9 each. The pills were then sold on the streets and in nightclubs for $12 to $25 apiece.
Hemli, a resident of Belgium, sent shipments to Goldberger and Freund in a hollowed-out night table, the feds said.
The trio began to panic earlier this month when a New York-bound shipment of 200,000 pills was “misdirected” to Spain, according to wiretapped talks.
“I’ve been in this business for years,” Goldberger told Freund during an April 24 phone call. “There is nothing you can do when the s–t hits the fan.”
Goldberger was arraigned with Freund in Manhattan federal court.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Dan Himmelfarb told the judge that Goldberger – a Cardozo Law School graduate – should be held without bail because he had a 1993 gun conviction, had strong ties to Belgium and Israel, and has “never been employed.”
Goldberger and Freund were ordered held without bail.
Hemli was busted in Miami Beach and is expected to be brought to New York.
The use of Ecstasy is on the rise in the city.
Two weeks ago, cops busted 10 people at the Tunnel nightclub, where 50 Ecstasy pills were recovered. The raid followed the death of 18-year-old James Lyons, who died after taking a lethal combination of Ecstasy and the animal tranquilizer Special K at the club.